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In this new regular feature on the Web, we will be drawing attention to books and writers worthy of rediscovery. Some will be classics that are gathering dust on the shelf, others will be contemporary books that got lost in the shuffle (the novels of Charles Portis after True Grit, for example), still others will be quirky, one-of-a-kind gems.
Our first selection is Soren Kierkegaard's Works of Love. While several of Kierkegaard's books show up routinely on reading lists, Works of Love does not. Steve Evans, a distinguished Kierkegaard scholar and a member of B&C's editorial board, explains why this book belongs on your shelf.
July 7, 2000
Works of Love
by Soren Kierkegaard
translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
Princeton Univ. Press 576 pp.; $26.95, paper
Modern secular thinkers find the idea that God is necessary as the foundation of morality amusing if not absurd. Many atheistic philosophers, and even some thinkers who call themselves theologians, complacently assume that some kind of purely humanistic ethic is possible, even though there is little consensus as to what such an ethic demands of us and how it is to be developed. Yet lonely voices, both from Christians and non-Christians, have occasionally sounded disturbing notes that disrupt this complacency. Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov announces that "without God, everything is permitted." Jean-Paul Sartre announces his opposition to "a kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible expense."1 Even Friedrich Nietzsche, while prophesying the birth of a new morality that may arise out of the death of God, claims that modern secular thinkers are oblivious to the devastating consequences for traditional morality that the demise of religious faith will entail.
Soren Kierkegaard is another of these lonely voices that disrupts the complacency of the secular mind. Kierkegaard is of course a controversial and enigmatic writer. His most- read and discussed books, such as Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, are described by Kierkegaard himself as "aesthetic works" and are ascribed to pseudonyms. These pseudonyms—Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, and Johannes the Seducer, for example—take on a life of their own, like characters in a novel, with views that may or may not be shared by Kierkegaard himself. Though Kierkegaard himself writes, in The Point of View for My Work as an Author, that he was "from first to last a religious author" and that all of these pseudonymous books are written as part of a calling to "reintroduce Christianity into Christendom," these claims are widely ignored or even regarded as dishonest by secular critics. Such critics can of course make no sense of Kierkegaard's claim that his writings were shaped by a "Divine Governance."
It is fortunate, then, that Kierkegaard also wrote books as a Christian under his own name, in which the problem of interpreting a pseudonym does not appear. Perhaps the most important of all these Christian writings is Works of Love, which has recently been published by Princeton University Press in a new translation by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, as part of the Kierkegaard's Writings edition, which Howard Hong has lovingly supervised from its inception. The translation accurately captures Kierkegaard's meaning, even if it necessarily often fails to convey the beauty and power of his Danish prose.
Kierkegaard was undoubtedly a genius; he was, in fact, too much of a genius for his own good. Though he died at the age of 42, he wrote too many profound and compelling works. If he had written only Works of Love, he would be famous as a theologian and philosopher for that book alone. As it is, the poetry and drama of the aesthetic works grab the spotlight and whatever attention the world is prepared to grant to an odd Danish thinker who was a Christian besides, leaving Works of Love to languish in the shadows. That is a shame, because Works of Love is one of the classics of Christian ethics; it exhibits Kierkegaard the theologian working hand in hand with Kierkegaard the philosopher, all wrapped up in memorable prose by Kierkegaard the poet and master stylist.
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