II. The Work of Love
III. Ecce Home! Putting Love to Work
The terms violence and power are often used synonymously: to exercise violence is to exert power, and violence seems to vindicate one’s claim to power. Hannah Arendt disputes this identity [1]. She associates power with authority, in the sense of rational or moral authority, in distinction to physical force. Violence, by contrast, represents the utter absence of power, its invocation signals impotence, for one only resorts to violence when one lacks legitimate authority. Thus a tyrant uses violence, in the form of secret police-inspired terror [2], not because he is powerful, but because he fears the people; though he may have massive instruments of torture and violence, he has no power, otherwise he would not be afraid.
Violence comes in many forms. Primarily we may define it as the use of physical instruments to harm or to coerce others. War is violence, striking another is violence; but pointing a gun at a person also is violence, since it puts him in fear, depriving him of his liberty of action; and lying also is violence, since the liar uses deception to deny his victim the opportunity to take action he would freely have chosen, which reminds us that freedom depends upon truth; and bigotry is violence because it uses the instrument of skin-color or other accidental quality to threaten or demean others.
Violence objectifies and brutalizes both assailant and victim: the victim becomes a body rather than a person and the assailant becomes a weapon. Both are reduced to the status of inert objects, of things, but the real brutalization is that of the assailant: the assailant can maim or physically destroy the victim, but his resort to brute force means that he despairs of and repudiates the powers of communication, compassion, understanding and persuasion, which uniquely define human beings and which inert matter and machines cannot muster. Pascal expresses nicely this radical, qualitative distinction between brute nature and human consciousness:
A human being is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. To crush him, the whole universe does not have to arm itself. A mist, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But if the universe were to crush this reed, the man would still be nobler than his killer, since he knows that he is dying, and that the universe has the advantage over him. The universe knows nothing about this.
In a similar vein, “Through space the universe grasps and engulfs me like a pinpoint; through thought I can grasp it” [3]. In violence the assailant cuts himself off from civilization by repudiating what makes it civilized-- what is unique and noble in humanity-- and descends instead to the abject state of speechless nature.
The exercise of power takes time, reflection, deliberation, whereas violence is the product of raving impulses and instants. Violence never constitutes political action, because action requires also trust, which is possible only in a community at peace. But violence is beyond the control of the violator as soon as it occurs. One cannot predict or control what the effects of violence, and long-term repercussions, will be, though experience teaches that violence almost invariably incites not only more violence in return, but also an escalation of violence; and today’s technology enables wide access to instruments of violence that can destroy us all, which is why a “war on terror” is a fool’s errand. Violence in a word implies lack of control and unpredictability-- powerlessness. Again, to descend to violence is to admit one’s impotence.
We might say now that power is the antithesis of violence, and this is correct in ordinary terms; but the true antithesis of violence is love. Violence is just what its name implies—a violation, something not just, the categorically unjustifiable. The essence of violence is to deny freedom to the victim—the freedom to be the person that she is. Violence indicates the abandonment of reason and compassion; thus love is the only proper response to violence because love is the total negation of it [4]. Consider first the phenomenon of spouse abuse, which represents the negation of love. The abuser—say a husband—out of a desperate insecurity perhaps, exacts complete control and possession of his wife; and he would tell you that he beats her “out of love.” The perversity of this is that by seeking control of his “beloved,” he seeks precisely to deny her freedom; she becomes, even to herself-- and this is what makes the cycle of domestic violence so difficult to break-- his own idea of what she should be, and it is this, a version of himself, that he loves, not her. His “love” is in fact a perverse form of self-love—the love of a self that cannot otherwise love itself. By contrast, truly to love is by nature to love the other, the beloved, thus only an independent, free being is worthy to be loved, a person who has freely made herself what she is. By foreclosing the freedom of the beloved, the violence of spouse abuse is the negation of love; and we shall see that love, as the occasion of freedom, is the negation of violence.
Love is unconquerable: it is everywhere complete always, and we can never run out of love because the more of it we use, the more there is to go around. The primary evidence I offer for this is the testimony of your own hearts; but consider the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Romeo says,
With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls;
For stony limits cannot hold love out:
And what love can do, that dares love attempt.
Romeo establishes the efficacy of love, whose wings bore him over the garden wall, while Juliet appeals to the boundlessness both of the human spirit and of love itself. In her words,
And yet I wish but for the thing I have:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.
That a fatal family feud could not quench the love of Romeo and Juliet reminds us that violence is no match for it. The phrase "to be in love" signifies precisely that it is love that one has one's life in. As Kierkegaard puts it, "Is it not obvious that the person who is really in love would never dream of wanting to prove it... or to defend it, for he is something that is more than all reasons and any defense: he is in love” [5]. Love is like faith: it is not subject to reason, nor is it a static state in which one "comes to a standstill":
the person who has come to faith... does not come to a standstill in faith. Indeed, he would be indignant if anyone said this to him, just as the lover would resent it if someone said that he came to a standstill in love; for, he would answer, I am by no means standing still. I have my whole life in it [6].
To love is to realize a continual rebirth [7]: the lover gives himself completely to love and only thus receives himself back in love: “The person who truly loves... loves with all his love; it is totally present in every expression; he continually spends all of it, and yet he continually keeps it all in his heart” [8]. And in words that echo Juliet’s, Kierkegaard says, "the one who loves is or becomes what he does. He has or rather acquires what he gives” [9].
This unconquerable power of love was the force that motivated and sustained Martin Luther King, Jr. His oppressors assaulted him with the reasonable expectation that he would react with hatred and anger, and had he done so he would have been crushed. But King turned the tables by loving his oppressors. Dr. King put love to work, and, though many suffered in that struggle and not a few gave it their lives, it was for all the world to see who had the power. The source of Dr. King’s power was his Christian faith, so to understand love I shall examine the example of Jesus. There is a personal reason for this-- I am a Christian, and the central thesis of this talk is that one’s faith is integral to one’s personality and thus essential to ethical decision; and there is the season-- this Sunday we Christians shall witness Jesus entering Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, as the people pave his way with palms. But philosophically I shall consider Jesus not to learn about him—this would be a theological concern; my own subject is not God but love, so my project here is to consider not what love can teach us of Jesus, but of what he might teach us about love. In so considering love, we shall discover the modern cultural idea of the self, which first emerges in the Confessions of Augustine. Augustine’s conceptual outline of the freedom of the will has become the pillar of western civilization’s sanctification of individuality. Ignore the dogma that Jesus is God, and we are left still with an idea of unfathomable power and an ethical ideal of undeniable nobility and proven efficacy.
Before turning directly to love, what does the example of Jesus show us of violence? There is but one word, with which an unassuming Hindu ousted an empire-- “turn the other cheek.” However, we might recall the expulsion from the temple of the moneylenders, the brokers, the traders in commercial paper and coin. These people intended no offense to the temple, but they were at least willing participants in, and eager beneficiaries of, the prevailing market economy; thus they were not “innocent victims.” We all today, as Americans, willingly and even greedily indulge in the fruits of empire, an empire heedless in all but word of any obligation or moral limitation that is inconsistent with our own “national security.” We built superpowerdom on the rubble of WWII, and we all today profit mightily from war and the sale of weapons, when we aren’t giving them away to support friendly, repressive dictatorships [10]. We are, after all, an empire, and our “authority” is founded on a fundamentalistic devotion to what produced and sustains that empire—the dogma of economic growth, the creed of consumer waste and the cult of technological progress. An empire by definition has the greatest capacity for violence, so it is sorely tempted to settle affairs by picking fights, and if it weren’t for technology we could go on bullying the world indefinitely; the problem today is that it is only a matter of time before the weapons of terror will make survival for anyone impossible on earth.
Those moneylenders were not innocent, but Jesus bore them no personal animosity; indeed, we must acknowledge that we are all today in that temple precinct and we’re on the moneylenders’ side: Jesus tossed us all out of the temple that day. He taught primarily by example, and he wanted to show us what it was to possess dual-citizenship—of the Kingdom of Heaven as well as of Jerusalem; but a rich man cannot enter the former, and Jesus saw that the people had transformed, unwittingly, their worship of God into the worship of money, which had become an object of religious devotion, an idol. How thoughtlessly do we Americans place a positive value on economic growth, regardless of what it grows; wastefulness, in a world of want, is bad enough, but much of what we produce is fatal. The economy has become an end in itself, and we are here apparently merely to serve it [11].
So Jesus did not come to us to announce our innocence; were we innocent we would have no need of love. Today, however, personal responsibility is about as popular as the doctrine of original sin [12]. Our daily discourse is riddled with a litany of complaints, as if each one of us were the personal whipping boy of all creation; our crimes are the fault of disease or addiction, not of ourselves; and the biggest scapegoat of all has become the subconscious. I do not question the necessity of suing corporations for product liability and the like, since money is the only language they understand, nor do I belittle psychological trauma; what I am suggesting is that our default response to any sin or peccadillo is some version of “the devil made me do it”; we are as anxious to assert our rights and grievances as we are quick to shun the responsibilities that attend them. The presence of Jesus among us, however, of him who alone is without sin, alerts us to our sinfulness; but this alert is given in love, because to be aware of oneself as a sinner is to be aware of one’s freedom; and it works the other way around: to be aware of oneself as personally responsible in principle, and thus free, is to be aware also, in practice, of what we are responsible for. Sin is the non-refundable price of freedom; freedom is the absolute work of love. Violence is sin because it repudiates love by denying freedom; sin is violence because its bondage renders one unworthy of love; thus love’s negation of violence looses the bondage of sin, which makes freedom possible.
The “new covenant,” which Jesus announces and embodies, represents a radical shift from the externally imposed legalism of the Old Testament to a creed whose foundation is the autonomous individual, the free self; and its radical insistence on individual autonomy entails the requirement of personal responsibility, which does not tolerate scapegoating. Jesus issued only two commandments: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength,” and, “like unto it,” “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Mark 12:29-31). In these two commandments we witness a transition from the simple worship of a meddlesome God to the demand that we follow in His own footsteps in the person of Jesus. The Old Testament God created us in His image; Jesus demands that we act like it. Thus we move from obedience to action, from the requirement of personal worship to a demand for personal commitment. The effect of this commandment is to relocate the origin of moral decision from stone tablets to individual conscience; and it commands us, affirmatively, to love our neighbor, including the one whom we call our enemy; and what is this “self” whom we are to love our neighbor “as”? Jesus announces, enables and embodies precisely this self. The very idea that an ordinary human being is also God makes good on the dogma, heretofore merely a possibility or promise, that the breath of God has invested us in eternity. Jesus is God, but we know him and can follow him because he is a man whom we can see, seize and crucify.
So I want now, in the interests of love, to take advantage of the example Jesus furnishes. In Part III we shall consider the political implications of this example, but first we shall look at Jesus as a hypothetical exemplar of love, and to do this we must observe him at the penultimate, and lowest, moment of his present ministry as he says, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
II. The Work of Love
If misfortune taught two human beings that they corresponded to each other in friendship or in love, how negligible the distress caused by the misfortune would seem compared with the joy the misfortune also brought-- that these two corresponded to each other! And if two human beings did not understand until the day of death that they corresponded to each other for all eternity-- oh, how brief, though bitter, that moment of separation that is death would be compared with an eternal understanding!
Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses [13]
We are all ‘strangers in the world.’ The phenomenon of forsakenness is essential to human being: one cannot escape at times feeling under-appreciated or neglected. But how is one to understand that God forsakes Christ at his uttermost extremity of suffering and humiliation? It is difficult enough to endure that a human parent should forsake its child: few acts are as likely to occasion moral indignation. But the forsakenness of Christ is of a different order-- that God, He of omnipotent love, should forsake His only son whom He begot in order to relieve us of the relentless scourge of conscience of which alone, of all things, we cannot relieve ourselves: how can one understand what Kierkegaard refers to as "the terrifying verse that made even Luther anxious when preaching on it-- 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'" (CA 155).
In his last major book, Practice in Christianity [14], Kierkegaard asks us to consider the way that a child might develop an understanding of the life and death of Jesus. The adult shows the child heroic pictures of people engaged in great exploits-- pictures of Napoleon on a horse, before his victorious army, and of William Tell, in earnest aim upon the apple. These images exhilarate and edify the child as we recount the stories that inspire them. But then we show the child a picture of a man crucified. This bewilders and disturbs the child, and we go on to recount that Jesus came to comfort the weak, the hungry, the poor in spirit, and that for this he was crucified. Childhood reflection initially leads to thoughts of revenge, but the young adult acknowledges that revenge would violate the very example that Jesus himself embodies. To experience that Christ suffered voluntarily out of unconditional love for us awakens in us the ideal possibility of an unqualified and self-subsistent love-- a love for love’s sake. Consider how the woman suffered who, weeping, anointed Christ with expensive ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, forgiven her sins "because she loved much” [15]: one might suffer much for the sake of love, yet love is worth it, indeed the greatest tragedy that can befall a person is never to love: "How pitiable,” says Kierkegaard, “is the person who has never been motivated by love to sacrifice everything for the sake of love and consequently has never been able to do it!" (SUD 126-7). How pitiable never to sacrifice everything for love, for love is that human capacity that propels the individual beyond the quotidian confines of self-interest to offer the solace and active fulfillment that only human society can provide.
In Works of Love [16], Kierkegaard asserts that love is a function of “inwardness” and “continuance.” He says,
The inwardness of love must be self-sacrificing, and therefore without the requirement of any reward. The purely human view of love also teaches that love requires no reward-- it wants only to be loved, as if this were no reward, as if the whole relationship did not still remain within the category of human relationship. But the inwardness of Christian love is to be willing, as reward for its love, to be hated by the beloved [17].
This is "a hard saying," but think of the love of Martin Luther King, Jr. for his oppressors, and consider, is a ‘love’ that would not withstand a quarrel or even outright rejection truly worthy of the name? Naturally human love seeks erotic fulfillment, but one surely would not make such fulfillment a condition of love. One speaks naturally and humanly of love as requiring sacrifice, but where is the ‘sacrifice’ if one expects a return on one's investment? Such expectation transforms ‘sacrifice’ into calculation, love into a contract. Thus one can only be certain that love is ‘true’ if the only certainty in love is not erotic fulfillment, but rejection-- that the lover be hated by the beloved precisely on account of the lover's love (Cf. PIC 141-3). Now this is love! Such an ideal love is not, however, for human beings to achieve, indeed for one person so to test another’s love would be sin, because it would effectively demand of the beloved not love but worship. But this perfect love is demanded of Christ in order that he be worthy to assume the sins of all human beings. God’s forsaking of Christ irrevocably fixes the certainty that Christ's love is a function not of calculation that seeks earthly glory, but of love itself. This is not assured by Christ's voluntary sacrifice alone, for, as Kierkegaard says, "sacrifice truly is elevation" (WOL 131): sacrifice distinguishes the martyr as worthy of veneration. To regard Jesus as other than a man is to render him inaccessible to us; indeed, to raise his dignity above anyone would remove him from that one, so Jesus must be absolutely the lowliest of the low, born homeless, wrapped in rags. Thus it is not sufficient that the apostles abandon him to his agony in the garden, that Judas betray him and Peter thrice deny him, that Nicodemus visit him in the anonymity of night and that his crucifixion be demanded, over that of a common thief, by the united voice of the mob-- that he be mocked, reviled, spat upon: any person might endure such treatment with equal equanimity. No, for Christ, the verdict of the mob must be confirmed, his humiliation and degradation absolute. Christ suffers the forsakenness of God because he alone understands that "before God no sacrifice, not one, has merit" (WOL 132). To suffer thus, for him who is "without sin"-- this is suffering worthy of the sacrifice that is love.
In a passage in For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard emphasizes the solitude and extremity of the suffering that attends Christ's sacrifice:
Then he is nailed to the cross-- just one more sigh and it is over. One more sigh, the deepest, the most terrifying: My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me! This humiliation is the last of the suffering...-- One with the Father, but if they are one, how then can the Father forsake him at any moment!... Thus it was not true that he was one with the Father. Oh what extremity of superhuman suffering...-- only the God-man must suffer all through this final suffering. (FSE 64)
In his suffering all through this final suffering, we witness not only the extremity of the struggle in inwardness, but also of the requirement of its continuance. As Kierkegaard puts it, "to struggle with oneself in self-denial, especially if one's aim is to be victorious, is regarded as the hardest of struggles; and to struggle with time, if one's aim was to be totally victorious, is regarded as an impossibility" (WOL 133). This is the requirement of love-- that one suffer in self-denial, and then, when the sacrifice seems to have reached its extremity, that one persist in the realization that one's reward is forthcoming not in time, but in eternity; but this eternity I speak of is not relegated to the afterlife, for in that case, impossibly, only the indefinite passing of time would bring eternity, and this would be to misunderstand eternity, which is not merely an extension of past and future, but an infinite presence. The eternity I speak of is that moment of eternity in time that is present, among us and our neighbors, as love. Such a moment is that when two lovers finally recognize their correspondence, a moment compared to which their entire lives were but a preamble and their deaths of no account. So the true suffering of Jesus is to doubt the presence of that eternity, to be cut off from God. This “suffering of separation,” says Kierkegaard, “is even more terrible than the separation of death, since death separates a person from the temporal and therefore is a release, whereas this separation shuts him out from the eternal and therefore is an imprisonment... because the home of the spirit is in the eternal and the infinite” (EUD 337). So the real suffering on the cross is not physical but spiritual [18]-- it is a crisis of faith like that many of us have experienced since 9/11, a separation of ourselves from ourselves, from our own meaningfulness-- which manifests our separation from God, our fallenness. If, to the believer, it is the feeling that God must be callously silent in the face of our anguish and despair, for others it is cynical confirmation of the meaninglessness of existence itself; but for all of us it is a reminder of the momentary contingency of life and society, in which faith ordinarily and imperceptibly sustains us. It was to protect that freedom, and thus to submit us all to the trial of faith, that Jesus resisted the devil’s third temptation-- to throw himself from the temple [19]. Thus is Jesus "tried in like manner" so that he can "take all on himself." As Kierkegaard puts it, this obligation is the expression of divine compassion, of his infinite love for human beings, so that "He, 'the comforter,' in whose place no one can put himself, can entirely put Himself in thy place and in the place of every sufferer" (3DCF 365). To lift all our sins, he must endure the superhuman suffering of innocence, which the penitent robber, who is crucified by Christ's side, uniquely recognizes.
What is upbuilding and instructive in the robber is that in the moment of his ignominious death he still had enough depth and humility to grasp that suffering as guilty is an alleviation in comparison with the pain of the death suffered on the cross standing in the middle. Through comparison with this suffering, the penitent robber finds comfort and relief in the thought that he is suffering as guilty. Why? Because then the suffering is not involved at all with the question of doubt's anxiety about whether God is love. (UDVS 272)
Christ alone suffers this, because "Before God only Christ was without guilt, and for this very reason he had to suffer the superhuman suffering, had to be led to the border, as it were, of justifiably mistrusting that God is indeed love, when he cried out: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’" (UDVS 270).
III. Ecce Homo! Putting Love to Work
Jesus came to us, out of love, to make us free, but we make an awful mess of it. It would appear that we are cruel, treacherous, manipulative and bigoted just because we can be-- because “everything is permitted”; in the words of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, “people speak sometimes about the ‘animal’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel” [20]. Even if we refrain from active sinning, who of us has not sinned by omission? It is evidently sin intentionally to exploit others, but what of unintentional exploitation—isn’t it sin not to make affirmative efforts to avoid exploitation altogether? Surely it is sin to withhold food and medicine, which we have in abundance; yet the point is not material support, but love—genuine concern for others-- for if we were to replace our typical indifference with attentive concern, which love commands, then food would be the last of our worries.
God of course knew that we would sin, but he is not thereby responsible for evil; His love made us free so that we could do good by choice— so that we might in fact be god-like, for if we were no freer than the wind, we would never do evil but we could also never deserve esteem for doing good. Freedom is God’s ultimate benefaction, for as we see among ourselves, the greatest act of love that one can bestow upon another is to make the other free; this is why, as we have seen, domestic violence is the negation of love. Thus a parent knows that in letting the child free, the child will inevitably find trouble, but, out of love, the parent struggles to permit her to make her own mistakes so that she can learn for herself—so that she can be free. This command of love entails that God cut us off completely from Him, which the expulsion from the Garden represents, just as the parent sends the child off into the big bad world. Again we all felt some version of that estrangement, God’s devastating silence and our despair of meaning, in the tragedy of 9/11 and its aftermath. I suspect that in a time of tragedy we notice the sudden absence of God and meaning because we don’t ordinarily pay attention to their continuous presence, but the good news is that there can be no quest for meaning before we come face-to-face with the perpetual threat of meaninglessness; indeed, there can be no plainer indication of God’s eternal presence than our awareness of his temporal absence. For each of us to feel this absence is the hardest, but least dispensable, lesson of freedom; and if it is to be merely temporary, it is for us to fill that void with love.
So freedom renders God inaccessible to us, but His omnipotence uniquely enables Him both to love each of us infinitely, and to leave us perfectly free of His direct supervision; He is the perfect, omnipotent parent. In so estranging us, God sends us into the teeth of moral relativism, but freedom’s requirement of action means that one’s moral convictions become the stuff of public scrutiny and debate. Thus action by nature forecloses moral relativism, which festers only in the dark. It is a popular notion that all opinions are merely personal and subjective and thus equally valid or true, which is plainly false-- it is easy to confuse the right of free expression with the rigid demands of truth; but the real poison of relativism is to deny us the power to distinguish truth from falsity, violence from love. We can and must distinguish them—this is precisely the gift of freedom-- and to fail to try is to deny that one’s life might be meaningful, that human nobility might in truth be a value and violence in fact a curse.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard considers the moral implications of our absolute separation from God and the struggle it entails. Enter the Knight of Faith, in the person of Abraham, preceded by the Knight of Infinite Resignation. The latter is the position of the tragic hero of Greek drama: he is resigned to his fate because he understands that his own trial is part of a divine plan, which he understands—he is not separated from the divine order, he is part of it. Thus Agamemnon knew that he must sacrifice his daughter, for which fate inevitably exacts reckoning at the hands of his wife, and he knew why-- so the winds would change to propel the Athenian fleet to Troy
Abraham understands perfectly the movements of this Knight of Infinite Resignation: for Abraham, the highest calling in his own universal, ethical order is a father’s protection of his son. But God demands Isaac’s sacrifice, and unlike the tragic hero, Abraham, without a word of reproach to God or explanation to Sarah-- and most of all, unlike Agamemnon, without a clue what it all meant-- sets out with Isaac to Mount Moriah, and binds Isaac on a stone, the same stone upon which the ancient Jewish temples stood and the very stone from which Mohammed’s horse sprang as he carried the Prophet to heaven—it is for this that the golden-domed mosque known as the “Dome of the Rock” now stands there, and one can today reach in and touch, embedded in that very rock, the hoof print of the Prophet’s horse. Recall that Isaac wasn’t just any kid: he had been promised to Abraham and the barren Sarah in their old age, so his very being was a miracle, but God had promised further that Isaac would be the father of the chosen people of Israel
Thus this Knight of Faith is not a political animal, indeed where communication is impossible so too is politics, which requires action—free decision and personal commitment. This Knight has faith, but how do we make him relevant to any but the affairs of isolated, personal spirituality? The answer, I submit, is to be found in the person of Jesus, in his life, death and sacrifice. He brings love to us across the unfathomable abyss that separates Him, as God, from us. He shows us not what it is to be God, for this he cannot do; rather, he wants to show us "what it is to be a man." This, suggests Kierkegaard, is the meaning of Pilate's words to the mob—“Ecce homo! —behold the man!” (John 19:5):
The god-man... continued to express that he was in the same human race with them. But then the family of man... declared: you are not related to us-- see, what a man. The god-man wants to show what it is to be a man, wants to elevate man into relation with God; the family of man thinks it understands the thing better, and declares itself not to be related to him [21]
Today, even those of us who are raised as atheists are taught to think of Jesus only as God—in his “loftiness”; but we know him only as a man—and what a man—no room at the inn, no visible means of support, the lowest of the low! How is it that Jesus can say, “Come here to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” [22]. In Kierkegaard’s words,
In order to incite them to come to one in this way, one must oneself live in the very same manner; poor as the poorest, poorly regarded as the lowly man among the people, experienced in life’s sorrow and anguish, sharing the very same condition as those one invites to come to one, those who labor and are burdened. (PIC 13)
Human charity typically elevates the giver over the beneficiary: no matter how well intentioned or beneficial, it still implies a put-down, thus it cannot be an act purely of love, which requires the giver personally to assume the condition of the beggar-- such love as only Jesus can muster. He is the lowliest among us so that we all might embrace him—I can think of no profounder expression of inclusion and tolerance than this: if we can love Jesus, this wretched beggar, then we can love anyone, and this is precisely his command-- to love all. Thus we all must be free in order to make each other worthy of love, and it is in love that we discover ourselves, reflected in our neighbors’ eyes.
In my earlier remarks on violence and power I pointed out that violence comes from nowhere and is utterly unpredictable both in its effects and in its repercussions; paradoxically this is the one point where violence and action appear to meet: one doesn’t know what the assertion of oneself in the risk for peace will bring, otherwise it wouldn’t be a risk. But recall that action, unlike violence, proceeds as a process of reflection and deliberation in a community of equality and trust, a community of peace. Violence offers no explanation: it is the end of action and the destruction of trust, upon which peace might otherwise have been built. Just as love requires a free and independent beloved, who is only thereby worthy to be loved, so political speech assumes a free and intelligent listener. Action builds a person into personhood, while violence is the repudiation of personhood as such; in action one defines oneself, while violence denies the self. Thus we must strive continually to reassess our goals and methods in light of the ever-changing field of human action and natural accident, an unceasing interplay of action and self-examination. Dogmatic inflexibility, as in religious fundamentalism, guarantees moral relativism, since dogmatism by definition prevents discussion; indeed, a literalist or fundamentalist creed is a form of violence: the unanswerable imposition of iron rule, whether by a tyrant or by a book of revelation, denies free action. By contrast, to be free is to act and to act is to assert, but not to command, that our own values are true; but in this assertion we test that claim of truth by exposing those values to open criticism and to opposing cultural values, and more primordially we render vulnerable our selves as selves; in action one risks showing oneself to be in the wrong, but if one is to be a person not a thing, one must not let this danger prevent taking this risk to exist, to be somebody.
I might complain that my life offers no occasion for the heroic sacrifice of love; but such occasions do not come to press one into their service, as occurred to Abraham, because we are free. Thus must we create them-- we must prepare ourselves to seize that eternal moment-- and surely there is no shortage of opportunities. This is the very idea of the modern, individual self. One might excuse one’s lethargy by saying, “one does what one can.” To this Kierkegaard responds, “But is it such an easy matter to determine how much that is—what one can?” Let’s be honest: who among us does what he or she really can? Rather than do what we can, we do what we do. The action love demands is affirmative, not passive, for it is only in love that one truly does what one can by changing oneself, and in so doing one becomes an example, capable of inspiration and emulation, of love at work. Kierkegaard scoffs at most people’s idea of “compassion and self-denial”: “For people are willing enough to practice compassion and self-denial,… but they want to determine the criterion themselves, that it shall be to a certain degree” (PIC 60). To set the criterion ourselves means practically that we shall sacrifice only as long as it strokes our own feelings of self-worth, but we can’t possibly be expected to permit our charity to encroach meaningfully on our personal comfort. But could one ever sincerely say “I love you… to a certain degree”? No, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus is to suffer and die for the truth, to be ridiculed before the mob so that we might bear facing ourselves -- in the mirror and before God. To put love to work is to wage peace, and it is by no means inappropriate, it seems to me, to use here the language of war, at least guardedly, because there is nothing passive about the assertion of self that love demands; on the contrary, to love is to marshal one’s powers to the utmost, to resist the temptation to banish oneself from civilization by abandoning ourselves to violence.
If this talk of sacrifice seems morbid, let me suggest that this work of love might offer its eternal reward here in time, that momentary glimpse of eternity, which love promises. Such a moment evidently occurred on April 3, 1968. It was a dark and stormy night; tornadoes hovered over Memphis
Before I conclude with a brief homage to Dr. King, let’s pause to review. We have been considering love as the antithesis of violence and as the only proper response to it-- its complete negation-- and I offered Jesus as a philosophical prototype of love. The perfect expression and guarantor of the ideality of Christ as love we saw in Christ’s forsakenness, an ideal image of our own separation from God, and in this moment is born the modern self. Then we considered two philosophical precursors to this new, free self. The first was the Knight of Infinite Resignation, played by Agamemnon, whose fate was determined according to the just measure of the manifest, universal order; then entered the Knight of Faith, in the person of Abraham, who was not merely stoically resigned to God’s treacherous and absurd command, but had also the faith that all would be well. But recall that Abraham’s faith was not a function of free self-assertion: his silence betrays his inability to explain himself, and where one cannot explain oneself one does not know enough of oneself even to have a self. Thus we have arrived here by proposing that Christianity’s calling, as implied in Christ’s second great commandment, is for an active, assertive and self-definitive love—it is a call to action. This is the love that not only expresses itself in the light of human personality, but also is itself, in the person of Jesus, the beacon of freedom. Is there a moment when that light penetrates the darkness and the dust?
So King made his way through the wind and the rain to the Mason Temple that night of April 3. He spoke of the assault on his life a few years previously, when he had been stabbed to within a cough of his life. "I'm glad I didn’t cough," he said. As the speech progressed King came to the present. "Now it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter what happens now," he said. He spoke of the bomb threat that had just been made against him "from some of our sick white brothers. Well, I don't know what will happen now." He continued,
We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter to me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop.
Like anybody I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.
And He's allowed me to go to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.
So I'm happy tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearin’ any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
The next day he was dead, but in that last, public moment King shows us that the life of a single person might mean something. This Dr. King, like Moses before him, discovered on that mountaintop. The tragic hero accepts the dictates of fate, Abraham is given the promise of the land and of Isaac; we are granted nothing but the possibility of freedom, so we must take a risk to wage peace. Abraham is a Knight of Faith but King is a Christian Hero, of whom God demands not only obedience, but also the active love of neighbor; in following the footsteps of Jesus, as did King, we too put love to work. This demand of action is to risk for peace not what I can fit into my schedule, but what justice demands, not what I think sufficient, but what love requires. It is to the mountaintop that God calls us, a call to action, for that is where time is beckoned to enter eternity. We might not get there, but the Promised Land is the only thing “worth fighting for.”
NOTES
[1]Cf. Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1970).
[2] Cf. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1979).
[3] Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Fr. 145 p. 36, Fr. 231 pp. 72-3.
[4] I use the term “proper” here in the narrow sensed of “belonging to” or “peculiarly appropriate to.” Thus my claim is stronger than it may appear—that the only response appropriate to violence is love.
[5] The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 104; hereinafter “SUD.” There is a subtext here: Kierkegaard is determined that faith and love categorically defy rational explanation or proof—they are transcendent or absolute concepts, not dependent for their meaning or existence on anything else. One might say that their truth is self-evident-- its very nature is manifestation, to show itself in its purity. Something that is self-evident in this way not only doesn’t need to be proven, but also it cannot be proven; indeed, to “demonstrate” or to “prove” faith or love may be to prove something, but it can’t be faith or love if it is even subject to such “proof.”
[6] Fear and Trembling, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 122-123; hereinafter “FT.”
[7] The Kierkegaardian concept here is “repetition,” which signifies a change in the self that manifests no outward alteration; thus the new self is a “repetition” of the old, but not a mere “rerun.”
[8] Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 30; hereinafter “UDVS.”
[9] Works of Love, trans. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946) p. 231; hereinafter “WOL.”
[10] This is evidently a tellingly ironic term— a regime that is both dictatorial and friendly; unfortunately, typically the most repressive regimes are considered by our foreign policy to be the most “friendly” because they are more likely to be stable than fledgling democracies; indeed the more repression the more stability, and security likes stability. This should indicate to us a deep and inherent moral flaw of our foreign policy as such.
[11] Cf. Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). Marcuse makes the point here that technology is a good thing only insofar as it serves to free us from unnecessary labor; but today technology has become an end in itself, as has the economy. In other words, rather than make policy by asking the question “is this good for people,” we ask the question “is this good for the economy,” as if people were no more than factors in the economy. Thus, much of our technology and economy are devoted to producing things that are either wasteful or outright harmful, which could not happen if we produced things according to their human value. Thus we in the West are today not in need of economic growth because we are already overdeveloped: economic growth is today the problem, not the solution.
[12] The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); hereinafter “CA.” In this difficult but highly rewarding book, Kierkegaard offers an account of original sin, a condition wherein one recognizes “the possibility of possibility,” that is, the possibility that one might encounter possibility—i.e. the possibility that I might have possibilities, that I might be free.
[13] Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 310; hereinafter “EUD.”
[14] Trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); hereinafter “PIC.”
[15] “Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays,” in Christian Discourses, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 379-386; hereinafter “3DCF”; and cf. "The Woman That Was A Sinner," in Training in Christianity, trans. Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 261-271.
[16] Trans. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946); hereinafter “WOL.”
[17]For Self Examination, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 64; hereinafter “FSE.”
[18] Cf. Winter Light, written and directed by Ingmar Bergman (Janus Films, 1962).
[19] The most penetrating account of the three temptations of Christ, of which I am aware, is that of The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; this is a great masterpiece both as a literary and as a spiritual work. Read the whole book, in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1991).
[20] Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa (New York: Vintage Classics, 1991) p. 238.
[21] Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers Vols. I-VII, trans. Hong and Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-78); hereinafter “JP.”
[22] “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30
[23] Recall that those sanitation workers, on their protest marches, bore signs reading I AM A MAN. Evidently, they became so precisely by taking the risk to stand up for the justice of their own dignity. For all of us, to be a person is to declare ourselves to be so by taking a risk to commit ourselves to something, for it is in committing ourselves that we discover our selves.
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