Søren Kierkegaard's Kjerlighedens Gjerninger (Works of Love), published in 1847 under his own name, is his most sustained engagement with ethics and the most explicitly Christian of his major works. Taking as its guiding text Matthew 22:39 ('you shall love your neighbor as yourself'), Works of Love argues that the commandment to love is not a constraint on love but its liberation: only the commandment's unconditionality - love grounded in duty to God rather than in the beloved's qualities - achieves the universality, equality, and permanence that spontaneous human affection cannot. The book has been enormously influential in philosophical ethics, continental philosophy, and feminist philosophy, and Emmanuel Levinas acknowledged it as a key predecessor to his own account of infinite obligation to the Other.
The Thinker and His Work
Works of Love was published two years before The Sickness Unto Death, and while the pseudonymous works explore the self's structure and despair, Works of Love presents the positive content of Christian existence: a life of active love for the neighbor. The work is organized as a series of 'deliberations' (Overveielser), each taking a biblical text as its starting point and developing its implications for the practice of love. Kierkegaard presents himself not as a lecturer but as a co-inquirer, addressing a 'reader' who is assumed to be engaged in the same struggle with love's demands.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Matthew 22:39 - 'you shall love your neighbor as yourself' - is the founding text and provides the book's central philosophical argument. Kierkegaard's reading is counterintuitive: the commandment is not merely a reiteration of natural human love (which tends to prefer some over others) but a redefinition of love's object and basis. The 'neighbor' (naeste - the one nearest to hand) is any human being whatsoever, not the one who attracts our affection. The self-love that is taken as the measure ('as yourself') is not natural self-love but the proper ordering of the self before God.
Luke 10:27-37 - the Parable of the Good Samaritan - provides the neighbor concept its content. The Samaritan loves the wounded man not because of kinship, ethnicity, or reciprocity but because he is the one at hand, the one in need. Kierkegaard argues that this concreteness - love's response to the actual person before me - is the antidote to love's abstraction into general benevolence or sentimental feeling.
John 15:12 - 'this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you' - grounds the commandment in Christology. The measure of neighbor-love is not natural self-love but the love of Christ, which gave itself in self-emptying (kenosis) for those who did not deserve it. This raises the standard of neighbor-love to an infinite demand that human beings cannot meet by their own resources.
Core Argument
Kierkegaard's central thesis is that only commanded love - love as duty - achieves true universality and permanence. Spontaneous affection (what he calls Elskov, erotic love, and Venskab, friendship) is inherently preferential: it loves this person because of their attractive qualities, their reciprocal love, their kinship. When those qualities change or that reciprocity fails, the love tends to change or fail too. Preferential love also creates a 'we' - the lovers or friends - that can become exclusive, even hostile to outsiders.
The commandment breaks this circle of preference by grounding love in something that does not vary: the neighbor's humanity, which is the same in every human being, and the commandment's divine authority, which does not depend on the neighbor's response. Commanded love thus achieves what spontaneous love cannot: equality (every person is equally my neighbor) and constancy (my obligation to the neighbor does not change when they change).
Kierkegaard develops this through a series of brilliant reversals. To 'build up' (opbygge) the neighbor is not to criticize or improve them but to presuppose the best about them, to give them interpretive charity even when their actions are ambiguous. To seek the neighbor's debt to you is to become a creditor of love who can never be repaid and should not wish to be. To 'grieve over the evil of the beloved' is the highest love - neither overlooking evil nor being destroyed by it but maintaining relationship through judgment.
Intellectual Context
Kierkegaard was writing in critical dialogue with both the Romantic tradition (which idealized erotic love and friendship as the highest forms of human relation) and Kantian ethics (which grounded morality in universal rational duty). Against the Romantics, he insisted that preference is not the highest form of love. Against Kant, he insisted that duty must be grounded in God's commandment, not in autonomous rational legislation - that secular duty without theological grounding is unstable and ultimately self-serving.
Reception and Critique
Emmanuel Levinas's account of the 'face of the other' in Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974) is the most direct philosophical descendant of Works of Love. Levinas's infinite obligation to the other - an obligation that is asymmetrical (I owe the other more than the other owes me), unconditional, and constitutive of my very subjectivity - translates Kierkegaard's commanded love into a non-theological idiom.
M. Jamie Ferreira's Love's Grateful Striving (2001) is the most sustained philosophical analysis of Works of Love in English, arguing that Kierkegaard's ethics is more careful and less rigoristic than critics like Gene Outka have claimed. Feminist philosophers have engaged Works of Love with mixed reactions: Sylviane Agacinski and Luce Irigaray find in it resources for thinking about sexual difference and care; others find the ideal of selfless love potentially oppressive for those already inclined to self-erasure.
Legacy
Works of Love established the Kierkegaardian tradition of 'second ethics' - the ethics of the religious sphere, in which love is not merely a rational duty but a responsive gift grounded in God's prior love. This tradition has influenced Protestant social ethics (Reinhold Niebuhr's account of agape as self-sacrificial love), Catholic social teaching (the emphasis on solidarity and preferential option for the poor), and virtue ethics (the recovery of the virtue of charity as a form of habituated love that transforms the one who loves).
Key Passages
'To love people is the only thing worth living for, and without this love you are not really living.' (Journals, Kierkegaard, related to the themes of Works of Love)
'You shall love - it is only when love is a duty that love is eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.' (Works of Love, I.II, trans. Hong and Hong)
Contemporary Relevance
Works of Love speaks directly to contemporary debates about the nature and limits of altruism, the psychology of compassion fatigue, and the ethics of care. Kierkegaard's analysis of how preferential love can be both genuine and ethically insufficient illuminates the tension in contemporary moral psychology between tribal loyalty and universal obligation. His insistence that the neighbor is always the concrete particular person before me - not an abstract category - provides a philosophical counterweight to utilitarian calculations that tend to dissolve the individual into aggregate welfare. The book is increasingly read in biomedical ethics, political philosophy, and interfaith dialogue as a resource for articulating a non-sentimental, demanding, and universal account of human solidarity.