KIERKEGAARDworks

And how does that simple love assure itself against jealousy? I wonder if it is not by virtue of the fact that it does not love in the comparative way. It does not begin by immediately loving perferentially; it loves. Therefore it can never love morbidly in a comparative way; it loves.

As the jaundiced see everything as yellow, so such a man discovers, as he sinks deeper and deeper, an increasing manifold of sin about him. His eye is alert and trained, not for the understanding of truth, hence for untruth; consequently his sight is prejudiced more and more so that, increasingly defiled, he sees evil in everything, impurity even in what is purest--and this sight (Oh terrible thought!) is still to him a kind of consolation, for it is important to him to discover as boundless a multitude as possible.

But the despairer... did not observe what was happening behind him, so to speak; he thinks he is in despair over something earthly and constantly talks about what he is in despair over, and yet he is in despair about the eternal; for the fact that he ascribes such great value to the earthly, or, to carry the thought further, that he ascribes to something earthly such great value, or that he first transforms something earthly into everything earthly, and then ascribes to the earthly such great value, is precisely to despair about the eternal.

But there is one environment which absolutely does not give and is not an occasion for sin: that is love. When a man's sin is encompassed by love, then it is outside its own element; it is like a beleaguered city whose every connection with its own people is cut off; it is like a man who has been addicted to drink: when placed upon a scanty ration he loses his strength, vainly waiting an occasion to become intoxicated.

Christianity knows a better answer to the question of what love is and about loving than does any poet. Precisely therefore it knows too that which escapes the attention of many poets, that the love they praise is secretly self-love, and that this explains its intoxicated expression about loving another man better than one's self. Earthly love is still not the eternal love; it is the beautiful fantasy of the infinite, its highest expression is mysterious foolishness.

Could anyone misunderstand this, as if it were the intention of Christianity to hold self-love in honor? On the contrary, it is its intention to strip us of our selfishness. This selfishness consists in loving one's self; but if one must love his neighbor as himself, then the commandment opens the lock of self-love as with a picklock, and the man with it. If the commandment about loving one's neighbor were expressed in some other way than by the use of this little phrase, "as thyself," which is at once so easy to use and yet has the tension of eternity, then the commandment would not be able thus to master the self-love... It does not leave self-love the least excuse, the least loophole open. How strange! Long and shrewd speeches might be made about how a man ought to love his neighbor; and then, after all the speeches had been heard, self-love could still hit upon an excuse and find a way of escape, because the subject had not been absolutely exhausted; all alternatives had not been canvassed; because something had been forgotten, or not accurately and bindingly enough expressed and described