Works of Love
Works of Love is a book Soren Kierkegaard published in 1847 under his own name. That detail matters more than it might seem. Kierkegaard was famous for hiding behind invented personas, releasing his most celebrated writings as works of fictional authors with names like Johannes Climacus or Anti-Climacus. So when he stepped forward and signed his own name to a book, he was signaling that this one was different. This one was personal.
The subject was love, but not the kind poets celebrate. Kierkegaard wanted to examine agapic love, the Greek concept of agape, a form of love the Christian tradition placed above erotic love, or eros, and above the preferential love given to friends and family, which the Greeks called philia. His question was what this highest form of love actually demands of a person, and what it means to live it out in real relationships with real people. What follows is a documentary about that question, the book that pursued it, and the thinker who could not separate theology from lived human experience.
Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works were among the most inventive in European philosophy. He gave fictional authors elaborate backstories and distinct personalities, using these masks to explore ideas without committing to them directly. Works of Love broke that pattern entirely.
Publishing under his own name placed Kierkegaard in a different relationship to the reader. He was no longer presenting a character's view for the reader to interpret. He was speaking as himself, a Christian, an ethicist, and a thinker shaped by a specific place and moment. Denmark in the 1840s was alive with political events that colored how any public intellectual addressed questions of duty, conscience, and community. Kierkegaard's position as a Christian ethicist, the source notes, was likely to appear distinct from how the religion's mainstream seemed to function when viewed from outside. That distinctiveness was not incidental. It was baked into the project from the start, shaped by his time and by what was happening around him in his native country.
The architecture of Works of Love rests on a distinction between three Greek words for love: agape, eros, and philia. Eros is erotic love. Philia is the preferential attachment a person feels for friends and family. Agape is something else entirely, the love that Kierkegaard places at the center of Christian ethics.
The difference is not just vocabulary. Eros and philia are selective by nature. They flow toward particular people for particular reasons. Agape, as Kierkegaard develops it across the book, is structured differently. It is obligatory. The word he returns to is not "I feel love" but "you shall love." That phrase, drawn from the New Testament, appears as a chapter heading in Part One of the book. The shift from feeling to duty is the engine of his argument. A love that depends on finding someone lovable is not yet the love he is describing. Genuine agapic love, as he frames it, reaches even toward the stranger, the neighbor, the person one has no natural reason to care about. The chapter heading "You Shall Love Your Neighbor" captures that obligation precisely.
Works of Love is divided into two parts, each organized as a series of reflections anchored to specific mentions of love drawn from the New Testament. Kierkegaard himself described them as Christian reflections rather than discourses, a distinction he cared about.
Part One opens with a meditation on love's hidden life and whether it can be recognized by its fruits. From there the chapters move through questions of duty, conscience, and the obligation each person carries toward others. "Love Is a Matter of Conscience" and "Our Duty to Be in the Debt of Love to Each Other" give a sense of the ethical weight Kierkegaard places on these questions. Part Two shifts register toward love's endurance and generosity. Chapter headings in this half include "Love Seeks Not Its Own," "Love Hides the Multiplicity of Sins," and "Love Abides." Two chapters near the end address territory few philosophers enter: "The Work of Love in Remembering One Dead" turns the concept of agape toward those who can no longer receive anything in return, and in doing so, the book closes on one of its most searching ideas.
Kierkegaard arrived at Works of Love as one of the thinkers who helped found existentialism, and that framework runs underneath every chapter. His earlier writings had developed a map of human existence organized into stages: the aesthetic stage, in which a person lives for pleasure and sensation; the ethical stage, in which a person lives according to moral rules; and beyond both, the religious stage, in which the individual stands in direct relationship to God.
Works of Love is preoccupied with the transfer from the secular stages to genuine religious existence. The relationships and experiences of Christ's disciples appear throughout the book as tangible models, not as remote examples from sacred history but as demonstrations of how actual human beings have lived out agapic love. Because human experience is central to understanding Kierkegaard's method, these scriptural lives carry the same weight as any observed life. The book cites the Christian Bible directly, weaving theology and existential analysis together in a way that kept his Christian ethics from resembling the institutional Christianity of his day. That gap between his account of love and the mainstream version would draw readers and critics to the book long after his death.
Kierkegaard described Works of Love as Christian reflections, and the word "reflections" points to something real about how the prose moves. The book is written in a rhetorical style that returns to the same ideas from different angles, accumulating examples and repeating key phrases rather than building a linear argument.
That repetition is deliberate. When a chapter title announces that love builds up, or that love hopes all things and yet is never put to shame, Kierkegaard does not state the point once and move on. He circles it, tests it against different situations, and asks the reader to hold it long enough to feel its weight. The chapter "Mercifulness, a Work of Love, Even If It Can Give Nothing and Is Capable of Doing Nothing" shows how far this method can stretch: love here is stripped of every outward result, and what remains is the act itself. That is the note on which Part Two turns before reaching its final chapter, "The Work of Love in Praising Love," which closes the book by turning the argument back on itself, asking what it means to love the very act of loving.
Common questions
What is Works of Love by Soren Kierkegaard about?
Works of Love, published in 1847, is a book about the Christian conception of agapic love, known in Greek as agape. Kierkegaard contrasts agape with erotic love (eros) and preferential love given to friends and family (philia), arguing that agapic love is an obligation rather than a feeling. The book uses New Testament passages as anchors for reflections on what it means to live out this form of love in real relationships.
Why did Kierkegaard publish Works of Love under his own name?
Kierkegaard published Works of Love under his own name to distinguish it from his more famous pseudonymous works, which he released under invented author personas. Signing his own name signaled that the book represented his direct personal and theological commitments as a Christian ethicist.
What is the difference between agape, eros, and philia in Works of Love?
In Works of Love, eros refers to erotic love and philia to preferential love felt for friends and family; both are selective attachments directed at particular people for particular reasons. Agape, by contrast, is the form of love Kierkegaard treats as obligatory, captured in the phrase 'you shall love your neighbor,' extending even to those one has no natural reason to care about.
How is Works of Love structured?
Works of Love is divided into two parts, each organized as a series of Christian reflections anchored to specific mentions of love from the New Testament. Part One covers topics including love's hidden life, duty, conscience, and the obligation to love one's neighbor. Part Two addresses love's endurance, generosity, and mercy, closing with a chapter on the work of love in praising love itself.
What role does existentialism play in Works of Love?
Kierkegaard was one of the founders of existentialism, and Works of Love uses that framework to examine the transfer of individuals from secular modes of existence, the aesthetic and ethical stages, to genuine religious existence. The actual relationships and experiences of Christ's disciples appear throughout as tangible models for how agapic love can be lived out.
What writing style did Kierkegaard use in Works of Love?
Kierkegaard described Works of Love as Christian reflections rather than discourses, and wrote in a rhetorical style that repeats key ideas and accumulates numerous examples rather than building a single linear argument. He deliberately circled central claims from multiple angles to let their weight settle on the reader.