3 of the individual to the status of the divine.

It is clear from Luther's "Treatise on Christian Liberty" that the Reformer will not entertain the idea of a faithful love of self.

We conclude, therefore, that a Christian man lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love; by faith he is caught up beyond himself into God, by l^ve he sinks down beneath himself into his neighbour...

1. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 48 Note the comparison with Feuerbach's I-Thou theory; "paradox" is S.K.'s additional element.

2. ibid.

3. A comparison of Kierkegaard's view of self-love with Augustine, Luther, Hegel, and Feuerbach would indeed be interesting, but such is beyond the scope of this essay. Each contributes in some way to S.K.'s formulation, but his dialectical view of the self renders his view unique. Particularly, despite some similarities, his view differs dec­ idedly from Augustine, due to S.K.'s emphasis upon the duty to love the neighbour. For Hegel self-love was "a word without meaning^ cf. Hegel, Early Writings, op.cit. p . 247 4. Luther, "Treatise on Christian Liberty", Classics of Protestantism, ed. Perm, Philos­

Kierkegaard, however, observes that self-love is a necessary condition for the love of neighbour, because the neighbour must be recognized as a self before he or she may be loved as oneself.

Kierkegaard seems to take the command to love the neighbour as the self (Mark 12:28-34) quite literally. The command to love

God is prior, but love for God is not different from the "passion"

of faith. Love for the neighbour depends upon the proper concept of self, in relation to God, so that, by faith both self and neighbour are loved in reference to God's prior love for humanity. Therefore, the self cannot simply be deleted, either in deference to God or to the neighbour. The neighbour is a "duplication" of oneself. There is, as Augustine held, no qualitative difference between the self and the neighbour. Under the authority of the royal law, they are equal: "As far as thought is concerned, the neighbour need not even exist." ^ Proper love for oneself is the same as proper love for one's neighbour. Just as God has demonstrated his identity with the human condition, the faithful is commanded to identify himself with his neighbour. Both justice and the nature of divine love hang in the balance.

With this concept of a "paradoxical" self-love we must notice that Kierkegaard's dialectic is once again at work. - He conceives of an innate self-love which is either the ground of a "religion of love" or the ground by which all love perishes. The connection between self-love 'A' and self-love ' B ' (to continue his distinction of Either/Or) is either positive or negative; there may or may not be a transition from one to the other. This connection is best represented in his own words:

Self-love lies as the ground of love; but the paradoxical passion of self-love when at its highest pitch wills prec­ isely its own downfall. This is also what love desires, so that these two are linked in mutual understanding in the passion of the moment, and this passion is love. Why should not the lover find this conceivable? But he who in self-love

1. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 59

2. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto De ath, op. cit. p. 262, inter alia

3. Works of Love, op. cit. p. 34

4. ibid p . 35

shrinks from the touch of love can neither understand it nor summon the courage to venture it, since it means his downfall. Such is then the passion of love; self- love is indeed submerged but not annihilated;...this is love's temptation.

In the above quotation, we observe that Kierkegaard's idea of self-love is not bad in itself. "At its highest pitch it wills its own downfall." In other words, selfhood understood through faith loses its absorption in itself. It becomes a passion which is equivalent to "the passion of love" - focussed not on itself, but on the eternal. Only by this release from bondage to itself does the self actually become a self, in the eternal sense. But without the 'courage' to make this movement of infinity, the self remains "in despair", absorbed in the finite, the temporal conception of itself, and thereby losing the infinite, eternal relation to itself, which can only be ©onsummated through faith in God. Kierkegaard's "definition of faith", which appears at the end of his book Sickness Unto Death, is concerned precisely with the paradox­ ical search for the self: "By relating itself to its (true) self and by willing to be its (true) self, the self is grounded transparen-

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