Kierkegaard's writings are interspersed with remarkable stories of love, commonly understood as a literary device that illustrates the problematic nature of aesthetic and ethical forms of life, and the contrasting desirability of the life of faith. Sharon Krishek argues that for Kierkegaard the connection between love and faith is far from being merely illustrative. Rather, love and faith have a common structure, and are involved with one another in a way that makes it impossible to love well without faith. Remarkably, this applies to romantic love no less than to neighbourly love. Krishek's original and compelling interpretation of the Works of Love in the light of Kierkegaard's famous analysis of the paradoxicality of faith in Fear and Trembling shows that preferential love, and in particular romantic love, plays a much more important and positive role in his thinking than has usually been assumed.
This chapter substantiates romantic love as not only a moral phenomenon but also a spiritual one. Demonstrating how the healing from despair, which amounts to the highest relationship with God, is dependent upon loving correctly, and given (as was demonstrated in previous chapters) that romantic love can be correct and hence moral, it becomes clear that moral romantic love is a sufficient condition for spiritual existence. Further, the chapter explicates the correspondence between lovers in terms of helping each other to become the selves they are intended to be, and clarifies the specific nature of romantic love as involving erotic joy. Finally, it uses one of the most paradigmatic tales of romantic love—Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—as a test case by which to tie all the threads presented throughout the book together. Reading this story, the thesis of romantic love as a meeting of essences is vividly portrayed.
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