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Is Love of God Hatred of the World?

This paper was brought about by a question that has both irritated and interested me for some time now: Is a person’s love of God inversely proportional to the same person’s hatred of the world? Must the one necessarily result in the other? Reading Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits reveals that this topic is constantly recurring throughout most of the discourses, though not all of them have this as a direct theme. In what follows I put forth the thesis that, for Kierkegaard, love is always one. Different kinds of love do not exist; there are only different forms in which love manifests itself. But fundamentally, love is one, and it is precisely this lack of ambiguity that guarantees a connection between a love of God and a love of the world, rather than a contradictory relationship. I am probably not alone in taking offence at the assertion that one’s love of God should be inversely proportional to one’s hatred of the world. Most likely, it is not only my intelligence and ethical consciousness that are alarmed by the idea that the one must necessarily result in the other. It is an assertion that repeatedly emerges throughout the New Testament and is quite often expressed and developed in many of Kierkegaard’s texts. It is a striking assertion. An offensive assertion, indeed, as all the while most of us are quite comfortable in the world we now inhabit and in the relationships we have formed with others in this life – with father, mother, brothers, sisters and all the others whom Kierkegaard collectively refers to as ‘neighbor.’ Why should a love of God imply a hatred of all that is wonderful, full of life and that which is God’s very own creation? What does God get out of it? The neighbor certainly goes home empty-handed! So why this (unreasonable) demand? What does it mean, anyway? How are we to understand the idea that loving God is hatred of the world?