7.27.2004

"Love, from time to time..."

Yesterday I came across this good passage again in Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. I remember copying it into a journal years ago:

Love, from time to time, has in this way helped a man along the right path. Faithfully he willed only one thing, his love. For it, he would live and die. For it, he would sacrifice all and in it alone he would have his eternal reward.

Yet the act of being in love is still not in the deepest sense the Good. But it may possibly become for him a helpful educator, who will finally lead him by possession of his beloved one, or perhaps by her loss, in truth to will one thing and to will the Good. In this fashion a man is educated by many means; and true love is also an education toward the Good.


I like that line, "Yet the act of being in love is still not in the deepest sense the Good." This quote by Simone Weil draws closer to the Good, I think (I liked it so much I made it into a card):