Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea

      originated through Omnipotence can be independent.

      That is why one human being cannot

      make another person wholly free . . .

      only Omnipotence can withdraw itself

      at the same time it gives itself away, and

      his relationship is the very independence of the receiver.

      (Journals and Papers 2.1252)

      The entirety of Kierkegaard’s existential thinking could

      be interpreted as reflecting on this Omnipotence that

      stands back in order to let the other be free.

      In the last three chapters of his Works of Love Kierkegaard

      explains the agapeic strategy for accomplishing reconciliation.[NL1-3]

      (1) We need to love the other as more important than ourselves

      that he or she might be graced to love others as more important.

      (2) We need to recollect the dead in praying for them and in asking

      them to pray for us that we might see a context that is big

      enough in time and space to let this impossible task happen.

      (3) We need to praise Love which is God that we might

      praise all others as members of his Incarnate Body.

      In humility Jesus taught us how God stands back to free others

      and thus sacrifices his omnipotence for the potency of others.

      In part two, chapter eight, of Works of Love: The Victory of

      the Conciliatory Spirit in Love, Which Wins the One Overcome,

      Kierkegaard poses the problem clearly when he writes:

      Let us suppose that the prodigal son’s brother

      had been willing to do everything for his brother-yet

      one thing he could never have gotten into his head

      that the prodigal should be more important. (338)

      If the prodigal goes to the altar to thank God he will be

      commanded by the Gospel to go to his elder brother and

      to seek reconciliation in accord with Matt 5:23–24.

      When the prodigal came home after squandering his money

      his brother took offense at him and was resentful because his father

      threw a party to welcome home the prodigal and did not seem

      in the elder brother’s eyes to see him as important as the prodigal.

      It was as if the father thought the prodigal to be more important.

      So for the prodigal to properly love the elder brother he has to

      not only forgive him but to go and be reconciled with him.

      That might be no easy task for the prodigal would have to treat

      the elder brother as more important and the elder brother would

      have to think of the prodigal as more important if there is

      to be true reconciliation according to the model of agape.

      The point of Kierkegaard’s authorship is to show how the brother

      can be brought to love the prodigal as more important than himself.

      How will the elder brother stop taking offense and being resentful?

      It is the task of the prodigal to be like Stephen for Paul.

      He has to stand back in self denial to free his brother.

      In resentment the brother may not want to become freed

      from his taking offense that he might be reconciled.

      So the prodigal has to have faith that it will happen

      in his brother’s and in God’s good time and even if

      it doesn’t happen in this life time the prodigal must not

      despair, but he must pray always even for the blessed dead.

      In the middle of his chapter on Praising Love Kierkegaard

      gives a summary of how reconciliation can be achieved:

      This is inwardly the condition or model

      in which praising love must be done.

      To carry it out has, of course,

      its intrinsic reward, although in addition

      by praising love in so far as one is able,

      it also has the purpose to win people to it,

      to make them properly aware of what

      in a conciliatory spirit is granted

      to every human being-that is, the highest.

      The one who praises art and science still

      shows dissention between the gifted and ungifted.

      But the one who praises love reconciles all,

      not in common poverty nor in a common

      mediocrity, but in the community of the highest. (365)

      For Kierkegaard the prodigal might remain an aesthete for whom

      the beauty of the party immediately pleases “me”, but if so

      he will come to the common poverty of me-centered prodigals.

      Or the prodigal might become ethical and reflect upon “my self”

      but in simply avoiding the dire consequences of prodigality

      with gifted insight he might be just as mediocre as his brother.

      The prodigal might go beyond the common poverty of the pre-

      aesthetic me and the common mediocrity of the reflectively

      ethical myself and become the “I” who is thankful to his father

      and to God. But, this “me,” “myself” and “I” can become other

      centered in a praising love that lets even aesthetic petition,

      ethical repentance and religious gratitude become praising.

      This is the seven step logic of reconciliation that is demanded

      of the prodigal and which is the core of Kierkegaard’s philosophy.

      We will now examine how Kierkegaard applied this logic

      throughout his authorship in reconciling older brothers and Jesus.

      Kierkegaard’s four noble truths

      I We humans bring each other into the suffering

      of boredom and fear and trembling

      II through the sin of taking offence at God’s

      existence in anxiety and despair

      III from which we can be creatively freed by following

      the God-man’s loving self-denial and self-sacrifice

      IV along the nine-fold path of his conciliatory love that

      recollects the dead in the praising love

      of humankind’s highest affirmation by moving

      (1) from the irony of Socratic skepticism

      in which love is a matter of conscience

      (2) to Abraham’s knight of