Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing by Sören Kierkegaard This book was first published by Harper in 1938. It was translated from the Danish and contains an introductory essay by Douglas V. Steere. Prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Willie Brock. Translator’s Introduction by Douglas V. Steere A helpful summary of Kierketaard's basic positions, written by an outstanding scholar of his work. Douglass Steere was Professor of philosophy at Haverford College. Preface A woman doing needlework on an altar cloth does not want the work admired or criticized, but rather that the intent of the work is that it be seen for its higher purpose. Kierkegaard desires his writing receive the same attention. Chapter 1: Introduction: Man and the Eternal In relation to the eternal, a man ages neither in the sense of time nor in the sense of an accumulation of past events. There is something eternal in a man, and the eternal must be able to exist and to be grasped within every change. Chapter 2: Remorse, Repentance, Confession: Eternity’s Emissaries to Man Remorse is a guide that calls out to the wanderer that he should take care. In confession one becomes at one with himself. Chapter 3: Barriers to Willing One Thing: Variety and Great Moments Are Not One Thing To will one thing can only mean to will the good, because every other object is not a unity. The will that only wills that another object, therefore, must become double-minded. Chapter 4: Barriers to Willing One Thing: The Reward-Disease If a man can will one thing, then he must will the Good, for the Good alone is one. Chapter 5: Barriers to willing One Thing: Willing Out of Fear of Punishment If a man wills only the Good out of fear of being punished he does not will one thing. Such a man is double-minded. Chapter 6:Barriers to Willing One Thing: Egocentric Service of the Good If a man wills the Good and wills its victory out of self-centered willfulness he does not will one thing. He is double-minded. Chapter 7: Barriers to Willing One Thing: Commitment to a Certain Degree The person who only wills the Good up to a certain degree is double-minded. Chapter 8: The Price of Willing Our Thing: Commitment, Loyalty, Readiness to Suffer All If a man wills the good in truth, then he must be willing to do all for the good or be willing to suffer all for the good. Chapter 9: The Price of Willing One Thing: The Exposure of Evasions The one who wills the Good puts cleverness to an inward use in order to prevent all evasions, and thereby to help him enter into and persist in the commitment. Chapter 10: The Price of Willing One Thing: An Examination of the Extreme Case of an Incurable Sufferer The man who wills the Good in truth must be willing to suffer all for the Good. Chapter 11: The Price of Willing One Thing: The Sufferer’s Use of Cleverness to Expose Evasion The sufferer who wills the Good sincerely, uses this cleverness to cut off evasions and hence to launch himself into the commitment and to escape the disillusionments of choosing the temporal way. Chapter 12: What Then Must I Do? The Listener’s Role in a Devotional Address Kierkegaard asks the reader: "What kind of life do you live, do you will only one thing, and what is this one thing? Chapter 13: What Then Must I Do? Live as an "Individual" The author asks the reader: Do you live in such a way that you are conscious of being an individual? Chapter 14: What Then Must I Do? Occupation and Vocation: Mean: and End It is not whether your work is great or mean, whether you are a king or only a laborer, nor earning a great deal of money or gaining power, prestige or fame. What is important is whether your occupation is great or mean. Do you dare think of your occupation it as a responsibility for eternity? Chapter 15: Conclusion: Man and the Eternal Only the individual can truthfully will the Good. For he is in touch with the demand that calls for purity of heart by willing only one thing. Translator’s Introduction by Douglas V. Steere When life’s weather is fair there are not many who read the Book of Job or Pascal’s Thoughts. Yet in times of outward or inward searching these books seem to many to be the one thing needful and men seek them out. Søren Kierkegaard is being discovered by the English-speaking world after something over three-quarters of a century of complete neglect. The creative writing of this Danish Pascal was nearly all done in a phenomenally productive six-year period between 1842 and 1848. Kierkegaard died in 1855 at the age of forty-two. The neglect of one who has influenced German theological thought for forty years and who more recently has been openly acknowledged as a formative force upon the minds of such divergent figures as the German philosophers, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger; as Karl Barth; as the lay Catholic thinker, Theodore Haecker, the Jesuit Pryzwara; and as the Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno can scarcely be charged to the insularity of the English-speaking religious and philosophical world or to the mere barrier of language. This insularity has been penetrated by far less significant continental and Scandinavian figures, and admirable translations of Scandinavian literature have been available for several decades. A deeper reason must be sought for this Anglo-Saxon neglect and for the present quickening of interest. The Liberal theologian of England and America is described with commendation by Dean Inge in the closing chapter of his Types of Christian Saintliness: "His ‘authority’ is the best available judgment of civilized humanity which is the Liberal’s Great Church. Theological Liberalism is thus a kind of consecration of all the best ethics and science and philosophy regarded as the manifestation or revelation of the will of God to man." This broad, liberal creed supported by a set of idealistic categories that never questioned seriously the progressive revelation of the mind of God in the existing personal and social relationships of man has been too much at home in this prosperous world to need to call out a rebellious Danish religious prophet who challenged the very categories of its thought. But the World War and the condition of soul revealed by the subsequent social, political and economic unsettlements as well as the open contempt for Christianity shown by the new economic and nationalistic religions have forced liberal Christianity to search its very foundations in order to see what is unique in its Christian faith; to ask whether Christianity is simply a synthesis or amalgam of all the finest world thought; to ask where the spring of its dynamic, of its power, of its revolutionary character is to be found; to ask why Christianity is on the defensive, instead of on the offensive; to inquire what the Christian religion demands of a man. It is this mood that is opening the Anglo-Saxon mind of our time to such a radical Christian thinker at Søren Kierkegaard. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing is the first of Kierkegaard’s Edifying Addresses to be translated into English. It was written in 1846 and was included in the volume of Edifying Addresses of Varied Tenor that appeared in Copenhagen on March 13, 1847. In the two important volumes Either-Or and Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard from 1843 onwards had explored from within the Esthetic and the ethical ways of life, and had done it with an imaginative insight and a dramatic richness scarcely surpassed in the history of literature. Here the Esthetic way of life and the ethical way of life are personified in well- drawn characters and presented in meticulous detail down to their most subtle refinements. Both of these ways of life are shown to be ultimately unstable in one who is aware of their full implications, and to point beyond themselves to the religious way of life, different aspects of which are represented in Fear and Trembling, Repetition, the Concept of Dread, Philosophical Fragments, and the Final Unscientific Postscript. All of these works were issued not under Kierkegaard’s own name but under pseudonyms. They are indirect. They prepare the way. They are intended to unsettle the reader by revealing to him the true character of the dwelling he has inhabited. But simultaneously with these works, there appeared regularly from 1843 onwards, some twenty Edifying Addresses, always bearing Kierkegaard’s own name. These are direct. They plunge abruptly into the religious way of life itself and explore it from within. The title of Edifying Addresses (Opbyggelige Taler) sounds quaint and uninviting to the ears of this century. An "address" sounds formal and reminiscent of the days of rhetoric and of ponderous oratory. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, like the rest of this series, is really not an address in the ordinary sense at all. It was never spoken aloud to an audience. Like all of Kierkegaard’s Edifying Addresses which are really unpreached sermons, it was written for men and women to speak aloud to themselves. It was aimed at an audience who read and who pondered what they read. Kierkegaard’s own life-long practice of reading sermons aloud to himself convinced him that there was no more effective way to engage with them.