The epigraph from Wittgenstein can help us approach Kierkegaard's extensive reflections on the third and culminating virtue of love. “Love” is not shapeless, anymore than are faith and hope; love too has a “grammar.” Like Wittgenstein's notion that grammar “shows differences” as well as the “family resemblances” between uses of a concept, Kierkegaard's reflections on love, as on faith and hope, show a similar dialectical interest in making distinctions. Love is analyzable as a human passion, and his literature, beginning even with his dissertation on The Concept of Irony and, of course, his portrayals of romantic love (especially in literature) and married love in Either/ Or, contain extensive treatments of human love. Kierkegaard is one of the great philosophical and theological thinkers on the love (pathological or healthy) that binds humans together. As indicated in the epigraph above from Works of Love, Kierkegaard sees divine love as the source and ground of human love. Christian love is specifically definable in terms of God's love and human love as a response of “neighbor-love.”

THE DIALECTIC OF OPPOSITION

The first impression that a reader receives in turning to Kierkegaard's understanding of Christian love is the contrasts between natural love and Christian love.