Kierkegaard - Works of Love Part 2 Chapter 5

Love Hides the Multiplicity of Sin

Love is what stops sin and the effects of sin and the temptation to sin  from spreading.

"What love does; it is. What love is; it does."  Love does not "discover" or take notice of sin even when it knows they exist.  Love is ignorant and small-townish and "a babe in evil" meaning it does not even try to understand evil. For trying to understand evil is to look for excuses for one's sins.

Gossip helps corrupt others and multiply sin. Why to we pay good money to bring scandal and gossip into our houses?

Love hides the multiplicity of sin by forgiveness. Forgiveness is the opposite of creating and this takes vitality away from sin.  On the other hand withholding forgiveness nourishes sin and the continuation of sin is a new sin.

Sin finds an opportunity in the commandment and the prohibition. But, it is not as though the occasion caused the sin.

Kierkegaard - Works of Love Part 2 Chapter 4

Love Seeks Not Its Own

That would be self-love.

True love gives like the gift already belongs to the recipient.

Kierkegaard - Works of Love Part 2 Chapter 3

Love Hopes All Things

The one who hopes is just as expectant as the one who fears. The difference is that the possibility of  the good is more than just a possibility, for it is the eternal.  This is the basis of the fact that one who hopes can never be deceived.

Everyone who does not understand that the whole of life shall be a time of hope  is in despair.  No one can hope unless he also loves.  The down drag of discouragement, downfall, perdition are all worldliness.

The lover has no indolence of habit, no pettiness of mind, no picayunishness of prudence, no extensiveness of experience, no slackness of the years, no evil bitterness of passion corrupts his hope or adulterates possibility.  Every morning, yes, every moment, he renews his hope and enlivens possibility, if love endures and he endures in love.

If there were no love, hope would be a blessed, awaited letter with no one to collect it.

Kierkegaard - Works of Love Part 2 Chapter 2

Love Believes all Things - and it is never Deceived.

Experience teaches that one acts prudently by NOT believing everything. Existence will test you and judges you every moment.

If someone says that one the basis of the possibility of being deceived one should believe nothing, then we can argue the opposite. You can expect good from even the lowliest fellow, for it is possible that his baseness is merely an illusion.  If we COULD judge every human, then everything would turn outward (external, superficial, acts ) and the God-relationship would be eliminated. Living would become easy; but empty.

Knowledge is placing these contrasting possibilities in equilibrium.  Mistrust is not equilibrium.  It tends towards evil, envy, spite, corruption.  Love understands that truth and deception both extend just as far and that in judging between possibilities the judger is revealed.

Giving one's money (or love) away willingly is not the same as being deceived  out of one's money (or love).  There is no desire to try to get it back.

In the light of the eternal, there is only one possible deception which is self-deception or giving up love.

Kierkegaard - Works of Love Part 2 Chapter 1

Love Builds Up

Spiritual language including scripture is transferred or metaphorical language.  Thus, saying love builds up (Corinthians 13) is a metaphor.

P212 
To build up means to presuppose love;  to be loving means to presuppose love; only love builds up. For to build up means to draw forth something from the ground up, but spiritually love is the ground of everything. No man can bestow the ground of love in another man's heart; nevertheless, love is the ground and one can only build up by presuposing love. Take love away - then there is no one who builds up andno one who is built up.