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# "God at the Threshold: A close reading from Soren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love"
- URL: https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/hall-ce144c/
- Published: 2010-12-07T21:50:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-17T20:54:20.000Z
- Author: Logan Martin Isaac
- Tags: coursework, MTS, Amy Laura Hall

*Submitted on December 7, 2010, to Amy Laura Hall in partial fulfillment of Christian Ethics: Love in the Christian Tradition (CE144).*

> *When the couch of death is prepared for you, when you go to bed never to get up again, and they are only waiting for you to turn to the other side to die, and the stillness grows around you - then when those close to you gradually leave and the stillness grows because only those closest to you remain, while death comes closer to you; then when those closest to you leave quietly and the stillness grows because only the most intimate ones remain; and then when the last one has bent over you for the last time and turns to the other side because you yourself are now turning to the side of death – there still remains one on that side, the last one by the death bed, he who was the first, God, the living God...*

Kierkegaard describes the ideal death scene; uncomplicated, peaceful and well-attended. His point is not to dramatize, but to make a point about God. He does this by whittling away the number of those present at the penultimate experience, those final moments before confronting the quietude of death. As he does so, he processes ever closer to that uniform experience that is the fallen fate of all human kind. Death is perhaps one of the only constants in human knowledge; everyone will face it and, with slight variations, will know it uniformly – as encroaching stillness and quietude. Kierkegaard’s word, though, is reassuring, since the still silence, “the last one by the death bed”, is Godself.

Beginning with the generic “they”, Kierkegaard indicates all those people with whom you had relationships with, in fact another edition substitutes “those close to you” (line 3) for “friends and family.” From there, he builds toward his crescendo, using “those closest to you” twice (lines 4 & 6) before moving to “the most intimate ones” (line 7) and concluding with “the last one” (line 7). This movement toward singularity seems to draw parallels to the notion that we leave this life with what we enter it with, no more and no less. We gain friends and family in life and we lose them in death. There is nothing and nobody that can protect us from the inevitability of our own mortality, our own finitude. Friends and family, for all their worth, cannot walk with us down that lonely road called death. They can, and will, escort us right to the threshold, but that is the limit of their participation.

For all life’s beauty, there are none who are able to experience life (and death) as we shall. From the deepest sorrow to the highest elation, our experiences are ultimately inaccessible to those closest to us, even our most intimate confidants. This passage from *Works of Love* seems to paint this truth as tragic; as we move toward death and away from friends and family, or as they move away from us, the stillness grows. Stillness of this magnitude is the most foreboding of natures. This stillness is the final stillness, for in it, we shall “never get up again” (line 1). Three times Kierkegaard repeats this fearsome phrase, “the stillness grows” (lines 3, 4 & 6). Stillness is a growing leviathan, waiting to swallow us upon the “couch of death” (line 1). To drive the point home, Kierkegaard repeats the word “last” (lines 7, 8 & 10) as many times as he does “the stillness grows”. The stillness will *be* our last; our heart’s last beat, our lung’s last breath, our life’s last moment.

“The last one” (lines 7 & 10) in this passage is actually two. On the one side, this person is your significant other, or your most intimate friend, if you happen not to marry, as Kierkegaard happened to have not. On the other side, however, the person is God. The former side, of course, is the side of physical life, in which one’s physical relationships are most easily and readily understood. The latter side, however, is the business end of the grave, in which God, in whatever form God is to take, is truly “the last one.” But that is not the last word Kierkegaard offers.

God is not the last, for Kierkegaard, without also being the first. Just as in Christian tradition, Jesus, God incarnate, is both alpha and omega. By being both the beginning and the end, God is truly the only constant; with you before you were stitched together in your mother’s womb, yet also waiting on the “other side” of death. The Almighty is closer than “those closest to you” and more intimate than “the most intimate ones”. The One called Emmanuel is with us before the beginning and after the end, God is both personal and eternal. But somehow Kierkegaard must tie this deliberately into his work *about* love, which is indeed a work *of* love.

Kierkegaard throughout *Works of Love* speaks ultimately about God. After all, his task is primarily theological, a task that focuses his gaze upon the most intimate One. As he deliberates upon key phrases about love from Christian scripture, he leaves out what is perhaps the most poignant and relevant to his point, that, for the author of the letters of John, “God is love.” This oversight seems too overwhelming to confine to the realm of coincidence, as though the preeminent Danish theologian, writing explicitly about love in light *of* God, mysteriously omits this direct and self-contained description that God *is* love. This central proposal merits nary a mention in any of his 18 deliberations spread between the first and second series of *Works of Love*. But that must not deter the reader, the “single individual” to whom Kierkegaard addresses his writings.

In his very first deliberation, he subtly inserts what becomes a central theme for his writing. He opines, “What is it, namely, that connects the temporal and eternity, what else but love, which for that very reason is before everything and remains after everything is gone.” God is present on either side of the threshold that we call death, because God does and is love. God is with us at our first step in this life and our last, even as we discover that what we think is our last ultimately becomes our first as we enter the life to come. God loved, loves, and will love. The stillness grows because it is God, gaining in size as we draw nearer to God alone. Before there were “those close to \[us\]” and “intimate ones,” before our own conception, before we were stitched together in our mother’s womb, God knew us. As those we have known in this life depart quietly from our presence, after we turn to the side of death, God will still know and love us. As we turn away from this life and face the next, love awaits because God is there. For that very reason, we have nothing to fear.