Works of Love XI: Love Believes All Things

[From Part II Chapter II, "Love Believes All Things and Yet is Never Deceived"]

“Love… believes all things.” ~ 1 Corinthians 13:7

“Love believes everything—and yet is never to be deceived. Amazing! To believe nothing in order to never be deceived—this seems to make sense. For how would a man ever be able to deceive someone who believes nothing! But to believe everything and thereby, as it were to throw oneself away, fair game for all deception and all deceivers, and yet precisely in this way to assure oneself infinitely against every deception: this is remarkable.”[1]

When it comes to trusting people, we modern Americans tend to be very careful. We consider it an essential skill, knowing who and when to trust. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” That proverb teaches us that if I allow myself to be deceived because I trusted when I should have known better, it’s really my fault, not the deceiver’s. And we desperately don’t want to be deceived ourselves, to the point that we will play it safe and not trust anyone—or trust very few people, after knowing them for a very long time. We are desperate not to be fooled by others, and so we choose not to truly trust anyone. In this mindset it seems very odd to hear Kierkegaard claim that “love believes all things, and yet is never deceived.” You know what we call a person who believes all things? A sucker. A patsy. A schmuck. We don’t want to be like that, do we? Much better not to trust anyone at all.

Obviously, Kierkegaard disagrees with this logic. First of all, for Kierkegaard, love is trusting, but it is not naïve, and it is not ignorant. “Love,” he writes,

 is the very opposite of mistrust, and yet it is initiated in the same knowledge. In knowledge the two are, so to speak, not distinguished from each other … only in conclusion and decision, in faith (to believe all things, to believe nothing), are they directly opposite to one another…. [A]bove all, love knows better than anyone else everything that mistrust knows, yet without being mistrustful; love knows what experience knows, but it also knows that what all men call experience is really a mixture of mistrust and love.”[2]

When we have the facts sitting before us—a person’s pattern of behavior, for instance—we have a choice to make. When love chooses to believe all things, it’s not because love doesn’t recognize the danger. It’s because love chooses to have faith (and, by the way, mistrust chooses to have faith as well, when it decides not to trust).

But even so, isn’t it still safer to play it safe and not trust people until they earn it? Isn’t that the best way to keep from being deceived? Well, according to Kierkegaard, a person who refuses to trust is being deceived right from the start:

“And yet, even if one is not deceived by others, I wonder whether he is deceived anyway, most terribly deceived, precisely by himself, by believing nothing at all, deceived out of the highest, out of the blessedness of devotedness, out of the blessedness of love! No, there is only one way to assure oneself against never being deceived; that is to believe all things in love.”[3]

If we choose not to trust people—if we expect them to earn it first—then we are deceiving ourselves about the nature of love and the consequences of loving. To be mistrustful does not keep you safe—it keeps you from loving. It doesn’t make you clever—it makes you uncompassionate. By refusing to trust you may think you are making your life better, but you are really robbing it of one of its chief joys.

See, there are two points of view, according to Kierkegaard, as to what it means to be deceived. The lower, worldly view is concerned with being deceived in worldly matters—being tricked into losing money, possessions, power, respect. To lose these things is to be deceived, and this fate must be avoided at all costs. But the higher view is only concerned with a totally different kind of deception:

“According to this view to be deceived signifies simply and solely to quit loving, to be carried away to the point of abandoning love in and for itself, and in this way to lose its intrinsic blessedness. For only one deception is possible in the infinite sense—self-deception. One need not infinitely fear them who are able to kill the body; to be killed is, infinitely no danger; nor is the kind of deception the world talks about a danger.”[4]

In the Christian view, the many tricks and deceptions of this world are not important because their consequences are only temporary. To lose all my money to a scammer is bad, yes, but in the eternal scheme of things it is not such a bad thing. Even death is not eternally a very big deal. But what is a big deal is whether I have abandoned love. When I get to heaven and stand before the throne, I won’t be ashamed of the times I was tricked by con-men or trusted a person who let me down. No, the times that will cause me shame are the times that I failed to show love—the moments when I abandoned love for the sake of things that do not matter eternally. When I stand before the throne, I will not care about those times that I gave money to a panhandler who secretly owned a BMW; I will, however, be ashamed of those times that I failed to give to a homeless person because I was worried they might be scamming me.

Ultimately, when we adopt this eternal point of view, we will see that the people who seek to deceive us are not really doing so. They may see us as suckers or schmucks, but this is not the case. We do not believe all things because we don’t think anyone would ever take advantage of us. We believe all things because we want to live in love and show love to all. And so, if we are taken advantage of, what have we really lost? As Kierkegaard says,

“One cannot deceive the true lover, who believes all things, for to deceive him is to deceive oneself. Indeed, what is the highest good and the greatest blessedness? Certainly it is to love in truth; nest to this to be loved in truth. But then it is impossible to deceive the lover, who precisely by believing all things abides in love. If it were possible to deceive someone in money matters in such a way that the so-called victim kept his money, would he then be betrayed? This is precisely the case here. By his attempt the deceiver becomes contemptible, and the lover preserves himself in love, abides in love and consequently in possession of the highest good and the greatest blessedness—therefore he certainly is not deceived!”[5]

Dear Father,

I confess that I hate to be the patsy. I hate the thought that I might be tricked by someone else. My pride revolts at the thought. And I confess that, in my efforts not to be deceived, I have pulled back from love. I have refused to believe in people simply because I did not want to be fooled. But you have said that love believes all things, and you believe in each of us. Remind me to trust out of love. Remind me that love is never deceived, because you are love and you are never deceived. Grant me a willingness to risk that which does not matter for that which is eternal. Help me to believe all things.

In the name of Jesus Christ, who believed in me enough to die for me,

Amen.

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[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love. Harper Perennial, 2009, p. 221.

[2] Ibid., 216.

[3] Ibid., 221-2.

[4] Ibid., 223.

[5] Ibid., 225.