Agape and Loving the Neighbor

Suppose you feel a strong pull to care more about your friends, family, and partner than about distant strangers.
Christian ethics turns that impulse upside down with the command: “Love your neighbor as yourself”—and then insists that your neighbor is basically everyone.

Agape is often used for this universal, self‑giving kind of love. In the New Testament, it names God’s love for humans and the love humans are commanded to have for God and neighbor. This is not preferential love—liking some people more because they are attractive, interesting, or related to you. It is supposed to reach enemies, the poor, the annoying coworker, the refugee you will never meet. The ethical shock is that what feels most “natural” to us—loving those who love us back—is downgraded; genuine love is measured by how you treat those who cannot pay you back. Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love takes this command as the central task of Christian ethics. He contrasts erotic love and friendship, which he calls “preferential loves,” with neighbor‑love, which does not depend on preference. To love the neighbor is to see every person as marked by eternal equality before God. That means the homeless man on the corner and your favorite sibling are equally “neighbors,” even though your feelings about them differ wildly. For Kierkegaard, agape is not a mood but an obligation: “If it were not a duty to love, then there would be no concept of neighbor at all.” This view cuts against a lot of romantic and friendship‑centered talk of love. It suggests that the love that can truly “change the world” is not the intense bond between two lovers, but the steady, often thankless practice of willing the good of anyone you encounter. That doesn’t mean you should feel the same about everyone—it means you are commanded to act from a stance where your neighbor’s worth does not depend on how much you like them. Modern movements for social justice often echo this agape logic: insisting that Black lives, disabled lives, queer and trans lives are not special cases but instances of a shared human claim on care and respect.

“Who, then, is one’s neighbor? The word is clearly derived from ‘near‑dweller’; consequently your neighbor is he who dwells nearer than anyone else, yet not in the sense of partiality, for to love him who through favoritism is nearer to you than all others is self‑love—‘Do not the heathens also do the same?’ …

It is in fact Christian love which discovers and knows that one’s neighbor exists and that—it is one and the same thing—everyone is one’s neighbor. If it were not a duty to love, then there would be no concept of neighbor at all. But only when one loves his neighbor, only then is the selfishness of preferential love rooted out and the equality of the eternal preserved.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, Part II, “You Shall Love Your Neighbor,” trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (wording approximate)

Kierkegaard starts with the everyday sense of “neighbor” as “near‑dweller,” then strips out the favoritism. Your neighbor is not the person you happen to like best or live closest to by chance. If you love only those whom you already prefer—friends, lovers, family—he thinks this is just refined self‑love, because you are really loving the reflection of your own tastes and needs. The command to love the neighbor cuts across that pattern. It tells you that everyone you encounter is, in the relevant sense, equally near. The second paragraph is even sharper. He says Christian love discovers that the neighbor exists and that this means everyone. That’s not a sociological claim; it’s a moral insight. If love weren’t a duty, “neighbor” would collapse back into the vague category of “people I happen to like.” Calling love a duty doesn’t make it cold; it protects it from the ups and downs of mood and attraction. Agape as Kierkegaard understands it is a disciplined way of seeing: you train yourself to notice the “watermark” of neighborhood on every person, including enemies, without denying that your emotional life remains tangled and unequal.

Imagine a mutual aid network in a city after a climate disaster. Volunteers deliver food, medicine, and cash assistance to whoever needs it, regardless of immigration status, political affiliation, or personal charm. You might start out helping because your friends are involved or because you like the “community vibe,” which looks like preferential love. Over time, though, the work confronts you with people you would never naturally choose as “yours”—elderly shut‑ins, abrasive relatives of your friends, strangers who never say thank you. The agape framing pushes you to ask: can I will their good as neighbors even when I do not feel affection? Kierkegaard would say this is where real neighbor‑love begins.

If love is a duty towards everyone, does that flatten your life, leaving no room for the intense partial loves that make life vivid? Or is there a way to hold preferential loves inside a wider agape that keeps correcting their built‑in unfairness?