Eternity has the sharpest eye for, and the most developed understanding of, mercifulness but has no understanding at all about money, any more than eternity is in a financial predicament or has, according to the Word, the slightest use for money. Yes, this is both a laughing and a crying matter. It would undeniably be a superb invention by laughter to imagine eternity in a financial predicament—ah, but then let us weep a little because temporality has so completely forgotten eternity and forgotten that from the eternal point of view money is less than nothing! Alas, many are of the opinion that the eternal is a delusion and that money is reality, whereas in the understanding of eternity and of truth money is a delusion!
Think of eternity in whatever way you want to; only admit that many of the temporal things you have seen in temporality you wished to find again in eternity, that you wished to see the trees and the flowers and the stars again, to hear the singing of birds and the murmuring of the brook again—but could it ever occur to you that there would be money in eternity? No, then the kingdom of heaven itself would again become a land of misery, and therefore this cannot possibly occur to you, just as it cannot possibly occur to someone who believes money is reality that there is an eternity. Of all the things you have seen, there is nothing of which you can be so sure that it will never enter heaven as money. On the other hand, there is nothing of which heaven is so sure as mercifulness. So you see that mercifulness is infinitely unrelated to money.
Yet money, money, money! That foreign prince is supposed to have said as he turned his back on mighty Rome, “Here lies a city for sale and only awaits a buyer.” Ah, how often might not one have been tempted despondently to turn one’s back on all existence and say, “Here lies a world for sale and only awaits a buyer”—provided one does not want to say that the devil has already bought it!
What is the earnestness of life? If you have in truth put this earnest question to yourself, then recall how you answered it, or let me remind you how you answered it. Earnestness is a person’s God-relationship. Wherever the thought of God accompanies what a person does, thinks, and says, earnestness is present; in that there is earnestness. But money is the world’s god; therefore the world thinks that everything that involves money or is connected to money is earnestness.
Behold that noble, simple, wise man of old; he would not take money for his instruction, and the Apostle Paul preferred to work with his own hands rather than defile the Gospel and debase his apostolic service and falsify the proclamation of the Word by taking money for it. What does the world judge of such things? Well, let us not fatuously ask what the world judges of that noble, simple man and the sainted apostle, inasmuch as the world has now learned by rote to eulogize them. But suppose someone today at this moment would do as those two did, what is the judgment of his contemporaries? They judge that this is eccentricity, that this is an exaggeration; they judge that such a person “lacks earnestness.”
To make money is earnestness; to make much money, even if it were by selling human beings, this is earnestness. To make a lot of money by contemptible slander—this is earnestness. To proclaim some truth—provided one also makes much money (it does not depend on its being true but on one’s making money)—this is earnestness. Money, money—this is earnestness. This is how we are brought up; from earliest childhood we are disciplined in the ungodly worship of money.
— Kierkegaard, Works of Love, VII. “Mercifulness, a Work of Love Even If It Can Give Nothing and Is Able to Do Nothing” (tr. Hong & Hong)
