Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing

En Leiligheds-Tale ("An Occasional Discourse") is a short work of Søren Kierkegaard, published in Copenhagen in 1847 as part of his Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig Aand (Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits). Its title carries its genre: Kierkegaard wrote it as a discourse for an occasion of confession, the kind of address a pastor might give before communion. In Danish church life of the 1840s, confession had become a settled routine, and Kierkegaard wrote to unsettle that routine from within, not by attacking it from outside. The English translation by Douglas V. Steere appeared under the title Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, the name by which the work is now best known to English readers, and it brought the discourse into wide use among those concerned with the practice of the spiritual life.

The argument is built around a single verse, James 4:8, "Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you; cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded." Kierkegaard reads purity of heart as singleness of will: to will one thing, and that one thing the Good. He then examines what prevents it. A person who wills the Good for the sake of reward, or out of fear of punishment, or from a stubborn insistence on their own way, does not will one thing but two, and the Good is not served by divided motives. The same holds for the person who wills the Good only to the degree of their own strength, or who treats the Good as one commitment among others. Kierkegaard presses the point that double-mindedness often passes for prudence or moderation, and that even apparent devotion can conceal a hidden bargain. Against this he sets the person who wills the Good in truth, who accepts that this willing must be sustained through time, through remorse and through suffering, and who understands that a person who wills the Good must also be willing to suffer for it. The discourse moves toward the confessional moment itself, where the hearer is asked to stand before God with nothing held back.

The work has endured because it describes a problem that every serious believer recognizes: the mixture of motives that clouds even good action. Its influence on twentieth-century devotional reading, partly through Steere's translation and his Quaker circle, was considerable. It is also one of the more accessible entry points to Kierkegaard, since it is addressed to the heart as much as to the intellect, and it avoids the pseudonymous complexity of his philosophical works.

Who should read this: Readers preparing for confession, retreat or a season of self-examination will find it searching and useful, as will anyone who suspects that their devotion is more divided than they admit. It is not for those seeking a quick or comforting devotional, since it presses hard and does not hurry. Nor is it a first introduction to Kierkegaard's philosophical thought, which is better approached through his other writings.