For both Augustine and Kierkegaard, eros is front and center. The exuberant rhetoric of pleasure and delight fills Kierkegaard’s pages, as it does Augustine’s tomes. Borrowing vocabulary from both classical philosophy and Christianity, Kierkegaard, like Augustine, describes human life as teleologically oriented toward what he variously calls “happiness,” “eternal happiness,” “the highest good,” and “blessedness.”56 Also
