At this point the reader may ask, What Then Must I Do? What is the Good that I must be ready to suffer all for? And how do I complete it? To which Kierkegaard returns the following responses:
“… at each man’s birth there comes into being an eternal vocation for him, expressly for him. To be true to himself in relation to this eternal vocation is the highest thing a man can practice… ”
“The talk asks you, then, whether you live in such a way that you are conscious of being an ‘individual.’ The question is not of the inquisitive sort; as if one asked about that ‘individual’ in some special sense, about the one whom admiration and envy unite in pointing out. No, it is the serious question, of what each man really is according to his eternal vocation, so that he himself shall be conscious that he is following it; and what is even more serious, to ask it as if he were considering his life before God… Indeed it is precisely this consciousness that must be asked for. Just as if the talk could not ask in generalities, but rather asks you as an individual.”
“You do not carry the responsibility for your wife, nor for other men, nor by any comparative standard with other men, but only as an individual, before God, where it is not asked whether your marriage was in accordance with others, with the common practice, or better than others, but where you as an individual will be asked only whether it was in accordance with your responsibility as an individual.”
“For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing; hence the consciousness before God of one’s eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.”
Regardless of if a modern reader agrees that an “eternal vocation” is given to him at birth, life will call us to something which we are responsible to fulfill. This is very, very similar to Viktor Frankl’s thought:
"In an age in which the Ten Commandments seem to lose their unconditional validity, man must learn more than ever to listen to the ten thousand commandments arising from the ten thousand unique situations of which his life consists."
“To be sure, man is free to answer the questions he is asked by life. But this freedom must not be confounded with arbitrariness. It must be interpreted in terms of responsibleness. Man is responsible for giving the right answer to a question, for finding the true meaning of a situation. And meaning is something to be found rather than to be given, discovered rather than invented.”
In Kierkegaard’s terminology we must “live as Individuals.” We must take personal responsibility for our lives and responsibilities before God. We must ask, What is my life calling me to? and take responsibility for completing that calling. In Frankl’s terms, we must listen to the ten thousand commandments.
As the philosophers attest, you can’t definitively answer “What is the Good?” in the abstract. The Good is concrete, embodied in each particular situation in each Individual’s life. It is up to us to find it and complete it.
Purity of Heart is a one-pointed focus on finding and fulfilling the Good we are uniquely called to do, in each individual moment, without any ulterior motives.