stretch and challenge
The leap of faith
Steve McCarthy explores the influence of Søren Kierkegaard’s work on the development of Christian theology and philosophy
The enigmatic Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard was born in 1813 and died in 1855. His copious and captivating writings did not have much impact on mainstream European thought initially, as he wrote in his native language and Danish was not widely read. In addition, he often wrote under pseudonyms and in a deliberately fragmentary style, making his work more opaque.
While Kierkegaard’s national background put him out on a limb for several decades, an appreciation of that sociocultural context helps our understanding of his ideas. While philosophers often argue that we should ignore a thinker’s personal life, in this case it helps us to appreciate the patterns that underlie his provocative ideas.
Even in the latter part of the eighteenth century, Denmark was so provincial that Danish surnames were not fixed. Kierkegaard’s forebears adopted the family name ‘Churchyard’, alluding to a graveyard. In retrospect, this appellation seems oddly prophetic, as their most famous son was both deeply religious and outside the established church. He was also acutely aware of his mortality — his oeuvre includes a work tersely titled Sickness Unto Death.
Continuing with this parochial glumness, Kierkegaard’s father has been described as ‘a monster’. He is said to have imposed a profound sense of personal guilt on his son from an early age. Externally Kierkegaard senior appeared both devout and affluent, though he probably shared the intimations of unworthiness and dread that he inflicted on his son.
Early life
Søren Kierkegaard was physically small. He had a slight curvature of the spine as a result of a childhood fall from a tree, and as a youth he compensated for his physical stature by developing an acerbic wit and a dandified manner. Approaching maturity, he found himself distanced from his contemporaries and became almost obsessively introspective.
As a young man Søren spent 10 years at the University of Copenhagen and is reported to have become proficient in ten languages while there. He also familiarised himself with most of the great works of the entire canon of Western culture. However, while displaying great academic gifts during his studies, he was prone to bouts of intense dissipation.
In 1837 he met the 14-year-old Regine Olsen and fell ‘head over heels’ in love with her. Initially Søren choose to keep his feelings quiet, preferring to let Regine mature. It has also been suggested that they may have been distantly related, which would have caused a stir.
During the succeeding period he prepared to live a ‘normal life’ as a country pastor with his young bride. In pursuit of this goal, he returned to the established church — from which he had previously distanced himself — and was also reconciled with his father, who was nearing the end of his life.
Adult life
The death of his father meant that Kierkegaard became financially independent. Freed from the imperative to earn a living, he became a freelance writer, and his financial security also enabled him to become engaged to Regine with a view to marriage and a life of domestic normality.
However, Kierkegaard was suddenly overcome with crushing doubts about his vocation. He broke off the engagement — a deeply scandalous act in the context — and fled to Berlin, an academic hothouse at the time. Hegelian philosophy ruled the roost and Kierkegaard conceived a new vocation to oppose the status quo as manifested in prevalent doctrines such as those of Hegel.
Kierkegaard began his almost manic opposition: writing through the night, standing at a high desk, surrounded by candles, in high collars, long hair flowing. His initial responses were addressed to Regine, in an effort to explain his conduct to her in a wider context. This led inexorably to his adoption of a role that he defined as ‘a corrective to things as they are’.
Response to Hegel’s philosophy
He rapidly became the arch anti-Hegelian and an opponent of the established church — in Denmark known simply as the Volkskirche. Broadly speaking, all members of the unusually homogeneous Danish population that did not specifically opt out of this church were deemed to owe allegiance to it. This community membership was expressed in real terms by the payment of a tithe. In return all members, almost the entire population, were said to partake in the church’s saving works. Such a mechanistic, banal appreciation of salvation was deeply abhorrent to Kierkegaard.
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Similarly, Søren saw the Hegelian notion of the inevitability of progress as dangerously glib and erroneous. He regarded the Hegelian theory of dialectical process as profoundly wrong-headed. He had a marked distrust for all such grand theories and their claims to have adopted a systematic, quasi-scientific approach. Again, memorable titles such as Philosophical Fragments suggest these antipathies to systematisation and quasi-empiricism.
His first published work appeared in 1841 and bore the appropriately barbed title The Concept of Irony. Many of his other early publications were published pseudonymously, using names such as Johannus Climachus. The ironic tone — sometimes verging on viciousness — and content of his writing outraged the people of his native Copenhagen, where he had now returned. They voiced their opinions in a journal called The Corsair, which represented the Volkskirche and Hegelian orthodoxy. During the mid nineteenth century disputation between Kierkegaard and The Corsair became increasingly intense.
In 1854–55 the embattled Søren experienced another profound personal crisis with the death of his confessor, Bishop Mynster, who had until then provided much support and assistance to his protégé. The prelate was succeeded by Professor Martensen, an arch Hegelian. Kierkegaard responded to his investiture as primate with another offensive against the status quo.
Death and legacy
Kierkegaard founded a journal himself, calling it The Instant. In it he rigorously maintained that the contemporary theology, represented by the new primate, was wholly incompatible with New Testament Christianity. Deliberately adopting a defiantly iconoclastic stance, the strain began to tell and he started to suffer extreme ill-health. In 1855 he collapsed with apoplexy and was hospitalised. Eventually his remaining family, except for his brother, rallied around his death bed. Even then no priest could be found who would accompany Søren in his final hours.
The spread of influence
In the 14 years between the publication of The Concept of Irony and his death, Kierkegaard wrote more than a dozen important philosophical works, as well as numerous essays and articles. When they were translated out of his native language — first into German towards the end of the nineteenth century and then after the First World War into other major European languages — they began to have farreaching influence. From the Second World War onwards they became particularly influential in the USA.
Kierkegaard’s antipathy towards submerging reality under universal categories meant that his ideas resisted glib summarisation and remained elusive for some time. For him reality was essentially individual and any analysis of it that ignored the human individual was defective. He chose to approach the human predicament from the perspective of the individual who is involuntarily thrown into space and time.
He did not deny that people share some characteristics and similarities. However, Kierkegaard’s choice of approach stemmed from an appreciation of humankind as fundamentally made up of individuals confronting desires, problems and goals. He maintained that we limited people should be perpetually striving, but that through this effort we also become potentially more than finite.
Paradox
Such paradoxical postures are characteristic of Kierkegaard. He placed people in insoluble paradoxical situations. He regarded individuals as caught by their own consciousness of their finite temporality and their goals beyond the mundane constraints of space and time. We all experience both the empirical limitations of our mortal nature and the insatiable longings generated by our infinite potential. Thus we can strive for freedom and justice, while being aware that it will not be fully achieved in our lifespan.
Kierkegaard considered Christianity to be riddled with paradoxes — complementary, but negating opposites (e.g. time/eternity, sin/grace and love/wrath). He regarded paradoxes as offences to reason and so was drawn to the conclusion that empiricism would inevitably lead to scepticism.
For him an appreciation of paradox should lead people to becoming subjective thinkers. It will return them to passion and dissatisfaction, driven beyond the generalities of theory to the supra-rational. For Kierkegaard, God is wholly other — unthinkable and inconceivable in human terms. Any association between such unalike, incompatible entities as God and a person is an offence to human reason. However, many believe that Jesus embodies this paradox.
The truth of the God/man association cannot be grasped rationally; Kierkegaard argued that it must be conferred on us. In his writings the only way to genuine Christianity is through paradox. His emphasis on paradox can be traced back to Socrates (name-checked in the subtitle of his first book) and the pre-Socratics. The concept had resurfaced in the works of some of the boldest eighteenth-century thinkers, notably Hume and Kant.
However, Kierkegaard believed that individuals cannot obtain a sense of the truth solely through reason, and in his estimation neither can the cold heights of metaphysics lead us to this end. He maintained that subjectivity is the individual grasping the truth. For him ‘truth is subjectivity’ and cannot be assimilated without experiencing sin personally.
Modes of existence
Kierkegaard opposed the very idea of the grand theories of reality that dominated nineteenth-century thought. Unlike Hegel’s theory of dialectical process, there is no inevitability of progress in Kierkegaard’s model of existence — we may progress, but we can regress, or stay still.
However, we can distinguish patterns underlying the Dane’s analysis of being. These patterns in turn reflect Søren’s own life experiences. He characterised the individual human being in terms of three modes of life: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. He describes these modes in a variety of works, including the 2-volume Either/Or.
The aesthetic mode
In Either he uses the character of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (based on the legends of Don Juan) to typify the aesthetic mode, a butterfly existence of aimlessly flitting from pleasure to pleasure. The Don Juan figure treats the world rather like a child in a toy shop and accordingly his character remains unformed.
Kierkegaard portrays this way of life as meaningless and ultimately dreary. In his account, the aesthete considers their prospects and is overcome by nausea and dread. This leads them either to bury themselves still further in the material world — the road to damnation — or to try for a more meaningful mode of life. We are reminded of the periods of dissipation that Kierkegaard indulged in as a student.
The ethical mode
In Either/Or he calls the next stage of being the ethical mode. An individual enters this by denying their libertine urges and opening themselves up to self-development through freely accepting the moral order. The acceptance of responsibility for another, through the formal institution of marriage, is used to typify this mode. Thus formlessness is replaced by obedience to an objective moral law. We are reminded of Søren’s decision to marry and settle down as a country parson.
However, this conventional ethical existence is portrayed by Kierkegaard as limited, partly by the inevitability of moral failure. He describes how ethical people recognise these moral shortcomings in themselves and experience guilt and remorse as a result. They become acutely conscious of their own fallibility and are confronted with a choice: either to languish in selfloathing, or to proceed to a higher mode of being.
The religious mode
For most of us it is difficult to conceive of the nature of this higher mode of being. Kierkegaard’s characterisation of it starts from the ethical mode. It is also founded on the observation that both actual and original sin are acceptances of finitude, since morality overall is essentially of the finite realm. To explore what might lie beyond it, he uses the Old Testament account of Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Søren uses this problematic narrative as an example of a command to transcend the morally universal. We are reminded of him breaking his engagement and the manic career that followed.
He considers the strength of Abraham’s trust, faith and obedience in depth in Fear and Trembling. In the introduction to the Penguin edition the translator draws a thought-provoking parallel with Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61’. Dylan sings, ‘Oh, God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son” / Abe says, “Man you must be puttin’ me on”’ — surely a response that is easier to empathise with than Abraham’s biblical obedience. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard was appreciative of the patriarch’s willingness to obey.
For Søren the absolute transcends the moral law, which is inadequate to mediate existence for the select few individuals that experience a closer proximity to God. At those moments of communion the ethical may be suspended, in his opinion — but this suspension is only justified in relation to the telos (higher aim), and Kierkegaard called it the teleological suspension of the ethical.
However, in his account of existence there is certainly no guarantee of achieving such elevated experiences. There is no inevitability of progression from one mode to another. Neither does an individual lose their sense of aesthetic or moral worth by proceeding to the next mode. If they proceed at all, it is only through experiencing angst — an effective state of mind in Kierkegaard’s analysis — leading to traumatic moments of personal decision.
Leap of faith
For Søren the solution to such highly personal moments of dilemma could not be arrived at rationally. The outcome of such moments of crisis may be that the individual accepts the courage of their convictions and makes a leap. Or they may back away from the edge, atrophied in conformity, back to their previous mode of life. Either they make such a leap of faith, or they do not. There are no guaranteed outcomes, though the fruits of repeated denial are ultimately the individual’s progressive loss of his or her soul.
In such leaps the individual is described as embracing what is objectively uncertain — faith. The leaper jumps and arrives at the other side purified, changed through performing an act of faith. However, just as the finite individual cannot possess the infinite divine, so they cannot permanently apprehend faith. Rather than possessing it, we must be brought to this moment of crisis repeatedly and driven to respond to it by leaping or not, with no certainty. For Kierkegaard, ‘true faith is constant doubting’.
Conclusion
Kierkegaard’s account stresses the difficulties involved in becoming what he regarded as a true Christian. He saw the ‘cheap grace’ offered by the Volkskirche as illusory and asserted that, ‘there is hardly a true Christian in the whole of Denmark, nay in the whole of Christendom. But his is the faith of the lonely stricken individual.’ I remember once being set an essay with the title ‘The trouble with Kierkegaard is not that he makes Christianity difficult, but that he makes it impossible’.
Søren’s account of ‘true faith’ is not easy to understand, let alone to live up to, and he did not make his own life easy either. However, his ideas have been hugely influential in the last century and had a massive impact on the movement that has become known as dialectical theology.
Philosophically his ideas were a powerful influence on existentialism, despite the fact that many of the prominent adherents of this school were not religious. For instance, the self-proclaimed atheist Jean-Paul Sartre was particularly appreciative of the pious, morose Dane’s ideas. In the late twentieth century his influence spread widely in the arts and humanities. In the twenty-first century I would like to think we catch a glimpse of it in the popularity of everything from Munch’s painting The Scream and television series such as The Killing and Borgen to Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
References
Kierkegaard, S. (1962) Philosophical Fragments, Princeton University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1965) The Concept of Irony, Harper Row.
Kierkegaard, S. (1985) Fear and Trembling, Penguin.
Kierkegaard, S. (1992) Either/Or, Penguin.