Kierkegaard styled
himself above all as a religious poet. The religion to which he sought to
relate his readers is Christianity. The type of Christianity that underlies his writings is a very
serious strain of Lutheran pietism informed by the dour values of sin, guilt, suffering, and
individual responsibility. Kierkegaard was immersed in these values in the family home through
his father, whose own childhood was lived in the shadow of the severe Indre Mission (Inner
Mission) -- a pietistic cult from Jutland. Kierkegaard's father subsequently became a member
of the Moravian Brethren congregation in Copenhagen.
For Kierkegaard
Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of
individual subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human artefacts.
Faith is the most important task to be achieved by a human being, because only on the basis of
faith does an individual have a chance to become a true self. This self is the life-work which
God judges for eternity.
The individual
is thereby subject to an enormous burden of responsibility, for upon h/er
existential choices hangs h/er eternal salvation or damnation. Anxiety or dread (Angest) is the
presentiment of this terrible responsibility when the individual stands at the threshold of
momentous existential choice. Anxiety is a two- sided emotion: on one side is the dread burden
of choosing for eternity; on the other side is the exhilaration of freedom in choosing oneself.
Choice occurs in the instant (Øjeblikket), which is the point at which time and eternity
intersect
-- for the individual creates through temporal choice a self which will be judged for eternity.
But the choice
of faith is not made once and for all. It is essential that faith be constantly
renewed by means of repeated avowals of faith. One's very selfhood depends upon this
repetition, for according to Anti-Climacus, the self "is a relation which relates itself to itself"
(The Sickness Unto Death). But unless this self acknowledges a "power which constituted
it,"
it falls into a despair which undoes its selfhood. Therefore, in order to maintain itself as a
relation which relates itself to itself, the self must constantly renew its faith in "the power
which
posited it." There is no mediation between the individual self and God by priest or by logical
system (contra Catholicism and Hegelianism respectively). There is only the individual's own
repetition of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and
to the
power which constituted it, i.e. the repetition of faith is the self.
Christian dogma,
according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are offensive to
reason. The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God
simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being (Jesus). There are two
possible attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. we can have faith, or we can take offense.
What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose
faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we
must believe by virtue of the absurd.
Much of Kierkegaard's
authorship explores the notion of the absurd: Job gets everything back
again by virtue of the absurd (Repetition); Abraham gets a reprieve from having to sacrifice
Isaac, by virtue of the absurd (Fear and Trembling); Kierkegaard hoped to get Regine back
again after breaking off their engagement, by virtue of the absurd (Journals); Climacus hopes
to deceive readers into the truth of Christianity by virtue of an absurd representation of
Christianity's ineffability; the Christian God is represented as absolutely transcendent of human
categories yet is absurdly presented as a personal God with the human capacities to love,
judge, forgive, teach, etc. Kierkegaard's notion of the absurd subsequently became an
important category for twentieth century existentialists, though usually devoid of its religious
associations.
According to Johannes
Climacus, faith is a miracle, a gift from God whereby eternal truth enters
time in the instant. This Christian conception of the relation between (eternal) truth and time is
distinct from the Socratic notion that (eternal) truth is always already within us -- it just needs
to
be recovered by means of recollection (anamnesis). The condition for realizing (eternal) truth
for the Christian is a gift (Gave) from God, but its realization is a task (Opgave) which
must be
repeatedly performed by the individual believer. Whereas Socratic recollection is a
recuperation of the past, Christian repetition is a "recollection forwards" -- so that the
eternal
(future) truth is captured in time.
Crucial to the
miracle of Christian faith is the realization that over against God we are always in
the wrong. That is, we must realize that we are always in sin. This is the condition for faith, and
must be given by God. The idea of sin cannot evolve from purely human origins. Rather, it must
have been introduced into the world from a transcendent source. Once we understand that we
are in sin, we can understand that there is some being over against which we are always in the
wrong. On this basis we can have faith that, by virtue of the absurd, we can ultimately be
atoned with this being.
1. David Borenstein
