Kierkegaard (30 page)

Christian Discourses

April 26, 1848

Søren Kierkegaard

“The sacrifice he offered he did not offer for people in general, nor did he want to save people in general—and it cannot be done in that way either. No, he sacrificed himself in order to save each one individually” (272).

The year 1848 was an important year for Europe and Denmark politically and Kierkegaard personally. The year saw the rapid success of people's revolutions sweep away old regimes, all of which Kierkegaard observed with an eye to the long view and the implications of popular sentiment and democracy for truth and individual existence. He notes this year was extraordinarily fruitful for him from a writing and thinking point of view; however, only two works were actually published. The first of these,
Christian Discourses
, took its title because, in Kierkegaard's view, “discourses” denotes open-ended discussion whereas a “sermon”
suggests the speaker is speaking “with authority.” The book's four parts were written at different times over 1847 and 1848, and reflect Søren's deepening mistrust of Christendom's self-satisfaction, which avoided individual responsibility at the expense of abstract historical triumphalism. Section one is titled “The Cares of the Pagans.” It focuses on the pre-Christian world and its anxious mind-set. The second section, “States of Mind in the Strife of Suffering,” offers a discussion of the joy the Christian life offers in the face of various hardships. The third section, “Thoughts That Wound from Behind,” is a polemical attack pointing out the “paganism” that actually informs Christendom. The fourth section, which Kierkegaard intended as a restoring call to worship after the temple-cleansing of the third, is entitled “Discourses at the Communion on Fridays.” It contains a number of reflections on seven biblical passages, two of which Søren actually delivered in the Church of Our Lady. The discourse on Matthew 11:28 in particular is noteworthy because the famous Torwaldsen statue of Christ, which bears this verse, stands next to the pulpit from which Søren preached. The passage, in which Jesus bids all who are weary to come and receive rest, will come to play a crucial part in
Practice in Christianity
and Søren's ensuing assault on the distorted religion of Bishop Mynster. Kierkegaard had intended to dedicate part of
Christian Discourses
to Mynster but removed the dedication so as to preserve the possibility that the bishop might respond with an admission of guilt in light of the polemics of part three. The admission was not forthcoming.

The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress

Published in the Fatherland over four parts, July 24–27, 1848.

Inter et inter

This was the second of only two pieces Kierkegaard published in 1848. It was deliberately released roughly in conjunction with
Christian
Discourses
as a sort of bookend to the pattern begun with
Either/Or
and the
Upbuilding Discourses
in 1843, where signed works of religious seriousness accompanied pseudonymous philosophic and aesthetic experiments. “I would like to create a little literary mystification,” Søren says in his journal of
Crisis
(JP 6060). The pseudonym he chose to run alongside the signed
Discourses
was
Inter et inter
(Latin for “between and between”), which seems to refer to the fact that this little piece stands between the first phase of the authorship leading up to Johannes Climacus and the second phase ushered in by the soon-to-be-inaugurated pseudonym Anti-Climacus. The piece is also important to Kierkegaard for he wanted to signal to readers that although he was indeed a religiously serious author, he had not for that reason left appreciation for poetry, drama, and aesthetics behind.

The actress of the title is Joanna Luise Heiberg, wife of the literary doyen J. L. Heiberg.
The crisis
of the title is one any artist faces: Will they succumb to anxiety or succeed under pressure?
A crisis
is the one specifically for Mrs. Heiberg, who was facing the challenge of taking on the Shakespearean character of Juliet, almost twenty years after she first played the role. The piece interprets and appreciates her work, especially her ability to preserve self-possession in the face of the watching crowd. She does not crumble in the presence of anxiety. The piece moves on to take on art criticism and public appreciation in general, especially when they devolve into obsession over the private lives of artists, their age, or physical characteristics. Instead,
Crisis
puts forward a theory of the timeless quality of the essential ideas the actress conveys, regardless of her age or stage in life. The Heibergs appreciated the piece, and Joanna was especially full of praise for the way Søren, a non-actor, could put into words what she had many times felt but did not express.

The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses

May 14, 1849

Søren Kierkegaard

To maintain the tradition of printing with the “left hand and with the right,” Kierkegaard arranged for these discourses to be published under his own name on the same day the second edition of
Either/Or
hit the shelves.

Kierkegaard loved nature and often reflected on the lessons one can learn from it. He often writes on the biblical treatments of nature and returns to the theme here with his discourses on a number of Jesus' sayings taken from the Gospel of Matthew concerning the lily of the field, the impossibility of serving two masters, the birds of the air, and the grass of the field. There are three discourses. The first is about “silence” as a form of essential communication. Birds and flowers cannot speak, yet their silence is a teacher. The piece is an example of Kierkegaard's mounting frustration with “the poetic” as the best way to communicate, and he pits the romantic notion of truth through poetry against the communication of the lilies endorsed by Jesus. “Because the human being is able to speak, the ability to be silent is an art” (10).

The second discourse concerns “obedience.” “Pay attention, then, to nature around you. In nature everything is obedience, unconditional obedience” (25). Birds and flowers are good examples of the peace that comes from only serving one master. But there is one crucial difference between nature and humans. Birds are naturally “obedient” because they do not have a will. People have to choose to obey God, a choice they usually do not make. In this, humans discover an aspect of God the birds and lilies will never know—that he is patient. God commands obedience (“thou shalt”) but also patiently takes humans by the hand and shows them the flowers of the field in order for us to learn what it is to live at peace with one, and only one, master.

The third discourse takes on “joy.” Birds trill ceaselessly and flowers ever bloom. Nature is filled with joy. This is not because nature is absent of pain and suffering. Kierkegaard is not sentimental enough to think the life of birds and beasts is anything but brutish and short (“The whole creation has been groaning,” Romans 8:22). Yet nonetheless, nature is joyful because it does what it is essentially supposed to do. Birds do this without willing it. Humans have to choose to be what they essentially are. “What is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself; but truly to be present to oneself is this
today
” (39). The joy of existence is the joy of being oneself, which is ultimately to be with and in God, for God is eternally “present to himself in being today” (39). This is the ever-present God of whom it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Hebrews 3:15). “Oh what unconditional joy: his is the kingdom and the power and the glory—forever” (44).

Two Ethical-Religious Essays

May 19, 1849

H. H.

This manuscript was sent to the printers on May 5, 1849, Kierkegaard's thirty-sixth birthday. It comprises two parts: “Does a Human Being Have the Right to Let Himself Be Put to Death for the Truth?” and “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle.” Both essays were originally written in 1847. In his journals, Kierkegaard remarks this book does not belong to his “authorship” proper as it is instead a comment and point of view on the authorship as a whole. He struggled with himself whether the work should be published under his own name or even anonymously. In the end he attributed the work to H. H., who along with Anti-Climacus stands over and above Kierkegaard himself. The second essay is an excerpt of material later published posthumously in
The Book on Adler
and is discussed below. The first essay is drawn from a lot of ideas
Søren had previously worked over in his journals. He tells us the draft of the manuscript was completed in eight hours. The essay is concerned with that most important of all Kierkegaardian categories: the martyr who is a true witness to the truth. Suppose a preacher were to eloquently expound on the glories of the history of martyrdom, and then suppose a naïve man in the pew comes forward and says he is ready to sign up? The preacher will be surprised. Become a martyr? Where in heaven did he get
that
idea? “Travel, find some diversion, take a laxative” (67). Confusion over the matter abounds in Christendom for preachers and audience alike. Kierkegaard tries to shed light on the situation by comparing the heroic death of Socrates with the crucifixion of Jesus. Unlike that merely human philosopher, Christ's death was not martyrdom to an idea but atonement and redemption. Kierkegaard points out Jesus did not die
for
truth. He himself
is
the truth. Socrates died for his limited conception of the truth. Christ died for his enemies; his resurrection was the sign that love and truth (in other words: judgement) were united at that moment. The categorical difference between Jesus' death and the death of anyone else at the hands of the crowd is that only Jesus' death removed the crowd's guilt. The man who willingly embraces martyrdom is bringing the crowd into guilt. Only God can remove guilt, and thus only God has the right to let himself die for the truth. Men, instead, should “lovingly to be concerned for the others, for those who, if one is to be put to death, must become guilty of putting one to death” (69).

Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

July 30, 1849

Anti-Climacus

The sickness that is unto death is
despair
. Despair is to be differentiated from depression. Depression is sadness, melancholy, or, as modern
science now tells us, unbalanced chemicals in the brain. One can be depressed without being in despair, and alternatively, one can live in full comfort but be despairing. Despair has to do with living a life without finding one's true meaning, or, in Kierkegaardian language, without finding one's authentic self. “But what is the self?” asks
Sickness unto Death
in a celebrated opening section. “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself” (13). The convoluted formulation is, probably, partly a joke on similar sounding Hegelian terminology. But in the hands of Kierkegaard—or rather
Anti-Climacus—
the formulation also acts as a launch pad for a searching examination of human identity and why it sometimes, often, goes wrong. The self, it should be noted from the formulation, is more of a
verb
than a
noun
. It is an action. Despair is a phenomenon particularly related to the action of the self relating to itself, but in such a way that it is a mis-relation, hence a “sickness.” Despair (much like anxiety from the earlier book
Concept of Anxiety
to which this is a companion) presumes and requires a self, thus it represents a certain humanising and superiority of existence. Beasts do not despair because beasts are not capable of personhood. To despair is human, but it is not necessary for humanity. It is a mark of something potentially glorious gone wrong. “The possibility of this sickness is man's superiority over the animal; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian's superiority over the natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian's blessedness” (15). Despair is the action of not willing to be one's authentic self. Enter God. God is the creator of all things and the ground of all existence. If one wants to find one's authentic existence, then one has to be rightly oriented to God. The action of becoming a self happens always before God. Refusal to become a self also happens before God.

Hence, Anti-Climacus begins part two of his book with the heading “Despair Is Sin.” Some humans actively rebel against God or are offended at his revelation. They are not in a right relation with existence and thus
will never become authentic. They are in despair. Other humans are fearful of the burden of being an individual. They hide in their mass herds and distractions. As a result they do not find authentic existence and are cut off from a right relation to the God who grounds all existence. They too live in despair before God, which is sin.

Sickness unto Death
develops a category that will go on to become of great importance to Kierkegaard, namely the “possibility of offence.” “There is so much talk about being offended by Christianity because it is so dark and gloomy, offended because it is so rigorous, etc., but it would be best of all to explain for once that the real reason that men are offended by Christianity is that it is too high, because its goal is not man's goal, because it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought” (83). Anti-Climacus goes to great lengths to counter the common idea (which he calls Socratic and pagan) that sin is ignorance. Christianly, sin is a matter of the will. “Therefore, interpreted Christianly, sin has its roots in willing, not in knowing, and this corruption of willing affects the individual's consciousness” (95).