Kierkegaard (29 page)

Like so many of Kierkegaard's works, the book combines humour and polemics with philosophy and intense spiritual reflection. The word “Unscientific” signals Søren's satirical dig at the pompous public figures of his day (such as the “assistant professor” H. L. Martensen and the nationalist, historian, and preacher N. F. S. Grundtvig) who purported to explain all life's questions through their pseudoscientific, systematic worldviews. The first thing a contemporary reader would have noticed about this book is that it physically resembled these rival tomes, mocking their forest of preliminary notes, technical jargon, and convoluted table of contents. The word “Postscript” indicates the place of this book in Søren's scheme as ending what Climacus started with
Philosophical Fragments
. As the postscript is five times the length of
Fragments
, the title is also part of the joke.

The book is wide-ranging but at its heart is the account of what it means for a religiously serious citizen of Christendom to become, finally, a Christian. The opening sections address various ways Christendom usually attempts to defend its religion. The book questions whether history, the church, or Scriptures are sufficient for “proving” Christianity, and, more importantly, it traces the ways these attempts end up betraying and distorting the very thing they are trying to protect. This is because Christianity is not, at its heart, a system, a science, or a cultural worldview. Any attempts to portray Christianity as common sense, patriotic, or objective will fail for the simple fact that God is not an object, and the incarnation is not common sense or culturally acceptable. God, as revealed in the incarnation, is a person—in other words, a Subject.

This is what
Postscript
means by the famous Kierkegaardian idea “Truth is Subjectivity” (discussed at length in Part Two, Section II, Chapter II). It is not a hymn of praise to subjectivism (where truth is generated from within yourself), but instead is an account of the essentially Person-centred nature of authentic Christianity and human existence,
where it is recognised that if anyone is to know the truth of the incarnate God, they will have to do so as Subjects. This relation is not only highly personal, it is also highly challenging to the forms of religion and identity usually found in Christendom. “The immorality of our age is perhaps not lust and pleasure and sensuality, but rather a pantheistic, debauched contempt for individual human beings. . . . Just as in the desert individuals must travel in large caravans out of fear of robbers and wild animals, so individuals today have a horror of existence because it is godforsaken; they dare to live only in great herds and cling together
en masse
in order to be at least something” (355–56).

Postscript
calls the common-sense religion of cultures and groups “Religiousness A,” and differentiates this with “Religiousness B,” which recognises the inner and personally reflective nature of Christianity that cannot be had simply by being part of a Christianised culture. The clash between most forms of Christianity and authentic Christianity will become explicit in the latter stages of Kierkegaard's life, yet it is implicit here too. “Now, if someone thinks that this is not quite right, that he is not a Christian, he is considered an eccentric. His wife says to him: ‘How can you not be a Christian? You are Danish aren't you? Doesn't the geography book say that the predominant religion in Denmark is Lutheran-Christian? . . . Don't you tend to your work in the office as a good civil servant; aren't you a good subject in a Christian nation, in a Lutheran Christian state? So of course you are a Christian' ” (50–51).

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, A Literary Review

March 30, 1846

Søren Kierkegaard

“The public is all and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most meaningless” (93).

A month after concluding his authorship, Søren published
Two Ages
. However, much like the wily author of
Prefaces
, Søren had a loophole.
Two Ages
is not a book. It is a review of one. Thomasine Gyllembourg was a celebrated author, and Søren was an admirer of her novels, which he thought brilliantly captured the tensions of contemporary life. His
Two Ages
is an extended review of her novel of the same name. The first two sections pertain to the novel, while the final section consists of an essay on the theme of the spirits of the age. This last section sometimes appears separately under the title
The Present Age
.

Søren identifies two competing spirits that put their stamp on any given era, an ethos of revolution and decision, and an ethos of reflection, deliberation, and talk. Both spirits have their place, but the contemporary age has gone too far in one direction. “In contrast to the age of revolution, which took action, the present age is an age of publicity, the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens but still there is endless publicity” (70).

In an age overtaken by reflection, talking about doing something important replaces actually doing it. The crowd likes the appearance of decisiveness more than it tolerates the reality of it. Indeed, the crowd works to halt the individual who ventures out on his own. “Entrapped air always becomes noxious, and the entrapment of reflection with no ventilating action or event develops censorious envy” (82). Kierkegaard's name for the way societies work to pull down any member who acts in a way that challenges its common sense is “levelling.” Levelling is the process of abstraction, whereby decisive choices are stripped of their power by being morphed into “ideas” or “worldviews,” and persons are subsumed into groups. Levelling happens wherever tribes, generations, churches, or countries lay claim to individual allegiance, but Søren has a catch-all term: “For levelling to take place, a phantom must first be raised . . . a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage—and this phantom is the public” (90). One of the public's most potent weapons in the war to defend itself against individuals
taking their existence seriously is an endless stream of celebrity gossip, manufactured ideological conflict, and opinion presented as facts no one owns but everyone has. Søren takes aim especially at the popular press as an agent for levelling. Using the press, the public is preserved through chatter. “What is it to chatter? It is the annulment of the passionate disjunction between being silent and speaking. Only the person who can remain essentially silent can speak essentially, can act essentially. Silence is inwardness. [ . . . ] But chattering dreads the moment of silence, which would reveal the emptiness” (97–98). It's not all bad however. Although the envious public inevitably opposes anyone who challenges its power, the result is the individual will be, finally, exactly where they need to be if they are to meet God. Stripped of any illusion that “the public” holds any truth, love, or authenticity, the person who has been levelled might find himself catapulted “into the embrace of the Eternal” (89). If any of this seems an unlikely scenario, it is worth noting that in the months leading up to the publication of
Two Ages
Søren himself had been subject to ceaseless mockery by the popular press and had himself experienced a profound realisation of where he stood in relation to the public, his vocation, and his God.

Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits

March 13, 1847

Søren Kierkegaard

Søren did not stop writing in 1846, but this was all in his private journals, and it was almost a full year after
Postscript
and
Two Ages
that the public was presented with another publication.
Various Spirits
dispenses with much of the satire and ambiguity of the previous authorship and is more seriously Christian than even the
Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses
of a few years previous. The whole is divided into three distinct parts: purity of heart, the lilies of the field, and the gospel of
suffering. The discourses have since developed a reputation as spiritual classics of discipleship and devotion; however, judging by the lack of reviews, they did not make much of an impact on Kierkegaard's first intended audience.

Purity concerns integrity and wholeness of purpose. Part one's constant theme is “purity of heart is to will one thing.” The reader is continually reminded they are responsible for the condition of their own souls. It is well-known men are judged at the eleventh hour, but in the eyes of Eternity, “it is always at the eleventh hour” (14). The essay spends less time on “purity” than many people might expect who are used to calls to repentance in the face of judgement. Instead the piece focuses on what it might mean to will one thing. Only one thing is Good, and that is the will of God. There are many barriers to willing the will of God, all of which Søren dubs double-mindedness. The double-minded one might will to be good for men's approval or for godly rewards or out of fear of punishment. No matter what the good intention might be, the self is conflicted because it is not desiring the Good in itself. The self is in rebellion against itself and against God. It needs reconciliation, an act of grace that comes every time an individual repents. What is more, repentance is not a one-off event. The multifarious nature of life means the individual needs to always be on guard: true repentance is accompanied by constant anxiety (in the Kierkegaardian sense), whereby God continually renews the self in wholeness.

Lilies celebrate what it is to be a flourishing, human life. A controlling theme is of contentment and of the solid self in the face of the anxiety of the crowd. Consider the lilies. Once upon a time there was a lily who stood alone in a dell, with only some small flowers and nettles for company. He was happy until one day a malicious bird flitted by, filling the lily's head with tales of more beautiful lilies, growing in masses beyond the dell. The lily grew troubled. Why was it secluded, all alone, with only weeds for company? The lily wished to be magnificent too, so he asked the bird to carry him to the yonder hill. The bird plucked the
lily by its roots and duly deposited him amongst the masses of similar flowers. Alas, the lily could not take root. He withered and died.

Suffering is an extended meditation on what it means to follow Christ. Did Jesus suffer so that his disciples might live a life of comfort? Or could it be that, like Job, a life of suffering and a life of righteousness might not be mutually exclusive? It would not be accurate to think this discourse was a celebration of suffering, however. The good news of the gospel is not hardship, but that with Christ, the burden becomes light. There is joy in suffering because God does not cause it, the world does when it feels its authority threatened. The apostles' suffering was a sign of the rightness of their cause. Suffering teaches patient endurance, and, most importantly, it provides the opportunity for that most ancient of Christian prayers “not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

Works of Love

September 29, 1847

Søren Kierkegaard

With his constant focus on the highly personal aspect of authentic identity and faith, a reoccurring criticism of Kierkegaard is that his thought is irredeemably individualistic. Similar criticisms dogged Søren in his own day.
Works of Love
was written partly in response to contemporaries who accused him of having no feeling for the social life of others.
Works
is a substantial tome. Its subject is Jesus' double love command. Key themes include a comment on the Lutheran culture surrounding “works” and “grace,” a searching examination of “love,” and an exploration of the prime human target of Christian love—namely “the neighbour.”

Søren's favourite book of the Bible was James. The epistle's insistence that “faith without works is dead” informs Søren's observations in
Works
of a Christianised culture that now takes faith for granted. Martin
Luther's great Reformation was based on the idea that salvation is by God's grace and not by anything humans might do to earn it. However, it was Søren's opinion that Danish Lutheranism took such grace cheaply, assuming “faith” was a matter of course. The transforming nature of grace on a life dedicated to Jesus Christ was lost on a culture that assumed becoming a Christian was as easy as being born.
Works
is part of Søren's attempt to rejuvenate a crucial aspect of Christian life that had fallen by the wayside thanks to Christendom. The works in
Works
are not social activism, alms, or indulgences. They are the qualities of love as drawn from the New Testament. For example, love “builds up,” it “believes all things,” it “hopes,” it “abides,” and it “covers a multitude of sins.”

Besides a healthy sense of the outworking of faith, Christendom has also forgotten what Christian love is. Love's various forms fall roughly into two categories:
eros
(passionate preference) and
agape
(disinterested love). Erotic love does not here mean only sex. Passionate preference is a love of “like for like.” It is the love of the patriot, the tribesman, the infatuated couple, the best friend, or the family unit. Such love has its uses; however, it needs to be noted it also tends towards monstrous selfishness. Passionate preference is, by necessity, exclusive. Such love is strongest when it is directed to one, and only one, object, be it a lover, a family, or a country. Yet if my love is primarily directed at those who sound as much like me and look as much like me as possible, then the ultimate horizon of such a love is . . . me. “Erotic love and friendship are the very peak of self-esteem, the I intoxicated in the other I” (56).

Søren identifies this sort of love as “pagan.” By contrast, truly other-regarding love that is not based on self-interest is a Christian invention. Agape is the love of God who does not need anything from humans. It is also the love we can have for others regardless of what they can do for us or what sort of relationship they have to us. Indeed, only agape can truly be called “love” because only agape cares about other persons for themselves. Jesus' story of the Good Samaritan furnishes Søren with his term for what to call these “other persons for themselves”: neighbours.
“No one in paganism loved the neighbour; no one suspected that he existed. Therefore what paganism called love . . . was preference” (53).
Works
contrasts the so-called love of preference, which is trumped up by poets and politicians, with the apparently mundane love commanded by Jesus. This love might not inspire any pop-stars, but it will result in real persons having their real needs met. “Love for neighbour does not want to be sung about—it wants to be accomplished” (46). Unlike the erotic obsession with identifying who is most deserving of love, Kierkegaard remarks that when one is searching for one's neighbour, all one needs to do is open the door and go out. “The very first person you meet is the neighbour, whom you shall love . . . There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognised as the neighbour” (51–52).