Kierkegaard (32 page)

For Self-Examination

September 10, 1851

Søren Kierkegaard

“And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise, and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale. Yes everything is soon turned upside down: communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point with regard
to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than—rubbish!” (48).

Kierkegaard half-heartedly tried to conclude his authorship four times in his life. The ink was barely dry on
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
in 1846 before he was finding ways to continue writing. Next he thought
Christian Discourses
and
The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress
might mark the end in 1848. Less than a year later, this “end” was followed by another conclusion with
On My Work as an Author
and
Two Discourses
with its thinly veiled dedication to Regine. Finally, he issued
For Self-Examination
in 1851, declining to publish its companion piece,
Judge for Yourself!
The ensuing three years of silence suggested this time Kierkegaard had stuck the landing. The silence can be explained because Kierkegaard considered
Judge!
to be too harsh and
Self-Examination
a fitting final coda to the challenge first issued to Bishop Mynster in
Practice in Christianity
. He was waiting for Mynster to respond. It was not until the Bishop's death and subsequent valorisation as a “truth witness” that Søren would come out swinging with his final attack upon Christendom.

For Self-Examination
has three parts, modelled after key dates in the liturgical calendar. The first is a deliberation on Scripture and a celebration of the fifth Sunday after Easter. The second is a reflection on Christ as the Way, in light of Ascension Day. The third, a treatise for Pentecost and a discussion of the Holy Spirit. The book sees Kierkegaard addressing Lutheranism and the Protestant Reformation. The reformation betrays itself when it simply allows one form of anaemic cultural Christianity to replace another. Instead, authentic Christianity is ever new, reforming itself with every generation and every individual. The greatest threat to Christendom's complacency are its own holy texts. Christendom has devised many ways to shield itself from the challenge inherent in Scripture. “Much in the way a boy puts a napkin or more
under his pants when he is going to get a licking,” (35) people put layers of scholarly research and interpretation between them and the Bible. “I shove all this between the Word and myself and then give this interpreting and scholarliness the name of earnestness and zeal for truth” (35). The Scriptures are not intellectually that hard to understand. It is their
implications
that are difficult. Kierkegaard asks his readers not to think of Scriptures as primarily repositories of historical data or beautiful literature but to use them as a mirror for self-examination. Dare to be alone with the Scriptures! If one dares this, one will invariably meet Jesus Christ in its pages. Christ is the Way. Ascension Day poses a temptation to Christendom as it is too easy to think of Christ glorified rather than the Christ incarnate who came first. Kierkegaard spends time on the difference between the “hard,” “narrow” way of Christ and the broad, easy way of destruction. Kierkegaard is keen to point out not all hard and narrow ways are Christ's ways. There can be idolatry and self-delusion in a life of martyrdom too. The followers of Christ are not asked to imitate the life of a sufferer but to imitate the life of Jesus, and that is the difference. Kierkegaard finishes the book with a discussion of the work of the Holy Spirit. “It is the Spirit who gives life” (75). Christendom takes the Spirit's life for granted—as if the role of God was to rubber-stamp whatever comfortable life the citizens have marked out for themselves. “No, no! . . . what blasphemy!” (76). It is not the old life the Holy Spirit endorses but a
new life
. New life requires death of the old life. Kierkegaard here tells a parable of a rich owner who bought a team of horses. He drove them for months, and soon they were tired and lifeless. They “acquired all sorts of quirks and bad habits” and “grew thinner day by day.” In desperation the owner calls in a royal coachman. The skilled driver had them for a month. “In the whole countryside there was not a team of horses that carried their heads so proudly.” How did this happen? The owner “drove the horses according to the horses' understanding of what it is to drive; the royal coachman drove them according to the coachman's understanding of what it is to drive.” Kierkegaard concludes,
“So also with us human beings” (85–86). The Spirit, as the author of life, gives life (faith, hope, and love) where man has come to the end of his own resources.

Kierkegaard deliberately sought as wide a readership as possible for
For Self-Examination
, and it is written in a straightforward, winsome style. It is fitting that this, the last book of the official authorship, is also a very good suggestion for a new reader of Kierkegaard wondering what should be their first.

The “Attack upon Christendom”
and
The Moment and Late Writings

December 18, 1854—September 24, 1855; Moment no. 10 published posthumously 1881.

Søren Kierkegaard

“So the silence can no longer continue; the objection must be raised . . . the objection to be representing—from the pulpit, consequently before God—Bishop Mynster as a truth-witness, because it is untrue, but proclaimed in this way it becomes an untruth that cries to heaven” (8).

The “Attack upon Christendom” is not the title of a single work, but is instead the collective label for a series of polemical articles that originally appeared in the self-published journal
The Moment
and in the
Fatherland
newspaper between 1854 and 1855. The name applies to the swirl of events, editorials, essays, letters to newspapers, and appeals to the public that characterised the final stage of Kierkegaard's writing career. It also marks the final phase of his life, as he died while in the middle of the attack before the tenth issue of
The Moment
could be published. In these articles, Kierkegaard does not resort to pseudonyms but writes under his own name. However, even this “direct communication” remains in a certain sense indirect, for Kierkegaard adopts a role of “corrective” to the
established order. He talks about himself as a fire chief ringing a bell, a detective discovering a great crime, a horsefly rousing its victim with a sting, or a doctor causing his patient to vomit in order to purge them of their poison. The cause of all this urgent imagery is
Christendom
, which for Kierkegaard encompasses not only the Lutheran Church of Denmark but also any and all Christianised cultures. “Oh Luther, you had ninety-five theses—terrible! And yet, in a deeper sense, the more theses the less terrible. The matter is far more terrible—there is only one thesis. The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at all” (39).

The problem with Christendom is that it tempts its citizens to confuse being a member of a civilisation with being authentically religious and has done away with Christianity as a result. In
The Moment
Kierkegaard maintains he is not a Christian, for under Christendom that term has become meaningless. He also emphasises he is not trying to convert anyone to Christianity—merely to get his readers to face honestly what they are and what they are not. “So let there be light on this matter, let it become clear to people what the New Testament understands by being a Christian, so that everyone can choose whether he wants to be a Christian or whether he honestly, plainly, forthrightly does not want to be that” (97).

In these articles, Kierkegaard appeals to the common man, and he names and shames a number of Christendom's public figures, most notably Jakob Mynster, the recently deceased Bishop of Denmark, and his successor, Bishop Hans Martensen.

A realistic description of the pastor is: a half-worldly, half-ecclesiastical, totally equivocal officeholder, a person of rank with a family, who (in the hope of a promotion . . .) ensures himself a livelihood, also if necessary, with the help of the police . . . lives on Jesus Christ having been crucified, claiming that this profound earnestness (this “imitation of Jesus Christ”?) is the Christianity of the New Testament . . . (31)

. . . it is easy to see that, Christianly, their whole existence is a malpractice . . . The “pastor” has a pecuniary interest in having
people call themselves Christians, since every such person is of course a contributing member and also contributes to giving the whole profession visible power—but nothing is more dangerous for true Christianity, nothing is more against its nature, than getting people light-mindedly to assume the name “Christians” . . . and “the pastor” has a pecuniary interest in having it rest there, so that by assuming the name “Christians” people do not come to know what Christianity in truth is, since otherwise the whole machinery of 1000 royal offices and class power would come to naught—but nothing is more dangerous for true Christianity, nothing is more contrary to its nature, than this abortion causing it to rest there, so that people assume the name “Christians.” (95–96)

The pieces caused great offence as well as admiration from all quarters of society.

Posthumous Works

The Book on Adler

Written, 1846–47; revised 1848; published posthumously 1872

Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard worked and reworked the material for this book many times. Eventually in 1849 he published a short excerpt, “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle” as one of the
Two Ethical-Religious Essays
attributed to the pseudonym “H. H.” The complicated process and Søren's reluctance to publish the full work is due to two factors: Kierkegaard's personal concern for Adolph Peter Adler and Kierkegaard's vocational concern for himself. The book is extraordinarily important as
a document about Kierkegaard's self-understanding as a poet who writes Christianly but “without authority.” Adler was a contemporary of Søren's, a pastor who began his career as a Hegelian theologian before having a religious experience in which he claimed Jesus wanted him to eradicate the Hegelian influence from all his theology. Adler faced widespread derision and was removed from his pastorate in 1844. He continued to write but went back on his previous claim to be communicating from direct revelation, instead formulating his work as a new philosophical development.

The book is essentially an investigation into the concept of divine revelation, the various ways the modern age gets its categories confused in relation to truth and what the difference is between communicating with divine authority (as an “apostle”) and communicating with skill (as a “genius”). Kierkegaard does not question the possibility of revelation, but he does question Adler's original claim, based on his subsequent attempt to dress his divine revelation up as sophisticated philosophy. The words of a “genius” can be critiqued, argued, and appreciated. An “apostle” with a revelation can only be received or rejected. “The question is very simple: Will you obey? or will you not obey; will you in faith submit to . . . divine authority or will you take offence?” (34). Beware! Kierkegaard continues, not taking any side is also an offence.

Kierkegaard draws a distinction between the historical event in Christianity (the appearance of the paradox of the god-man) and the history of Christendom (the development of Christian civilisation and the church). The modern confusion arises because Christendom attempts to prove the plausibility of its foundational event by appealing to common sense, literacy, or intellectual sophistication. Yet, says Kierkegaard, the paradox is not to be tested and proved by men. It is men who are proved and tested by the paradox, which must be encountered afresh in contemporaneity.

Adler claimed he was an apostle with a revelation, but he attempted to communicate as a genius with rhetorical skill. The two categories are qualitatively different. That is Adler's confusion, the confusion he shares with his wider culture. The final chapter of the book thus finds Adler to
be a “phenomenon” of the present age. The age confuses aesthetics with the religious—for example, much ink is spilled praising the Apostle Paul for his excellent command of Greek. The age is drunk on seeing itself collectively as an advanced movement of history rather than as individuals continually before the paradox. The present age thinks the more people rally together about something the truer it is or becomes, forgetting that divine revelation, if it exists, remains true whether it attracts the agreement of a million, a hundred, one or none of the human race.

Point of View for My Work as an Author
and
“The Single Individual”: Two “Notes” Concerning My Work as an Author

Written, 1848; published posthumously 1859

Armed Neutrality

Written, 1848; published posthumously 1880

Søren Kierkegaard

“
The Point of View for My Work as an Author
must not be published, no, no! . . . The book itself is true and in my opinion masterly. But a book like that can only be published after my death” (JP 6327).

The popular
Either/Or
was due for reprinting in 1849. Although the money that would come from this publishing was welcome, the event was not wholly positive for Kierkegaard. This aesthetic-moral work lay at the beginning of his authorship. By 1849 the works had moved on to much more religiously serious matters, trenchantly pitting a highly Christocentric understanding of Christianity against the cultural assumptions of Christendom. Kierkegaard was concerned about dragging his authorship back into the aesthetic stage. To make matters more
complicated, much of the most Christian material from 1848 still lay on Kierkegaard's desk while he wondered in what manner and under which name to print it. The authorship had used non-Christian pseudonyms to piously deceive readers into Christian edification. The current material awaiting publication was Christian at a higher, more ideal level than Kierkegaard had previously expressed. Some sort of report reminding readers of the full gamut of the authorship and an accounting of his method of indirect and direct communication seemed in order.