Authors: Søren Kierkegaard
Only the individual can truthfully will the Good, and even though the penitent toils heavily not merely in the eleventh hour of confession, with all the questions standing as accusations of himself, but also in their daily use in repentance, yet the way is the right one. For he is in touch with the demand that calls for purity of heart by willing only one thing.
If you, my listener, unquestionably know much more concerning the office of Confession than has been set forth here; if you know the next thing that follows upon the confession of sins, still this extended talk has not been in vain if it has made you pause, made you pause before something that you already know well, you, who know so much more. But do not forget, that the most terrible thing of all is to “live on, deceived, not by what one might expect to be deceived (alas, and on that account horribly deceived) but deceived by too much knowledge.” Consider that in these times it is a particularly great temptation for speakers to leave the individual as quickly as possible in order to get as much as possible said, so that nobody might suspect that the speaker did not know what every man in a Christian country knows. Alas, only God knows how the individual knows it. But what does it profit a man if he goes further and further and it must be said of him: he never stops going further; when it also must be said of him: there was nothing that made him pause? For pausing is not a sluggish repose. Pausing is also movement. It is the inward movement of the heart. To pause is to deepen oneself in inwardness. But merely
going further is to go straight in the direction of superficiality. By that way one does not come to will only one thing. Only if at some time he decisively stopped going further and then again came to a pause, as he went further, only then could he will only one thing. For purity of heart was to will one thing.
Father in Heaven! What is a man without Thee! What is all that he knows, vast accumulation though it be, but a chipped fragment if he does not know Thee! What is all his striving, could it even encompass the world, but a half-finished work if he does not know Thee: Thee the One, who art one thing and who art all! So may Thou give to the intellect, wisdom to comprehend that one thing; to the heart, sincerity to receive this understanding; to the will, purity that wills only one thing. In prosperity may Thou grant perseverance to will one thing; amid distractions, collectedness to will one thing; in suffering, patience to will one thing. Oh, Thou that giveth both the beginning and the completion, may Thou early, at the dawn of day, give to the young man the resolution to will one thing. As the day wanes, may Thou give to the old man a renewed remembrance of his first resolution, that the first may be like the last, the last like the first, in possession of a life that has willed only one thing. Alas, but this has indeed not come to pass. Something has come in between. The separation of sin lies in between. Each day, and day after day something is being placed in between: delay, blockage, interruption, delusion, corruption. So in this time of repentance may Thou give the courage once again to will one thing. True, it is an interruption of our daily tasks; we do lay down our work as though it were a day of rest, when the penitent (and it is only in a time of repentance that the heavy-laden
worker may be quiet in the confession of sin) is alone before Thee in self-accusation. This is indeed an interruption. But it is an interruption that searches back into its very beginnings that it might bind up anew that which sin has separated, that in its grief it might atone for lost time, that in its anxiety it might bring to completion that which lies before it. Oh, Thou that givest both the beginning and the completion, give Thou victory in the day of need so that what neither a man’s burning wish nor his determined resolution may attain to, may be granted unto him in the sorrowing of repentance: to will only one thing.
1
Ecclesiastes 3:1.
2
Kierkegaard often takes some liberty with his quotations paraphrasing what he takes them essentially to mean. “He hath made everything beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart from the beginning to the end.”
3
For example: 2 Thessalonians 1:3.
4
Matthew 23:23. See note 2. The precise text is: “These ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone.”
5
James 3:5.
6
Matthew 12:43, 45.
7
Compare Börne,
Collected Works,
Vol. II, p. 126: “All are not free who scoff at their chains.”
8
Compare Thrasymachus in Plato’s
Republic
I. 16, 20.
9
Compare Romans 8:38, 39.
10
1 John 5:19.
11
Of Themistocles in Cicero’s
de Oratore
II. 74, 299.
12
Plato’s
Republic
IX. 572.
13
Genesis 2:18.
14
Ecclesiastes 4:10.
15
Compare Luke 17:10.
16
See translator’s introduction.
17
These words are attributed to Francis I as having been spoken after the battle of Pavia where he was taken prisoner.
18
Compare 2 Timothy
3:7.
19
Psalms 94:9.
20
Proverbs 4:23.
21
Ecclesiastes 7:2.
22
Compare Luke 9:59.
23
Compare Luke 17:10.
24
Compare Mark 8:36.
25
Matthew 27:41-44.
26
Shakespeare in
Henry V,
Act 2, Scene 4.
27
Socrates, Plato’s
Republic
VI. 492 B.
28
John the Baptist.
29
Compare Rosenkranz,
Erinnerungen an Karl Daub,
p. 24: “So as on sentry duty, at night on a lonely post, perhaps before a powder magazine a man has thoughts that under any other circumstances would be quite impossible.”
Kierkegaard refers to this same passage again in
Fear and Trembling, Collected Works,
Vol. III, p. 100.
30
Genesis 12:1.
31
Jose Arndt’s,
True Christianity.
32
Luke 15:7.
33
Compare Matthew 11:28.
34
Epicurus in Diogenes Laertius, 140.
35
Mark 9:36.
36
Ephesians 6:14, 17.
37
Acts 5:40-41.
38
The Danish word for “courage” is
Mod
and for “opposition” is
Modstand.
(Tr.)
39
The Danish word for “patience,”
Taalmod,
contains the Danish word for “courage,”
Mod,
and invites the discourse which follows. (Tr.)
40
Compare Acts 22:27-30, and 24:23.
41
Compare 1 Peter 1:16.
42
The Danish word for “actor,”
Skuespiller,
means literally
show
or
display—player.
(Tr.)
43
Socrates in Plato’s
Republic
VII. 518 A.
44
Psalms 2:4.
45
The Latin proverb “Tu si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.” See Boethius
Consolatio philos.
II.
17.
46
Proverbs 25:13.
47
Romans 5:3-4.
W
HEN LIFE
’
S
weather is fair there are not many who read the Book of
Job
or Pascal’s
Thoughts.
Yet in times of outward or inward searching these books seem to many to be the one thing needful and men seek them out.
Søren Kierkegaard is being discovered by the English-speaking world after something over three-quarters of a century of complete neglect. The creative writing of this Danish Pascal was nearly all done in a phenomenally productive six-year period between 1842 and 1848. Kierkegaard died in 1855 at the age of forty-two. The neglect of one who has influenced German theological thought for forty years and who more recently has been openly acknowledged as a formative force upon the minds of such divergent figures as the German philosophers, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger; as Karl Barth; as the lay Catholic thinker, Theodore Haecker, the Jesuit Pryzwara; and as the Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno can scarcely be charged to the insularity of the English-speaking religious and philosophical world or to the mere barrier of language. This insularity has been penetrated by far less significant continental and Scandinavian figures, and admirable translations of Scandinavian literature have been available for several decades. A deeper reason must be sought for this Anglo-Saxon neglect and for the present quickening of interest.
The Liberal theologian of England and America is described with commendation by Dean Inge in the closing chapter of his
Types of Christian Saintliness:
“His ‘authority’ is the best available judgment of civilized humanity which is the Liberal’s Great Church. Theological Liberalism
is thus a kind of consecration of all the best ethics and science and philosophy regarded as the manifestation or revelation of the will of God to man.” This broad, liberal creed supported by a set of idealistic categories that never questioned seriously the progressive revelation of the mind of God in the existing personal and social relationships of man has been too much at home in this prosperous world to need to call out a rebellious Danish religious prophet who challenged the very categories of its thought. But the World War and the condition of soul revealed by the subsequent social, political and economic unsettlements as well as the open contempt for Christianity shown by the new economic and nationalistic religions have forced liberal Christianity to search its very foundations in order to see what is unique in its Christian faith; to ask whether Christianity is simply a synthesis or amalgam of all the finest world thought; to ask where the spring of its dynamic, of its power, of its revolutionary character is to be found; to ask why Christianity is on the defensive, instead of on the offensive; to inquire what the Christian religion demands of a man. It is this mood that is opening the Anglo-Saxon mind of our time to such a radical Christian thinker at Søren Kierkegaard.
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing
is the first of Kierkegaard’s
Edifying Addresses
to be translated into English. It was written in
1846
and was included in the volume of
Edifying Addresses of Varied Tenor
that appeared in Copenhagen on March
13, 1847.
In the two important volumes
Either-Or
and
Stages on Life’s Way,
Kierkegaard from
1843
onwards had explored from within the æsthetic and the ethical ways of life, and had done it with an imaginative insight and a dramatic richness scarcely surpassed in the history of literature. Here the æsthetic way of life and the ethical way of life
are personified in well-drawn characters and presented in meticulous detail down to their most subtle refinements. Both of these ways of life are shown to be ultimately unstable in one who is aware of their full implications, and to point beyond themselves to the religious way of life, different aspects of which are represented in
Fear and Trembling, Repetition,
the
Concept of Dread, Philosophical Fragments,
and the
Final Unscientific Postscript.
All of these works were issued not under Kierkegaard’s own name but under pseudonyms. They are indirect. They prepare the way. They are intended to unsettle the reader by revealing to him the true character of the dwelling he has inhabited.
But simultaneously with these works, there appeared regularly from
1843
onwards, some twenty
Edifying Addresses,
always bearing Kierkegaard’s own name. These are direct. They plunge abruptly into the religious way of life itself and explore it from within.
The title of
Edifying Addresses
(Opbyggelige Taler) sounds quaint and uninviting to the ears of this century. An “address” sounds formal and reminiscent of the days of rhetoric and of ponderous oratory.
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing,
like the rest of this series, is really not an address in the ordinary sense at all. It was never spoken aloud to an audience. Like all of Kierkegaard’s
Edifying Addresses
which are really unpreached sermons, it was written for men and women to speak aloud to themselves. It was aimed at an audience who read and who pondered what they read. Kierkegaard’s own life-long practice of reading sermons aloud to himself convinced him that there was no more effective way to engage with them. In creating these addresses he always spoke them aloud sentence by sentence before he set them down. This may account
for the unusual degree of intimate intensity that characterizes them.
The addresses are written to “edify.” The Danish word “opbyggelig” means literally “upbuilding,” and in spite of the modesty of his prefaces in which he protests that he is without authority and that he makes no pretense of being a teacher, Kierkegaard expressed in his title precisely what he intended for them to do. They were not written as the present-day mind would perhaps prefer them: to entertain, to instruct, or to provoke—but to “upbuild.” Yet for Kierkegaard the “upbuilding” of a life could not take place by building on another room like one of the regular additions to a New England farmhouse, or like an interior remodeling that altered a few partitions. No, it was rather an “upbuilding” that called for a costly abandonment of the security of the old under walls. Men must build on a new foundation. They must bottom themselves in a new center. “There are plenty to follow our Lord halfway,” declared Meister Eckhart, “but not the other half.” The story of the nun, Dame Morel, in the reform of Port Royal, who was ready to give up all of her luxuries but one—all but the key to her little private garden—is the story of men everywhere whom Kierkegaard sought to lay hold of in these
Edifying Addresses.
They wish to keep at least one key back. As Christian swimmers they long to keep one foot on the bottom. Kierkegaard sought to draw them out into water that is
70,000
fathoms deep where life depends not upon half-measures, but upon faith.