Mynsters Sermons
A stock ingredient in Soren's Christian upbringing was the sermons of Jacob Peter Mynster (1775-1854), a curate at Our Lady's Church in Copenhagen and a popular preacher among the cultural elite of Danish society at that time. Kierkegaard's father was devoted to Mynster as a preacher and spiritual advisor, and his published sermons were regularly read at devotionals in the Kierkegaard household (JP vi. 6627). Soren was even 6 See Garff (2005 19-20) Kirmmse (1996 151). encouraged, on promise of...
Christian Love as Self Denial
Another way of expressing this is to say that Christian love is self-denial's love, which is the boundless and passionate giving of ourselves to others in such a way as to drive out selfishness in ourselves by placing the neighbour as a middle term or third party between self-love and its 'other I' in the beloved or friend (WL 54). As Kierkegaard sees it, self-denial is 'Christianity's essential form' and is what distinguishes Christian love most of all from other forms of love such as erotic...
The Dialectical Constituents of the Self as a Synthesis
In order to awaken us to an understanding of what despair really is and the specific forms it can take in a human being, Anti-Climacus analyses despair first of all in terms of the dialectical constituents of the self as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility. Since the first pair of these constituents was introduced in The Concept of Anxiety, Anti-Climacus limits himself to a discussion of the disparity in the self's relation to the...
Despair As A Sickness Of The Human Spirit
If anxiety is the psychological precursor and consequent of freedom or spirit in a human being, despair is the psychological expression of the disparity or misrelation (misforhold) in a human being's relation to itself as spirit. Recognizing as early as 1836 that 'the present age is the age of despair', Kierkegaard analyses despair as a universal sickness of the human spirit in The Sickness unto Death, published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus and subtitled 'A Christian Psychological...
The Subjective Thinker
According to Climacus, the way to cultivate subjectivity in oneself is to become a subjective thinker, whose task is to achieve self-understanding in existence (CUP i. 73-80, 349-60). Whereas objective thinking is indifferent to the thinker's own existence, requiring the abandonment of oneself in objectivity, subjective thinking does not forget the fact that the thinker is an existing person and includes that thought in reflection in the interest of existing in what is thought. Due to the...
Faith versus Doubt and Offence
Climacus also distinguishes between two senses of faith (Tro) faith in the ordinary sense, or belief concerning the coming into existence of anything historical, and faith in an eminent sense, which is based solely on the contradiction that the god has come into existence (PF 87). The first form of faith pertains to the immediate apprehension of anything that has come into existence or become historical, such as a star or an event, inasmuch as its coming into existence is uncertain or elusive...
Grew up in Orthodoxy
Kierkegaard was also having doubts about Christianity at this time, as it seemed to him to have 'such great contradictions that a clear view is hindered, to say the least' (JP v. 5092). The Lutheran orthodox 'colossus' under which he had grown up began to totter when he started to think for himself. This colossus was built upon the Bible as the absolute standard and sole authority for all Christian teaching, the confessional writings of the early church (the Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian...
Hoping All Things Always
Kierkegaard defines more explicitly what it means to hope in a Christian sense in Works of Love. Christianly understood, 'hope is composed of the eternal and the temporal', which means that its task is both to hope all things (the expression for its eternal aspect) and to hope always (the expression for its temporal aspect), which together express the same thing 'at every moment always to hope all things' (WL 249). The only point at which the eternal, which simply is and thus not subject to...
Hoping for Others
As Kierkegaard sees it, hope in the possibility of the good is inherently related to love, so that it is impossible to hope for oneself without also hoping for others No one can hope unless he is also loving he cannot hope for himself without also being loving, because the good has an infinite connectedness but if he is loving, he also hopes for others. In the same degree to which he hopes for others, he hopes for himself, because in the very same degree to which he hopes for others, he is one...
Imitation Versus Admiration Of Christ
In the present age, especially in Protestantism, Kierkegaard contends that the prototype has become so far removed from the single individual that 'it has become merely an idea of the race', with the result that 'it never occurs to him in the remotest way to want to strive toward likeness' (JP ii. 1873 cf. 1904). Imitation or following after Christ thus has been done away with and replaced with aesthetic admiration of him, as in Kant's view (JP ii. 1895). The person specifically indicted for...
Medieval And Modern Views Of Christ As Prototype
But what does it mean for Christ to be a prototype and in what sense is imitation of him required Let us begin to tackle these questions by first noting the historical background within which these ideas became prominent in the Christian tradition. The notion of a prototype is associated with being an archetype or original pattern, model, form, or ideal of some kind. In the Christian tradition the notion of Christ as a prototype and example for the Christian life through his perfect obedience,...
Socrates And The Christian Believer
According to Climacus, to become a subjective thinker who seeks self-understanding in existence was the Greek principle, exemplified in the Socratic exhortation to 'know yourself' (CUP i. 352). Socrates serves as the paradigm of the subjective thinker for Climacus because he expresses the thesis that subjectivity is truth in his philosophizing by paying attention to 'the essential meaning of existing' and to the fact that the thinker is an existing person whose task as a thinker is first and...
The Concept of Innocence
In contrast to Schleiermacher's notion of an innate sinfulness in Adam and humankind prior to the first sin and in direct opposition to Hegel, Vigilius reaffirms the traditional notion of Adam's innocence before the Fall, which in his view has been confused with the concept of immediacy in Hegel's logic (CA 35).30 As conceived by Hegel, immediacy is a pure state of being in innocence or ignorance that should be annulled by mediation or reflection in an immanent, necessary movement to a higher...
Poetical Venture
Having dialectically distinguished Christianity from philosophical idealism and other immanent approaches to the knowledge and acquisition of eternal truth, Climacus embarks on a poetical venture in the imaginative construction of a poetic analogy to the human learner and divine teacher in the parable of the king and the maiden. To recap the parable briefly, the king god is motivated out of love for a lowly maiden learner to do away with the inequality between them in order to establish a happy...
The Corsair Affair
The first of these events was occasioned by one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms being singled out for praise in a satirical weekly tabloid called The Corsair (from the French corsaire, meaning 'a pirate or pirate ship'), which in keeping with its name specialized in plundering and destroying the reputations of Copenhagen citizens of note. This scandal sheet, or 'pirate paper' as its editor Meir Goldschmidt (1819-87) called it, enjoyed the largest circulation of any newspaper in the city and...
The Silence of Abraham
Much of the inner distress and anxiety associated with the passion and paradox of faith as exemplified by Abraham derives from the fact that he is utterly unable to make himself intelligible to anyone, including his own family, inasmuch as he stands outside the universal in an absolute relation to God that commands him in a particular instance to do what ethics would forbid. Unlike aesthetics, in which concealment plays an essential role in 13 Cf. Hegel (1991b 108-24 1984-7 i. 385-96, 407-16)...
The Absolute Paradox As The Absurd
The second dialectical problem confronting the subjective thinker in Christianity has to do with the qualification of eternal, essential truth itself as the absolute paradox and the absurd as a result of having entered into the temporal realm at a specific moment in time. Climacus warns first of all against conceiving this coming into existence speculatively as an eternal-historical event in which 'the coming into existence of the eternal in time is supposed to be an eternal coming into...
Universal Religious Awakenings Versus A Christian Awakening
Unlike most people, then, Adler had been 'deeply moved' and 'shaken in his inmost being' by being 'fetched home by a higher power' and 'tossed out into extreme mortal danger' over '70,000 fathoms of water' (BA 104, 108, 112). As Kierkegaard sees it, however, to be deeply moved in this manner is not equivalent to having a Christian awakening, as pagans and Jews, for example, are also capable of being deeply moved by something higher or abstract such as the eternal or an idea. Thus 'not every...
Rationalist Theology
If Kierkegaard was in doubt about the foundations of orthodox Christianity, he was even less satisfied with the rationalist theology to which he was introduced in the lectures of Professor Henrik Nicolai Clausen (17931877) (SKS xix 1. 1-8).30 Theological rationalism was a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which sought to subject everything to rational criticism, making reason the primary criterion for determining truth.31 Philosophically, modern rationalism had its genesis in the...
The Reception Of Kierkegaard
Because Kierkegaard's writings had to be translated into other languages before they could become widely available outside Denmark, the initial reception of Kierkegaard in the seventy-odd years following his death was slow in coming.23 When it did come, it was quite mixed and often coloured by partisan reviews, misconceptions, and a lack of access to his writings other than The Moment, which was the first to be translated. This had the deleterious, off-putting effect of making Kierkegaard seem...
The Concept Of Paradox
The stage is now set for the introduction of Christ as the absolute paradox. It is important first of all, however, to clarify what a paradox is before there 13 Cf. Plato, Symposium, 220b (1997 501). can be any talk of an absolute paradox. Etymologically, this term is derived from the Greek words para ('beyond') and doxa ('opinion'), connoting something that goes beyond or is contrary to common opinion. A common misunderstanding of the concept of paradox is to regard it as a formal or logical...
Unum Noris Omnes
The view set forth in Two Ages on the difference between the sociality of the crowd or public and genuine community is further confirmed and given its most incisive expression in a journal entry from 1850 In the 'public' and the like the single individual is nothing there is no individual the numerical is the constituting form and the law for the coming into existence of a generatio aequivoca spontaneous generation detached from the 'public' the single individual is nothing, and in the public...
The Emancipation of Women
Kierkegaard's negative attitude towards social equality also led him to oppose the emancipation of women, the subject of his very first publication in a newspaper article while still a university student (EPW 3-5).31 In the 1830s there was already a women's liberation movement brewing in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe which continued to gather steam in the 1840s, particularly after the political revolutions of 1848.32 Viewing Christianity as seeking to bring about only the change of...
Conscious Despair in Weakness
The next level of despair is conscious despair, in which one has a truer conception of despair and greater clarity about oneself as being in despair, although one may still have only 'a dim idea' of one's true state and self-identity at this level (SUD 48). Anti-Climacus basically distinguishes between two forms of conscious despair despairingly not to will to be oneself (despair in weakness or 'feminine despair'), and despairingly to will to be oneself (defiant despair or 'masculine despair')...
Objectivity In Subjectivity
The fact that faith is related to an objective uncertainty does not mean, however, that it lacks intellectual content or an objective referent outside the inwardness of the individual. On the contrary, we have seen that 13 On the implications of Climacus's view of subjective truth for multiculturalism and religious pluralism, see Perkins (2004a). 14 See also Gouwens (1996 19-21, 105-8, 150-1), and Evans (1983 126-31). Climacus clearly recognizes that Christianity possesses intellectual content...
Holy Communion
For Kierkegaard the longing for reconciliation with God begins with the consciousness of sin, in which one becomes aware of one's distance from being a self before God.51 But the consciousness of sin is dialectical in character, inasmuch as it may lead one further away from faith in the continuation and intensification of sin, as described in The Sickness unto Death, or it may become further qualified so as to function as an indirectly positive aid in bringing a person to faith.52 In the latter...
The Doctrine Of The Incarnation
The biblical basis for the doctrine of the incarnation rests principally on two passages from the New Testament.2 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1 14) Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness....
The Objective Issue
In order to distinguish the subjective issue of the individual's relation to Christianity as clearly as possible from the objective issue of the truth of Christianity, Climacus begins with a brief characterization of how the latter is determined in the modern age. Reflecting Leibniz's famous distinction between contingent and necessary truths, or truths of fact and truths of reason, he points out that, objectively viewed, truth can be understood as being either historical or philosophical in...
The Teleological Suspension of the Ethical
Over against a Hegelian conception of the single individual as subordinate to the universal, Johannes asserts just the opposite with respect to Abraham and faith 8 On Kantian elements in this work as well, see Green (1992 86-91, 183-205) Knappe (2004 12-13, 77-97). 9 Hegel (1991a 129-40). On Hegel's ethics, see Wood (1990 1993b). 10 Cf. Kant (1990 24) Hegel (1991a 64, 189-98). Faith is exactly this paradox, that the single individual is higher than the universal, but in such a way, mind you,...
Reflecting On Faith
In a journal entry from 1850 Kierkegaard testifies to the centrality of the question of faith in his pseudonymous works and to the importance of employing dialectical reflection to illuminate it, which he claims to have done with unparalleled devotion and accuracy In many forms and under several pseudonyms, a whole pseudonymous literature is chiefly concerned with illuminating the question of faith, with discerning the sphere belonging to faith, with determining its distinction from other...
Contemporaneity with Christ
In his journals Kierkegaard states that 'before there can even be any question about having faith, there must be the situation. And this situation must be brought about by an existential step on the part of the individual The requirement is that you must venture out, out into water 70,000 fathoms deep. This is the situation' (JP ii. 1142). As Johannes Climacus sees it, the situation that results in either the happy passion of faith or the unhappy passion of offence is occasioned by an encounter...
The Church Militant Versus The Church Triumphant
Kierkegaard's beef with the established church was so uncompromising that he is often accused of lacking a positive conception of the church, which is not so. To be sure, he did not write much on this topic, the only sustained discussion of it in his published works appearing in Practice in Christianity by his Christian pseudonym Anti-Climacus. But his critique of the established church was prompted by a clear understanding of what constitutes the true church in the realm of temporality. As...
Hoping Against Hope
Just as Christian faith goes against the understanding by believing in possibility in the face of impossibility, Christian hope is a 'hope against hope' that also goes against the understanding by hoping at precisely that point where, humanly speaking, there is no hope and all purely natural hope has been changed into hopelessness or despair (EUD 94-5 FSE 82 SUD 18).21 Christian hope is thus a gift of the Spirit that comes only after one has 'died to' the understanding's merely human view of...
The Equality of Love
A central feature of Kierkegaard's understanding of Christian love is its emphasis on our common humanity and universal equality as human beings. In contrast to paganism, in which, according to Kierkegaard, 'people are inhumanly separated one from another by the dissimilarities of earthly life' and individuals are taught to disclaim kinship with one another, Christianity affirms the eternal equality and kinship of all human beings before God (WL 69 cf. EUD 141-5). It teaches us to shut our eyes...
Anxiety as the Precondition of Hereditary
Of primary interest to Vigilius is the question of how innocence is lost, which brings him at last to the psychological explanation of the Fall promised at the beginning of his deliberation. Reminding the reader that no science can explain sin, which comes into existence suddenly and inexplicably through a qualitative leap, Vigilius aims to stay within the boundary of what psychology can explain, namely the psychological preconditions that lead up to but do not cause or explain sin itself. He...
The Double Danger of Christian Love
If we venture to mediate our love relations in this way, however, conflict with the world is inevitable because Christian love is the opposite of pagan, worldly, merely human conceptions of love (WL 118, 121, 123). As Kierkegaard sees it, the Christian life is exposed to 'double danger', involving struggle on two fronts, first of all inwardly in striving to develop a Christian disposition within oneself, and then outwardly with the world, which rewards the true expression of love to others with...
Christianity is an Existence Communication
Kierkegaard did not consider himself to be a theologian but only 'a singular kind of poet and thinker' who wrote 'without authority' (WA 165). Like Luther, he did not claim to teach anything new but sought 'once again to read through, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers'(165 cf. CUP i. 629-30).1 While basically affirming and reflecting orthodox Lutheran theology in his authorship,...
The Speculative Point Of View
The speculative point of view of Hegelian philosophy and theology also regards Christianity as a historical phenomenon but seeks to determine its truth through reason rather than by historical methods. As Climacus sees it, however, the question of the thinker's own eternal happiness does not even arise in this perspective, inasmuch as the speculative task requires one to move away from oneself in abstract thought, abandoning or losing oneself in objectivity, as in the natural sciences (CUP i....
Christ as Absolute Paradox Redeemer and Prototype
The absolute paradox of Jesus Christ as the God-man, or more accurately the God-human being (Gud-Mennesket),1 constitutes the heart of Kierkegaard's understanding of Christianity, for as he sees it, 'all Christianity is rooted in the paradox' (JP iii. 3083). In reflecting on the person and work of Christ as the absolute paradox, Kierkegaard was not interested in expounding the doctrines of the incarnation and atonement as such but in clarifying their meaning for the single individual who...
The Consequences of Hereditary
Having established that original or hereditary sin enters the world in every individual in the same way as it did in Adam, through the individual's own first sin in a qualitative leap from innocence to guilt as a result ofbecoming anxious about the possibility of freedom, Vigilius may appear to have dismissed the traditional notion of hereditary sin as having a corrupting effect upon later generations through generation. But he explicitly rejects such a conclusion, claiming that 'the view...
The Relation Of Religion And Politics
The political turmoil of the time also provided an occasion for Kierkegaard to articulate in a more theoretical fashion his views on the relation between religion and politics or church and state. Reflecting Luther's distinction between the two realms or kingdoms, Kierkegaard's general position is that their viewpoints are worlds apart, as the religious takes its point of departure from above and seeks to transfigure and lift the temporal or earthly to the level of the heavenly, spiritual, or...
Credo Quia Absurdum
In introducing the notion of the absurdity of the absolute paradox, Climacus alludes to Tertullian, who not only articulated the two-natures doctrine of Christ that was later adopted by the church but also made the following famous statement in defence of that doctrine 'The Son of God was crucified I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd quia ineptum est . And He was buried, and rose again the fact...
That Single Individual
Like many young people struggling to find themselves in the modern world, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-55) at age 22 was uncertain about his purpose in life. Writing in a poetic, possibly quasi-autobiographical fashion for a projected novel while vacationing by the sea, he mused What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I...
Venturing a Relation to
For Kierkegaard, theology or discourse about God is rooted in and arises out of the single individual's God-relationship, which is a possibility for every human being and the only way one really comes to know the divine. The proper context for thinking Christianly about God, therefore, is within a personal relation to God, not by engaging in abstract speculation on the nature of the deity.1 As Kierkegaard sees it, a relation to God is 'a voyage of discovery' in which one comes to know God...
The European Crisis Of 1848
The forced but peaceful transition from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy in Denmark in 1848, together with the violent political revolutions in France and Germany that same year, confirmed in Kierkegaard's mind the validity of his diagnosis of the sickness of the present age and his predictions about the future articulated two years earlier in Two Ages JP iv. 4167 BA 315-16 . Personally, he regarded this event as something to weep over, as to him it represented the victory of...
Faith as a Second Immediacy
The contradiction between Abraham's inner feeling of love for Isaac and the outward act of violence he was willing to perform for God's sake and his own sake as a test of faith leads Johannes to make a second point about 11 See e.g. Stewart 2003 321-3 , who proposes as an analogue to Abraham's situation the political assassination of a Russian noble by a German theology student named Karl Ludwig Sand, who was presumably 'inspired by the higher calling of German nationalism' during the period...
Dialectical Thoughtproject
Writing in the persona of Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard first tackles this issue indirectly by proposing a 'thought-project' concerning the paradoxical question of whether truth can be learnt PF 9-22 . Paraphrasing Plato's Meno, the Socratic dialogue in which this question is raised, Climacus states the paradox thus 'a person cannot possibly seek what he knows, and, just as impossibly, he cannot seek what he does not know, for what he knows he cannot seek, since he...
Balles Catechism
One of the religious texts in which Kierkegaard was instructed as a child was Balle's Primer, a catechism that contained an elementary exposition 11 Ibid. 224, 228-9, 231-5. 12 Ibid. 235-43. 13 Burgess 2006 . 14 Tudvad 2004 168-9 Kirmmse 1996 14 . 15 Kirmmse 1996 3-4, 6-8, 10, 151 . 16 Ibid. 7. 17 Tudvad 2004 168-73 . of the main tenets of the Christian faith.18 It was from this book that Kierkegaard received his first formal theological instruction. Balle's catechism was authorized for use in...
The Knight of Faith versus the Knight of Infinite Resignation
Johannes candidly admits that he is incapable of making the movement of faith whereby, by virtue of the absurd, the finite is regained in its entirety after having been renounced in infinite resignation, but he does claim to be able to describe this movement. Although he has never come across an authentic exemplar of faith in his own time, he can very well imagine what one would be like. As Johannes envisions him, the knight of faith bears 'a striking resemblance' to a bourgeois philistine,...
Speculative Dogmatics
Kierkegaard's theological training culminated in an introduction to speculative dogmatics in the university lectures of his former tutor Hans Lassen Martensen and readings on the subject. Nineteenth-century German and Danish speculative dogmatics developed out of the idealist philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770-1831 , who sought to comprehend everything, including God or Absolute Spirit, as an encompassing whole through speculation from the Latin speculum, meaning 'mirror' or the...
Christ As A Sign Of Contradiction
The possibility of essential offence at Christ is thus occasioned by the fact that he is a 'sign of contradiction' PC 124 . To be a sign means that something is different from what it immediately is to be a sign of contradiction means that it contains a contradiction in its composition, that it is the opposite of what it immediately is or appears to be. In the case of Christ, this means that his lowliness is inversely a sign of his loftiness. Christ's lowliness poses the possibility of offence...
The Paradox of Faith
One of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms who is acutely aware of the fact that he lacks faith is Johannes de silentio John of Silence , the 'author' of Fear and Trembling.4 In this early pseudonymous work, Kierkegaard's literary persona laments the tendency of modern philosophy by which he means Hegelian speculative philosophy most notably that of the Danish Hegelians and Martensen in particular to 'go further' than faith by presumably comprehending it conceptually in a philosophical system FT 3-4 . As...
Subjectivity As Untruth
The first dialectical problem that confronts the subjective thinker in Christianity concerns the condition of the thinker's own subjectivity. Seeking to show how Christianity makes an advance upon the Socratic position that subjectivity is truth, Climacus claims that in Christianity one must begin by positing the opposite thesis, namely that 'subjectivity is untruth' 19 On the inverse dialectic of Religiousness A, see Walsh 2005 8, 83-5, 114-16 . See also Law 1997 Westphal 1996 150-79 Evans...
Subjectivity Is Truth And Truth Is Subjectivity
If Christianity is an existence-communication rather than a doctrine, a truth to be appropriated in existence rather than comprehended by thought, then it must be regarded as being essentially subjective rather than objective in nature. Accordingly, Climacus defines Christianity in the following manner 'Christianity is spirit spirit is inwardness inwardness is subjectivity subjectivity is essentially passion, and at its maximum an infinite, personally interested passion for one's eternal...
Unconscious Despair
Anti-Climacus identifies several forms of despair based on their differing levels of intensity, which are directly proportionate to the increase in a person's consciousness of being in despair and having a self 'the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair' SUD 42 . The lowest level of despair is that of being unconscious of being in despair and having a self that is eternal or spiritual in nature. This form of despair is equivalent to what was earlier identified in...
Demonstrating The Existence Of
If God is a subject to whom one is related in a subjective rather than objective manner, it goes without saying that God's existence cannot be objectively or rationally proved. In fact, as Kierkegaard sees it The idea of proving the existence of God is of all things the most ridiculous. Either he exists, and then one cannot prove it no more than I can prove that a certain human being exists the most I can do is to let something testify to it, but then I presuppose existence or he does not...
Grundtvigs Matchless Discovery
Another anti-rationalist theological movement in Denmark from which Kierkegaard disassociated himself early on was the cultic Christianity of Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig 1783-1872 and his followers, one of whom was Kierkegaard's older brother, Peter Christian. A pastor, theologian, poet, hymnodist, educator, politician, historian, and philologist, 38 Tice 2006 1-16 . 39 Schleiermacher 1996 22, 29-31, 46-7 1956 5-18 . 40 N. Thulstrup 1978 46 see also Crouter 2005 98-119 . 41 Crouter 2005...
Classical Theories Of Atonement
Before turning to these writings, however, let us briefly review the Christian doctrine of atonement concerning God's redeeming and reconciling activity in and through the suffering and death of Christ. Several types of atonement theory have emerged in the Christian tradition to explain how and why Christ's atonement took place and what it accomplished. The earliest type, known as the classic or dramatic theory, was first worked out by the Greek church father Irenaeus, whose interpretation...
Now he is Dead
The third and final phase of Kierkegaard's authorship was precipitated by the death in 1854 of Bishop Mynster, whom Kierkegaard had known and revered since childhood but over the years increasingly had come to criticize in his capacity as Primate Bishop and chief representative of the Danish People's Church. The problem, as Kierkegaard saw it, was that Mynster and the established church he represented promoted a toned-down version of Christianity that actually had compromised, changed, and...
God Is Love
With the theme of God's love we arrive at what for Kierkegaard is the main 'thesis of Christianity', namely that God is love JP ii. 1446 . As he sees it, love is not a predicate or attribute of God such as omnipresence or omnipotence but constitutes 'the only substantive' qualification or very essence of God JP ii. 1319, 1446 .21 What does it mean, then, to say that God's essence is love Perhaps the best explanation is given in a late journal entry in which Kierkegaard states 'The law of loving...
Defiant Despair
In defiant despair there is an even greater consciousness of the self, of what despair is, and of one's own state of despair as being self-initiated. One wants to become oneself, but one wants to become the self one wants to be rather than the self one is intended to be by God. As Anti-Climacus expresses it, 'the self in despair wants to be master of itself or to create itself, to make his self into the self he wants to be, to determine what he will have or not have in his concrete self' SUD 68...
The Infinite Qualitative Difference Between God And Human Beings
One reason Kierkegaard, via the persona of Johannes Climacus, so adamantly opposes the immanence or pantheism of ancient and modern speculation is that it does away with the infinite qualitative difference between God and human beings. As Kierkegaard sees it, the law governing the relation between God and human beings is that 'there is an infinite, radical, qualitative difference' between them JP ii. 1383 translation modified cf. CD 63 . Consequently, when a human being wants to speak about...
Becoming Subjective
If Christianity is inwardness or maintains itself within the individual in the form of subjectivity, the proper way to relate to it, then, is by becoming subjective through the cultivation of subjectivity in oneself. We thus arrive at the subjective issue of how subjectivity must be constituted in the individual in order for the decision of faith, which is 'the highest passion of subjectivity', to take place CUP i. 132 . As Climacus sees it, becoming subjective is equivalent to becoming...
The Herrnhuters
Another major influence in Kierkegaard's early upbringing was his family's involvement with the Herrnhuters, a Moravian pietist group that Michael Kierkegaard joined soon after coming to Copenhagen. Although its roots go back to the Czech reformer John Hus 1374-1415 and his followers, this movement originated in the eighteenth century in the German state of Saxony through the good will of Count Nikolaus Ludvig von Zinzendorf 1700-60 , a Lutheran nobleman who invited a group ofMoravian refugees...
The Christian Doctrine of Hereditary
The Christian doctrine of original or hereditary sin is based on the biblical story of the Fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 and on the testimony of the Apostle Paul in Romans 5 12 'Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned'.8 The term 'original sin' does not occur in the Bible, but in the second century of the Christian era the Greek church father Irenaeus c. 130-200 worked out a theory of original...
If I had had Faith I would have Stayed with Regine
Kierkegaard nevertheless remained in the engagement for thirteen months. On 11 August 1841 he formally broke it by letter and returned the engagement ring Regine had given him.70 Needless to say, this was a very trying time for both parties, and Regine did not let him go without a fight, pleading to him again and again not to leave her and threatening to despair if he did. His action was also a matter of great concern to her family and damaged his reputation in the city, where it soon became...
Abbreviations
References to Kierkegaard's works and papers in English and Danish are cited in parentheses in the text using the following list of abbreviations together with volume and page numbers or, for Kierkegaard's papers, entry numbers. BA The Book on Adler 1995 , ed. and tr. Howard V Hong and Edna H. Hong Princeton Princeton University Press . C The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress. See CD. CA The Concept of Anxiety 1980 , ed. and tr. Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson...
