HAVE YOU MET KIERKEGAARD?
Richard E. Palmer

In a recent article in the Restoration Review, Harry and Bonaro Overstreet ask the question, “Have you met Socrates?”1 By this they meant more than a casual meeting; they had in mind a

profound encounter with a grea t personality, the kind of meeting after which one can never be the same person one was before. It is the kind of meeting in which even the shortest contact may have profound rewards, and repeated contact never wears it out but imperceptibly deepens it and makes it more meaningful. In a fainter way it is like that much more important and revolutionary meeting with the great personality of Jesus. Have you met Jesus Christ? Unless it has transformed your life, perhaps you have not really met Him.

This article asks, “Have you met Kierkegaard?” This meeting is not of the same kind as the meeting the Overstreet’s had in mind. Kierkegaard’s personality was not the kind one instinctively admires and strives to imitate. On the contrary, one tends to draw back from this man who spent his life alone in a garret and whose writings reflect a mind tortured by guilt and dominated by a desire for Christian faith. His life was negative and unhappy, and his writings divide themselves between condemnations of the established church in Denmark and searchings for a return to a Biblical faith that is not a matter of external ritual and the performance of external obligations but an inner, vital, transforming, personal experience.

Yet this man’s brilliant critical mind pierced to the core of the sickness of the Church at his time, and he analyzed and exposed the weaknesses of the faith of many people who considered themselves “Christians.” While everyone stampeded in enthusiasm for scientific and economic progress, Kierkegaard perceived the dead end to which all this enthusiasm for science reason, and economic liberation was to lead. He called in vain upon his age to look at the hollowness and inadequacy of its inner state, its lamentably growing loss of inner truth and vitality.

Kierkegaard died in 1855, so we cannot meet him in person. in this life. But we can meet him in his writings in the same way we meet other great religious personalities of the past, such as Luther, Calvin, John Wesley, and George Fox. Indeed, we may know Kierkegaard perhaps better and more profoundly than if we were actually able to turn back the years and meet him, an introverted hunchback, solitarily trudging the streets of Copenhagen, Denmark, returning to his lonely writing desk in an equally lonely garret.

Kierkegaard is of special interest to readers of the Restoration Review because he, like Luther and Calvin and Wesley, felt the need for a change of the established church. Like them, he desired a return to a Christianity which was a vital, inner experience. Like them, he formed his theological beliefs on a profoundly Biblical basis. Unlike them, his was a personality of a recluse, and he was content to pour his entire efforts into pamphlets seeking to reform the established form of Protestant Christianity in nineteenth century Denmark —indeed, in nineteenth century Europe. Unlike them, he did not found a great Protestant church. For half a century after his death, his writings were virtually forgotten in Denmark and unknown outside this small country; during the last half century his religious writings have exerted an ever-increasing influence over those who are seeking to re-establish Christianity as a vital, personal religion based on Biblical faith. Perhaps Kierkegaard is a person you would like to meet.

To really meet Kierkegaard, you must go directly to his writings and let him speak with his own words directly to you. You will not meet Kierkegaard in this article; you will only be introduced to him by a sympathetic friend. A skillful introduction makes you want to meet the person who is being introduced; the most this article can do is to make you want to meet the great Christian reformer, Soren Kierkegaard.

“BECOMING A CHRISTIAN”

According to Kierkegaard, the aim of all of his writings was “becoming a Christian.” He asserted that one does not immediately become a Christian merely by being baptized, nor through any other ceremony as such, but through inner transformation, through constant consciousness of not being a Christian truly, and through constantly striving to become a Christian. He deeply felt that most people who claimed to be Christians were deceiving themselves and taking a very shallow view of Christianity. He said that any belief that Christianity was commonly practiced, or that any European country was a “Christian” country, was “a prodigious illusion.”² He believed that it was theoretically wrong to have a clergy whose income was from the state. These clergymen too often were bulwarks of conservatism and glorifiers of things as they were; their ministry was one which soothed but did not save.

WEAKNESS OF SCIENCE

In Kierkegaard’s time, the natural sciences were beginning to achieve greater and greater importance. Philosophy was dominated by the idea of becoming a great encompassing system that would give everything a classification and a category in much the same way as natural sciences were attempting to classify all their materials into systems and subsystems. The result was that philosophical thought became more static, abstract, and dead. Kierkegaard was one of the few thinkers of his time who realized the essential limitations of objective science and objective philosophy. An essential aspect of the timeliness of the writings of Kierkegaard is his ability to pierce through the deceptive appearance of power of natural sciences and show man how powerless science is to deal with man’s most basic and essential concerns. Science is incapable of grappling with the problems of the human soul, or of even recognizing its existence. The most important things about man are exactly those things with which science is incapable of dealing.

THE FALLENNESS OF MAN

Kierkegaard passionately opposed the popular idea of the essential goodness of man, the power of man’s reason and the idea that man is progressing. Kierkegaard asserted that man is still a fallen creature, that he still must not deny his original sin. Kierkegaard called upon his readers to recognize that they are finite, limited, and imperfect, that their knowledge is imperfect and there are some things that can never be known by man. There are some decisions that only faith can prompt. Indeed, Kierkegaard goes so far as to say that what seems “absurd” to the intellect may be highest wisdom, the wisdom of subjectivity and faith. Man must remember. that the foolishness of God is wiser than men.

THE IMPORTANCE OF ANGUISH

Kierkegaard believed that anguish was the distinctive state of a true Christian. Just as Jesus preferred the man who cried out in anguish that he was a sinner and who beat his breasts in despair, so also Kierkegaard believed that complacency was a good sign that one was not a true Christian. In an age which complacently regarded reason as man’s greatest blessing, Kierkegaard reasserted that fallenness and fallibility of man. He asserted that when a man realizes that he is hopelessly in sin, then he falls into the state of anguish and despair which are the beginning of hope for true salvation. The thread of Kierkegaard’s own anguish runs through all his writings, as attitudes of dread, fear, trembling, guilt, and despair occur again and again. Indeed, the personal consciousness of sin and the obsession with the need for faith seem to dominate much of his thought. This is an underlying reason for the mastery of his two works dealing with the psychological aspects of sin: The Concept of Dread and The Sickness unto Death. A basic kinship with Dostoevsky can be felt in the fact that like the works of Dostoevsky these works examine the dynamics of tortured souls and repeatedly stress the importance of suffering.

THREE SPHERES OF EXISTENCE

Perhaps Kierkegaard is most widely known for his conception of three basic orientations or approaches to life, which he called the three “spheres” or “stages” of existence: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. Almost the whole corpus of Kierkegaard’s writings may be said to be devoted to the examination and criticism of one, two, or all of these “stages on life’s way.” His famous book, Either/Or is a study in contrasting aesthetic and ethical approaches to life; Stages on Life’s Way resumes this study and adds a specific religious system of values in the “Story of Suffering.” In his later and more comprehensive work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he explores still further human “subjectivity” in the ethical and religious approaches. Even one of the last products of his pen, the theological essay on the difference between a genius and an apostle, makes a contrast between the aesthetic and the religious orientation to life in order to point the moral of a modern confusion in theological thought. Thus, Kierkegaard submits an analysis of what he considers to be the three basic approaches to life. One might say that he describes the three basic types of men: the aesthetic man, the ethical man, and the religious man.

THE AESTHETIC MAN VERSUS THE ETHICAL MAN

The aesthetic man finds significance in the draining of the maximum amount of pleasure from life. Human happiness is, for him, synonymous with en joyment. On the other hand, the ethical man considers human happiness to consist in the performance of an obligatory task, a task so basically related to his personality as to be nothing more nor less than the realization in this performance of one’s duty of one true and given self. One’s self is, then, given in the form of a task, and the possibility of performing it is dependent upon the individual’s own free co-operation for its realization.

The aesthetic personality is static; the ethical personality is dynamic. This is because the aesthetic personality sees pleasure as the highest goal in life, and lives in and by that in his personality which is already completed; he lives, in other words, on the basis of what he is: he is a natural man. The aesthetic man is not, in any basic sense, a becoming being because the nature of physical enjoyment is that it accompanies a functioning whose organ is already adequate to its task. On the other hand, the ethical man lives in and by the effort and strain of an essential becoming of something other than he presently is. This is because ethical categories are ideal; they place an obligation on an individual to become something more than he is. In the final analysis, then, the aesthetic man remains what he is; his pleasure is ultimately self-defeating and unsatisfying, and often brings a hang-over of melancholy in the wake of short-lived happiness.

The contrast between the aesthetic man and the other two types of men might be put in David Riesman’s two famous categories: “other-directedness” and “inner-directedness.”³ The aesthetic man depends on an external or uncertain condition-for example prosperity, good fortune, success —as determining his happiness. Unfortunately, these external conditions are largely accidental and always somewhat beyond his control. Even when he seems to be seeking the meaning of life in something within the personality, as in the unfolding of a talent, he is still depending on a condition which is not given in and through his on will merely, but is in the personality without having been placed there by the personality. Basically the man whose life is dependent on pleasure will always be “other-directed,” controlled by elements basically outside his essential personality.

THE ETHICAL MAN

The ethical and religious men, however, are “inner-directed.” The ethical man gains the direction of his life from a meaning which he himself is able to give to life. His happiness comes from within and does not depend on elements outside himself and largely beyond his control. For the religious man, the external world cannot arbitrarily destroy his happiness, for his kingdom is not dependent on the external world but is within himself.

How does the ethical man, then, differ from the truly religious man? As stated above, the basic concern of the ethical man is to perform an obligatory task, his duty before God. By doing this, he becomes a different self; he realizes his possible self. The ethical man, however, has not other relation to God than that which is universal to all men; his relation to God is never private; it is without secrets, without mysteries, without privacies of any kind. God is still the universal background for his life, but He does not in any special sense break into it.

The ethical man is a man of action, action with victory assured. Ethical faith is the resolute faith in the victory, and ethical enthusiasm is sharply distinguished from all forms of aesthetic enthusiasm. The aesthetic man most naturally expresses himself in art; the ethical man has no other expression than action, action which transforms a potential self into an actual self. The aesthetic man forgets himself, tries to lose himself in a fusion with the object or idea with which he is dealing; the ethical man forgets the whole world in order solely to attend to himself and his own ethical transformation. The aesthetic man is essentially concerned with a world of imagination; the ethical man rejects this world of imagination as immature.

THE RELIGIOUS MAN

The ethical man tends to become a religious man, for he is already performing a duty before God. He finds himself committed to certain ends; but soon he finds that he is absolutely committed to relative ends, and he sees this commitment to an absolute end. He finds that he himself must first be changed, and that his change must come from the eternal and divine, towards which the imperfect, actual personality assumes a passive attitude. He must submit himself passively to the divine in order that the imperfect may be rooted out. This purgation is felt in the human being as suffering, and suffering is therefore a decisive category for the religious life, just as enjoyment is the decisive category for the aesthetic life. Not all suffering is religious, but this special type of suffering is.

In fact, all religious life involves this suffering, so that if suffering is taken away the religious life is also abolished. But why suffering? Suffering arises out of the inability of the individual before his task. (Pleasure, in contrast, arises from the ability of an individual to do his task.) But why is the individual unequal to the task, thus making him require the transforming discipline of suffering? The answer at bottom is guilt. As the religious man comes closer to God, he relates himself to his objectives in a never-suspended consciousness of, and everlasting memory of, guilt. Guilt is not the memory of an individual wrongful act, but a consciousness of man’s essentially fallen nature, his essential imperfection before God, and most important his unbridgeable separation from God.

IMMANENT RELIGION VERSUS TRANSCENDENT RELIGION

For Kierkegaard, the religious man who is truly Christian believes in a leap of faith, a basic transcendence of the old and sinful self through no power of his own, but the free gift of Grace from God. Thus, he distinguishes between immanent religion and transcendent religion. In immanent religion there is a passive relationship to the divine and a sense of suffering and guilt, but the tie that binds the individual to the divine is still, in spite of all tension, essentially intact. This form of religion Kierkegaard considered to be more like paganism than like true Christianity.

In transcendent religion; the sense of guilt becomes a sense of sin, by which all continuity is broken off between the actual self and the ideal self, the temporal self and the eternal self. The personality is fundamentally invalidated, and thus made free from the law of God because it is unable to comply with its demands. In other words, by sin man becomes absolutely different from God, and there is no fundamental contact left with the divine.

Thus, Christianity is basically a religion of transcendence; it is marked by an absolute transcendence, by the introduction of a new passion: faith. It is marked by a new contact with the divine and a new point of departure in the consciousness of the individual: conversion. All of these conceptions —sin, faith, conversion —are, from the standpoint of the old, invalidated personality, (the personality without them), seen as paradoxical and absurd. By “absurd” Kierkegaard means only that they are impenetrable with the faculty of human reason, and so seem contrary to human reason. Thus, to the unteligious man, the doctrine of the forgiveness and absolution of sin, the doctrine of the God-man in Christ, even the idea of sin —all are contrary to reason, are “absurd.”

THE TRULY RELIGIOUS MAN

What kind of man, then, is the religious man? The religious man is a man who sees himself as always “before God,” as transparent to God. The religious man has an acute consciousness of his essential fallenness and imperfection, his sin which has created an absolute gap between himself and God which only a “leap of faith” on his part and a gift of Grace of God’s part can bridge. For the religious man, the state of his subjective, inner self is far more important than any external consideration. The religious man sees himself in the light also of a potential, ideal, as yet unrealized self, and he constantly feels a call to strive to become this self. Life, for him, is a matter of becoming, always becoming what one not yet is. This self that one can become, this potential self, is actually a sort on non-being waiting to be; thus, the religious man’s life is a profoundly creative life, a life that creates being out of non-being.

The religious man, however, must choose actively and is absolutely responsible for his own decision; the religious man is a man of decision. The life of a religious man is one which has contained a Moment, a moment of decision, a moment of a leap of faith, a moment which is an unaccountable break in logical continuity, a sharp turn, a revolution. For the religious man, the reality of life is a mystery, a profound secret that cannot be communicated with any words, for words are in the realm of the objective and logical. Words, then, for the religious man are on an external plane of truth; truth in its profoundest meaning, however, has no words, but is deep inside the individual, is innerness. Truth for the religious man involves a process of “appropriating” what in the external light of objective reason are uncertainties until they become a part of one’s being. The profoundest truths are the truths of faith, are “objective uncertainties” which have become subjective certainties.

The life of the religious man, then, is not cool and objective, but passionate and strenuous and dynamic; the religious man is profoundly a man of action. For the religious man, life is not a matter of a smooth and progressive evolution, but a matter of radical and logically unaccountable breaches of continuity and “leaps” at every important juncture.

The religious man is at all times “before God.” This is a matter of profoundest importance to his point of view about life. The unreligious man does not recognize this relationship to God, but the religious man does. With his recognition of this basic fact of being always “before God,” he comes to a whole series of related “recognitions”: that man is basically fallen, finite, and in “original sin”; that salvation is impossible through knowledge or reason; that the old, finite self must be absolutely transcended and God is necessary to achieve this transcendence; that man can do nothing and that self-realization can come only through God, through a realization of the transparency of the self before God, a leap of faith in Him, and a free granting by Him of the gift of grace; and finally that suffering is central to the religious life, for there can be no religious life without suffering.

These are the three main types of men, or to say it another way, the three basic stages or spheres of existence. A man is not born as aesthetic, religious or ethical; he chooses his sphere, chooses the man he will be. Thus, for Kierkegaard, a man is absolutely responsible for what he becomes in life, for what a man becomes is a matter of inner transformation rather than any outer success or happiness.

KIERKEGAARD SPEAKS TO THE PRESENT DAY

If Kierkegaard were to look around today, he would undoubtedly find the vast majority of the population to be in the lowest stage of existence —the aesthetic stage. He would, as he did then, see everywhere only men concerned with externalities, with things outside themselves. He would find, as he did then, a dismal lack of any true and vital inner development, a tragic lack of ethical or religious enthusiasm. He would assert, as he did then, that the belief in salvation through scientific improvement, economic improvement, or other external improvement is a delusion. All this concern with things on the outside of man, reveals a basic failure and fear of man to grapple with or even recognize the state of his inner self; it is a fear of being a human being, it is a desire to be a machine. His comment on the nineteenth century seems to apply equally to the twentieth:

In the midst of all our exultation over the achievements of the age and the nineteenth century, there sounds a note of poorly conceived contempt for the individual man; in the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human. Everything must attach itself so as to be a part of some movement; men are determined to lose themselves in the totality of things, in world-history, fascinated and deceived by magic witchery; no one wants to be an individual man.⁴

Kierkegaard saw through the hollowness, despair, and ultimate futility of faith in science alone, or in any outer transformation of the state of man. He recognized the value of science as a tool, but called attention to the fact that a tool cannot do man’s thinking for him, nor should it give man his values. In an age when faith was becoming more and more the step-child of reason, he called attention to the basic limitations and inadequacies of human reason to grapple with the important aspects of human existence. He called for a Biblical faith that does not try to water down its miracles, mysteries, and paradoxes to adjust to the secondary and inferior light of human reason. He tried to puncture the self-importance of man and his blind faith in the power of his reason. He showed the essential deadendedness of all living centered around pleasure or any other external consideration as its primary reference. God and His Word must always be the primary reference, and inner purity before God man’s primary concern. He called attention to the fact that one is never “part of a group” before God; one is always an individual before God, transparent in all his sinfulness. He asserted that man is not a vegetable determined by an environment or a pawn of external circumstances, but free to choose his inner state, and furthermore responsible for his choice or failure to choose. Kierkegaard conceived of man as fallen, yet free to choose transcendence; as surrounded by externality and a world of “objectivity,” yet needing desperately to achieve inner purity and humility before God.

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Richard E. Palmer is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at MacMurray College, and he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Existentialism in Modern Poetry (University of Redlands through the Intercollegiate Program of Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences and Humanities of seven southern California private, liberal arts colleges). He is a member of the Society of Friends.

WHAT IS MAN?

All those who have been exceptional, who have lived sparsely scattered through time, have each of them delivered their judgment on “man.” According to the report of one: man is an animal; according to another: he is a hypocrite; according to another: he is a liar, etc.

Perhaps I shall not hit it off least happily when I say: man is a tWaddler -and that with the help of speech.

With the help of speech every man participates in the highest-but to participate in the highest with the help of speech, bur talking nonsense about it, is just as ironical as to participate in a royal banquet, as a spectator from the gallery.

Were I a pagan I would say: an ironical deity gave mankind the gift of speech in order to have the amusement of watching that self-deception.

From a Christian point of view of course it is out of love that God gave man the gift of speech, and thereby made it possible for every one really to grasp the highest —oh, with what sorrow must God look upon the result! —Kierkegaard