Scope:
Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel offered influential models for thinking about religion and Christianity in modern terms, especially with reference to modern conceptions of reason, experience, ethics, and history. Equally influential, though not immed'iately, was Seren Kierkegaard's Christian challenge to modernity.Kierkegaard attacked modern efforts to make Christianity "reasonable" and was particularly critical of Hegel's systematic world-historical effort to grasp Christian faith conceptually. Instead, Kierkegaard emphasized the existential nature of faith, the idea that faith is only realized in the passionate commitment of the existing, not just the thinking, person. In Fear and Trembling, he presents the figure of Abraham, with particular reference to the biblical story of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac, as a paradigm of faith grounded in a passionate relationship to God that defies clear explanation.
Outline
I. In many ways, the Danish philosopher Seren Kierkegaard challenged the mainstreams of Western religious thought of the 19th century.
A. As a writer and philosopher, he departed radically from the conventions and main ideas of the 19th century.
1. He is one of the great writers of the Western philosophical tradition.
2. But he wrote differently than most philosophers, assigning pseudonyms to many of his great works, writing with wit and irony, and rather than trying to abstract from life, he immersed himself in what would come to be called an "existential perspective."
3. He was geographically and linguistically marginal, living in Copenhagen and writing in Danish, and he was institutionally marginal, not having an academic position.
B. Of great importance for these lectures, Kierkegaard is also the first major figure we've seen who is, in many respects, a critic of modernity, modern philosophy, and modern conceptions of religion.
1. He was a critic of the comfortable bourgeois life of so many of his contemporaries, especially of the way that it domesticated their Christianity, making it a religion of comfort and social status.
2. He was critical of the way philosophers mirrored this comfort and complacency with philosophies that stressed rationality and system over the passion of life.
3. He was critical of the way Enlightenment reason had influenced conceptions of religion and Christianity,
making it "reasonable."
C. For Kierkegaard, Christianity was about passion and faith and about the passion of faith.
1. For Kant, faith is a relatively easy issue: We get to it simply by right thinking.
2. For Kierkegaard, faith is the struggle of a lifetime.
3. It is an encounter with the creative source of life God — but one that always involves suffering and doubt or, to cite the title of the book we will examine here, "fear and trembling."
II. At the center of Kierkegaard'sFear and Trembling is the biblical figure of Abraham and the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of his beloved son, Isaac. This story illustrates for Kierkegaard the "absurdity of faith" and the idea that faith is faith for this life, not for the afterlife.
A For Kierkegaard, Abraham is the paradigm of faith and a life of fear and trembling.
1. Abraham lives a life of obedience to God, even to the point of being willing to sacrifice his long-awaited and beloved son, Isaac, though at the last minute, God stays Abraham's hand and allows him to sacrifice a lamb
instead of Isaac.
2. Throughout the biblical account and throughout Kierkegaard's account, Abraham is silent, unable or unwilling to talk to his wife or his son about what God has commanded.
3. For Kierkegaard, this silence points to the fact that there is no "reason" for Abraham's obedience; it is, in some sense, "absurd."
4. In other words, faith involves the "teleological suspension of the ethical"; From the perspective of ethics and human reason, the sacrifice of Isaac is murder,
but from the perspective of God, it is an act of faith.
B. Kierkegaard offers two perspectives on this act of faith.
1. It is an act of "infinite resignation": The point of faith is that we must learn to view the things of this world, even the most important ones, as unimportant compared with
things eternal, that is, God.
2. This is significant for Kierkegaard, because in faith, one does hand oneself over to God, but Kierkegaard also insists that even as Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac, he has faith, "by virtue of the absurd," that he will get
Isaac back.
3. Abraham's faith, then, is not caught up in the resignation of this life for the eternal but is more complex.
C. Faith, as Kierkegaard says, is a movement of passion rather than a movement that we can calculate by weighing the pros and cons and considering consequences.
D. Unfortunately, Kierkegaard's own life seemed closer to resignation than faith.
Suggested Reading:
Kierkegaard, Evans, and Walsh, Fear and Trembling.
Welch, Pvotestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
Questions to Consider:
1. In what ways does Kierkegaard represent a departure from the majority of modern thinkers we have examined so far?
2. In what respects is faith a "passion" for Kierkegaard?
Lecture Sixteen — Transcript
Kierkegaard's Faith
Over the past three lectures, we've explored the different ways that Christians and Jews in the 19th century struggled with questions of faith and suspicion. We have considered how liberal Christians and Reform Jews embraced many modern ideas regarding reason, morality, and history — and in light of these ideas took Christianity and Judaism in some new directions. We have seen how other Christians and Jews tried to articulate visions of their traditions that, as they saw it, retained crucial elements of those traditions that they thought were threatened by modernity. In this lecture and in the next, I want to introduce a Christian thinker, the Danish philosopher Seren Kierkegaard, who in many interesting ways confuses and challenges the dichotomy that established itself in the 19th century between modernists and traditionalists.
He is, I think, one of the most fascinating and provocative figures we will encounter in these lectures. I want to do two things in this first lecture on Kierkegaard. First, I want to place him in the context of the ideas and movements we've been exploring, particularly in relation to the work of Kant and Hegel. I want to do this by talking about three closely interrelated aspects of Kierkegaard's significance for us: Kierkegaard as a writer, Kierkegaard as a philosopher, and Kierkegaard as a religious thinker. The second thing I want to do in this lecture is to focus on his conception of faith, which is at the heart of his thinking. This conception of faith has exerted a profound influence on 20 -century religious thought, and it is here, I think, that we see Kierkegaard the thinker at his most penetrating — a thinker who posed questions that were radical and disturbing in their time and are no less so today.
I remember encountering Kierkegaard for the first time in a college Religious Studies course that I had taken, quite by chance, as a break from a Pre-Med menu of Chemistry and Calculus. I found his writing captivating from the start — it was puzzling and frustrating, too, but it was really the first time in my life that I'd been captured by the voice and the ideas of a thinker. For me, that was the end of my Pre-Med days. I have distinct memories of walking around campus that fall, wracking my brain to figure out what Kierkegaard meant by what he described as the "absurdity of faith." I will admit I also liked the idea of looking like the tortured thinker I imagined Kierkegaard to be — walking around campus with my furrowed brow and making sure everyone could see that I was thinking deep thoughts and — to use a word appropriate for thinking about Kierkegaard — "existential" thoughts. I'm not sure I really understood back then what "existential" meant — it meant "deep" or something like that — but it is important for understanding Kierkegaard to get at this idea of "existential," and we' ll come back to it in just a moment.
Kierkegaard was born to a well-off family in Copenhagen in 1813. Like most Danes, his family was Lutheran, and his father was deeply pious. He received the equivalent of a Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen, where he studied philosophy and theology, and he wrote a dissertation on the concept of irony in Socrates. He spent the rest of his relatively short life as an independent writer, having inherited enough from his family to live in relative comfort and to even finance the publication of his early works. In my view, and I don't believe that I'm being particularly controversial here, Kierkegaard is one of the two or three most captivating writers in the Western philosophical tradition. Even when he is at his most dense and his writing can be extremely dense and abstract — his wit and his style shine through. I' ll begin with a passage from the preface to his 1843 book, Fear and Trembling, and this book will be the focus of this lecture. This is from its Preface:
The present author is by no means a philosopher. He is in a poetic and refined way a supplementary clerk who neither writes the system nor gives promises of the system, who neither exhausts himself on the system nor binds himself to the system. He writes because to him it is a luxury that is all the more pleasant and apparent the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes. He easily envisions his fate in an age that has crossed out passion in order to serve science, in an age when an author who desires readers must be careful to write in such a way that his book can be conveniently skimmed during the after-dinner nap.
So, this is vintage Kierkegaard. The writing sparkles, it's witty, and it's a bit savage — and, above all, it's ironic. Here we see Kierkegaard downplaying the significance of his own status as a philosopher while he's actually mocking the pretensions of the philosophical ethos of his age. In particular, he is mocking the system — by which he means the philosophy of Hegel, who, as I've said, was the philosopher of the first half of the 19 century. I'll address other aspects of Kierkegaard's view of Hegel in a moment, but the first thing to say, that Kierkegaard's style of writing — witty, ironic, and often radically indirect — is intimately related to his criticisms of philosophical systems and philosophy's pretensions to scientific knowledge.
Kierkegaard wrote to engage the reader existentially, to engage the reader's passions and questions — to encourage people to reflect not simply on reality and ultimate truth, but on their own lives. One of Kant's great achievements, as we have seen, was to provide philosophical grounding for scientific knowledge, answering the question: How do we know?He also gave us philosophical grounding for the question of practical knowledge, answering the question: What shall I do? In answering these questions, Kant also argued that theoretical and practical reason led us ineluctably to rational faith in God. Although Kierkegaard had no interest in directly refuting Kant, or even Hegel's more grandiose vision of rationality, he thought that such efforts missed something very important — namely, the individual human being, the human subject as existing, deciding, feeling, being. It missed, in short, what he called "inwardness" — the texture of the inner life of a human being faced with decisions and possibilities. Let me go back, then, to the Preface of Fear and Trembling and read another passage:
In our age, everyone is unwilling to stop with faith but goes further. It perhaps would be rash to ask where they are going, whereas it is a sign of urbanity and culture for me to assume that everyone has faith, since otherwise it certainly would be odd to speak of going further. It was different in those ancient days. Faith was then a task for a whole lifetime because it assumed that proficiency in believing is not acquired either in days or in weeks. When the tried and tested oldster approached his end, had fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the anxiety and trembling that disciplined the youth that the adult learned to control, but that no man outgrows — except to the extent that he succeeds in going further as early as possible.
So, "Everyone is unwilling to stop with faith" — as Kierkegaard puts it. As we will see in a moment when we begin to look more carefully at Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, in contrast to the "everyone" in this passage, he believed that it was crucial to stop and think very carefully about faith and — as he also says in this passage — that one must not only think carefully about faith, but, more important, live one's life in a way that one is always struggling with faith. It is, as he says here, the task of a lifetime. From this perspective, then, he is mocking what he calls in this passage "our age."
To this point in these lectures, with the exception of a few religious traditionalists, all the thinkers we've been examining have been champions of "our age" — that is, of modernity. Kierkegaard is the first thinker we' ve looked at, with the possible exception here of Hirsch, who is directly engaged with the pressing philosophical and religious questions of the day and critical of the promises made on behalf of rationality, universalism, progress — and especially critical of the way these modern ideals obscure the real difficulties and challenges of life. Kierkegaard's criticism here takes two forms in his writing. It takes philosophical form in his criticisms, particularly of Hegel. For Kierkegaard, Kant is wrong for thinking that we can get to faith through right thinking, and he thought that Hegel's claim to have comprehended the whole of reality and history misses the important thing — the individual. But Kierkegaard was not just a philosophical critic, but also a cultural critic. He was a harsh critic of bourgeoisie Christianity that was more a norm and expectation, a marker of respectability, than a challenge — or, to use the word that Kierkegaard emphasizes in his discussion of faith, a "passion." So he' ll say that: "What our generation lacks is not reflection but passion."
We can think about it this way. Where so many religious thinkers of his time were confidently proclaiming that Christianity was being fully realized in modern Western civilization, Kierkegaard was convinced that modernity had produced a new Christendom — not the Catholic Christendom of the Middle Ages, but a bourgeoisie modern Christendom that paradoxically, in its very pervasiveness, actually made it more difficult to be a genuine Christian — that is, to live faith as a passion. So, Kierkegaard is a very interesting marginal figure in 19 -century Europe. In his philosophical sophistication and in his existentialist passion, he's not a defender of traditional religion, of Church authority or biblicism, but he's also not a modernist in certain crucial respects. We can think about his marginal status from a number of angles and see that there is some truth to what he writes in the passage above about himself not as a philosopher but as a "supplementary clerk." He was geographically and linguistically marginal, spending almost all his life in Copenhagen and writing in Danish, rather than in those venerable philosophical languages of, English, French — and, especially, German. He was institutionally marginal because he was an independent writer and not a university professor in an age where philosophy had become more and more professionalized. He was marginal given the central role that his fine literary sensibility played in his philosophical writing. At a time when systematic argument and above all "seriousness" was paramount for philosophers, Kierkegaard communicated as much through his humor, and his style, through metaphor and literary strategy, as through his arguments. What he tried to communicate above all, as I've said, was the passion of faith.
We ordinarily think about passion as an intense desire for, or commitment to, something. But with Kierkegaard, and in the Christian context more generally, we always have to keep in mind that passion also means suffering or ordeal. So, we call Christ's trial and crucifixion the "passion of Christ." Faith, for Kierkegaard, is a passion in this sense, an encounter with the creative source of life God — that certainly involves desire and commitment, but also demands the trial of suffering and doubt. Or, to point to the title of the book we are focusing on in this lecture, faith is always a matter of "fear and trembling." Kierkegaard borrows this phrase from the Bible, specifically from Paul's Letter to the Philippians, which reads at Philippians 2:12: "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." We see here that faith, for Kierkegaard, is not a matter of easy "spirituality" — not a matter of comfort or consolation, not simply a starting point that settles and secures one's life.
Rather, the life of faith is a life of spiritual discipline — it is a life of what Kierkegaard calls the "single individual," who, standing alone before God, must face the uncertainty and openness to life that comes with surrender to God. From his perspective, wanting always to go further than faith is first and foremost a strategy of avoidance and refusal — refusal to confront the reality of God and the reality of one's own heart. So, what is it to face God and one's own heart? We can begin to get a sense of this by introducing Kierkegaard 's model of faith, the main figure of Fear and Trembling: Abraham. Those of you familiar with the Bible will know that Abraham is one of the major characters in the book of Genesis — along with Adam and Eve and venerable patriarchs, such as Noah. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard tells the story of Abraham from different perspectives meditates and reflects on this story in an effort to think through what he calls the "absurdity of faith."
Here's my summary of the story. As a young man, Abram, not yet Abraham, is called by God to leave his home in Mesopotamia to travel to a new, unknown land — where, God tells Abraham, "I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you." Without fuss or question, Abram goes, with his wife Sarah, to this new land — which later will be called Canaan, and then Israel. But although Abram does everything God asks of him — including submitting to the rite of circumcision, at which point Abram becomes Abraham — he and Sarah are still not blessed with the child and, thus, the nation that God had promised. But then, after much trial and adventure miracle of miracles — Sarah, at age 90, gives birth to Isaac, and it appears that Abraham, who had continued to trust in God, has had his faith rewarded. But, when Isaac is still a child, God one day speaks to Abraham and says to him: "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you."
Abraham obeys God, travels dutifully and without protest — in fact, with barely a word — to Mount Moriah with Isaac, ascends the mountain, prepares the sacrificial altar, binds Isaac to it, and raises the knife, and it is only then that God intervenes — staying Abraham's hand and offering him a ram to substitute for Isaac. This is Abraham's ordeal or trial. For Kierkegaard, this is a story that raises a host of difficult questions. He puts it this way:
So everything was lost, even more appallingly than if it had never happened! So the Lord was only mocking Abraham! He had wondrously made the preposterous come true; [that is Isaac was born when Sarah was 90 and Abraham was even older] now he wanted to see it annihilated.... All was lost! Seventy years of trusting expectancy, the brief joy over the fulfillment of faith. Who is this who seizes the staff from an old man, who is this who demands that he himself shall break it! Who is this who makes a man's grey hairs disconsolate, who is this who demands that he himself shall do it? Is there no sympathy for this venerable old man, none for the innocent child? And yet Abraham was God's chosen one, and it was the Lord who imposed the ordeal.
What I want to do in the time remaining in this lecture is to consider a line of thinking that emerges from these questions and that I think will illuminate a central aspect of Kierkegaard's vision of faith: Faith, for Kierkegaard, is faith for this life — not for the life hereafter.
I' ll begin by noting a crucial aspect of Abraham's trial: It wraps Abraham in silence. Throughout the biblical account, throughout Kierkegaard's account of the story, Abraham is silent — unable or unwilling to talk to his wife or his son about what God has commanded him to do. But, of course, what's he going to say? It would make no sense. Why would God command this? Perhaps even more troubling, how could Abraham assent to God's command? As Kierkegaard discusses in probably the most famous section of the book — such a conception of faith requires what Kierkegaard calls "the teleological suspension of the ethical." Basically, this means that from the perspective of ethics and human reason, killing Isaac is murder, but from the perspective of God, it is a sacrifice — an act of faith.
Here we see Kierkegaard opposed to the close link that Kant forges between ethics and religion, where the ethical and the religious are perfectly integrated. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, the religious perspective suspends the ethical perspective, can require us to transgress it. This is one way to think about Kierkegaard's conception of faith and the way it's also opposed to Hegel's emphasis on the social nature of ethics and religion, because Kierkegaard places the believer in direct relation to God as a single individual, and in that sense can be opposed to the social. Abraham here is commanded by God to do something that not only would not be allowed under Kant's categorical imperative, but also cannot be explained even to those closest to him — Sarah and Isaac. It isolates Abraham.
We can contrast here perhaps with, as Kierkegaard does, with stories from Greek mythology and tragedy. We can compare, that is, Abraham's situation with that of Agamemnon — who must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, before the gods will allow his fleet to sail to Troy. Agamemnon is put in a tragic situation. He must make a terrible sacrifice, sacrifice his daughter for the good of the fleet, and so the good of his people, but in his mind — and, just as important, in the mind of his people — he is doing it for the greater good. It makes sense to them, and so even as it wounds Agamemnon deeply — and, of course, it wounds his daughter even more — Agamemnon knows, in an ethical sense, that he did the right thing. But Abraham remains silent. We do not even know what he is saying to himself — only that when God calls, he answers: "Here I am." To us, to Sarah and Isaac, and we must presume, possibly even to Abraham himself, it seems absurd. But perhaps there's a way to make more sense of all of this, to explain Abraham's actions in a relatively familiar way. Perhaps we should look at things from the perspective of what Kierkegaard calls "infinite resignation." Perhaps the point of faith is that we must learn to view the things of this world, even the most important ones, as unimportant as compared with things eternal — that is, with God. So, we must learn to release, to give up, the things of this world for the sake of God — symbolized here by the sacrifice of one's son and one's future hopes.
One of the most affecting sequences in Fear and Trembling is Kierkegaard's portrait of what he calls the "Knight of Infinite Resignation," a portrait of a certain kind of faith, a certain commitment to God, that gives up this world for another. But it' s clear that Kierkegaard introduces the Knight of Infinite Resignation in Fear and Trembling not to explain Abraham, but as a way of contrasting this familiar view of faith with Kierkegaard's insistence that faith — genuine faith — holds on to the things of this world. There is, he says, something important about infinite resignation. In faith, one does hand oneself over to God: Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac if God commands it. But the key to faith, for Kierkegaard, is that even as one is fully willing to do God's bidding, one also simultaneously — keeps the faith that God will grant you your life here and now. For Abraham, this is the faith that he will get Isaac back:
Yet Abraham had faith, had faith for this life. In fact, if his faith had been only for a life to come, he certainly would have more readily discarded everything in order to rush out of a world to which he did not belong.... But Abraham had faith specifically for this life — faith that he would grow old in this country, be honored among the people, blessed by posterity, and unforgettable in Isaac, the most precious thing in his life.
There are two points to emphasize here. First, Kierkegaard stresses Abraham's youthfulness throughout: Even though Abraham is 100 years old, he lives as if he were a young man, with hope for the future. Second, Isaac, as Kierkegaard says, is the most precious thing in Abraham's life. So, later, Kierkegaard will say that Abraham "had faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and yet he was willing to sacrifice him if it was demanded. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for human calculation was out of the question." So, even as he is willing to sacrifice his most precious Isaac to God, Abraham has faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and he holds to this faith by what Kierkegaard calls "by virtue of the absurd." What does that mean? This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of Kierkegaard's thought — in part because we must resist the temptation to try to make sense of this movement that, after all, for Kierkegaard is on some crucial level inexplicable; this is, after all, what it means to say that something is "absurd."
But let me try to say just a little more about this absurdity in this lecture, and I' ll come back to it from a different angle in the next lecture. We should start by going back to passion. Faith, as Kierkegaard says, is a movement of passion rather than a movement that we can calculate by weighing the pros and cons and considering the consequences. It is, as Kierkegaard puts it in one of the most well-known images from his writing, "a leap of faith." It involves taking a risk, of acting without certainty, of trusting that one can hold on to both the eternal — God — and the temporal — Isaac. But to call it a leap of faith is not to call it blind faith, but rather to talk about it in terms of the kind of risk one takes any time one trusts — or, more specifically, loves — someone else.
By contrast, consider the calculation of infinite resignation, of giving up the temporal for the eternal. This isn't to say that it is easy, or that it does not involve a certain passion, but it does, if accomplished, says Kierkegaard, bring one "peace and rest." You give up everything for the sake of the future, and then that gives you a certain kind of security. One can stop yearning for the things of this life, or at least be finished with the hopes that one's yearning will be realized. Faith, for Kierkegaard though, is not a resting point, but a constant, difficult examination of the relation of one's loves and one's passions. Another way to put this is that what is being tested here in the trial of Abraham is not just his love for God, but also his love for Isaac. Abraham does not resign himself to a life without Isaac—the most precious thing in his life. He does not say to himself: "Gee, God asks me to sacrifice Isaac, so I must learn to be happy with that." Yes, he's willing to perform the act — and even once Isaac is gone, to live in continuing faith in God, but, still, his passionate faith holds tightly to his love for Isaac.
Is this absurd? How can he do both? It is this "how" that we need to avoid trying to explain too much — for again, Kierkegaard says explicitly, Abraham does this "by virtue of the absurd." Yes, this is not much of an answer — other than to say that the point for Kierkegaard is not to explain Abraham's love and passion, but to show us a human heart risking all in standing before God as a single individual. It's crucial that Abraham does not try to justify his actions to Sarah or Isaac. The point of the ordeal is not to rationalize his behavior to others, but to open his heart to God — trusting that God's love will always bring us back into this life.
To sum up then, we have seen how Kierkegaard stands apart from both the philosophical and the religious mainstreams of his day both in the way he writes and in the way he refuses to subsume the life of the individual under that rationality of Kant — or under the social and historical, like Hegel. We see this most clearly in Kierkegaard's treatment of Abraham and faith, where he tries to capture the workings of passion and love by which Abraham relates to God and to his life here on earth. In the next lecture, then, I want to elaborate on what we have discussed here by brining to bear Kierkegaard's conceptions of sin and salvation. At this point, I want to end with an illustration that helps to bridge these two lectures. It' s a rather sad one that came out of Kierkegaard's own life. As most readers of Kierkegaard know, his life and writing were deeply marked by his love for a woman named Regine Olsen. After a year long engagement, Kierkegaard broke it off and apparently broke his own heart in doing so. At one point, he wrote the following:
If I had not been a penitent [that is, one who is conscious of one's own sin], if I had not had my [melancholy] — marriage to her would have made me happier than I had ever dreamed of becoming. But being the person I unfortunately am, I must say that I could become happier in my unhappiness without her than with her.
So, on the one hand, this is a testimony to self-doubt and broken dreams, and in this sense is very wrenching and sad. But, from another perspective, it seems to me to fly in the face of everything Kierkegaard wrote about faith as hope and affirmation of this life: One doubts one's self — one is a penitent, a sinner — but one nonetheless trusts in the chance for the loves of this life, believes that in spite of penitence and unhappiness, that God loves you and is concerned for your worldly happiness. What makes this doubly sad — and one reason why Kierkegaard is often referred to as "the melancholy Dane" — is that he knew this. So, elsewhere, he wrote: "If I had had faith, I would have stayed with Regine."
