Kierkegaard, Ecumenism, Theosis
Why reading must be done with an open mind
There is so much talk about being offended by Christianity because it is so dark and gloomy, offended because it is so rigorous etc., but it would be best of all to explain for once that the real reason that men are offended by Christianity is that it is too high, because its goal is not man's goal, because it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought. [Anti-Climacus], The Sickness Unto Death, p. 83.
A lot of assumptions get made about one of my favorite authors. When he is spoken of at all, Kierkegaard is portrayed as a worryingly depressed figure, devoid of joy, of that which makes life worth living. No less than Theodor Adorno thought that “Kierkegaard even speaks of the happiness of eternity in such gloomy tones that it appears to consist of nothing but the giving away of any real claim to happiness.”1 People very often feel that Kierkegaard sees no goodness in man, nothing whatsoever worthy of retaining. And to some extent I understand that picture—but I believe it is a woefully incomplete one.
One source of this picture is assuredly Kierkegaard’s penchant for giving his books depressing titles. Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Anxiety...they’re all great band names, but they don’t inspire confidence in one that the author is mentally stable. Yet Kierkegaard’s own view of Christianity2 is that “...the real reason that men are offended by Christianity is that it is too high, because its goal is not man’s goal, because it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought.” Where, then, is the cause of discontinuity between this claim and the perception of Kierkegaard as anti-human?
As I have noted previously, part of the issue is simply that Kierkegaard is a complex author with a multifaceted corpus of texts. If you follow Adorno in giving every text equal weight in determining what Kierkegaard “really” thought, you get a picture replete with contradictions. This is not because Kierkegaard painted a picture replete with contradictions, however! Many of the texts are pseudonymical, representing differing viewpoints that SK wanted to vividly illustrate. The following quote, for example, gives an extraordinarily depressing viewpoint on life:
Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy. —Either/Or, Vol. 1.
But of course, this is not written under Kierkegaard’s own name—it is written under the pseudonym of the aesthete, one who values novelty above all else. He surely felt that it was true at some point or other in his life, but ascribing this to him as his true assessment of the world is a grave error.
The issues of pseudonymity are far from the only cause, however. There is a much broader issue when we come to texts with preconceived notions of the themes and forms and emotions that we will find. Fr. Christopher Poore recently wrote an excellent article on the dangers of homogenizing the Christian East and West; when we incorrectly universalize cultures and times and places, they become monolithic lies. What was once a sparkling, many-faceted gem is reduced to a single plane, hard and unyielding. Fr. Poore was addressing the homogenization of Eastern and Western eschatologies; I think we have the same issues when reading Kierkegaard.
It is true, of course, that Kierkegaard was a Lutheran; that his father was an astonishingly strict man; that myriad neuroses passed from father to son; that Kierkegaard struggled with a depression which could fill many lifetimes; that his Pietist upbringing is central to his view of the world. All of these elements are present in his work. But it seems to me that when we let this be the defining view of what Kierkegaard says to us, we miss out on key counterbalancing elements. Consider the following passage:
Just as only entities of the same kind can be added, so everything is qualitatively that by which it is measured, and that which is its qualitative criterion is ethically its goal; the criterion and goal are what define something, what it is, with the exception of the condition in the world of freedom, where by not qualitatively being that which is his goal and his criterion a person must himself have merited this disqualification. Thus the goal and the criterion still remain discriminatingly the same, making it clear just what a person is not—namely, that which is his goal and criterion.
[…]
Qualitatively, a self is what its criterion is. That Christ is the criterion is the expression, attested by God, for the staggering reality that a self has, for only in Christ is it true that God is man’s goal and criterion, or the criterion and goal. (The Sickness Unto Death, p. 79-80, 114, bold my own)
While it is certainly stated in a Lutheran Pietist register, in a book filled with the echoes of Kierkegaard’s strict upbringing and immense internal turmoil, this remains nothing less than a doctrine of theosis. “But theosis is an Eastern doctrine!” I hear you say. No! No, we must not engage in intellectual sophistry that replaces nuance with monolith. Kierkegaard says that the criterion and goal “are what define something, what it is”, and he says that in Christ, God is our criterion and goal. If we take this seriously, I do not see how we could read it as anything other than theosis.
It seems to me that moments like this, when an author subverts our expectations and our prior perceptions of who they are, are the most important moments in a book. If we forget our pretensions for a moment, does the above passage sound all that different from what Berdyaev says below?
In order to be completely like man it is necessary to be like God. It is necessary to have the divine image in order to have the human image. Man as we know him is to but a small extent human; he is even inhuman. It is not man who is human but God. It is God Who requires of man that he should be human; man on his part makes very little demand for it. [...] In this lies the mystery of God-manhood, the greatest mystery of human life. Manhood is God-manhood. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Divine and The Human, p. 110-111
Man on his part makes very little demand to be human—indeed Christianity offends men because the goal of Christianity is far higher than that which man naturally seeks. Berdyaev was influenced by Kierkegaard, of course; that is part of why they are resonant. Yet we give Berdyaev carte blanche to speak of “Eastern” doctrines like theosis, while Kierkegaard could not possibly believe such a thing because of...geography?
If we want ecumenical progress to move forward, then we must not constrain our views of theologians because of their background, their upbringing, their birthplace, etc.; our prior perceptions for a thinker should be held loosely at best and discarded when necessary. There is no use pretending that the “West” and the “East” are unified viewpoints which can in good faith always be spoken of monolithically. Are there particular resonances which are drawn out in some traditions more than others? Of course. But we should not make the mistake of boxing in thinkers because a teacher handed us their work with pre-attached labels like “Pietist” or “Orthodox” or “Evangelical.” Collapsing the nuances of an individual into a denominational identity is a travesty.
This refusal to collapse an author into our preconceived notions of them is ultimately a work of love. We can only be said to truly love a person if we love that person, and not our idea of that person. What makes all loving relationships difficult is a continual revelation that my perception of the other person was incorrect; I have to continually adjust my own personhood as I come to understand the other. The same principle of hermeneutical charity ought to apply in our ecumenical strivings. This is true regardless of whether those strivings are in the form of reading thinkers outside one’s own tradition, or that of loving a friend with whom we have deep disagreement. Indeed, the authors of the past are no less persons, no less my neighbor than those who are before me in the present. Should we not strive to love in all things?
For my discussion of Adorno’s treatment of Works of Love, see this article from the Works of Love series.
His view as expressed through the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, who I understand to be the realization of the ideal christian. Kierkegaard considered publishing Sickness under his own name, but thought better of it because he did not want his readers to get the false impression that he lived up to the stringent upbringing he was expositing therein.