Introduction to Part Three
Part 3 of this volume concerns the figure who may very well lie at the heart of Kierkegaard’s life and authorship—Jesus Christ. Of course, at this point, it should come as no surprise that Kierkegaard’s interest in Jesus is neither historiographical nor doctrinal. That is to say, he refuses to engage in modern scholarly debates about “the historical Jesus” and thus effectively presupposes the New Testament account of Jesus’s birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension. Moreover, he does not occupy himself with ecclesial-cum-academic debates about the finer points of christological doctrine, and he thus adheres to the basics of Chalcedonian Christology: Jesus Christ is the Son of God, one divine person in two natures, truly human and truly divine. Hence, as with the topics of “God” and “Creation,” Kierkegaard’s principal focus is on what Jesus means in and for human existence, though he addresses this problem in various ways throughout his authorship.
To be sure, in early pseudonymous works such as Fear and Trembling (1843) and Philosophical Fragments (1844), Kierkegaard explores the nature of “faith in the incarnate Christ,” albeit by way of a subtle and unique fusion of philosophy and literature. But the writings that succeeded Kierkegaard’s public row with The Corsair—a quarrel that began late in 1845 and erupted into a cause célèbre during the first few months of 1846—adopt a different approach. In them, Kierkegaard increasingly views the Christian faith “in terms of being willing to share with [Christ] the experience of rejection and of going with him on the way to the cross.” With this newfound focus, he slowed (but did not stop) his production of pseudonymous writings and, little by little, intensified his polemics against the Danish state church, arguing that its political function had led it to neglect the very foundation of Christianity—that the Christian believer is to live, or at least always strive to live, in conformity with the example [Forbillede] of the humble and suffering Jesus.
Nevertheless, even this later stress on imitatio Christi is far more nuanced than often assumed. It is neither a straightforward equation of Christianity and martyrdom nor the inexorable endpoint of a jaded outsider. In fact, Kierkegaard’s writings about Jesus are not haphazard musings but are rooted in his lifelong interest in Catholic mystical and Pietist literature, as well as in his upbringing among Denmark’s Moravian community. Thus they betray a familiarity with and a sensitivity to the challenges they raise, even as they register a variety of emotions and perspectives on the significance of Jesus—a variety that is reflected in the four pieces included in this section, each of which belong to the period following the Corsair affair.
The first selection might be seen as inaugurating Kierkegaard’s turn to the imitatio motif. Entitled “What the Thought of Following Christ Means and What Joy Lies Therein,” it stands as the opening discourse of The Gospel of Sufferings: Christian Discourses, which itself constitutes the third and final part of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Here the larger title The Gospel of Sufferings is already indicative of Kierkegaard’s task in the piece included here. According to Kierkegaard, the decision to follow Christ is likewise a choice to suffer, for following means precisely to live in the manner that Christ lived—namely, as one who serves others in humble self-denial. And yet, the upshot of this suffering is not misery but joy, inasmuch as the follower has made the blessed choice to walk in the footsteps of the Son of God, both in this world and in the next.
The second piece in this section belongs to another one of Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacan writings—namely, Practice in Christianity (1850). It is, indeed, a kind of sequel to The Sickness unto Death, presupposing its predecessor’s psychological analyses of despair and sin and, in turn, attending to “the healing of the sin-conscious self and the indicative ethics gratefully expressive of the redemptive gift.” Thus Practice in Christianity has an exhortative, encouraging tone—indeed, Kierkegaard had pondered entitling it The Ultimate Cure: Christian Healing/The Atonement—and this tenor is clear from the outset. The book comprises three major sections, each of which is based on a New Testament passage that encapsulates some aspect of Jesus’s life or teaching. The two short pieces reproduced here are taken from the first section, “Come unto Me, All You That Labor and Are Heavy Laden, and I Will Give You Rest.” After a brief “Editor’s Preface,” which is ascribed to Kierkegaard himself, the book opens with a brief “Invocation” followed by a section called “The Invitation.” The purpose of the “Invocation” is to petition and to recall Jesus, not as a triumphant Savior, but as the poor and humble figure who lived on earth—a key theme in Practice in Christianity and in many of Kierkegaard’s later writings. “The Invitation,” meanwhile, is a tripartite meditation on the manifold implications of Jesus’s desire to bestow “rest” (Hvile) on weary humanity.
Part 3’s third selection is taken from For Self-Examination, which Kierkegaard published in September 1851 in the midst of another remarkable period of productivity. Roughly a month earlier, the Dane had issued a pair of short treatises, On My Work as an Author and Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, and he was working on another text alongside For Self-Examination, namely, Judge for Yourself!, which came out posthumously in 1876. Of course, these works also bear an overarching relation to the Anti-Climacan writings, which appeared in 1849 and 1850, respectively. As Howard and Edna Hong explain, “The tone and aim of For Self-Examination link it retrospectively to Practice in Christianity,” inasmuch as it “shares the high ideality of Practice as well as the implied critique inherent in that ideality.” The phrase “high ideality” here broadly refers to Kierkegaard’s insistence that Christian discipleship is a venture, entailing various temptations and trials, including suffering at the hands of the other people. More specifically, however, it indicates the emphasis on imitatio Christi that animates much of Kierkegaard’s later output—an emphasis that permeates the second discourse in For Self-Examination, “Christ Is the Way.”
Of course, “Christ Is the Way” is a somewhat self-explanatory title, though here Kierkegaard gives the imitatio motif an intriguing contemporary application. The discourse is based on Acts 1:1–12, which describes Jesus’s glorious ascension into heaven. Kierkegaard concedes that the glory of the ascension might seem to contradict his own longstanding stress on Christ’s hard and narrow way. Moreover, he acknowledges that a doctrine such as the ascension, which is doggedly supernatural, has engendered skepticism in the modern era. But why? Kierkegaard returns to the problem of imitation. The ascension, as an object of faith, presupposes a life of committed discipleship; it is a promise to and a hope for those who are willing to pass through “the narrow way.” He argues, then, that modern people tend to doubt Christ’s ascension (and other aspects of Christian teaching), not because modernity is intrinsically superior to earlier historical epochs, but because it is an era that cowers before Christ’s demand to follow his way.
The final selection of Part 3 was written during Kierkegaard’s notorious “attack upon Christendom.” Kierkegaard’s polemics against the Danish state church began in December 1854, when he published a critical rejoinder to the claim that Jakob Peter Mynster, the recently deceased bishop of Zealand, should be remembered as a “witness to the truth” (Sandhedsvidne). Kierkegaard rejected this characterization for a number of reasons, but his fundamental objection was that Mynster, both in his life and in his teaching, supported the symbiosis of church and state in Denmark—a symbiosis that Kierkegaard feared had reduced Christianity to an insipid bourgeois humanism on the one hand and the church to a mere branch of the state on the other. Kierkegaard’s diatribes first appeared in the Danish periodical The Fatherland (Fædrelandet), but he soon began publishing his own paper, The Moment (Øieblikket). Several editions of The Moment were issued between May 1855 and September 1855, when he fell ill. Then, after a fairly rapid decline, Kierkegaard died on November 11, 1855.
In a sense, then, The Moment served as the conclusion of Kierkegaard’s authorship, but, intriguingly, he also published a few writings separate from The Moment during the summer of 1855. One of these pieces has already been encountered in this volume, namely, “The Unchangeableness of God.” Another one composes the last chapter of this section. Entitled “What Christ Judges of Official Christianity,” it came out in June 1855, bearing all the hallmarks of Kierkegaard’s “attack upon Christendom”—the biting satire, the black humor, and the relentless disparagement of the Danish state church. What distinguishes this treatise, however, is that it draws even more heavily from the New Testament, applying, often quite literally, Christ’s condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees to the ecclesiastical leaders of his day. Thus Kierkegaard’s “attack upon Christendom” becomes Christ’s as well, effectively completing the christological turn taken by Kierkegaard in the mid-1840s and epitomizing Kierkegaard’s notion that Christian discipleship involves imitating (or, indeed, “re-presenting”) Christ even in the midst of modern society.