General Introduction

Prologue

The great Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) once remarked to a friend, “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” Just what Wittgenstein meant by this statement is unclear. After all, there is not a direct correlation between intellectual accomplishment and holiness. We do not say a thinker is excellent on account of holiness, nor do we understand holiness as a guarantee of intellectual excellence. When the two do seem to coincide—as in the case of a Thomas Aquinas or an Edith Stein—we may very well appreciate the concurrence. And yet, Thomas’s Summa Theologica remains widely read today not due to the saint’s religious virtue but, rather, to his philosophical and theological insight.

How, then, should Wittgenstein’s claim about Kierkegaard be taken? Perhaps the juxtaposition of “thinker” and “saint” is instructive enough, for, as this volume will demonstrate, Kierkegaard was a thinker deeply concerned with the problem of being a saint—that is to say, with the problem of holiness.

What is holiness? Is holiness possible for human beings? If so, what are its characteristics? What implications does it have for one’s social life? Both in his published and unpublished writings, these are questions to which Kierkegaard directly and indirectly returned. Moreover, he dedicated a significant portion of his authorship to fostering holiness, though, as will be seen, he preferred the term upbuilding. Thus it appears that Wittgenstein actually gets to the heart of the matter: Kierkegaard’s holiness, however it be construed, cannot be separated from his willingness to think about and think through holiness.

The purpose of this volume is to acquaint readers with this fundamental aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought. Included here are some of Kierkegaard’s most important spiritual writings, ranging from his early “upbuilding discourses,” which gently encourage the reader to consider a life lived in and for God, to his late broadsides against the Danish state church, which shock in their condemnation of bourgeois Christianity. In between are a variety of pieces that see Kierkegaard develop his spiritual insights and methods. His discourses on the lilies of the field and the birds of the air are lyrical parables that treat the natural world as an image of the human being’s spiritual condition. His analysis of the human self in The Sickness unto Death uses philosophical language in order to make a spiritual point—namely, that happiness stems from the self’s willingness to find “rest” in God. In every case, Kierkegaard establishes himself as one of the key figures in modern Christian spirituality.

A Short Biography of Kierkegaard

For all its complexity, Kierkegaard’s life loosely resembles the structure of a three-act play: (1) an early period in which his habits and interests were formed; (2) a middle stage during which his literary career began to thrive, even as he was slowly pressed into conflict with certain elements of Danish society; and (3) a dramatic final phase culminating in his so-called attack upon Christendom and his untimely death at forty-two years of age.

Kierkegaard’s Upbringing

Though born into a well-heeled family in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard should not be confused with a typical member of the haute bourgeoisie. In fact, one could argue that Kierkegaard’s authorship is an outgrowth of his inability to fit into polite Danish society. The primary source of this tension was Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756–1838), a man whose combination of brooding melancholy and religious piety has become legendary in Kierkegaard studies.

The son of a peasant whose surname was adopted from the small churchyard (kirkegaard) he managed, M. P. Kierkegaard grew up in the West Jutland parish of Sædding, an area of limited economic opportunity, known for its bucolic way of life and traditional values. Even as the Enlightenment compelled the Danish state church to exchange older catechetical and liturgical materials for works more compatible with modern rationalism, Jutlanders remained committed to the Christianity of previous generations. A nearby village served as a base for Pietist evangelization and, with it, the proclamation of what the great Pietist forefather Johann Arndt (1555–1621) called “true Christianity.” For Arndt and his followers, the Christian life was not a matter of social propriety but of repentance for sin, faith in salvation, and constant growth in holiness.

Driven by economic necessity, M. P. Kierkegaard would leave his home as a youth, but he sustained an “unbroken connection with the religious awakening movement of the faraway West Jutland village of [his] childhood.” This was evident in the way he ordered his family’s religious affairs. Despite his rise as a successful businessman in Copenhagen, M. P. Kierkegaard almost exclusively associated with Pietist-minded clergy and organizations. The Kierkegaard family became involved in Copenhagen’s Moravian Brødresocietet (Society of Brothers) and regularly attended its services, which combined homiletic stress on what was referred to as “upbuilding” (opbyggelse) with liturgical attention to the crucified Christ—themes that, notably, would come to dominate Søren Kierkegaard’s own writings. Likewise, the Brødresocietet nurtured the long-standing Moravian practice of spiritual reading. Books such as Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ and Arndt’s True Christianity, both drawing from the complex legacy of Catholic mystics such as Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1327) and Johannes Tauler (1300–1360), were staples in Moravian households. Kierkegaard himself kept volumes by Tauler, Thomas à Kempis, and Arndt, and he read and admired spiritual writers as diverse as Henry Suso, Angelus Silesius, Jakob Böhme, and Gerhard Tersteegen.

This lifelong interest in Pietist literature adds another layer of complexity to Kierkegaard’s relationship with his father, whose religious piety was equaled only by a “melancholy mingled with a strong dose of guilt.” The precise origin of this guilt is difficult to pin down, but, whatever the case, “it appears that Søren believed quite literally that his father’s sins had been transmitted to him as well.” Precisely how or why Kierkegaard arrived at this conclusion has puzzled scholars for decades. Certainly the fact that five of Søren’s siblings died before his father was received as evidence that a “guilt must remain on the entire family.” Yet, in the end, the lone certainty is that the Kierkegaard family sought to wrench theological meaning from personal sorrow.

Something similar could be said of the other major event in Kierkegaard’s background, namely, his broken engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841. On the surface, their match seemed almost ideal. Both families were affluent. Both were pious: Regine’s family, too, attended the Brødresocietet’s meetings when she was a child. And yet, Regine and Søren did not respond to their backgrounds in the same way. Kierkegaard could not shake an ambivalence about wealth, even as he relied on it to support his literary career. Moreover, he struggled to reconcile Christian asceticism with conjugal life. Regine, on the other hand, had a jaunty, “cheerful personality.” She did not see a conflict between earthly happiness and religious devotion. It is hardly surprising, then, that she fought to preserve the engagement.

But it was not to be, for reasons that “may not have been completely clear even to [Kierkegaard] himself.” What is evident is that Kierkegaard “came to believe that he had some personal impediment or flaw that made it impossible for him to marry.” This obstacle may have involved his father’s murky past or an altruistic desire to shield Regine from his own “melancholy and sadness.” It almost certainly had to do with Kierkegaard’s sense of religious vocation, which, in his mind, placed him outside of “normal” cultural expectations. Ironically, Regine’s resistance on the latter point persuaded him to play the rake. He even told her that the breakup was simply an occasion to have a fling—hardly a mature decision, but one he hoped would demonstrate that the relationship was untenable. Ultimately, Regine relented.

The end of the affair was indelibly painful. Regine would go on to marry Frederik Schlegel, a finance minister who, in 1855, assumed the governorship of the Danish West Indies. Schlegel was a “stable, harmonious” person, and, by all accounts, his marriage to Regine was a contented one. Still, Regine remained captivated by her first love, just as Kierkegaard never stopped loving Regine. References to her populate his authorship, and there is “evidence that Kierkegaard’s writings…are partly intended as ways of communicating with Regine.” Indeed, Kierkegaard’s break with Regine catapulted him into a new phase in life. He was a writer now, and it would not be long until he made his mark in Danish letters.

Kierkegaard’s Literary Career

Kierkegaard’s literary output in the years following the breakup rivals that of anyone in Western intellectual history, though, in a sense, it started accidentally. Still distraught, Kierkegaard journeyed to Berlin in October 1841, citing a desire to hear the lectures of one of the day’s leading philosophers, Friedrich Schelling. Kierkegaard was hardly the only burgeoning thinker to attend, but Schelling failed to retain the Dane’s attention: “Schelling talks the most insufferable nonsense,” as he bluntly put it. So Kierkegaard elected to immerse himself in his own writing. By the time he returned to Copenhagen in 1842, he had “serviceable drafts” of his own literary-cum-philosophical opus, Either/Or. The finished product, which numbers well over seven hundred pages, would be published in 1843.

Thus began a remarkable stretch of creative activity. From 1843 to 1846, Kierkegaard issued an assortment of works. On the one hand were his pseudonymous writings, whose prolix, lyrical élan belied philosophical and theological ruminations on all manner of topics—the origin of melancholy, the beauty of monogamous love, the challenge of faith, the anxiety of freedom, and the relation between faith and reason. A number of these works, including Fear and Trembling (1843) and Philosophical Fragments (1844), have since been reckoned among the most significant in Western thought. On the other hand were Kierkegaard’s many upbuilding discourses, which bore his own name and were published more or less concurrently with his pseudonymous works. These discourses will be discussed in greater detail later. For now, suffice it to say that Kierkegaard considered them “directly religious” and thus a decisive counterbalance to the searching, even skeptical tone of their pseudonymous relatives. That, indeed, was why he deemed them “upbuilding” (opbyggelige), a term he encountered among Copenhagen’s Moravians. They are intended to fill the reader who, “like [an] empty jar,” is receptive to spiritual wisdom.

Yet, despite his productivity, the life of an author did not sit easily with Kierkegaard. He periodically floated other pursuits—teaching, traveling, and, perhaps most seriously, pastoring. This vocational tension came to a head in 1846. In February of that year, he published Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, which would prove to be another pseudonymous masterwork. Unlike its predecessors, however, the Postscript ends with a brief appendix, “A First and Last Explanation.” In it, Kierkegaard discloses that he stands behind the series of pseudonymous writings that began with Either/Or. This admission afforded Kierkegaard the opportunity to stipulate “what to make of his ‘authorship,’” particularly by underscoring that the author himself is not to be identified with the pseudonyms, who are more like characters in a play than facsimiles of his own personality. It also reflected his desire to take leave of his literary pursuits and to become a parish priest. As he writes in a February 1846 journal entry, “My idea is now to qualify myself for the priesthood[.] For several months I have prayed to God to help me along, for it has long been clear to me that I ought not continue as an author, which is something I want to be entirely or not at all.”

Kierkegaard’s interest in becoming a pastor was not new. He entered the Royal Pastoral Seminary in 1840 and delivered his final qualifying sermon for the priesthood in February 1844. He had delayed ordination on account of his authorial career—a career that suddenly seemed less appealing. “If only I could make myself become a priest.…Out [in a rural parish], in quiet activity, granting myself a bit of literary productivity in my free moments, I would breathe more easily.” To understand this change, not to mention Kierkegaard’s post-1846 writings, attention has to be paid to what scholars call “the Corsair affair.”

The Corsair (Corsaren) was a satirical periodical well known for its scandalous attacks on the leaders of Danish culture. In December 1845, one of its anonymous contributors, a literary critic and poet named Peder Ludvig Møller, published an acerbic critique of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous text Stages on Life’s Way, even questioning the mental stability and moral probity of its “author.” Many in Copenhagen’s intellectual circles understood that Møller was attacking Kierkegaard. Of course, Kierkegaard did too. Soon he responded with a polemical article of his own, poking fun at Møller’s literary and personal foibles and tempting The Corsair to ridicule him in its pages. The magazine took the bait. In January 1846, it launched a sustained literary assault on Kierkegaard, repeatedly lampooning his external appearance and depicting him as naive, self-centered, and even insane.

These incidents carried profound consequences. In fomenting the scandal, Kierkegaard called attention to The Corsair’s malevolence and, incidentally or not, wrecked Møller’s chances of becoming a professor at the University of Copenhagen. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Now an object of open ridicule, “it became literally impossible for [Kierkegaard] to walk around Copenhagen without crowds of curious and sometimes jeering onlookers.” In this way, his life came to resemble an archetype all too familiar today—that of the disgraced celebrity, hounded by the press and mocked in society. He did not expect this outcome. He was publicly isolated and, despite his literary achievements, made into a laughingstock.

The Corsair affair forced Kierkegaard to reconsider his vocational intentions. His plans to enter the ministry were put on hold, and, in March 1846, he published A Literary Review—a brief but significant work that signaled a change in his activity and in his outlook. Ostensibly a work of literary criticism, occasioned by Thomasine Gyllembourg’s 1845 novel Two Ages [To Tidsaldre], A Literary Review provided Kierkegaard with an opportunity to assess Western society at the midpoint of the nineteenth century. What he found was grim indeed. Kierkegaard argues that, despite its intellectual and technological progress, “the present age” was morally and religiously bankrupt. Enervated by the press, which facilitates envy, gossip, and skepticism, social life has turned away from the noble if sometimes violent aims of the past and been set on a course of decay. Cocktail parties and dilettantes have usurped the place of sacred ceremonies and heroes. This deterioration cannot be easily reformed, since, unlike previous eras, the press now stands between individuals and meaningful action, showcasing the flaws of would-be leaders and undermining the bonds that once held society together. In conclusion, Kierkegaard suggests that religious life may offer an egress from the present age’s iniquity, but only if it is patterned on the example of Christ—rigorous in self-dispossession, unafraid of persecution, patient in adversity, and obedient to God in all things.

Emerging from this newfound point of view was, in many respects, a new body of literature, sometimes referred to as Kierkegaard’s “second authorship.” These post-1846 writings display a marked emphasis on Christian discipleship, paying an increased amount of attention to the theme of imitatio Christi. This tendency begins with Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847) and turns up in several signed works, including Works of Love (1847), Christian Discourses (1848), The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air (1849), and For Self-Examination (1851). Kierkegaard also continued to develop a pseudonymous authorship, albeit with some differences. For example, two of his most celebrated later works, The Sickness unto Death (1849) and Practice in Christianity (1850), are attributed to Anti-Climacus—a name that harks back to Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Yet, whereas Johannes Climacus epitomizes an ironic, quizzical approach to Christianity, Anti-Climacus stands as a Christian of penetrating insight. The prefix Anti- (“opposite” or “before”) already discloses this point, as it signals both a contrast to and a precedence over his predecessor. For that reason, some commentators have noted a “change from the old lower-level pseudonyms to the new higher-level religious ones.”

In any case, after the publication of For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard’s activity as an author ground to a halt, at least publicly. For over three years, he confined himself to private matters, committing “to his journals many reflections about himself, his ‘task’ and project, and his past, and about his relationship to Regine.” He increasingly registered disdain for modern society in general and for the Danish state church in particular. As he saw it, an authorship that had unfolded as an endeavor to awaken and to upbuild Danish Christianity had proven unsuccessful. He would have to ponder what went wrong and what else, if anything, could be done. He also hoped that members of the clergy, headed by Jacob Peter Mynster, bishop of Zealand, would come forward and admit that institutional Christianity had failed to uphold traditional Christian ideals, particularly those involving the imitation of Christ. Only such an admission, he concluded, would truly recover the church in Denmark. And so he waited and waited. These were the “‘silent years’ before the storm.”

The Final Act: Kierkegaard’s “Attack upon Christendom”

To get a sense of how controversial Kierkegaard’s last years were, one might well start with his funeral. It was held on November 18, 1855—a week after his passing. The service concluded at Assistens Cemetery, the burial place of many of Copenhagen’s notables. The cemetery “soon became a sea of people; groups large and small surged over the graves and their little gated plots of flowers.” After ceremonial rites, a “tall, pale man clad in black, stepped forward from the crowd” and doffed his hat. The man’s name was Henrik Sigvard Lund—a son of Kierkegaard’s deceased sister, Nicoline Christine. Observing his uncle commemorated by the very institution he had died condemning, Lund could not help but register both irony and horror. He read from Kierkegaard’s short essay “We Are All Christians” and then addressed the gathering:

Isn’t [Kierkegaard] correct? Is not what we are all witnessing today—namely, that this poor man, despite all his energetic protests in thought, word, and deed, in life and death, is being buried by “the Official Church” as a beloved member—isn’t this in accordance with his words? It would never have happened in a Jewish society, not even among the Turks and Mohammedans: that a member of their society, who had left it so decisively, would, after his death and without any prior recantation of his views, nevertheless be viewed as a member of that society. That was something reserved for “official Christianity” to commit. Can this be “God’s true Church,” then?

Applause briefly rang out, but Lund’s words did not so much produce fury as silence. A few people began to leave. Others waited expectantly, wondering “what would happen next.”

This scene was, in a sense, a fitting summary of Kierkegaard’s authorship. His doctoral dissertation on irony focused, among other things, on Socrates’s “divine mission” to undermine the establishment of ancient Athens. In similar fashion, Kierkegaard’s copious pseudonymous writings were intended to needle the reader, forcing him or her to “consider what is put forward and make the decision to choose or not to choose the…ethical-religious path.” The Corsair affair only intensified these tendencies. Moreover, it convinced him of the poverty of the present age, which, despite its celebration of “progress” and nominal acceptance of Christian doctrine, lacked the moral and spiritual resources to seek justice and truth. Thus the stage was set for Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom.

By “Christendom” (Christenheden) Kierkegaard understood something quite different from “Christianity” (Christendommen). He equated Christianity with the teachings of the New Testament, particularly as embodied in the lives of Jesus Christ and the apostles. Furthermore, he insisted that genuine Christianity involves striving to realize their example, even if such a standard exceeds one’s own capability. That is why true Christianity also entails the need for “forgiveness for sin through faith in Christ.” The Christian may fall short of holiness, but, if he or she is honest about such failures, God will both forgive and provide the grace needed to resume and, hopefully, to fulfill the task of sanctity.

In contrast, “Christendom” describes the attempt to translate Christianity into the sociopolitical sphere. It encompasses a peculiar conception of the church—namely, as an institution dedicated to indoctrinating persons into a given society or, simply put, as a wing of the state. For Kierkegaard, the trouble with this ecclesiology is manifold. Christendom “tones down the radical character of God’s demands on a person’s life. Christ’s life was a decisive challenge to the established order of his day, and he paid the price for this challenge with his life. On Kierkegaard’s view, the Christian who becomes a follower of Christ can expect to suffer opposition and persecution from the established order as well.” Thus Kierkegaard rejected the assumption that Western society had become Christian. For him, the “Church in this life must always be a Church militant, struggling to define itself over against the world.”

Kierkegaard had adumbrated such views for years—a tendency that became unmistakable with the publication of Practice in Christianity and For Self-Examination. Still, he had avoided a direct and public confrontation with the Danish church, partly because J. P. Mynster was his father’s pastor and partly because he continued to hope for change. Mynster’s death in 1854 would force him to reassess the situation.

Mynster was eulogized by Hans Lassen Martensen, an upwardly mobile churchman and theologian. With an eye on the deceased’s bishopric, Martensen highlighted the triumphs of Mynster’s twenty-year episcopacy, even declaring him a true imitator of Christ, a “link in [the] holy chain of witnesses to the truth,” which stretches “across the ages, from the days of the Apostles up to our own times.” This statement “was [either] too much for Kierkegaard, or it was just what he was waiting for, the moment for decisive action.” Kierkegaard dashed off a critical rejoinder, in which he maintained that, however great Mynster’s earthly accomplishments, the bishop should in no way be confused with a “witness of truth.” The latter is characterized by a total commitment to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, while Mynster ought to be seen as a career-minded ecclesiastic, who tendered a diluted version of Christianity in exchange for political stability and personal gain.

Bearing the title “Was Bishop Mynster a ‘Truth-Witness,’ One of ‘the Authentic Truth-Witnesses’—Is This the Truth?,” the piece appeared in December 1854. The reaction was “one of stunned incomprehension.” Mynster’s association with the Kierkegaard family was well known, and despite Kierkegaard’s protests to the contrary, his article was widely regarded as an unwarranted betrayal of the deceased. “Only those who had read Kierkegaard’s works and understood them, or were privy to the journals, could have appreciated the reasons for the collision.” Yet, at that time, the journals were unpublished, and Kierkegaard remained an elusive figure for many. Misunderstandings abounded. Conservatives, among whom he was once numbered, were scandalized by the antiestablishment undercurrent of his polemics. Liberals, of whom he had been critical, supported him in private and eventually in public. Martensen, for his part, published a brief reply and then refused to comment again. The vast majority of the “clergy simply let the incident pass them by.”

But Kierkegaard was determined to press the issue. At first he simply wanted to provoke further reaction from Martensen. When a response failed to materialize, Kierkegaard released a series of articles and, in time, his own periodical, The Moment (Øieblikket). This was an ironic decision, given Kierkegaard’s criticism of the press in A Literary Review. Nevertheless, The Moment stands as a “classic of satirical literature,” in which Kierkegaard not only chastises the Danish church but, indeed, seeks to embarrass it. As he writes in the fifth edition of The Moment,

Beware of the pastors! It belongs to being a Christian…to have suffered for the doctrine. And believe me, as sure as my name is Søren Kierkegaard, you will get no official pastor to say that—which is natural, since to do so would be suicide for him. At the same moment it is said that to have suffered for the doctrine is required even for being any ordinary Christian, at the same moment the whole machinery…is exposed. That is why you will get no official pastor to say it. On the contrary, you can be completely sure that he with all his might will…prevent you from thinking those thoughts so that you can be kept in the condition he considers to be Christian: a good sheep for shearing, a harmless mediocrity, to whom eternity is closed.

It is not only the clergy who get a drubbing. In one piece, dubbed “The Sort of Person Who Is Called a Christian,” Kierkegaard lampoons the status of the Danish laity. Its opening vignette describes a “young man,” blessed with “more than ordinary capacities,” who marries, has a child, and only then feels “compelled to have religion.” Thus he has the child baptized—a decision that makes a mockery of the sacrament by which Christians pledge “to live as sacrificed ones in this world of lies and evil.” A second picture portrays a hardened tradesman, who reasons that a moral person cannot succeed in the business world. And yet, this same tradesman maintains his ties to Christianity, since his association with the church allows him to cultivate the appearance of integrity:

Two or four times a year this man dresses up in his best clothes and goes to Communion. There a pastor makes his appearance, a pastor who (like those figures that jump out of a snuffbox when the spring is touched) jumps as soon as he sees “a blue banknote.” And then the holy ceremony is celebrated, from which the tradesman, or rather both of the tradesmen…return home to their ordinary way of life.

Kierkegaard drives home the point with ferocity: “And one dares to offer this to God in the name of the Sacrament of the Altar, the Communion of Christ’s body and blood!”

In spite of its vitriol, Kierkegaard’s attack was not so much trying to destroy the Danish church as trying to keep it from destroying itself. “I am only a corrective,” he once wrote, “I have nothing new to bring.” Its negativity gestures toward something positive—namely, the kind of faith celebrated in the lives of the great martyrs and saints, whose pursuit of justice, truth, and love did not cower before convention or prejudice, precisely because it shared in the overflowing, unlimited generosity of God himself.

Not long before the tenth issue of The Moment was to go to press, Kierkegaard became ill. On October 2, 1855, he collapsed in the street, and, just over a month later, he was dead. The cause of his deterioration was unclear. Kierkegaard himself associated his sickness with his attack upon the Danish church, “the cause [to] which he has devoted all his intellectual strength to resolving…and for which alone he believes that he has been intended.” Indeed, it appears that Kierkegaard understood his death as essential to the continuation of his “religious battle.” Otherwise his polemic would trudge on indefinitely and, in the long run, “peter out.” In death, however, “it will maintain its strength.”

And yet, there is a sense in which The Moment does not represent Kierkegaard’s last word. In 1846, as he approached his thirty-third year of life, Kierkegaard drew up details for the reparation of the family burial site at Assistens Cemetery—a place that can be visited to this day. After mentioning a few details, he adds, “And then there will be enough space for a little verse which may be done in small type.” The “little verse” was from one of Kierkegaard’s most cherished poets, the Pietist hymn writer Hans Adolph Brorson (1694–1764). Kierkegaard refers to Brorson’s songs throughout his authorship, citing, for example, Brorson’s hymn, “I Go in Danger, Where I Go,” in both Stages on Life’s Way and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and using “Draw Me, Jesus,” as inspiration for the third section of Practice of Christianity. For his gravestone, Kierkegaard would choose the tenth stanza of Brorson’s “Hallelujah! I Have Found My Jesus”:

In yet a little time,

I will have won,

Then will the whole struggle

Be over and done,

Then I can rest [hvile]

In halls of roses,

And continually,

And continually

Talk with my Jesus.

In selecting this verse for his tombstone, Kierkegaard did more than acknowledge his debt to Brorson. He also made Brorson’s words his own—indeed, his last communication with the world. As Johannes Climacus explains in the Postscript—a work that dates from the same year that Kierkegaard sketched out the plans for his burial site—the words on one’s headstone signify what “the dead person calls out” from the grave. Thus Kierkegaard, dead now for more than 150 years, continues to “call out” what he saw as the essence of Christian existence—that, while always a struggle, it nevertheless tends toward and culminates in the joy and “rest” of a relationship with Christ. As will be seen, his spiritual discourses and writings bear out this declaration.

Kierkegaard’s Place in the History of Christian Spirituality

Spirituality has been defined as the pursuit of “life integration” by way of a process of “self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives.” Thus particular doctrines underlie every spirituality—for they articulate the “ultimate value” in question—but spirituality itself is not a mere set of doctrines or rules. Rather, it involves the existential application of such principles, whether they concern “the Transcendent, the flourishing of humanity, or some other value.”

With this in mind, “Christian spirituality” refers to that spirituality whose “horizon of ultimate value is the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ and communicated through his Holy Spirit, and the project of self-transcendence is the living of the paschal mystery within the context of the church community.” The person concerned with Christian spirituality, then, will have certain presuppositions about who God is. Her task, however, will not be to elucidate and to expand on those presuppositions—as it is in theology—but to relate them to who she is and to what she wants in life. On this understanding, Christianity is always already more than a cognitive assent or an interior “feeling.” It is a mode de vie, which involves political, sexual, social, and spiritual matrices.

As a thinker, Kierkegaard has often been labeled as an “existentialist” or, more forcefully, as the “father of existentialism.” As Robert Solomon explains, “It is generally acknowledged that if existentialism is a ‘movement’ at all, Kierkegaard is its prime mover.” Existentialism can be defined as a way of philosophizing that stresses the importance of the human subject, not only as a thinker, but also as a concrete, acting individual confronted by a variety of problems—for example, the experience of freedom in a world that often seems hostile, even absurd. But this is, doubtless, an extensive definition, and, as Simon Blackburn notes, “existentialism” is not so much a unified philosophy as a “loose title for various philosophies that emphasize certain common themes.” Thus existentialist themes crop up in writers of various stripes, from the ontological ruminations of Martin Heidegger to the probing of meaninglessness by Jean-Paul Sartre. In other cases, what seems to be “existentialism” may not be that at all. Thomas Merton once observed that the differences between existentialism and mysticism are not always clear-cut, for both focus “on the ineluctable fact of death, on man’s need for authenticity, and on a kind of spiritual liberation.” Similarly, James Collins argues that existentialism cannot be reduced to a modern phenomenon, given that it has “striking parallels” in thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo and Blaise Pascal. With this in mind, it is worth adding that Collins does not view Kierkegaard as an existentialist per se but instead as one who, along with Friedrich Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl, strongly “contributed to the current of thought from which existentialism stems.”

Identifying Kierkegaard with “existentialism,” then, is hardly a straightforward matter. It may be that the very themes that Kierkegaard bequeathed to existentialism are better understood in light of Christian spirituality, since a number of Kierkegaard’s most cherished ideas and motifs follow the “contours of Christian spirituality.” Lawrence S. Cunningham and Keith J. Egan maintain that “any authentic Christian spirituality” must possess each of these general features: (1) an emphasis on Christianity as a “way of life,” rather than “an abstract philosophy or a code of beliefs”; (2) a thematization of the Christian way of life as discipleship, understood, in particular, as the following of Jesus Christ; (3) a recognition that discipleship is not purely an individual matter, but also entails interpersonal involvement; (4) a stress on the reception of the Eucharist; (5) a sensitivity to the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of discipleship; and (6) an openness to the world, rather than a longing for a “shield from the exigent realities around us.” Kierkegaard’s authorship displays each of these qualities. The upbuilding writings, in particular, might be taken as manifestly spiritual. And yet, even Kierkegaard’s more philosophical works, many of which are seen as existentialism’s loci classici, either highlight or, at least, hint at the contours of Christian spirituality. Hence, rather than portion out a “philosophical” and a “religious” Kierkegaard, it is better to view his authorship as a whole, which, at any juncture, is capable of moving from irony to upbuilding.

Whatever the case, the persistence of spiritual themes in Kierkegaard’s authorship raises the question, Where do they come from? In other words, if thinkers such as Kant and Hegel form the background of Kierkegaard’s philosophical output, who are the key sources behind Kierkegaard’s spiritual writings? Answering this question will not only better situate Kierkegaard in the history of Christian spirituality, but, eventually, will also bring his own contribution to Christian spirituality into sharper relief.

The Pietist Influence on Kierkegaard

Among the myriad influences on Kierkegaard, it may have been the Pietists who mattered most to him. He remained a lifelong devotee of Pietist literature, reading figures such as Johann Arndt and Gerhard Tersteegen for edification and frequently alluding to them with great reverence in his writings, whether published or unpublished. As he put it in an 1850 journal entry,

Yes, indeed, pietism [Pietisme] (properly understood…in the sense of witnessing for the truth and suffering for it, together with the understanding that suffering in this world belongs to being a Christian, and that a shrewd and secular conformity with this world is unchristian)—yes, indeed, pietism is the one and only consequence of Christianity.

What, exactly, did he learn from the Pietists? A number of answers might be ventured here. First, it is clear that, in Pietism, he saw an emphasis on Christianity as a way of life, namely, a way of life centered on the example of Jesus Christ. The theme of imitatio Christi, common among Pietists, garnered decisive impetus in Johann Arndt’s groundbreaking work True Christianity. For Arndt, Christ stands as the “example, mirror, and rule for [one’s] life.” What this means, in particular, is that the Christian’s life is to express the virtues incarnated by Christ—humility and love, to be sure, but also all types of suffering, from poverty to persecution. This stress gives Arndtian piety an “ethical focal point” that would come to be characteristic of Pietism and, later, of Kierkegaard’s thinking, especially in post-1846 works such as Works of Love and Practice in Christianity.

Second, Kierkegaard was attracted to the Pietist emphasis on sanctification, that is, on the process by which one becomes holy. In order to appreciate this emphasis, it must be remembered that, after Martin Luther, sanctification was a point of controversy in Protestant circles. While it would be false to accuse Luther of lacking an interest in holiness, it is nevertheless true that he disdained the notion that holiness is an outcome of a “heavenward journey,” achieved gradually, if also painfully, by the Christian pilgrim. As Carter Lindberg puts it, “For Luther salvation is not the process or goal of life, but rather the presupposition of life, [thus] his theology became a transvaluation of all values.” For that reason, Luther could not endorse the imitation of Christ, at least not understood as a deliberate “imitation of the suffering Christus exemplum.” For him, any such human attempt to approach God is nothing but temptation, since the “desire to be as God (homo deificatus) is the root of all sin.”

The Pietists, however, tended to take a different position. While accepting Luther’s stress on faith as the terminus a quo of holiness, they added that the process of sanctification presupposes evangelical faith, and so the one who grows in holiness does so on the basis of faith and not on that of human works. Thus the Pietists were able to combine the Lutheran principle of sola fide with an emphasis on constant progress in holiness. Moreover, they were bold enough to thematize this process in categories borrowed from Catholic mysticism—most notably, the notion of “detachment” (Gelassenheit). For Arndt, who, indeed, was strongly indebted to Catholic spiritual authors such as Johannes Tauler and Thomas à Kempis, “detachment” is synonymous with resignation from earthly goods. This sort of restraint is necessary not because such goods are intrinsically evil, but so that “nothing other is to live, shine, act, will, love, think, speak, or rejoice in man except God himself.” In this way, “Tauler’s emphasis on Gelassenheit,” which was otherwise more speculative and metaphysical, “worked easily into Arndt’s order of salvation.”

Kierkegaard, too, was adamant that Luther’s sola fide be understood as a starting point for ethical striving, and he was highly critical of those who would suggest otherwise, including Luther himself. Moreover, he credits spiritual authors such as Tauler and Arndt for upholding the connection between faith, suffering, and progress in the spiritual life. As will be seen, he was to replicate this tendency in his own authorship.

A third way in which Pietism shaped Kierkegaard was its promotion of what might be termed “countercultural” Christianity—an inclination that was characteristic of the Moravian Brethren, with whom, as has been noted, Kierkegaard was personally familiar. In conducting missions in harsh environments, and in separating into semimonastic communities such as Christiansfeld in southern Jutland, Denmark’s Moravians represented a Christianity that refused to assimilate willy-nilly into the burgeoning secular world. This radical commitment made a significant impression on Kierkegaard. On the one hand, he admired the Moravians’ dedication to social equality, and in one 1848 journal entry, he even suggested that they are the only true Christians left in Denmark. On the other hand, he saw their tendency to cluster in like-minded communities—in which “all people [are] alike…dressed alike, praying at specified times, marrying by drawing lots, going to bed by the clock”—as an evasion of the demand to suffer in the world as Christ did. As he notes, “There is much that is beautiful in their lives, but their quietness is still not Christianity, not in the deepest sense.”

Yet, even here, Kierkegaard betrays the influence of Pietism, for he uses the Pietist emphasis on imitatio Christi as a means of critiquing a certain aspect of the movement. Indeed, it could be argued that his evaluation of the Moravians is representative of a larger debate within Pietism vis-à-vis the proper locus of the religious life. Namely, are Christians to pursue holiness within a secular and perhaps even hostile society, or are they to separate from such a society so as to practice their faith more freely? For Kierkegaard, these are not easy questions: a dialectic of confrontation and retreat can be found in his own writings. Still, in the end, he is certain that Jesus Christ must remain the standard by which Christians are measured. Thus he concludes that the countercultural Christianity of the Moravians is not really countercultural if it fails to confront the established order as Jesus did—namely, head-on.

Kierkegaard’s Anticipation of Modern Christian Spirituality

In pondering Kierkegaard’s role in the history of Christian spirituality, it is important not just to look behind but also to look forward. He did not just receive a number of insights from figures such as Tauler and Arndt, but he anticipated some of the key themes of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian spirituality. Thus it is worthwhile to consider where Kierkegaard’s spiritual writings overlap with those of subsequent authors.

Still, this task is more than a little difficult. First, and most obviously, Kierkegaard has been received primarily as a philosopher of existence or of religion, rather than as an Erbauungsautor. Thus his relation to Christian spirituality has garnered a relatively small degree of attention, whether in the secondary literature or, even more significantly, among spiritual writers themselves.

Yet, the absence of direct influence hardly means that Kierkegaard is irrelevant to the development of Christian spirituality. Just as he dealt with issues that would become familiar in twentieth-century philosophy, so are there thematic correspondences between his writings of those of later spiritual authors. The goal here is to highlight a couple of these common points of emphasis and, in turn, to demonstrate that Kierkegaard stands as a pertinent—and seemingly prescient—figure in modern Christian spirituality.

The first such thematic correspondence is what Kierkegaard terms unrecognizability—a motif that plays a pivotal role in his 1846 work, A Literary Review. As mentioned earlier, Kierkegaard is damning of modernity’s preoccupation with objective information, which, he argues, has been legitimized by philosophy and then popularized by the press. The upshot is a coolness toward ethical-religious ideals. People are so busy gobbling up facts, figures, gossip, and news that self-knowledge and the contemplation of the meaning and purpose of human life are forgotten. Even worse, this cycle is almost impossible to break, since anyone who tries to bring reform will be subjected to the same apathy, resentment, and scorn that drives the media in the first place. Kierkegaard terms this process “leveling,” likening it to a “deathly stillness in which nothing can rise up but everything sinks down into it, impotent.” It is a form of violence, but in a negative sense: it robs individuals and, with them, society of zeal for the good. Hence, far from bringing liberté, egalité, and fraternité, “the present age” ensnares individuals in a crude desire for aesthetic stimulation and, in turn, weakens the principled creativity needed for social flourishing. Even if a certain “numerical equality” follows, it is but a shadow of true egalitarianism, “the idea of religiousness,” which is based on the unconditional love of the neighbor.

But where can this true equality be found? Is it a purely eschatological notion? Kierkegaard is loath to give an answer. While acknowledging that the Moravian Brethren provide an intimation of genuine unity, he refuses to endorse what he saw as their preference for separatism. Remote religious societies that define themselves over against the larger society are not the answer, nor is the hierarchical ecclesial establishment. Consequently, there is no given religious community into which one can enter. Rather, one must cultivate it in the midst of worldly opposition: “Only when the single individual in himself has won ethical firmness despite the whole world, not until then can there be talk about uniting in truth.”

With this in mind, Kierkegaard turns to “the unrecognizables”—a religious community that will neither disclose nor proclaim itself as such, since the individuals who constitute it “have divinely understood the diabolical principle of the leveling process.” Kierkegaard likens the unrecognizables to “plainclothes policeman” or to “secret agents.” They work for the good within common society, yet must guard their true identities, lest their mission be exposed and undermined. Herein lies an immense burden. The unrecognizables must serve in quiet, even in the face of rampant criminality, so that their larger aims can be met. Thus their unrecognizability is not a flight from the world but, rather, a solidarity so deep that it is willing to suffer evil for the sake of good. And Kierkegaard does think that good will come in this way—indeed, perhaps only in this way:

The unrecognizables recognize the servants of leveling but dare not use power or authority against them, for then there would be a regression, because it would be instantly obvious to a third party that the unrecognizable one was an authority, and then the third party would be hindered from attaining the highest.…He does not dare to defeat leveling outright—he would be dismissed for that, since it would be acting with authority—but in suffering he will defeat it and thereby experience in turn the law of his existence, which is not to rule, to guide, to lead, but in suffering to serve, to help indirectly.

This orientation, as Kierkegaard sees it, is ultimately an expression of the love of Christ. For just as Christ let go of the reins of history, refusing to seek worldly power, so have the unrecognizables learned that loving others is not about “ruling” them but about “constraining oneself on their behalf.”

A few decades later, a similar emphasis on unrecognizability would be taken up by one of the great mystics of modern times, Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916). Born into an aristocratic family in Strasbourg, Charles grew up with the advantages of nobility but lacked “any wider purpose or ambition.” Yet, a turning point arrived when Charles was sent to North Africa as part of a French regiment. He became fascinated with the region and undertook a geographical expedition to Morocco. This experience led Charles to reconsider not only his lifestyle, but also his relation to God. He joined a Trappist monastery in Syria but found its order too comforting, its poverty too respectable. As he saw it, the Trappists had not renounced everything in the manner of Christ; they retained an evident measure of dignity. Receiving a dispensation, he left the monastery and began another period of vocational discernment, eventually settling in Algeria.

His primary goal there was to “live among the poor in a spirit of service and solidarity.” In other words, he wanted to interact with Algeria’s Muslim population, not as one who wanted to control or to convert them, but as a lowly “Christian presence in their midst.” He expounded on this approach to Christian mission—with more than a little resemblance to Kierkegaard—in his various writings. He wrote in 1897,

I must…embrace humility, poverty, detachment, abjection, solitude, suffering. I must make little of human greatness and the respect and approval of men, but I must respect the poor as much as the rich. For myself I must always seek the lowest of the low places, and arrange my life so that I may be the last and the most despised among men.

Like Kierkegaard, then, Charles insists that the Christian life must be patterned after the example of the abased Christ. What’s more, he describes this as a “hidden life,” wherein Christian devotion is misunderstood and, indeed, unrecognized: “You are…unknown, inordinately poor, lowly in your smock and sandals….Some take you for a laborer of the lowest kind; others think you are an outcast….Most—nearly all, in fact—take you for a fool.”

But what, exactly, is the purpose of such piety? Just as Kierkegaard saw the unrecognizables as serving the good apart from sociopolitical power, so does Charles appeal to those who “lead hidden lives, possessing [Christ] without having been given a mission to preach.” These hidden ones, Charles explains, carry “the Gospel…not by word of mouth but by the persuasive force of example, not by speaking, but by living.” In this way, they “work for the sanctification of the world,” even “in the midst of those who do not know [Christ].” While differences between Charles and Kierkegaard might be found, it is nevertheless remarkable that both writers, when confronted with the barriers that sociopolitical power presents to evangelization, maintained that the Christian life must return to the example of the Son of God, whose incarnation not only promised salvation, but dared unrecognizability.

A second thematic correspondence between Kierkegaard and later spiritual authors is the absolute otherness of God. Kierkegaard’s fervent and repeated insistence that God lies beyond all human conceptions and conventions harks back to older ways of understanding the relation between divine reality and human understanding—ways that, notably, were prevalent among Christian mystics. As developed in pseudonymous works such as Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Sickness unto Death, as well as his signed upbuilding writings, Kierkegaard assumes that religiousness is not limited to organized churches or groups but is present within the human as such. Inasmuch as all human beings ask questions of existential consequence, they are capable of a “dialectical inward deepening” that leads to a confrontation with ultimate reality—or, at least, with the possibility of such a reality. This view means that, for Kierkegaard, religion is not something imposed on human beings from the outside; rather, it emerges out of the concern and curiosity endemic to human life and thought.

Still, as Johannes Climacus insists in the Postscript, the immanence of religiousness ought not be confused with the comprehensibility of the eternal. In fact, the more one progresses down the road of immanent religiousness (what Climacus dubs “Religiousness A”), the more one realizes that human existence cannot be brought into correspondence with the eternal. Every human step toward God bears the recognition that this gap can only be bridged by God himself, though, by the same token, to come to this recognition is to open oneself up to divine activity. Hence, for Climacus, the spiritual life is not only perfected by God’s absolute otherness (as in traditional Christian accounts of salvation), but also and ever spurred on by it, so much so that one cannot be a Christian if the inward-directed, contemplative passion of immanent religiousness is missing.

Thus a Kierkegaardian approach to spirituality hinges on correctly understanding who God is and who human beings are in relation to God. As Sylvia Walsh puts it, “[A] true conception of God is [for Kierkegaard] required in order to have a true conception of life and oneself, but one cannot have a true conception of God without also having a corresponding true conception of life and oneself.” Here the unconditional distinction between divine and human, Creator and creature, is fundamental—a distinction that may seem like a given for much of Christian history but, in truth, has been challenged on a number of fronts, particularly in modernity. For example, the great German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) formulated a so-called theology of experience, whose Romantic tendencies situated human feeling at the starting point of Christian theology. Consequently, Schleiermacher risked the immanentization of God and, in turn, the blurring of the divine and the human—a point that Kierkegaard recognized and, indeed, warned against. Moreover, Hans Lassen Martensen—the same Martensen whom Kierkegaard so vehemently opposed in his polemics against the Danish state church—advocated for a “modern philosophical approach to God [which has] its starting-point in human self-consciousness.” For Kierkegaard, a key problem with this Hegelian-tinged theology lies in its assumption that a phenomenological analysis of consciousness can illuminate precisely how human beings stand vis-à-vis God, whereas Christian faith is a personal commitment to the God who reveals himself to humanity. God is not an object of philosophical scrutiny but a subject in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). That the Hegelian theologians miss this point is the reason why Kierkegaard says they lead to “the philosophical volatilization of Christian doctrines.”

Kierkegaard’s response to speculative theology would prove to be “the nineteenth century’s sharpest statement of the difference between the divine and the human,” and, in turn, it would come to exercise major influence on subsequent thinkers. Karl Barth, to cite the most famous example, once wrote, “If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: ‘God is in heaven, and thou art on earth.’” At the same time, however, Barth contrasts Kierkegaard’s “dialectical audacity” with the human desire for holiness, since, in his view, spiritual discipline “presents piety as a human achievement, [and] evokes worship which knows not how to be silent before God.” In short, for Barth, the religious impulse in human beings is not liberating but enslaving: “Religion is that human necessity in which the power exercised over men by sin is clearly demonstrated.”

Thus Barth effectively inverts Kierkegaard’s conception of religiousness, which does not depict God’s absolute transcendence as an unconditional Nein to human religiousness but, rather, as that which draws one along the path of the human to the divine. In this approach, Kierkegaard not only recalls the spirituality of earlier Christian mystics but also anticipates that of one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers, Simone Weil. Weil was a Marxist philosopher and activist who grew interested in religious ideas and, in time, began to have what might be termed mystical experiences:

In a moment of intense physical suffering, when I was forcing myself to feel love, but without desiring to give a name to that love, I felt, without being in any way prepared for it (for I had never read the mystical writers) a presence more personal, more certain, more real than that of a human being, though inaccessible to the senses and the imagination.

This juxtaposition of God’s inaccessibility and presence would come to characterize Weil’s thought. On the one hand, she insists that God “is infinitely beyond our reach,” so much so that, in a sense, God “is absent.” On the other hand, this divine distance makes possible divine intimacy: “We can only turn our eyes toward him. We do not have to search for him….It is for him to search for us.” Indeed, Weil recounts a number of encounters with “Christ himself.” At one point, she recalls, “I felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.” Elsewhere she tells of a mysterious visitor with whom she shared bread and wine—a visitor whose love she cannot fathom and of whom she “cannot help thinking, with fear and trembling, that perhaps, in spite of all, he loves me.”

Such ideas were developed further in Gravity and Grace—a collection of Weil’s notebook entries. There she writes that “God can only be present in creation under the form of absence.” This is not a hollow paradox; rather, it is a metaphysical point. For Weil, as for Kierkegaard, God is utterly distinct from the universe and, therefore, by no means related to what William Blake once called “Nobodaddy”—the proverbial great man in the sky, frequently assumed to be the object of religious worship. On the contrary, God is beyond conceptualization, beyond predication. For that reason, Weil goes so far as to say that God does not exist, since “existence,” as applied to creatures, connotes a number of conditions (birth, composition, death) that necessarily fall short of divine reality. To confront God, then, is to enter into a kind of intellectual and spiritual void. But this void, once accepted, is the prerequisite for religious growth. Here Weil comes much closer to Kierkegaard than Barth does. As she sees it, the infinite qualitative difference between God and creatures occasions the religious life, even as it serves as a check against religious hubris. Indeed, for that reason, Weil does not so much call persons to seek God as to receive God.

Once more, such an approach bears a notable resemblance to Kierkegaard, whose pseudonymous work The Sickness unto Death describes faith as a transparent rest in God. This phrase means that the ideal relation to God is not attained through autonomous striving but through spiritual openness and repose. It has been frequently noted that Kierkegaard’s contributions to modern philosophy include his stress on the limitations of the human condition and on the hazards of putatively comprehensive systems of human thinking. What has been suggested above is that this stress resonates with later spirituality too. Kierkegaard may not have directly influenced Weil, but his thinking tilled the soil, as it were, for the development and the reception of her ideas.

The Prominence of “Upbuilding” in Kierkegaard’s Spirituality

There is little doubt that Kierkegaard’s legacy rests primarily with his pseudonymous writings, especially those published between 1843 and 1846. It was in and through these texts, from Either/Or to Fear and Trembling to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, that Kierkegaard emerged as one of the modern world’s most important and controversial thinkers. In this, however, lies a striking irony. For these pseudonymous magna opera are not so much independent, self-contained pieces as parts of a larger authorial task—a task that marshaled a range of literary devices and philosophical-theological insights for its achievement. Later in his career, Kierkegaard described this task as follows: “The truth about me as an author is that I am and was a religious author, that the whole of my authorial activity is related to Christianity, to the problem: how to become a Christian.” In other words, Kierkegaard retroactively understood his authorship as an exercise in upbuilding, in facilitating the spiritual development of persons, particularly in relation to Christianity.

Admittedly, Kierkegaard is not always read in this way. Some commentators disregard his Christian interests, preferring to treat him as a philosopher instead. Others attend to his entire corpus, including his directly religious writings, yet with an eye to their philosophical import. Still others question Kierkegaard’s stated authorial mission, which, in the wake of postmodernity and its suspicions about (or even hostility toward) a unitary presence behind a given text, looks misleading at best and incoherent at worst. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s own understanding of his literary career endures and, at the very least, stands as an intriguing line of interpretation—one that is more supple than it may appear prima facie. After all, as George Pattison has suggested, the choice between perfect authorial clarity and deconstructive self-invention is a false one. Instead, it makes sense to see Kierkegaard’s authorship as “an ongoing quest to gain clarity and understanding about the meaning of his own words and works, a quest that involved him in experimenting with a variety of self-representations and points of view, and testing these out in relation to…issues that recur throughout the authorship.” The pseudonyms, then, are not opposed to clarity; they belong to the means by which Kierkegaard obtained clarity.

Thus Kierkegaard’s elucidation of the nature and purpose of his writings may be simplified, but it is hardly incoherent. As he took stock of his literary career, he perceived that he always was a “religious author,” even as the process by which he arrived at this realization was not linear. Yet, adds Pattison, this is not “only…an experience familiar to many authors, but…one that lies at the heart of philosophy itself, namely the never-ending attempt to reach clarity about what it is we really are saying.” Doubtless this conclusion will go a bridge too far for an ardent poststructuralist, though it may simply be the case that a thoroughgoing postmodern reading of Kierkegaard is not sustainable. As C. Stephen Evans writes,

The radical postmodern Kierkegaard is a Kierkegaard who is an object of aesthetic appreciation. Such an approach to Kierkegaard allows a person to enjoy the style and literary techniques of Kierkegaard without fear of being challenged by Kierkegaard as one human person speaking to another about issues of ultimate importance.

Kierkegaard’s authorship may be play, but it is not just play. The goal of upbuilding, however concealed at times, is ever present.

And yet, one may very well ask, Why conceal anything at all? Why did Kierkegaard not just come out and say what he wanted to say? There is a philosophical and a historical answer to these questions. The former has to do with Kierkegaard’s peculiar philosophy of pedagogy, which, during the period of 1847–48, he hoped to turn into a series of lectures. The lectures themselves never materialized, but Kierkegaard left a number of drafts, notes, and sketches among his journals and papers. They are collected under the title The Dialectic of Ethical and Ethical-Religious Communication.

Kierkegaard opens by criticizing the modern notion that ethics should be taught scientifically, that is, in objective fashion. There is undue focus on knowing what is right, when, in truth, ethics is best communicated by practicing what is right. For living well is an art rather than a science. People implicitly know the difference between right and wrong; the problem is that they often fail to actualize this knowledge. The modern world, then, has it backward. It craves information when what it really needs is exemplarity; it is so busy telling that it neglects to show.

With this in mind, Kierkegaard shifts his attention to indirect communication—the best way, in his opinion, to teach the ethical. This belief is grounded in his conviction that, insofar as the attainment of ethical perfection lies outside human capability, one can never arrogate the title of “master-teacher.” On the contrary, God alone is to be thought of as master, and, for that reason, the best a teacher of ethics can do is to facilitate the individual’s God-relationship. Put differently, in relation to ethics, direct communication is impossible on two counts: it is ineffectual for the teacher to simply impart a catalog of ethical rules, and it is intolerable for the teacher to stand before the student as master. The teacher’s role, then, is to lead in such a way that she disappears, to put herself out of a job, as it were. Kierkegaard likens this approach to that of Socrates, whose maieutic method sought to bring “to birth the ethical possibilities latent in the pupil.”

It is well known that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings represent the use of this approach. The various pseudonyms signify Kierkegaard’s attempt to communicate with the reader via the portrayal of certain Weltanschauungen and thus are not to be identified with Kierkegaard himself. He makes this point explicit in “A First and Last Explanation,” a short appendix to the Postscript: “What has been written…is mine, but only insofar as I…have placed the life-view of the creating, poetically actual individuality in his mouth.” He compares his role to that of a “secretary” and adds that he, too, has sought to learn from the pseudonyms, whose ideas are “dialectically reduplicated” in his own person. This point underlines that the pseudonymous writings by no means lie outside the scope of Kierkegaard’s larger task of upbuilding. Rather, they are a crucial part of building up the reader, since, in their variegated moods and perspectives, they facilitate ethical-religious reflection and prompt the reader to deepen her own self-knowledge and relation to the eternal.

Yet, if the pseudonymous treatises belong to the upbuilding, what is the purpose of Kierkegaard’s nonpseudonymous (“signed”) and presumably direct writings? Before addressing this question, it is worth pointing out that, for Kierkegaard, religious communication is not identical with ethical communication. One may very well have an a priori understanding of right and wrong, but knowledge of, say, Jesus Christ is not intrinsic to human nature. Therefore some objective knowledge of Christianity is required, and, consequently, there is warrant for direct communication among Christians—a point that explains why Kierkegaard was not hesitant to call his signed discourses “directly religious.” He intended these writings to supplement or, in a sense, complete their pseudonymous counterparts. Whereas the latter seek to cast the reader into ethical-religious reflection, the former aim to communicate religious truth. As Kierkegaard expounds, “In relation to pure receptivity, like the empty jar that is to be filled, direct communication is appropriate, but when illusion is involved, consequently something that must first be removed, direct communication is inappropriate.”

At the same time, however, it would be wrong to label Kierkegaard’s signed works as “dogmatic.” In fact, Kierkegaard is at pains to distinguish his signed discourses—which, unlike the pseudonymous treatises, are frequently specified as opbyggelse (upbuilding)—from doctrinal teaching or official instruction. This qualification partly has to do with Kierkegaard’s lack of ecclesiastical authority, which he tends to underline in the forewords to the discourses. It also, however, involves the kind of direct communication necessitated by his authorial context. Writing in Denmark, which was and is a formally Christian nation, Kierkegaard presupposed that his reader already had adequate knowledge of church doctrine and the like. The trouble lay with the application of that knowledge, with getting persons to appropriate the teachings they already know. Thus religious instruction circles back to the problem of ethics. How can the communicator facilitate the actualization of the ethical possibility latent in the knowledge of Christian truth?

With this mind, it is clear that Kierkegaard’s signed discourses are not that different from the pseudonymous ones. Their focus on ethical actuality and their disclaimers of ecclesial authority, not to mention “Kierkegaard’s insistence that ethical communication of this kind is necessarily indirect, would…seem to mark them out as indirect communication after all.” Indeed, the very rhetoric of the discourses supports this point. At first glance, they appear to be transcripts of formal addresses or perhaps even sermons; yet, as noted, Kierkegaard explicitly precludes the latter possibility. Besides, the incorporation of other elements—for example, direct references to the reader (“my listener”), the usage of the first-person plural personal pronoun (“we”), and the recurrent (bordering on incessant) utilization of interrogative sentences—give the discourses a decidedly conversational feel. It is as if Kierkegaard is not only speaking to, but also with, his audience. In this way, his language instantiates his communicative theory, deflecting attention away from the author’s authority and toward the individual’s understanding both of herself and of God. Ultimately, then, the signed discourses are both direct and indirect. They bear Kierkegaard’s name and often accentuate the Christian presuppositions underlying his thought, even as they attempt to avoid the objectivism that, according to Kierkegaard, plagues so much religious instruction.

And yet, amid Kierkegaard’s shifting strategies and voices, there is a constant goal—to upbuild his readers. But upbuild to what? Or for what? What does Kierkegaard envision as the outcome of opbyggelse? It should be clear that Kierkegaard’s oeuvre is not designed for pat answers. Its complexity demands the reader’s effort, juxtaposing the extensive points de vue of the pseudonymous works with the intensive dialectic of the signed discourses. Indeed, the indirect and direct writings were not issued in linear fashion, as if one might simply march from one side of the authorship to another, but were, quite literally, issued together. Kierkegaard inaugurated this approach in 1843, when, after publishing the pseudonymous Either/Or in February, he issued the signed Two Upbuilding Discourses in May. Later that year, he repeated this practice: the pseudonymous works Fear and Trembling and Repetition were published on the same day (October 16) as the signed Three Upbuilding Discourses. This pattern would come to characterize Kierkegaard’s literary career. As he put it, “The religious is present from the very beginning. Conversely, the esthetic is still present even in the last moment. After the publication of only religious works for two years, a little esthetic article follows.…The duplexity is both first and last.”

Thus the upbuilding and its attendant religious concerns are present at every stage of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. But insofar as those concerns are existential in nature (that is, they do not involve dogmatic instruction), they have to do with developing and strengthening the individual’s spiritual life. This goal especially relates to a pair of excellences that, in the larger Christian tradition, are often described as “theological virtues”—namely, faith and love.

Kierkegaard connects the latter to opbyggelse in explicit fashion. Drawing on the words of Paul—who famously told the church in Corinth that “love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1)—Kierkegaard asserts that the upbuilding “is exclusively characteristic of love.” Here he does not mean that all forms or manifestations of love are upbuilding. An erotic relationship can become twisted by greed and selfishness; a friendship can become warped by elitism and pride. Nor does Kierkegaard mean that love upbuilds at the exclusion of other activities. Indeed, he quotes Paul to the contrary: “[Love] does not insist on its own way” (1 Cor 13:5). For Kierkegaard, this means that love has a noncompetitive relationship with the world. It does not have to get out of the way in order for another activity to take place. Rather, it is capable of “being able to give itself in everything, be present in everything.” In this sense, love is identical to upbuilding: “Everything can be upbuilding in the same sense as love can be everywhere present.” Kierkegaard illustrates this point with an example:

We would not think that the sight of a person sleeping could be upbuilding. Yet if you see a baby sleeping on its mother’s breast—and you see the mother’s love, see that she has, so to speak, waited for and now makes use of the moment while the baby is sleeping really to rejoice in it because she hardly dares let the baby notice how inexpressibly she loves it—then this is an upbuilding sight.…Just to see the baby sleeping is a friendly, benevolent, soothing sight, but it is not upbuilding. If you still want to call it upbuilding, it is because you see love present, it is because you see God’s love encompass the baby.

Here Kierkegaard does not bother to account for the shift from “the mother’s love” to “God’s love.” Elsewhere, however, he is clear that human love is but a sharing in the love of God, the “Eternal Love,” who is the “source of all love in heaven and on earth,” “so that the one who loves is what he is only by being in you.”

Hence, for Kierkegaard, there is an intrinsic bond between upbuilding, love, and God that makes up a type of trinity. Wherever love is present, so is the upbuilding. Yet, since God is love, it is also true that the presence of the upbuilding signifies the presence of God. Again, Kierkegaard’s task as an upbuilding author is to manifest these connections, not in dogmatic fashion, but in such a way that they come to develop the reader’s spiritual life.

One might object that other facets of life are upbuilding—for instance, political competence, artistic skill, and scholarly erudition. But these talents, sensu stricto, do not concern themselves with love, and so Kierkegaard maintains that their upbuilding “is still not upbuilding in the deepest sense.” “This is because, spiritually, love is the ground, and to build up means to erect from the ground up.”

Yet, in so elevating love, Kierkegaard might be seen as diminishing the centrality of faith. His words call to mind the viewpoint of the Apostle Paul, whose famed encomium on love states that, in relation to other Christian virtues, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13). How, then, does Kierkegaard conceive of the relation between faith and love and, in turn, faith’s role in his larger authorial project of upbuilding?

Kierkegaard wrestled with this question for some time. Already in 1834 a pair of journal entries question the link between faith and volitional activity. Then, in 1836, Kierkegaard hits on an understanding that will come to characterize his analysis of the problem. Comparing faith to a “vital fluid” and to “the atmosphere we breathe,” he concludes that it is “the prerequisite for everything.” He later reworks this notion, explaining that faith is the “a priori” that “hovers over all the a posteriori of works.” Intriguingly, Kierkegaard likens this position to that of Paul—a point borne out by scholarship on the apostle’s epistles. According to J. Paul Sampley, Paul understands faith as “the right relation to God,” which, in turn, “makes love possible.” In other words, “love presupposes faith.” But this perspective does not place faith over love. Faith is a “human commitment” that “may end,” whereas love, “grounded as it is in God and a signal and eternal characteristic of God’s commitment toward all creatures, is the one disposition that believers share most fully with God.” Thus love flows from faith and, indeed, is its perfection. But without faith it could not begin. To return to Kierkegaard’s language, faith is the prerequisite for everything.

Kierkegaard develops this line of reasoning at the outset of Works of Love. He opens with a prayer that lauds the “God of love.” Here the term he uses for “love” is Kjerlighed, which can be compared to the Latin term caritas, signifying nonerotic benevolence or kindness. Thus God is Kjerlighed. Kierkegaard presents this point in trinitarian fashion, describing God as “the source of all love in heaven and on earth,” “the Savior and Redeemer,” “who revealed what love is,” and the “Spirit of love,” who reminds “the believer to love as he is loved and his neighbor as himself.” In emphasizing love’s divine origin, Kierkegaard is also stressing its mystery. As M. Jamie Ferreira puts it, “Love is hidden because its source is God, who is hidden, who is invisible, a ‘secret source.’” The same is true for Kjerlighed in human life, which, stemming from God, “dwells in hiding or is hidden in the innermost being.” In turn, Kjerlighed does not proceed from a calculus of cost-benefit. It is not like a coin, which is presented in exchange for something else. Rather, it is given, even without recognition, for the sake of the beloved.

Yet, precisely because this sort of love confounds ordinary ways of doing things, precisely because its saturation of the created order renders it incomprehensible, one must have faith in it. Works of Love emphasizes this point. The tendency of “conceited sagacity,” Kierkegaard writes, is to “believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes.” But this way of thinking carries a decisive implication: “we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love,” which cannot be empirically demonstrated. Such logic, says Kierkegaard, ought to give one pause for thought. It is true that no one in life wants to be “deceived by believing what is untrue.” And yet, this impulse can be taken too far. One can become obsessed with wanting to make oneself “absolutely secure against being deceived,” policing out anything that lacks experimental proof. But this is itself a deception—indeed, a more intractable and damaging deception. For such a person, proud of his or her intelligence, is “deceived by not believing what is true.”

The challenge, then, is to have faith in love. It is to believe that love is present, not only in human life, but also in eternity. In fact, these two loves go hand in hand:

[Love] is in an unfathomable connectedness with all existence. Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love [Kjerlighed] originate even more deeply in God’s love [Kjerlighed]. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then there would be neither the little lake nor a human being’s love.

Thus love cannot be seen, much less comprehended. “When you think that you see [love’s essence], you are deceived by a reflected image.” That is why faith is necessary. It does not seek to infiltrate the mystery of love but, rather, to presuppose it, to rest in its presence. In this way, faith is like a channel, which allows one to “tune in” to the reality of love. Faith does not create love but enables the human being to grow in it—a point that brings this discussion back to Paul. For Kierkegaard, as for Paul, love and its works are the perfection of faith. Yet, it is also true that love is an aspect of faith, since, without faith, love could not be known in the world.

It would seem critical, then, that Kierkegaard’s writings seek to upbuild the reader’s faith. But herein lies a problem, already laid out in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous treatise Philosophical Fragments. In that work, Johannes Climacus argues that faith cannot be taught, since its condition is not intrinsic to human nature. After all, if it were, then Socrates has done the most that can be done for a human being, and Christian teaching about the incarnation of the Son of God is superfluous. In contrast, Christianity teaches that the condition for faith is supplied by God himself. As Climacus explains,

When does [a person] receive [the condition for faith]? In the moment. This condition, what does it condition? His understanding of the eternal. But a condition such as this surely must be an eternal condition. —In the moment, therefore, he receives the eternal condition, and he knows this from his having received it in the moment, for otherwise he merely calls to mind that he had it from eternity. He receives the condition in the moment and receives it from that teacher himself.

Climacus, then, endorses the longstanding Christian position that faith is not a product of human effort but a divine gift: “The god gave the follower the condition to see…and opened for him the eyes of faith.” And yet, this top-down model of faith risks nullifying human participation altogether. It seems that one is either zapped by the deity or destined to go without faith—a conclusion that would render any attempt to “build up” another’s faith pointless.

In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, however, Climacus expands on his position. While he continues to insist that faith in the revelation of the incarnate Son of God “depends on the active assistance of God, giving the ability to recognize the truth as such, and not on the inherent powers of human reason,” he argues that this assistance does not come at the expense of human effort—a claim that emerges as one of the focal points of the Postscript. At the heart of Climacus’s argument is the idea that, even though Christian faith is not a faculty latent in the human self, all human beings do possess a capacity for religion. He is not talking about, say, the practice of prayer or of ceremonial ritual but, rather, about a dedicated exploration of existential questions. Here, again, he cites as an example “the Socrates of Socratic ignorance (objective uncertainty), of Socratic irony (indirect communication), and of Socratic uncertainty ‘if there is an immortality’ (objective uncertainty again).” Put differently, this sort of religiousness arises whenever one probes the meaning of life, particularly with regard to the possibility of an eternal origin and purpose. It is, in short, a religiousness of passionate (or impassioned) inward deepening.

Such a broad conception of human religiousness necessitates a broad name, and so, as alluded to above, Climacus calls it “Religiousness A.” The “A” indicates its relation to Christianity (or “Religiousness B”), which Climacus treats as transcendent, emerging solely through divine initiative. Hence, on Climacus’s analysis, not all religious persons are Christian, but all Christians are religious in the sense of Religiousness A. Climacus goes so far as to insist that one cannot be Christian without having passed through the crucible of Religiousness A. This should not give the impression that Religiousness A is a simple affair, as if it were a baby step prior to the sprint of Christianity. Climacus divides Religiousness A into a trio of stages, wherein the person slowly but surely comes to face the paradoxes of human existence—that one desires eternal life yet is unable to procure it; that every movement toward the divine only illumines its distance; that the greatest of all human tasks (the pursuit of eternity) terminates in the failure of human effort.

It is clear that this “Socratic form of the religious life” is, for Kierkegaard, critical for the development of Christian faith. And it is on that level that most of his signed, upbuilding discourses work. They are not written as apologies for Christian revelation, nor do they attempt to explicate systematically the various tenets of Christian faith. And though they do draw on motifs and persons from the Christian tradition, they do so with an eye to understanding and to stirring immanent religious passion and its interleaving desires for eternal justice and happiness. In short, these discourses try to foster the reader’s spiritual life, precisely because “the development of genuine ‘inwardness’ in a person is a process that also involves the development of a knowledge of God and a relation to God.” They facilitate Religiousness A but, in doing so, open up a space for the reception of Religiousness B, that is, for the faith that comes from God alone.

Thus Kierkegaard’s project is, in the end, very much about the building up of love and faith, not in opposition to an otherwise recalcitrant human nature, but through the faculties most characteristic of the human—intellect, memory, and will. That this process encompasses both the pseudonymous and signed works suggests that there is, after all, a unifying purpose to Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. Kierkegaard has a Socratic side, and Kierkegaard has a Christian side. Yet, “the point of similarity between irony and radical [Christian] discipleship is to be located precisely in the category of the upbuilding.”

If, for Kierkegaard, the goal of human life lies in faith’s happy rest in God, which positions one to love God and neighbor in imitatio Christi, it is also true that not everyone gets there the same way. Some respond to philosophical interrogation, others to the traditional doctrines of Christianity, and still more, perhaps, to some combination of the two. Kierkegaard’s authorial task was to address just such a variety of persons—a task that was as ambitious as it was distinctive. In an authorship famed for polyphony, it is not an exaggeration to say that “the upbuilding” is its cantus firmus.

Conclusion

In closing, it seems appropriate (if also ironic) to register Kierkegaard’s disdain for the kind of material presented here. He writes in an 1848 journal entry,

What I have to say may not be taught; by being taught it turns into something entirely different. What I need is a man who does not gesticulate with his arms up in a pulpit or with his fingers upon a podium, but a person who gesticulates with his entire personal existence [Existents], with the willingness in every danger to will to express in action precisely what he teaches.…Precisely this is the profound untruth in all modern teaching, that there is no notion at all of how thought is influenced by the fact that the one presenting it does not dare to express it in action, that in this very way the flower of the thought or the heart of the thought vanishes and the power of the thought disappears.

Scholars often ascribe such complaints to Kierkegaard’s opposition to the Hegelian system and its concomitant model of philosophy as objective science—an interpretation that is not without merit. And yet, to prioritize this reading is to suggest that Kierkegaard is best defined by what he is against rather than what he is for. It is to treat him as a detractor rather than as an advocate.

Gradually, however, the notion that Kierkegaard is a mere voice of existentialist angst and protest is fading. Since the 1980s, increasing attention has been paid to Kierkegaard’s category of opbyggelse, and there has been a resurgence of interest in Kierkegaard’s mystical-cum-Pietist sources and their influence on his thinking. To say the least, then, Kierkegaard’s connection to and treatment of Christian spirituality is a live issue in the scholarly world, and the upshot is a fuller understanding of the Dane’s work.

I hope this book will contribute to this ongoing development, demonstrating that Kierkegaard wants to provoke existential transformation and to foster Christian holiness. Moreover, in devising and effecting such a project, Kierkegaard finds himself not at the margins of Western thought but, rather, as part of an intellectual tradition that stretches back to antiquity, finds its full flowering in the Christian era, and remains prominent to this day. This is the tradition of spiritual writing, and it boasts some of the most important thinkers in Western history, from Plato and Augustine to Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Ávila. To the extent that this volume encourages one to situate Kierkegaard among their kind, it will have met its aim.

Notes

Maurice O’Connor Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 87–88.

I have treated these issues extensively elsewhere. See, first and foremost, Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

Jørgen Bukdahl, Søren Kierkegaard and the Common Man, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 35.

Kaj Baagø, Vækkelse og Kirkeliv in København og Omegn (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1960), 23.

C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 5.

SKS 27, 292, Pap. 305:3, my translation. Also see Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 346–47.

Garff, Kierkegaard, 176. Also see Joakim Garff, Kierkegaard’s Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen, trans. Alastair Hannay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

See, e.g., Bruce Kirmmse, ed., Encounters with Kierkegaard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 35.

Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 158.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 5.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 5.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 5.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 154.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 158.

Garff, Kierkegaard, 485.

Kirmmse, Encounters with Kierkegaard, 53–54.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 5.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 160. Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Engels, and (according to some reports) Karl Marx likewise attended Schelling’s lectures.

SKS 28, Brev 4 / LD, 141.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 164.

SKS 13, 14 / PV, 496.

SKS 13, 14 / PV, 497.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 315.

SKS 18, 278, JJ 415 / KJN 2, 257.

SKS 20, 19, NB:7 / KJN 4, 16–17.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 7.

Julia Watkin, Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy (Lanham, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2001), 404.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 401.

See, e.g., SKS 22, 298, NB13:37 / JP 6, 6511.

See, e.g., SKS 22, 141, NB11:233.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 401.

Garff, Kierkegaard, 798.

Garff, Kierkegaard, 798.

Quoted in Garff, Kierkegaard, 798.

Garff, Kierkegaard, 798.

SKS 1, 221 / CI, 173.

Watkin, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, 129.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 9.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 9.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 9.

Quoted in Garff, Kierkegaard, 729.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 402.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 405.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 405.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 407.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 407.

Hannay, Kierkegaard, 410.

SKS 13, 248 / M, 197.

SKS 13, 286 / M, 229.

SKS 13, 287 / M, 230.

SKS 13, 288 / M, 230.

SKS 13, 288 / M, 231.

SKS 13, 288 / M, 231.

SKS 24, 197, NB22:172.

LD, 28.

LD, 28.

LD, 28.

LD, 28.

SKS 28, Brev 39 / LD, 26–27.

For more on Brorson and on Kierkegaard’s interest in him, see my “Hans Adolph Brorson: Danish Pietism’s Greatest Hymn Writer and His Relation to Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions—Theology, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 63–80.

Hans Adolph Brorson, Udvalgte salmer og digter, ed. Steffen Arndal (Borgen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 1994), 99–101. Also see SKS 28, Brev 39 / LD, 26–27.

SKS 7, 214 / CUP1, 235.

As will be explained, the notion of “rest” (Hvile/Ro) is an important one in Kierkegaard’s spirituality. Indeed, it is by no means insignificant that his tombstone inscription features “rest” (hvile), in addition to the more celebrated—even stereotypical—Kierkegaardian motifs such as “struggle.”

Sandra M. Schneiders, “Christian Spirituality: Definition, Methods and Types,” in The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Philip Sheldrake (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 1.

Schneiders, “Christian Spirituality, 1.

Schneiders, “Christian Spirituality, 1.

Robert Solomon, “Introduction,” in Existentialism, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.

Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 129.

Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1969), 24.

James Collins, The Existentialists: A Critical Study (Chicago: Regnery, 1952), 2.

Collins, The Existentialists, 3.

Lawrence S. Cunningham and Keith J. Egan, Christian Spirituality: Themes from the Tradition (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1996), 9.

Cunningham and Egan, Christian Spirituality, 14.

Cunningham and Egan, Christian Spirituality, 9–14.

See Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999). Strawser would add, however, that the reverse is also possible. George Pattison, while agreeing with Strawser’s attempt to read Kierkegaard in holistic fashion, nevertheless breaks from “Strawser’s apparent acceptance of a complete equivocation between irony and upbuilding.” See George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology (London: Routledge, 2002), 139.

NB20:175, NB20:175a / JP 3, 3318.

Johann Arndt, True Christianity, ed. and trans. Peter C. Erb (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 39.

Christian Braw, Bücher im Staube: Die Theologie Johann Arndts in ihrem Verhältnis zur Mystik (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 43–44.

Carter Lindberg, “Luther’s Struggle with Social-Ethical Issues,” in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 165.

Lindberg, “Luther’s Struggle with Social-Ethical Issues,” 166.

Dietmar Lage, Martin Luther’s Christology and Ethics (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 60.

Lage, Martin Luther’s Christology and Ethics, 81.

See, e.g., Braw, Bücher im Staube, 80.

Arndt, True Christianity, 30.

Peter C. Erb, “Introduction,” in True Christianity, trans. Peter C. Erb (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 13.

See, e.g., SKS 20, NB2:10 / JP 4, 4598.

See, e.g., SKS 18, JJ:451 / JP 5, 5920.

On this point, see, above all, Andrew Burgess, “Kierkegaard, Moravian Missions, and Martyrdom,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Without Authority, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 177–201.

SKS 8, 64 / TA, 65–66.

SKS 21, NB7:101 / JP 3, 2751.

Pap. IX B 22.

SKS 21, NB7:101 / JP 3, 2751.

These questions remain vital today, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding the so-called Benedict Option. See, e.g., Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2017).

SKS 8, 81 / TA, 84.

SKS 8, 102 / TA, 108.

SKS 8, 85 / TA, 88.

See, e.g., SKS 9, 87 / WL, 81.

SKS 8, 101 / TA, 106, my translation.

SKS 8, 101 / TA, 107.

SKS 8, 102 / TA, 107.

SKS 8, 103–4 / TA, 109.

SKS 8, 104 / TA, 109, my translation.

Robert Ellsberg, “Introduction: Little Brother of Jesus,” in Charles de Foucauld: Essential Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 15.

Ellsberg, “Introduction: Little Brother of Jesus,” 20.

Ellsberg, “Introduction: Little Brother of Jesus,” 21.

Charles de Foucauld, Charles de Foucauld: Essential Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 65.

Charles de Foucauld: Essential Writings, 42.

Charles de Foucauld: Essential Writings, 44.

Charles de Foucauld: Essential Writings, 44.

Charles de Foucauld: Essential Writings, 44.

SKS 7, 505 / CUP1, 556.

SKS 7, 352 / CUP1, 386.

Sylvia Walsh, “Kierkegaard’s Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 295.

SKS 27, Pap. 13:11.

George Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the “Point of Contact” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 49.

SKS 19, Not8:52 / JP 3, 3285.

Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century, 27.

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 10.

Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 252–53.

Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 253.

For more on this topic, see my From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), esp. chap. 2, “Kierkegaard on God, Self, and the Spiritual Journey.”

Quoted in Leslie A. Fiedler, “Introduction,” in Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009), xxiii.

Weil, Waiting for God, 143.

Weil, Waiting for God, 143.

Weil, Waiting for God, 27.

Weil, Waiting for God, 27.

Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. 2, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 1976), 638–39.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 109.

SKS 11, 242 / SUD, 131.

Again, see my From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard for more on this topic. Also see Paul Cruysberghs, “Transparency to Oneself and to God,” in At være sig selv nærværende: Festskrift til Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, ed. Joakim Garff, Ettore Rocca, and Pia Søltoft (Copenhagen: Kristeligt Dagblads Forlag, 2010), 138–39.

SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23, my translation.

Here one might cite the example of Martin Heidegger, who, far from dismissing Kierkegaard’s upbuilding writings as merely devotional, argued that they bear significant philosophical import. As Heidegger once wrote, “There is more to be learned philosophically from Kierkegaard’s ‘edifying’ writings than from his theoretical ones—with the exception of his treatise on the concept of anxiety” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962], 494).

See, e.g., Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–48. As Barthes writes, “[A] text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the ‘Author-God’) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146).

One well-known proponent of this perspective was the late Roger Poole, who argued that Kierkegaard’s “irony and his many-voiced-ness, his heteroglossia, distance him from any position that could be asserted to be finally ‘his’ position” (Roger Poole, “The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-Century Receptions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 48).

Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 14.

Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 14.

Evans, Kierkegaard, 13. It should be noted, however, that some postmodern readings of Kierkegaard do, in fact, stress the socioethical thrust of his authorship. See, e.g., Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).

SKS 27, 396, Pap. 365:12 / JP 1, 649.

Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 18.

SKS 7, 569 / CUP1, 625.

SKS 7, 571 / CUP1, 627.

SKS 13, 14 / PV, 8.

SKS 13, 14 / PV, 8.

Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 21.

SKS 16, 16–17 / PV, 30.

SKS 9, 215 / WL, 212.

SKS 9, 215 / WL, 212.

SKS 9, 215 / WL, 212.

SKS 9, 216 / WL, 213.

SKS 9, 217 / WL, 214.

SKS 9, 12 / WL, 4.

As Paul Müller puts it, “Kierkegaard proves himself a…theologian,—for the sake of upbuilding” (“Begrebet ‘det Opbyggelige’ hos Søren Kierkegaard,” Fønix 7 [1983]: 15).

SKS 9, 219 / WL, 216.

SKS 9, 219 / WL, 216.

SKS, 27, 97, Pap. 58 / JP 2, 1094; SKS, 27, 99, Pap. 62 / JP 2, 1095.

SKS 27, 112, Pap. 92 / JP 2, 1096.

SKS 17, 247, DD:79 / JP 2, 1097.

See, e.g., Rom 8:35–39.

J. Paul Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 10, ed. Leander E. Keck et al. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 955.

Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” 955.

Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians,” 955.

SKS 9, 12 / WL, 3.

For that reason, Kjerlighed is often contrasted with its Danish counterpart, Elskov, which indicates erotic or sensual love. That does not mean, however, that the two are mutually exclusive. For Kierkegaard in particular, Kjerlighed might be seen as the completion of Elskov, since, without Kjerlighed, Elskov cannot be sustained in nonviolent fashion. As he explains, Christianity “has made erotic love a matter of conscience,” since it refuses to reduce love to “drives and inclination” (SKS 9, 142 / WL, 140). Put simply, Christianity also treats the erotic lover as “the neighbor,” whom one is supposed to love as oneself. In this way, the Christian stress on Kjerlighed, which reflects a participation in the nature of God, protects “what was begun on the basis of the erotic” (Watkin, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, 155).

SKS 9, 12 / WL, 3.

SKS 9, 12 / WL, 3–4.

M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22.

SKS 9, 17 / WL, 9.

SKS 9, 13 / WL, 5.

SKS 9, 13 / WL, 5.

SKS 9, 13 / WL, 5.

SKS 9, 13 / WL, 5.

SKS 9, 13 / WL, 5.

SKS 9, 17–18 / WL, 9–10.

SKS 9, 18 / WL, 10.

Kierkegaard develops this insight poignantly later in Works of Love, namely, in the discourse “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins.”

SKS 4, 265–66 / PF, 64.

SKS 4, 266 / PF, 65.

Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 131.

Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith, 208.

Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith, 111.

Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith, 123.

Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith, 123.

SKS 20, 321, NB4:72 / JP 1, 646.

See, e.g., Paul Müller, “Begrebet ‘det Opbyggelige’ hos Søren Kierkegaard,” Fønix 7 (1983): 1–16; Anders Kingo, Den Opbyggelige Tale: En Systematisk-Teologisk Studie over Søren Kierkegaards Opbyggelige Forfatterskab (Copenhagen: Gad, 1987); and Anders Kingo, Analogiens Teologi: En Dogmatisk Studie over Dialektikken i Søren Kierkegaards Opbyggelige og Pseudonyme Forfatterskab (Copenhagen: Gad, 1995). Also see George Pattison, The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Chesham, UK: Acumen, 2005) and especially his Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, cited earlier.

See, e.g., Andrew Burgess, “Kierkegaard, Brorson, and Moravian Music,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Practice in Christianity, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 211–43; Andrew Burgess, “Kierkegaard, Moravian Missions, and Martyrdom,” in Perkins, International Kierkegaard Commentary: Without Authority, 177–201; Peter Šajda, “Kierkegaard’s Encounter with Rhineland-Flemish Mystics: A Case Study,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2009: Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 559–84; Simon Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Simon D. Podmore, Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013); and Peter Kline, Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard’s Apophatic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017).

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