Chapter 4: Politics as Indirect Communication in The Moment and the Attack upon “Christendom”
4
Politics as Indirect Communication in The Moment and the Attack upon “Christendom”
I propose first that Kierkegaard is a political actor and thinker, second that his politics is embodied by his attack upon Christianized culture, and third that this attack is itself an example of indirect communication. Hence the claim of the title: politics as indirect communication in The Moment and the Attack upon “Christendom.”
Any examination of the political dimension to Kierkegaard’s project will have to consider the literature and events which together comprise the final phase of his life where he openly courted controversy with the Danish establishment. Kierkegaard famously eschewed most forms of party politics, however, this does not render him apolitical by any means. His engagement with “Christendom” encompassed a swirl of nationalism, civic identity, language rights, individual freedom, tribal allegiance, religious conscience, monarchy, bishops, revolution, reformation, bourgeois economic aspirations, and the plight of the common man. When The Fatherland published the first article attacking Mynster and Martensen in February 1854, Kierkegaard took a confident stride into the very heart of a perfect storm of politics.
Yet it is a common assumption that this final phase of Kierkegaard’s life is a deviation from the method of indirect communication the earlier Kierkegaard had carefully cultivated. Kierkegaard’s attack, so the feeling runs, is not really Kierkegaardian. Our examination of Kierkegaard’s attack will thus consider the relationship of this latter phase of his career with the earlier: is the pseudonymous, public, and accessible nature of The Moment and other late writings an aberration from the pseudonymous, personal and cryptic authorship? By speaking out loudly in his own name, did Kierkegaard abandon indirect communication? In answer to these questions I argue that Kierkegaard does not abandon indirect communication in his attack. Furthermore, I suggest that a proper recognition of the indirect form that his attack takes is crucial for understanding not only Kierkegaard as a political agent but also a Kierkegaardian political posture applicable today.
To be sure, “indirect communication” as a concept develops throughout the authorship to the point where it looks different in the attack than it does in the works of key pseudonyms such as Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, and yet, it remains “indirect’” all the same. Subsequent pseudonyms bring Kierkegaard to the point where he is able to make his public attack on Christendom without also abandoning his precious category of indirect communication. Indeed, by the time indirect communication reaches its full development, public expression is seen to be a necessary component of indirect communication. The communication of The Moment and other late writings is more than mere printed words directly stating Kierkegaard’s case. The communication adopts an intentionally unbalanced polemic designed to be a corrective. It openly courts the possibility of offense by inviting the readers to look at the incongruous life of the author in order to elicit an emotional and personal choice not based on emulation or objective arguments. It is existential, subjective, and offensive, creating the catalyst for a personal decision regarding one’s allegiance and love, rather than demanding intellectual assent to a set of logical propositions. In other words, it is indirect. Its target is the relationship one has to one’s social context, group affiliation, and the rights and responsibilities that a Christ follower has toward an inherited civic identity and moral order which has become “Christianized.” In other words, it is political. Thus, it is precisely this mode of indirect communication which he adopts at the end of his life that constitutes Kierkegaard’s politics.
A Brief Overview of “Indirect Communication” in the Key Pseudonyms
The literature divides communication into two categories, direct and indirect.115 Johannes de Silentio does not specifically dwell on the definitions, but both Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus understand direct communication as the imparting of knowledge by a legitimate authority, and indirect communication as the communication of capability, in other words, the bringing of each individual to the point where they can make a decision for themselves and in themselves.116 For Johannes de Silentio, true to his name, indirect communication happens through “silence,”117 for Climacus through “double reflection”118 and for Anti-Climacus through “reduplication.”119 With his attack upon Christendom, the possibility of indirect communication as reduplication is extended from a unique mode available only to Christ, to a form of communication embodied by Kierkegaard when he becomes an offensive sign of contradiction to his native culture.120
Communication, to be indirect, must repel the listener to some extent. Johannes de Silentio’s silence repelled would-be followers, forcing them to face God on their own. Climacus’s double reflection repelled followers by forcing them away from the communicator, separating the message from the one giving it. With reduplication, Anti-Climacus presents a new level of indirect communication that also repels listeners, but in a very different way than the previous, non-Christian pseudonyms were repelled. For the religious-ethical Johannes de Silentio, and the religious-intellectual Climacus, what was repelling was not intrinsic to the communicator. The ideal figures of Abraham and Lessing were not men who were fundamentally repellent in themselves. At all times, the otherwise attractive men had to use either silence or double reflection to divert would-be disciples. What repels listeners in the books by Johannes de Silentio and Climacus is not Abraham or Lessing, but the radically individual demands of faith and the incomprehensible and intellectually offensive claims of Christianity. But Anti-Climacus is not concerned with “faith,” or even so much with the religious system that is labeled “Christianity.” Rather, Anti-Climacus is overwhelmingly concerned with the person and life of Jesus Christ. In Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus complains (against Climacus?) that the God-Man has been made into “speculative unity” or turned into “that no-where-to-be-found medium of pure being” instead of seeing that “the God-Man is the unity of God and an individual human being in a historically accurate situation.”121
Anti-Climacus defines reduplication as the teacher existing in the teaching,122 and what is more:
Wherever it is the case that the teacher is an essential component, there is reduplication, the communication is not completely direct paragraph-communication or professor communication. . . . And now, when the teacher, who is inseparable from and more essential than the teaching, is a paradox, then all direct communication is impossible . . . [and] Christ is infinitely more important than his teaching.123
What is potentially repellent for Anti-Climacus is not any idea or demand that Christ communicates. It is Christ himself who “repels” because he exists as a sign of contradiction.124 A sign of contradiction “is a sign that intrinsically contains a qualitative contradiction in itself.”125
The God-Man repels not by avoiding disciples—but by calling them to himself. The incarnation “draws attention to itself and then represents a contradiction.”126 For such a figure, direct communication is shown to be an impossibility.127 This is because even straightforward invitations like “believe in me,”128 are obscured by the intrinsic contradiction inherent in who it is who is doing the speaking. For Jesus Christ there can only be indirect communication, because direct expression involves directly recognizing what the communicator essentially is, an act impossible with the God-Man who is profoundly incognito.129
Jesus Christ is reduplication because he exists as his message. In effect, that message is “I am God,” taking the discrepancy between message and messenger to its extreme:
If someone says directly: “I am God, the Father and I are one,” this is direct communication. But if the person who says it, the communicator, is this individual human being, an individual human being just like others, then this communication is not quite entirely direct. . . . Because of the communicator, the communication contains a contradiction, it becomes indirect communication.130
Christ, precisely because of what he is, simply cannot give a direct communication:
The single direct statement, like the miracle, can serve only to make aware in order that the person who has been made aware, facing the offence of the contradiction, can choose whether he will believe or not.131
Anti-Climacus hints at, but does not develop, the idea that normal humans can embody messages the way that Christ embodies his.132 The reduplication that Kierkegaard will extend to himself and others in his polemic against Christendom is yet to be fully developed in the Anti-Climacean literature. The imitatio Christi (the move from human witness to reduplication) does not occur with any pseudonym, but only with Kierkegaard himself. However, it is by maintaining Anti-Climacus’s vision of reduplication, that Kierkegaard can preserve the precious indirect communication necessary for Christianity, even while descending to a direct war with the established order.
The Attack upon “Christendom” as Indirect Communication
It is false to assume that it is pseudonyms alone that constitute the whole of what it means for Kierkegaard to communicate “indirectly.” Of course, many commentators do hold that when Kierkegaard is writing or speaking out in his own name, the communication is automatically “direct.” This assumption is widespread in popular, accessible research sources133 but also in the secondary academic literature, apparently without there being seen a need to craft an argument to back up this belief. Instead it is simply taken for granted that if Kierkegaard is using his own name, then of course he must be communicating directly.134 The Hongs speak for many when they write: “Whereas the pseudonymous works from Either/Or through Concluding Unscientific Postscript are indirect communication, the signed discourses from first to last are direct.”135
The assumption that writing under Kierkegaard’s own name equals direct communication colors the interpretation of much of Kierkegaard’s private journals and later literature. In opposition to this type of approach, I propose that Kierkegaard’s attack is not an example of direct communication. By drawing attention to his own life and his own inadequacies as an ideal Christian, and by the very polemical and corrective tone of the writings which make up the attack, Kierkegaard shows us that he is not offering up a wholesale version of his views, as if he were a serving boy presenting “Christianity” on a silver platter. Instead, The Moment continues from the precedent set by the previous pseudonymous authors, indirectly communicating an awareness of the responsibility of the listeners to personally appropriate the message.
If you imagine that I am a waiter, then you have never been my reader; if you actually are my reader, then you will understand that I can even regard it as my duty to you that you will be strained a little.136
There are three reasons why the final works should not be interpreted as an abandonment of indirect communication. First, the critique is indirect because it is a corrective, and does not represent a point of view that is independent of other views.137 Direct communication does not require the cooperation of the listener, nor an interaction with any other messages in the public domain, in order to be true.138 This is not the case with the attack, which intentionally adopts an extreme polemic in order to counterbalance the opposite extreme of comfortable Christendom, and whose truth emerges only in conjunction with the faulty message to which the attack is a dialectical partner. Second, the attack is indirect because Kierkegaard eschews followers, actively working to repel would-be pupils.139 Instead, he seeks to make people aware of the choice that is facing them and impress upon them the responsibility that they have to make an honest decision for themselves. The communication is not delivered with complete disregard for the individual (i.e., “objectively”),140 but instead the ultimate fulfillment of the message is found only in the individual’s new awareness of the stark difference between authentic Christianity and Christendom, and the decision that they must make as result of this awareness. Third, and most importantly, the attack is indirect for in his writing and in his life, Kierkegaard himself reduplicates his message, adopting for himself the Christ-mode as the sign of contradiction.141 Jesus Christ’s existence as God and man is the message that contains the possibility of offense, his invitation prompting a choice that can only be either faith or disobedience.142 As such, Kierkegaard calls attention to his life and his own inadequacies in relation to his message. He himself cannot be the model of ideal Christianity that he espouses in his writings. For this reason, Kierkegaard’s message is not “follow me,” but “make a decision,” and his very existence as an offensive, ridiculous and potentially hypocritical fool forces the reader to have to make an honest choice about Christianity that is not based on any direct proof of Kierkegaard’s life.
Very simply—I want honesty. I am not, as some well-intentioned people—I cannot pay attention to the opinions of me held in bitterness and rage and impotence and blather—have wanted to represent me, I am not Christian stringency in contrast to a given Christian leniency. Certainly not. I am neither leniency nor stringency—I am human honesty.143
This must be said; I place no one under obligation to act accordingly—for that I do not have authority. But having heard it you are made responsible and must now act on your own responsibility as you think you can justify it before God.144
To make this position very clear, we will consider the indirect nature of The Moment and other late writings first as a corrective, second as the making aware of responsibility; and finally, as reduplication below.
The Attack upon “Christendom” as Corrective
The Moment reaches the conclusion that not only is Christianity qualitatively different from the world, it is also, by necessity, actively opposed to it.145 In terms of indirect communication, this development can be seen in the attack as a corrective polemic. Although it may seem at first that a polemic can only be direct, in line with the strictures set by the pseudonyms, it is possible to speak forthrightly without thereby also communicating directly. Here, Moment-as-corrective assumes a role along lines Anti-Climacus has already sketched in Practice in Christianity:
If the communication by a communicator is to be direct, then not only the communication must be direct, but the communicator himself must be directly defined. If not, then even the most direct statement by such a communicator still does not—because of the communicator, because of what the communicator is—become direct communication.146
A corrective is an unbalanced response to an unbalanced situation. It is not known apart from the malign context in which it operates. Hence it is not directly defined. It is a straightforward statement which nonetheless remains indirect.
This is the case for this stage in Kierkegaard’s career, which is not an exercise in didactic preaching, but rather dialectic engagement. The extreme of his side of the message is set against the extreme of Christendom’s message, and Kierkegaard does not wish his polemic to be taken as anything other than a corrective. “Take an emetic!” he cries, offering for his part a picture emphasizing the suffering of true Christianity in order to wake people from their comfortable delusions.147 Kierkegaard is not a waiter,148 but a surgeon,149 a fireman,150 and a detective,151 all of whom must deal with what is harmful or unsavory in the service of the greater good. Of the inevitable fallout from his attack on Christendom, Kierkegaard says that “everything must burst so that in this nightmare individuals who are able to bear New Testament Christianity might come again into existence.”152
Christendom, writes Kierkegaard, has stopped Christianity from being a necessary corrective at any given time and place.153 With his polemic, Kierkegaard is redressing the balance of what has been lost. In his attack, Kierkegaard purposely steers clear of even-handed arguments. At one point, he sarcastically alludes to the academic ideal of being able to talk objectively about Christianity without actually having to live by it.154 The assistant professors look down on people who are so “one-sided” that they actually practice what they teach. In opposition to these professors, Kierkegaard says that this sort of one-sidedness is exactly what is needed.155 It is only by being one-sided that Christianity will attain its dialectical purpose as a corrective to Christendom’s one-sidedness, which Kierkegaard identifies as its claims of sophisticated superiority over every other previous culture.156 “Christian” for Kierkegaard is a “polemical concept” and thus “one can be a Christian only in contradistinction or by way of contrast.”157 As a result, he perceives that his task to communicate Christianity in an ostensibly Christian land must be approached indirectly. In an important section apparently overlooked by those who assume that The Moment must be direct as a matter of course, Kierkegaard provides hints toward his own project of one-sided indirect correction:
When Christianity entered the world, the task was to proclaim Christianity directly. . . . In Christendom the relation is different. . . . If Christianity is to be introduced here, then first and foremost the illusion must be removed. . . . [The task] is directed to what can be done to clear up people’s concepts, to instruct them, to stir them by means of the ideals, through pathos to bring them into an impassioned state, to rouse them up with the gadfly sting.158
Ultimately, the purpose of the surgeon’s scalpel, or the sting of the gadfly, is to create pain in order to spark a reaction in an otherwise unresponsive person. In a variation of his “fire-chief” analogy, Kierkegaard claims that strictly speaking he is not the one ringing the alarm, but the one starting the fire.159 With his drastic and unbalanced attack, Kierkegaard is not directly conveying knowledge that his public can take or leave as if it were a self-contained package of Christian information. The information imparted by direct communication does not rely on individual appropriation, or on extenuating circumstances, for it to be true. The corrective message of The Moment however, requires both an extreme state of affairs to which it runs counter, and the cooperative response of its readers, in order to be successful. It is as a corrective that the attack promotes the “coming to awareness” of individual responsibility. It is this “awareness” factor that leads to the second aspect of the attack’s indirect communication. Kierkegaard’s dialectic serves to make individuals aware of the discrepancy between Christendom and Christianity, and once they are aware it is they who are responsible for deciding about what they will do about it.
The Attack upon “Christendom” as Making Aware
That Kierkegaard is not leading a reform movement or asking for followers, but is instead foisting the responsibility for change back onto his listeners, is another mark of the attack’s indirect communication:
As for myself, I am not . . . a reformer, in no way, nor am I a profound speculative intellect, a seer, a prophet—no, I have, if you please, to a rare degree I have a definite detective talent.160
Unlike the one leading a movement, the detective merely brings the facts to light, leaving it to others to take the necessary action suggested by the uncovered truth.161 Even when Kierkegaard began to write in The Moment, his own self-published magazine, he fought to dissuade followers. Preferring the purity of the “separateness of singleness,” Kierkegaard considers it his task to avert popular movements in his name.162 In a subsequent edition, Kierkegaard urges his readers not to subscribe to his magazine, preferring that people think twice instead of acting from a misplaced and hot-headed rebellious zeal.163 “Do believe me,” he implores, “I do not involve myself with you in a finite sense at all, [I] do not seek to draw you to me in order to found a party, etc. No, I am only religiously doing my duty.”164 Although he is obviously concerned with Christianity, Kierkegaard does not identify himself as one,165 for that would propel him into the sphere of the religious reformer or evangelical revivalist. “I do not participate in changing what Christianity is in order thereby to obtain millions of Christians.”166
What then, does Kierkegaard want? “Very simply—I want honesty [Redelighed].”167 It has been a temptation of some theologically minded readers to paint a picture of Kierkegaard in this final phase as being a champion of Christianity and a declaimer of the Christian message. Besides the aberration that this makes of The Moment regarding direct communication, it also deviates from the attitude to Christianity found throughout the pseudonymous works. There, the pseudonyms agree that whatever else Christianity might be, at the very least whatever is authentic about it is not something that needs to be preached, demonstrated or defended. As Anti-Climacus says in Sickness Unto Death:
Therefore it is certain and true that the first one to come up with the idea of defending Christianity in Christendom is de facto a Judas No. 2: he too, betrays with a kiss. . . . To defend something is always to disparage it.168
To assume that with his attack Kierkegaard takes on the role of apologist extraordinaire is to assign to the author a position completely at odds with anything that has come before. Instead, it should always be kept in mind Kierkegaard’s insistence that he is promoting “honesty,” not “Christianity” as such. “I am not Christian stringency in contrast to a given Christian leniency. Certainly not, I am neither leniency nor stringency—I am human honesty.”169 Thus, Kierkegaard is not a churchman, fighting for one particular Christian denomination or interpretation over another.
I am not saying that it is for Christianity I venture—suppose, just suppose that I become quite literally a sacrifice. I would still not become a sacrifice for Christianity but because I wanted honesty.170
Despite his consistent claims that he is not a Christian, however, it is still appropriate to speak of Kierkegaard as having a Christian direction to his work. With his abandonment of the title “Christian” for polemical reasons, Kierkegaard was not signifying that he was no longer interested in the authentic concerns of the faith. To interpret Kierkegaard as some sort of proto-atheist by treating as direct communication his claims that he was not a Christian, is again to ignore the setting in which this particular jewel of a phrase inheres.171 Such phrases cannot be read in isolation from the larger body of work that makes up Kierkegaard’s task. It is the whole authorship and the ascent through the stages that looms in the background when we read:
But although I do not dare say that I venture for Christianity, I remain fully and blissfully convinced that this, my venturing, is pleasing to God, has his approval. Indeed I know it; it has his approval that in a world of Christians where millions and millions call themselves Christians—that there one person expresses: I do not dare call myself a Christian; but I want honesty, and to that end I will venture.172
As an alternative to the millions of Christians who have not individually faced the possibility of offense, Kierkegaard would rather open and honest rebellion against God than the hypocritical religion of Christendom.173
So let there be light on this matter, let it become clear to people what the New Testament understands by being a Christian, so that everyone can choose whether he wants to be a Christian or whether he honestly, plainly, forthrightly does not want to be that.174
The Moment retains as all-important the choice that the individual must make. The events and writings that make up the attack upon Christendom cannot therefore be thought of as an example of direct communication. Direct communication does not rely on the receiver for it to have achieved its aim. The direct communicator can, like a “barker of subjectivity,” didactically pronounce his knowledge from a street corner.175 His message does not change whether anyone is listening or not, because his message is made up of facts and information. If, in his polemic, Kierkegaard were only promoting the existence of a particular factual version of Christianity, then he too would be a street barker. However, unlike water, which remains the same no matter whether it is drawn by tap or by well, honest Christianity is not indifferent to the way that it is obtained.176 Kierkegaard cries for “honesty,” a goal that necessarily requires the cooperation of the listening public. The content of Kierkegaard’s attacking message is that Christianity is no more, and that people must face this, either continuing in honest and open defiance of God, or, in honesty, submitting themselves to the possibility of authentic faith through the possibility of offense.177 Kierkegaard is not handing down knowledge as a guru to his disciples, but he is instead making his listeners aware of the responsibility that they have toward the faith they claim to own and the society that uses religious language while denying its power.
In keeping with his aversion to followers, or to being cast as a reformer, Kierkegaard repeatedly throws his audience back into their own resources. After alluding to his own authorship in general, and of the unspoken implications of Practice in Christianity in particular, Kierkegaard says of the former head of “official” Christianity that “I have not pronounced judgment upon Bishop Mynster, no, but in the hands of Governance I became the occasion for Bishop Mynster to pronounce judgment upon himself.”178
Kierkegaard extends the onus of the decision onto all who attend to his message:
This must be said; I place no one under obligation to act accordingly—for that I do not have authority. But by having heard it you are made responsible and must now act on your own responsibility as you think you can justify it before God.179
Having been made aware by the fireman, the surgeon, the detective, and the gadfly, Christendom’s citizens can no longer remain content with the soporific herd mentality. Kierkegaard makes it personal, presenting to the individual the stark reality of their situation, a choice of submission of defiance. Taken as a whole, the pseudonymous works, the edifying discourses, the unpublished journals and the prayers and comments during his attack provide ample evidence as to Kierkegaard’s opinion of which choice was preferred. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s message is not to choose Christ but simply to choose. “You yourself, then, bear and have to bear the responsibility for how you act, but you have been made aware!”180 It is only with this primary communication clearly in mind that we can turn to Kierkegaard’s idea of what the responsibility of living up to the “Christian” moniker implies. Building mostly from work done previously in Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard provides his opinion of what the opposite of honest defiance would look like. Having been made aware, the individual’s responsibility for honest obedience follows only one pattern, “the responsibility is this: imitation of Jesus Christ.”181
The Attack upon “Christendom” as Reduplication
How Kierkegaard brings about the moment [Øiblikket] at which the individual becomes aware of his responsibility for a decision is wrapped up with Kierkegaard’s own particular imitation of Christ. In PC, it was seen that the process of reduplication occurred when the messenger existed as the message.182 Anti-Climacus was keen to shift attention away from the possibility of this sort of indirect communication for normal humans, and instead focused on Christ as the unique example of reduplication.183 Jesus Christ effectively declares that he is God, inviting all men to “Come here . . . and I will give you rest”;184 yet the being saying this is a lowly human. Thus, the contemporaneous individual is faced with the moment of having to choose whether he will accept or reject the invitation as it stands. In the realm of Christian faith, there is no automatic, logically necessary conclusion. Miracles and other “proofs” do not help, as the choice must be made by faith alone—in fact, Anti-Climacus points out that demonstrations of the divine only serve to emphasize the potential offensiveness of having the holy coexist with the human.185
By the time of his attack, Kierkegaard personally appropriates the formerly unique Christ-mode of reduplication, making himself stand as a sign of contradiction, a sign that creates the moment when individuals become aware of the choice facing them. It is because of reduplication that Kierkegaard can make such direct statements under his own name, and yet the communication of The Moment remains indirect. It is argued that like Christ, Kierkegaard draws attention to himself, effectively making the disparity that exists between him and his message part of the message.186 Christ embodied the communication that people must have faith that God has appeared in human form. Kierkegaard’s communication is less cosmically drastic, but no less reduplicated—“I am human honesty.”187
Roger Poole, in his book Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, makes a similar argument toward seeing Kierkegaard’s embodiment as reduplication. Poole chooses to base his arguments on the events surrounding Kierkegaard’s death, devoting most of his chapter on the final events of Kierkegaard’s life not on the events of the attack but instead on the personal reflections of Kierkegaard’s friends who were with him in the end.188 It is Poole’s intention to demonstrate that Kierkegaard imitated Christ to those around him, thanks to the marriage of irascible outspokenness and a personally meek and gentle demeanor. Poole makes much of various eyewitness accounts that Kierkegaard appeared to emanate a sort of glowing, peaceful aura at the end of his life, thus demonstrating his ability to embody contradictory messages.189 It is curious that Poole veers off into this sort of speculation, indulging in secondary, ethereal memoirs to prove his point when there is much better information closer to hand in Kierkegaard’s final writing. In a similar vein, Michael Strawser rightly argues that Kierkegaard’s “religious” works are not necessarily more direct than his “philosophical” ones,190 but Strawser too chooses to focus on sources other than The Moment. In his case, Strawser argues for a more “indirect” reading of Kierkegaard by successfully demonstrating that aesthetic and philosophical themes run throughout the early non-pseudonymous texts like the Edifying Discourses.191 However, just as it is for Poole, it is a problem for Strawser’s argument that he does not deal with The Moment, Kierkegaard’s most supposedly direct communication. It seems that even for those critics who question much of the received wisdom on Kierkegaard, the tradition of ignoring the attack remains unchallenged.
This is a shame, for a wealth of information can be found in these final texts supporting the claim that Kierkegaard’s last public pronouncements were indirect, not despite their public nature, but because of it. We begin with Kierkegaard’s view that there is only one requirement from Christ and the apostles: imitation.192 This Kierkegaard explicitly identifies as “suffering,” because truth always suffers in this sinful, hypocritical, selfish world: “Christianity is the suffering truth because it is the truth and is in this world.”193 Christ’s mode of being is thus extended to his followers, in that their existence is a suffering on the earth: “That one has faith can be demonstrated in only one way: by being willing to suffer for one’s faith.”194 The Christ-imitation of suffering makes up one aspect of the final development of “offence.”195
But suffering also has communicative properties. Christ’s followers embody the life of abasement in order to serve the particular needs of proclaiming Christianity in Christendom.196 According to Kierkegaard, God wants Christianity to be proclaimed unconditionally to everyone, which is why the apostles were simple, ordinary people and why Christ the prototype (Forbillede) is in the lowly form of a servant. “All this to indicate that this extraordinary is the ordinary, is open to all.”197 Christendom stopped looking at Christ as the prototype and saw him instead only as the Redeemer. “Instead of looking at him with respect to imitation, they dwelt on his good works and wished to be in the place of those to whom they were shown.”198
The implication of this for the communication of Christianity in Christendom is that the “suffering servant” is the message. A “suffering servant” is political insofar as the suffering is directed from the settled masters to the unsettled subservient. Suffering and servanthood here necessarily presume orders of hierarchy, notions of common good, reward, station and the like. The suffering of the servant does not happen in azure isolation apart from the mores of the society against which he has offended. Christianly, this works itself out in the authentic follower of Christ who, by his or her very existence, provokes in the polity the opportunity to choose either faith or social offense by presenting the stark difference between Christ and the comfort of culture. It is important for Kierkegaard that it is ordinary, lowly people who imitate Christ, and consequently act, in their very humbleness, as the sign of contradiction and the possibility of offense.199 Although he himself an active member of Denmark’s intellectual and artistic circles, Kierkegaard stressed his connection to ordinary folk, distancing himself from his successful sophisticated peers.
You common man! I have not segregated my life from yours, you know that; I have lived on the street, am known by all. Furthermore, I have not become somebody. . . . So if I belong to anyone, I must belong to you common man.200
In an effort to draw out Kierkegaard’s political applicability to a nonreligious readership, commentators such as Bruce Kirmmse and Jørgen Bukdahl make much of these times when Kierkegaard identifies himself with the proletariat.201 Yet the passages cannot be used to support a separation of Kierkegaard’s Christian concerns from his (secular) political ones, for the whole point of Kierkegaard’s sociopolitical humility is that it serves as his imitation of Jesus Christ. Kierkegaard, like Christ, draws attention to himself, but also like Christ, his very being acts as a stumbling block to the message that he is proclaiming. Following the development of indirect communication in the pseudonyms, Kierkegaard moves from his previous style, which took the form of double reflection via multiple characters, to the point where Kierkegaard does not seek to distance himself from his message. Yet Kierkegaard is not abandoning indirect communication, for consistently throughout his attack, whenever he asks people to look at his life as if he were an example, Kierkegaard at the same time highlights his own inadequacies for the role that has been foisted upon him.202 The failure of Kierkegaard to live up to the ideal that he himself is communicating acts as an instance of Christ-like reduplication, with the same implications applying to his indirect message as those that applied to Christ’s. The listener is not asked to believe the message based on outward, quantifiable reasons, but is, in Kierkegaardian terms initially “drawn in” and then “thrust back upon himself,” required to make an honest decision not clouded by attractively compelling appearances.
Over and over again, passages in The Moment repeat a similar pattern, with Kierkegaard initially drawing attention to himself, only to quickly emphasize his own failures and inadequacies. Calling specific attention to the “circumstances of my own life”203 which have made him more aware than others of authentic Christianity, Kierkegaard then immediately backs down from claiming himself as a Christian example.204 Kierkegaard is reduplicating the message of awareness, not of Christianity. This fact is reinforced when he again draws attention to himself as the one who has the honor of setting forth the idea of contemporaneity which results in awareness, and then quickly reminds his readers that he did not invent the idea—the New Testament did.205 Kierkegaard justifies his qualification to write as he does about Christianity, boasting that by his many years as an author and by his “life as a public personality,” he is entitled to join in the discussion about what Christianity is.206 Kierkegaard then quickly nullifies his own boast by going on to address the fact of his ongoing public mockery, reminding his readers that the name “Søren” was being used by his enemies as a euphemism for Satan.207 At times, Kierkegaard holds up his reputation as a famous firebrand and poet, and then says that after all he is possibly “entirely superfluous” and “something quite minor,”208 someone who can write about something without understanding it himself.209 Elsewhere, Kierkegaard predicts that he will fail to be understood, and that his attack will not prevail.210 Anyone who knows him, Kierkegaard says, knows that he is not committing himself to his attack out of skill or interest in party politics.211 As a writer and public figure, the attack is not earning him any money or prestige, a fact that is clearly evident to everyone.212 Even when claiming for himself the highest accolade of them all—that he was chosen by Governance and slowly brought up for the special task of the attack—still Kierkegaard refers to his powerlessness and impotence.213
Significantly, Kierkegaard takes himself out from under the protection of sociopolitical respectability by refusing to call himself a Christian.214 In terms of indirect communication, Kierkegaard makes himself a stumbling block by applying the judgment of his own message to himself.215 One cannot accuse Kierkegaard of hypocritically setting standards that he himself does not abide by, for he is very aware that his one thesis that there are no Christians in Christendom applies equally to him as to anyone else. Kierkegaard is complicit in Christendom, he does not claim to have the passion “that belongs to being involved with God alone in the most complete separation.”216 As a detective, Kierkegaard can see more clearly than others do their shared state of affairs: “What makes me shudder is this . . . it occurs to no one, no one that by being human beings they are indeed subject to the same conditions as I am, that the accounting of eternity awaits them also.”217
After Kierkegaard’s death, the tenth and final volume of The Moment was found among his papers, among the last words he ever wrote, completed and ready for publication.218 This volume is perhaps the most important text for examining the role that reduplication as indirect communication played in Kierkegaard’s life because it stresses Kierkegaard’s reasons for not calling himself a Christian. In a section entitled “My Task,” he writes: “I do not call myself a Christian; I do not speak of myself as a Christian. It is this that I must continually repeat; anyone who wants to understand my very special task must concentrate on being able to hold this firm.”219
He knows that this seems a strange thing for him to continually repeat, obviously concerned as he is with Christ, yet in the world which has turned this term into blather, a stand such as his must be made.220 Saying that he is not a Christian takes a certain respectability and power away from Kierkegaard, thus making him into the right kind of vessel for the communication that he has to make. He refers to the omnipotent power who “especially uses my powerlessness” and who would have no use for him if he changed his statement and decided to identify himself as a Christian after all.221 Kierkegaard says that he wants to “keep the ideal free.”222 For this reason:
I do not call myself a Christian. That this is very awkward for the sophists I understand very well, and I understand very well that they would much rather see that with kettledrums and trumpets I would proclaim myself to be the only true Christian, and I also understand very well that an attempt is being made to represent my conduct falsely in this way.223
Kierkegaard directly calls attention to himself, and he openly speaks his mind, yet his communication remains indirect, because it is intimately concerned with the response of his listeners. By his very being, Kierkegaard stands at odds with the picture of authentic Christianity that he conjures up in The Moment, but it is by this discrepancy that Kierkegaard embodies his message calling people to make an honest decision. Kierkegaard is well aware that he is making a public fool of himself,224 but this would only detract from his message if he were directly preaching Christianity. Instead, the circumstances of Kierkegaard’s life serve to prevent any listener from making a choice for the wrong reasons. No one can accuse Kierkegaard of making the Christian life look appealing, or of setting himself up as some sort of charismatic popular leader. It is Kierkegaard’s task to bring his readers to awareness of their own responsibility for making an honest choice about Christianity in Christendom. “In my books, I have pursued my task, and with my being and my authorship I am a continual attack on the whole Mynsterian proclamation of Christianity.”225 Just as Christ’s human life acted as the possibility of offense and the catalyst for faith, so too Kierkegaard appropriates the reduplication model, using his own life to provoke a response that can only be either a continued life of hypocrisy, or an honest appraisal of Christianity. By acting as a polemic corrective in order to make people aware of the choice facing them, and by doing this using his own life as the sign of contradiction, Kierkegaard’s attack is not an aberration from his previous work, but instead it represents the final development of Kierkegaard’s indirect communication.
Conclusion
It is with his final attack upon Christendom that Kierkegaard extends to himself and others the possibility of becoming a sign of contradiction, an act of reduplication. Because it is a straightforward, non-pseudonymous polemic, the received wisdom of the secondary literature is that the material from this stage marks Kierkegaard’s embrace of direct communication. However, in opposition to this assumption, I proposed that the attack and its written material is indirect for three reasons. First, it is a corrective, part of a dialectic whose meaning is not “self-contained.”226 Second, it is not a reformation manifesto, calling for followers, but instead actively repels people in order to make them aware of the honest choice they have to make regarding Christianity in Christendom.227 Third, it is not direct communication because it is an example of Kierkegaardian reduplication.228 Although he is forthright in his own name, because of who Kierkegaard is, his communication is rendered indirect. Like Jesus Christ, Kierkegaard stands as a sign of offense, embodying his own message and thus his audience is faced with an either/or decision. By following the development of the theme through the authorship, it is apparent that the final attack is a natural culmination of Kierkegaard’s project, the practical working out of Anti-Climacus’s pure vision of reduplication and the fulfillment of authentic Christian communication within Christendom. This communication, although public and polemical, nevertheless remains “indirect” precisely because it involves lived praxis on behalf of the communicator (Kierkegaard) and demands participation from the audience (the Reader). The attack does not contain the truth but instead creates the opportunity for the possibility of offense. It is in the listener’s response that the truth will be known. Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom is an assault on the assumed morals and inherited affections of his readers, an intentionally unbalanced corrective, which, if received, will invariably lead to consequences that are overtly social, economic and political.
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115. For examples, see the story of the king who tries to communicate his love to a peasant girl in Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 26–32; Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 72–80, 242–50; Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 127–36.
116. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 75; Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 142.
117. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 14, 23, 38–41, 53, 82–120.
118. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 72–118, 251–300.
119. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 123–27, 131–32, 133–36.
120. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 15, 20–25, 38, 42, 46, 60, 74, 78, 83–84, 135, 180–82, 197, 213, 290, 311–12, 316, 321, 324, 333, 329–54.
121. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 123.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid., 123–24.
124. Ibid., 124–28, 132, 134–36, 141.
125. Ibid., 124.
126. Ibid., 126.
127. Ibid., 127, 133–39.
128. Ibid., 135, quoting John 14:1.
129. Ibid., 131–32.
130. Ibid., 134.
131. Ibid., 136.
132. Ibid., 129–31.
133. See, e.g., the entries on Kierkegaard in the peer-reviewed IEP (Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) and the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. A notable exception is the online resources provided by D. Anthony Storm.
134. Examples are legion, including but not confined to the early days of English Kierkegaardian scholarship. Sample commentators include: Arbaugh and Arbaugh, Authorship; Blanchot, Faux Pas; Brookfield, “What Was Kierkegaard’s Task,” 23–35; Damgaard, “Biblical Variations”; Dunning, “Who Sets the Task?,” 18–33; Elrod, Kierkegaard and Christendom; McCombs Paradoxical; McCracken, Scandal; Pojman, Logic; Sponheim, Kierkegaard on Christ and Christian Coherence; Stocker, Kierkegaard on Politics. Two notable recent exceptions include Mooney, “Pseudonyms and ‘Style,’” and Westfall, Kierkegaardian Author.
135. These sentiments have been widely influential in the reception history of Kierkegaard. Cf. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, xi. The Hongs also include the Anti-Climacus works Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity among the number of self-penned, and therefore in their opinion, directly communicated, works. In the translator’s introduction to Fear and Trembling, the Hongs equate “indirection” with pseudonymity (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, x). In this the Hongs do not substantially depart from the earlier translator, Walter Lowrie. Lowrie says that Kierkegaard’s final period “amounts to a retraction of the pseudonyms and the whole elaborate apparatus of ‘indirect communication.’” Lowrie, Short Life, 187, but also 172, 175, 176, and 198. On Kierkegaard’s frankness of speech as his supposed aversion to indirect communication, see the translator’s introductions to Attack upon “Christendom,” xv; Sickness Unto Death, 138; Point of View, xxiv. See also Kierkegaard, 1:271–80, esp. 277, and 286–90; Kierkegaard, 2:467.
136. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 106.
137. Ibid., 12, 24, 34, 40–41, 51, 67, 99–100, 106–7, 130, 143, 211, 217–20, 226, 335.
138. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 73–76.
139. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 13, 29, 33–34, 40, 46, 48–49, 73–74, 76, 97, 101, 110, 130, 197, 212, 236, 336–37, 340–47.
140. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 75.
141. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 15, 20, 23, 25, 38, 42, 46, 60, 74, 78, 83–84, 135, 180–82, 197, 213, 290, 311–12, 316, 321, 324, 333, 329–54.
142. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 35–36, 75–83, 94, 119, 102–3, 121.
143. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 46.
144. Ibid., 73.
145. Ibid., 17, 20, 39, 109, 143, 149, 162, 168–69, 170, 188, 206, 222, 226, 257, 321, 332. 334.
146. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 134, emphasis added. See also 134–36.
147. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 99–100, also 211.
148. Ibid., 106.
149. Ibid., 12, 24.
150. Ibid., 217–20.
151. Ibid., 40, 130, 226.
152. Ibid., 34.
153. Ibid., 41.
154. Ibid., 194.
155. Ibid., 67.
156. Ibid., 335.
157. Ibid., 143.
158. Ibid., 107, emphasis added.
159. Ibid., 51.
160. Ibid., 40, see also 34.
161. Ibid., 40.
162. Ibid., 76.
163. Ibid., 101.
164. Ibid., 197.
165. Ibid., 46–49, 143, 212–13, and esp. 340–43.
166. Ibid., 212.
167. Ibid., 46.
168. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 87. See also Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 43; Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 46–49; and Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 26–31, where Anti-Climacus calls the attempt to defend Christianity “blasphemy.”
169. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 46.
170. Ibid., 49.
171. The idea that Kierkegaard was an aware and active non-believer, or was at least on his way to becoming one, has its roots in Kierkegaard’s first biographer. Georg Brandes, friend of Nietzsche and chronicler of Kierkegaard’s life, celebrated the Dane as a potential atheist “free thinker” in his Danmark. Two examples of arguments that Kierkegaard was never a Christian come from Usher, Journey and Zuidema, Kierkegaard.
172. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 49. In ibid., 33, Kierkegaard says that to some he appears to be an atheist, but he has God on his side. See also Kierkegaard, “My Task,” 340–47, in the last issue of The Moment, which was fully prepared, but not published in Kierkegaard’s lifetime.
173. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 48.
174. Ibid., 97.
175. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 77.
176. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 110; Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 73–75.
177. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 29, 48, 49, 74, 97, 236.
178. Ibid., 13.
179. Ibid., 73.
180. Ibid., 236. See also ibid., 29, 74, 97, 336.
181. Ibid., 337.
182. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 123.
183. Compare ibid., 129–31, with 36, 123–24, and 134–35.
184. Matt 11:28.
185. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 96–97.
186. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 23, 25, 38, 60, 74, 78, 83, 213, 290, 311–12, 333, 340.
187. Ibid., 46.
188. Poole, Kierkegaard, ch. 9.
189. The deathbed accounts of Kierkegaard’s nephew Troels Lund and of Lund’s niece Henriette are recounted in Poole, Kierkegaard, 274–81.
190. Strawser, Both/And, ch. 8.
191. Ibid., 177.
192. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 42, 135, 316.
193. Ibid., 321.
194. Ibid., 324.
195. Ibid., 292. See also 31, 42, 135, 148, 182, 321, and 332.
196. Ibid., 20.
197. Ibid., 180.
198. Ibid., 182.
199. Ibid., 334.
200. Ibid., 346, also 84.
201. Bukdahl, Søren Kierkegaard; Kirmmse, Kierkegaard, 481.
202. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 23, 25, 38, 60, 74, 78, 83, 213, 290, 311–12, 333, 340.
203. Ibid., 213.
204. Ibid.
205. Ibid., 290.
206. Ibid., 311.
207. Ibid.
208. Ibid., 25.
209. Ibid., 38.
210. Ibid., 23, also 312.
211. Ibid., 60.
212. Ibid., 74. See also esp. 78, which begins a section that reminds readers of Kierkegaard’s miserable life during the time of writing.
213. Ibid., 83.
214. Ibid., 46–49, 143, 212–13, and esp. 340–43.
215. Ibid., 197.
216. Ibid., 332.
217. Ibid.
218. Vol. 10 is printed as an appendix in ibid., 329–54.
219. Ibid., 340.
220. Ibid.
221. Ibid.
222. Ibid., 341.
223. Ibid., 340–41.
224. Ibid., 311, 333.
225. Ibid., 15, emphasis added.
226. Ibid., 12, 24, 34, 40–41, 51, 67, 99–100, 106–7, 130, 143, 211, 217–20, 226, 335.
227. Ibid., 13, 29, 33–34, 40, 46, 48–49, 73–74, 76, 97, 101, 110, 130, 197, 212, 236, 336–37, 340–47.
228. Ibid., 15, 20, 23, 25, 38, 42, 46, 60, 74, 78, 83–84, 135, 180–82, 197, 213, 290, 311–12, 316, 321, 324, 333, 329–54.