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Kierkegaard, What it means to seek God.8

09 Saturday Oct 2021

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This brings us to the conclusion of Kierkegaard’s discourse. There are a few related concepts here, all which revolve around the central idea of meeting God:

“God is near enough, but no one can see God without purity, and sin is impurity, and therefore no one can take cognizance of God without becoming a sinner.”

This matter of seeing oneself as a sinner is not a matter of being made to feel guilty by a skillful orator. “A fear and trembling inspired by abomination of religious debauch is not true fear and trembling.” A true sense of sin, as Kierkegaard will explain concerns one actual coming to be before God, “If he learns to know that he is a sinner, then it happens that he learns it, just he, by being alone with the Holy One….Whoever is alone with the consciousness of sin, will indeed feel himself, yet not by comparison with others, to the greatest sinner, for he will be conscious of himself as an individual, and he will feel himself the essential magnitude of his sin in the presence of the Holy One.”

In this place of being confronted with God, one comes to the place of true worship, “Learn first to be alone, thus you will true worship which is to think highly of God, and humbly of yourself.” 

What really strikes in this discussion is the reality of the meeting of God. This is not a meeting in a crowd; it is a meeting of the individual with God. And while the Church is not a collection of bare individuals, there is a striking element of being an individual when it comes to confession. 

In this element of confession, Kierkegaard seems to have something of this passage in mind:

Zechariah 12:10–14 (ESV) 

10 “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn. 11 On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad-rimmon in the plain of Megiddo. 12 The land shall mourn, each family by itself: the family of the house of David by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of the house of Nathan by itself, and their wives by themselves; 13 the family of the house of Levi by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of the Shimeites by itself, and their wives by themselves; 14 and all the families that are left, each by itself, and their wives by themselves. 

An emphasis on reality of this confrontation is underscored by a parable used by Kierkegaard. He speaks of a ship’s pilot who has studied in books how to rightly handle a ship in a storm, who the confronts an actual storm at sea. It is the reality of the experience, not the speculation of the knowledge which matters. It is a matter of appropriation, “a mature person learns only by appropriation, and he appropriates essentially only that which is essential to living.”

In his comparison of the false fear and trembling brought about by the “thundering” of a skillful preacher and true conviction brought about a confrontation with the living God, Kierkegaard reminds me of the Puritan distinction between legal and evangelical conviction.  Legal conviction brings a kind of despair without hope; it is the condemnation of the law without rescue:

Despair is the result of strong legal convictions, urging the sentence of the law against us, without any consideration of gospel-grace for our relief and succour. This works great consternation, fills the soul with amazing fears, shuts it up in a dark dungeon, claps it in irons, binds it hand and foot, and so leaves it under a fearful expectation of fiery indignation to devour it. 

James Nichols, Puritan Sermons, vol. 2 (Wheaton, IL: Richard Owen Roberts, Publishers, 1981), 515. Stephen Charnock explains the difference between the two: 

A legal conviction ariseth from a consideration of God’s justice chiefly, an evangelical from a sense of God’s goodness. A legally convinced person cries out, I have exasperated a power that is as the roaring of a lion, a justice that is as the voice of thunder; I have provoked one that is the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, whose word can tear up the foundations of the world with as much ease as he established them. This is the legal conviction. But an evangelically convinced person cries, I have incensed a goodness that is like the dropping of the dew; I have offended a God that had the deportment of a friend, rather than that of a sovereign. I have incurred the anger of a judge, saith a legalist; I have abused the tenderness of a father, saith an evangelically convinced person. Oh my marble, my iron heart, against a patient, wooing God, a God of bowels! It makes every review of acts of kindness to be a sting in the conscience; it makes such a person miserable by mercy, and scorches him with the beams of goodness; turns the honey into a bitter pill, and useth a branch of the balsam tree as a rod wherewith to lash him. O wretch, to run from so sweet a fountain to rake in puddles! to rush into a river of brimstone, through a sea of goodness! What a cut is it, when ingenuity is awakened, to reject a natural goodness, much more an infinite goodness; to reject the goodness of a man, much more that of a God; the goodness of a friend never provoked, much more the goodness of a God that had been so highly incensed! There is a torture of hell in both, kindled by the breath of the Lord; in the one by the breath of his wrath, in the other by the breath of his goodness. One is inflamed by justice to a sense of rebellion, the other by goodness to a sense of his own vileness. This is that which was promised should be in gospel times, that in the latter days men should fear the Lord and his goodness, Hos. 3:5. That is a true evangelical conviction, that springs from a thorough sense of God’s goodness, when the goodness of God excites ingenuity, as well as the majesty of God strikes a terror.

Stephen Charnock, The Complete Works of Stephen Charnock, vol. 4 (Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; James Nisbet and Co.; W. Robertson; G. Herbert, 1864–1866), 199. 

Kierkegaard seems to address the same topic but from the experience of the one confronted by God. The discussion is not doctrinal but existential. 

By comparing the two explanations of the same events gives us a fuller understanding. 

Kierkegaard, What it means to seek God.7 The existential crisis

07 Thursday Oct 2021

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This brings us to the existential crisis which lies so importantly at the crux of Kierkegaard’s thought. (Now those who have much greater expertise may identify a different controlling idea in the Dane’s thinking, and will defer to their greater knowledge. But from what I have read, this seems to be the motivating conceit).

The one who, by reason, no longer experiences Romantic Wordsworthian Wonder at a flower or shadowy forrest, finds himself in a strange place. At this point, we know that there things which could inspire a lesser wonder and a lesser fear: a fear of an angel or devil; or a fear of some terror in the world. But all such fears can at most lead to superstition.

But there is a true and wonder and a true fear which can be experienced when the false fears are cleared away.

“True wonder and fear first appear only when he, just he, whether greatest or humblest, is alone with the omnipresent God.”

True wonder and fear fear appear only when he, just he, whether greatest or humblest, is alone with the omnipresent God

It matters nothing who the human being is when confronted with this God. All things in the creature matter nothing: that confrontation with God is a confrontation of pure fear and wonder. This fear and wonder are secure from an assault of reason: reason can merely clear away the creaturely wonders and fears.

“The experience here described was once the lot of every man in the moment of decision, when the sickness of the spirit struck in, and he felt himself imprisioned in existence, everlasting imprisoned.” What he means by this everlasting imprisonment I think must be mean the apparent inability to move past this confrontation.

The thought becomes particularly opaque (at least to me), but the sense seems to be unless one is changed at this confrontation, there is an imprisonment. This is the confrontation of “fear and trembling” and movement to the stage of faith (the “leap”).

Here is the salient passage, “Therefore the thing sought exists, the seeker himself was the place [because we find God in faith in the confession of sin — as will be explained later], but he is change, changed from having once been the place whether the thing sought was [this is the movement in the thought which I find confusing]. Oh, now there is no wonder, no ambiguity! When the soul apprehends this, its condition is fear and trembling in the consciousness of guilt, passion in the sorrow following remembrance, love in the repentance of the prodigal.”

I am not quite sure about that clause of the seeker having once been the place. But the remainder makes sense: this existential confrontation of the living God is the confrontation of a realization that of my guilt and of knowing that I am loved in the confession of and repentance from sin. It is the paradoxical moment of grace: that I am received precisely in the moment I realize I am bound to be cast-off.

God justifies the ungodly; God shows love for the unlovely. Indeed, it is precisely when one realizes one’s complete unworthiness that the Father welcomes in the prodigal and gives him the robe and the ring and fattened calf. If that moment is achieved, there is nothing in human existence which can equal it for importance.

There is one final note which to make about this section of the discourse concerning apologetics. It is a brief section, but it is worth considering. Someone may “wish” to say, “it is so hard to find Him [God] that some men even prove that He exists, and find evidence necessary.” At this point, one could accuse Kierkegaard of pure fideism: he merely asserts God exists. But he continues on at this point in a way which I think is helpful when we consider apologetics. “Let the work of proving it be hard and especially troublesome for him who tries to understand that it proves anything; for the author of the proof, it is easy because he has place himself outside, he does not deal with God, but considers something about God.”

God is personal — absolutely so. Yet, so often in our theology of God, and particularly in apologetics, we can reduce God to an object of our consideration. We speak about God and reduce God to an inference. But for the one who knows God, we do not merely know about God. Indeed, we cannot now the most critical elements of Christianity by deduction from historical evidence. We could prove up the death and burial of Jesus. We can make a quite cogent argument for the Resurrection. All those facts could be unquestionably true, but they cannot lead us to understand that Jesus died for me. I cannot know God in Jesus Christ except by knowing in experience.

It is that experience which is the most critical event in the life of a human being. If our apologetics is to be greatest use it must be more than winning an argument over historical deduction. And we must be careful that we do not merely “something about God” rather than God.

Kierkegaard, What it means to seek God.6 The valley of vision

06 Wednesday Oct 2021

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What effect does the despair of the loss of wonder bring upon the searcher? He can no longer wander about, see something he cannot explain, and think, Ah, I have come upon the divinity in this place. This realization leads one to despair. And this despair, as it intensifies, leads one to a very different conclusion. 

The trajectory which he describes here seems to follow along a very particular path: There is the Romanticism of a modern who is searching for God in nature. I cannot really understand his explanation as being applicable to a true animist pagan. For such a one, the spirits are not beautiful but rather frightening. Virgil’s Tityrus in the first eclogue is quite pleased with his local god – but Virgil was an extremely sophisticated Roman.

The wonder expressed by Kierkegaard seems to sound more like Wordsworth or Coleridge. Perhaps he is speaking of himself. 

The Romantic posture is quite appealing to one on this side of the Enlightenment who still can’t bring himself to banish the spiritual and God. Perhaps there is a way around the world as machine. And so in this sermon, Kierkegaard seems to be speaking to a particular type of person. The one is who is a dull-headed materialist by default is not his target.

This would be the “spiritual but not religious” young adult: You are finding some evidence for the divine in this or that “wonder.” But I must tell you something, this will fail. 

One solution is mocking, but not realizing, “mockery [is] a two-edged sword!” If this is you, you know of what I am speaking. You understand the “jumble of confused memories.” This person, I would presume, retreats to an aesthetic position. 

Or, there is the one who cynically abides by the rules, and – in Christian parlance – seeks to fulfill the Law (however misguided the sense of the Law may be. I believe that we can understand a great deal of modern political discourse among professedly “secular” people as an intense desire to fulfill the Law).

But there is another way through this: The despair is intensified and brought to a new sense of “wonder.” Something has happened here, something unexpected: “The wondering individual is changed.”

The despair wrought by learning that one’s first Romanticism has failed gives rises to something more profound: You are now different. He also has realized something new about God. 

He no longer looks for the place where the thing sought is concealed, for this exactly within him; nor does he look for the place where God is, he does not strive therefore, for God is with him, very near him, near him everywhere, omnipresent in every moment, but he shall be changed so that he may in truth become the place where God dwells.

This language is very striking, because Kierkegaard has restated something which has become domesticated in Christian discourse. But this is precisely what is at the heart of the Christian message. 

The proximity of God is a truly terrifying and awe-inspiring aspect of Christianity which seems so often completely absent. Our familiarity with the concepts domesticates them. Then when Kierkegaard expresses the idea in an unfamiliar way, it sounds dangerous.

But consider these passages:

Romans 10:5–13 (ESV) 

5 For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. 6 But the righteousness based on faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down) 7 “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). 8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); 9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. 11 For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” 12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. 13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” 

1 Corinthians 6:19–20 (ESV) 

19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. 

Luke 10:9 (ESV) 

9 Heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ 

Kierkegaard then describes the limitation on modernity, “ Was it not a blessed thing that superior power could shut you up in the darkest prison, but could not shut out God?”

Then this final line reminds me of a prayer, which I will quote below

“Was it not blessed , was it not indeed blessed that you could fall into the deepest pit, where you could not see the sun or the stars, and still could see God?”

The Valley of Vision:

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly,

Thou has brought me to the valley of vision,

where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights;

hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold

Thy glory.

Let me learn by paradox

that the way down is the way up,

that to be low is to be high,

that the broken heart is the healed heart,

that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,

that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,

that to have nothing is to possess all,

that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,

that to give is to receive,

that the valley is the place of vision.

Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells,

deepest wells,

and the deeper the wells the brighter

Thy stars shine;

Let me find Thy light in my darkness,

Thy life in my death,

Thy joy in my sorrow,

Thy grace in my sin,

Thy riches in my poverty

Thy glory in my valley.

Kierkegaard, What it means to seek God.5 Disillusion

01 Friday Oct 2021

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At this point, the argument begins to shift from “wonder” to “striving.” The movement is not completely clear, and the emphasis is upon the distinction between the two aspect of seeking after God. 

As I have been considering the schema of this sermon, it seems to me that Kierkegaard is working through his three-tiered understanding of human existence as Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious stages. In this sermon, he writes of wonder, striving, and confession. This is a tentative understanding and I will have to consider it at some more length. 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the aesthetic stage as, “characterized by the following: immersion in sensuous experience; valorization of possibility over actuality; egotism; fragmentation of the subject of experience; nihilistic wielding of irony and scepticism; and flight from boredom.” This seems to match with the discussion of wonder.

To return to the sermon, Kierkegaard considers what happens to the one who realizes that wonder may be founded on a deception, “Now wonder and wish are about to undergo a test.” The original relationship between the subject and the unknown was an “immediate relationship.” It was direct, and apparently naïve. 

But at this point, he cannot seek as he did before, “blindly.” He knows that he cannot just meander and then fasten upon that which is esthetically pleasing and incomprehensible, the “unknown” which gives rise to “wonder.”

He has an interesting metaphor to describe this movement of the one who no longer moves by chance but now must strive: the change from the flight of birds to the crouching of four-footed beasts. Even more painful is the movement from the one who “dash[es] recklessly into the unknown” to the only who has “gained the security of a pedestrian on the highway of mediocrity.” This second stage reminds me of a back-hand to Judge Wilhelm of Either/Or.

The seeker who has moved past wonder is one for whom “enchantment” is over. Here he then makes an interesting statement concerning ethics or bare morality – if that is indeed what he is critiquing here. If we assume Kierkegaard is looking at bare moralism from the paradoxical perspective of one who has comes to know God in faith (and confession), that is a state of grace as opposed to an earned state of moral merit before God, then his words are jarring and damning:

And then in the next moment the thing sought is nothing, and that is why he is able to do everything himself.

The critique of moralism from the perspective of faith, is that the moralist believes he can do “everything.” The pre-conversion Paul was perfect as to the law. That is not the jarring observation. If is the first clause of the sentence, “the thing sought is nothing.” Moralism becomes a degrading of God: if God can be reached by my direct moral effort, then what is God? What sort of “infinite” can be scaled with mediocre sobriety? 

This is the content of life which returns with each generation. 

At this point, Kierkegaard comes to consider the life which simply gives way to this morality, “a security possessed which also deceives, a remoteness from all decision where one may be lost without even dreaming of such a possibility. Let the terrible in life take its prey, oh, this illusory security is a more terrible monster!”

This reminds of Thoreau’s dictum, I did not want to come to die to find that I had never lived. 

Here Kierkegaard is useful, because avoidance of this trap is most often merely a retreat into the aesthetic: it is posture which cannot be sustained for long because it is either self-destructive or purely deception. Kierkegaard will contend that the solution is a movement toward God. But he has not come to that solution yet in the sermon. 

Kierkegaard, What it means to seek God.4 — Wonder

30 Thursday Sep 2021

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At this point, Kierkegaard examines the nature of wonder – which is perhaps an initial step in seeking after God. The argument will move from pagan wonder to a more deliberate striving to find God. 

He explains wonder as the result of one coming upon something “unknown, and thus wholly undetermined, or rather infinitely determinable.” When we come upon some-thing whose nature we cannot readily understand or explain, we may assign any number of explanations to account for the sight. He considers a number examples of the pagan being confronted in nature with some event he cannot readily explain. That event, being unexplained causes the pagan to wonder. 

            He then makes this observation: the greatest wonder one could experience would be to encounter God: for what would be more inexplicable in terms of something else than God. Kierkegaard then writes this about God, God “is the inexplicable whole of existence.” 

            What this phrase means is itself a wonder, because I am not quite sure how to take it. The language seems most explicable as pantheism, an identification of God with nature. This is problematic, because Kierkegaard is not a pantheist. He is unquestionably Christian.

            The statement is explicable from the position of a pagan – and he immediately returns to the question of the pagan. But then we are left to wonder what he means by “God.” The God of a Christian and of a pagan are very different things. 

            Kierkegaard wrote so quickly and so very much, I should not be surprised with an inartful phrase here or there. This is especially the case when he is also seeking to be deliberately evocative and paradoxical. Finally, I am also working with a translation.  The best I can make of this idea is that it a pagan concept of “God.”

            What then happens when the sight which was a primitive wonder becomes domesticated and no longer provokes worship? When the idolatry is brought indoors so to speak, it become poetry (or “posey” in my translation). 

            The posey aside, what happens to the one who was seeking God who wished to encounter God and who has come to realize that what once brought wonder has only brought disillusion? That thing which previously was full of wonder is now seen as a deception. For example

“When the gnarled tree-trunk creates the illusion of a figure unfamiliar to him, resembling a human being, and yet, to his surprise, resembling supernatural proportions he stops and worships.” What when that pagan realizes, this is merely a tree and no wonder? 

He realizes that he has been stumbling merely toward that which he does not understand. At that point he no longer experiences wonder but only confusion. 

Here he moves from wishing to find God. Now he must seek. He cannot trust to blundering along and being surprised and worshiping whatever he stumbles upon provided it provokes an emotion and surprise. Wonder alone is an insufficient guide to God. There must be a purposeful striving.

Kierkegaard, What it means to seek God.3

24 Friday Sep 2021

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Kiekegaard comes to the matter of wishing and seeking. He does admit the limits of the one who merely is wishing for this — it is never expressly stated, only hinted at. The limits are that he is seeking some “definite place.”  If he is wishing to find “the stillness”, he will never find that stillness: the stillness is not someplace one can go. 

And so wishing is limited, not because of its object but because of its ignorance. The wisher does not know whether his movements bring him nearer or leave him further away. 

But the one who gives up wishing is worse still.  This one has “exchanged the precarious wealth of the wish for the certain wretchedness of mediocrity!” I will do without the wish and without the stillness. 

He shifts the focus, again. The logical connection is not explicit, this implies that; rather it is suggestive, requiring the reader to ask, why this topic here?

The possible suggestion here is that, you could wish or seek for any number of things. The only thing which you could encounter “which is not determined by its relation to others … and this good is God.” This is the greatest thing for which one could wish for which one could seek. 

Then he ties together this concept of wishing and seeking (without knowledge of how to find) with God. The movement here is striking.  The wisher is wandering about and then “he is startled, and the expression for his wonder is worship.” 

When one comes upon God, or the realization that God is there the moment of confrontation is one of “wonder.” He then unpacks “wonder” as follows, wonder contains “both fear and bliss.”

Is that fair or true? One cannot simply read Kierkegaard without pausing repeatedly to reflect. But I cannot say this definition is wrong. Nothing focuses the attention quite so well as fear, but rather than retreating  — which is the normal response to fear – one is also transfixed, hence the bliss. 

He then provides this marvelous discussion of worship

The worship is therefore mingled fear and happiness.

Even the most purified and rational worship of God is 

            happiness in fear and trembling, 

            confidence in deadly peril,

            frankness in the consciousness of sin.

This underscores the paradox of seeking God which he raised above: One must come to this God in purity of heart and as a sinner. The saint is the most acutely aware of danger. 

I think of the story of Peter in the boat with Jesus: 

Luke 5:1-8

On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, 2 and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. 4 And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” 5 And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” 6 And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. 7 They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” 

Any number of such stories could be found in the Bible. To be confronted with the knowledge that God is here is both fascinating and terrifying; I cannot look away and I cannot come nearer. 

If this is worship, then why do we settle for emotional inflammation? Do we actually truly want to be “startled” by God?

Kierkegaard, What it means to seek God? 2

23 Thursday Sep 2021

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One cannot follow an argument in Kierkegaard the way one would follow a lecture or a legal presentation. The parts do not move in the same obvious logical progression. He is famously suggestive and indirect. This is not to say that the ideas move illogically. But rather than move directly to a point, he seems to circle the topic, forcing to you to consider it from all sides. He at times will not make his conclusion clear, forcing you to think through the implications. It is as if he brings you to see a waterfall from a new angle.

And so when he comes to the main point of this sermon, What is it means to seek God, he answers with a paradox. He borrows here from Luther’s maxim that we are simultaneously sinners and justified

No man can seek God without purity and no man can know God without becoming a sinner.

Having presented that paradox, he immediately seems to back off; perhaps you will not want to proceed with me. Certainly, “This discourse … has no authority.” I cannot compel you to come with me as we consider this. It may be too much for you to seek this “stillness.”

But you must know that this stillness is not in some particular place. Then, having made plain that one does not confront God by going somewhere (recall at the first that he raises the question of how far away God may be), he shifts to the poet.

He references the “poetical” that a wordless sigh may “the best prayer.” This he compares to the one who thinks that God can be approached by traveling to some particular place. Both this moves “help to create an illusion” of worship.

No, he says, if you actually come into confrontation with God you will have words. This poetical idea springs from a vague idea of God (just as the concept that God is some place is a vague idea of God.

If one had an actual confrontation with God, you would have clear words. But this is a “difficulty not dreamed of when God is at a distance.”

He then shifts focus slightly again to our everyday world. We live in a world which proclaims that the most important thing to is to avoid this danger. It would seem that the danger is a confrontation with God.

But the nature of avoiding that danger throws an interesting light on avoiding this danger. It is one “who is neither in solitude nor confusion but in a busy absent-minded state of reflection.” It is one who simply has no thought of the thing. Solitude and confusion are the poles for the one who think of God is being found in a pilgrimage: I must go some particular place to meet God. This person is even less awake: he is not looking at all and is not even thinking of looking for God.

Notice that he is not directly addressing how to come God. Rather he is holding up a portrait of what is to not seek God. To come to God is a paradox: you may not be interested in this. You might think that it is going somewhere or perhaps a “poetical” sigh o fa prayer – well its not either. But you who are not even considering the matter are like one sleeping walking in life.

Yes, I can’t make you come to seek God: But I can show you what it is to not seek God.

How does he describe this sort of place: avoiding the “danger”? This “is the most mediocre thing in the world.” You are busy avoiding. Kierkegaard does not directly articulate what is being avoided, the implication requires the reader to think through what is being avoided so that the one who is reading and who is also avoiding God must accuse himself? What am I avoiding? God.

This seems to turn our age of authenticity on its head. The temptation of the Serpent was to define ourselves. But the one who has not confronted God (as a sinner and one pure of heart – in confession) is not actually a human being.

The idea which strikes him here is Peer Gynt who comes to the end of his life and seems to be so inconclusive he cannot even be sent to Hell.

This man who who simply goes about life in an absent minded way being himself and avoiding God – at best having vague thoughts is simply “mediocre”.

I can’t help thinking about mold of the world that seeks for us nothing better than to be tax payers, workers, consumers, busily entertained, always absent minded.

Considering Stillness in Kierkegaard’s “What it means to Seek God.” (With a contrast to Burnt Norton)

21 Tuesday Sep 2021

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Eliot contemplation in Burnt Norton of a still point evokes a certain, difficult to describe concept where the vagaries and mere appearances of life can fall away. There is a certain existential movement in the poem and mediation on the confrontation of reality. Eliot is searching around for a poetic space somehow outside of time which confronts reality.

Kierkegaard does something similar — but only similar — in his sermon “What it means to seek God.” In way, one could say that Eliot is trying to seek God. But for all its beauty and evocation, I’m not sure that Eliot provides us with any sure guide to find this place. The bird who calls us along is a metaphor and our passage is imagination. Kierkegaard opens up a different possibility.

This sermon “On the Occasion of a Confessional Service” begins with a prayer to God “who is all of things most near.”  This raises an idea which is developed in various ways throughout this sermon: how exactly is God either close or near? Is God nearer is some physical or temporal location? Or, how does one go about seeking God?

He begins the sermon with the idea of seeking “stillness” and “confession.” 

What he emphasizes at the first is utter existential solitude with God which takes place in confession. When we come to death and when we come to confession, we are alone with God. No other person can come into that space. “For whoever is intent upon confession is solitary, aye, as solitary as one who is dying.”

And it is this still place to which we aim to come in confession. This still place is difficult to find amid the distractions of life. 

There are two notes which K. makes upon this still space. First, it is impossible to purchase entrance into this place. And one in, it is impossible to force your way in. This does not mean that entrance is without some cost. Entrance comes at the greatest of all possible prices. But once you have achieved entrance, it cannot be taken away. Second, the world seeks to drown out this stillness: it is an attempt to avoid “God’s voice of judgment in solitude.”

When one enters into this place, there is no condemnation of any other: In this stillness, one is pressed with an accounting for one’s own sins. The sins of others are of no account to the one confessing. The only who condemns here is the “One who sees in secret” and the one who hears the confession. It is this extraordinary space that K. refers to as the stillness.

Why then would one come to this place? Because in confession on is seeking God. This is the “way that leads to salvation.” In this place of confession, one does not forgive oneself even the slightest sin: all is known to God and all is confessed. And in this place of complete admission of sin, of confession of sin one comes to confront

He summarizes the first movement of this sermon as follows: 

The penitent seeks God in the confession of sin. And the confessional is the way, and on the way of salvation, it is a place of prayer, where there is pause, where reflection concentrates the mind. 

Kierkegaard on the Difference Between the Tragic Hero and Abraham

22 Sunday Mar 2020

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In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard draws an interesting contrast between Abraham and Agamemnon: both men are called upon to sacrifice a child: but Agamemnon is a tragic hero and Abraham is an example of faith. What then is the true distinction between the two?

The tragic hero is compelled to his end by an ethical demand. To fulfill his oath, Agamemnon must lead the force into war. The demand to sacrifice is daughter is tragic and painful, but it is compelled by the demand of his oath. His act is meaningful and ethical to the community.

But it is not so with Abraham. There is no ethical duty which is recognizable to anyone who watched Abraham. The soldiers who saw Agamemnon move to give up his daughter, would have a basis to understand and even sympathize with Agamemnon. But if one were to watch Abraham: his actions would make no ethical sense. There is no apparent duty.

A second and related comparison comes with the matter of disclosing his conduct.

In this section Kierkegaard first makes an observation about concealment and revelation. In the older Greek tragedies, the concealment was brought about by fate. Oedipus kills his father, but it is concealed to him. It is revealed afterward.

In the modern age, the act of concealment is brought about the character’s decision. He compares two types here. There is the esthetic concealment, where two lovers conceal to bring about their desired end. And to have the happy ending we enjoy such action.

Esthetics permits these actions, even if unethical:

But esthetics is a civil and sentimental discipline that knows more ways out than any pawnshop manager. What it do then? It does everything possible for the lovers. (75)

But ethics requires revelation: The concealment is a deception, and even if pleasing aesthetically it is repugnant to ethics. Ethics requires an explanation, a justification for the conduct. There must be a public rationale.

Abraham differs, because he cannot explain. What is there to say? He is seeking something absurd. Abraham is not merely doing something which seems outside of all ethics; he is doing something he knows cannot be true. He will kill Isaac and Isaac is the child of promise and God will fulfill his promise. This is not merely improbable; it is paradoxical.

There is no public rationale, because the wisdom of God is greater than man.

We go wildly astray if we think Kierkegaard says that faith is believing things which are untrue or improbable. That is what is often miscredited to him. Faith is not believing stupid or false things. Faith is believing that God is above human categories:

1 Corinthians 1:20–29 (ESV)

 20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

 

Some observations on the “absurdity” of faith from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

06 Friday Mar 2020

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Kierkegaard’s Fear and Loathing considers the fact of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. A central concern of this work has to do with the obvious ethical problem of murder: how can Abraham be a great man of “faith” when his greatest act of “faith” is so obviously unethical?

Kierkegaard takes on this problem from multiple directions. Here, to merely get the ideas straight in my own mind, are certain elements of this text which I found most interesting and useful.

“The old saying that things do not happen in the world as the parson preaches.” (Cambridge University Press, trans. Sylvia Walsh.) Too often philosophy is too abstract, to pat; too often sermons are more platitude than help in patience.

When it comes to the question of Abraham, this book works to avoid neat theories of Abraham’s act: What could he do? God was making him do this thing. Or, well he knew that Isaac would live again in the resurrection; so what does it matter? Or Abraham knew it was some mere trial.

The work (written by a pseudonym; thus, there is some distance between Kierkegaard and the “author” of the work, does nothing to shy away from the fact this great act of faith hinges upon a murder; and thus, unethical in the fullest sense of the world. “What is left out of the Abraham’s story is the anxiety … to the son the father has highest and most sacred duty.”

The ethical makes a demand upon Abraham which runs counter to the command of God; thus, the ethical paradoxically becomes a temptation!

One aspect of the analysis lies with the common understanding of ethical as merely a culturally determined pattern for behavior. While faith may be consistent with such ethics, faith is not necessarily constrained by such ethics.

Abraham cannot kill Isaac and point to some greater ethical good. If it were, then Abraham’s killing could be justified on the ground of the greater good.  But, there is no argument of the loss of the one for the community. And yet somehow, Abraham’s act is a matter of faith. He is not a “tragic hero” who ultimately has an ethical justification for an unethical act.

Kierkegaard aims to disentangle the matter of temptation (by the ethical) from the matter of paradox.

Next, faith is not merely resignation to the greater will of God and a willingness to lose Isaac.  Kierkegaard writes at length of the Knight Infinite Resignation. This knight resigns himself to the loss because there is (again) a greater context in which the paradox of God’s command “makes sense”.

A common intellectual tactic is to resolve a present problem into an unknown future good in the world to come. There is something in the “infinite” which justifies this action in the “finite”. In such a circumstance, the present loss and conflict removes the difficulty of the command of God.

Again, the resolution of the matter is completed by resolving and dismissing the “paradox” of God’s command.

But this will not work, because Abraham does not proceed according to some platitude and hope for the vague future. Abraham expects to murder and receive Isaac in the same act: “By faith Abraham did not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac.” (41)

In another place, Kierkegaard notes that Abraham was not hoping for some future but was hoping for something in this life: God had promised Abraham that Isaac was the son of promise.

How then does this work out? Abraham is tempted to the ethical; but how could God command the unethical. Abraham is tempted to merely resign himself to duty or overwhelming power, but instead expects to receive Isaac back.

Moreover, Kierkegaard rules out another escape hatch. Abraham is not believing in something merely improbable (which is another dodge undertaken in the name of faith).  Kierkegaard expressly does not mean by faith, something highly unlikely.

Rather, solves his problem by grasping it squarely and stating that faith is a paradox; it actually does hinge upon something “absurd” which we too often which to domesticate.

Abraham believed. He did not believe that he would be blessed one day in the hereafter but that he would become blissfully happy here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, call the sacrifice back to life. He believed by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation had long since ceased. (30)

By absurd, he does not mean “the improbable, the unforeseen, the unexpected.” (39). Before Abraham can believe that he will receive Isaac in this life, he must first fully resolve himself to the fact that Isaac is lost. He knows that Isaac is lost, utterly lost. That is the “movement” of infinite resignation. Faith then takes an “absurd” step to believe that Isaac will be restored in this life – knowing full well that Isaac is lost. Faith then says, Yes, Isaac is lost and I will receive Isaac back though he is lost.

One could ask what this dense, often difficult discussion of faith and ethics has to do with the actual life of a Christian today? I do not necessarily find myself struggling with Hegelian categories of thought on the same grounds as that faced by Kierkegaard in the 19th Century church of Europe.

The answer lies in our constant tendency tame faith in some manner.

Olivia Walsh, in her essay, “The Silencing of Philosophy” makes the observation

This idea of the absolute duty to God in faith can lead to some rather remarkable commands, such as the Gospel injunction to hate one’s “own faith and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life” (Luke 14:26 RSV) which exegetes tend to water down in typically ethical fashion.

I will testify to having heard this and similar texts being domesticated by turning the word “hate” into the phrase “love less”.  But the language itself is shocking. We can say this means hyperbole; but if so, what is the toned-down understanding of “hate”.

Moreover, Jesus in nowise ever abrogates the duties to one’s family. Indeed, he commands love even of one’s enemies. Kierkegaard helps us here by seeing the paradox in the duty toward God and human beings. There is a resignation to loss and recovery back which refuse to be resolved by ethical games or linguistic tricks.

Indeed, the Christian religion itself hinges upon the most profound of paradoxes:

2 Corinthians 5:21 (ESV)

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

God made Christ sin – the one who was sinless; so that we who are sinful might become righteous. There are no ethical tricks, no linguistic tropes, no logical move which resolves the utterly paradoxical movement in this passage. Faith takes hold of the paradox in joy.