The Abased Christ: A New Reading of Kierkegaard’s 'Practice in Christianity' 9783110999716, 9783110989465, 9783110989519, 2022941403

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Thomas J. Millay The Abased Christ

Kierkegaard Studies

Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Heiko Schulz, Jon Stewart and Karl Verstrynge in cooperation with Peter Šajda

Monograph Series 46 Edited by Jon Stewart

Thomas J. Millay

The Abased Christ

A New Reading of Kierkegaard’s ‘Practice in Christianity’

ISBN 978-3-11-099971-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-098946-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-098951-9 ISSN 1434-2952 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022941403 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

To Paul Martens, who taught me how to question

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Preface

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Chapter One: Preliminary Matters: Context, Title, Structure, Author I Context 1 6 II Title III Structure 9 IV Author 11 Chapter Two: Abasement 14 I Practice in Christianity as Christology 14 16 II The Overarching Structure of Abasement III Marks of Abasement (1): Poverty 24 IV Marks of Abasement (2): Marginality 26 32 V Marks of Abasement (3): Offense VI Excursus: A Brief Survey of Inoffensive Christologies VII Marks of Abasement (4): Persecuted 48

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Chapter Three: Contemporaneity 52 I Introduction: Why? 52 II Contemporaneity: A Definition 53 III The Logic of Contemporaneity: Or, Anti-Climacus’s Philosophy of History 54 IV Anti-Climacus’s Counter-Philosophy of History 69 V Inverse Dialectic 77 VI The World is the Same: History, Contemporaneity, Salvation 82 Chapter Four: Imitation 85 I Imitatio Christi: A Brief History 86 II Imitation, Contemporaneity, & the Double Danger III A Youth 97 IV Imitation/Admiration 103 V The Christian as Criminal 109

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Chapter Five: Kierkegaard and Womanist Theology 111 111 I Introduction II Rejecting the Cross: Delores S. Williams 113 III The Cross as Potentially Liberative: JoAnne Marie Terrell 116 IV M. Shawn Copeland: The Cross & Enslaved Agency 120 126 V Conclusion Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgements I must begin by thanking my grandma, Miss Lena Dehority, who taught me how to read. Paul Martens: This book is dedicated to you. You taught me not only how to think about Kierkegaard, but how to think in general. Jon Stewart, your patient editorial eye is much appreciated. Tekoa Robinson, your dialogue has increased the rigor of this book’s final chapters by an incalculable degree. Thank you. I must also thank Tyler Davis and Shryl Uzzel, who helped at various points in the book and graciously read the manuscript for me, and I must thank Malcolm Foley for his implacable support for critical thinking within the life of faith. My church, First Christian Goldsboro, is a delightful environment for learning to grow in faithfulness to Christ, both conceptually and existentially, and I am immensely grateful for its support, even for a strange person who keeps repeating the word ‘Kierkegaard’ over and over again. Laura Ziemer Millay, you fill every day with a happiness that radiates and transforms everything. I could not ask for a better partner in this life. Margaret Penny: You knew from the age of two how to say the name ‘Kierkegaard’. What a joy it has been to see the world through your eyes. My daughter, Eleanor Lena Millay, was born as I completed the index to this book. She is perfect in every way. Finally, I would like to thank Gordon Marion and the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, including Eileen Shimota. Your institutional support and general belief in me have meant a great deal.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-001

Abbreviations ASKB Auktionsprotokol over Søren Kierkegaards Bogsamling, ed. by H.P. Rohde, Copenhagen: The Royal Library 1967. CA The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and trans. by Reidar Thomte, in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. VIII). CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Volume I: Text, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XII:1). FSE For Self-Examination, in For Self-Examination; Judge for Yourself! ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XXI). FT Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling; Repetition, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. VI). JP Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk, vols. 1 – 6. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1967 – 1978. KJN Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist, vols. 1 – 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007 ff. Pap. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. by P.A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, and E. Torsting, vols. I–XI-3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1909 – 1948. PC Practice in Christianity, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XX). PF Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. VII). SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, and Johnny Kondrup, vols. 1 – 28, K1–K28. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 1997 – 2013. SUD The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XIX). TA Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XIV). M The Moment and Late Writings, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XXIII). UD Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XV). WL Works of Love, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XVI).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-002

Preface My first copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity was the translation by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, published in 1991 by Princeton University Press. The book is distinguished by its cover’s vivid tone: a bright, blistering red. This has always seemed an apposite choice to me. Practice in Christianity is indeed red: it is a warning, a rallying cry, and a brutal exposé of the pretensions of ‘Christian’ culture. It is riotously fun to read, and, as I will argue, it remains provocative to this day. Despite all this, Practice in Christianity is not paid much attention in scholarship on Kierkegaard. In 2005, Sylvia Walsh wrote: “Kierkegaard has been interpreted for the most part on the basis of his writings up to and through Concluding Unscientific Postscript and in terms of his differentiation between the aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres of existence.”¹ That assessment remains true today. Many scholars are now working hard to correct this tendency.² In what follows, I seek to do my part to remedy the situation. In fact, the extended reading I offer here will be the first full-length work to engage with what Kierkegaard scholars often affectionately call ‘Practice’. This neglect is especially lamentable because Practice in Christianity is undoubtedly Kierkegaard’s Christological masterpiece. Although Jesus Christ is important to every word Kierkegaard wrote, it is here that we get Kierkegaard’s fullest portrait of Christ. Practice is not a traditional work of Christology, as will be noted. But it is a fully-worked out vision of who Christ is, why Christ should be seen in exactly this way, and how we as potential Christians should relate to Christ. My reading focuses precisely on these issues as a way of illuminating the cohesive Christological vision of Practice in Christianity. After some preliminary matters, The Abased Christ takes up the who, why, and how of Kierkegaard’s Christ, with a chapter on each interrogative. My method is synthetic and thematic, drawing together whatever texts are relevant to the topic at hand. In this way,

 Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press 2005, p. 1.  Here I mention only Frances Maughan-Brown’s The Lily’s Tongue, Albany: State University of New York Press 2019, Christopher B. Barnett’s From Despair to Faith, Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2014, and C. Stephen Evans’s Kierkegaard and Spirituality, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2019, though there are many others. Still, if one reads for example the recent survey by Paul Cruysberghs, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge (“Kierkegaard Literature from 2005 to 2013. A Descriptive Bibliography,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2017, pp. 441– 553), the vast majority of Kierkegaard scholarship continues to be occupied with the first, pseudonymous authorship. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-003

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Kierkegaard’s carefully crafted vision will be unfolded through patient exegesis of the textual themes which correspond to each question. Those corresponding themes are abasement (who?), contemporaneity (why?), and imitation (how?). The end of Chapter Four, on imitation, completes my reading of Kierkegaard’s text. However, at this point there is still work to be done. Given that a purely historical reconstruction of his writings is alien to the spirit of Kierkegaard,³ it is appropriate to ask what we should make of Practice in Christianity today. The final chapter of The Abased Christ attempts an answer to this question through a dialogue with womanist theology on the place of suffering in the Christian life. The questions which occupy Kierkegaard and the questions which occupy womanist theologians are (perhaps surprisingly) similar. This final chapter suggests that there is a good deal which has to be modified and qualified in any contemporary appropriation of Practice in Christianity. To recommend a universal call to suffering without any attention to the different social positions from which it is possible to be called would be to willfully ignore major insights made by womanist theologians (amongst others). Scholars of Kierkegaard should be aware of these insights; they offer helpful complication, in the sense that responsible interpretation in the 21st century takes account of social position. At the same time, Kierkegaard not only converges with womanist theologians on many Christological points, he also offers additional material which womanist theologians may find helpful as buttresses for their own Christological visions (this is especially the case for Kierkegaard’s philosophy of history). The Conclusion to the book returns to a thorny question raised in Chapter Five and attempts to answer it with greater rigor. That question is: Can all people imitate Christ? Here I advance the potentially offensive argument that, according to Anti-Climacus, the imitation of Christ is not available to all people. At the same time, Christ’s invitation to rest is universal. By the end of this text, I hope the reader will have gained a deeper appreciation for Kierkegaard’s Christological masterpiece and have been aided in thinking through what we might make of the text today. These two goals constitute the entirety of the purpose of The Abased Christ. If that seems too limited, I suggest that the reader is not yet acquainted with the power of Kierkegaard’s text. My aim is to do at least some justice to that power in what follows.

 See Kierkegaard and Christian Faith, ed. by C. Stephen Evans and Paul H. Martens, Waco: Baylor University Press 2016.

Chapter One: Preliminary Matters: Context, Title, Structure, Author The principal aim of this work is to provide an in-depth reading of Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity. However, before commencing with that task, it will be helpful to place a few preliminary items on the table. This will enable us to enter into specific considerations with a sense of the general context and purpose of Kierkegaard’s Christological masterpiece. In this chapter, I provide succinct answers to four questions: What contextual situation does Practice in Christianity address? What does the title “Practice in Christianity” really mean? How is Practice in Christianity structured as a book? And who is the author of Practice in Christianity?

I Context A sufficient treatment of the context of Practice in Christianity would require, at the very least, an entire book. Thankfully, Bruce H. Kirmmse, Peter Tudvad, and —at a more personal level—Joakim Garff, have all undertaken precisely this task, devoting entire volumes to the world in which Kierkegaard authored his books.¹ The interested reader will profit greatly from these volumes, if she or he has not already. Here I provide only the briefest outline of Kierkegaard’s context, with the more focused goal of facilitating our later reading of the text. As an entry point for considering the context of Practice in Christianity, let’s take a look at the subtitle of the book. The final choice of subtitle was “For Awakening and Inward Deepening,” but an earlier possibility was “A Contribution to the Introduction of Christianity into Christendom.”² There is a great deal to be unpacked in this short phrase. At the very least, we grasp from it that Kierkegaard understands his book to be something delivered “into Christendom.” “Christendom,” that into which Practice in Christianity is delivered, is therefore a crucial context for the book. It is a complex concept, and there are at least two levels to it. On one level, it refers to the bureaucratic reality of a marriage between church and state, such that taxes collected by the state fund church ac Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990; Peter Tudvad, Kierkegaards København, Copenhagen: Rosinante 2013; Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005.  See Pap. IX B 45:1 / PC, 306. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-004

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tivities, buildings, and ministerial positions. On another level, “Christendom” is a label Kierkegaard uses to describe a broader marriage of church and society, such that Denmark is understood as a religious and indeed a Christian society. This means that the social organization of Denmark in terms of family structure, economic arrangements, racial hierarchies, and ecclesial organizations, is seen to in some sense reflect Christian teaching and a Christian vision of life. Furthermore, it means that achieving prominence within the nation of Denmark requires a basic endorsement of Christianity. Thus affirming Christianity within Christendom increases one’s chances of upward social mobility, rather than decreasing them. It is therefore this twofold joining—the bureaucratic and social marriage of Christianity and Denmark—that Kierkegaard sees his text as addressing. A concrete example of what “Christendom” means can be seen in the person of Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster (1775 – 1854). Bureaucratically, Mynster was Bishop of Sjælland, the highest appointed church official in the land of Denmark, and he was that for almost the entirety of Kierkegaard’s adult life. He thus stood atop a vast administrative apparatus of ecclesial appointments and offices, all supported by money collected by the state. Socially, Mynster was an elegant representative of Christian religion. Though he endorsed Christian orthodoxy, he had seriously grappled with skepticism and Enlightenment philosophy, and thus he appealed to the intellectual elite of Denmark.³ Mynster was also a man of tact and manners, who could diffuse awkward situations and ease potential conflicts. He was a living embodiment of what the phrase “good taste” referred to at the time.⁴ The choice of Mynster as the leader of the Danish church is a way of saying that Christianity is not just for the common man; it can also be the religion of choice for the most urbane, gifted and socially elevated members of society. In Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard (via Anti-Climacus) subjects Mynster to a harsh critique, one that is aimed at both his teaching and his social function. Mynster’s Christianity was essentially a resource of psychological reassurance for those who were working hard to contribute to society. Jesus offered reassurance that one’s station in life was ordained by Providence and that any mistakes and failures of one’s person while operating in that station were covered by God’s mercy and forgiveness.⁵ He offered this Christianity to Denmark in his sermons and also in a book of “Observations” (Betragtninger), about which Anti-Climacus has this to say:

 See Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, pp. 100 – 101.  The title of Kirmmse’s chapter on Mynster is: “Piety and Good Taste: J.P. Mynster’s Religion and Politics” (ibid., p. 100).  See ibid., pp. 106 – 107.

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The Christian sermon today has become mainly “observations” (Betragtning)⁶: Let us in this hour consider; I invite my listener to observations on; the subject for our consideration is, etc. […] In this manner, by means of its favorite way of observing what is the essentially Christian, which is just by “observation” and “observations,” the sermon presentation has abolished what Christianly is decisive in the sermon presentation—the personal: this You and I, the speaker and the one being spoken to; this, that the one who is speaking is himself personally in motion, a striver, and likewise the one spoken to, whom he therefore stirs up, encourages, admonishes, and warns, but all with respect to a striving, a life; this, that the speaker will continually not go away from himself but come back to himself and will help the listener, not to go away from himself but to come back to himself. In our day, the sermon presentation has itself first totally disregarded, and subsequently has contributed to its being totally forgotten, that the Christian truth cannot really be the object of “observations.” The Christian truth has, if I may say so, its own eyes with which to see; indeed, it seems to be all eyes. But it would be very disturbing, indeed, it would be impossible, for me to look at (betragte) a painting or a piece of cloth if I discovered while looking at it that it was the painting or the cloth that was looking at me. And this is the case with Christian truth; it is Christian truth that is observing me, whether I am doing what it says I should do. See, this is why Christian truth cannot be presented for observation or discoursed upon as observations.⁷

Mynster can offer his listeners “observations” from Christianity because Christianity does not set the basic terms of his understanding of the world. Those terms are set by society and the variety of roles one can play within it. Christianity then occasionally offers supplemental truth, for example when one is facing a crisis. Anti-Climacus thus accurately skewers Mynster for subordinating Christianity to a secondary role, such that it makes no personal demands upon one, gives no imperative directions for one’s life, but only offers the occasional encouragement if one happens to be in need of it. By having Anti-Climacus use the buzz word “observations”—the first word in the title of what was likely Mynster’s most famous book—Kierkegaard makes clear to his readers that he has Mynster in mind. Yet we should not think this the only passage from Practice in Christianity to subject Mynster to critique. Take, for example, the following, which compares a sensible proclamation of religious comfort to the radical invitation of the poor and abased Christ: “Come here, come here, all, all you who labor and are burdened, come here, see, he is inviting you, he is opening his arms!” When an elegant man dressed in silk says this in such a

 The editors of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter have provided a helpful list of passages from Mynster’s sermons where—beyond his book Betragtninger over de christelige Troeslærdomme—Betragtninger and its various forms are used; the list is quite long. See SKS K12, 227; cf. also PC, 395, n.112.  SKS 12, 227– 228 / PC, 233 – 234.

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pleasant, melodious voice that it gives a lovely echo in the beautiful vaulted ceiling, a silken man who spreads honor and esteem upon listening to him; when a king in purple and velvet says this against the background of a Christmas tree hung with the glorious gifts he is about to distribute—well, then there is some sense to it, isn’t there? But whatever sense it has for you, this much is certain—it is not Christianity; it is the very opposite, as diametrically opposite to Christianity as possible—remember the inviter!⁸

As Kirmmse notes, this passage is “a scarcely veiled reference to the style and social function of Bishop Mynster.”⁹ The criticism is therefore not just of Mynster’s message; it is also of his medium. When Mynster proclaims comfort from the pulpit, it is difficult not to take it in the sense that Providence will in the end turn everything out all right for you, because Mynster is himself such a prime example of worldly happiness. Mynster should be seen as both a theoretical and existential endorsement of the established order; both his words and his style of life extol fulfilling one’s duty within society as it now stands. His message is that one should take heart and be encouraged, for certainly God wants what is best for you, and surely that includes a comfortable station in life where one can do good for one’s country and one’s family. Kierkegaard was implacably opposed to Mynster’s theory and practice, and he states this openly in Practice in Christianity. It is the first of his works to be so bold.¹⁰ Kierkegaard’s critique of Mynster is rigorous, but we must remember it is not intended to be narrowly focused. Although there is a sense in which Kierkegaard’s critical relation to Bishop Mynster was deeply personal, there is another sense in which Mynster functions as a synecdoche of larger trends. He was at the center of the Danish church in what has come to be known as the Danish Golden Age, which was an “optimistic”¹¹ era of admirable artistic production and continuing colonial expansion: where Denmark’s vision of the good life was seen as intrinsically correct, self-validating, and worthy of propagation. Perhaps the best way to describe modern Christendom is as a social vision which tried to have it all: a society where people’s spiritual and material needs were recognized

 SKS 12, 51 / PC, 38.  Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, p. 385.  See ibid., p. 379: “Training is the major turning point in SK’s career from the time of the conclusion of the properly pseudonymous authorship (with the Concluding Unscientific Postscript) until his death. It marks the beginning of a relentless and single-minded campaign against ‘Christendom,’ in which SK no longer takes time to discourse in detail upon ethics or Christian love or the psychology of the individual but moves steadily into an increasingly open posture of conflict with the established Church and the Golden Age notion of Christian culture.” (“Training” is a reference to an earlier English translation of Practice in Christianity.)  Ibid., p. 399.

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and, to an ever-greater extent, satisfied. Christendom is happiness achieved; it is flourishing for the here and the hereafter. This is the situation which Practice in Christianity addresses—or, more accurately put, attacks. It does so at a curious juncture, since Practice in Christianity was written in 1848, the year Denmark switched from an absolutist to a constitutional monarchy. Given the secularism of many liberal movements at the time, this may seem to portend large changes for the church and Danish Christendom generally. Such was not the case, however. Kirmmse gives the following helpful summary: In the end, there was very little change from the absolutist period. Despite the 1849 Constitution and the triumph of liberalism, liberal secularism was never even attempted. The Church remained bound to the state administration more tightly than ever, and the cabinet portfolio of Kultusminister was established to oversee the Church, education, museums, the ballet and opera, and culture generally—which ought to give a fair idea of how, and in what categories, Christianity was construed by governing circles.¹²

The Danish Golden Age was, especially for the privileged urban elite of Copenhagen, a period of placid optimism and happy bourgeois family life. It was such even in the midst of a revolution, which was bloodless and did not really change much, especially with respect to the church. One aspect of the church did change: its name, which in 1849 shifted from the State Church (Statskirke) to the Danish People’s Church (Folkekirke). However, in terms of the essential elements Practice in Christianity subjects to critique, this nominal transformation did nothing beyond soliciting more openly the people’s approval for an essentially pagan form of religion which all have agreed to call “Christianity.” Again Kirmmse proves helpful: The formal relationship of the Church to the state did not change at all after 1848 – 49, and the personnel, the procedures, and the socially supportive, cultural functions of the Church were likewise unchanged. But now, in the moral and political sense, the Church had been bound more tightly than ever to the state, and both of them had been made the inalienable moral and political property of the common man, whether he wanted this burden or not.¹³

Nothing had changed, but—now that the church was at least formally speaking the people’s property—perhaps change was possible. It was into this stultifying but potentially open situation that Kierkegaard released his critical intervention in September of 1850.

 Ibid., p. 76.  Ibid., p. 76.

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II Title The book which Kierkegaard lobbed as a kind of bomb onto the playground of Christendom was titled Practice in Christianity. In its pages, one finds a portrait of a Christ who fundamentally undermines Christendom’s claim to Christ. In this book of commentary, I hope to offer a synthetic presentation of Kierkegaard’s Christology, such that we as readers might be confronted by a vision of Christ which, as is made clear in Chapter Five and the conclusion to this book, still has the ability to productively unsettle us. Before turning to a synthetic presentation of Anti-Climacus’s Christology, a word of caution is in order. Even to speak of a ‘Christology’ in relation to any of Kierkegaard’s writings is necessarily a reduction of the actual character of his multivalent writing. Kierkegaard by no means develops a systematic, proposition-based or expository Christology in Practice in Christianity or any other work. As David R. Law puts it: Anti-Climacus is not concerned to speculate on the Person of Christ or to offer a Christology that addresses the problem of how two apparently contradictory natures can be united in the one Person of Jesus Christ. To devote oneself to such questions is a distraction from the crucial issue of one’s relation to Christ, which should be not one of understanding but of discipleship.¹⁴

Kierkegaard’s general refusal of the speculative mode of writing theology applies to his relation to Chalcedonian doctrine as well: such doctrine is everywhere assumed, but nowhere made the object of an exposition.¹⁵ The conceptual elements which are undoubtedly present in Practice in Christianity have the aim of producing discipline (askēsis) rather than comprehension. In fact, the very title of the work, Practice in Christianity, reinforces our current moment of caution and gives us instruction as to how we might faithfully approach this text, being careful to respect its intentions. This is not so evident in English, so let’s take a moment to delve into the Danish original. The Danish title of Anti-Climacus’s text is Indøvelse i Christendom. The word the Hongs translate as “practice”—indøvelse—gives us a clue as to the genre of the work. Alongside “practice,” indøvelse can also be translated as “training” or “exercise.” In Latin—a crucial language in the development of Danish religious understandings—the word was exercitium, and it was a key concept for the late medieval movement known as the devotio moderna (14th–16th centuries).

 David R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, p. 217.  Ibid., pp. 217– 218.

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John Van Engen provides a useful summary of how “exercise” or “practice” was understood in these communities: For the spirituality of the New Devout, the importance of ‘exercise’ cannot be overstated. They could apply the word at times virtually to their entire way of life, including their prayer and work. More specifically it referred to the ‘spiritual training’ they regularly subjected themselves to. It is most evident in its meditational aspect. When they read in Scripture or a devotional book, when they systematically focused on the life and passion of Christ at certain times of the day and attempted to absorb and relive it, all of that counted as ‘exercising,’ as training their spiritual selves.¹⁶

It would be an overstatement to say that Practice in Christianity is intentionally continuing the work of the devotio moderna movement in particular. However, it is not too much to say that he is building off this tradition, which was also continued by Pietism.¹⁷ Consider, for example, that Thomas à Kempis—and especially his famous work The Imitation of Christ—are hallmarks of devotio moderna piety. The Danish translation of The Imitation of Christ (Om Christi Efterføgelse) by J.A.L. Holm, which Kierkegaard purchased during the year he wrote Practice in Christianity, uses a word similar to indøvelse, øvelser, to translate the Latin exercitium in Chapter XIX of the first book of The Imitation of Christ,¹⁸ a crucial chapter wherein à Kempis lays out how devotion (Danish Fromhed) should be practiced. According to this chapter of à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, within the devotio moderna one practices or exercises devotion by the daily renewal of one’s conversion, a renewal that entails a reactivation of one’s inward resolve as directed towards the service of God’s will. Furthermore, nothing strengthens this inward resolve more than thinking on the example of Christ’s obedience. Such is the context in which Christ is considered within the devotio moderna.

 See John Van Engen’s “Introduction” to Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, Mahwah: Paulist Press 1988, p. 29.  See Christopher B. Barnett, “Kierkegaard’s Reading of Pietist Literature: An Investigation of Themes Christian and Socratic,” in his Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness, Burlington: Ashgate 2011, pp. 63 – 109.  Thomas a Kempis, om Christi Efterføgelse, fire Bøger, trans. and ed. by J.A.L. Holm, intro. by A.G. Rudelbach, Copenhagen: Wahlske Boghandels Forlag 1844, 24; cf. pp. 70, 102. This is the edition to which I have access. Kierkegaard’s own copy was an 1848 reprint of this edition: ASKB 273; The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library, ed. by Katalin Nun, Gerhard Schreiber and Jon Stewart, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate 2015 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 20), p. 17.

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In like manner,¹⁹ Practice in Christianity asks one to think on the sufferings of Christ, to make them present to oneself in an inward consideration that is potent in an existential sense. Instead of being a fully developed treatise on Christology such as one finds in Thomas’s Summa,²⁰ Practice in Christianity thus follows after the genre type seen in the devotio moderna. It exercises its readers in passional thoughts about Christ that establish an existential connection between his life and one’s own. In lieu of Practice in Christianity, another possible translation of Indøvelse i Christendom is Ascetic Exercises in Christianity. The usefulness of this alternate translation is further reinforced when one takes into account the usage of the Latin exercitatio to translate the Greek ἄσκησις.²¹ Noreen Khawaja is thus absolutely correct when she says that Practice in Christianity is “Søren Kierkegaard’s ascetic masterpiece.”²² This is not to claim Practice in Christianity is equivalent to a work of medieval monasticism. It rather indicates the generic aims of Practice in Christianity, which are to produce discipline and renunciation rather than comprehension. Although Kierkegaard’s presentation of the person of Christ is not systematic in form, it does bear consistency and evince a repeated group of themes. In other words, there is a Christology—a unified understanding of the person of Christ— behind the text, even if the text itself refuses to exposit this Christology in something like a propositional manner. The goal of my own writing is to draw out this unified understanding of Christ through asking the three questions of ‘Who? Why? How?’ as covered above, in the Preface. Rather than focusing on how Kierkegaard uses writing to draw us into the Christian life, I aim to establish what exactly he understands that life to be. While I hope my treatment is successful, it is also limited in a way Kierkegaard’s text is not: it does not aim, through the use of a variety of rhetorical devices (such as exaggeration, satire, and the imperative mode), at reforming the reader such that she is drawn closer to the Chris-

 The Italian translation of Practice in Christianity helps to make this likeness more explicit. See Esercizio di cristianesimo, ed. by Salvatore Spera, trans. by Cornelius Fabro, Casale Monferrato: Piemme 2000.  See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, tertia pars, passim but especially the first fifty-nine questions, ably summarized by Bernard McGinn, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica: A Biography, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2014, pp. 106 – 112.  See Novum Lexicon Manuale: Graeco-Latinum et Latino-Graecum, ed. by A. Benjamine Hederico, rev. by Gustavus Pinger, Leipzig: Jo. F. Gleditsch 1825, s.v.  Noreen Khawaja, “Religious Truth and Secular Scandal: Kierkegaard’s Pathology of Offense,” Philosophy Today, vol. 59, no. 4, Fall 2015, p. 628.

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tian life. Its aim is conceptual clarity: also a goal of Kierkegaard’s, though not the only one.

III Structure Since my reading of Practice in Christianity will be synthetic and thematic, it is useful before beginning to lay out the structure of Kierkegaard’s text, so that the reader will have an idea of the work as a whole before circling back to consider a few themes in further depth. What follows thus provides an orientation, especially for those unfamiliar with Kierkegaard’s book. Practice in Christianity unfolds in three parts, along with a few introductory words: some title pages, an “Editor’s Preface” and an “Invocation.” The title pages include a quotation of Matthew 11:28, a statement of purpose (that the work is “For Awakening and Inward Deepening”), and a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, Procul o procul este profani, which serves to intimate the presentation of high ideality which is soon to follow.²³ The “Editor’s Preface” is authored by “S.K.” and offers a moment of reflection on the work of Practice in Christianity as a whole, and that before the work really commences. “S.K.” writes that Practice in Christianity is a statement of ideal Christianity, but that the ideal “should indeed be stated, presented, and heard.”²⁴ “S.K.” states that, for him, the purpose of hearing such a requirement, exalted though it may be, is that he might properly learn to seek grace.²⁵ Though stringent, the purpose of Practice in Christianity is not to inculcate despair. This “Editor’s Preface” is then repeated referentially before parts two and three of Practice in Christianity, thus framing the whole work in terms of the statement of the ideal and the confession of non-ideality inherent in the search for grace. Then follows the “Invocation,” the first major part of the work to be authored by Anti-Climacus, which is a plea before God that we might see Christ accurately. It is thus a kind of Christological petitionary prayer, in which the themes of abasement, offense, faith, and contemporaneity are mentioned, foreshadowing much of the work to come. After these introductory components, the first of the three parts of Practice in Christianity begins with an extended meditation on Matthew 11:28, “Come here, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” Though this might seem a saying which offers comfort, Anti-Climacus focuses on the character of

 SKS 12, 13 / PC, 5.  SKS 12, 15 / PC, 7.  SKS 12, 15 / PC, 7.

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Chapter One: Preliminary Matters: Context, Title, Structure, Author

the one who invites. We are being invited to join Christ and thereby receive “rest,” but joining Christ means joining someone who in this life was spat upon, mocked, marginalized, impoverished, and criminalized. We can only forget these characteristics of Christ if we abstract from his life to consider the grand development of Christianity over the centuries, thereby excerpting ourselves from what Anti-Climacus calls the situation of “contemporaneity” with Christ, a situation which is an unavoidable precondition for a truly Christian faith. Many of the crucial passages depicting Christ’s abasement are to be found in this first part of Practice in Christianity, and they serve as reminders that the Christ found in the Gospels—the Christ his contemporaries saw—is not a glorious pantocrator, but a humiliated peasant. Before moving on to the second part, Anti-Climacus appends a brief epilogue which he calls “The Moral”—an important statement if we are to understand the place of Practice in Christianity within Kierkegaard’s developing authorship. Although what precedes it may seem to indicate that Christendom should be completely abolished—namely, because its foundation is a distorted vision of Christ who supports worldly triumph—here in “The Moral,” Anti-Climacus states that the aim of his writing is not to abolish Christendom but to provoke it to confession.²⁶ He seeks not to get rid of the established order, but to bring it towards honesty, which would be an admission that it is not equal to the ideal under whose name it operates. Just like Kierkegaard himself, then, Practice in Christianity should prompt the established order to rely upon grace. In this sense, as Kierkegaard later writes, Practice in Christianity was a final defense of Christendom, a chance for the established order to redeem itself through the embrace of honesty.²⁷ Practice in Christianity “No. II” is an extended treatment of the theme of offense in relation to the person of Christ. It is a remarkably systematic piece for

 SKS 12, 79 – 80 / PC, 67– 68.  “My earlier thought was: if the established order can be defended, this is the only way to do it: by poetically (therefore by a pseudonym) passing judgment on it; then by drawing on grace in the second power, Christianity would come not only to find forgiveness for the past by grace, but by grace a kind of indulgence from the actual imitation of Christ and the actual strenuousness of being Christian. In this way truth still manages to come into the established order; it defends itself by judging itself; it acknowledges the Christian requirement, confesses its own distance, yet without being able to be called a striving in the direction of coming closer to the requirement, but resorts to grace ‘also in relation to the use one makes of grace’” (SKS 14, 213 / M, 69). For more on the multi-step process by which Kierkegaard moves from this demand for honesty to direct advocacy for the abolition of Christendom, see Thomas J. Millay, Kierkegaard and the New Nationalism: A Contemporary Reinterpretation of the Attack upon Christendom, Lanham: Lexington 2022, pp. 69 – 87.

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Kierkegaard, in that it goes through nearly the entirety of the New Testament usage of σκάνδαλον, “offense,” and offers commentary on a good number of these passages. Kierkegaard is in this way a kind of biblical scholar of offense. Yet, as is to be expected, Kierkegaard via Anti-Climacus hardly confines himself to this academic genre. Larger points are being made, for example: that Christendom tries to circumvent the offensive aspects of Christ, that Christian suffering is distinguished by its voluntary aspect, and that Christianity is self-contradictory insofar as our selves are constituted by selfishness. The third and final part of Practice in Christianity reflects on John 12:32, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all to myself.” This verse serves as the occasion to define exactly what it means to be drawn by Jesus. If Jesus is now glorified, does that mean his earthly followers are now being drawn into glory? Practice in Christianity “No. III” consists of seven “Christian Expositions” which each give a firm ‘No’ as an answer to this question. The two most important expositions are V and VI; these two expositions are in fact the dénouement and crowning achievement of Practice in Christianity as a whole. V is a brilliant exposition of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of history, which denies progress, affirms the continuing reign of selfishness, and thus—given these conditions—concludes that the Christian life should be characterized by a continual militancy. VI defines what it means to imitate Christ. It is therefore an essential text as this thematic is important to a number of Kierkegaard’s works but is only here the subject of an extended theoretical development. Especially memorable is AntiClimacus’s distinction between imitation and admiration, which takes Christendom to task for its aesthetic-objective relation to a Christ who does, after all, ask us to follow him. Practice in Christianity then ends on a note of grace, offering prayers for all, for infants, husbands, wives, for the converted and for those in need of conversion, and even for pastors, that Christ might draw each and every one of them to himself.

IV Author A final preliminary matter must be dealt with: Who is the author of Practice in Christianity? The text was published under the pseudonym “Anti-Climacus.”²⁸ But what does this signify? Does it mean that—like his earlier text Either/Or— Kierkegaard has created a fictional personage whose message must not be equated with what Kierkegaard himself believes?

 SKS 12, 7 / PC, 266.

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Not exactly. When it comes to Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard nowhere signals disagreement or distance from the essential teaching of the text, a fact that is reinforced by the inclusion of “S. Kierkegaard” as the editor of the work, along with his “Editor’s Preface” on how the “requirement should be heard.”²⁹ It is not as if Practice in Christianity presents a different viewpoint from Kierkegaard’s as to what is the essential nature of Christianity. Rather, by using the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard means to indicate that he himself is not personally to be equated with a perfect existential realization of the message of the text. Kierkegaard wants to say that he stands under the judgment of Practice in Christianity, along with everyone else. Thus, the use of a pseudonym suggests not distance from the message of Practice in Christianity, but Kierkegaard’s personal distance from an actualization or full appropriation of the message.³⁰ Thus, Anti-Climacus is “a Christian on an extraordinarily high level”³¹ who presents the ideal; Kierkegaard agrees with the ideal theoretically, but his life does not agree with the ideal existentially, and that is what the pseudonym signifies. But what about this strange name, ‘Anti-Climacus’? Not only is this the name of the author of The Sickness unto Death (1849), it seems also to be clearly related, in some way, to an earlier pseudonym of Kierkegaard’s: namely, Johannes Climacus. In the “Historical Introduction” to their translation, the Hongs state the following about the author of Practice in Christianity: The new pseudonym chosen for Sickness unto Death and Practice was Anti-Climacus. Obviously the name bears a relation to Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est. The prefix “Anti” may, however, be misleading. It does not mean “against” but “before,” a relation of rank, the higher, as in “before me” in the First Commandment.³²

 SKS 12, 7 / PC, 1; SKS 12, 15 / PC, 7.  With reference to Practice in Christianity (and also possibly The Sickness unto Death), Kierkegaard writes: “Without a doubt it is the most perfect and the truest thing I have written; but it must not be interpreted as if I am supposed to be the one who almost censoriously bursts in upon everybody else—no, I must first be brought up myself by the same thing” (SKS 22, 265, NB12:196 / JP 6, 6501, n.d. 1849; cf. SKS 22, 355, NB14:19 / JP 6, 6528). In this way, Practice in Christianity is a work of poetry.  SKS 22, 265, NB12:196 / JP 6, 6501, n.d. 1849.  PC, xii–xiii. On Anti-Climacus as a “higher” continuation of Johannes Climacus, see also Jakub Marek, “Anti-Climacus: Kierkegaard’s ‘Servant of the Word,’” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate 2015 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 17), pp. 39 – 40.

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Although one still occasionally sees statements to the contrary,³³ the Hongs’ assessment is fundamentally correct. It has clear support in several journal entries,³⁴ and as we will see—particularly in the treatment of the theme of offense in Chapter Two—it makes good sense of the relation between the works of Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus. In what follows, I respect Kierkegaard’s wishes as stated in Concluding Unscientific Postscript³⁵ and refer to the author of Practice in Christianity as Anti-Climacus. However, it should be kept in mind that Kierkegaard does not disagree, in a conceptual sense, with anything that is said in Practice in Christianity. In fact, he says in 1855 that, if he were publishing the book for the first time in that later year, he would have published Practice in Christianity under his own name.³⁶ With these preliminary matters dealt with, we turn to the text itself.

 See Leo Stan, “Contemporaneity,” in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome II, Classicism to Enthusiasm, ed. by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate 2014 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15), p. 63, though Stan only states that Anti-Climacus is Johannes Climacus’s “purported opponent.”  “The pseudonym is Johannes Anticlimacus in contrast to Climacus, who said he was not a Christian. Anticlimacus is the opposite extreme: a Christian on an extraordinary level—if only I myself manage to be just a simple Christian” (SKS 22, 127– 128, NB11:204 / JP 6, 6431). Cf. SKS 22, 130, NB11:209 / JP 6, 6433; SKS 22, 138 – 139, NB11:228 / JP 6, 6442. On the other hand, see SKS 22, 135 – 136, NB11:222 / JP 6, 6349, where Anti-Climacus says that he and Johannes are “opposites” who are, however, pursuing the same goal: “simply and plainly to be a genuine Christian.” The meaning here seems to be that Johannes and Anti-Climacus agree about the meaning of Christianity, yet have an opposite existential relation to it, with Johannes claiming not to be a Christian, and Anti-Climacus claiming to be an extraordinary Christian.  SKS 7, 571 / CUP, [627].  SKS 14, 213 / M, 69 – 70.

Chapter Two: Abasement I Practice in Christianity as Christology As is recognized by David R. Law, there are two principal Christological works in Kierkegaard’s authorship: Philosophical Fragments, by Johannes Climacus, and Practice in Christianity, by Anti-Climacus.¹ Both works possess the distinctive Kierkegaardian mark of in-depth reflection on subjectivity, specifically the believer’s subjective relation to Christ.² What Practice in Christianity provides that is lacking in Philosophical Fragments is material on the character of the person of Christ, such that we come to know to a much greater extent the Christ to whom we are relating. In Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus is famously content to leave the matter of the person of Christ at the level of a simple proposition: God became human.³ Practice in Christianity then tries to answer: Who is this God-man? What is his character? How is his “true form” constituted for us? The figure of the abased Christ is developed in response to questions such as these, as the opening of Practice in Christianity makes clear. In the “Invocation” appended to the beginning of the work, Anti-Climacus prays to Jesus that we “might see you in your true form.” He goes on to specify what he means by “true form” in a kind of Christological petition to Jesus, that we might see the Lord: “in the surroundings of actuality as you walked here on earth, not in the form in which an empty and meaningless or a thought-less romantic or a historical-talkative remembrance has distorted you.”⁴ Expressed in this prayer is a desire to see Jesus truly and a wish to reject distorted views of Christ. Given the placement of this “Invocation” at the beginning of Practice in Christianity, and given the content that follows, with its focus on the person of Christ, it is reasonable to see the text as a contribution toward making the requests iterated here a reality, insofar as the author is able. In other words, Anti-Climacus’s prayer to Jesus is hopefully effectuated through the work of Anti-Climacus himself. Answering the stated questions—Who is this God-man? What is his character? How is his “true form” constituted for us?—serves to explicate the person of Jesus Christ so that we might see him clearly, rather than in a distorted, self-serving fashion. Despite the hesitations which David Law  David R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, p. 1.  See Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2013, pp. 8 – 15, 305 – 323.  See SKS 4, 300 / PF, 104.  SKS 12, 17 / PC, 9. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-005

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rightly notes (given the resolutely unsystematic character of Kierkegaard’s thought), it is the case that Practice in Christianity is a Christological work, a work that focuses on understanding the nature and character of the person of Christ, as is made clear in many statements to this effect.⁵ Such an effort toward conceptual clarity concerning the person of Christ is important, in Anti-Climacus’s mind, because of the lamentable status of his audience. In Anti-Climacus’s interpretation, his audience is not a Christian but a pagan audience, though they lack awareness of this fact. It is Anti-Climacus’s thesis that, in Denmark, “Christianity has been abolished,”⁶ an achievement that rests upon a preceding fact: “the modern age has abolished Christ.”⁷ More specifically, the modern age has abolished Christ (and thus Christianity) not by ceasing to speak of Christ, certainly not by persecuting those who call themselves Christians, but through the “recasting of Christ”;⁸ that is, the making of the Christ of the Gospels into a figure who offers eternal comfort and security in order to match and complete the earthly comfort and security currently enjoyed by the citizens of modern Denmark. By making Christ entirely a figure of comfort, the modern world has “confused the conception of the God-man.”⁹ The Christendom that purports in its very name to be based on Christ is thus not based upon Christ at all, but upon its own self-justifying, all-too-human creation.¹⁰ Anti-Climacus’s solution to the dreadful and confused state of his audience is to write in such a way that we be “reminded of his [i. e., Christ’s] abasement.”¹¹ The solution to the problem, in other words, is Christology: an articulated understanding of Christ that is not afraid to speak of those aspects of Christ our human nature would rather forget, of Christ’s poverty, his persecution by human society, his homelessness, his lack of honor and dignity—in short, his abasement. Indeed, the character of Christ is thoroughly and succinctly described as abasement (Fornedrelse). Specifying precisely what this means is not, however, so brief a matter. The goal of this chapter is to fill in the general category of

 SKS 12, 51, 78, 165, 169, 176, 214– 215 / PC, 38, 66, 161– 162, 166, 173 – 174, 219 – 220.  SKS 12, 132 / PC, 127.  SKS 12, 132 / PC, 128.  SKS 12, 78 / PC, 66.  SKS 12, 132 / PC, 128.  See Thomas J. Millay, “Conceptual Clarity: Kierkegaard’s Dialectical Method as a Response to the Religious Crisis of Golden Age Denmark,” in The Crisis of the Danish Golden Age and Its Modern Resonance, ed. by Jon Stewart and Nathaniel Kramer, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2020 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 12), pp. 109 – 120.  SKS 12, 158 / PC, 154.

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abasement with a rich variety of specific meanings, since that is in fact what Practice in Christianity gives us in distinction to its predecessor, Philosophical Fragments. Practice in Christianity gives us an abased Christ, but we can say much more than that rather minimal descriptive phrase. The concept of “abasement” can be divided into two broad categories. The first is the general meaning of abasement in terms of the overarching movement of incarnation, the becoming flesh of God. The second is the concrete meaning of abasement in terms of certain specific temporal markings; namely, the four marks of poverty, marginality, offense, and persecution. The first category captures the dynamic of God-as-human; the second category, God-as-this-human, a person, Jesus. As we will see, these categories exist in a productive dialectical relation to one another. But it is helpful to separate them out analytically so that the whole can be perceived more clearly.

II The Overarching Structure of Abasement As we will see, Anti-Climacus’s use of the word “abasement” means specific, concrete, visible things about the person of Christ. It describes his material poverty and his marginal social status, for example. However, “abasement” as a theme also captures the overarching movement of the incarnation, that movement described in John 1:1– 18 and Philippians 2:5 – 11 and elaborated upon by Anti-Climacus in two different ways: (1) the emptying or renunciation inherent in the incarnation of God, also called kenōsis, and (2) the inextricable conjunction of loftiness and lowliness, for in the lowliness Christ embraces via kenōsis he does not abdicate his divinity, but ties divinity to abasement in a strict knot. (1) Kenōsis as a general theme refers to Christ emptying himself of the power and security belonging to his divine status in order to become human. It has its origins in the following scriptural passage, Philippians 2:5 – 8, which I give in Greek, Danish, and English, respectively: τοῦτο φρονεῖτε ἐν ὑμῖν ὅ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, ὅς ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ ὑπάρχων οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών, ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος· καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν γενόμενος ὑπήκοος μέχρι θανάτου, θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ.¹²

 The Greek New Testament, Fourth Revised Edition, ed. by Barbara Aland, Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo M. Martini, and Bruce Metzger, Stuttgart: United Bible Societies & Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft 2001, p. 675.

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Thi det same Sindelag være I Eder, som og var I Christus Jesus, hvilken, der han var I Guds Skikkelse, ikke holdt det for et Rov at være Gud lig; men han forringede sig selv, ide than tog en Tjeners Skikkelse paa, og blev Mennesker lig; og da han var funden I Skikkelse som et Menneske, fornedrede han sig selv, saa han blev lydig indtil Døden, ja Korsets Død.¹³ Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.¹⁴

This passage of Christological reflection does not operate as a series of propositions, but instead tells a narrative: Christ Jesus was with God, emptied himself of such glory to become human, and then—once found as a human—humbled himself to die an ignominious death. As Law notes, it is clear that Philippians 2:5 – 8 is fundamental to Anti-Climacus’s understanding of Christ and to Practice in Christianity as a book.¹⁵ At this point, it may seem the course of the present chapter will unfold by identifying abasement (Fornedrelse) with kenōsis, the doctrine of Christ’s selfemptying that famously has its origins in the Philippians 2 passage. However, this is not the case. A closer inspection is needed. Therefore, let’s walk through the passage a little more slowly.¹⁶ Although there seems to be a clear reference to the doctrine in Philippians 2:6 (ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ), Anti-Climacus does not spend a great deal of time speculating on Christ’s pre-incarnate existence (sometimes referred to in Christological discourse as the logos asarkos).¹⁷ Instead, Anti-Climacus focuses on the emptying or kenotic movement of Christ in becoming incarnate. This is in keeping with the anti-speculative bent of Practice in Christianity’s Christology (see  From the authorized New Testament translation of 1819, in Biblia, det er: den Ganske Hellige Skrifts Bøger (Copenhagen, 1830), ASKB 7.  NRSV translation.  See Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology, p. 267. In fact, he goes so far as to say, “these two works [i.e., Philosophical Fragments and Practice in Christianity] can be regarded as a creative reworking of the Philippians Christ-hymn” (ibid.). This requires some adjustment in reference, as the passage Law refers to is Philippians 2:6 – 11.  Here in our reading of Philippians 2:5 – 8, we follow Kierkegaard’s own injunction to practice slow reading. See Thomas J. Millay, You Must Change Your Life: Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Reading, Eugene: Cascade 2020, pp. 28 – 32.  See Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology, pp. 268 – 269. It should be noted that such a lack parallels the paucity of Scripture. The prologue to John’s Gospel, for example, is usually read as referring to the logos asarkos, but—as John Behr has noted—there are significant problems with such a reading (John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019).

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above). Yet the pre-incarnate glory of Christ remains important as a presupposition, even if it is not often referenced. In order for the kenotic or emptying movement associated with incarnation to be significant, it must be an emptying of something. This is briefly and obliquely referenced at PC, 76, where Anti-Climacus speaks of Christ as “he who came from far, far away, from heaven’s glory.”¹⁸ What seems to be the clearest passage in relation to kenōsis is found near the end of Practice in Christianity No. I, where it is stated as a matter of course that “Christ abased himself and took the form of a servant.”¹⁹ The ordering of the two phrases in the previous compound sentence seems to suggest a clear reference to kenōsis as found in Philippians 2:7, where Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” However, it should be noted that the Danish translation of the New Testament Anti-Climacus uses throughout Practice in Christianity does not translate ἐκένωσεν with a form of fornedrelse but with forringede. ²⁰ A form of fornedrelse is rather found in Philippians 2:8, translating ἐταπείνωσεν, usually put into English as “he humbled himself.”²¹ This is significant because this humbling takes place after “being found in human form” (Philippians 2:7) —that is, after the movement of incarnation has already taken place. Let us go back to the biblical text to parse out what is going on here. It is important to pay attention to the temporal movement of the passage: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself (ἐκένωσεν, forringede), taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself (ἐταπείνωσεν, fornedrede) and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.

Although there are several different verbs in this Christological hymn, only two of them are crucial, representing the turning points in the drama of Christ’s life: ἐκένωσεν and ἐταπείνωσεν; the other verbs follow upon these two turning

 SKS 12, 88 / PC, 76.  SKS 12, 77 / PC, 65.  That translation being the authorized New Testament translation of 1819 cited above, its use throughout Practice in Christianity being documented by the editors of SKS 12, in SKS K12.  For an extensive exegesis of ταπεινοφροσύνη, see Eve-Marie Becker, Paul on Humility, Waco: Baylor University Press 2020.

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points. And since there is so much focus on ἐκένωσεν, “emptied himself,” it is often forgotten that there is a second moment: ἐταπείνωσεν, “humbled himself.” As mentioned, the humbling of himself—or, in other words, the abasement of Christ—occurs within the context of Christ’s earthly life; that is, after the incarnation in bodily human form (καὶ σχήματι εὑρεθεὶς ὡς ἄνθρωπος) has already occurred. If Christ chooses to become incarnate, he also chooses to humble himself within the terms of that incarnate life. There are two moments and two choices.²² The focus of Anti-Climacus is clearly the latter choice. He wants to emphasize the abasement Christ chose while on the earth, not simply the emptying that brought Christ to the earth in the first place. Again the anti-speculative bent of Anti-Climacus’s Christology shines through, for human persons can actually imitate Christ in the choosing of earthly abasement,²³ though we cannot imitate the choice to incarnate our divine selves in human form. Anti-Climacus’s focus is on abasement and its constituent elements of poverty, marginality, offense, and persecution. What I would like to note here is that, beyond the specifics of abasement, the general movement of humbling or abasing himself while on earth retains its importance for Anti-Climacus. He wants to clarify that these particular elements of abasement are not contingent; they are the result of Christ’s voluntary choice. Always in the background of any particular detail, the voluntary choice of that detail gives it theological depth as an act of self-renunciation which we, as Christians, are called to imitate. That abasement is no accidental feature of Christ’s life is made clear in a crucial early passage in Practice in Christianity: Furthermore, what mockery of God if someone is presumptuous enough to say of Christ’s abasement: Let this matter of his abasement be forgotten now. But Christ’s abasement certainly was not something that happened to him, and perhaps would not have happened to him in a better age. Christ himself willed to be the abased and lowly one… With him, then, it is not as with a person who because of the injustice of his age was not allowed to be himself

 Law helpfully discusses the “double kenosis” present in Kierkegaard’s Christology in Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology, pp. 228 – 229.  As will become clear in Chapter Five, it is only some human beings who are able to imitate this choice, for to choose abasement for oneself implies that one’s life could have been otherwise. In fact, however, many lives of abasement are forced upon people who have no choice in the matter. Thus, the choice of abasement entails some amount of potential power and privilege: at the very least, enough power and privilege that another choice could have been made. Thus, although Anti-Climacus would typically say that all human beings can imitate Christ, it is clear by his own logic that at least to some extent they cannot, as I argue more fully in the above referenced chapter.

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or to be regarded for what he was, but history made it manifest, for Christ himself willed to be the abased one, this was precisely how he wanted to be regarded.²⁴

However, it should be noted again: although the voluntary choice Christ is making in this passage is logically dependent on his kenotic entrance into human form, that is not the voluntary choice directly depicted or at issue here (though it certainly does amplify the voluntariness at issue). Instead, the topic is the voluntary choice that comes about in Christ’s earthly life. The same emphasis is present in a passage found in the penultimate discourse of Practice in Christianity, where Christ is depicted as: [T]he one who here on earth lived in poverty and lowliness, without a place where he could lay his head, and did not live this way accidentally through the cruelty of fate, himself longing for other conditions, but lived this way of his own free choice by virtue of an eternal resolution.²⁵

The “eternal resolution” Anti-Climacus speaks of probably makes reference to the kenotic resolution of Philippians 2:7, given how the active intra-Trinitarian ‘drama’ begins with such a choice; however, no strict distinction is made between the ἐκένωσεν of Philippians 2:7 and the ἐταπείνωσεν of Philippians 2:8, and it is best to see the “eternal resolution” as Christ’s choice of the whole complex provisionally separated between Philippians 2:7 and Philippians 2:8, thus encompassing both the emptying out of glory entailed in incarnation and the humility of Christ’s earthly life. However, given the references to “poverty,” “lowliness,” and homelessness, it is clear that once again the descriptive emphasis is placed on the humility of Christ’s earthly life, or, in other words, his abasement. In short, although Anti-Climacus certainly affirms that Christ emptied himself of his divine status in order to become human, this affirmation is not his focus. Beyond the abasement involved in simply becoming human, Anti-Climacus highlights a second level of abasement (hinted at in the progression of the biblical text itself): namely, Christ’s temporal, earthly commitment to being an outcast, to being poor, to renouncing any offer of power—in sum, to not only the abasement of being a human person, but of being an abased human person. (2) Not only did Christ empty and humble himself. In doing so, he inextricably joined divinity and abasement. “Christ himself willed to be the abased and lowly one: thus the abasement (to be this lowly human being although God) is something he himself has joined together, something that he wills should be  SKS 12, 47 / PC, 33 – 34; cf. SKS 12, 134, 179 / PC, 130, 177.  SKS 12, 247 / PC, 255.

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tied together, a dialectical knot that no one should presume to untie.”²⁶ The primary emphasis in Practice in Christianity is on Christ’s lowliness. Anti-Climacus is at pains to make clear that what we see in the Christ of the Gospels is not a good citizen, nor a bourgeois contributor to the flourishing of nation-state, but a poor, homeless, offensive and persecuted man. Such an emphasis makes sense if one is trying to remind one’s audience of Christ’s abasement.²⁷ Yet the emphasis should not be isolated from its dialectical counterpart. Given the slaughterhouse that is history, given how often people are crushed, maimed, or annihilated, a wretched human being is nothing out of the ordinary. No, what is extraordinary here is not sheer lowliness: it is the conjunction of loftiness and lowliness in the same person; it is God in and as an abased human being; it is God choosing to be an abased human being. What is extraordinary is that here is an ordinary human being—or even a less than ordinary, a lowly human being—who says: I am God.²⁸ The claim, then, is not just that Christ was abased, but that “in his abasement he was God.”²⁹ What is being affirmed is the appearance of loftiness in a lowly form. This helps make sense of the opening “Invocation” of Practice in Christianity, which would otherwise remain something of a riddle: Lord Jesus Christ, would that we, too, might become contemporary with you in this way, might see you in your true form and in the surroundings of actuality as you walked here on earth, not in the form which an empty and meaningless or a thoughtless-romantic or a historical-talkative remembrance has distorted you, since it is not the form of abasement in which the believer sees you, and it cannot possibly be the form of glory in which no one as yet has seen you. Would that we might see you as you are and were and will be until your second coming in glory, as the sign of offense and the object of faith, the lowly man, yet the Savior and Redeemer of the human race[.]³⁰

Especially the phrase “it is not the form of abasement in which the believer sees you” seems to sit uneasily with one of the chief purposes of Practice in Christianity, which, as we have noted, is to remind readers of Christ’s abasement.³¹ Yet Anti-Climacus is not saying here that the believer does not see Christ’s abasement; rather, he is saying the believer never sees only Christ’s abasement (as,

     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

12, 47 / PC, 33. 12, 158 / PC, 154. 12, 44 / PC, 30. 12, 45 / PC, 31. 12, 17 / PC, 9 – 10. 12, 158 / PC, 154.

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for example, a purely historical perspective on Jesus might³²). The believer always has a kind of double-vision, seeing God in abasement, glimpsing loftiness in lowliness. Indeed, “you cannot choose between the two”—loftiness and lowliness—“without becoming guilty of an untruth, whereby you deceive yourself, not him, and you defraud yourself out of the truth, which he is.”³³ Lose either loftiness or lowliness, and you lose Christ; the two must always be seen in conjunction. At the same time, Anti-Climacus—aware of the proclivities of his audience— decidedly puts his finger on the scale of lowliness and abasement. The emphasis on abasement should thus be seen as a corrective.³⁴ Anti-Climacus’s contemporaries know that Christ is glorified; it is his job to insist that this glory resides in the poverty of Christ’s human form. Further, Anti-Climacus insists we must begin with this poor human form; the dialectic has an entry point, and it is lowliness. Why must this be so—why must we begin with lowliness? Two reasons. First of all, because of our all-too-human tendency to bypass abasement to get to the happiness and security of glory. Second, lowliness is the historical form in which Christ appeared in our world, in which he appears in our Gospels, in which he chooses to reveal the glory of God (John 1:14). We can certainly affirm that Christ is now on high. But this is not the Christ we know; this is not the Christ of our world. Since we remain in this world, the form of Christ’s appearance in this world remains authoritative (more on this in Chapter Three, “Contemporaneity”). The world remains a fundamental condition of knowledge. We are not in that “other world” for which we long.³⁵ We are still in this world, therefore we know Christ as he appeared in this world: “as far as Jesus Christ is concerned, certainly no one can say that he first became acquainted with him when he had come on high; for everyone who has learned to know him learns to know him in his lowliness, and if he truly learns to know him learns to know him in his lowliness.”³⁶ The believer’s encounter with Christ follows a certain delineated sequence. She must first set her sights on a man, a wretched man, and only then make the affirmation: this man was God. To depart from this sequence is to say that Christ’s glory can be directly seen in this world, which means that the nature

 See, e. g., David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, vols. 1– 3, trans. by George Eliot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010.  SKS 12, 169 / PC, 166.  On Kierkegaard’s writing as a corrective, see SKS 22, 194– 195, NB12:97 / JP 6, 6467 n.d., 1849.  See SKS 13, 374 / M, 312: “One certainly does not have religion for the sake of this life, in order to get through this life happy and well, but for the sake of the other life (andet Livs); in this other world (anden Verden) lies the earnestness of religion.”  SKS 12, 175 / PC, 172.

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of Christ and the nature of the world are in harmony, such that the world can seamlessly translate Christ’s nature as it actually is and make it observable for all. If one attends to the Christ of the Gospels, it is clear that such a revelatory principle—that the glory of God can be directly translated into human glory— is invalidated by the revelation of God as we have it in Christ. Not that all Christians have thought so: direct revelation is the kind of Christology Giles Constable has shown to be characteristic of the early medieval period (see below, Chapter Four), where the person considered to be most like Christ on earth was the king. Anti-Climacus calls this way of thinking “paganism.”³⁷ Whether this is an accurate reading of Greco-Roman or Norse culture is not at issue for us, here. Instead, the issue is what Anti-Climacus means when he uses the construct “paganism,” which is formed in contradistinction to Christianity. For “paganism,” that which is true and noble is rewarded in the life with honor and distinction, whereas the premise of Christianity—based in the very life of Christ itself—is that in this world the true and noble is mocked and scorned. But wait—hasn’t Anti-Climacus forgotten something? Since the “pagan” time of Christ, when Christ and the followers of Christ were naturally persecuted, hasn’t the world become Christian? Hasn’t Christianity transformed the world and remade it in its image? Is not Christianity now welcomed and praised, rather than persecuted? To ask these questions is to mistake the notional acceptance of a teaching with actual existential transformation. No, this world is still animated by selfishness and the truth is still persecuted.³⁸ We must understand that the affirmation that Christ is now in his glory will always be mediated to us, who are still in this world, inversely: we must still affirm the persecuted truth, that is what we experience, that is Christ meeting us where we are—and the glory of Christ, the glory and enthronement in power of the True, Good, and Beautiful: that can only be believed. It cannot be seen.³⁹ If some of the above statements appear tendentious, making overly strong claims concerning the essential nature of the world and the forces of history, that is an understandable cavil. In fact, Bishop Hans Lassen Martensen’s responds to Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom by stating that “external suffering and martyrdom belong to certain historical epochs and presuppose partic-

 SKS 12, 49 / PC, 35.  See SKS 12, 94– 100 / PC, 85 – 92. For further analysis of the particular forms selfishness takes in modern society (e. g., “levelling”), see SKS 8, 82– 91 / TA, 86 – 96. Barnett highlights these passages from A Literary Review as the moment in his authorship when Kierkegaard’s understanding of society as fundamentally selfish coalesces, in the wake of The Corsair affair (Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness, Burlington: Ashgate 2011, pp. 154– 155, 167).  SKS 12, 47– 48 / PC, 33 – 34.

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ular social conditions and circumstances; they cannot appear during all epochs.”⁴⁰ Yet Anti-Climacus’s position remains firm. His grounds for making such claims are discussed in Chapter Three, when we address the question of why this particular vision of Christ and his followers (viz., as always characterized by abasement) is necessary or authoritative. But before we discuss the issue of why this Christ is authoritative for the Christian life, there is much more to say about who this abased Christ is. What actually is this abasement we are speaking of when we say ‘the abased Christ’? What are its distinctive marks, so that we might be able to recognize it? These marks are given in the Gospels, certainly, but they are repeatedly drawn together and organized by Anti-Climacus into four categories, held up for us to examine so that we might achieve conceptual clarity as to what the abased Christ actually looks like in this world. Those four categories are as follows. Anti-Climacus’s Christ is: (1) poor, (2) marginal, (3) offensive, and (4) persecuted.

III Marks of Abasement (1): Poverty Jesus Christ was poor. If lowliness includes other things, it begins with this: poverty. And, as the two different blessings of Matthew 5:3 and Luke 6:20 suggest, Christ’s poverty consists of two notionally separable elements (even if, in actuality, the two frequently overlap): (a) poverty in spirit,⁴¹ and (b) material poverty.⁴² These two elements are both faithfully reproduced in Practice in Christianity. (a) Christ was poor in spirit. Though divine, Christ did not hold himself aloof from people in an exalted nobility. No: instead of holding himself at dignified remove, as a “sagacious and sensible,” worldly-wise person would expect Christ to do, one finds Christ “to be accessible to all or, more correctly, to go himself to everyone, to associate with everyone, almost as if being the extraordinary meant to be the servant of all: as if being the extraordinary, as he himself claims to be, meant to be concerned whether people will have benefit from him or not—in short, as if being the extraordinary meant to be more concerned than anybody else.”⁴³ The worldly person, who expects everyone to act in self-assertion, cannot understand why Christ seems “to sacrifice himself as he is doing, not to assert

 Encounters with Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, p. 202.  “Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι,” “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3).  “Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοί,” “Blessed are the poor” (Luke 6:20).  SKS 12, 55 / PC, 42.

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himself in the least, almost to beg people to accept these benefactions.”⁴⁴ In short, what the worldly person cannot understand is Christ’s poverty in spirit, a poverty Anti-Climacus summarizes in terms of an attitude of service: it is “to be at everybody’s beck and call every hour of the day, more zealous than the busiest practicing physician.”⁴⁵ To be poor in spirit is to place oneself in service to others. It is to humble oneself before others—which is, after all, in addition to ‘abase oneself,’ another translation of ἐταπείνωσεν. (b) Christ was not just poor in spirit, he was materially poor, in the sense that he did not have money: “No, not a penny—he does not have a penny, and if he did he would promptly give it away.”⁴⁶ In this poverty, Christ is “identifying himself completely with the poor and wandering around in the company of beggars.”⁴⁷ Indeed, Christ is homeless;⁴⁸ even as he starts to garner fame, he remains “the lowly man who literally does not have a place to lay his head.”⁴⁹ These two dimensions of poverty are vividly combined in the existence Christ embodied before his ministry. Anti-Climacus mentions twice that Christ’s father was a carpenter,⁵⁰ and it is generally assumed that this was Jesus’s trade as well. This means that Christ was familiar with what the ancient Greco-Roman world termed ponos (πόνος) or drudgery.⁵¹ Drudgery is a concept that combined material deprivation with the burden of difficult daily labor. So when Christ speaks to those who labor and are heavy laden (Matthew 11:28), to those who “feel the burden to be ever so heavy, feel the labor to be heavy, and are now standing there irresolute and sighing,”⁵² to those who are “tired” and “weary,” whose existence is gesturally captured in a “sigh”⁵³—when Christ speaks to such as these, he knows whereof he speaks. Christ stands “in kinship with a few other common folk of the lowest class.”⁵⁴ Which is to say: he is one of them, in that he lacks material goods and is familiar with the drudgery of daily manual labor in the world of the Roman Empire, and in his ministry he chooses to continue to embody the posture of a servant. He refuses the self-as-

 SKS 12, 56 / PC, 43.  SKS 12, 58 / PC, 45; cf. Mark 6:30 – 44, Matthew 14:13 – 21.  SKS 12, 58 / PC, 45.  SKS 12, 68 / PC, 56.  SKS 12, 52 / PC, 39.  SKS 12, 54 / PC, 41.  SKS 12, 50, 54 / PC, 37, 40.  See Peter Brown, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2016.  SKS 12, 32 / PC, 20.  SKS 12, 33 / PC, 22.  SKS 12, 50 / PC, 37.

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sertive glory of a worldly king, whose very status is inherently dependent upon being above others who serve and support him. So then, Christ is poor: poor in things and poor in spirit, poor in every way one could conceivably be poor.

IV Marks of Abasement (2): Marginality Christ was not just poor, he was also marginalized, meaning that he was far from the centers of power, influence, and honor that structured the social reality of his age. Anti-Climacus speaks of Christ’s “absolute isolation, his distance from everything that is called the established order”;⁵⁵ Christ is as one “whose residence has been assigned among the graves,” who “in the eyes of society” is “regarded as dead” but is “not missed.”⁵⁶ Furthermore, anyone who associates with Christ risks the same marginalization: “merely to let oneself be helped by him meant to risk one’s honor, life, and goods, in any case exclusion from the synagogue.”⁵⁷ In short, Jesus Christ was not welcomed by the powerful; he found no place among them. Yet Christ’s marginality is not only a negative theme of exclusion. It is also a positive gathering, a placing of Christ within a certain category of persons, with whom he stands in solidarity. Christ stands “in the company of sinners, tax collectors, lepers, and madmen.”⁵⁸ What is Christ’s social group? With whom is he at home? With “‘Idle and unemployed people, street loafers and tramps,’”⁵⁹ with “‘desperate people with nothing to lose.’”⁶⁰ Like a prostitute, respectable people only visit Christ at night.⁶¹ His only close friends are uneducated “fishermen,” “ignorant fellows who yesterday netted herring.”⁶² Indeed, “his company could be described as the ‘outcasts of human society’; his company is the lowest class of people. Moreover, they are sinners and tax collectors—whom anyone who is anybody at all shuns for the sake of his good name and reputation… Furthermore, his company is lepers, whom everyone avoids, lunatics, who only arouse horror, the sick and the wretched, poverty and misery.”⁶³ The poor, the sick, the homeless, the in-

        

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

12, 60 / PC, 47. 12, 29 / PC, 18. 12, 51 / PC, 37. 12, 51 / PC, 37. 12, 63 / PC, 50. 12, 63 / PC, 51. 12, 65 / PC, 53. 12, 66 / PC, 54. 12, 66 / PC, 54.

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sane, criminals, and sinners: these are those with whom Christ is associated. Such is his station in society, his place on earth: he is about as far from being a “solid citizen” as one could possibly be.⁶⁴ That Christ associated and was associated with the marginal is clear enough from the Gospels. But why does Anti-Climacus emphasize this particular aspect of Christ’s earthly existence? The answer is obvious enough: he believed that his audience associated Christianity with the established order, and he emphasizes Christ’s marginality as a way to decouple or to denaturalize the association unthinkingly made by his audience. At this point, it is worth pausing a moment to delve deeper into Anti-Climacus’s analysis of Christendom. By stating that Anti-Climacus believed his audience naturally associated Christianity with the established order, he is not claiming that his audience lacked familiarity with those stories of marginality that suffuse the Gospels. It is not as if the Gospels are suppressed in Christendom, such that people would be unaware of the nature of Christ’s social relationships and startled by whom he actually associated with. Nor is it even the case that Christendom denies the marginality of Christ. It is rather that Christendom views itself as having progressed beyond the society that marginalized Christ. There is a story that is told—one might call it the narrative of Christendom: Once upon a time, before the world was Christian, the truth was marginalized; “now, truth is victorious, the truth that was once contending is now the established order.”⁶⁵ Indeed, “if Christ came to the world now he would first become a professor and would steadily advance.”⁶⁶ Now that the world is Christian, true and authentic Christian existence is rewarded, not punished. “To be in the truth can no longer mean to have to suffer, and the more one is in the truth the more suffering. No, here there is congruity; the more one is of the truth, the more honored and esteemed one becomes.”⁶⁷ Consequently, the better a Christian one is, the more honored by one’s Christian society one is. This only seems right: a Christian society honors Christians, “here there is congruity.” So what is Anti-Climacus’s disagreement with this train of thought? The problem is that if the established order believes it has the capacity to determine who is close to God, then the established order has placed itself in the role of God; that is, it has placed itself in the role of the one able to make

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

12, 62 / PC, 50. 12, 97 / PC, 89. 12, 97– 98 / PC, 89. 12, 97 / PC, 89.

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judgments about an individual’s faith. The established order has, in Anti-Climacus’s words, “deified itself.”⁶⁸ To make this point, Anti-Climacus asks a question related to the subject matter of Fear and Trembling. ⁶⁹ He queries: “Is the single individual higher than the established order?”⁷⁰ Christendom—and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right insofar as it echoes Christendom⁷¹—would say: no, the single individual is not higher than the established order. For if she were, the ability of society to judge and consequently honor who is close to God would be undermined. It would introduce an inadmissible measure of doubt: ‘perhaps the one we are rewarding is not actually close to God, or one we have marginalized is close to God—we cannot fully know, since that judgment is up to the individual and God.’ Such a doubt would call into question the legitimacy of the whole idea of Christendom, wherein good Christians are honored for being good Christians. Indeed, it would call into question the whole idea of a Christian society; it would make such an entity an impossibility. What the established order (or its correlates of Christendom or Christian society) cannot abide is insistence upon “inwardness” in the God relationship.⁷² Inwardness entails hiddenness and hiddenness implies a limit to the established order’s ability to judge, a place it cannot reach nor have authority over. That is why it cannot be tolerated. One is marginal to the established order as soon as one insists on inwardness, for one has revealed oneself as a traitor to the whole project, committing lèse majesté against Christian society’s ability to decide who is Christian. Such an erasure of inwardness eliminates the basic dynamic of Christian existence as Kierkegaard understands it. This basic dynamic is established in the first two major works of Kierkegaard’s second authorship, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits and Works of Love. That basic dynamic proceeds in two steps, as follows: Christianity begins with intentional isolation.⁷³ Within this isolation, one meets God, receives a call, and goes out to minister in the world.⁷⁴ By con-

 SKS 12, 99 / PC, 91.  See “Problema I: Is There a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?” and “Problema II: Is there an Absolute Duty to God?” (SKS 4, 148 – 171 / FT, 54– 81), along with Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, Macon: Mercer University Press 1987, and Paul Martens, Reading Kierkegaard I: Fear and Trembling, Eugene: Cascade 2017.  SKS 12, 94 / PC, 85.  SKS 12, 96 / PC, 87.  SKS 12, 96 / PC, 87.  See SKS 8, 227– 228, 234 / UD, 127– 128, 135.  See SKS 9, 58 / WL, 51.

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trast, no individual relation to God is required in the scheme of Christendom. And yet, all consider themselves to be Christians. From these two facts, Anti-Climacus draws a decisive conclusion in the pages of Practice in Christianity: society has proclaimed itself divine. It has closed itself off such that there need be no relation to something other or outside (a transcendent God thus becoming, in the words of Johannes de silentio, a “vanishing point”⁷⁵). On this account, society can be the final arbiter of good, both within this life and, in addition, for the next. Like God, it can decide who is deserving of reward. Because Christendom is divine, its judgments are always valid. What is good is regarded as good, what is evil is regarded as evil, without fail. Anti-Climacus makes this point through a comparison between Christendom and the scribes and Pharisees of the age of Christ: Thus Judaism at the time of Christ became, through the scribes and Pharisees, a complacent, self-deifying established order. The outer and the inner had become entirely commensurable, so totally that the inner had dropped out. This commensurability and congruity are sure indications that an established order is in the process of deifying itself. Everything that could remind one of the contending truth is abolished as something now regarded as not far from ridiculous—now truth is victorious, the truth that once was contending is now the established order. To be in the truth can no longer mean to have to suffer, and the more one is in the truth the more suffering. No, here there is congruity; the more one is of the truth, the more honored and esteemed one becomes.⁷⁶

The self-deification of the state (or, in Anti-Climacus’s phrase, the “established order”) is closely tied to the confidence the state has in its judgments. Instead of the New Testament’s opinion of the state, we have the reverse: the good can be known with certainty in this world and awarded appropriately with honor and esteem. And not only can this happen; in Christendom, it does. Therefore, the good are those who are publicly recognized as good. We can identify with confidence who the good are. They are the honored and esteemed ones. The “self-deification of the established order” is precisely this: the ability to decide who represents the good. There is no relevant realm of judgment outside of society; closed off in such a way, it becomes the highest, the divine.

 “The whole of human existence of the human race rounds itself off as a perfect, self-contained sphere, and then the ethical is that which limits and fills at one and the same time. God comes to be an invisible vanishing point, an impotent thought; his power is only in the ethical, which fills all of existence” (SKS 4, 160 / FT, 68).  SKS 12, 97– 98 / PC, 89.

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The proposition that society is the divine is supported by the popular philosophy of the Danish Golden Age: Hegelianism.⁷⁷ Of course, this is not the first time Kierkegaard has been critical of Hegelianism. Johannes Climacus’s Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript subject the speculative approach of Hegelian philosophy to extensive critique. Yet here, in the world of Anti-Climacus, the problem with Hegelianism is not so much a speculative approach to truth as it is a full acceptance of social morality (Sittlichkeit) as determinative of Christian morality, a side of Hegel that appears not so much in his Logic as in his Philosophy of Right, where the end-goal of morality is always the flourishing of the state.⁷⁸ Thus, what is implicitly in the ideology of Danish society is explicitly formulated in Hegel’s work. To accept the reign of Sittlichkeit as a final end is to accept the divinity of public judgment. Whatever is seen to contribute to the public good is the Good, with no remainder.⁷⁹ There is no good that is incommensurable with the public good. Anti-Climacus makes this point with direct reference to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “Why has Hegel made conscience and the state of conscience in the single individual a ‘form of evil’ (see Rechts-Pholosophie)? Why?

 On the character and popularity of Hegel and Hegelianism in 19th century Denmark, see the work of Jon Stewart: A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, The Heiberg Period: 1824 – 1836, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel’s Publishers 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 3), and A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, The Martensen Period: 1837 – 1842, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel’s Publishers 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 3).  See Thomas J. Millay, “Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Augustine on Love,” in The Kierkegaardian Mind, ed. by Adam Buben, Eleanor Helms, Patrick Stokes, Abingdon: Routledge 2019, pp. 446 – 456.  Kierkegaard also makes this point in a humorous fashion in the second issue of The Moment: “Here is my attempt, and I flatter myself that it actually does make clear to what degree it is true that we all are Christians. We are that to such a degree that if there lived among us an atheist who in the strongest terms declared all Christianity to be a lie, moreover, in the strongest terms declared he was not a Christian—it is futile, he is a Christian; according to law he can be punished—that is another matter, but he is a Christian. ‘What nonsense,’ says the state, ‘what would this lead to; as soon as we allowed someone to declare that he is not a Christian, it would soon end with everyone’s denying that he is a Christian. No, no, principiis obsta [resist beginnings] and stand firm on the principles. We now have well-tabulated statistics, everything classified, everything accurate, always on the presupposition that we all are Christians—ergo, he also is a Christian. A conceitedness such as that, which merely wants to be eccentric, must not be indulged; he is a Christian, and there the matter rests’” (SKS 13, 159 / M, 117). In other words, Christianity and the public good have been so identified that one cannot even be allowed to be an atheist, as it is not in the general interest for one to be so; in modern Christendom, such a claim of unbelief does not even really need to be persecuted but is simply dismissed.

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Because he deified the established order.”⁸⁰ Anyone who makes an individual claim for the goodness of self-denial thereby excerpts herself from the self-interested project of the established order, and her isolated claim to goodness will undoubtedly be branded as evil. Self-denial does not contribute to the temporal flourishing of the established order; therefore, anyone recommending it is evil. He or she is anti-social. To bring the individual’s God-relationship into complete congruity with society’s judgments is—according to Anti-Climacus—to express a desire for secularity, because we want to bring the other world into this world, to reduce the delay and the difference inherent to eternity until all that is left is the homogenous present.⁸¹ Thus, even though Christendom is supposed to be a thoroughly religious order, where all are Christians, where Christianity is at the center of the state, and where the best Christians are the leaders of the state (i. e., are those closest to the center)—despite that, exactly the opposite is the result: “ultimately the relationship with God is also secularized; we want it to coincide with a certain relativity, do not want it to be something essentially different from our positions in life, etc.”⁸² But what gives Anti-Climacus the right to dissent from the project of Christendom? Who is he to call into question the judgments of society? Such questions would be a problem, if such questioning rested on the authority of Anti-Climacus, the fictional creation of the flawed human being known as Søren Kierkegaard. Yet the argument of Practice in Christianity is that it is not Anti-Climacus who questions society, but Christ. Christ is the one who elevates the individual’s relationship with God above society’s ability to make judgments about that relationship. As Anti-Climacus puts it, “By making devoutness and piety inwardness, Christ prodded this whole structure of qualifications and relativities, this direct recognizability of piety by honor and esteem, power and influence, this objectivity.”⁸³ And if Christendom objects that Christ’s society was not Christian, and that now things have changed, Anti-Climacus would retort: you now have again taken the ability to judge away from God, to whom Christ wanted to return and reserve such judgment, as is made clear,

 SKS 12, 96 / PC, 87. Such a deification of course requires banishment of the actually divine, as Kierkegaard indicates in SKS 13, 193 / M, 149: “If we take the merely human and omit consideration of the divine (Christianity), the relation is this: the state is the highest human authority, is humanly the highest.”  See SKS 12, 98 – 99 / PC, 90.  SKS 12, 99 / PC, 91.  SKS 12, 100 / PC, 92.

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for example in Matthew 6 (“and your Father who sees in secret [ἐν τῷ κρυπτῷ] will reward you”; Matthew 6:4, 6:6, 6:18). Furthermore, in taking the ability to judge away from God, you have given it to a human society still ruled by selfishness and self-interest. Anti-Climacus does not so much argue for this point as he simply assumes you will agree that selfishness still reigns. If you do agree that society has not been transformed into the Kingdom, then it follows that any given society is a society which (selfishly) wants to protect itself, and issues judgment against anything that threatens it.⁸⁴ Thus it issues judgment, for example, against those who threaten it by insisting on inwardness and the absolute nature of the God-relationship, for this insistence threatens society’s power to judge, calling into question its ruling authority—in fact, calling into question whether there can even be such a thing as a ‘Christian society’! In other words, the established order of a given society— Christendom or no—issues judgments against Christ and anyone who, like him, insists on hiddenness and strictly reserves the ability to judge to God alone. Any established order whatsoever thus has a particular animus against Christ, with his commitment to hidden inwardness and the reservation of judgment to eternity. The character of that animus is the focus of the next section.

V Marks of Abasement (3): Offense Anti-Climacus summarizes the animus characterizing the established order’s reaction to Christ with one word: offense (Forargelse), which is used to translate σκάνδαλον, used several times in the Gospels when a person or group takes offense at Christ.⁸⁵ The established order and those attached to it are offended by Christ; their animating sensibilities are affronted by the figure who stands before them. When Pilate says ecce homo, the established order is disgusted that this person claimed to be Christos, messiah. The establishment is offended by Christ because he strips it of its ability to judge, which is crucial to its status. This is certainly true and was covered in the

 See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 – 1976, New York: Picador 2003; here Foucault is picking up and expanding on Carl von Clausewitz: for there are many ways society is defended, not just by war.  See Mt 11:6 (“salig er den, som ikke forarges paa mig,” in the Danish translation Kierkegaard used, though slightly amended by Anti-Climacus when he placed it on the title page of Practice in Christianity No. II); cf. Mt 13:21; Mt 13:57; Mt 15:12; Mt 16:23; Mt 26:31, 33; Mk 4:17; Mk 6:3; Mk 14:27, 29; Lk 7:23; Jn 6:61; Jn 16:1. These passages are all treated, in systematic fashion, in SKS 12, 94– 127 / PC, 85 – 121.

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previous section. There is another dimension to offense taken by the established order, however, which should not be ignored. The established order is offended by the suggestion of a disjunction between happiness on earth and happiness in eternity. For to suggest such a disjunction is to intimate that there might be a cost to faith. Perhaps, the disjunction intimates, one might have to give something up in this life in order to receive a reward in the next life. This implication is something the established order—grounded as it is in self-assertion—is inherently and implacably opposed to. Rejection of an either/or when it comes to temporality and eternity is constitutive of the established order; it always urges a both/and. It is not the case that there is no role for the eternal or the religious in Christendom. Rather, it is the case that the eternal and the religious must always be understood as supplemental. As Anti-Climacus puts it: We start with the secular, observing civic justice (good—better—best); we make ourselves as comfortable as possible in everything we can scrape together of the goods of the world— what is Christian is stirred into it as a seasoning, an ingredient that sometimes almost serves to refine the enjoyment.⁸⁶

In this scheme, Christianity is just icing on the cake: it means the happiness I have had here on earth will continue. Christianity is thus confined to a supplemental role, to provide reassurance and comfort to the one who is happy in this life but may have worries about the next. And what is the ultimate result of such confinement? “There is no infinite contrast between what is Christian and what is secular; the danger of offense has no awful significance.”⁸⁷ At most, Christendom allows Christianity to be related to suffering, but only to natural or unavoidable suffering, to which the thought of eternity can be a salve.⁸⁸ Eternity thereby assists the established order by ameliorating its failure to completely eliminate suffering. Thus, the Christianity of the established order addresses suffering, but only within a limited system of coordinates. It must allow some considerations of suffering, while disallowing others. Such other viewpoints might introduce a different logic, a different way of calculating, which would challenge Christendom’s reigning ideology. For example, the Christianity of the established order is never related to voluntarily chosen suffering, which would make little sense to such a worldview, invested as it is in happiness and nothing but happiness.

 SKS 12, 119 – 120 / PC, 112.  SKS 12, 120 / PC, 112.  See SKS 12, 118 / PC, 110.

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What is offensive to the mindset of Christendom is the suggestion that religion might step out of its role of supplemental comfort. To deny oneself and choose to suffer, to choose suffering that is avoidable because of one’s absolute faithfulness to one’s God relationship: this makes no sense to the worldview of Christendom. It mistakes the very purpose of religion, introducing an offensive, self-righteous standard of abased life that no human being could reasonably be expected to choose.⁸⁹ Yet voluntarily chosen suffering is precisely what we see in Christ’s life and what he asks of us if we are to follow him. Suffering is an essential element in the Christian life⁹⁰—but not just any suffering: “What is decisive in Christian suffering is voluntariness.”⁹¹ Christendom, in its mendacious cleverness,⁹² has done away with the Christ who asks us to suffer and the subsequent definition of Christianity as chosen suffering.⁹³ It is important to be precise about how Christendom has achieved this erasure. As already acknowledged, the Christianity of the established order does speak about suffering. So how does it keep this secret—how does it still successfully preclude the possibility of askēsis, of the suffering of the cross which the follower (efterfølger, which can also be translated “imitator”) of Christ is bidden to embrace? Anti-Climacus’s answer is clear. The Christianity of the established order has achieved the suppression of askēsis by inculcating a certain conceptual confusion.⁹⁴ Christendom has done away with Christ’s call to suffering by eliding the difference between unavoidable suffering and voluntary suffering: “Unavoidable human sufferings must be endured just as in paganism, but then they are preached into being Christian sufferings, are preached together with Christ and the apostles”;⁹⁵ “To lose everything and to give everything up become synonymous.”⁹⁶ Whenever suffering is spoken about from the pulpit, the people hear a message about how Christ offers rest to the weary and the heavy laden, how Christ  See SKS 12, 135 / PC, 131.  See SKS 26, 238, NB32:145 / JP 4, 4725; SKS 26, 384, NB35:20 / JP 4, 4729, which read: “Christianity is suffering.”  SKS 12, 117 / PC, 109.  The Hongs often translate kløge as “sagacious” (e. g., PC, 42), but it can also be translated as “clever” with an accompanying negative valence. My thanks here are owed to C. Stephen Evans.  See SKS 12, 107– 109 / PC, 99 – 101.  On how conceptual confusion can aid in reducing the difficulty inherent to Christianity, see Thomas J. Millay, “Conceptual Clarity,” pp. 109 – 120.  SKS 12, 117 / PC 109 – 110.  SKS 12, 117 / PC 109.

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eases the burdens of this life, instead of hearing about how Christ firsts asks us to choose suffering and only offers comfort to the human existence whose actuality unfolds within this choice. The Christ of mild comfort, who gives sweet words to those in pain about how everything will eventually be better—whom could he offend? And yet we know the Christ of the Gospels gave offense. So what is missing in our understanding of Christ? Of course, the call to choose suffering, that which the natural human most wants to avoid hearing. What is missing, in other words, is any hint of contradiction. Natural human desire and the message of Christianity have been thoroughly harmonized.⁹⁷ True Christianity,⁹⁸ by contrast, always involves us in contradiction. The contradiction is a contradiction of the self, where what we naturally desire and what the love of Christ causes us to desire are placed in opposition to one another. This explains a rather enigmatic invocation of the “self-contradiction” of Christianity in Practice in Christianity: In ordinary human suffering there is no self-contradiction; there is no self-contradiction in my wife’s dying—after all, she is mortal—no self-contradiction in my losing my possessions —after all, they are losable etc. Not until the self-contradiction of the suffering appears does the possibility of offense also appear, the possibility which, to repeat, is inseparable from being a Christian.⁹⁹

In saying that Christianity involves self-contradiction, Anti-Climacus is not saying that Christianity is logically in contradiction to itself; it is not self-contradictory in that sense. Rather, Christianity is self-contradictory in that it contradicts the self—that is, the human self with its natural orientation toward self-preservation, self-assertion, and self-love. For instance, Christianity offers solutions that seem to the natural human being to be much worse than the problem. Thus, if your eye causes you to sin, you should pluck it out (Mt 18:9). The natural

 Here I use the phrase “natural human desire” in Kierkegaard’s typical sense, wherein the phrase refers to tendencies of self-assertive acquisition and the achievement of secure temporal happiness in terms of material resources, familial bliss, and the respect of one’s society; see SKS 12, 118 – 119 / PC, 110 – 111 on “the natural man (naturlige Menneske)” and further Thomas J. Millay, “The Late Kierkegaard on Human Nature,” in Acta Kierkegaardiana VI: Kierkegaard and Human Nature, May 2013, pp. 137– 151. This is in contrast to the natural human desire for God, emphasized by Augustine and de Lubac. The natural human desire for God is also abundantly found in Kierkegaard, only without being framed in exactly those terms, as both Carl Hughes (Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of Eros, New York: Fordham University Press 2014) and Lee Barrett (Eros and Self-Emptying) have noted.  That is, Christianity grounded in the abased Christ.  SKS 12, 118 / PC, 110.

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human can acknowledge that his eye has caused him to do bad things, certainly; but he wants a kind of relative justice, wherein the eye is chastised but his own possibility of temporal happiness is not permanently damaged. Christianity contradicts this desire of the natural self by asserting the absolute priority of eternal happiness as a consideration: “It is better for you to enter into life one-eyed than to have two eyes and to be thrown into the fire of hell” (Mt 18:9). The fact is that, at least according to this passage, embracing eternal happiness involves renouncing temporal flourishing. Anti-Climacus draws all this together in a striking distillation of Matthew 18:9: “Therefore that which is really the occasion for offense is the infinite passion with which eternal happiness is comprehended.”¹⁰⁰ The natural human self wants happiness both here and in the hereafter, while Christianity says: either be happy here, or be happy there, you cannot have both.¹⁰¹ A choice must be made, and it is precisely within that choice—the very choice which Christ forces the self to confront—that contradiction is felt and offense is taken. The self-contradictory nature of Christianity is thus inherently connected to its capacity to offend. The contradiction of our desires is why we are offended by Christ and his call; thus, “it really is self-contradiction that constitutes the possibility of offense.”¹⁰² With Christ we cannot help but wonder, as did Gerard Manley Hopkins, “wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, how wouldst thou worst/Defeat, thwart me?” Let us return for a moment to that famous verse, Matthew 11:28: “Come here all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give thee rest.” When one of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries such as J.P. Mynster preaches on this text, he— as expected—preaches comfort, citing Psalm 139 alongside Matthew 11:28 to emphasize that God is always present when we need him.¹⁰³ Anti-Climacus confronts his readers with a quite different interpretation of the verse: Come here now, all you who labor and are burdened, that is, if you feel the need, even if you are of all who suffer the most miserable, if you feel the need to be helped in this way, that is helped into even greater misery—then come here, he will help you.¹⁰⁴

 SKS 12, 119 / PC, 111.  Matthew 6, for example, reads like a series of variations upon this theme.  SKS 12, 118 / PC, 110.  See J.P. Mynster, Prædikener paa alle Søn-og-hellig-dage I Aaret [Sermons for all Sundays and Holy Days in the Year], vol. 2, Copenhagen: Gyldendal’s Press 1827, pp. 518 – 519.  SKS 12, 68 / PC, 56.

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True, there is rest at the end of the invitation for both Mynster and Anti-Climacus, but for Anti-Climacus there is first a Way (ὁδός) to reach that end, and the way is misery, always greater and greater misery. The invitation of Matthew 11:28 is to rest, but if we focus on that end without the mediation of earthly suffering, we abstract from the character of the Inviter. Anti-Climacus’s Christology, by contrast, is concrete: it refuses to look away from the condition of life from which (and thus to which) the Inviter invites us. Taking up Matthew 11:28, Anti-Climacus places special emphasis on the word “here” (hid). Christ tells us to “Come here” (Δεῦτε προς με; Kommer hid). But where is this “here” to which Christ bids us to come? The answer is simple enough: it is where Christ is! So, now that we are looking for the location of the “here” and wondering where Christ is so that we may fulfill his invitation, the appropriate question to ask is: in Matthew 11, is it the Christ of glory—the resurrected Christ, the “highly exalted” Christ, sitting at the right hand of the Father? No! This is not the Jesus referenced in Philippians 2:9 – 11; this is the Jesus we met on earth, the Jesus of Philippians 2:7– 8. It is “Jesus Christ in his abasement” (Jesus Christus i sin Fornedrelse).¹⁰⁵ The place we are invited (“Come here”) is not a comfortable spot: if we are to receive comfort, we must first voluntarily step into a place of suffering, the very place Christ occupied. Notice that in all this, Anti-Climacus is describing the person of Christ in the stark earthly wretchedness in which he appears in the Gospels; but he is also doing more. Threading together the voluntary abasement of Christ with a constant refrain that this is the Christ we want to ignore, Anti-Climacus has set up a kind of litmus test for the accuracy of a given Christology. If the Christ you are presenting cannot give offense, something has gone wrong. For the inoffensive Christ you are presenting is precisely thereby not the figure we find in the Gospels. Furthermore, what is lost in the losing of offense is not simply an accurate picture of Christ. According to Anti-Climacus, faith itself is at stake. Without the possibility of offense, there is no possibility of faith. Faith and offense exist in a continual dialectical relation, such that in order to have faith one must be continually overcoming the possibility of offense: So inseparable is the possibility of offense from faith that if the God-man were not the possibility of offense he could not be the object of faith, either. Thus the possibility of offense is taken up into faith, is assimilated by faith, is the negative mark of the God-man.¹⁰⁶

 SKS 12, 38 / PC, 24; cf. SKS 20, 376 – 377, NB5:14 / KJN 4, 376 – 377.  SKS 12, 146 / PC, 143; cf. SKS 12, 53, 87– 88, 123 – 124, 143 – 147 / PC, 39, 75 – 76, 115 – 117, 140 – 144.

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If one does not find oneself challenged to overcome offense by faith, one does not have faith at all, but merely a kind of secular wish-fulfillment structure where one’s natural desire for acquisition will be answered by a kind of divine Santa Claus. But God is not a divine Santa Claus and neither is Jesus. God does not exact belief from us by meeting our every possible desire, such that we would have no choice but to acknowledge the giver of our manifest beneficence. God’s will manifests itself in our world as a call, certainly; but that will does not overlap with our natural desires—far from it. The life of faith continually confronts the possibility of offense because the life of faith involves a continuous assent to the call toward self-denial, and as long as we are natural human beings who are naturally oriented toward selfishness and self-assertion, this call will continue to offend some deeply rooted aspect of us. As long as our self is a natural human self—what Paul would call the physical or psychical body (σῶμα ψυχικόν, 1 Cor 15:44)—the life of faith will continuously be experienced as self-contradictory. We cannot in this life completely uproot our natural urge to acquisition; thus, such an urge must continually be combatted, through the work of the Holy Spirit continuously putting to death our human nature.¹⁰⁷ Only in this situation of overcoming does faith exist. Everything else is a comforting self-delusion that evades the requirement of difficulty inherent to Christian life, based as it is upon one who chose the cross and asks us to do the same. This leads us back to why Practice in Christianity was written in the first place. It was written, as a fragment of the epigram states, “For awakening.”¹⁰⁸ We cannot be awake to the true nature of Christianity apart from grappling with the possibility of offense. Yet, as Anti-Climacus makes clear, this possibility—the possibility that Christianity might require something of us that would offend our natural sensibilities—is precisely what Christendom had done away with: In established Christendom, this and every other possibility of offense is basically abolished—in established Christendom one becomes a Christian in the most pleasant way of the world without being aware of the slightest possibility of offense. In established Christendom, the natural man has had it his own way. There is no infinite contrast between what is Christian and what is secular.¹⁰⁹

 See SKS 13, 98 – 105 / FSE, 76 – 85.  SKS 12, 13 / PC, 5.  SKS 12, 119 / PC, 111.

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Anti-Climacus writes for awakening because of the context of his audience, who live in Christendom, the latter being defined as an established order that encourages somnolence toward the true nature of Christianity—and it does so precisely by the pretense of embodying and thereby defining that Christianity. Christendom has covered over the bright, searing light that is the demand of true Christianity; thus it lets us sleep soundly knowing that all will be well for us, both in this life and in the life to come. Like a caring parent, Christendom reassures us, comforts us, and—say if we perhaps ask too many questions about our bedtime story—bids us to shut our eyes and go to sleep. In this context it is helpful to remember something of which Martin Heidegger so forcefully reminds us, that the Greek word for “truth,” ἀλήθεια, alētheia, means to be unveiled (the word is a compound noun composed of a, “without,” and lēthe, “veil”).¹¹⁰ What Christendom has covered over, Anti-Climacus means to uncover: the true Christ. This true Christ, the offensive Christ, is brought forward in Practice in Christianity as a corrective to the supplemental Christ, that Christ who serves only to augment our earthly happiness but makes no further demands. It is Kierkegaard’s hope, writing through the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus, that the true Christ will be unveiled and the possibility of offense recovered.¹¹¹ It is a modest aim, in a sense, because Kierkegaard is not trying to make his readers into Christians; he is only trying to make Christianity a possibility. To be awake to the true nature of Christianity does not make one a Christian, as existential appropriation is still required. Still, it is an important step along the Way (ὁδός). As we have seen, without offense there can be no faith. That is why the comforting Christ of Denmark is such a problem. Yet it is not only Denmark that has covered over the offensive Christ. One may have been struck during the course of this treatment of Practice in Christianity at how unique Kierkegaard is as a theologian in his elevation of ‘offense’ as a key category of Christology. If this response of surprise rings true to you, I would now like to pause briefly to justify your reaction with a few moments of historical reflection.

 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven: Yale University Press 2000, p. 107.  See SKS 12, 157– 158 / PC, 154.

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VI Excursus: A Brief Survey of Inoffensive Christologies It is my hypothesis that Kierkegaard—via Anti-Climacus—is distinctive as a theologian in elevating offense to a central place in his Christology. Here, I provide a brief sketch of one ancient, one medieval, and one modern Christology to support this contention. Of course, such a hypothesis could not be absolutely verified except in a much larger work dedicated to this purpose alone. However, if my contention is accepted, I hope to make the suggestive point that one of the most significant things Kierkegaard’s Christology can give us is a heightened attention to the place offense should have in Christological treatises. Taking Kierkegaard seriously enables us to form a kind of litmus test: In short, if the Christ being presented by any given theologian does not make us as readers in the least bit angry or upset or at minimum perturbed, Kierkegaard would question whether this author is doing her or his job. Here I will lay out briefly some Christologies that—whatever their other virtues—seem to fail such a litmus test.

A Ancient: Gregory of Nazianzus What Gregory of Nazianzus (329 – 390) sets out to solve in his Five Theological Orations is essentially an intellectual puzzle. It consists of two questions. First: how does Scripture speak about Christ—in other words, what are the puzzle pieces? Second, how do we make sense of these various pieces? Or, better: how is the notion of the God-man more than a simple violation of Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, thus a violation which does violence to and offends the human intellect?¹¹² He approaches answering these questions in turn. First, he shows that the data of Scripture speaks about Christ as both God and man. Second, he shows that these scriptures can be synthesized in a logically coherent manner that does not propose simple contradictions, nor offend the human intellect—even if, at the same time, Gregory holds that logic cannot possibly comprehend the divine. The data of Scripture are primarily collected in Oration 29.17– 18. Passages such as 1 Corinthians 1:24, “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God,” are juxtaposed with passages like John 4:6, “Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well.” How these various puzzle pieces fit together in a coher-

 See further Frederick W. Norris, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory Nazianzen, Leiden: Brill 1991.

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ent way is laid out in Oration 29.19 – 20 and Oration 30.6, in Gregory’s teaching of deification (θέωσις),¹¹³ namely that in the incarnation Christ “remained what he was; what he was not, he assumed… Man and God blended. They became a single whole, the stronger side predominating, in order that I might be made God to the same extent that he was made man.”¹¹⁴ This is just to skim the surface of what is undoubtedly one of the greatest works in Christian theological history. Yet this surface is enough to show that the purpose of the Five Theological Orations is intellectual defense of the Godman proposition. “This is the answer we make perforce to these posers of puzzles,” Gregory says.¹¹⁵ The very form of the work suggests as much, with its challenges which are posed and then resolved.¹¹⁶ It seems reasonable to suggest, then, that the aim of Gregory’s Five Theological Orations is to resolve possible intellectual offense at the God-man proposition: to show how the proposition is defensible and, at least to some extent, understandable. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with such an endeavor. I mean only to point out that Gregory’s work is meant to decrease offense at Christ, rather than pricking us so as to raise our hackles.

B Medieval: Bonaventure Given the history of Christology (more on this in Chapter Four), one might expect the (later) medieval period’s focus on the suffering Christ to generate some offensive Christologies. Let us take up one figure who is squarely at the center of the high/late medieval turn to the lowly Christ, Bonaventure (1221– 1274), and see whether his Christology should be counted as offensive or not. There is a beautiful portrait of the suffering Christ in Bonaventure’s The Tree of Life, a work of Christological poetry and meditation which forms a kind of companion to his more famous The Soul’s Journey into God (Itinerarium Mentis in Deum). The words are vivid and evocative:

 See further Donald F. Winslow, The Dynamics of Salvation: A Study in Gregory of Nazianzus, Cambridge: The Philadelphia Patristic Foundation 1979.  Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 29.19; The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. by Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2002, 86.  Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 29.21; Five Theological Orations, 88.  See esp. the course of argument across Or. 29.18 – 21.

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See, now, my soul, how he who is God blessed above all things, is totally submerged in the waters of suffering from the sole of the foot to the top of the head. In order that he might draw you out totally from these sufferings, the waters have come up to his soul. For crowned with thorns he was ordered to bend his back under the burden of the cross and to bear his own ignominy. Led to the place of execution, he was stripped of garments so that he seemed to be a leper from the bruises and cuts in his flesh that were visible over his back and sides from the blows of the scourges. And then transfixed with nails, he appeared to you as your beloved cut through with wound upon wound in order to heal you. Who will grant me that my request should come about and that God will give me what I long for, that having been totally transpierced in both mind and flesh, I may be fixed with my beloved to the yoke of the cross?¹¹⁷

Surely this is an exception to the rule stated above, that Anti-Climacus is distinctive in his offensive Christology! And is not the following passage even more so an exception? “With Christ I am nailed to the cross,” from Galatians, chapter two. The true worshiper of God and disciple of Christ, who desires to conform perfectly to the Savior of all men crucified for him,

 Bonaventure, ed. and trans. by Ewert Cousins, Mahwah: Paulist 1994, pp. 148 – 149.

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should, above all, strive with an earnest endeavor of soul to carry about continuously, both in his soul and in his flesh, the cross of Christ until he can truly feel in himself what the Apostle said above. Moreover an affection and feeling of this kind is merited to be experienced in a vital way only by one who, not unmindful of the Lord’s passion nor ungrateful, contemplates the labor, suffering and love of Jesus crucified with such vividness of memory, such sharpness of intellect and such charity of will that he can truly say with the bride: A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me; he will linger between my breasts. ¹¹⁸

True, it may seem such a passage is an indisputable exception to claim that AntiClimacus is relatively unique in his offensive Christology. Yet look more closely: observe such words as “affection” “feeling” “memory,” and the invocation of contemplation. What is the purpose of the The Tree of Life, according to Bonaventure? “To enkindle in us this affection, to shape this understanding and to imprint this memory, I have endeavored to gather this bundle of myrrh from the forest of the holy Gospel, which treats at length the life, passion and glorification of Jesus Christ.”¹¹⁹ The orientation of The Tree of Life is to the cultivation of feeling and memory via vivid contemplation. Perhaps one could make an argument that, when you set The Tree of Life into a literary context along Bonaventure’s Life of St. Francis, the existential and even societal aspects of imitating Christ are implicitly present in Bonaventure’s Christology. Perhaps. My only point here is that an argument must be made, whereas with Anti-Climacus, he makes the argument himself, to the point where there is no other conclusion that a reader can reasonably draw; namely that the imitation

 Ibid., p. 119.  Ibid., pp. 119 – 120; cf., e. g., p. 144: “O whoever you are,/who at the word of an insistent servant,/that is your flesh,/by will or act/have shamelessly denied Christ,/who suffered for you,/remember the passion of your beloved Master/and go out with Peter/to weep most bitterly over yourself”; p. 147: Christ has died for us, but we “do not repay him/with gratitude and devotion”; p. 158: on developing “that feeling of compassion” which Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene “experienced/at the very hour of your passion.”

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of Christ involves not just com-passion, feeling along with Christ, but existing in the same martyrological-existential-political danger Christ lived in. It is not that Bonaventure’s Christ is not abased, it is that he is not necessarily offensively so, because one can share in Christ’s abasement by feeling along with him in a movement of imaginative sympathy, rather than being called to live a life that leads to one’s own crucifixion at the hands of the state.¹²⁰ It is for this reason that I hold Bonaventure’s Christology can also be counted inoffensive.

C Modern: Kathryn Tanner One of the most influential recent texts in Christology is Kathryn Tanner’s Christ the Key. This work continues a program laid out in her first major work, God and Creation in Christian Theology (1988), which aimed to clarify the difference between God and creatures, a difference which is not like the difference between one creature and another. God is not simply a more powerful version of a creature. Rather, creatures are radically dependent on God as the origin of their being. Whereas God exists by nature and has the power of life as a natural possession, we have life only as a gift given to us, and thus only exist by participation in the Source. This Creator/creature-Source/participant distinction leads to an ontological difference that can never be overcome. As St. Basil would put it, no matter how far we progress in holiness, we will never become holy by nature:¹²¹ that is a gap—a diastēma as Gregory of Nyssa would say—that can never be overcome.¹²² Yet, paradoxically, that means we can dare the most intense language of intimacy, because no matter how close we come to God, there is no risk of absorption; the gap remains. This radical Creator/creature distinction also has consequences for how we understand the relation between God’s will and the agency of human beings. These two categories exist at completely different levels. There is God’s will, by which everything comes into being and is sustained in being; every created thing is completely dependent on this will. Then there is the agency of human beings: they make choices within the limited regions of the created realm in which they reside. These are simply two very different kinds of agency. In fact,

 See the perceptive commentary by Rachel Davies, Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020, p. 108.  St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 1980, p. 76.  On the diastēma in Gregory of Nyssa, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Concept of Spacing,” in Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco: Ignatius 1995, pp. 27– 35.

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Tanner argues, they are so different that they cannot come into competition with one another. It is not the case that if God’s will acts in our world, our own agency is somehow lessened. Our agency is only to make choices within the overall fabric given by God. God’s will subtends that overall fabric within which we act. God’s will does not come into competition with our wills, but actually makes our choices possible.¹²³ In Christ the Key, Tanner reflects more extensively on the incarnation as the ground of our understanding of the relation between God and creation. In the incarnation, we see a perfectly achieved unity of God and humanity—a perfect realization of the human being as imago Dei. At the same time, Tanner’s account of the difference of God and creation enables her to speak with boldness on how we as Christians can appropriate Jesus’s relation to God. According to Tanner, we can become “knit into the Word,” which would mean relating to God in our humanity in a way like unto how Jesus relates to God in his humanity.¹²⁴ We as humans are able to become like Christ and relate to God like Christ does. Yet that word “become” preserves the distinction between Creator and creature when it comes to us and Jesus, for Jesus is by nature what we can only gradually approximate by participation.¹²⁵ This has bearing on how we understand human personhood and agency. Rather than becoming more like God and less like ourselves by degrees of ontological ascent, we are united to God in a life best described as participatory.¹²⁶ In relating to God, our agency and personhood is not replaced; rather, we are drawn into a unity which is a furtherance of ourselves and of God at the same time. Such an account of non-competitive participation is then applied by Tanner to a whole host of issues, such as nature and grace, trinitarian life, Christological political judgments, and the internal-external/immediate-mediate workings of the Spirit. Perhaps most relevant to our discussion of abasement here is Tanner’s discussion of the suffering and death of Christ (issues which will resurface in

 For a poignant case of a modern thinker forgetting these conceptual distinctions, see Christopher J. Insole’s The Intolerable God: Kant’s Theological Journey, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2016.  Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010, p. 36. It should be noted that, for Tanner, the activity of the Spirit is crucial to this process, for both Christ and ourselves. It is the Spirit who “forms Christ’s humanity according to the divine image,” and the same Spirit who is reforming our humanity into the same image (ibid.); only, Christ has this relation to the Spirit by nature from eternity, whereas we have it in fragments, shards of glass being forged into a mirror, made to be glorious but never achieving the completed perfection that is possible when the relation is one of nature, not a graced gift (Christ the Key, p. 35).  Ibid., p. 35.  See especially ibid., p. viii.

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Chapter Five). This discussion includes a strong critique of atonement theories of the penal substitution variety. Instead of Christ’s death satisfying a contractual obligation humanity owes to the Father, Christ dies in order to enter into death, to participate in it, and thereby to infuse it with the life that is his hypostatic possession within the communicatio idiomatum. ¹²⁷ Let us pause a moment here for further reflection on this last theme. In Tanner’s discussion of the suffering and death of Christ, which takes place in Chapter Six of Christ the Key, the issue of non-competitive agency is shifted to the background. At the same time, Tanner’s theological style is on full display. She aims to address a conflict and show how it can be resolved. The conflict is between traditional accounts of Christ’s atoning work and the concerns of “feminist and womanist theologians.”¹²⁸ Tanner demonstrates how the problem is not with traditional accounts of the atonement as such, but rather with accounts of the penal substitutionary variety. By way of contrast, she shows how traditional patristic accounts of Christ’s salvific participation in suffering and death should not cause “worry” ¹²⁹ for feminist and womanist theologians. The Christus Victor model, properly understood, does not glorify death or suffering; neither does it uphold surrogacy. Instead, this account of the atonement shows how Christ redeems us from those things.¹³⁰ There are several problems with Tanner’s account. One is the totalizing invocation of “feminist and womanist concerns.” Not only are there differences between feminist and womanist theologians on these matters, as we will see in Chapter Five, there are significant differences among womanist theologians themselves, with some rejecting the redemptive suffering of the cross as an appropriate theological theme, some provisionally accepting it, and some offering a wholehearted endorsement. Beyond this initial problem, there is the matter of the goal toward which Tanner writes. Bringing up this topic begins to circle us back around to Kierkegaard. We need to ask: In what sense is Christ they key? To speak about a key

 “Each moment of Jesus’ life as it happens is being brought into connection with the lifegiving powers of the Word, and the reworking of each of them takes time. Jesus is not saved from death, therefore, until he dies and not saved from the terrible consequences of his rejection in a sinful world until he suffers them, at which time those aspects of Jesus’ human life are taken up by the Word and subject to a process of reworking through the powers of the Word” (ibid., p. 261; cf. pp. 252– 261, passim).  Ibid., p. 247; the phrase is repeated several times in Chapter Six.  Ibid., p. 262; at least, these accounts should not cause undue worry, as Tanner’s more qualified language has it here.  Ibid., pp. 261– 262.

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suggests there is a lock. In fact, there are a number of locks, as that metaphor signifies a theological problem which is difficult to solve. Christ is the key in the sense that he helps us to solve these problems. Tanner shows in a consistently effective way that many theological issues assumed to be problems can be resolved by dissolving false dichotomies: always a useful activity since the creation of dualisms is probably the most basic activity of the human mind,¹³¹ and we frequently go astray into a kind of hyperactivity, making dualities where there in truth are none. By placing her in this lineage of inoffensive Christologies, I do not mean to disparage Tanner’s achievements in the field of Christology, which are significant. Rather, I mean to suggest Anti-Climacus (and Kierkegaard) would question the purpose of this enterprise. In Kierkegaard’s understanding, Tanner’s Christology is technically correct but rather beside the point. It is true that penal substitution is not an adequate theory of the atonement. It is also true that Christianity does not hold there to be a competitive relation between God and human agency. On the other hand, Christianity does teach us that there is an implacably competitive relation between God and “the world”:¹³² [T]he world and Christianity have completely opposite conceptions… The difference between secularity is not that the one has one view and the other another—no, the difference is always that they have the very opposite views, that what the one calls good the other calls evil, what the one calls love the other calls selfishness, what the one calls piety the other calls impiety, what the one calls being drunk the other calls being sober.¹³³

In other words, while Tanner is correct, she sidesteps the main drama of Christian existence and the competition contained therein.¹³⁴ There is a duality that structures everything; there is a dichotomy that cannot be resolved, at least in this lifetime. There are in fact problems that only a renunciatory askēsis, prac-

 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning, New York: Schocken Books 1978.  In the Johannine literature, “the world” almost always refers to human society. See Lidija Novakovic, John 1 – 10: A Handbook on the Greek Text, Waco: Baylor University Press 2020.  SKS 16, 154 / JFY, 96.  It seems to me this second problem—namely, that of glossing over the continuing difficulties of Christian life and the theological problems such difficulties continue to generate—is related to the first problem. If Tanner reckoned to a greater extent with the variety of womanist thinking on redemptive suffering, I do not believe she would count the issues resolved so easily. For example, what should we make of the fact that many Black women have in fact made sense of their lives through seeing the glory of choosing to suffer on behalf of another? Insightful works by JoAnne Marie Terrell and M. Shawn Copeland address precisely this question, to which we turn in Chapter Five.

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ticed moment-by-moment, can solve. There is no intellectual clarification that can, by itself, accomplish this task. Tanner’s Christology is inoffensive precisely because it is effective in accomplishing its goal. It is inoffensive because it dissolves problems, rather than pointing us to the one problem we can solve only through difficult daily labor: namely, the lure the world still holds over our hearts.

VII Marks of Abasement (4): Persecuted In this final category through which Anti-Climacus sketches the abased character of Christ, it becomes clear how all the distinguishing marks of the savior are connected in a kind of dynamic movement. It is Christ’s voluntary choice of poverty and marginality (made possible by his voluntary choice to become human flesh) that causes offense to the natural human being; and in such offense one finds the passion that animates and gives rise to our final category, persecution. If offense is a kind of passionate affect in human beings, persecution is the effective result of that affect.¹³⁵ Practice in Christianity’s most vivid evocation of persecution comes to us in aviary form. In Exposition III of Practice in Christianity No. III, Anti-Climacus draws the following analogy: Indeed, just as we sometimes see a poor bird that all the birds of the same species continually persecute and mistreat, and peck at because it is not just like the others, until they finally fulfill their wish to kill it so the kinship can be put to an end, so the human race likewise did not wish to be kin to this child or this man; it was of prime importance, a matter of life and death, to kill this man in order to put an end to the kinship.¹³⁶

Anti-Climacus is precise about the reason why kinship must be denied to Christ: Lord Jesus Christ! How various are the many things to which a person can feel drawn, but there is one thing to which no one ever felt naturally drawn, and that is to suffering and abasement.¹³⁷

 “Affect” is a contested term. The sense in which I use it here is influenced by Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, London: Verso 2013.  SKS 12, 171 / PC, 168.  SKS 12, 170 / PC, 167.

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We natural human beings are joined by this kinship: that we would never voluntarily choose suffering.¹³⁸ Yet this is precisely what Christ is asking us to do. The abased Christ who appears to us in the Gospels must be removed from this earth because of what he asks of us. We see in him that a life of renunciation with no visible reward is possible for a human being. But we do not want to see that. Christ’s call to self-denial must be silenced. There is nothing which the self-assertive root of human nature is more opposed to than such a call.¹³⁹ Thus, it must be banished. Therefore, the persecution of Christ. But would it not suffice to cut out Christ’s tongue—to make him a ‘confessor,’ as was done to Maximus (580 – 662 CE)—so that he can no longer say to us things like “Pick up your cross and follow me”? No, this will absolutely not suffice, for the whole earthly life of Christ is a call to self-denial. This is why it is so significant that Christ is not simply a teacher of the laudable nature of poverty; he is poor. Further, he has chosen to be so. His abasement and marginality are voluntary. This is crucial. It is not simply that Christ is poor and marginal: there is nothing inherently offensive about that, nothing about poverty and marginality per se, that can generate the passion embodied in persecution. No, it is that Christ chose poverty and marginality, and that he associates God and God’s will with such a choice (rather than, say, a flourishing society in which God is ‘properly’ worshiped). That we might be called to actively choose poverty and marginality: this is the notion that so irks the fundamental selfishness of the human being. So we peck at the person who issues such a call until he is destroyed. And—as we will see in Chapters Three and Four—we do the same to anyone who brings that same call to mind today.¹⁴⁰ So far we have established the universal human desire to persecute Christ. Yet to remain at this universal level would somewhat blunt the critique of Practice in Christianity. We have seen that the demand for self-denial that Christ and his followers represent must be repressed. Here we need to add that this repression must happen most of all not in so called ‘pagan’ lands, but in Christendom. Why in Christendom most of all? Because it claims Christ. Christendom therefore exists upon this secret or repressed fact: namely, that it must continually deny its foundation.¹⁴¹ The person of Christ is a call to self-denial; yet the

 This is stated in a global sense; i. e., even if we did choose to suffer, it would be to secure further earthly good for ourselves down the line. To choose suffering with no discernible reward is pure absurdity to the natural human being.  “The prospect of a God who humbles God’s own self is the deepest kind of offense to the relentless human drive for self-exaltation,” Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying, p. 313.  See SKS 12, 174 / PC, 171.  See SKS 12, 99 – 100 / PC, 91, 201– 232.

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society of Christendom, as every other human society, exists in a mode of selfassertion. What makes Christendom especially egregious in Kierkegaard’s understanding, then, is not that it is unlike all other human societies; rather, it is like all other societies, only it claims not to be.¹⁴² Christendom’s continued existence depends on sustaining an illusion, on making its claim to Christ’s name seem plausible when—in actuality—nothing could be further from the truth. But why make such a claim in the first place? Why claim to be Christian when the prototype for the Christian life—Christ—is so obviously inimical to a flourishing temporal society? The particular genius of Christendom is that it is able to give people all they want. Anti-Climacus assumes human persons will be selfishly worried about their eternal fate, just as they are selfishly worried about their temporal fate. Human persons want things to go well for them, both here and in the hereafter. Christendom is the solution to this demand. It makes no demands of self-denial; instead, it praises the beauty of worldly life and exalts bourgeois security. Yet it also assures its citizens with respect to the eternal destiny of their souls. They are Christian—after all, they are Danish¹⁴³— therefore they are saved. There is no need to worry; they have already passed the test, thanks to the benevolent arrangements of their society, which has enrolled them in Christianity from the moment of their birth. Their souls are safe, and incidentally their bodies are doing okay too.¹⁴⁴ The most threatening reality to Christendom is not if it were somehow found out that Jesus Christ did not really exist. Rather, it is the existence of Christ as he actually was—that is, as abased—who most threatens this social order. For if the abased Christ is the standard, then everything Christendom evaluates as good— security, good health, riches, dominance, family, land—would be suspect and subject to renunciation in order to retain fidelity to the prototype. Anti-Climacus has written to remind us of the abased Christ and has in so doing recovered a reality which threatens everything his audience held—and continues to hold¹⁴⁵ —dear. Christendom does everything it can to erase this reminder, by confusing the concept of Christ and by putting to death (physically or socially—whichever

 See SKS 12, 218 – 219 / PC, 223 – 224; cf. SKS 12, 77– 78 / PC, 66, on honesty versus hypocrisy.  See SKS 7, 55 / CUP 50 – 51.  See SKS 12, 115 / PC, 107; cf. SKS 20, 239, NB2:263 / KJN 4, 239; SKS 20, 213, NB2:182 / KJN 4, 212: “Present-day Christendom rlly lives as if the situation were as follows: Christ is the great hero and benefactor who has once and for all secured salvation for us; we now must merely be happy and delighted with the innocent goods of earthly life and leave the rest to him.”  On the continuation of Christendom and its desires, see Jason A. Mahn, Becoming a Christian in Christendom, Minneapolis: Fortress 2016.

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way is more expedient) anyone who threatens to clarify the concept of Christ such that we might see him in his abasement. If the identity of the abased Christ has become more clear, this chapter has achieved its goal. Still one may yet wonder: Why is this challenging, threatening Christ necessary? Was Kierkegaard just a curmudgeon, a bitter cynic who liked to be seen as radical, who therefore fabricated a Christ he knew would irritate people? I hope to address such questions in the next chapter.

Chapter Three: Contemporaneity —Men hvor skulle vi begynde? Kierkegaard, Indøvelse i Christendom, 1850

I Introduction: Why? According to Anti-Climacus, Christians are followers of the abased Christ. We now have a greater sense of what “the abased Christ” means. But why do Christians follow this Christ? After all, Christ is not now abased. Right now, Christ is in glory, and—as the verse which the entirety of No. 3 of Practice in Christianity expands upon proclaims—it is from on high that he will draw all to himself (John 12:32). Anti-Climacus recognizes this theological fact as a potential problem with his emphasis on the normativity of the abased Christ, and formulates our question for us: “Thus he begins the second time from on high, here he begins what from now on is his only task, to draw all to himself—but where should we begin? Because he is now on high, can we therefore also begin with loftiness; that is, because he inherited loftiness, can we therefore also take it in advance?”¹ In other words, if Christ is drawing us from on high, why are we not being drawn to the heights? Why are we not being made more glorious, more powerful, more authoritative? Why are we not being made more like Christ as he is right now? Within the terms of our unfolding treatment of Practice in Christianity, all that has been demonstrated is who the abased Christ is. As yet we have little sense of why it is this Christ whom we should follow. Does God simply want us to suffer, just for the sake of suffering? Is the God of Anti-Climacus some kind of transcendent masochist? Or is God retributive, requiring us to suffer because he suffered? Not exactly. There is a reasoning and a logic to the necessity of the abased Christ as our model, and it does not have anything to do with some desire God might have for us to suffer. Instead, the answer to the question “why this Christ?” lies in Anti-Climacus’s concept of contemporaneity.²

 SKS 12, 182 / PC, 182 (italics original).  In his summary treatment of “Contemporaneity,” Leo Stan provides a helpful definition of the Danish term: “Related to the Old Norse word, samtí∂a, the Danish nouns Samtid and Samtidighed essentially denote the chronological simultaneity or co-presence of events, persons, or objects. Both terms unambiguously refer to the present moment, while in a secondary sense they designate the (larger or smaller) community of humans that belong to a certain time perihttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-006

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The concept of contemporaneity is crucial to understanding Practice in Christianity. According to Anti-Climacus, there is no Christianity nor the practicing of it, no faith nor belief in Christ, without contemporaneity. To have faith simply is to become contemporary with Christ; “contemporaneity is the condition of faith, and, more sharply defined, it is faith.”³ Thus, one cannot understand what AntiClimacus means by “faith” or “belief” without simultaneously grasping the meaning of contemporaneity. The concept is central to the conceptual dynamics of the work, and—as we will see—its invocation requires a particular definition of the person of Christ for the believer. In short, it makes the abased Christ of history the same Christ who is present for us in the daily walk along the way that is Christianity. Contemporaneity makes the abased Christ normative and any other Christ a delusional wish-fulfillment, a product of the naturally selfish desires of an ordinary human being. Thankfully—given its centrality to Practice in Christianity—understanding the concept of contemporaneity is fairly straightforward. However, understanding the logic that drives Anti-Climacus’s distinct articulation of the concept is considerably more difficult. It is worth unpacking, and that is what this chapter aims to do.

II Contemporaneity: A Definition Let’s begin with the relatively straightforward task of definition. David R. Law helpfully summarizes the basic features of the concept of contemporaneity insofar as it appears in Practice in Christianity and is applied to the believer’s relationship with Christ: Paradoxically, although we relate ourselves to the eternal Christ who is equally close to each generation, we relate to the eternal Christ in the form in which he manifested himself historically. Christ spoke his words of invitation during his earthly existence as a lowly, abased servant. Because these words were spoken by the incarnate Christ, we must continue to understand them in the way they were spoken during his earthly life, even though Christ has now ascended to the Father. That is, we relate not to the eternally present Christ in his exalted form, but to the eternally present Christ through the servant form he adopted

od” (Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome II, Classicism to Enthusiasm, ed. by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate 2014 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15), p. 61). Stan makes reference to Ordbog overdet danske Sprog, vol. 18, s.v. I would add that Samtidighed can somewhat clunkily be translated as ‘sametime-ness’ (Sam-tid-ighed).  SKS 12, 17 / PC, 9.

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for the duration of his earthly ministry. We are contemporaneous not with Christ as he now is in the status exaltationis, but with him as he was in his earthly life. Or to put it more accurately, our present relation to the exalted Christ is mediated through the lowly servant form he assumed during his earthly ministry.⁴

Law’s assessment is entirely correct. According to Anti-Climacus, the Christian who is on earth becomes contemporary with Christ as he was during his time on earth.⁵ This is the Christ to whom we relate in faith.⁶ How Christ lived on earth during his time is thus normative for us during our own time on earth. That much is clear. But Law’s summary still begs the question: why this Christ?⁷ Why are we not made contemporary with the exalted Christ, whom, after all, is who Christ now is? Is there any deeper reasoning to this position, or is it simply an assertion?

III The Logic of Contemporaneity: Or, Anti-Climacus’s Philosophy of History To answer these questions, we have to go beyond asserting the earthly Christ’s normativity and delve into the logic of Anti-Climacus’s understanding of contemporaneity. There is indeed a philosophical ground to the necessity of contemporaneity in the individual’s relation to Christ. This philosophical ground is AntiClimacus’s philosophy of history.⁸ In the pages of Practice in Christianity, one

 David R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, p. 260.  See SKS 12, 50 – 68 / PC, 36 – 56. In other words, to be contemporary with Christ means to join (con) oneself to the time (tempus) of Christ, and that time is defined by Anti-Climacus as the course of his life on earth as recorded in the Gospels.  For the relation between faith and contemporaneity, see “The Halt,” SKS 12, 35 – 78 / PC, 23 – 66.  Law does say “Because these words were spoken by the incarnate Christ, we must continue to understand them in the way they were spoken during his earthly life” (Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology, p. 260). However, the logical necessity of this historicizing approach is still lacking. One could ask of the preceding quotation: Why this approach and not another? Why must we remain yoked to the historical Christ? Simply because it was historically the incarnate Christ who spoke these words is not a sufficient argument. I aim to provide the logical grounds for Anti-Climacus’s historicizing approach in what follows.  This is missed by Stan, who makes oblique reference to Anti-Climacus’s “novel, albeit insufficiently developed, philosophy of time” (Stan, “Contemporaneity,” p. 63), but does not address the importance of Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history for an understanding of his concept of contemporaneity. This section of the chapter is an expansion of Thomas J. Millay, “The Logic of

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finds a philosophy of history which explains why we must relate to Christ through the abased form in which he was incarnate on earth. As we will see, our own relation to Christ can occur because the world Christ faced is essentially the same world any Christian faces, no matter how many ages separate the two. Our action can mirror his because our world is essentially the same as his. Without the backdrop of the world (as it was in Christ’s age and remains in ours), there is no substance from which a relation to Christ can be forged. What exactly this means, and what it looks like, will be further specified in what follows. Before turning to Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history, however, it will be useful to set the stage by taking a look at the dominant philosophy of history amongst intellectuals in Golden Age Denmark—viz., what might be called a dialectical-progressive philosophy of history, stemming from the thought of G.W.F. Hegel. The key passage for Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history begins with a dismissal of “this talk whereby people flatter the human race and themselves that the world is advancing.”⁹ In order to really understand the pointedness of his critique, we have to grasp what “this talk” was all about. Excavating this context will provide a negative backdrop which will illuminate the distinctiveness of the position Anti-Climacus takes. Anti-Climacus’s contrasting position will appear all the more clearly against this shaded background. After a prologue on Hegel himself (a), I will further situate Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history by reviewing the reception of Hegel’s philosophy of history in three Danish figures: (b) J.L. Heiberg; (c) Christian Molbech; and (d) Hans Lassen Martensen.¹⁰ As we will see, these Danish figures—though occasionally critical of Hegel in important ways—take up and continue the grand themes of Hegel’s philosophy of history, such that, at least when it comes to issues of the philosophy of history, the intellectual context into which Anti-Climacus speaks is thoroughly Hegelianized. (a) G.W.F. Hegel (1770 – 1831) was one of the most influential of the German Idealist philosophers operating in the wake of Immanuel Kant. In the “Preface” to his first major work, Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel developed a rigorously dialectical approach to the task of thinking, wherein one affirmation always negates and yet simultaneously continues that which precedes it. For example,

Contemporaneity: On Anti-Climacus’s Philosophy of History,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, Volume 27, Issue 1 (2022), pp. 95 – 121.  SKS 12, 226 / PC, 232.  Poul Martin Møller could also be added to this group (at least initially, before 1837) due to his 1825 essay “On the Development of Popular Ideas,” as Jon Stewart makes clear (A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, The Heiberg Period: 1824 – 1836, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel’s Publishers 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 3), pp. 211– 216).

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the modern state negates pure individualism by elevating the importance of social duty, while at the same time preserving a notion of inalienable individual rights. The dialectical method of negation and continuation as first laid out in the “Preface” is then subsequently used by Hegel in a variety of arena, such as consciousness, logic, politics, art, and religion. In the years 1822 to 1831, Hegel added a treatment of subject of history to his developing portfolio. He did so on five separate occasions, delivering a series of lectures on the topic at the University of Berlin. Our knowledge of these lectures is based off student notes and Hegel’s own partial manuscripts. For our purposes, which are shaped by the Danish reception of Hegel, Hegel’s philosophy of history encompasses four great themes: (i) progress, (ii) freedom, (iii) the state, (iv) God’s Kingdom on earth. (i) It is important that progress be our first topic when assessing Hegel’s philosophy of history. Given what has been said about Hegel’s authorship thus far, particularly how it is grounded in the dialectical thinking established in the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, one might think it would be more appropriate for our survey to begin with the dialectical method itself. In actuality, progress is a more fundamental theme for Hegel than the dialectic. Progress is what is occurring; the dialectic is simply the means by which this occurring happens. The fundamental presupposition of Hegel’s philosophy is well-stated at the beginning of Book Two, Section II of his Logic, where he baldly proclaims: “Essence must appear.”¹¹ What that means is that progress must happen, for progress simply is ‘happening’ itself. This is the case for consciousness, art, philosophy, religion, and the course of history more generally. The principle of progress (Fortgang) is stated early in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: “World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom¹²–a progress whose necessity we have to recognize.”¹³ In general, the

 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010, 418. According to Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno used to draw a comparison between Hegel’s declaration that “Essence must appear” and the opening bars of Ludvig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso 2009, p. 60). This makes a good deal of sense: progress is the theme upon which everything else plays as a variation.  For further treatment of the theme of the progressive actualization of freedom in history as it appears in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, see Peter C. Hodgson, Shapes of Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy of World History in Theological Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012, Chapter Two, “History and the Progress of the Consciousness of Freedom,” pp. 31– 62. I rely heavily on Hodgson in what follows.  G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Volume I: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822 – 3, ed. and trans. by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson,

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vision that Hegel sets forth and defends in his Philosophy of World History has to do with things other than the notion of progress, such as freedom and consciousness. What this indicates is not the insignificance of progress, but rather its fundamental nature for Hegel’s thought. It is not often discussed because it is the presupposition for everything else. Thus, when Hegel takes up the theme of freedom, he is investigating the progress of freedom; when he takes up consciousness, the progress of consciousness is what is being explored. Hegel’s philosophy proceeds like this: Let us assume that progress occurs. How then does it occur, and with respect to what? The latter questions are Hegel’s central preoccupations, but the assumption of progress should not be forgotten. Without it, there is really nothing for Hegel’s philosophy to be about. (ii) History is progress, certainly; but we can say more. History is the progress of something specific: freedom. In the process before us,¹⁴ the essential nature of freedom—which involves in it absolute necessity—is to be displayed as coming to a consciousness of itself (for it is in its very nature self-consciousness) and thereby realizing its existence. Itself is its own object of attainment, and the sole aim of Spirit. This result it is, at which the process of the World’s History has been continually aiming… This final aim is God’s purpose within the world.¹⁵

We will come back to the final phrase about ‘God’s purpose’ in section (iv), below. What is to be emphasized here is twofold: (1) Hegel identifies for us the essence of history, and that essence is the progressive unfolding of greater and greater freedom over time; (2) This freedom can be identified somehow with self-consciousness, that is, the knowledge of the role we play in Spirit’s realization. Here, although he gives it his own characteristic dialectical bent, Hegel speaks as a mouthpiece of some of the core beliefs of modernity, shared by a great many of its thinkers.¹⁶ History is a tale of humans becoming more free, and we in modernity are more free than anyone in previous ages. This is so in (at least) two key ways: (a) Having thrown off a self-incurred tutelage, we are now conscious of ourselves as self-legislating agents; (b) We have formed societies in which self-legislating agents who are conscious of themselves as being

Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011, p. 88; cf. pp. 155 – 166. The citation is from the Introduction to the lectures which Hegel gave beginning in November of 1830.  The “process” referred to is history itself.  G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. by John Sibree, New York: Barnes & Noble Books 2004, p. 21.  See Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” in his A Secular Age, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2007, pp. 159 – 211.

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such can give shape to their world, can take their deliberative decisions and make them actual via policy and rationally generated social roles, with each role having its own logically parseable explanation.¹⁷ The first key to the progress of freedom in modernity is found paradigmatically in Kant;¹⁸ the second is the topic of Hegel’s theory of the state. Hegel narrates the difference between individual freedom and the social freedom the state enables, and the transition between them, near to the end of his lectures on the Philosophy of World History. This narration sums up Hegel’s thematics of freedom and takes us to our next section: The Will is Free only when it does not will anything alien, extrinsic, foreign to itself (for as long as it does so, it is dependent), but wills itself alone—wills the Will. This is absolute Will—the volition to be free. Will making itself its own object is the basis of all Right and Obligation—consequently of all statutory determinations of Right, categorical imperatives, and enjoined obligations. The freedom of the Will per se is the principle and substantial basis of all Right—is itself absolute, inherently eternal Right, and the Supreme Right in comparison with other specific Rights; nay, it is even that by which Man becomes Man, and is therefore the fundamental principle of Spirit. But the next question is: How does Will assume a definite form?¹⁹

(iii) The answer to that question is the “The State” (Der Staat).²⁰ Why? If freedom is not instantiated in society, it remains only an inward or noumenal possession of an individual; in other words, it remains unrealized and abstract.²¹ The state is necessary to the realization of freedom insofar as, within the domain of the state, one’s concrete employment can be taken up into the realization of the Idea upon

 A clear summary of this thematic, reflecting though not specifically referencing Hegel, can be found in Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 165 – 167.  See, for example, Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. by H.S. Reiss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, pp. 54– 60.  Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 521.  For Hegel, the state is not the same thing as the nation. On the difference between state and nation in Hegel (and for his debate on the topic with J.G. Fichte), see the excellent treatment by Pheng Cheah in Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, New York: Columbia University Press 2003, who shows how, for Hegel, the pervasive rationality of the modern state must transcend accidental allegiances such as language and culture (pp. 141– 161). Cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Political Writings, ed. by Laurence Dickey and H.B. Nisbet, trans. by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 158; Lydia L. Moland, “Das Volk als Staat: National Identity as a Component of Political Identity,” in her Hegel on Political Identity: Patriotism, Nationality, Cosmopolitanism, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2011, pp. 76 – 96.  See especially Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §§ 135– 141.

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earth. (By ‘state,’ Hegel means the modern state;²² earlier instantiations of society featured arbitrary allocations of power [for example, an absolute power given for reasons of heredity alone] and thus could not embody reason in any substantial sense.) As an individual within a rationally organized society, one does one’s part in the actualization of the Idea, and insofar as one occupies that role and is conscious of occupying it, one is actually and substantially free.²³ In other words, one has found a vocation worthy of one’s status as a self-conscious being aware of how Reason is being translated into real historical circumstances; one can oneself play a part in this translation and be consciously aware of how one is playing such a part, and this is freedom.²⁴ As we glean from another set of lectures, on the Philosophy of Right, the modern state is composed of a variety of purposeful administrative offices, together tasked with the cultivation (Bildung) of communal flourishing.²⁵ Each office is determined not by purely contingent factors such as heredity, but by Reason’s assessment of what makes for a flourishing life on earth. This permeation by Reason is that which makes the modern state modern,²⁶ and it is what marks it as a progression beyond the forms of absolute monarchy and feudalism. Thus, the modern state is essential to the realization of freedom—freedom not simply as an inward-abstract-subjective potentiality, but as an objective-concrete-worldly actuality: Concerning the nature of the state, it should be represented as follows: that in it freedom becomes objective to itself, that in it freedom is realized in a positive [i. e. historical] fashion —in contrast to the representation that the state is a collection of human beings in which the freedom of all is limited, and that therefore the state is the negation of freedom in such a way that for individuals only a small area remains free…. However, the state is freedom in its objectivity; and the constrained space within which people have… known freedom is only arbitrary choice or free will (Willkür), thus the opposite of freedom. Therefore the

 See Allen W. Wood, “Hegel’s Political Philosophy,” in A Companion to Hegel, ed. by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, Chichester: Blackwell 2011, p. 298.  “The state is the actuality of the substantial will, an actuality which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness when this has been raised to its universality; as such, it is the rational in and for itself. This substantial unity is an absolute and unmoved end in itself, and in it, freedom enters into its highest right, just as this ultimate end possesses the highest right in relation to individuals, whose highest duty is to be members of the state” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 258, p. 275).  For further treatment, see Hodgson, Shapes of Freedom, Chapter Three, “The State and the Actualization of Freedom,” pp. 63 – 88; Alan Patten, Hegel’s Idea of Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999, Chapter Six, “A Civic Humanist Idea of Freedom,” pp. 163 – 201.  See especially Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 272.  See Taylor, “The Rise of the Disciplinary Society,” in A Secular Age, pp. 90 – 145.

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way in which philosophy comprehends the state is that the state is the actualization of freedom. This is its principal definition….Thus the state is the idea as it is present on earth.²⁷

In the movement from the individual to the state, we sense the essential dynamic of history. The modern state is a result of the progress of Spirit from inward individuality to objective sociality, and in this progress freedom itself is coming into the world. Without the state, freedom is an abstract, inward ideal. With the state, freedom is a concrete, objective reality. (iv) Lest we mistake the significance of Hegel’s argument, modernity has not only allowed a slight progression in the actualization of freedom. It has enabled something much greater: it has made possible a vision of the end of history. What we are talking about with respect to the possibilities of our age is not simply incremental progress, but the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth: The key to world history is the ‘mystery’ of God as it ‘unfolds’ through the actualization of freedom in history—an actualization in social shapes that transcend yet include individual freedom. The goal for individuals per se is simply the ‘eternal peace’ that comes from sharing in the divine life, from giving God the honor and glory.²⁸ … That the History of the World, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and the realization of Spirit—this is the true Theodicæa, the justification of God in History. Only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the History of the World—viz. that what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not ‘without God,’ but is essentially His Work.²⁹ … Spirit’s absolute is the absolute of everything, the divine being. Spirit’s purpose, its absolute drive, is thus to gain a consciousness of this being such that it is known as the one and only actual and true being through which everything happens and proceeds—to know that everything must be arranged, and is actually arranged, in accord with it, and therefore that it is the power that guided and guides the course of world history, the power that rules and has ruled it. The recognition of this in these deeds and works is what religion rightly expresses by giving God the honor and glory, or by glorifying and exalting the truth…. The individual spirit has its glory in glorifying God. This is not its particular honor; rather its honor comes from knowing that its self-feeling is the substantial consciousness of God, that its action is to the honor and glory of God, of the absolute. In this knowledge the individual spirit has attained its truth and freedom; here it has to do with the pure concept, with the absolute; here it is at home not with another but with itself, with

 Translation in Hodgson, Shapes of Freedom, pp. 64– 65. As Hegel indicates, this material is simply a summary of the lengthier development found in his Philosophy of Right.  Translation in Hodgson, Shapes of Freedom, p. 163.  G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 537.

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its essence, not with something contingent but rather in absolute freedom. This, accordingly, would be the final end of world history.³⁰

These statements should make clear just how committed Hegel is to an understanding of history as progress. Not only are we moderns more free; through our social endeavors, we have made possible the desire of nations. The Kingdom which all of us long for is now close at hand, and it will take the shape of a rationally organized society in which each member is rationally conscious of the essential part he plays in that society; in other words, it will take the shape of freedom. Thus, when the individual acts in accord with reason within a society structured in accord with reason, and when he consciously knows that he does so, then history is complete; then God’s Kingdom has come on earth. It is hard to imagine a more thoroughgoing celebration of progress than this! Quantity has become quality; an incremental increase in freedom has led to the kingdom of God on earth. History is progress made manifest, and we are now— through our rationally governed institutions—at the cusp of a great breakthrough. Hegel’s intoxicating vision is picked up by various Danish Golden Age figures; let us now see how. (b) Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791– 1860) was one of the first major Danish thinkers to appropriate Hegel for philosophical use within Denmark, and— given his cultural status as a kind of scion for Danish Golden Age literature³¹ —he was perhaps the most significant. As Stewart remarks: Heiberg was a determining figure for the development of Hegelianism in Denmark due to the fact that he was probably the only one among those interested in and inspired by Hegel’s philosophy at the time to have made it a central part of his own identity and academic program to promote it in his home country. With his wide-ranging talents in the different fields, he did this in a number of different, not always strictly speaking philosophical,

 Translation in Hodgson, Shapes of Freedom, p. 176. Though the literal phrase “kingdom of God” is not used here, the conceptual development is certainly akin to it. See Hodgson, Shapes of Freedom, p. 177.  For the social significance of Johan Ludvig and the other important members of the Heiberg family (including Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, author of A Story of Everyday Life), see Henning Fenger, The Heibergs, trans. by Frederick J. Marker, New York: Twayne Publishers 1971; a helpful and succinct summary can also be found in Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990, pp. 138 – 140. For Heiberg as a literary critic, see especially the twin essays of Tonny Aagaard Olesen, “Heiberg’s Initial Approach: The Prelude to his Critical Breakthrough,” “Heiberg’s Critical Breakthrough in 1828: A Historical Presentation” (both essays translated by Jon Stewart), in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008, pp. 211– 307.

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ways, including writing Hegelian dramas and founding a Hegelian journal. He is thus to be credited with being the figure who played the most dominant role in the initial stages of the Hegel reception in Denmark.³²

Heiberg was at the center of intellectual culture in Golden Age Denmark. Therefore, if Heiberg is found to endorse a Hegelian philosophy of history, such a fact has significance not only for his own personal development, but for our understanding of the milieu or general tone of the Danish Golden Age more broadly. Though he wrote previous works in a Hegelian vein, it is Heiberg’s 1833 pamphlet On the Significance of Philosophy in the Present Age that is particularly relevant to our discussion here. Given the responses it generated, it is not an exaggeration to claim that this pamphlet “represents a landmark in the Danish Hegel reception.”³³ It was published as a kind of advertisement for a lecture series that never actually occurred, yet it still made a sizable contribution to the burgeoning discussions swirling around Hegel’s philosophy at this time.³⁴ The aim of the brief work is to expostulate Heiberg’s distinctive approach to addressing the cultural crisis of his era (a crisis which many agreed was occurring, though both diagnoses and prescriptions differed wildly).³⁵ It may seem strange to focus on this work, as the exposition of a philosophy of history is never made an explicit topic in these pages.³⁶ However, an operative philosophy of history is detectable if one grasps the role Heiberg gives to philosophy in this text. The first proposition to note in Heiberg’s unfolding argument is that the present age is one of a confusing ferment of energies:

 Stewart, History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, pp. 115 – 116. See further Stewart, “Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Hegel’s Danish Apologist,” in The Cultural Crisis of the Danish Golden Age: Heiberg, Martensen, and Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2015, pp. 33 – 77.  Stewart, History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, p. 404.  See the responses to Heiberg’s pamphlet by Zeuthen, Mynster, and Tryde, helpfully collected and translated by Stewart, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel’s Publishers 2005, pp. 121– 213. This material also includes Heiberg’s responses to these responses. See also Stewart, History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, pp. 391– 472.  With respect to On the Significance of Philosophy as a response to a perceived “crisis,” see On the Significance of Philosophy, p. 87, along with Millay, “Conceptual Clarity: Kierkegaard’s Dialectical Method as a Response to the Religious Crisis of Golden Age Denmark,” in The Crisis of the Danish Golden Age and Its Modern Resonance, pp. 109 – 112.  This lack of explicit focus on history, apart from the evocation of a series of geniuses who rise above their times, is typical of Heiberg. See Joachim Schiedermair, “Hegelian Terminology and Platonic Imagery: On Two Competing Models of Art in Heiberg’s Works on Aesthetics,” in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, p. 319.

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Anyone who, with an attentive eye, has observed the present generation as it appears in the most civilized states and as it thus can be said to represent humanity at its present level of development, will without doubt have found that this generation—which is rich in the experience which the previous centuries have provided and is armed with the strength which only the living moment bestows—strives powerfully forward in manifold new directions. However, it does not itself know where many of these directions will lead it and thus does not know whether they all lead to a common goal or what that might be.³⁷

The role philosophy can play in response to this onrushing cataract is to show how this manifold can be organized and understood as progress.³⁸ In other words, the clarity philosophy provides shows how a variety of seemingly unconnected endeavors are in fact in fact leading to the “common goal” of progress, even if they are individually unaware of this trajectory in the moments of their own unfolding.³⁹ What would otherwise be a confusing hodgepodge of cultural movements in art, drama, religion, and literature, is shown by philosophy to be in actuality a variety of tributaries enfolding upon one another to become an onrushing river. Progress is not immediately evident; philosophy makes it so. In other words, philosophy allows one to see history for what it is: the progress of the Idea, made actual in various forms over time—forms that are dialectically related to one another.⁴⁰ What might seem to be chaos is in actuality the busy forward march of the Idea. Furthermore, “progress” is interpreted here in

 Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy, p. 87.  What Heiberg is tracking is “the gradual development of humanity” (ibid., p. 93). This phrase is used in a rather offhand way, as if it is a given, commonly accepted reality; the matter of debate is how to interpret this development, rather than whether it is happening. On “development of humanity” as a theme within On the Significance of Philosophy, see Thomas Fauth Hansen, “The Expression of Infinity: Reflections on Heiberg’s View of Contemporary Culture,” in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, pp. 462– 470. On philosophy’s contribution to understanding, see Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy, p. 98.  See Heiberg, On the Significance of Philosophy, pp. 92– 93: “[T]he present generation cannot have its philosophy yet since it is itself in a crisis, that is, in a period of transition in which the material is still present and thus not completed or incorporated into the realm of the dead, and this lack is what the manifold conflicting undertakings of the age, sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously, try to set right, even though this goal cannot be reached before the critical time has been survived. But in the age, as in every becoming, there lies the force necessary to sublate itself and become a condition. The critical ferment has no other goal than to bring forth its opposite: the calm clarity which can serve as a mirror for the Idea.” Cf. ibid., pp. 98 – 99.  See ibid., p. 89: “All differences are grounded in unity; they are only moments in it, i. e., they are the necessary states in the unity’s own development. The truth is not so empty or abstract that it could not, without damage to itself, take up the conflicting moments and keep them in the common womb. They contradict, they sublate each other; for just this reason it is absurd to ask: ‘in which of them is the truth?’ It is in none of them, but they are all in it.”

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a thoroughly Hegelian manner, as the becoming actual of freedom in the knowing consciousness of human beings.⁴¹ Like Hegel, progress is hardly even mentioned as an explicit theme in Heiberg’s work. Yet, also like Hegel, it is abundantly clear that progress is the presupposition that makes all other subsequent positions possible. Thus, smack in the middle of this great Golden Age, one of Denmark’s leading artists and thinkers promulgated a philosophy of history that thoroughly endorsed the notion of progress, and did so by giving it a Hegelian spin that made artists and philosophers the most important members of society. (c) In 1840 – 1841, Christian Molbech—primarily known to posterity for his groundbreaking Danish dictionary⁴²—published his Lectures on the Philosophy of History at the University of Copenhagen. While Heiberg and Martensen do occasionally modify Hegel in one way or another, Molbech’s lectures are notable for being essentially Danish copies of Hegel, and of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History in particular. Morten Borup comments: [A] closer comparison shows that Molbech’s lectures in actuality should be regarded as a Danish reworking of Hegel’s lectures, without so much as a word being given to indicate this. To be sure, Hegel is quoted frequently but often only in order for Molbech to distance himself from him… But the basic structure is Hegel’s and with what concerns the oldest peoples, which Molbech had no first-hand knowledge of, he copies quite slavishly.⁴³

In other words, as Jon Stewart summarizes, “Molbech’s rather pedantic criticisms of small points in Hegel obscure his profound debt to him.”⁴⁴ And this is the case, as Borup indicates, not only with respect to particular historical details, but also with regard to the broad structure of his work, the dialectical-progressive understanding of the overall movement of history, which Molbech inherits from Hegel. According to Molbech, history is progressing, and it is progressing dialectically via the direction of Spirit and the providence of God: Historical truth therefore does not dwell alone and reveal itself solely in the material details of its subject matter—but also in the subject matter of the ensouled Spirit in historical life, which shows itself as something internal in the events, which brings them into an organic

 See ibid., p. 103, and the role Heiberg gives to the cultural vanguard on p. 92.  Christian Molbech, Dansk Ordbog indeholdende det danske Sprogs Stammeord tilligemed afledede og sammensatte Ord, efter den nuværende Sprogbrug forklarede I desres forskiellige Betydninger, og ved Talemaader og Exempler oplyste, vols. 1– 2, Copenhagen 1833.  Morten Borup, Christian Molbech, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1954, p. 352, trans. by Jon Stewart, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, p. 493.  Stewart, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, p. 505.

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connection with the whole, of which they constitute fragmentary parts; it brings the events into a rational relation to a higher unity, and in this relation or in its contemplation, the historical truth alone becomes accessible and clear to us as we take it up in our understanding and consciousness. … When, moreover, Hegel unfolds and explains this fundamental proposition such that it is God who rules the world through reason, and it is the richest product of this created reason which we are to grasp when we wish to grasp world history, then it cannot help but strike us that an entirely religious philosophy lies at the foundation of this kind of a historical view of the world.⁴⁵

Setting “God” to one side for the moment, notice that Molbech believes reason rules the world. The study of history is the study of how this occurs. Furthermore, Molbech concurs with Hegel that history is a theatre in which human freedom is realized to a greater and greater extent over the course of time.⁴⁶ There are always negations and a certain tarrying with the negative, but the overall direction is clear: the Idea is becoming actual. We are coming to an era where the truth will finally be comprehended, not merely as substance, but also as subject, and human consciousness will thereby be lifted into its true freedom: and this is essentially what it means for the Kingdom to arrive on earth.⁴⁷ In this closest of the Danish followers of Hegel, Molbech replicates Hegel’s themes of progress, freedom, and God’s kingdom come on earth. Molbech is certainly a minor figure in the history of philosophers, if he is even to be counted in such a history at all. That is precisely why he is worth including here. Molbech was not an academic philosopher, nor was he particularly well-versed in philosophy. Yet the popularity of Hegel’s philosophy of history in the Denmark of the early 1840s was such that even a relatively uninformed figure such as Molbech could be inspired by the zeitgeist to write what is essentially an extended commentary on (or perhaps copy of) Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history. Molbech is evidence of how thoroughly Hegel’s views on history pervaded the intellectual sphere in this age. (d) If Heiberg was the principle actor in the introduction of Hegelianism to Golden Age Denmark, Hans Lassen Martensen (1808 – 1884) was the philosophy’s consummation. Martensen was an able exponent and occasional critic of Hegel, and as the Bishop of all Sjæland from 1854 to 1884, he brought the He-

 Christian Molbech, Forelæsninger ved Kiøbenhavns Universitet over Historiens Philosophie, vols. 1– 2, Copenhagen 1840 – 1841. Quotes from vol. 1, p. 14 f., vol. 1, p. 42, trans. by Stewart, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, pp. 494– 495.  See Stewart, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, p. 494.  Molbech, Historiens Philosophie, vol. 1, p. 14.

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gelian philosophy right to the center of power as it was constituted in his age. According to Jon Stewart, Martensen’s ascendancy “marks the true breakthrough in the Danish Hegel reception, when it became a highly popular and influential cultural movement.”⁴⁸ Published in 1871, Martensen’s three volume Christian Ethics represents his mature thought on the proper relations between Christianity and society.⁴⁹ True to his Hegelian roots, Martensen’s ethical considerations of Christianity and society do not issue in a static set of rules as to how these two categories should relate. Instead, what the reader enters into is a narrative of development: an explanation of how we got to where we are (which is clearly a good place to be). Some rules may result from a view of how good things are under the modern Christian nation-state, but these rules are only that—a result, born of the historical becoming-actual of the Idea.⁵⁰ More than Heiberg or Molbech, Hans Lassen Martensen’s philosophy of history is directly tied to the progressive evolution of nations. This emphasis on nations is actually generated by Martensen’s commitment to Christianity and Christian culture. For in order for Christianity to become actual, it must be instantiated through the nation as an objective reality. Much as with his understanding of infant baptism,⁵¹ Christian culture must be objectively present in order for an individual to subjectively appropriate it.

 Stewart, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, p. 1; cf. p. 11. However, it should be noted that this breakthrough is associated with Martensen’s extraordinarily popular lectures on speculative dogmatics given at the University of Copenhagen, from 1837 to the early 1840s, rather than being connected to Martensen’s ordination to the highest ecclesiastical post in the land. Although the latter represented Martensen and thus Hegelianism’s greatest ascent to formal power, its intellectual power was greater in the late 1830s/early 1840s period. See Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, pp. 170 – 171.  He had in 1841 published his Outlines of Moral Philosophy (see the translation in Between Hegel and Kierkegaard, trans. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997, pp. 245 – 313, and a helpful summary in Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, pp. 171– 175). There is substantial continuity between the works. As suggested by the title, the earlier product is an outline, and it is in fact filled in via the subsequent tomes. Cf. Stephen Backhouse, “State and Nation in the Theology of Hans Lassen Martensen,” in Hans Lassen Martensen: Theologian, Philosopher and Social Critic, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2012 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 6), p. 294.  See especially Hans Lassen Martensen, Christian Ethics: Special Part. Second Division: Social Ethics, trans. by Sophia Taylor, Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1892, §§39 – 50; cf. Backhouse, “State and Nation,” p. 304. These pages from Martensen include some particularly chilling analysis of the obstacle Jewish people supposedly pose for the full triumph of the Christian state.  See Curtis L. Thompson, Following the Cultured Public’s Chosen One, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008, pp. 36 – 44.

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The nation plays a crucial role in making Christianity possible, insofar as the nation is the vessel through which the objective aspects of Christian faith, such as doctrine and sacraments, are handed down (traditio). It is in analyzing the role of the nation in Christian faith that Martensen’s progressive philosophy of history manifests itself. According to Martensen, the evolution of humanity necessary to the production of Christianity should not be neglected. It is not as if Christ comes as a vertical invasion of the divine into an otherwise hostile world. Rather, the world was prepared for the revelation of Christ through a gradual evolution: In Martensen’s dialectical system the ideal Good finds expression in actuality, and it does this through the developing stages of civilization. With respect to pre-revelation, history had developed to the point of necessity that required the incarnation. With respect to post-revelation, it continues to be the aim of history to give expression to this revealed Good; however, it is not for any and all stages of civilization to enjoy this ‘new development.’ Martensen’s system of historical development means that only certain cultures can apprehend the importance of the incarnation, and put into practice the expression of the Good that it reveals. The teleology of creation, which is the ideal relationship between God and men, finds its fullest expression in the Christian states of Christendom. It is here at this stage of civilization, and only here, where the development of history will find its proper completion.⁵²

We can add further here that this evolution of civilization is understood by Martensen to essentially take place via national cultures and to finally instantiate itself in a Christian national culture: Nationality is sacred because it is the means through which the in-and-for-itself sacred, the eternal and universal shall be taken up and appropriated. For if the spiritual is to become our actual property, if it is to become life and nature in us, then it must be presented for us in a native form.⁵³

For Martensen, the question is: How is the religious to be given to us? The answer is objectively, through the nation’s creation of native forms which are particular

 Backhouse, “State and Nation,” pp. 306 – 307; cf. p. 316: “Thus for Martensen the relationship between Christianity and highly developed culture is not one of simple cause and effect. It is not merely the presence of Christianity that produces civilization, but rather revelation itself needs a certain level of culture and social development in which to adhere.” However, one may note this does not yet meet Hegel’s definition of the social, which has to do not simply with inherited traditions, but is a sphere within which cognizant individuals can make their inner commitments actual in the real world. Hence the necessity of the Kingdom thematic.  Hans Lassen Martensen, Outline to a System of Moral Philosophy in Between Hegel and Kierkegaard, p. 305.

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to each culture, having to do with language, holidays, the education system, and the public financing of the Church that preserves proper doctrine over time. One of the most important doctrines of the Church is the spiritual nature of man, which—according to these 19th century comparative scholars—not every culture affirmed, and only Christian culture fully affirmed. It is necessary to take one further step. For Martensen, it is not simply as a preparation for Christianity that culture evolves or progresses. Once Christianity is present, there is yet further evolution, toward the full realization of the Kingdom on earth: [Once a civilization becomes Christian] In turn, that culture will be given fresh impetus to continue the course of its development, moving from strength to strength. It is only then that the endpoint of earthly history can finally be fulfilled: Christendom: “Now will be found in a true and full sense an alliance of nations…. Christendom will be one flock under one Shepherd (Christ), and the ideals of humanity, a Christian family and a Christian state, Christian art and Christian science, will be fully realized.”⁵⁴

The nation Christianizes the individual, but in turn the individual Christianizes the nation. The nation gives the individual a Christian understanding of himself as spirit, but in turn the individual spiritualizes the nation and makes it a flourishing dwelling place of God’s full intentions for human beings. In this dialectical interplay, Martensen fully endorses the views of progress and the Kingdom of God on earth which we have argued characterizes Hegel’s philosophy of history. However, when it comes to Hegel’s view of the state, Martensen has pursued a line of reasoning which is at least implicitly critical of Hegel, for Martensen exalts the nation and not just the state. For Hegel, the state is a rationally organized institution with diversified roles which are based on reasoned analysis of the needs of a people. The nation, on the other hand, is simply a contingent agglomeration of language and land; it does not rise to the level of reason.⁵⁵ In comparison, the nation is much more significant for Martensen. In fact, the differentiation which contemporary scholars and Hegel often make between state and nation is rejected by Martensen, as he makes explicit in Outline to a System of Moral Philosophy: “The concept of the state is inseparable from the concept of the people. The folk-spirits or spirits of the people, whose natural boundary lines are language, are given a right to external existence in the states.”⁵⁶  Backhouse, “State and Nation in the Theology of Hans Lassen Martensen,” p. 316, quoting from Martensen, Christian Ethics: Special Part. Second Division: Social Ethics, p. 357.  Again, on this matter see Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality.  Martensen, Outline to a System of Moral Philosophy, p. 303; cf. Backhouse, “State and Nation,” pp. 294– 295.

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Given the essential—not merely contingent—content of the nation, then, Christian nations with Christianly inflected language and geographical domination of land are essential to the realization of humanity’s progress. Martensen’s exaltation of the nation is an important variation on Hegel. However, we should not oversell such a difference with respect to his overall philosophy of history. There remains broad continuity. As suggested earlier, Martensen represents a continuation of Hegel when it comes to progress, freedom, and the Kingdom of God. Furthermore, his theory of the nation still agrees with Hegel that the ethical must come to realization in society, not just in individuals. It is fair to say, then, that Martensen greatly resembles Hegel—only he is slightly more nationalistic. Having covered Hegel’s reception amongst Kierkegaard’s Danish contemporaries, and having shown how they appropriate and extend the key themes of Hegel’s philosophy of history, we can now turn to Anti-Climacus’s contrasting philosophy of history. As we will see, Anti-Climacus’s philosophy is diametrically opposed to both Hegel and the Danish Hegelians. Rather than society being the consummation of the ethical project, society is a domain ruled by selfishness. It always has been and always will be; thus, there is no such thing as progress. Let us then turn to Practice in Christianity in order to fully develop Anti-Climacus’s counter-position.⁵⁷

IV Anti-Climacus’s Counter-Philosophy of History Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history⁵⁸ stands in stark contrast to his contemporaries. At various points in Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus denies each of

 The language here is influenced by Alain Badiou’s notion of the “anti-philosopher.” See Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, London: Verso 2011.  In what follows I will highlight the contrast between the Hegelian philosophy of history and Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history. Thus, my project is quite different from that of Georgios Patios, who in his Kierkegaard on the Philosophy of History, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 2014, argues that “neither Hegel nor Kierkegaard can, on their own, provide us with a total and full picture of the nature of history because Hegel, on the one hand, focuses on the macroscopic view of history and Kierkegaard, on the other, on the microscopic view (that is, from the point of view of the individual). This is why a possible synthesis of both views is suggested as a better way to truly understand history” (p. ix). Patios is focused primarily on Kierkegaard’s treatment of individual freedom and human responsibility, taking these themes as an important counterweight to Hegel’s contextual dialectics. Practice in Christianity is not mentioned in the text. Patios is, however, one of the few scholars to make Kierkegaard’s philosophy of history an issue for consideration.

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the four points that characterize Hegel’s philosophy of history. To cut through unnecessary complexity, we may confine ourselves at the moment to just one such denial, that of progress. The other elements of Hegel’s philosophy are impossible without this ground that acts as a springboard. Without progress, the dynamism that drives the historical development of freedom, the state, and the kingdom of God is simply absent. Hegel’s philosophy of history thus stands or falls on this point, whether you agree with him that “Essence must appear” and progress occur. Anti-Climacus does not agree. He makes this plain in what can be counted the clearest passage summarizing his philosophy of history, found in the Fifth Exposition of Practice in Christianity No. III: It is, however, untruth, this talk whereby people flatter the human race and themselves that the world is advancing. The world is going neither forward nor backward; it remains essentially the same, like the sea, like the air, in short, like an element.⁵⁹

Some like to think the world is progressing, that history is advancing toward greater justice, freedom, and equality. According to Charles Taylor, this is in fact a core belief of modernity.⁶⁰ To this Anti-Climacus says: No. There is no progress, no advance, no improvement. Like Qoheleth, Anti-Climacus affirms there is nothing new under the sun (Ecc 1:9). Difficult as it is for a modern person to believe, we are not inching closer to utopia; human history is now essentially in the same place in which it began.⁶¹ By taking this position, Anti-Climacus has effectively denied the entirety of the Hegelian philosophy of history. If there is no progress, then freedom is not being progressively realized—neither dialectically nor in any other way. Since the role of the State was to give space for the social realization of the progress of freedom (thus making freedom actual and concrete rather than abstract and

 SKS 12, 226 / PC, 232.  Again, see Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” in A Secular Age, pp. 159 – 211.  To those who might object, ‘But what about the abolition of slavery?’, M. Shawn Copeland has an effective rebuttal: “We must protect the memory of chattel slavery from outright rejection or denial. We must ‘protect the remembering and retelling’ of chattel slavery from modernity’s insistence that its abolition denotes progress. Rather, such a view overlooks the neoslavery that followed emancipation and sealed black bodies in unfreedom for nearly nine decades. Moreover, the plantation is not a relic of the past; the prison-industrial complex reinscribes the agony of slavery—surveillance, violence, discipline, control of the black body” (Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience, Maryknoll: Orbis 2018, pp. 99 – 100). We will return to Copeland’s work in Chapter Five.

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ideal), the state also has lost the rationale it possesses in Hegel’s scheme. Finally, according to Anti-Climacus the world is just as opposed to God’s Kingdom as it has always been; therefore, we are not even inching closer to the telos of Hegel’s end of history, let alone just about to realize it. If progress is not assumed— if it is instead denied—then it is clear the entirety of Hegel’s philosophy of history collapses. At this point, it may seem as if Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history is entirely negative in character. Is what Anti-Climacus offers in Practice in Christianity, then, simply a denial of the dialectical-progressive view of history, with nothing to take its place? Put in a more existential fashion: If there is no progressive dynamic to history, what is it we are supposed to do? As the Kierkegaardian novelist Sheila Heti has put it, “How should a person be?”⁶² Why act at all, if we are not contributing to making the world a better place? It should be recognized here that Anti-Climacus is challenging a primary context for making sense of one’s life in modernity.⁶³ Therefore, a danger presents itself here: namely, that in his refusal of a progressive philosophy of history, all sense of meaningful action is lost. The result would be nihilism, in this context meaning a loss of the highest values combined with a lack of anything which might replace them.⁶⁴ We will return below to Anti-Climacus’s critique of modernity. Here, I would like to emphasize that, with respect to philosophy of history, Practice in Christianity is not a merely negative work. There is in fact a meaningful context for action in Practice in Christianity, despite his denial of a progressive philosophy of history. The context is Christ himself. [Christ] lived here upon earth; this, his life, is the prototype. Thereupon he ascends on high and then he says, as it were, to the generation: Now you begin. And what is it they are supposed to begin? Begin living in conformity to the prototype—but, he adds, sometime, at the end of time, I am coming again. Therefore, if I dare to put it this way, this form of existence makes the Church’s whole existence here upon earth into a parenthesis or something parenthetical in Christ’s life; the content of the parenthesis begins with Christ’s ascension on high and ends with his coming again.⁶⁵

 Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?, New York: Henry Holt 2012. On Heti’s devotion to Kierkegaard, see her interview with Clare Carlisle and Noreen Khawaja, https://lithub.com/on-kier kegaard-authenticity-and-how-a-person-should-be/.  Again, Taylor’s “Modern Social Imaginaries” remains helpful.  See especially Martin Heidegger’s four-volume work on Friedrich Nietzsche, titled simply Nietzsche, New York: HarperCollins 1991.  SKS 12, 199 / PC, 202.

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Christian life is life lived within the parenthesis. Action within the parenthesis is measured by its conformity to the prototype who initiates the parenthetical series. Success and failure is not measured by one’s contribution to the progress of humanity. Instead, the goal is something like what is captured in Philippians 3:10 – 11: “I want to know him and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” Not progress, then, but the achievement or failure of imitation is the standard by which a human life is measured. This re-orientation toward existence within the life of Christ sets up a whole different dynamic to action. At this point, it is useful to draw from a text outside of Kierkegaard’s corpus, specifically Paul J. Griffiths’s book Decreation, where we can find an image that, via expansion, lends Anti-Climacus’s lapidary formulations greater clarity. Thus, I will pause a moment and focus on a brief overview of two vivid concepts from Griffiths’s work. Doing so will lay the groundwork for building a meaningful context for worldly Kierkegaardian action. Such groundwork will enable us to eventually return to Anti-Climacus’s alternative philosophy of history with a richer, more complex sense of its positive and negative components. In his book Decreation, Griffiths opposes two different kinds of time, which he calls metronomic and systolic. Metronomic time is simple duration, one damn thing after another. It is a linear march.⁶⁶ Systolic time, on the other hand, is time that is always drawn back to one specific event: How then to characterize Edenic and heavenly time? A good label for this, following a cue from St. Paul, is systolic time.⁶⁷ […] What might that be? That the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus lie at the heart of time. That time is contracted by those events, pleated and folded around them, gathered by them into a tensely dense possibility. By and in those events, the events of the passion, metronomic duration, the regularly measurable fabric of timespace, is systolated: it has folds or gatherings in it because of its contraction. The principal fold is exactly that provided by the passion: there, time is folded most thickly, pleated most delicately and intricately, contracted—systolated—most tightly […] The passion is to the fabric of timespace just as the heart’s systole is to our bodies. Time receives its proper order in the passion, and it is an order opposed in every significant way to the metronome.⁶⁸

As metronomic time ticks on and on, systolic time is distinguished by a complex and multidirectional movement. It makes a new thing out of time, such that it is  Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures, Waco: Baylor University Press 2014, pp. 89 – 93.  See 1 Corinthians 7:29a: τοῦτο δε φημι, ἀδελφοί, ὁ καιρὸς συνεσταλμένος ἐστίν.  Griffiths, Decreation, pp. 95 – 96.

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not a simple forward march, but is characterized at all moments by a procession or recession from what von Balthasar called the “heart of the world.”⁶⁹ With every movement out, it is to this life, Christ, that we come back. With every gathering in we return to this center, whose life is definitive of all meaningful possibility for human persons.⁷⁰ While ordinary time marches on, relentlessly, with no possibility for return, systolic time establishes meaning for its inhabitants via its looping pattern; while it does go forward and out, it always returns, and there is no meaning to life without this return. This is the pattern that gives meaning, without which there is only sound and fury. In this way, Christ is the beating heart of the life of a person of faith. Our life is defined by our going out and our gathering in, all centered on this one life. Restoration and renewal happens through a traveling back and forth, not through a unidirectional progressive growth. We never leave the parenthesis; we are always found within its borders, defining our lives by the parameter indicated at the beginning of the ordered series. The opposition in Griffiths is between systole and metronome. The distinction is a helpful one, but it needs to be modified for our purposes. For we are considering history, not just time. Philosophies of history can build on philosophies of time, but that does not mean they are identical.⁷¹ For our purposes, I propose three philosophies of history that build on Griffiths’s dual times. The three philosophies can be broken up into two distinct branches. (1) Systolic history. This understanding of history is fairly identical with the concept of systolic time. Christian history is always defined by return and renewal. Its structure is a loop. To say Christian life is life lived within the parenthesis is simply another way of saying this. (2) Metronomic history, which can be further subdivided into static metronomic history and progressive metronomic history. (a) Static metronomic history. To the metronomic under-

 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World, San Francisco: Ignatius 1986.  It may seem a similarity to Hegel has snuck in at this point; after all, Hegel’s philosophy of history is teleological in the sense of Greek physis; that is, progressive evolution occurs only in relation to a kind of nature which is already in a noetic or spiritual sense present at the beginning of the development. However, this seeming similarity dissipates upon further inspection. For Anti-Climacus simply does not endorse a progressive realization of anything. Both Hegel and Anti-Climacus’s philosophies of history involve a return, but only Anti-Climacus’s is a return to a fullness already established.  In the final section of Valences of the Dialectic, Fredric Jameson makes such a distinction and then proceeds to build his own philosophy of history on top of Paul Ricœur’s philosophy of time: an inspiration for what I attempt here. See Thomas J. Millay, “‘In This Second Case, History’: On Fredric Jameson’s Reception of Paul Ricœur’s Temps et récit,” Telos, vol. 174, Spring 2016, pp. 75 – 91.

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standing of time, this philosophy of history adds the insistence that the perpetual forward movement of history does nothing to change the nature of the world. This is the view of Qoheleth. Everything that happens has happened before. That statement may seem like a loop, but it is not: for there is nothing significant to loop back to. All history is the same. There is no direction to history that would change anything about the world we currently experience. This view does not necessarily say the world is bad or good; it simply says: it is the same. Time marches on, but it goes nowhere. In this way, it has a kind of eternity to it.⁷² Any notion of fundamental change in the world is an illusion. Consequently, whatever the nature of human beings was in the past, so is it now. (b) Progressive metronomic history. This understanding of history takes up metronomic time and gives it a particular bent. Time marches on, as in the metronome. There is no looping back, no structure of return for renewal. But added on to the forward march is a notion of progressive unfolding. History does not just go on; it is not just one damn thing after another. Instead, history has a direction. The world itself is headed towards greater and greater realization of freedom. This is true in multiple senses: in a material sense, in terms of available consumer goods, and also in philosophical, artistic, literary, and political senses. In each sphere, progress is being made. Humans are headed toward an age of happiness and perpetual peace. We are familiar with this view, as it has appeared in Hegel and his Danish epigones. These philosophies of history, building off Griffiths’s philosophies of time, enable us to return to Anti-Climacus with new eyes. In light of the above paragraphs, it may seem Anti-Climacus simply chooses systolic history; but the view of Practice in Christianity is in fact more complicated. In actuality, Practice in Christianity combines two philosophies of history, and the first makes possible the second. The fundamental position is that of static history, which affirms that nothing really changes in the course of history. Things might superficially move around, but everything remains the same, “like the sea.” This articulation of static history is given further shape in Practice in Christianity via its interpretation of this monotony as evil. Not only does the world not change, this lack of change means that it persists in evil. The world was evil in its origins and continues to be so. Thus, history was and will continue to be human selfishness

 This is captured well by novelist Patrick Modiano’s character Noëlle Lefebvre when she is speaking about Rome, the Eternal City: “Maybe, when you thought about it, that’s what ‘life in Rome’ was: a metronomic tick-tock, regular and eternal” (Invisible Ink, New Haven: Yale University Press 2020), p. 138; cf. The Great Beauty, Criterion Collection 2013. The static metronomic view is simply saying that what is true of Rome is true of everything.

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played out over time.⁷³ This basic position of static history then makes possible the Christian’s choice of systolic time and systolic history. That is to say, we are all born into static history, but—from within static history—the choice of another history is possible. Such a choice is not possible within progressive history. Since it marches on according to its own internal telos—an immanent telos that defines possibilities of action as either contributing to progress or not—progressive history obviates the possibility of choosing any other type of history. It is a self-concealed narrative. Thus, with static history (and static history only!) as its backdrop, the Incarnation makes possible a new relation to history. In the life of Christ, a different possibility has been opened. This is described in Johannes Climacus’s Philosophical Fragments as “the moment” (Øieblikket),⁷⁴ which could also be translated “the instant” or “the eye-blink,” a concept that is also taken up in Practice in Christianity. ⁷⁵ The moment is an invasion of time by eternity that is not absorbed into history.⁷⁶ Static history remains. The Christian is not taken out of the world (Jn 17:15). But there has been a life that shows, definitively, what it looks like to relate to something outside metronomic time and static history while one yet remains in the world. Here is the Christ; Here is the eternal in time; Here is what it looks like for a human being to have a

 See SKS 12, 48, 170, 180, 217– 226 / PC, 34– 35, 167, 178, 222– 232. This is the position of the late Kierkegaard more generally; cf. Millay, “The Late Kierkegaard on Human Nature,” pp. 137– 151.  See SKS 4, 222– 229 / PF, 13 – 21 for the initial exposition, though it is also taken up later in the work.  SKS 12, 35 – 78 / PC, 23 – 66. Though it is not explicitly taken up in terms of “the moment,” much of the same conceptuality is at play throughout “The Halt” as in Philosophical Fragments via the notion of contemporaneity. The parallel is especially acute on SKS 12, 76 / PC, 64: “The past is not actuality—for me. Only the contemporary is actual for me (kun det Samtidige er Virkelighed for mig). That with which you are living simultaneously is actuality—for you. Thus every human being is able to become contemporary only with the time in which he is living—and then with one more, with Christ’s life upon earth, for Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred history, stands alone by itself, outside history.”  This is the case not only for “the moment” as descriptive of Christ (or “the God-man”) in Philosophical Fragments, but for “the moment” more broadly in Kierkegaard’s authorship. See David J. Kangas’s summary: “The instant is the name for a beginning that cannot be interiorized, appropriated, recollected, represented, or possessed. It is not a work of self-consciousness, not mediation, but rather the event through which self-consciousness is first enabled. The instant is the gift or birth of presence. An instant cannot claim to be. Of itself it is nothing, it is nowhere; it neither is nor is not. And yet everything changes in the instant” (Kierkegaard’s Instant: On Beginnings, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2007, p. 4). See also Thomas J. Millay, “Classical Greek Sculpture in The Concept of Anxiety,” in Acta Kierkegaardiana VII, Toronto: Kierkegaard Circle 2018, pp. 40 – 54, for the moment of eternity-in-temporality via the disjunctive spirit as articulated in The Concept of Anxiety.

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true relation to eternity in time. In Christ, the new breaks in: here we have selfrenunciation rather than selfishness, poverty rather than riches, abasement rather than glory-seeking. But the new is breaking in within history, which is not yet changed and which reacts in a hostile way, protecting the dynamic that has always characterized it. One need not relate to this newness of life, but one can choose to do so.⁷⁷ To make such a choice is to be initiated into systolic time, and—insofar as your choice manifests in concrete action—it is to implement systolic history, as well: that is, history that can only be explained by returning to the paradigm, Christ. Or, to put it another way, it describes lives which make no sense apart from the abased Christ.⁷⁸ Thus, in the person of Christ, eternity has invaded time in the space of a moment or an eye-blink (et øieblik). It is to this moment that systolic time and systolic history return again and again, in which they find definition and renewal. In the midst of a monochromatic march that is going nowhere, new life has arrived. Christ says: there is the eternal, and this is how you relate to it. In this way, Anti-Climacus combines two philosophies of history and in so doing establishes the basic parameters of Christian life. We live in a world of unrelenting selfishness, and it will always be so. But there is another way, another possibility, and that is what we see in Christ. We can choose to live a life of following after Christ (at være en Christi Efterfølger), always returning to him as definitional for what our life in relation to the eternal should look like. Systolic time and systolic history thereby writes itself into our static world, introducing new categories and new possibilities, which it is the goal of Anti-Climacus—and really the whole second authorship of Kierkegaard—to describe. This complex philosophy of history also introduces a general principle of interpretation for events that occur in world history. It gives Christians a way of understanding and reading events. The general principle is called inverse dialectic; it is the subject of what follows and it brings Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history into the realm of an everyday hermeneutic.

 See SKS 12, 76 – 78 / PC, 64– 66; cf. SKS 14, 180 / M, 48: “I want honesty. If this, then, is what the generation or the contemporaries want, if they want straightforwardly, honestly, candidly, openly, directly to rebel against Christianity and to say to God, ‘We cannot, we will not submit to this power’—but, please note, this is to be done straightforwardly, honestly, candidly, openly, directly—well, then strange as it might seem, I go along with it, because I want honesty.”  This is a variation on a frequent theme in the writings of Stanley Hauerwas. For an example, see The Hauerwas Reader, ed. by John Berkman and Michael Cartwright, Durham: Duke University Press 2001, p. 137.

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V Inverse Dialectic Anti-Climacus’s counter-philosophy of history rejects the assumption of progress. At the same time, this counter-philosophy is not merely negative. Anti-Climacus’s is a complex philosophy of history, combining static and systolic themes. What remains to be clarified is how this philosophy of history inflects our interpretive vision when we look out at present and past worlds. How do we evaluate what we see there—what kind of hermeneutic does Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history generate? When Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history is applied to the task of interpretation, the result is inverse dialectic (omvendt Dialektik): what is in truth good appears as bad, what is in truth beautiful appears as ugly, what is in truth true appears as false. In other words, not only is there no progress, this thing which we continually remain in—this history that remains the same, repeating the same patterns like the sea—has a repetitive dynamic of inversion which we can identify. Anti-Climacus uses a hybrid celestial-aquatic image to illustrate the dialectic: The star truly is high in the sky, is just as high in the sky although, seen in the sea, it seems to lie far under the earth. Likewise, to be a Christian is the highest elevation, even though in this world’s depiction it must appear as the deepest abasement.⁷⁹

Inverse dialectic is the dynamic that characterizes all of human history, according to Anti-Climacus and Kierkegaard himself. In inverse dialectic, what appears as negative on this earth—such as suffering, abasement, and social ostracization —is, spiritually and thus actually considered, positive. What is shunned by the natural human being as bad for us is, within the perspective of our eternal destiny, good. It might be surprising—especially after the extensive critique of a dialecticalprogressive view of history just developed—that Kierkegaard or his pseudonym Anti-Climacus endorse any sort of dialectic whatsoever. Yet Kierkegaard frequently employs what Fredric Jameson calls “local dialectics,”⁸⁰ even as he re SKS 12, 196 / PC, 198.  Fredric Jameson helpfully distinguishes between what he calls “the dialectic” and “local dialectics.” The definitions are as follows: “To speak of the dialectic, with a definite article or capital letter, as you prefer, is to subsume all the varieties of dialectical thinking under a single philosophical system, and probably, in the process, to affirm that this system is the truth, and ultimately the only viable philosophy” (Valences of the Dialectic, p. 5). “The logical sequel to the definite article is the indefinite one: and it is clear enough that when we isolate dialectical moments in the work of non- or anti-dialectical thinkers, such as Nietzsche or Deleuze, Bergson

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jects the dialectic as an overall method which rules every logical assertion, shift in human consciousness, development in human history, or variation in political formation.⁸¹ The inverse dialectic of loftiness and lowliness is precisely one such local dialectic, and in fact is just one employment of a broader principle of the dialectic of inversion, as Sylvia Walsh makes clear in her masterful text Living Christianly: There is another feature of Kierkegaard’s understanding and use of dialectic that is of central importance in his perception and presentation of Christianity and Christian existence. The existential dialectic appropriate to Christianity is informed by a peculiar dialectical method and character which Kierkegaard identifies as “inverse dialectic” (omvendt Dialektik) or “the dialectic of inversion” (Omvendthedens Dialektik). Briefly stated, in inverse dialectic the positive is known and expressed through the negative, what appears to be negative may be indirectly positive (and vice versa), and the positive and the negative, Christianly understood, are always the inverse of the natural, human, worldly, and pagan understandings of these terms.⁸²

For example: one sees joy in suffering, faith in the consciousness of sin, and new life in death to the world. The principle itself (as Walsh notes⁸³) is explicitly stated in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “The sign of the religious sphere is … that the positive is distinguished by the negative,”⁸⁴ “the religious continually uses the negative as the essential form,”⁸⁵ and also in an 1852 journal entry: “the formula for essential Christianity is: the essentially Christian is always

or Wittgenstein, it is of a local dialectic we are speaking… At that point the dialectic, which formerly reigned supreme, is reduced to a local law of this or that corner of the universe, a set of regularities observable here or there within a cosmos which may well not be dialectical at all” (Valences of the Dialectic, pp. 15 – 16). As examples of the dialectic, Jameson cites Hegel and Marx, though he complicates both references. As examples of thinkers who practice a variety of local dialectics, Jameson cites Kant, Lacan, Althusser, Lukács, and Piet Mondrian, in addition to the figures above listed.  Dialectics as an overall method that governs each of these fields is the position of G.W.F. Hegel. For logical assertion, see The Science of Logic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010; for consciousness, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018; for history, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History; for statecraft, Philosophy of Right. For an excellent treatment of Hegel’s advocacy of the dialectical method, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005.  Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly, pp. 7– 8.  Ibid., pp. 8 – 9.  SKS 7, 393 / CUP, 432.  SKS 7, 476 / CUP, 524.

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the positive which is recognizable by the negative.”⁸⁶ The Kierkegaardian Christian would thus in a sense agree with Hegel that essence must appear; but, she would argue, it does so inversely. The principle of inverse dialectic is thus a general hermeneutic framework which colors every interpretation the true follower of Christ makes in this life. Every time she sees something of low estate, she will know in truth that it is exalted; every time she sees something mocked, she will know that in truth it has dignity; every time she sees something near to the margins, she will know that in truth it is in the center, smack in the middle of God’s concern. This is the case throughout the course of history, as the believer looks back; it is also true of her own world, as she seeks an interpretation of the social reality surrounding her. Inverse dialectic thus describes the type of vision or interpretive framework the Christian must cultivate if she is to see her world rightly, i. e. according to Christian categories. It should also be recognized that inverse dialectic requires constant practice and discipline for its vision to be maintained. Anti-Climacus identifies such a practice and discipline with the spiritual aspect of a human being’s composition.⁸⁷ In the space of interpretations which are in accord with inverse dialectic, we see the activity of spirit. To read things inversely is not to accept them as they immediately appear; rather, “Spirit is the denial of direct immediacy.”⁸⁸ Inverse dialectic is a reflective vision which incorporates the choice of the viewer to see things as otherwise than how they first appear. Such is the case, for example, with any true relation to Christ. What one sees is a lowly and despised criminal with no possessions, no home, and no esteem. What one chooses to believe about Christ, however, is that this wretched worldly appearance is actually the manifestation of the Good itself. Of course, Christ directly asks us to believe in him (Jn 14:1), as if he were the Good, as if he were God —yet his appearance is one of abasement. It is in that “duplexity”⁸⁹ that activity of spirit is required: He is the sign of contradiction, and by the direct statement he attaches himself to you only so that you must face the offense of the contradiction, and the thoughts of your heart are disclosed as you choose whether you will believe or not.⁹⁰ …

 SKS 24, 457– 458, NB25:32 / JP 4, 4680.  The composition of the human being was a major subject of Anti-Climacus’s previous book, The Sickness unto Death.  SKS 12, 139 / PC, 136.  SKS 12, 164 / PC, 160.  SKS 12, 140 / PC, 136.

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Therefore he, who abased himself, therefore he, the abased, will from on high draw the human being to himself. Yet he is in lowliness and in loftiness one and the same, and this choice would not be right if someone thought he was to choose between Christ in lowliness and Christ in loftiness, for Christ is not divided; he is one and the same. The choice is not: either lowliness or loftiness. No, the choice is Christ, but Christ is a composite and yet one and the same, is the abased one and the lofty one, and thus specifically prevents choosing one of the two parts, while both parts, or that both parts are there, make it impossible to be drawn to him without a choice. If he could truly draw to himself without a choice, he would have to be unitary, either the lofty one or the abased one, but he is both. Thus nothing, no natural force, nothing on earth draws to itself in this way, through a duplexity; only spirit can do that, and in turn only in this way can spirit draw spirit to itself.⁹¹

In sum, one holds—through one’s spiritually affirmative reflective activity—that the lowliness one sees is in truth loftiness. It is precisely in that movement of inversion that the activity of spirit resides. The metaphysics of inversion makes possible an activity of the self that would not be possible if everything were directly as it appears. This practice of vision is the activity of spirit. Inverse dialectic is important because it enables us to glimpse one of the chief activities or practices of the Christian: namely, to train her vision to see things inversely, to see her suffering as a joy and her abasement as closeness to her Redeemer. Thus, the metaphysics of inversion makes possible the activity of spirit, which is also called “faith.”⁹² The Christian faith is the daily practice of seeing suffering as joy, abasement as exaltation, and lowliness as loftiness. Christianity is a kind of vision sustained by the activity of spirit in which the world is understood via Christian categories. A Christian philosophy of history results in an inverted understanding of the world, which is practiced on a daily level of seeing suffering as a blessing and not a curse.⁹³ One final word of clarification before leaving the theme of inverse dialectic. It may be objected that Anti-Climacus’s philosophical framework is metaphysical here in a bad sense, that it fails to appreciate the given because its interpretation has already been decided in advance. However true such an objection might be, it should be recognized that Anti-Climacus’s metaphysics of inverse dialectic is based not on abstract philosophizing, but on a phenomenon: specifically, the cross. Let us pause for a moment and reflect on a crucial passage: “[John] interprets being lifted up from the earth as abasement, as the deepest abasement, the

 SKS 12, 164 / PC, 160.  SKS 12, 144 / PC, 141.  Kierkegaard’s earlier work titled Christian Discourses is especially clear on this. See “Part Two: States of Mind in the Strife of Suffering,” SKS 10, 99 – 166 / CD, 93 – 159.

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crucifixion. Thus, Christianly understood, in this world loftiness is abasement.”⁹⁴ I would like to highlight Anti-Climacus’s use of the logical connector “Thus” in this passage. The Gospel of John interprets the abasement of Jesus’ crucifixion as being at one with his exaltation or glorification;⁹⁵ thus loftiness is abasement. The connection here enables us to make the following conclusion: the logic of loftiness being lowliness is metaphysical, but not abstractly so. It comes from Christ. What the passage just quoted means is that the principle of inverse dialectic flows from the cross. In the cross, Christ has manifested History as such, has revealed that History —all History!—is fundamentally structured as human selfishness played out over time. There may be some momentary utopian exceptions, but this is the rule, and it consistently wins out. The great majority of subjective actants within History will therefore always be threatened by self-denial, by the call to give up selfishness, and therefore the one who practices self-denial will always meet with ire. The broad spectra of human society that constitute and make up History will at every moment be opposed to self-denial, as it is the form of life that most succinctly calls into question all the self-oriented pursuits that fill human history —that give it its thickness and depth, its motivating factors and its actual modi vivendi. This is simply the character of History, and the person of Christ has revealed it to be so; for Christ’s abasement is not accidental.⁹⁶ The crucifixion is not contingent. It is not something that just happens. As well as revealing something about God, the crucifixion reveals something about the world. The perfect selfdenial seen in the God-man renouncing his form and coming to earth will always be met by an equally perfect hatred from self-interested human beings; thus, the lofty will always appear as lowly, the good as evil, the exalted as abased.

 SKS 12, 250 / PC, 259.  See John 12:23 – 26, 13:31– 32, 17:1– 5; cf. John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019, passim; Behr makes the case for a much more expansive reading of the theme of a unified glory-cross than merely the citations above listed.  See SKS 12, 48 / PC, 34.

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VI The World is the Same: History, Contemporaneity, Salvation To conclude, let us return again to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter, “Because he is now on high, can we therefore also begin with loftiness; that is, because he inherited loftiness, can we therefore also take it in advance?”⁹⁷ Are we not called to be united to Christ (2 Cor 5:17– 21)? And is not Christ now living in glory? So it seems we also are called to live in glory, to share in the riches of the Father, and that this is simply what salvation is. Within such a mindset Anti-Climacus’s Christology that is focused on the suffering, pain, and poverty of Christ is blind to the fact that Christ has already gone through those experiences for us, such that we are now, by his mercy, invited to experience the glory he has won for us. For us and for our salvation he came down, in order to save us from what is down here (in the world), thus to save us into what is above.⁹⁸ According to Anti-Climacus, the mistake here is not in thinking that Christ has done something for us that we should thankfully accept. Nor is it wrong to think that the glorified Christ bids us to share in his glory. Instead, the problem lies in how the loftiness position secretly smuggles a changed world into its calculations. Yes, Christ has won us eternal glory, Anti-Climacus affirms.⁹⁹ But eternal glory has nothing to do with a fundamental change in the character of the world, such that what is good is now rewarded within temporality. To hold to the loftiness position is to make the mistake of thinking one is already in eternity; it is to think one can be like Christ is in eternity while one is still on earth.

 SKS 12, 182 / PC, 182.  According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, the theme of ascent predominates in patristic literature: “For the Fathers, love is a total transcending and being drawn out of all being that is merely relative and participative into the movement where God returns from the world to himself. For man to join with God to help to complete the descending movement of the incarnation wherein God turns to the world would have made no sense to the Fathers. For since creation and, even more so, the Fall have already brought us into this ‘below,’ this ‘distance from God’ and since Christ in his incarnation has searched for us in this region ‘below,’ all that now matters is to link up with him and take the same way back to God as Christ took” (“The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” Communio, vol. 24, no. 2, Summer 1997, p. 395).  This is in part the meaning of John 12:32, the biblical text on which Anti-Climacus comments throughout Part III of Practice in Christianity. Anti-Climacus by no means wants to deny that this glory will someday be given to Christians, only that it will not be given within a temporal world characterized by hatred of the truth (SKS 12, 158 / PC, 154). Thus, Anti-Climacus does not deny future glory; he only denies glory’s temporal relevance to the task at hand—namely, an imitation of Christ’s life.

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Internal to this mistake is a forgetting of the character of History, which—as discussed above—Christ has revealed to be inimical to truth. Therefore, to become contemporary with Christ while one is in temporality is to become contemporary with Christ as he was in temporality. In other words, it is to become abased. Thus, to become contemporary with Christ is to “become contemporary with him in his abasement.”¹⁰⁰ Anti-Climacus is making a Christological point here: the form of Christ’s incarnation—his abasement—remains normative,¹⁰¹ for “his present here on earth never becomes a thing of the past.”¹⁰² It never becomes past because it reveals the whole of temporality for what it is: a sphere in which selfishness reigns and self-denial is persecuted. To think that Christ reveals God without also revealing how the world reacts to the presence of God is an abstract Christology Anti-Climacus rejects. Those who think that Christ’s incarnation changed the character of the world, or somehow enabled the possibility of a ‘Christian’ world, have a mistaken scope to their Christology.¹⁰³ Christ changes our ability to relate to eternity within temporality—certainly.¹⁰⁴ But Christ does not change temporality into eternity. This is simply wishful thinking on the part of human beings who want to have earthly glory whilst still bearing the name ‘Christian’: This is the relation of loftiness and lowliness in the prototype. The loftiness must not be the direct kind, which is the worldly, the earthly, but the spiritual, and thus the very negation of worldly and earthly loftiness. The lowliness must be the direct kind, because direct lowliness, if one must go through it, is precisely the way… that makes sure that loftiness is not taken in vain.¹⁰⁵

 SKS 12, 47 / PC, 34. This goes beyond the purely formal definition of contemporaneity found, for example, in François Bousquet’s summary: “La contemporanéité comprend ainsi deux éléments indissociables: c’est toujours maintenant, au present, que cela se passe—et c’est pour moi” (Le Christ de Kierkegaard, Paris: Desclée 1999, p. 261). Bosquet’s is an accurate treatment of contemporaneity as it appears in Philosophical Fragments, but it misses the fact that Practice in Christianity adds the following: contemporaneity always applies to me, and it always applies to me in the form of abasement. The addition of abasement contributes content to the formal conception of contemporaneity in line with all the concrete descriptions of abasement developed in the previous chapter.  That Christ’s earthly form remains normative does in fact go against some patristic interpretations of 2 Corinthians 5:16 (“From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh; even though we once knew Christ according to the flesh, we know him no longer in that way”). See Colin Morris, “Christ after the Flesh: 2 Corinthians 5.16 in the Fathers and in the Middle Ages,” Ampleforth Journal, vol. 80, 1975, p. 45.  SKS 12, 17 / PC, 9.  See esp. SKS 9, 194 / WL 194– 195, a passage we will return to in the next chapter.  See SKS 4, 222, 237– 242 / PF 13, 30 – 36.  SKS 12, 232 / PC, 238.

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The one who thinks that the Incarnation means that the world has become Christian and rewards Christians is this one who wants to take Christ’s loftiness in vain; her human desire to live a respected, rewarded, and secure life has warped her Christology such that it has departed from the prototype. Let us take a moment to reflect on what these investigations into Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history and metaphysic of inversion have established for our understanding of the theme of ‘contemporaneity’ in Practice in Christianity. Our findings can be summarized as follows. A human being can become contemporary with Christ for two reasons: (1) in Christ, the eternal touches time (the “moment”); (2) the temporal world has not changed in its reaction to the eternal within it. Therefore, when we bring eternity into temporality in imitation of the pattern of Christ’s life, we live in exactly the same world as Christ lived.¹⁰⁶ We become contemporaneous with him in that we live in the same world which will—to the extent of our faithfulness—react to us in the same way.¹⁰⁷ These two reasons are the conditions for contemporaneity, and contemporaneity itself is the condition for the possibility of imitation, to which we now turn.

 This sentence brings greater conceptual precision to an assertion made above, namely that loftiness and lowliness is a local dialectic, its status as such being indicative that Kierkegaard does not subscribe to the dialectic (the dialectic as system); he does not, for example, subscribe to an inverted version of Hegel’s progressive dialectic. Loftiness and lowliness do not replicate the dialectic as method and metaphysic as we find it in Hegel because it refers only to this dynamic of bringing the eternal into the temporal, which is not something Kierkegaard imagines is happening all the time. In fact, it is quite rare. This also qualifies the Christian’s practice of inverted sight. More precisely, it should be said: ‘Every time the Christian sees something of low estate, she will know in truth that it is exalted’—if that thing or that person is of low estate because of their commitment to bringing the eternal into the temporal world.  See Leo Stan, “Imitation,” in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome III, Envy to Incognito, ed. by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate 2014 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15), p. 205: “In this way, suffering for the truth, not only comes to play a pivotal role in the reconciliation with God, but also renders the follower contemporary with the exemplar’s own drama.”

Chapter Four: Imitation So far, we have seen who Christ is, according to Kierkegaard. Christ is a poor, marginal, offensive, persecuted, and above all abased individual who also claimed to be God. We have also seen why Christ’s earthly appearance must take this form. If Christ is the truth, whose very existence thus speaks of the poverty of temporality and the riches of eternity, then the world in its self-interest will inevitably react to him with hostility, further deepening the humiliation he already took upon himself in the initial moment of incarnation. The task for this chapter is to develop how we as individuals are supposed to relate to the abased Christ we have encountered in Chapters Two and Three. As indicated by the title of this chapter, Anti-Climacus holds that we are to relate to this Christ by imitating him.¹ The theme of imitation is not often granted explicit discussion in Practice in Christianity. Yet when it does come up, it is clear that it is central to the whole text: the description of Christ as abased, the condition of contemporaneity, the inevitable reaction of human society as it is threatened by truth—all of these are important because they clarify what it means to imitate Christ. Imitation is, in short, the criterion with respect to whether a given individual is or is not a Christian: [F]or truly to be a Christian surely does not mean to be Christ (what blasphemy!) but means to be his imitator (men er det at være hans Efterfølger), yet not a kind of prinked-up, nicelooking successor who makes use of the firm and leaves Christ’s having suffered many centuries in the past; no, to be an imitator (at være Efterfølger) means that your life has as much similarity to his as is possible for a human life to have.²

 For a brief overview of imitation in Kierkegaard, see Leo Stan, “Imitation,” in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome III, Envy to Incognito, ed. by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate 2014 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15), pp. 203 – 207. For different readings of what makes imitation possible, see Joshua Cockayne, “Imitation and Contemporaneity: Kierkegaard and the Imitation of Christ,” The Heythrop Journal, Early View, published online 12 October 2017, pp. 1– 14; Wojciech T. Kaftanski, “The Socratic Dimension of Kierkegaard’s Imitation,” The Heythrop Journal, vol. 58, no. 4, 2017, pp. 599 – 611; Thomas J. Millay, “Kierkegaard, Imitation and Contemporaneity: The Importance of the Double Danger,” The Heythrop Journal, vol. 62, no. 1, November 2020, pp. 21– 24.  SKS 12, 114– 115 / PC, 106; cf. SKS 16, 235 / JFY, 188: “Imitation, the imitation of Christ, is really the point from which the human race shrinks. The main difficulty lies here; here is where it is really decided whether or not one is willing to accept Christianity”; SKS 13, 383 / M, 321: “Only one thing did the Savior require; the same thing the apostle in turn after him and the truth-withttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-007

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To be a Christian is to be an imitator. This is why it is legitimate to claim imitation is in actuality central to the text, even if a linguistic search suggests the concept hardly appears outside of exposition VI of Practice in Christianity, No. 3. If— as is indicated by the title of the work and the “Invocation” found in part one, amongst other things—the project of Practice in Christianity is to lead its readers toward a Christian existence, then the project of Practice in Christianity is to make its readers into imitators, for to be a Christian is to be an imitator. Whatever imitation means, it is clear there is a great deal riding on it. So what does imitation mean, for Anti-Climacus? In order to answer this question, it will be useful to explore a bit of the history of the concept as it is used in Christological discourse. For, even if he is undoubtedly making it his own, Anti-Climacus is picking up a theme—imitatio Christi—which appears frequently in the Christian tradition. In order to understand how he makes imitatio Christi his own, we should have an idea of what he picks up; thus Anti-Climacus will reveal his own intentions via his own particularity.

I Imitatio Christi: A Brief History Given the great breadth of the Christian tradition, it is helpful to have a guide when tracking a theme which is as popular as the imitation of Christ. Thankfully, there is an excellent guide available: the medievalist Giles Constable (1929 – 2021), director of the Dumbarton Oakes Research Library for many years and author of studies on the abbeys of Cluny and Bec. In 1995, Constable published Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought. The second study is titled “The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,” and in it Constable shows how the understanding of imitatio Christi shifts and develops over its many centuries of use. Constable’s account is limited to the Western Christian tradition, a suitable restriction for our purposes, given it was chiefly this tradition which influenced Kierkegaard. In order to provide a comprehensible structure for his treatment, Constable separates the Western tradition of reflection on what it means to imitate Christ into two distinct categories that enable a parsing out of two key tendencies.³ The categories are: the imitation of the divinity of Christ, and the imitation of

ness required as the one and only thing: imitation”; SKS 25, 78, NB26:74 / KJN 9, 75: “Without imitation Christianity is mythology, poetry” (trans. modified).  Cf. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness, Burlington: Ashgate 2011, pp. 66 – 68.

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the humanity of Christ.⁴ These categories are associated with specified time periods in which they were dominant, the former in patristic and early medieval periods, the latter in the high and late medieval periods. In what follows, I give only the briefest of summaries; the original essay is rich with further examples. Imitating the Divinity of Christ. Imitating the divinity of Christ has to do with ascent: the individual leaves behind the ravages of this world, especially the marks of sin and death upon the self, in order to reach heights made newly possible through Christ’s gracious indwelling. At the end of his survey of “the imitation of the divinity of Christ,” Constable offers the following summary of his theme: The imitation of Christ here was the means provided by God for man to recover the lost image and likeness to God, and to pass from the visible and material to the invisible and immaterial, bridging ‘the region of dissimilitude’ (as it was called) between his present condition and the form in which he was created.⁵

A pithy example of imitating the divinity of Christ that illustrates Constable’s conclusion can be found in the third century North African bishop, Cyprian, who summarizes the results of imitatio Christi as follows: “Recreated spiritually through the indulgence of God and reborn, we imitate what we shall be.”⁶ Imi-

 In contrast to my approach, Sylvia Walsh sharply distinguishes Kierkegaard from medieval theologians: “For Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, and Kierkegaard, therefore, the spiritual path to eternal happiness and the expression of Christian love for God, Christ, and the neighbor are quite different from that of the medieval tradition, taking a backward, inverse, indirect course rather than a straightforward, direct one in ascending to the highest expression of Christian character in the loftiness and abasement of Christian love instead of striving to climb a ladder of virtues by which to scale paradise” (Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard and Religion: Personality, Character, and Virtue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018, p. 152). Walsh is in part correct, as Kierkegaard does not take a theōsis inflected approach to Christian life; however, as I aim to show, her characterization of the medieval tradition is overly monolithic.  Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995, pp. 167– 168.  De dominica oration, 36, Corpus Christianorum, IIIA, p. 113, cited and translated in Constable, Three Studies, p. 154. The shift registered in Cyprian also involves a turn away from the criterion of martyrdom, a phenomenon Simone Deléani summarizes: “Cyprien passe aisément de la notion de martyre à celle d’imitation morale et existentielle du Christ, et de Christum sequi ‘suivre le Christ sur la voie de sa Passion’ à Christum sequi ‘écouter les paroles et imiter les actes du Christ’” (Christum sequi. Etude d’un thème dans l’oeuvre de saint Cyprien, Paris: Études augustiniennes 1979, p. 95).

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tation is in this sense an active realization of eschatology, or the method by which eschatology is realized. Through imitation, the glorified Christ leads human beings to the glory they will eventually know fully in the eschaton, a process which is labeled divinization.⁷ In divinization, the temporal human being takes on aspects of immortality, such as: freedom from passion, greater knowledge of God,⁸ fuller spiritual communion with God, and restoration of the human being as the image of God. The vertical motif is one of ascent and not descent.⁹ Divinization can thereby serve as a one-word summary of Constable’s “imitation of the divinity of Christ” motif. The theme of divinization should not be seen as a purely individual matter: this vector of imitatio had effects beyond the field of spirituality. As Constable argues, the emphasis on glory as the mode of imitation enabled the ascription of Christlikeness to kings.¹⁰ Since Christ was the King of kings, regal authority was seen to participate by imitation in this transcendent reality. By such means, imitatio Christi could be wrapped up in the sacralizing of particular human social relations.¹¹

 See the helpful definition of deification at the beginning of Norman Russell’s magisterial study, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, pp. 1– 3. For a classic medieval expression, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, III, q. 1, art. 2, resp: “The true beatitude of man and end of human life… is the full participation of divinity… and this is granted to us through the humanity of Christ” (cited and translated in Constable, Three Studies, p. 245). The purpose of the humanity of Christ is to lead human beings to divinity (cf. Thomas’s Comendium theologiae, 2, in Opuscula theological, 1: De re dogmatica et moralia, ed. by R.A. Verardo, Turin and Rome 1954, p. 14).  See, e. g., Adam of Perseigne, Ep. 40: “The recovered understanding of truth is a restoration of the divine image, and since image takes its name from imitation, we shall already begin to imitate our Founder a bit by having rejoiced in the splendor of the understood truth” (trans. by Constable, Three Studies, p. 167).  This contrast is adumbrated at length by Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Father, the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” pp. 347– 396.  See Constable, Three Studies, pp. 160 – 163, 247: “The divinity of Christ, and His position in heaven, were thus brought to earth and used as a model for a royal imitatio Christi.”  See, in general, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1957; for a particular example, see Philipp Jaffé and Paul Ewald, Regesta pontificum Romanorumj, 2nd ed., JE (Leipzig: Veit 1888), post 3109: Pope John VII said on occasion of the coronation of Charles the Bald (877), that he was made to be king “in imitation… of the true king Christ His son” (trans. by Constable, Three Studies, p. 160).

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Imitating the Humanity of Christ. In imitating Christ’s humanity, on the other hand, the motif of descent is primary.¹² For Christ, descent into the world meant suffering and death (Phil 2:8). Since suffering and death characterize Christ’s earthly life, so suffering and death should also characterize the lives of those who follow after his life. Joined to suffering and death are themes like illness, poverty, and social marginalization. Thus, for this group imitation means not so much glory as humiliation. Whereas the imitation of the divinity of Christ via glorification characterizes the Christology of many early church writers, the emphasis on suffering as an imitation of the humanity of Christ became popular especially in the late medieval period.¹³ A representative text can be found in Henry Suso (c. 1295 – 1366): “Oh gentle Lord, since a loving imitation (nachfolgen) of your meek way of life and your suffering from love is so very pleasing to you, I shall spend all my efforts from now on to imitate (nachfolgen) you than weep over you, though I know I should do both according to your words. Therefore I beg you to teach me this art of imitative suffering (wie ich mir dir súl gelichen an disem lidenne).”¹⁴ According to Suso and others like him in this late medieval period, one connects to Christ not through becoming immortal and impassible, but through suffering like Christ suffered. Plague victims, rather than kings, are those identified with Christ in this late medieval period, as Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1493) supremely demonstrates. Let’s turn for a moment to a work we have already touched on briefly: the most famous product of the devotio moderna, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. This text certainly participates in the high to late medieval turn toward imitating the humanity of Christ which Constable identifies. It also helps us be more specific about how imitation was understood—that is, it helps us to answer the question: what did imitating the humanity of Christ mean to these groups of medieval authors and readers? The Imitation of Christ opens with these words: “‘Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness,’ says our Lord. In these words, Christ calls us to imitate

 “It was in the course of the Middle Ages, and above all the twelfth century, that Christ was brought to earth as an exemplar for everyday life and that the desire to imitate Him centered on His earthly life and character” (Constable, Three Studies, p. 248).  See ibid., p. 201.  Das büchlein der ewigen Weisheit, §3, ed. by Karl Bihlmeyer in Heinrich Seuse: Deutsche Schriften, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer 1907, pp. 208 – 209; trans. by Frank Tobin, Henry Suso: The Exemplar with Two German Sermons, New York: Paulist Press 1989, p. 217 (translation emended). For Suso’s influence on the devotio moderna, see John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2008, pp. 16 – 17.

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His life and conduct, if we desire true enlightenment and freedom from all hardness of heart. So let our chief endeavor be to meditate on the life of Jesus Christ.”¹⁵ Clearly, imitation holds a central place for Thomas; but what does this mean, “to imitate His life and conduct”? It does not mean that one literally follows after the actions of Christ, doing what he did. Rather, ‘imitating’ Christ’s life and conduct means ‘meditating’ on Christ’s life and conduct, spending time in deep contemplation of these events such that one, in a sense, meditatively repeats them in one’s consciousness. Above all, this involves the emotions or affections. Imitation is a kind of ‘feeling with’ Christ, feeling what Christ felt as a result of thinking on his life and conduct. If this is a surprising definition of imitation, John Van Engen— while acknowledging there is some potential confusion for contemporary readers—clears things up for us: “Imitation” is probably a misleading term for their outlook. Their emphasis fell neither on imitation in a strict sense, as in works of mercy, nor on ‘mystic union,’ as in the teachings of many late medieval authors, but rather on an individual and affective identification with particular moments in Christ’s life, chiefly his passion, the result or purpose of which was ideally fourfold: to ‘relive’ with Christ his virtuous life and saving passion, to have him ever present before one’s eyes, to manifest his presence to others, and to orchestrate, as it were, all of one’s mental and emotional faculties around devotion to him.¹⁶

As a result of one’s daily exercise of thinking on Christ’s passion, one establishes a firm connection to Christ as one—via meditation—suffers with him in his suffering: and that is how imitation is understood. These two tendencies together compose the background for Anti-Climacus’s reflections on imitating Christ. As we will see, Anti-Climacus certainly takes a side in the debate; yet he also modifies his inheritance. This negotiation is the subject of the next section.

II Imitation, Contemporaneity, & the Double Danger Seen within this historical context of dueling tendencies, Anti-Climacus’s understanding of imitation clearly leans toward the imitation of the humanity of Christ. Although it is important for Anti-Climacus that Christ claims to be the  Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. by Leo Sherley-Price, New York: Penguin 1952, p. 5.  Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, ed. and trans. by John Van Engen, Mahwah: Paulist Press 1988, p. 25.

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God-man, this claim means that divinity is tied together with abasement, not that the human person of Christ is tied to glory (at least not in this life). Thus Anti-Climacus highlights aspects of Christ’s person in a way that is similar to the late medieval imitation of Christ’s humanity, focusing on his lowliness, his suffering, his poverty, and his physical pain. In this way, Anti-Climacus can be placed in continuity with a tradition stretching back to the high-to-late medieval period (a tradition whose later development also includes Pietism).¹⁷ While Anti-Climacus participates in this tradition, he also modifies it. As we have seen, “imitation” in the late medieval context refers to a meditation upon Christ wherein one feels the various passions of his life within one’s own soul. Through meditative reflection, one achieves a kind of emotional identity with Christ. This is not how Practice in Christianity understands the concept of imitation. Rather, for Anti-Climacus, imitation means that one’s own life and conduct is found to have a quite literal affinity to Christ’s life and conduct. One’s life literally resembles Christ’s: one suffers as he suffered, not just in one’s meditative imagination, but in everyday life. Yet, as this definition already indicates, the affinity of the imitative life is literal, but should also be understood to be distinctly formal in nature. What might ‘formal’ mean in this context mean? It means that a literal imitation does not include aspects such as wearing sandals and living in Palestine. Rather, the imitation is formal in the sense that Anti-Climacus abstracts a particular form-of-life from the narratives collected in the Gospels, and it is this broader form-of-life which one is called to imitate, rather than details such as one’s style of dress. The form-of-life Anti-Climacus abstracts from the Gospel accounts is a life lived in the double danger. The ‘double danger’ refers to the two difficulties constitutive of the Christian life: the difficulty of self-denial, and the difficulty of being persecuted for self-denial. Kierkegaard lays this out in two lucid paragraphs in Works of Love: If the world is not as Christianity originally assumed it to be, then Christianity is essentially abolished. What Christianity calls self-denial specifically and essentially involves a double danger; otherwise the self-denial is not Christian self-denial. Therefore if anyone can demonstrate that the world or Christendom has now become essentially good, as if it were eternity, then I will also demonstrate that Christian self-denial has been made impossible and Christianity abolished, just as it will be abolished in eternity, where it will cease to be militant. The merely human idea of self-denial is this: give up your self-loving desires, cravings, and plans—then you will be esteemed and honored and loved as righteous and wise. It is

 Again, see Barnett, “Kierkegaard’s Reading of Pietist Literature: An Investigation of Themes Christian and Socratic,” in Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness, pp. 63 – 109.

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easy to see that this self-denial does not attain to God or the relationship with God; it remains worldly within the relationship among human beings. The Christian idea of self-denial is: give up your self-loving desires and cravings, give up your self-seeking plans and purposes so that you truly work unselfishly for the good— and then, for that very reason, put up with being abominated almost as a criminal, insulted and ridiculed. For that very reason, if it is required of you, put up with being executed as a criminal, or more accurately, do not put up with it, since one can scarcely be forced into this but chooses it freely. Christian self-denial knows in advance that this will happen to it and freely chooses it. Christianity has eternity’s idea about what it is to give up one’s self-seeking purposes; therefore it does not let the Christian off at half price. It is easy to see that Christian self-denial makes its way to God and has its only abode in God. But to be abandoned in this way—in double danger—only this is Christian self-denial. The second danger, or the danger in the second place, is the very assurance that the relationship with God is in order, that it is a genuine relationship to God.¹⁸

This vision of the double danger, articulated with such precision in Works of Love, is fully endorsed by Practice in Christianity: [I]t will never be the case that at a given time all or even the majority become true Christians, or Governance in fact did not see far enough ahead, for if it ever is the case that indeed all are in truth Christians, then this life is no longer a time of testing. The testing is, namely, self-denial, to deny oneself; to be a Christian is the test, and to be a Christian is to deny oneself. But if at a given time all are actually true Christians, then there is no self-denial connected with being a Christian, at least not Christian self-denial. Magister Kierkegaard has shown (at the end of Part One of Works of Love) what is to be understood by Christian self-denial, that there is Christian self-denial only when there is double-danger, that the second danger, the danger of suffering because one denies oneself, is the decisive qualification.¹⁹

The identity between these two authors does not depend solely on Anti-Climacus’s mention of Kierkegaard. For here we have the same two-step process, the same denial of progress (not all are Christians), and the same assertion of the double danger’s central role in defining a truly Christian life. There is a commonality of concepts, not simply a surface-level endorsement. The first sentence of these remarkable paragraphs from Works of Love should not be overlooked. It illustrates how Kierkegaard’s understanding of the double danger rests upon his philosophy of history. In short, the world must essentially be the same as it was originally assumed to be if Christianity is still to be possible. And, clearly, Kierkegaard believes the world is in fact still the same. Temporality has not been brought over into eternity. The basic selfishness of the  SKS 9, 194 / WL, 194– 195; cf. SKS 10, 235 – 236 / CD, 228.  SKS 12, 217 / PC, 222.

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world is still threatened by God’s call to self-denial. Therefore, just as Christ existed in the double danger, so can we. In this sense, contemporaneity refers to the fact that we still live in essentially the same world in which Christ lived. Our world has the same reaction to the truth as 1st century Palestine did: it kills it. Contemporaneity does not simply refer to the personal, living presence of Christ in one’s soul—though surely it means that as well.²⁰ Contemporaneity means that, with respect to the truth, we live in the same world Christ did; and, to the extent we embody the truth, we can expect from the world the same reaction. This much should already be clear from the previous chapter. At this point, however, an important clarification is necessary. This clarification further completes the material on contemporaneity from the previous chapter, while also preparing the way for the next chapter. The clarification is as follows: The fact that those who follow Christ can expect a negative reaction from the world does not necessarily mean that they intentionally seek after this same reaction, as if Christians were supposed to actively seek out persecution. Rather, Kierkegaard’s view of contemporaneity means precisely that we do not have to seek out persecution; for if we are embodying truth in the world, persecution will surely find us. This interpretation of contemporaneity is supported by the following passage in Practice in Christianity, the context of which is Anti-Climacus’s refutation of the notion that history has vindicated Christ, proving that he is in fact the God-man: If it assumed that history is capable of doing this, Christ’s abasement is placed in an accidental relation to him—that is, one makes him a human being, an extraordinary human being to whom such things happened through the impiety of the generation, but something he for his part was far from desiring, for he would preferably have been somebody great in the world (this is human)—rather than that Christ freely willed to be the lowly one, and although his purpose was to save mankind, yet he also wanted to express what the truth would have to suffer and what the truth must suffer in every generation.²¹

Christ’s life on earth is revelatory not simply of eternal truth (e. g., God is love), but of what happens to the truth within temporality. His existence is a paradigm, a pattern for what will happen to anyone who similarly embodies the truth within the confines of the world.  This aspect of contemporaneity is beautifully developed by Joshua Cockayne, in his Contemporary with Christ: Kierkegaard and Second Personal Spirituality, Waco: Baylor University Press 2020; see esp. pp. 43, 59.  SKS 12, 48 / PC, 34– 35.

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This understanding of the inevitable reaction of the world to the truth in its midst helps to make clear the link between contemporaneity and imitation. There is a sense in which the world in which Christ existed has never become a thing of the past. The consistent opposition of temporality to eternity creates a kind of simultaneity across all times, at least in this one respect. If we, then, are embodying the truth in a similar fashion to the way Christ did, the world will react to us in a similar way. Our lives will in a literal sense look like Christ’s.²² The people of the present age would not adore Christ if he appeared in their midst. Instead, instinctively feeling their selfishness threatened, they would persecute Christ now just as he was persecuted then. In fact, using the terms ‘now’ and ‘then’ is misleading: in relation to the presence of truth within this world, there is effectively only one time, because the reaction is always the same. The truth must be made to suffer; the suggestion that there is another world for which it might be worth totally renouncing this world must be snuffed out; the call to voluntary suffering must be silenced. I claimed earlier that Anti-Climacus’s account of the imitation of Christ is a formal one. We can now see how this account of formal imitation depends on a formal similarity of worlds, namely between Christ’s world and ours. We can also see what such a formal similarity might mean. It does not refer to having the same political structures, geography, or style of dress. Instead, the similarity is in reference to the continuing selfishness of human beings within temporal existence. In this sense, and only in this sense, the world is exactly the same. Yet even this minimal or formal similarity enables us to live in the same double danger in which Christ lived.²³ And to live thusly is to imitate Christ. To those who know Kierkegaard’s journals well, it is possible that an objection to my account of Practice in Christianity has been lingering. Earlier in this book, I proposed an alternative translation for Practice in Christianity’s Danish title, namely Ascetic Exercises in Christianity. I have also been comfortable using the language of askēsis to describe the vision of Christianity put forth in

 As Anti-Climacus makes clear throughout the penultimate exposition of Practice in Christianity, imitating Christ means living in the same situation of danger in which Christ lived (SKS 12, 227– 249 / PC, 233 – 257).  Here I have been influenced by Kaftanski’s interpretation that imitatio Christi in Kierkegaard is not a slavish imitation of particular concrete details in Christ’s life; instead, it is a reduplication of the kind of ideals Christ’s life embodied (“The Socratic Dimension of Kierkegaard’s Imitation,” p. 606). I prefer to speak of a formalization process, whereby the details of Christ’s life are transformed into the double danger principle, which can be embodied in a variety of ways. Though our language is different, I believe our interpretations share a good deal.

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Anti-Climacus’s text. Yet, in his journals, Kierkegaard rather forthrightly critiques traditional asceticisms. For example, there is Kierkegaard’s critique of the medieval monastic imitatio Christi. This critique is succinctly developed in the following 1854 journal entry: It is a special sort of retreat we should make. Back to the monastery—the question must be brought back to the monastery from which Luther broke out (this is probably the truth) […] The monastery’s error was not asceticism, celibacy, etc. No, the error was that Christianity was reduced by allowing this to be regarded as pertaining to extraordinary Christians—and then all the purely secular nonsense as ordinary Christianity. No, asceticism and everything belonging to it is merely a beginning, a condition for being able to be a witness to the truth. Therefore the swing Luther made was in the wrong direction […] Consequently the error in the Middle Ages was not the monastery and asceticism but that basically the secular mentality had conquered in the monk’s parading as the extraordinary Christian.²⁴

The connections established in this chapter between double danger, contemporaneity, and the imitation of Christ illuminate precisely what is being critiqued in these journal entries. It is not asceticism wholesale, for Anti-Climacus and Kierkegaard certainly require the practice of rigorous discipline in their vision of Christian life. Rather, in these journals Kierkegaard is critiquing a certain foreshortening or narrowing of askēsis. It is not medieval Christianity’s excess asceticism that is the problem; it is that it is not ascetic enough. Insofar as monasticism’s self-denial is not practiced before the world, it fails to be the imitation of Christ.²⁵ Why? Because it lacks the second aspect of the double danger. If we are not risking the reaction of persecution by practicing our self-denial within the domain of the world (in public, so to speak), we are not truly imitating Christ. We are in fact coddling ourselves, protecting ourselves from the full danger of the truly Christian life.²⁶  SKS 25, 345, NB29:85 / JP 3, 2762; cf. Cockayne, “Imitation and Contemporaneity,” p. 5. For more on Luther, Kierkegaard, and Practice in Christianity, see Merold Westphal, “Kenosis and Offense: A Kierkegaardian Look at Divine Transcendence,” in Practice in Christianity, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon: Mercer University Press 2004 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 20), pp. 19 – 21.  Kierkegaard does not seem to consider those medieval monastic forms-of-life that were practiced in the midst of the world, such as the mendicant orders (e. g. Franciscans and Dominicans), the Beguines, and the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life (also known as the devotio moderna). For treatments of these different, more public forms of monastic life, see, e. g., Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2013, Tanya Stable Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2014, and John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life.  See SKS 25, 482, NB30:119 / JP 2, 1930.

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Insofar as it remains within the confines of the monastery, then, the medieval imitatio Christi fails to meet Kierkegaard’s criterion of the double danger. To truly follow Christ, we must practice our self-denial in such a way that the world can perceive it, be challenged by it, and react against it in defensive anger. And we can follow Christ in this way because, with respect to selfishness, our world is the same as his. Let’s sum up what has been established up to this point. Contemporaneity is the condition of imitation; because the world is the same, we can follow after the form of the life of Christ, and that form is: self-denial followed by persecution. Contemporaneity enables the double danger, and to exist in the double danger is to imitate Christ. Christ is present to the individual believer, certainly; but, perhaps even more importantly, so is the world. We can become contemporary with and imitate Christ because we still live, essentially, in the same world. “In Christendom, therefore, Christianity is continually still militant.”²⁷ Christian life has always been one of opposition to oneself and to the world, and it will be so until the coming of the new age. It should now be clear that Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history is a far cry from abstract, academic philosophizing about the meaning of existence. Rather, Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history sets a concrete context for action; it gives a shape to everyday life. It is a philosophy of history which prescribes a particular form-of-life for every person who would wish to imitate Christ. Thus, as is appropriate for a work of Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity exhibits a zeal for the existential, even when broaching so seemingly abstract a topic as philosophy of history. For what we are talking about is the how in which one lives one’s everyday life. Insofar as one’s situation is the same situation as the one Christ faced, one’s everyday life is able to exhibit all sorts of parallels to Christ’s own. The possibility of imitation may be encouraging for those who want to draw near to Christ, but it is also, properly understood, frightening. It involves immense suffering. It is not something one should enter into lightly. Anti-Climacus makes this clear in a mini-novella which grapples with the negotiation of suffering in one potential imitator’s life. Looking at this narrative will allow us to further explicate how—on a daily level and in the contemporary world of modernity —one establishes a relation to Christ via imitation.

 SKS 10, 237 / CD, 229.

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III A Youth There is the theory of the imitation of Christ, and then there is its actual practice. Anti-Climacus—here embodying Kierkegaard’s existential proclivities—is attentive to this difference. In fact, he devotes nearly an entire discourse to the difficulties of someone who accepts the imitation of Christ as his guiding criterion of life, in a theoretical sense, but who then must practice (or exercise) this acceptance in the struggles of daily life over a lengthy period of time. The fourth exposition of Practice in Christianity No. III begins by establishing three themes: (1) Christ as the prototype for imitation;²⁸ (2) temporal existence as a time of testing;²⁹ (3) that the test of temporal existence consists in the fact that what is truly lofty appears here as lowly, thus faithfulness to the prototype requires a reflective spiritual sight (in other words, faith) which interprets the world in inverted terms.³⁰ These three themes should already be familiar to the reader of this commentary. Why are we focusing, then, on this text? Because after beginning with these three themes, Anti-Climacus shows how they play out in a hypothetical life, that of “a youth.”³¹ In Anti-Climacus’s theology, “Governance” is assigned the task of directing a person’s life such that, if she correctly relates to the events of her life, she continually grows closer to God—and indeed to the image of God which is Christ.³² Yet Governance is an exquisitely sensitive type of agency; it is attentive to the people it directs; it knows the character of these ordinary people, knows they can be overwhelmed if all that will be required of the given individual is presented to her at once. The knowledge and sensibility of Governance results in how life appears to the individual: as a gradually unfolding revelation of the requirement. Another way to put this is to say that Governance knows we are not exactly like Christ; we are in a state of becoming and not of being, and the development of one to the other must take place gradually if it is to successfully manage the more delicate nature of an ordinary person. Anti-Climacus makes this comparison between Christ and the ordinary human right before he begins his narrative about the youth:

    

SKS 12, 181– 182 / PC, 181– 182. SKS 12, 183 / PC, 183. SKS 12, 184– 185 / PC, 184– 185. See SKS 12, 186 – 197 / PC, 186 – 199. SKS 12, 188 – 190 / PC, 188 – 191.

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A human being is a frail creature, not able like the God-man to know everything in advance, from the first moment, his suffering and the certainty and necessity of his downfall, and yet capable of living day after day, quiet, devoted to God, as if only everything good were in store for him. A human being must be handled gently, and that is why a person is given his task little by little; he is little by little pressed more and more firmly into the greater and greater effort of the test and examination. That to live is to be examined thus becomes little by little a matter of earnestness for the single individual, and the supreme examination is: whether one will in truth be a Christian or not.³³

The grace of Governance is to lead us, but gently. Governance does not want to break us or leave us in despair; it is more utilitarian than that. It wants to achieve its purpose. In order to further clarify how this occurs in actuality, Anti-Climacus tells a story. It begins: “We shall now imagine a youth,”³⁴ and Anti-Climacus then tracks life of this hypothetical youth through several stages of development. The story of the youth is a story of imitation; this section of Practice in Christianity is a long walk-through of what it actually looks like to imitate. To imitate is to hold an image out before oneself and to be led gradually by Governance, stepby-step, into becoming like that image, into making what is imagined into what is actual. The first step in the youth’s life is an act of imagination; the imagination is what produces the image which then leads to the youth’s attempts to imitate the image. The image, produced by the imagination, provides the template for imitation. This is not, however, a simple matter, for the factor of time introduces difficulties. Anti-Climacus explains the relation between the ideal image of imitation and the actual time of imitation in the following way: So the imagination is related to this image of perfection, and even if it were the image of the perfect one, whose perfection was to have endured not only terrible sufferings but also that which is diametrically opposite to perfection (ideality), daily indignities and mistreatment and annoyances throughout a long life, it looks very easy the way the imagination depicts this image; one sees only the perfection, sees even the struggling perfection only as finished. In other words, the imagination is in itself more perfect than suffering in actuality. It is timeless, beyond suffering in actuality. It can splendidly depict perfection, has all the magnificent colors to describe it, but, on the other hand, the power of the imagination cannot depict suffering except in a perfected (idealized), that is, in a mitigated, toned-down, foreshortened depiction. In one sense the imagination’s image or the image that the imagina-

 SKS 12, 185 – 186 / PC, 186.  SKS 12, 186 / PC, 186.

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tion depicts or maintains is still nonactuality; with regard to adversities and sufferings, it lacks the actuality of time and of temporality and of earthly life.³⁵

Imagination initiates the sequence of a Christian life: it provides the image which the imitator seeks to follow after. Yet the imagination does so in a particular way, one that distorts the image in question. It makes the suffering of an actual life, extended over countless days and hours of intense pain, of an excruciatingly long endurance, into the glorious image of a completed life of suffering, which thereby reduces what the suffering is actually like, over time, to one glorious moment of perfect triumph. It ignores the martyrdom of the everyday in favor of the martyrdom of the moment, the actual point of death—which, compared to the almost limitless extension of daily suffering, is not so horrific. At the same time, rather than this distortion being a flaw which can be corrected by a more precise imagining, the distortion of the image by the imagination is an important and positive factor in any individual’s coming to resemble the image. For if the potential imitator were truly to understand the horror of daily suffering involved in the life of imitation, such understanding would overwhelm any possible attempt at taking up the image as a guide for oneself; the torment would be too great to choose. The imagination is in this sense a happy fall or a noble lie.³⁶ The true image is there before the youth, but it is not truly understood. As the youth travels further in his daily journey of imitation, a greater understanding will be communicated, for “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength” (1 Cor 10:13). So then, the youth picks up the image and holds it dear. He makes it his ideal; he lives in a world of becoming, and it is what he wants to become.³⁷ As of yet, however, he has little knowledge of what imitating this image will entail. That knowledge begins to be revealed to the youth when, after his initial infatuation with the ideal, he realizes that the world of actuality in which he lives his life is in no way equal to this ideal. If Christ is the ideal of self-giving love, the world is a theater of self-assertion and aggression. Anti-Climacus portrays this moment of realization as follows:

 SKS 12, 186 – 187 / PC, 187.  “In a certain sense the youth’s imagination has deceived him, but indeed, if he himself wills, it has not deceived him to his detriment, it has deceived him into the truth; by means of a deception, it has, as it were, played him into God’s hands” (SKS 12, 189 / PC, 190).  Although initially the youth does not have a gender, eventually male pronouns are used to refer to him.

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Now back to the youth. So this image of perfection is his love. His appearance shows it; his eyes see nothing of what lies closest around him, they seek only that image; he walks like a dreamer, and yet one can see by the fire and flame in his eyes that he is wide awake; he walks like a stranger, and yet he seems to be at home, for through the imagination he is always at home with this image, which he desires to resemble. And just as it so beautifully happens with lovers that they begin to resemble each other, so the young man is transformed in likeness to this image, which imprints or impresses itself on all his thought and on every utterance by him, while he, to repeat, with his eyes directed to this image —has not watched his step, has not paid attention to where he is. He wants to resemble this image; he is already beginning to resemble it—and now he suddenly discovers the surrounding world of actuality in which he is standing and the relation of this surrounding world to himself.³⁸

The youth is captured by his love, but the rest of the world does not mirror his passion. When he looks around in actuality, he does not find like-minded compatriots; instead, he finds a world which couldn’t care less about the ideal. It is as if a music lover has discovered a new, little-known artist, and embraced a great passion for her music; she tries to tell the world about her discovery, then finds the rest of the world reacts to this music with indifference or even disdain. What will happen now? Will the youth realize he has been a foolish idealist and come to terms with what is often called the ‘real’ world of violence, competition, and theft? It seems it is now time to abandon his idealism and become an ‘earnest’ citizen, taking up a solid occupation that will comfortably provide for himself and for a family, forgetting about any grandiose dreams of transcendent love. This is indeed what the world considers earnestness. Anti-Climacus disputes such a definition: The earnestness of life is not all this pressure of finitude and busyness with livelihood, job, office, and procreation, but the earnestness of life is to will to be, to will to express the perfection (ideality) in the dailyness of actuality, to will it, so that one does not to one’s own ruin once and for all busily abandon it or conceitedly take it in vain as a dream—what a tragic lack of earnestness in both cases!—but humbly wills it in actuality.³⁹

A deep, perhaps unconscious knowledge of this counter-vision of earnestness resides within the youth, and he cannot be persuaded to abandon the image he loves. Now he knows that “suffering is in store and is not to be avoided”;⁴⁰

 SKS 12, 188 / PC, 189.  SKS 12, 189 / PC, 189 – 190.  SKS 12, 189 / PC, 190.

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the world is imperfect and that which resembles perfection will be subject to opposition. The youth knows this, and yet he remains faithful to the image. Still, what the youth knows is limited. He does not yet imagine his whole life as one of defeat and torment. Governance, in its gentle love, has not yet made this plain for him. Rather: He has seen that he is going to suffer; he has seen what this love will cost him, but who knows, he says, after all, better times may come, help will certainly come, and it can still turn out all right. So he does not abandon the image but cheerfully enters the suffering into which he is being led.⁴¹

The youth accepts his present suffering, but still he hopes for better times. He imagines his suffering may at some point be alleviated. Things are bad now, for sure, but “it can still turn out all right”:⁴² this is the hope to which the youth clings. The youth’s hopes for this life are then maintained over many years. He keeps telling himself “it can still turn out all right,” and he keeps being thwarted. He continues to face the opposition of the world, which does not seem to want someone resembling the prototype in its midst. They peck at him like a bird that does not belong. He continues to accept this moment-by-moment pain which is continually renewed in the dailyness of actuality, yet he makes no larger conclusions about this life. He simply persists, daily, in his devotion to the image, no matter the cost. All the while, the youth is becoming stronger. Through this life of day-to-day suffering, Governance is gradually leading the youth toward the realization of a larger truth. With each day of suffering, the youth cares less for his worldly hopes; though he yet affirms “it can still turn out all right,” it matters to him less and less whether this actually happens. He is being weaned from his earthly hope. Then, at the right time—which only Governance, in its wisdom, knows—a fundamental change occurs. A revelation is vouchsafed to the youth: Then comes a moment when everything becomes clear to him; he understands that that hope belonged to youth, he understands now that suffering cannot be avoided and that it will increase with every step he goes forward.⁴³

 SKS 12, 190 / PC, 190 – 191.  SKS 12, 190 / PC, 191.  SKS 12, 190 / PC, 191.

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This is the decisive moment. It is the point at which suffering is infinitely compounded, for there is no longer the psychological reassurance that “it can still turn out all right.” To daily suffering is added the knowledge—a knowledge which itself creates suffering—that this daily suffering will never change. It will be like this for the rest of one’s life. One will continue to live in the double danger, “struggling even harder to be wholly unselfish, sacrificing, and loving”⁴⁴ while receiving the approbation of the world precisely because of this renunciatory form of life. One will continue in this pain—if, that is, one continues to follow the prototype. So will our youth continue? Can he maintain himself in this test, “a suffering with which no other human suffering can be compared in pain and anguish”⁴⁵—the test of being a Christian? Yes, for Governance has waited till the right time. Even though he now knows that things will indeed not turn out all right, still he follows the image which is the source of his suffering, crying out: “I cannot do otherwise, God help me.”⁴⁶ For Anti-Climacus, this is what imitation looks like. It is having each of one’s worldly hopes shattered, one-by-one, over the course of time. It is persisting in unselfish love, despite the fact that one knows one will not be rewarded for love’s works, but will instead be persecuted on their account. The only comfort is that one has been faithful to the image. For Christ has “expressly manifested” that in this world “love is hated, truth is persecuted.”⁴⁷ When the same happens to you, when you renounce power and are hated for it, then you know you have drawn close to the image; then you know you are a follower; then you know you have—at least to some extent and through the gradual lessons of gentle Governance—learned to live in imitation of Christ. The life of the youth is obviously enormously difficult. Anti-Climacus’s claim is that this difficulty is constitutive of Christian life itself. Yet for the average bourgeois citizen of modern Denmark, life is not characterized by any of these difficulties; it is instead a life of comfort and ease that is understood to extend into an eternity of similar comfort and ease. How, then, have these citizens of Denmark avoided all this trouble, while at the same time continuing to think of themselves as Christians? Anti-Climacus’s answer is that a crucial substitution has been made.

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

12, 195 / PC, 197. 12, 194 / PC, 196. 12, 190 / PC, 191. 12, 196 / PC, 198.

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IV Imitation/Admiration As we have seen, the theme of imitation is not meant to propose that our lives take on the precise historical details of Christ’s life, as if the follower of Christ were some Pierre Menard (the latter-day author of Don Quixote ⁴⁸). Instead, the one who imitates Christ takes on a form of life analogous to that found in the Gospels: she practices voluntary self-renunciation, and is persecuted for it.⁴⁹ To live like Christ is to exist in the double danger. The imitation of Christ is as simple as that (even if, granted, its application may be complicated, as the story of the youth demonstrates). What obscures the simple ideal of imitation are the simulacra fabricated as a substitute for it. These replace Christianity with a less strenuous ideal that is more amenable to human beings.⁵⁰ Anti-Climacus singles out for us one substitution in particular: admiration for Christ has taken the place of imitation of Christ.⁵¹ This substitution is the subject of the last major exposition in the

 See Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Collected Fictions, New York: Penguin 1998, pp. 88 – 95.  Sylvia Walsh beautifully summarizes the person who practices voluntary self-renunciation as “the single individual who is reflective enough to perceive what the prudent thing to do is but passionate enough to reject it” (Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008, p. 177). In this way, the imitation of Christ includes what Kierkegaard calls “sagacity” or “clever self-interest” (kløgtighed) and simultaneously rejects it.  See, for example, Kierkegaard’s later comments on the human transformation of Matthew 11:28 (“‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest’”): “The pastors or lie-pastors get grace changed into indulgence. Grace consists, quite plainly, of a person’s having benefits from God, and the pastor has benefits from the people whom he makes believe this, inviting them with Christ’s words ‘Come here, all of you,’ the true meaning of which is that the invitation is undeniably to all, but when it comes down to brass tacks and it must be certain what it is that Christ invites them to (in imitation to become a sacrifice), and this is not turned into something that pleases everybody—then it will be manifest, just as in contemporaneity with Christ, that all will most decidedly decline this with ‘Thanks for nothing’” (SKS 13, 409 / M, 345). The passage is from the 10th issue of The Moment, published only posthumously.  Here Anti-Climacus is taking up and transforming the opposition in Western Christian theology between admiratio and imitatio. Traditionally, the opposition was applied to the saints’ miracles, which one admired, and Christ’s suffering, which one imitated (see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Wonder,” The American Historical Review, vol. 201, no. 1, 1997, p. 7). (However, the emphasis on imitating Christ’s suffering should also be qualified as different from Anti-Climacus’s interpretation.) Anti-Climacus makes no such distinction between what one admires and what one imitates in Christ. Instead, he discusses admiratio and imitatio as intentionalities of the subject which wholly determine their object. Thus, in Anti-Climacus’s sense, one either admires Christ or imitates him, with no dividing up of what is admired and what imitated.

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final part of Practice in Christianity (Exposition VI of No. III). The contrast begins with a description of admiration and its pretensions. The admirer of Christ appears to be pious, saying in effect: ‘I am so grateful that Christ has suffered on my behalf.’ At the same time, the admirer makes no attempt to suffer in a way similar to Christ. She remains separate from the ideal, appreciating the sacrifice made on her behalf while seeing any demands for mimesis as an exaggeration, an impossibility on account of the exalted status of the ideal. The praise of the ideal as unattainable is only further confirmation of the admirer’s piety. Anti-Climacus aims to expose this piety as false. What has actually happened, in his view, is that the admirer has found a clever way to exempt herself from the divine call that works itself out in the Christian’s daily renunciations. Anti-Climacus unmasks this clever operation in his precise formulation of the contrast between admiration and imitation: What, then, is the difference between an admirer and an imitator? An imitator is or strives to be what he admires, and an admirer keeps himself personally detached, consciously or unconsciously does not discover that what is admired involves a claim upon him, to be or at least to strive to be what is admired.⁵²

The admirer keeps Christ at an exalted distance.⁵³ This gives the appearance of piety, but once it is unmasked we can see that this kind of exaltation is simply an evasion of the existential claim Christ makes upon one’s life—namely, to change it, to die to the world and embrace the eternal. The admirer shrinks from the required existential change.⁵⁴ The admirer appreciates what has been done for her without actually doing anything herself; her gratitude is expressed only in rhetoric. Furthermore, those who admire Christ admire what has been done for them, but they do not really admire the abasement of Christ as something to laud in itself. This links back to the earlier themes of abasement and contemporaneity. Those who admire Christ do not want to become contemporary with the Christ of abasement—indeed, how could they? For “there was unconditionally nothing to admire, unless one wanted to admire poverty, misery, contempt, etc.”⁵⁵ Admiration as a human intentionality can only arise in conjunction with a perceived  SKS 12, 234 / PC 241; cf. SKS 12, 242 / PC, 249: “And yet there is an infinite difference between an admirer and an imitator, because an imitator is, or at least strives to be, what he admires.”  See the precise formulation in SKS 13, 281 / M, 225: the poet, who admires but does not live the Christian life, exists “in a mood at the distance (Afstand) of imagination from actuality.”  See SKS 12, 239 / PC, 246: “The admirer is only spinelessly or selfishly infatuated with greatness; if there is any inconvenience or danger, he pulls back[.]”  SKS 12, 234 / PC, 240.

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good; therefore one cannot admire abasement. Though she may appreciate the difficult times he had to go though, the one who admires Christ wants to become contemporary with Christ only in his present loftiness. Thus, she does not treat Christ’s abasement as a good that she actually wants to appropriate. She has transformed Christ into an object capable of being admired. The fabrication involved in admiration does not come out of nowhere. Instead, it is generated by human desire. So also, however, is the true, imitative relation to Christ. In fact, this exposition speaks of two types of human desire, thus tying different relations to Christ back to their origin in the fundamental dynamics of the human being who relates to Christ.⁵⁶ These two types of desire can usefully be labeled ascetic desire and aesthetic desire.⁵⁷ What drives imitation is ascetic desire, which is “when someone desires (ønsker)⁵⁸ nothing but this one thing, to have to suffer with him”;⁵⁹ “No, now he desired (ønskede) only one thing, to suffer approximately as [Christ] suffered in this world.”⁶⁰ Such is the desire of the new human being, not of the natural human concerned with her own temporal flourishing.⁶¹ The new human being is moved to imitate Christ; love (erōs) stands at the basis of imitation:

 This is yet another phenomenological “reduction” that one can add to the open list generated by Kevin Hart in “The Elusive Reductions of Søren Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment, ed. by Jeffrey Hanson, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2010, pp. 5 – 22.  On desire in general in Kierkegaard, see especially Carl Hughes, Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire. Hughes’s work has definitively established the multivalent (not simply negative) nature of human desire in Kierkegaard.  On the translation of ønske as “desire,” see Hughes, Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire, p. 204n.36.  SKS 12, 176 / PC, 173; cf. SKS 12, 122 / PC, 115, here using “jeg vil” instead of “ønske,” though with substantially the same meaning: “Now the issue is: will you be offended or will you believe. If you will believe, then you push through the possibility of offense and accept Christianity on any terms. So it goes; then forget the understanding; then you say: Whether it is a help or a torment, I want only one thing, I want to belong to Christ, I want to be a Christian (enten den nu er Hjælp eller Plage, jeg vil kun Eet, jeg vil tilhøre Christus, jeg vil være Christen).”  SKS 12, 180 / PC, 178; translation modified. The Hongs translate ønske and its derivatives alternately as “desire” and “wish.” I have modified the translation primarily in order to demonstrate Anti-Climacus’s continuing preoccupation with this issue. It should be noted that the relevant vocabulary can be expanded yet further. Concluding Unscientific Postscript speaks of desire and suffering in terms of “want” or “craving” (kræver): “Whereas the immediate person involuntarily looks away from misfortune, does not know that it exists as soon as it is not present externally, the religious person continually has suffering with him, wants suffering (kræver… Lidelse) in the same sense as the immediate person wants good fortune” (SKS 7, 395 / CUP, 434– 435).  See SKS 13, 98 / FSE, 76.

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If the sign of this abased one can so move a person, can it not so move you also? This is how it moved the apostles, who knew nothing and wanted to know nothing except Christ and him crucified—can it not so move you also? From this it does not follow that you become an apostle—presumptuous—No, it means only that you become a Christian. This sight so moved the glorious ones whom the Church remembers as its fathers and teachers, who together with the apostles knew nothing and wanted to know nothing except Christ alone and him crucified—can it not so move you also? From this it does not follow that you become such a one—conceited thought! From this only follows that you become a Christian. Why did this sight move them in this way? Because they loved him (Fordi de elskede ham). That is why they discovered his sufferings, because only the person who loves him understands that he was love, and therefore only he can become aware of how he suffered: how severely, how agonizingly, and how he suffered: how gently, how lovingly, how he suffered: how right he was, how he suffered—what wrong! If this sight does not move you in this way, then it must be because you do not love him. But do not give it up, in order that the sight of this abased one in his suffering might still move you to love him. In that case, you will come to see this sight a second time, and then it will also move you to want to suffer in a way akin to the suffering of him—who from on high will draw all to himself.⁶²

Desire rules human intentionality, such that we see what we want to see. In this sense, askēsis is necessary for the correct perception of Christ. It is only in the disciplining of human desire that Christ can be allowed to be, for us, what he is: the suffering truth who proclaims that the truth must suffer in this world. The disciplining of desire such that aesthetic desire is replaced by ascetic desire: this is what allows the true Christ to appear to us. If that discipline does not occur and aesthetic desire remains in place, Christ is transformed into a pleasant savior, a comforting word that assuages any suffering we may on occasion have: gone is the Messiah who chose to suffer and asked us to do the same (Mt 16:24; Lk 9:23). And these two intentionalities, aesthetic desire and ascetic desire, are so fundamental to our perception that they can take the same words as found in the Gospels and push them in completely opposite directions: Christianity’s requirement to die to the world, to surrender the earthly, its requirements of self-denial, does this not contain enough requirements—if they were to be obeyed—to produce the danger of actuality that makes manifest the difference between an admirer and an imitator, makes it manifest precisely in this way, that the imitator has his life in these dangers and the admirer personally remains detached although they both are nevertheless united in acknowledging in words the truth of Christianity?⁶³

 SKS 12, 180 / PC, 178 – 179.  SKS 12, 244 / PC, 252.

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Both the admirer and the imitator acknowledge Christ as Messiah, and both acknowledge the same scriptural sentences as truth. Yet what this acknowledgement means, and who the Christ that is acknowledged turns out to be, is completely dependent on the character of the intentionality interpreting the text. True connection to Christ depends not on a simple reading of these pages, but on a prior commitment to a personal embrace of suffering. Erasure of Christ’s abasement is the ultimate result of aesthetic desire’s triumph over ascetic desire. Aesthetic desire transforms Christ from someone lowly into someone lofty, whom it is appropriate to admire, toward whom it is actually an affront to aspire to be like him: If Christ exists for us only in loftiness, if his abasement is forgotten or if he had never existed in lowliness, then in that case not even Christ himself, in order to be self-consistent, could require anything but admirers, adoring admirers, since loftiness and admirer, divine loftiness and adoring admirer, correspond perfectly to each other. Yes, in relation to loftiness, on our part it would even be effrontery, arrogance, blind infatuation, more or less madness, to want to be imitators rather than decorously to decline to aspire to what perhaps is not allotted to us, because it is allotted to someone else, and decorously to be satisfied to admire and adoring to admire. But the correlative of abasement and lowliness is: imitators.⁶⁴

Admirers cite passages like John 12:32 in order to justify themselves, to which Anti-Climacus’s Christology responds with a bitter reminder: “It is also well known, as I have repeated elsewhere again and again, that it is the abased Christ who is speaking, that every word we have from Christ is from him, the abased one.”⁶⁵ This is why Anti-Climacus’s specific notion of contemporaneity is so important. In the moment of encounter, one does not meet the Christ already in glory; one does not become contemporary with a kind of eternal Christ who already sits enthroned and is present to provide the believer inward comfort. No, one meets the Christ who lived on earth, the very Christ who spoke the words we read, the one who calls the believer to be poor and abject as he was, the one who draws us from on high through the suffering and pain of the world, the one who asks us to be with him in a death like his so that we might someday (ἐσόμεθα)— not now—join him in a resurrection like his (Rom 6:5).⁶⁶ If one is to be a follower (Efterfølger) one must be an imitator (Efterfølger) of the Christ who was present here on earth, who lived the way of abasement.

 SKS 12, 231 / PC, 237.  SKS 12, 231 / PC, 237.  The existential verb highlighted here, ἐσόμεθα, is in the future tense.

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In short, we can all be poor and despised as Christ was, and to claim that one would not presume to want to be like Christ is therefore to utilize a pious mode of discourse in order to evade what one does not want to do. There are occasions when the aesthetic desire to admire is correct, when such an intentionality appropriately meets its object: for example, if some human being has a particularly outstanding talent or walks in beauty with “lovely limbs (le belle membra)” to an extraordinary degree.⁶⁷ But here—in relation to Christ, the abased one—the aesthetic desire to admire is inevitably motivated by “excuse and evasion,”⁶⁸ the wish to wrangle out of the prototype being the prototype, the instinctive avoidance the natural human being has for anything ascetic. There is nothing to admire in the person of Christ, who is poor and abject. Thus, if admiration is being directed at “Christ,” one can be sure the person of Christ has been changed from what he truly is; namely, the most abased human being ever to live.⁶⁹ We began this section wondering: if the Christian life is so difficult—a difficulty exemplified in Anti-Climacus’s narrative of the youth—why then are so many lives in modern Denmark marked by comfort and ease? The substitution of admiration for imitation was the suggested solution. Now that we have comprehended the contrast between admiration and imitation, we can see more fully how it applies to a critique of Christendom. Given the temporal aims of Christendom, Anti-Climacus exposes how there is a certain double bind at work in Christendom’s constitution. Christendom cannot allow the true imitation of Christ that is grounded in self-denial, as such imitation would threaten its temporal goals. But Christendom also needs the figure of Christ in order to be validated as truly Christian, thus assuring its citizens of the rightness of its cause and the safety of their souls. Christendom is caught in a bind of needing Christ while also needing to get rid of the imitation of Christ. Admiration is Christendom’s ingenious solution to this problem. In this mindset, one can praise all the wonderful things Christ has done on one’s behalf, while also not committing to any form of self-denial whatsoever. Christ can in some sense be the foundation of one’s society, while also not having a significant impact upon actual forms of life within said society. This is a perfect encapsulation of a worldly Christology, to which Anti-Climacus’s Christology of abasement is opposed. Christendom and warped admiration of Christ go handin-hand, as Anti-Climacus makes clear:

 Purgatorio XXXI.50; cf. SKS 12, 234– 235 / PC, 241– 242.  SKS 12, 234 / PC, 240.  SKS 12, 234 / PC, 240.

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It is surely easy enough to perceive that it is a lie, deceit, is sin to want to admire in relation to Christ—or what amounts to the same thing, to want to admire adoringly—instead of imitating him. Since, however, this form of conscious or unconscious self-delusion is so very common in the world or in Christendom, and since Christ’s life as the prototype is expressly designed to annihilate this self-deluding game—which is why it is doubly to be lamented that right here in Christendom through the misuse of Christ’s loftiness this has become very common—it certainly is made necessary to bring to light with the help of the prototype what has deliberately and intentionally or merely through thoughtlessness been made obscure.⁷⁰

This deception is buttressed by strategies which help to cover over that anything is amiss. Anyone who tries to shift their existence from admiration to imitation, from praise of self-denial to actual self-denial, is mocked and labeled an enthusiast: “in connection with any contemporary who ventures that far out, we assume that it is vanity.”⁷¹ And if the soft persecution of mockery does not work, harsher forms of persecution will be invoked, “for the admirers will become very exasperated with this imitator.”⁷² Anti-Climacus even suggests that physical martyrdom is a real possibility for anyone so impertinent as to be a true Christian within Christendom; the true Christian must at least face the possibility of martyrdom, even if it turns out in the end not to happen.⁷³ Still, physically martyred or mocked or subjected to misrepresentations, the same thing will happen to the true Christian in Christendom as in any other human society that is dominated by human interests: her critique of human selfishness will be silenced, one way or another.

V The Christian as Criminal As a coda for this chapter, I emphasize the final resting place within society for all who truly imitate Christ. We have seen that Christ was persecuted; we have seen also that martyrdom is a possibility for Christ’s true followers, even in a society which bears Christ’s name. At the same time, there is a kind of vagueness to these ideas of persecution which a powerful motif in Practice in Christianity helps to dissolve. There is a particular social station which all who truly follow after Christ will find themselves in: they will be labeled criminals. This category, that of a criminal, helps further establish the impossibility of combining Chris   

SKS 12, 236 / PC, 243. SKS 12, 71 / PC, 59. SKS 12, 244 / PC, 252. See SKS 12, 220 – 221 / PC, 226.

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tianity with anything like a bourgeois life or a position of power within any given human society. When Anti-Climacus considers the inevitable reaction of human society to a Christian in its midst, he comes to a striking conclusion: the true Christian is always seen as a criminal. Thus he remarks: “it is the believer in whom the world sees a criminal.”⁷⁴ In fact, the Christian is not just a criminal but is the worst criminal of all in Christendom, for she calls into question the very existence of Christendom itself—she queries whether the adjectives “comfortable” and “Christian” can be combined and forces modern Christendom to admit it never really has been Christian, after all. What would a sagacious member of modernity be more apt to crush than this line of questioning: a line of thought that calls the whole sustaining synthesis to account and threatens to blast it apart. To admit the mendacity is to give up the game; therefore, in countries that call themselves Christian, the true Christian must be labeled a criminal, and quickly. Correlatively, according to Practice in Christianity, if one has not been labeled a criminal, one’s status as a Christian is in serious jeopardy.⁷⁵ This is, to my mind, a quite concrete test of whether or not one has lived in full imitation of Christ. One simply asks the question: am I in jail or not? In the field of Christology, such a blunt question may be seen as refreshingly direct. At least, I hope it is seen as such. Now that Kierkegaard has asked many questions challenging us, it is time to ask some questions of Kierkegaard. This is what the final chapter will aim to do.

 SKS 12, 127 / PC, 120.  See SKS 12, 127 / PC, 120; cf. SKS 8, 427– 428 / UD, 337, an early yet remarkably clear passage on the anxiety a comfortable Christian should have: “The person who acknowledges a triumphal view is of course joyful on the day of victory, not only on account of victory, but because for him the victory is a confirmation that he actually is going along the road he intended to take, because what he was waiting for has now happened. But the person who acknowledges a militant view is joyful on the day of persecution, because what he must be waiting for now indeed happens. This is in harmony with his whole view. The victory in the first instance is not an accidental piece of good luck but is the essential. If the victory had failed to come for that first person, he surely would have searched for the fault within himself; if the persecution had failed to come for the second person, he presumably would have searched for the fault in himself.”

Chapter Five: Kierkegaard and Womanist Theology I Introduction For Anti-Climacus, and for Kierkegaard more generally, suffering is definitive of Christianity. We are all called to suffer and to embrace suffering in imitation of Christ. This call is universal. Anti-Climacus does not brook exceptions: Christ is the pattern, and that’s the end of the story.¹ What such a universal call ignores, however, is that some people are already suffering more than others. For some, much of the suffering they experience is not voluntary. They don’t have the option to choose suffering; it has already been chosen for them.² Furthermore, Christ in Anti-Climacus’s understanding was persecuted because he renounced power. But, in our world, not everyone has an equal amount of power to renounce (to say the least).³

 SKS 12, 115 / PC, 107.  This is recognized by Wanda Warren Berry in her essay “Practicing Liberation: Feminist and Womanist Dialogues with Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity,” in Practice in Christianity, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon: Mercer University Press 2004 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 20), pp. 327– 328: “While much in Practice in Christianity emphasizes the universality of the invitation to ‘all’ (for example, PC, 12), it is addressed particularly to those in power who need to choose to identify with the lowly, rather than to those who are powerless within oppressive systems. The recurrent call for ‘abasement’ or lowering oneself (see PC, ‘Index,’ 405) correlates with the heavy reliance we have seen on the kenosis imagery of ‘emptying’ oneself of power.” Berry’s essay is the only precedent I have found for the dialogue staged in this chapter. It can be consulted as an example of the many other types of conversation which could happen between Kierkegaard and womanist theologians. What follows in this chapter is focused only on the topic of suffering and renunciation. This is a topic raised in Berry’s essay, but only briefly (pp. 328 – 330, 338 – 341).  In this respect, the following words from Daphne Hampson—though perhaps too broadly stated—remain instructive: “That [kenosis] should have featured prominently in Christian thought is perhaps an indication of the fact that men have understood what the male problem, in thinking in terms of hierarchy and domination, has been. It may well be a model which men need to appropriate and which may helpfully be built into the male understanding of God. But… for women, the theme of self-emptying and self-abnegation is far from helpful as a paradigm” (Theology and Feminism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, p. 155). Berry makes the point with respect to Practice in Christianity and womanist theologians in particular: “[Anti-Climacus’s] emphasis on imagery of self-emptying servanthood is soteriologically relevant to a different audience than womanists… Its intended audience is those who have been habituated into dominance and who need, therefore, to renounce that pattern” (“Practicing Liberation,” p. 339). This chapter https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-008

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Such distinctions in the worldly conditions of those who are called to Christianity is a major contribution of 20th and 21st century theology. In particular, the valuation of social position in liberation theologies has greatly contributed to our understanding of how the call of Christianity might differ depending on one’s differing position in the world.⁴ In other words, the call of Christianity is not univocal. It asks different things of different people depending on where the call meets them. One especially fruitful mode of theology which is attentive to the difference one’s social positioning makes is womanist theology. This discourse is apropos to the current project because it often has to do with thinking critically about how one interprets the relation between suffering and Christianity.⁵ There has been a rich and often conflictual debate about this topic in womanist theology, and any book which speaks about the relation between suffering and Christianity as often as the current one does would do well to learn from this discourse. Womanist theology helps us to see the following questions as relevant in any attempt to apply Practice in Christianity to current theological discourse: Is suffering redemptive? How should we speak of the suffering of Christ to those who are suffering? Should we glorify the cross? “Does the image of Jesus as a surroshares a similar set of concerns with Deidre Nicole Green’s Works of Love in a World of Violence: Feminism, Kierkegaard, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2016. However, Green’s focus is on how certain forms of self-sacrifice can serve to enable the vices of the neighbor, and thus do not meet Kierkegaard’s definition of love as an upbuilding of the neighbor in her God-relationship. I find this reading entirely persuasive and do not intend to take issue with Green in what follows; my intention is to treat a different topic within the same overall field of concern.  For a more comprehensive coverage of the differing positions of liberation theologies, and for an exposition of the principle of positionality, see Lillian Calles Barges, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018. Barges does important work connecting the endorsement of positionality to increasing interest in the political dimensions of theology. Furthermore, she demonstrates how adherence to liberation theology goes hand-in-hand with a rejection as inadequate and harmful any theology which does not take the improvement of the worldly life of oppressed peoples as one of its primary aims. Interestingly—as indicated by her title—Barges points to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s affirmation of theology written “from the perspective of suffering” in his Letters and Papers from Prison, translated into a Latin American context through the journal Cuadernos Teológicos (1954), as an important source of inspiration for the valuing of position in theology in the latter half of the 20th century.  By engaging the topic of suffering, womanist theology joins conversations which have taken place since the origin of varied traditions of women’s writing, such as (for example) the first female author whose writing survives in English, Julian of Norwich (1343–ca. 1416). Furthermore, the topic of suffering has received rich and sustained attention in women’s writing in English since this beginning. See Cynthia R. Wallace, Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering, New York: Columbia University Press 2016.

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gate figure have salvific power for black women, or does it reinforce the exploitation that accompanies their experiences of surrogacy?”⁶ How should we adjudicate the traditional Christian themes of sacrifice and self-renunciation—are they appropriate themes for an audience of whom so much has already been asked? Thankfully, womanist theology also helps us to answer these questions: although, as we will see, the answer each theologian gives to each question is quite different; womanist theology is by no means a univocal discourse. In what follows, I have selected three thinkers for extended treatment: Delores S. Williams, JoAnne Marie Terrell, and M. Shawn Copeland. The dialogue with Kierkegaard which is staged here is attentive to one particular thread in womanist theological discourse. This of course means that much rich material in womanist theology will be bracketed in order to trace our thread. Furthermore, I have chosen three thinkers whose arguments I believe engage each other in an especially interconnected way, which means that I have not included many other womanist theologians whose work is also relevant. This focused vision will allow us to delve more deeply into three arguments which deserve awareness, attention, and engagement within the field of Kierkegaard studies.

II Rejecting the Cross: Delores S. Williams Published in 1993, Delores S. Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk was immensely provocative then, and it remains so now.⁷ This is mainly because Williams is bold enough to say: The cross is not good. How could she say this about the cross, a symbol that has been so important for so many Christians over the centuries? In short, because Williams sees the cross as a sign of surrogacy: of one person suffering for others and taking on their burden. From the perspective of Black women as Williams understands it, surrogacy is not a good thing. In fact, surrogacy defines what Black women are seeking to be liberated from, not to embrace out of the imitation of Christ. Williams argues that those who encourage Black women to imitate the suffering of Christ’s cross are complicit in their further subjugation. These encouragers are attempting to force Black women to accept a reality that should not be accepted.

 JoAnne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience, Maryknoll: Orbis Books 1998, p. 7.  Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Maryknoll: Orbis 1993.

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In order to understand Williams’s argument, let’s pause and step back for a moment. As powerful as this argument is, it really only occupies a few pages of her book.⁸ There is a good deal in the background here that contributes to the persuasiveness of Williams’s claims. First of note is the overall goal of theology, for Williams. As she was writing Sisters in the Wilderness, she asked herself “How do I shape a theology that is at once committed to black women’s issues and life struggles and simultaneously address the black community’s historic struggle to survive and develop a positive, productive quality of life in the face of death?”⁹ The contents of the book are her answer to this question. It is clear that womanist theology should aim at generating a greater flourishing of life for Black women and for the Black community in general. When she looks at Black life, and asks what theology can do, her hope is to make Black life more positive and productive. Next, Williams spends a good deal of time documenting the antebellum and postbellum oppression Black women have faced in the United States of America. The biblical figure invoked throughout Sisters in the Wilderness is that of Hagar. Like Hagar, Black women have consistently faced rape, forced surrogacy, unacknowledged children, exploited labor, and the “freedom” of being cast out into a wilderness where economic survival is difficult, if not impossible. Williams aptly summarizes these conditions as an attempted genocide.¹⁰ In this context, salvation looks not so much like the imitation of Christ (who, according to Anti-Climacus, voluntarily chose renunciation) as it is doing and believing whatever is necessary to survive.¹¹ It is important to understand these background elements to get a handle on why Williams rejects the cross as bad. What Williams especially rejects is the notion of substitutionary atonement. Given the centuries of forced surrogacy, of involuntary suffering on behalf of others, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is neither productive nor positive for Black women; it serves only to

 Ibid., pp. 143 – 148.  Ibid, p. xv; cf. p. 171.  Ibid., pp. 116 – 118.  “Black women’s stories in the first part of this book and Cheryl Gilkes description of an Afrocentric biblical tradition in this chapter attest to black women’s belief in Jesus/Christ/God involved in their daily affairs and supporting them. Jesus is their mother, their father, their sister and their brother. Jesus is whoever Jesus has to be to function in a supportive way in the struggle… Our black communities are engaged in a terrible struggle for life and well-being. All of our talk about God must translate into action that can help our people live. Womanist theology is significant only if it contributes to this struggle. We must, like Hagar, obtain through our Godgiven faith new vision to see survival and quality-of-life resources where we have seen none before” (ibid., p. 180).

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glorify and in some measure justify the ugliness they have been through.¹² Beyond glorification and justification, substitutionary atonement also encourages embracing the behavioral pattern of suffering on another’s behalf. This is the case even if such surrogate suffering is not so much actively chosen as it is passively accepted. To encourage such a behavioral pattern is to undermine the importance of Black “resistance” to evil,¹³ a resistance which Williams elevates to doctrinal status in the Black church,¹⁴ which is to say she makes resistance part of the very definition of true Christianity. The cross is thus seen by Williams as a sign of everything the Black community is empowered by God to overcome: surrogate suffering, the persecution of healing forces, and the attempted genocide of a people.¹⁵ This is what Williams means when she says the cross is bad. The cross is a symbol of the forces of death; it should not be celebrated or glorified, but lamented and, ultimately, rejected. It is important to note that Williams’s rejection of the cross is not a rejection of Christianity. Rather, in Williams’s interpretation, the resurrection should be seen as God’s rejection of the cross. Rejecting the cross would therefore actually entail embracing Christianity, insofar as Christianity is a force for positive, productive, life-affirming work. Salvation is not found in the cross but in the overcoming of the cross. As Williams puts it: The resurrection does not depend upon the cross for life, for the cross only represents historical evil trying to defeat good. The resurrection of Jesus and the flourishing of God’s spirit in the world as the result of resurrection represent the life of the ministerial vision gaining victory over the evil attempt to kill it.¹⁶

 See ibid., pp. 143 – 145; cf. p. 143: “Surrogacy, attached to this divine personage, thus takes on an aura of the sacred. It is therefore fitting and proper for black women to ask whether the image of a surrogate-God has salvific power for black women or whether this image supports and reinforces the exploitation that has accompanied their experience with surrogacy. If black women accept this idea of redemption, can they not also passively accept the exploitation that surrogacy brings?”  Ibid., p. 145.  See ibid., pp. 192– 193.  “Jesus was quick to remind his critics that humans were not made for the Sabbath; rather, the Sabbath was made for humans. God’s gift to humans, through Jesus, was to invite them to participate in this ministerial vision (‘whosoever will, let them come’) of righting relations. The response to this invitation by human principalities and powers was the horrible deed the cross represents—the evil of humankind trying to kill the ministerial vision of life in relation that Jesus brought to humanity” (ibid., p. 146).  Ibid., p.146.

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In these sentences, vicarious suffering shifts its categorial valence, from what we are trying to embrace to what we are trying to overcome. In Williams’s re-visioning, Christianity would not be about the glories of suffering but the manifestation of an abundant life which defeats all attempts at suppression, for “in all these things we are more than conquerors” (Rom 8:37). At this point, I can hear a Kierkegaard scholar objecting: ‘But neither Kierkegaard nor Anti-Climacus offer any extended endorsement of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. What relevance, then, does Williams’s critique have to your larger project?’ It is true that Anti-Climacus does not advocate the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. At the same time, he does exalt voluntary suffering; this is one of the main things Anti-Climacus wants to encourage throughout Practice in Christianity. Williams does not give extended treatment of the theme of voluntary suffering, which is understandable due to the overwhelming weight of involuntary suffering her audience has experienced. One wonders whether voluntary suffering could be integrated into Williams’s goal of developing theology that is positive and productive of life in the face of death.¹⁷ I believe this remains an open question in Sisters in the Wilderness; it is a problematic which benefits from other voices contributing to womanist theological discourse, and thus will receive further reflection in what follows.

III The Cross as Potentially Liberative: JoAnne Marie Terrell Published five years after Sisters in the Wilderness, JoAnne Marie Terrell’s Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience is in some ways a response to Williams, though it is not limited to this purpose. Terrell’s text ranges widely, and does important work drawing parallels between the cross as understood by early church martyrs and the cross as understood by the Black community. Perhaps the sharpest disagreement in the work is with Williams, however, and their difference is instructive.¹⁸ To be clear, Terrell values and welcomes Williams’s critique of surrogacy and her concern for how the hermeneutic of sacrifice has been used to reinforce Black women’s oppression.¹⁹ At the same time, Terrell objects to Williams’s at-

 Ibid., p. xv.  In bringing Terrell into conversation with Williams, I am following Terrell’s own references, but also a helpful lecture from Eboni Marshall Turman, “This Is My Body: Black Womanist Christology in Perspective,” delivered at Yale Divinity School in 2017 and available on YouTube.  See Terrell, Power in the Blood?, pp. 120 – 122.

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tempt to effectively bar the cross from meaningful integration in Black lives.²⁰ It is true that Williams’s argument seems to run: this is how the cross has been misused, so let us therefore not use it anymore. Terrell’s response is in many ways an abusus non tullit usum argument, which begins with the ethnographic fact that Black women do continue to make sense of their suffering (and their children’s suffering) through the symbol of the cross.²¹ Mamie Mobley, mother of Emmett Till, comes up several times in Terrell’s analysis,²² and the implication seems to be: If the cross helps Mobley make sense of what happened to her and her son, who are we to object? This is not to say that Terrell disagrees with Williams when Williams states that the cross is evil. In fact, Terrell would agree with Williams on this point.²³ However, the fact that the cross is evil does not mean it lacks meaning, nor that it should be dropped as a significant symbol. Indeed, the cross is evil, is a sign of what the world does to goodness, but this sign of evil can also be liberative. For it says to the sufferer: what happened to you also happened to God. It says: God is at-one with me in my suffering. Therefore, suffering can be an occasion not of the generation of self-loathing nor of nihilism, but of self-love, the affirmation that God is in me and I am in God and that “we who suffer can be redeemed.”²⁴ Terrell recognizes the danger of imposing such a hermeneutic upon someone, but she also recognizes the danger of completely taking such a hermeneutic away.²⁵ Of the cross, Terrell asks: Can we say it meets people where they are, without saying they should be there? Can we say the suffering Jesus meets Black women where they are, without endorsing their endemic oppression? Williams says ‘No’; Terrell says ‘Perhaps.’ Power in the Blood? is a book that does not answer a question; it remains in the interrogative. I believe it is this interrogative mode for which Terrell is ultimately arguing. This is appropriate considering the complexity of any decision about whether the cross is playing a liberative role in a given person’s life. Terrell recovers this complexity by expanding her understanding of the cross beyond substitutionary atonement, which is Williams’s concern. Most significantly, she wants to continue to talk about the cross while arguing that Jesus did not choose the cross: “Jesus’ sacrificial act was not the objective [of his life]. Rather, it was the tragic,

     

See ibid., pp. 124– 125, 139. See ibid., p. 125. See ibid., pp. 126, 128 – 131, 139 – 140, 144. See ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 125. See ibid., pp. 124– 125.

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if foreseeable, result of his confrontation with evil.”²⁶ Jesus did not choose the cross; he chose to practice what Williams would call a “ministerial vision”²⁷ which then resulted in the cross. This significantly departs from Jesus’ choice in the substitutionary atonement theory, to suffer as a surrogate for others. Instead, Jesus chooses life—healing and prophecy and protest—and meets with death because of the evil world in which he resides. This distinction frees the cross from the surrogacy thematic inherent to substitutionary atonement. However, this different vision of atonement does not solve all problems. This is because there are two possible elements of identification with which Terrell provides her readers: (1) Jesus is an innocent person who has been made to suffer by a vicious imperial regime; (2) Jesus made an active choice for renunciation or sacrifice which preserved his innocence and extended his ministerial vision, and it was for this choice he suffered. To sacralize the first element apart from the second would be to glorify involuntary suffering—exactly the kind of hermeneutic of sacrifice which both Williams and Terrell want to avoid. However, the second element of identification does include a notion of agency and choice.²⁸ This is a person living creatively, embracing the fullness of a life overflowing in gifts of love, who then meets with suffering and even death because of her choice to give and because of the evil of our present age. For such a person, Jesus’ cross stands as a symbol which makes sense of the way in which she employed her agency, granting sacramental worth to her choice to live generatively —that is, to live in such a way that flourishing for others is created. This second way of identifying with Jesus seems to involve enough agency or choice to fall within the rubric of liberation (though such a deliberative judgment is by no means absolute and can always be contested).²⁹ Terrell does not want to disallow the use of the first element of identification with Jesus, either; but she does want to point out that there is something amiss here, that there is nothing of God in the denial of agency. There is an annihilation of the person at work in an isolated consideration of the first element that must be lamented, not sacralized, even

 Ibid., p. 142.  Sisters in the Wilderness, p. 146 (italics removed).  Terrell both endorses sacrifice involving agency and laments ‘sacrifices’ which do not involve agency in the following statement: “Sacrifice understood as the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim is not genuinely that unless it involves one’s own agency” (Power in the Blood?, p. 124).  On suffering, renunciation, and deliberative judgment, see Thomas J. Millay, “Renouncing Harvard: The Ascetic Theology of Jonathan Tran,” CrossCurrents, vol. 70, no. 4, January 2021, pp. 394– 405.

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while the innocence of the given person can draw them into identification with Jesus. This lament prevents the sacralization of passive acceptance. One cannot say to the person in question ‘accept your lot, in imitation of Jesus’ cross,’ for the response would be: ‘I am trying to imitate Jesus, but I must actively resist you if my imitation is to be complete.’ The one who is to fully imitate Jesus cannot simply die on the cross. She must be an active agent of ministerial vision. Terrell’s overarching point is that, given the complexities of suffering and agency, we cannot decide in advance whether the cross will be a liberative symbol in a person’s life or not: I believe that continuous learning will be facilitated for oppressed Christians by always situating the call to sacrifice in historical context; by employing liberative hermeneutics, taking note of dissonances within the text, the experiences of the community, and the community’s understandings of God. My mother’s ultimate sacrifice and those of countless other black women, who suffer abuse and die at the hands of patriarchal, violence-driven persons; whose deaths go unreported and under-reported, unprosecuted and under-prosecuted—are potentially liberating for women if we learn from their experiences, if we see how they exercised or did not exercise their moral and creative agency. This seems a much more relevant view of the atoning worth of women’s blood. Although it is true, as some feminists assert, that women’s bloodloss has been devalued in Christian sacrificial tradition, Jesus’ own life and sacramental example of affirming the intrinsic worth of women enable humankind to see women’s blood as sacred.³⁰

Note Terrell’s conditional, “potentially liberating,” which encapsulates well her judgment on the symbol of the cross for Black women. There is something of Hegel’s Owl of Minerva here: one can only decide whether the cross was liberative for a person’s life in retrospect, in the difficult work of analysis, parsing out whether agency was in this individual case involved to a sufficient extent. Terrell’s ultimate point of disagreement with Williams, then, is not that Williams’s critique is incorrect. Rather, Terrell objects to Williams’s proscription of the cross as an important symbol of Black life; for the cross can be liberative, even if it is not always so. The overlap with Kierkegaard at this point is significant. Anti-Climacus’s Jesus does not so much choose to suffer for others as he voluntarily chooses the renunciation of this world and suffers as a result of this active choice.³¹ It is this choice of renunciation that then leads to the hatred of the world which ultimately results in the cross. Yet the choice of renunciation that results in

 Terrell, Power in the Blood?, pp. 142– 143.  SKS 12, 217 / PC, 222; cf. above, Chapter Four; one imagines Anti-Climacus might have in mind passages like Luke 4:1– 13 (Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness).

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the cross is different from the choice of the cross. This distinction—shared by Williams, Terrell, and Anti-Climacus—is inherent in Kierkegaard’s notion of the double danger, for the doubleness of the double danger arrives as a reaction of the world to one’s prior choice, rather than itself being a choice intended by the one who becomes a victim. As a result of the fact that Christ does not choose to suffer, there is consequently nothing of substitutionary atonement in this theory. Anti-Climacus thus parallels the dangerous commitment to ministerial vision and its confrontation of evil which are key themes in both Williams and Terrell. Furthermore, his philosophy of history and metaphysic of inverse dialectic fully support Williams’s and Terrell’s indications that it is the very bringing of the good into this evil world that causes a given human subject to suffer. We will return to this issue again and add further narrative texture when considering the work of M. Shawn Copeland. Where Williams and Terrell complicate Anti-Climacus is in their reckoning with the problem of agency. There is no sophisticated analysis of this problem in Anti-Climacus or in Kierkegaard more generally. Christ is the paradigm for human action to imitate; yet it is only because Christ had the choice of kingship that he can renounce it. It is only on account of his access to power that he can give it up. Therefore, Anti-Climacus makes voluntary suffering his paradigm, as do Williams (to some extent) and Terrell (more fully). At the same time, he does not recognize that not everyone has access to power in the same way—in short, that some have less to renounce and more to bear, that some do not so much need to “pick up” (ἀράτω, an active verb) “their cross” (Lk 9:23) as they have already had it placed upon them. In this way, womanist theology confirms the insights of Kierkegaard in many respects, while also extending his analysis to reckon with agential complications which Kierkegaard (to be frank) completely fails to recognize.

IV M. Shawn Copeland: The Cross & Enslaved Agency With regard to the question of whether the cross is a liberative symbol, Delores Williams answers ‘No’ and JoAnne Terrell responds with a ‘Maybe.’ For M. Shawn Copeland, on the other hand, the answer is ‘Yes, most certainly.’ Copeland has for many years been an important voice within Black Catholic theology and feminist theology more broadly. Her most recent work, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience, does not self-identify as a work of womanist theology, as Williams′s and Terrell’s texts do. However, her ac-

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knowledged contributions to the field of womanist theology³² and the clear relevance of her work to our conversation lead me to include her as a crucial part of our ongoing dialogue about the cross. At the same time, it is important to recognize the role Copeland plays in our dialogue, for she does not so much add new conceptual or categorial possibilities (as does Terrell in comparison to Williams) as she takes the examples of ‘Yes’ allowed by Terrell and descriptively expands upon them. In the same way, the insights we gain from Copeland with respect to Anti-Climacus will be similar to those found in Terrell, only with added texture, particularly with respect to power. To be clear—although she is on the whole more affirmative of the positive role the cross can play in African American lives than either Williams or Terrell—Copeland recognizes the abuses of the cross outlined by Williams and Terrell. Going further, she also cites the words of ministers James Furman and Thornton Stringfellow as concrete examples of white supremacist ministers using the cross to reinforce subordination and enslavement.³³ Why then does Copeland persist in evaluating the cross as liberative? Why does she answer ‘Yes’ to our question? Her positive evaluation rests squarely on the interpretive agency of enslaved peoples. It is the witness of such agency that leads her to answer ‘Yes’ to the question posed above. According to Copeland, it is certainly the case that slave masters attempted to teach enslaved persons a bankrupt and heretical Christianity which reinforced enslaved persons’ enslavement as morally right and endorsed by God. It is simply also the case that when enslaved peoples heard the stories of Scripture, they did something entirely different than what the masters wanted or expected them to do. Enslaved persons were given words intended to further entrap their bodies and spirits. Instead, they took these same words and saw in them God’s desire

 See Enfleshing Theology, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2018, p. xi, and Copeland’s participation in the important 1989 panel “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 5, no. 2, 1989, pp. 83 – 112, where she appears alongside Cheryl J. Sanders, Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, bell hooks, and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes. This discussion is reprinted in The Womanist Reader, ed. by Layli Phillips, New York: Routledge 2006. Copeland identifies her work and her concerns as Womanist in an earlier work which is relevant to the following discussion: “Wading through Many Sorrows: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective,” in A Troubling in my Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil & Suffering, ed. by Emilie M. Townes, Maryknoll: Orbis 1993, pp. 109 – 129; cf. also Copeland, “Enfleshing Freedom: Theological Anthropology in Womanist Perspective,” in Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, Minneapolis: Fortress 2009.  See Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience, Maryknoll: Orbis 2018, pp. 11– 12.

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for freedom, which applied just as much to them as anyone else. For enslaved people, the cross meant that Jesus “understood them and their suffering like no one else,” and building on that solidarity, Jesus “would help them to negotiate this world with righteous anger and dignity.”³⁴ Thus, “The enslaved people’s embrace of the crucified Lord was no act of self-abnegation but an act of signifying resistance.”³⁵ Copeland’s appreciation of enslaved person’s interpretive labor leads her to give the following paean to the agency of enslaved people: Deprived of literacy—reading and writing—the enslaved people too came to knowledge of God, of God’s will and purpose, and intimate knowledge of God’s Son Jesus through hearing. The enslaved people listened as they stood near the open windows of churches or parlors. They talked and prayed and ruminated among themselves under the boughs of hush arbors, in thickets, or in rude cabins. They prayed silently at day during work in the fields, cried out in hurt at dark midnight. The enslaved people entrusted to memory and heart miracle stories and parables, events and sayings, names and places from the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian Testament. They selected and sifted, worked and shaped this material over and over again. They crafted imagery, fashioned symbols, plumbed meaning, structured musical architecture, and grafted themselves—their yearning and hopes, pain and suffering—into “the aural text.” In the opaque enigma of their enslavement, the people prayed and sang and praised the God whom they believed would break the slavery chain at last.³⁶

Despite a concatenation of circumstances which a reasonable person might assume would abrogate agency and artistry, enslaved people persisted. They took the desiccated fragments of Christianity given to them and made them breath life, infusing them with the Spirit of the liberating God who has a history of freeing the enslaved. What the slave masters meant for evil, enslaved peoples took up and made it mean for good. The teachings of the Christian faith—including the suffering of Jesus on the Cross—did not further abase enslaved persons, but inspired and sustained their resistance and their desire for freedom. In spite of all attempts to dehumanize,³⁷ enslaved peoples remained human. Indeed, “With confidence and without any resort to sentimentality or exaggeration, we may say that the enslaved people negotiated this ontological and metaphysical assault by audaciously asserting their essential humanness in the face of dehumanizing conditions by choosing transcendence.”³⁸ It is true that the masters wanted the cross to be a symbol of surrogacy. But, for Copeland, it is     

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. 26. p. 25. p. 33. p. 14. p. 40.

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in the mismatch between intention and result that a true representation of the power of Christian faith can be found. Both God and enslaved peoples escape the cages made for them; God’s Spirit working through enslaved peoples made the cross signify not surrogacy, but resistance and redemption. For enslaved peoples, “The power of God in the cross was the power to live and to love—even when violence does its worst.”³⁹ So there is power in the blood, and the intention of Copeland’s book is precisely to honor the courage and resilience of the people who found and forged such power through the cross, and who continue to do so to this day.⁴⁰ Combing through the narrative strata of Copeland’s book, we can continue to delve into exactly how enslaved persons made the blood powerful (or the blood was made powerful through them). As Copeland notes, the preeminent cultural artifacts of enslaved people’s agency are the spirituals.⁴¹ These songs demonstrate remarkable poetic sensitivity, especially in their employment of ancient scriptural figures and narratives to speak about contemporary devastations and God’s continuing promise to act. Beyond this artistic ability, there is the affirmation of the interpretive agency of enslaved peoples. In the midst of a society attempting to deny them humanity, “enslaved people saw themselves, read themselves, inscribed themselves on the pages of the Bible.” Yes, they may have first (over)heard about Jesus from a white man. But that is not the social location in which Jesus remained. Rather, the spirituals speak as an affirmation for the enslaved persons that “Jesus was for them!”⁴² The spirituals are a testament to enslaved peoples bold claim to have “privileged hermeneutical ground”;⁴³ for claiming the right to interpret—the right to put oneself at the center of the narrative, in the middle of God’s economic concerns—is in fact a form of resistance. The spirituals thus embodied an ontological affirmation of enslaved people’s humanity, that they could know, discover, and praise Jesus on their own terms. And, in so doing, they forged a tradition of song which sustained spirits and bodies amid some of the worst conditions in which any human being has ever lived.

 Ibid., p. 35.  “Knowing Christ Crucified begins in the heart of the slave quarter in the eighteenth century and stretches to the bowels of brutality in the United States in the twenty-first century. The deepest desire of this work is to make clear the brilliance and power, inspiration and relevance of the witness of African American religious experience” (ibid., p. 174).  Ibid., pp. 5 – 8.  Ibid., p. 57.  Ibid., p. 41.

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Yet the power of enslaved people’s agency was not only to endure their condition. Amid rampant involuntary suffering, agency can be seen in additional suffering that was in a meaningful sense chosen. This can be seen, for example, in enslaved persons’ persistence in the practice of prayer, even in the midst of deadly threat.⁴⁴ It can also be seen in the continued choice to worship. As the formerly enslaved Hannah Lowery reports: “Some of them didn’t have arbors. When they wanted to sing and pray, they would steal off into the woods. During that time, most of the masters were cruel. If they would hear them (slaves) singing, they would get their whips and whip them all the way home. Whipping did not stop them from having meetings.”⁴⁵ The cross of voluntary suffering can also be seen in figures such as Harriet Tubman, who after escaping slavery repeatedly risked her life and her freedom in order to liberate around seventy enslaved persons.⁴⁶ Tubman is a precise example of the “solidaristic compassionate action” which Copeland identifies with “discipleship.”⁴⁷ Choosing to suffer and to risk everything for others, Tubman lived her life “at the disposal of the cross.”⁴⁸ Highlighting the voluntary suffering of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons does not glorify suffering in itself, nor need it reinforce the depredations of involuntary surrogacy. Instead, what Copeland is doing is honoring these particular people, who made this choice to take on yet more suffering than the much they had already experienced, in conformity to Christ their Lord and with the hope of freedom as their aim. For it is not only entitled white men who can choose to suffer.⁴⁹ Imitation of the God-man and life in the double danger is found in many places. No matter how hard the masters of this world attempt

 See ibid., pp. 19 – 20 (citing Henry H. Mitchell’s Black Belief: Folk Beliefs of Blacks in America and West Africa, New York: Harper & Row 1975, p. 100): “Another woman reported that on the Scott plantation her husband was beaten often because ‘[the master] caught him praying.’ This did not stop her husband from praying: ‘He just kept on…. They didn’t have any bible on the Scott plantation she said, for it meant a beating or a killing if you’d be caught with one.’ The enslaved people prayed anyway.” Cf. Mitchell, Black Belief, p. 31, “Praying Jacob.”  John B. Cade, “Out of the Mouths of Ex-Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 20, no. 3 July 1935, p. 329; cited in Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, p. 20. Lowery is quoted by Cade’s student M.J. Jones.  See Terrell, Power in the Blood?, pp. 17, 57.  Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, p. 128.  Ibid., pp. 125 – 126.  This critical point is also made by Julietta Singh in her critique of Mahatma Gandhi’s understanding of sacrifice. See Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, Durham: Duke University Press 2018, pp. 40 – 41. Singh is here building off the work of Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial, Durham: Duke University Press 2010.

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to scrub it out, the image of God remains, and that image is employed in the active choice to suffer for the sake of a greater good. Strangely enough, abasement can be empowering. Yet—to again acknowledge the abiding relevance of Williams’s critique—this language of the active choice of suffering is dangerous and needs qualification. When speaking of voluntary suffering, we need to be careful to glorify the agency and not the suffering. Kierkegaard helps us to be precise: It is the choice of the good, the work of love for our neighbor, the preservation of faithfulness amidst a hostile world, that is the aim of Christian agency. It is only because we live in an evil world that such choices inevitably result in suffering.⁵⁰ To say that is not to glorify suffering, but to lament the world that crucifies the truth. In turn, womanist theology helps us to be more precise with respect to Kierkegaard, especially with respect to what he means by “voluntary” suffering.⁵¹ For oddly enough, voluntary suffering is not really about the choice of suffering. It is about the choice of the good, which then results in suffering. The one who chooses the good knows it will result in suffering, since she knows this world; thus, ‘voluntary suffering’ is still an appropriate label. Still this distinction between intended choice and inevitable result is important. Perhaps an example will make clear why. In no sense do we want to endorse someone choosing slavery; this is precisely the kind of slave holder religion we must reject. At the same time, the cross illuminates how someone like Harriet Tubman, who is in some sense renouncing her freedom and choosing to engage in actions that could easily result in her re-enslavement, is—despite the worldly calculus of advantage which would describe her action as insanity—making a choice that deserves to be honored as meeting the highest standards of Christianly conceived action. It is thus in properly describing and praising such action that Kierkegaard’s Christology continues to be relevant. The abased Christ continues to show us where truth is in this world. There is no greater gift than to risk one’s freedom for one’s friends, to continue to choose the good even when the world effects a powerful resistance. Despite the power and the powers of the evil, there is a yet greater power: the power of the blood, the power of the Cross, the power of the abased Christ. This is precisely the power to choose the good no matter the consequences, because one knows one’s vindication is near. With the light of the resurrection in the background, we can see that in the cross as voluntarily chosen, abasement and empowerment are one and the same.

 See SKS 12, 189 / PC, 190.  SKS 12, 117 / PC, 109.

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In this way, Copeland continues the direction of Terrell, while adding to it thick descriptions of what the power of the blood looks like in action. Such descriptions in turn help us to see Anti-Climacus’s abased Christ as a figure of resistance: not someone who has chosen suffering nor someone who has passively accepted suffering, but someone who chooses the good and has faith that he will be with God in victorious power no matter how things may seem in the moment. Let’s now see if we can draw these threads together and weave a suitable garment out of the results of our dialogue between Kierkegaard and womanist theologians.

V Conclusion There are two principle gains for Kierkegaard scholarship which are established in the preceding dialogue. We learn: (1) When the imitation of Christ is an appropriate theme for a Christian life, and when it is not; (2) To make a crucial distinction between a choice of the good that results in suffering and the choice of suffering as an end-in-itself. (1) Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus consider the imitation of Christ to be a requirement for all who would like to consider themselves Christians. However, given that the definition of the imitation of Christ involves the renunciation of power (see Chapter Four), our three womanist theologians help us to see how such imitation is not equally available to all. There are some for whom a dynamic of renunciation is neither possible nor helpful—for whom, indeed, such a dynamic might serve to reinforce a corrupt and involuntary surrogacy. The call to an imitation of Christ, then, is not as univocally universal as Anti-Climacus or Kierkegaard believe it to be. To explain this critical qualification of Kierkegaard by means of a contemporary saint, Harriet Tubman must possess the empowerment of freedom before she is able to risk renouncing that power in solidarity with her enslaved brothers and sisters. (2) Voluntary suffering is a major theme in Practice in Christianity. Concerns about the misuse of a surrogacy thematic are most evident in Williams, but are also shared by Terrell and Copeland; these concerns assist us in being more precise with respect to the nature of voluntary suffering. Voluntary suffering is not the choice of suffering. It is the choice of the good (or the advocacy of a ministerial vision) which, given the conditions of the world, inevitably results in suffering. In these two ways, womanist theology (insofar as this tradition is constituted in Williams, Terrell, and Copeland) helps Kierkegaard studies become more precise about Kierkegaard’s own work, while also usefully complicating its contemporary reception.

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In my judgment, there is much more which Kierkegaard can learn from womanist theologians than womanist theologians can learn from Kierkegaard. Be that as it may, there is one significant contribution Kierkegaard, via Anti-Climacus, can make. It is suggested several times in the womanist texts covered above that the result of choosing the good or practicing a ministerial vision is the reception of suffering at the hands of an evil world which persecutes truth. I propose that Kierkegaard takes that suggestion and strengthens it by means of his Christology, philosophy of history, and concept of inverse dialectic. Anti-Climacus’s insistence that the suffering of Christ is not accidental—that it is not a contingent happening of his own time, but what would happen to Christ in any time or place—provides a substantial theological ground to the notion that the world is evil and that the good is inevitably persecuted. This Christological insight is then taken up into Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history, wherein he rejects modernity’s assumption of progress, instead positing a repetitively homogenous world that is always ruled by selfishness. As Copeland might put it, forms of neoslavery always crop up.⁵² Finally, inverse dialectic informs our everyday interpretation of the characters who people our worlds. If we sign on to Anti-Climacus’s metaphysic, we will see the abject as those who are likely to be the good, and the exalted as those likely to be evil: “So the last shall be first, and the first last” (Mt 20:16). I believe all these emphases to be present already in the womanist theologians engaged in this chapter. Kierkegaard is of assistance only because he takes up the matter of the evil nature of the world in a more extended way, supplementing a general conviction with a theological and philosophical apparatus that gives explanatory depth to the notion. Through the gift of womanist theology, our appropriation of Kierkegaard is made more careful. We are not likely to endorse the universalistic application of Kierkegaard’s theories after a serious reckoning with this contemporary tradition. At the same time, the amount that is shared between Kierkegaard and womanist theology is striking. The world is evil; the good is persecuted; what happened to Christ happens to anyone who has the power to voluntarily choose a truly ministerial vision. Both womanist theologians and Kierkegaard are aware of the costs of resistance, which are high. In the continuing work of Christological reflection, then, it seems Kierkegaard and this group of womanist theologians are friendly dialogue partners, advancing an agenda of love while aware of the likely (or inevitable) result: suffering. Thankfully, God’s blessing continues amidst pain.

 Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, pp. 99 – 100.

Conclusion Although it was passed over fairly quickly, a major and potentially offensive Christological stipulation was made in the previous chapter: namely, that there are some situations in which particular human persons cannot imitate Christ. This was only one point among many in Chapter Five. It is a scandalous enough point, however, that it deserves further reflection. Thankfully, there is a recent contribution to Kierkegaard studies which provides an opening for doing just that. In what follows, I engage this contribution as a way to return to and reconsider the exclusionary nature of imitation in Practice in Christianity. In 2022, Wojciech Kaftanski published a landmark study of imitation in Kierkegaard’s writings titled Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity. Appreciating select points in Kaftanski’s important work leads us to ask again whether the imitation of Christ is truly available to all and to say even more firmly that the answer is ‘No’—or, at least, it leads us to say that imitatio Christi is not available to all in every moment and situation of their lives; there are some contexts that preclude its possibility. As shocking and potentially offensive as this statement might sound, I will argue that the exclusivity of the imitation of Christ is balanced—in Practice in Christianity and in other texts—by the universality of Christ’s invitation to rest. Kaftanski’s Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity gets to the heart of a paradox which lies at the center of Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood. Becoming an individual is crucial to this account; the self who is only a member of a crowd or a public is really no self at all, but an amalgamation of diverse opinions meant to ease one’s integration into society. The paradox Kaftanski points us to is this: becoming an individual is inseparable from the task of becoming a self, but, according to Kierkegaard, one only becomes an individual through imitation of others. These seemingly contradictory movements, individuality and imitation, can only be held together if one has a sufficiently complex understanding of imitation. Kaftanski convincingly demonstrates that Kierkegaard possesses just such a rich conception of mimesis. According to Kierkegaard, true imitation is not copying. Mimesis utilizes a model, but authentic mimesis always involves creative variation upon that model, and it is in creative variation that one makes the original model one’s own. Borrowing language from Paul Ricœur, Kaftanski labels this the refiguration of the figure, and applies it to imitatio Christi as it is found in Kierkegaard:

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-009

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The refigurative reading of the imitation of Christ is open to a plurality of expressions of Christian existence. It indicates that a given expression of the following of Christ that takes on board the flexibility regarding the means of the expression is then part of all (possible) instances of Christian life… Refigurative imitation in existential mimesis is then an alternative to the totalizing trends focusing on establishing a unified meta-narrative of human experience through mimicry, aping, comparison, social pressure. It considers the diversity of human experience as part of the human experience.¹

When mimesis lives up to its full potential as refigurative imitation, it embodies five specific characteristics: “it is nonimitative, non-comparing and refigurative, but also indirect and intention-driven/goal-oriented.”² True imitation distinguishes itself from mere copying by discerning the intention of the original act and using creative variation to apply the intention of that act in a new situation. In the language of Christianity, Jesus calls all his followers to “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24), but this taking up does not involve every follower of Jesus incurring literal crucifixion on a wooden cross; to imagine the taking up of the cross as necessarily involving exact replication is to misunderstand Jesus’ imperative, as Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Gospel according to Mark” wryly points out.³ The pith of Kaftanski’s argument is that a specific kind of imitation is central to Kierkegaard’s account of becoming a self, and the kind of imitation which helps one become a self is always refigurative, improvisatory, and creative. Kaftanski’s is a welcome account of the complexity of imitation in Kierkegaard, and his work supports points made in Chapter Four of this work. However, given what has been developed thus far in this reading of Practice in Christianity, a significant qualification of Kaftanski’s work must be advanced. If we exclusively emphasize the importance of creative variation within imitation, we risk losing the distinctive contribution Practice in Christianity makes within Kierkegaard’s authorship, which is to develop concrete categories of imitation sourced directly from the life of Christ. That is to say: there is room for creativity and variation within Kierkegaard’s account of imitation, but the variance developed therein must always be tethered to specific categories (earlier, I referred to these as the ‘marks’ of abasement). Thus, it is not a requirement for Christians to be poor in exactly the same way in which Jesus Christ was poor. However, it is a

 Wojciech Kaftanski, Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity: A Study Imitation, Existence, and Affect, London: Routledge 2022, p. 219.  Ibid., p. 205.  See Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, New York: Penguin 1998, pp. 397– 401.

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requirement for them to be poor; that category must in some meaningful way be applicable to their life. The tethering of imitation to specific categories has the benefit of providing meaningful criteria to determine whether someone can accurately be called an imitator or not; it provides a limit to how far imitation can vary from a prototype without veering into simple departure from any recognizably mimetic protocol. However, these specific categories also create an interesting dilemma with respect to the availability of imitation. If imitation requires particular, identifiable actions—such as, for example, the renunciation of power—does not such specificity immediately generate problems of exclusion? Given the diversity of material reality, it seems any precise specification of what imitation requires will exclude those who do not share the worldly conditions necessary for connecting their actions to the prototype. Another, more blunt way to put the problem is to ask: If imitating Christ requires the renunciation of power, is it really the case that ‘all’ persons are able to imitate Christ? This question was broached in Chapter Five; here, by way of conclusion to my reading of Practice in Christianity, I will attempt to address the problem more rigorously.⁴ Recall the marks of abasement as delineated in Chapter Two. Jesus Christ in his abasement is poor, marginal, offensive, and persecuted. The problem of whether ‘all’ are truly able to imitate Christ arises specifically in relation to the category (or mark) of persecution. This is on account of the pattern of Christian persecution as developed in Works of Love and applied to Christ in Practice in Christianity. That three-fold pattern, referred to as existing in the “double danger,” is as follows: (1) One has access to power; (2) One renounces that access; (3) One is persecuted for said renunciation. The pattern is directly sourced from the life of Christ, as we saw in Chapter Two. As the hymn puts it, “He could have called ten thousand angels/To destroy the world and set him free/He could have called ten thousand angels/But he died alone for you and me,” and as the Gospel puts it when Christ is on the Cross, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him” (Matthew 27:42). Christ could have used his charisma, his healing abilities, and his cosmic connections to the heavenly archons to establish an earthly rule that rescued Israel from the Romans, thereby achieving peace and security for all his compatriots. Yet he refuses to use his power in this way. According to the double danger, Christ is then persecuted—crucified—precisely for his refusal to wield the power he could have employed. Another way

 My thanks are due here to Tekoa Robinson, without whom this more rigorous approach would not have been prompted. I return to Robinson’s work below.

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to put this is to say that Christ refuses to use evil means to achieve the good. He in every situation remains with the good, an abiding that requires renunciation of evil means when they present themselves as available to him. The problem of whether all are able to imitate Christ, introduced in Chapter Five and returned to here, is related to the first stage in the threefold dynamic of Christian persecution. The first step of imitating Christ’s route to persecution stipulates that one renounce one’s access to power. Clearly, such a formulation includes a presumption, namely that one has access to power; for one must have access to power in order to renounce it. Thus, one must have access to power if one is to be able to follow the pattern of imitating Christ as it is developed in Practice in Christianity. The danger of such a formulation is that it is potentially exclusionary.⁵ Do we really want to say that some people—on account of their very abject status—cannot imitate Christ? Such a statement seems to pile an additional violence on top of the crushing burdens already being faced by those living the subjected life. This appears to be a significant problem with the Christology Anti-Climacus offers us. Yet in the pages of Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus does not seem to recognize the dilemma we have advanced in this conclusion. In fact, Practice in Christianity opens by repeatedly emphasizing the universality of Christ’s invitation: “Come here, all you!”–Amazing! It is not so amazing, people being the way they are, that someone who perhaps in the end cannot help one single person foolishly bites off more than he can chew and invites everybody. But when a person is entirely sure that he can help and when he is also willing to help, when he is willing to devote all his time to this and with every sacrifice, then as a rule he does reserve for himself one thing—to make a selection. However willing a person is, he still does not wish to help everyone— he will not abandon himself in that way. But he, the only one who in truth can help and in truth can help all, consequently the only one who in truth can invite all, he makes no condition whatsoever. These words, which seem to have been designed for him from the beginning of the world, he does in fact say: Come here, all you.⁶ … What an enormous variety, what almost limitless differences among the invited guests. A human being, a lowly human being, certainly can attempt to portray a few specific differences—the inviter must invite all, although each one separately or as an individual.⁷ … The invitation blasts away all distinctions in order to gather everybody together[.]⁸

 I return to the issue of whether it in actuality excludes anyone below.  SKS 12, 23 / PC, 12– 13.  SKS 12, 27 / PC, 16.

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These and other statements make clear that Anti-Climacus believes that Christ invites all people to come to himself, no matter their station in life. Yet however convinced Anti-Climacus is that Christ’s invitation is universal, he does not seem to wrestle with the fact that he has articulated a blueprint for imitating Christ which cannot be appropriated by all people (or, at least, cannot be appropriated by all people in all situations). On the other hand, Anti-Climacus does explicitly mention the material conditions under which the invitation is received as a legitimate concern, and he states that Christ chooses to be in poverty precisely out of that concern. In choosing poverty, no one is excluded from heeding Christ’s invitation by reason of inadequate resources. He himself was with the poorest-of-the-poor; thus the poorest-of-the-poor can be with him: “Come here to me.” Amazing! Human sympathy does, after all, willingly do something for those who labor and are burdened; we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, make philanthropic donations, build philanthropic institutions, and if the sympathy is deeper we probably also visit those who labor and are burdened. But to invite them to come to one, that cannot be done; then one’s entire household and way of life would have to be altered. It will not do, when one is living in abundance oneself or at least in joy and gladness, to reside together in a house and live together in a common life and in daily association with the poor and wretched, with those who labor and are burdened. In order to invite them to come to one in this way one must oneself live in the very same manner, poor as the poorest, poorly regarded as the lowly man among the people, experienced in life’s sorrow and anguish, sharing the very same condition as those one invites to come to one, those who labor and are burdened. If someone wants to invite the sufferer to come to him, he must either alter his condition and make it identical with the sufferer’s or make the sufferer’s condition identical with his own, for if not, the contrast makes the difference all the greater. And if someone wants to invite all the sufferers to himself (of course one can make an exception in the case of an individual and alter his condition), it can be done in only one way, by altering one’s condition in likeness to theirs if it is not already originally so designed, as was the case with him who says: come here to me, all you who labor and are burdened. This he says, and those who lived with him saw and see that there truly is not the slightest thing in his way of life that contradicts it.⁹

The line of thinking in evidence here comprises three basic positions: (1) Christ separates himself from no one; he invites all to himself; (2) Wealth creates separation—i. e., one only has worldly goods at the expense of other people not having such goods (for, in the world of scarcity Anti-Climacus presumes, in order to accumulate worldly goods one must keep others at arm’s length, preventing

 SKS 12, 28 / PC, 17.  SKS 12, 23 – 24 / PC, 13 – 14.

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them from taking the goods one has acquired for oneself—the very concept of wealth thus being inseparable from distinction, separation, and distance); (3) Christ chooses not to have wealth so that he might be separate from no one and invite all to himself. In promoting this tripartite description of Christ’s poverty, it does seem AntiClimacus fails to comprehend the implications of his own thought. It is true that Christ is the poorest-of-the-poor. Thus, no one is excluded from participation in Christ’s ministerial vision; all can live in the way he did, not attempting to violently secure the material means-of-life out of the fear of scarcity, but trusting as the lilies and the birds do in the providence of God, and believing in one’s worth as established in God and held by God, as the lilies and the birds also do.¹⁰ However, there is one significant difference between Christ and some of those included in Christ’s universal invitation: Christ had access to power. It was Christ’s choice to be poor; he voluntarily embraced poverty, marginality, and insecurity.¹¹ And in fact this voluntary embrace is precisely what resulted in his persecution. Without the ability to choose, one cannot live in the double danger, and if one cannot live in the double danger, one cannot imitate Christ. This is why the invitation to imitate Christ cannot truly be made to all; it can only be made to those who have something to renounce. Hence, when Anti-Climacus says things like “the inviter must invite all,”¹² it seems evident that he does not understand the implications of his own thought. Beyond the problem of self-contradiction, the larger problem at issue here is the potentially exclusionary nature of Anti-Climacus’s Christology. Again: Do we really want to say that some people cannot imitate Christ? Does Anti-Climacus’s Christology keep Christ at arm’s length from those involuntarily born into abasement, who had no choice in the matter? This certainly seems to be the risk Anti-Climacus’s pattern of imitation, predicated upon existing in the double danger, is running. In order to assess this risk, let’s retrieve two concrete examples from the previous chapter, both from  On the lilies and the birds as exemplars in Kierkegaard, see Kaftanski, Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity, 221– 225. See also broader treatments of the lily and bird discourses in Kierkegaard in Frances Maughan-Brown’s The Lily’s Tongue, Albany: State University of New York Press 2019; Søren Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016, trans. with an introduction by Bruce Kirmmse; Christopher B. Barnett, From Despair to Faith, Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2014, Chapter Four, “Icons of Faith: The Natural World,” pp. 87– 130.  More precisely, rather than intentionally choosing poverty in-itself, Christ refused to use his charisma to amass worldly wealth; he chose to remain faithful to the good, which resulted in poverty.  SKS 12, 27 / PC, 16.

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M. Shawn Copeland’s book Knowing Christ Crucified. Recall that Copeland is invested in painting a picture of enslaved agency, demonstrating through historical chronicle that no matter how strenuously slave owners attempted to extinguish such agency, they were not successful. Copeland quotes first-hand experience reported in Henry H. Mitchell’s Black Belief: Another woman reported that on the Scott plantation her husband was beaten often because “[the master] caught him praying.” This did not stop her husband from praying: “He just kept on…. They didn’t have any bible on the Scott plantation she said, for it meant a beating or a killing if you’d be caught with one.” The enslaved people prayed anyway.¹³

If even such enslaved persons, against whom were marshalled the most extreme conditions of agential annihilation, could choose to suffer more than they were already suffering, and choose to do so in the name of Jesus Christ, is there truly anyone who does not have the chance to renounce power and security in imitation of Christ?¹⁴ This question reveals the need for a more complicated understanding of renunciation. It is not as if these two categories—those who have something to renounce and those who do not—are static containers within which we can entirely place a given person’s life. There are instead some regions or zones within which a person can exercise agency in their life and some where they cannot. Life as an enslaved person on a plantation could be subject to such intense surveillance that nearly all effective opportunities for power or security were taken from a person.¹⁵ And yet, as Copeland shows, occasionally a region of opportunity pres Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience, Maryknoll: Orbis 2018, pp. 19 – 20, quoting from Henry H. Mitchell’s Black Belief: Folk Beliefs of Blacks in America and West Africa, New York: Harper & Row 1975, p. 100.  The ‘power’ and ‘security’ at stake here would be the lesser suffering an enslaved person would have to endure if such a person chose to conform exactly to their owner’s expectations of them, in this case refusing to behave as the spiritual person they in fact are. It certainly seems strange to speak about this choice as one involving power and security. Yet that is exactly the terms in which Copeland praises their choice (Knowing Christ Crucified, p. 33): These enslaved persons had the power to make their lives slightly more secure, and they refused to do so, in order that they might praise God.  “Chattel slavery abrogated the slave’s humanity through discursive and physical (de)formation that taught slaves from childhood to view themselves as property, thus alienating the slave from all that constitutes human being-in-the-world—history, heritage, memory, family and kin, individuality, idiosyncrasies, anxieties, and desires…. Enslaved people opposed the violation of their liberty, although not always, not always successfully, and never completely” (ibid., p. 14). Cf. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, London: Verso 2017; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton King-

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ents itself even in a rigorously controlled plantation life, and enslaved persons demonstrated not only their humanity but extraordinary Christlikeness in such moments of renunciation. Recognizing this more complicated reality, wherein much of life is subjected to a powerful objectifying force, while some agential openings remain, is crucial to reckoning with the possibility of imitating Christ, if such imitation is indeed to be predicated on real-world access to power. Thus, matters are more complicated than they might at first seem, which might suggest deficiency in Anti-Climacus’s understanding of imitatio Christi, since it appears unable to bring a great deal of clarity to this topic. However, on the other hand, it is perhaps the case that—when it comes to questions of power, security, and agency—the matter of life simply is complicated, and the difficulties inherent in applying Anti-Climacus’s account of imitation usefully highlight real-world complications. Consider, for instance, the illumination Anti-Climacus might bring to the second example retrieved from the previous chapter, the life of Harriet Tubman. It does seem accurate to say that some new possibility for bringing her life into conformity with Christ is opened to Harriet Tubman after she is freed from slavery. At that point, she clearly can choose to renounce a certain level of security, freedom, and power, just as Christ did at the moment of incarnation (kenōsis, emptying) and throughout the course of his life (etapeinōsen, abasement). Obviously, Tubman had agency when she was an enslaved person. But just as obviously, she has newfound agency—connected to newly available power and security—as a freewoman, and she chooses to use this agency in a way which manifestly parallels the life of Christ as we find it in Philippians 2 and Practice in Christianity. If it is granted that there is real explanatory power to how Anti-Climacus has articulated the imitatio Christi theme, the difficulty then becomes how to preserve this theme while also balancing these competing Christological concerns: namely, not to exclude any person from the Christian life, while at the same time appreciating the illumination Anti-Climacus brings to that pattern of Christ’s life as we actually find it, which involves the renunciation of the real-world power and security available to him, thus speaking directly to those who have realworld power and security available to them. This is the lingering difficulty Anti-Climacus’s Christology leaves us. If we are convinced there is truth in his account of imitatio Christi, it will still take careful, attentive acts of practical dis-

dom, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2013, esp. Chapter Eight, “The Carceral Landscape,” pp. 209 – 243.

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cernment to figure out how such truth might be applied to the world as we see it and the people we know within it. In all this, we should not forget that imitation is not the only way to relate to Christ. It is not as if Anti-Climacus’s Christ has no message for the abased who did not choose their abasement. He says to them: I stand in solidarity with you. The world may see you as scum, but I am right where you are, and I see you for who you truly are. I see your dignity when no one else does. Come to me and rest in this fact.¹⁶ Anti-Climacus puts it this way: Come here, all, all, all of you; with him is rest. And he makes no difficulty; he does only one thing: he opens his arms. He will not first ask you, you suffering one—alas, as righteous people do even when they are willing to help: You are not yourself to blame for your trouble, are you? You have nothing to reproach yourself for, have you? But he will not question you in this way[.]¹⁷

There are questions that can be asked which implicitly explain away the difference between those who have and those who have not, shaming those who lack in order to effectively keep them at a distance and justify one’s own possession of goods. The Christ of Anti-Climacus refuses such questions. Instead, he simply issues the invitation: Come here. Rest. Your sorrow is understood by the man of sorrows.¹⁸ This is a Christological sentiment beautifully echoed by Copeland. Her work displays the concrete historical application of Christ’s invitation to rest, and the vital resistance to imposed abasement such an invitation can foster: Caught within the labyrinth of the social oppression of slavery, black people fixed their eyes on Jesus and his cross as they grappled with the absurdity of enslavement. They took Jesus to themselves as one of them; the innocence, agony, and cruelty of his suffering was so very like their own. The enslaved people met Jesus’s compassion with compassion, his love with love, his care with care. They knew Jesus as a friend with whom they could share their secrets, a savior to whom they could entrust their hopes and fears, a companion with whom they could walk through life’s deep shadows, a healer who could make the wounded whole, a fellow sufferer who knew in his body the sting of the lash, enduring with them what was their daily portion. Bloodied and nailed to rough wooden planks, he was the One who went all the way with them and for them. Jesus was their “all in all,” their joy, their Rose of Sharon. In the paradox and promise of his life and suffering, they found their own.¹⁹

 SKS 12, 25 / PC, 15: “ah, if all, all you who labor and are burdened, were to come to him, he would embrace them all and say: Now remain with me, for to remain with me is rest. The helper is the help. Amazing!”  SKS 12, 30 / PC, 19.  See SKS 12, 32– 33 / PC, 20 – 22.  Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified, 26.

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Anti-Climacus emphasizes that Christ’s arms are open to the abased; Copeland gives us a concrete group of abased persons and a thick description of what Christ’s open arms mean to them.²⁰ Here we have a different message hiding within the pages of this demanding text, a secondary theme residing amidst the primary emphasis on costly discipleship. In general, Practice in Christianity is an invitation to choose abasement in imitation of Christ, but it also has a message to those whose abasement has been chosen for them. In brief, those who have been already abased by the world can rest. In situations where they have no worldly agency, no great existential transformation is required. When the abased hear the invitation, all that is needed is to accept the implication that they are loved right in the midst of their condition. This is not to say the abased should passively accept the conditions of their poverty. It is to say that they need not achieve worldly success in order to secure a meaningful identity. They are already with Jesus. Perhaps, then, Anti-Climacus is not contradictory in his emphasis on the universality of Christ’s invitation. It is simply the case that the invitation is different as it is issued to different people. Or, to put it more pointedly, the type of invitation Christ extends to you depends on how much worldly power you have and in what situations you have it. To be clear, different forms of invitation are not explicitly recognized by Anti-Climacus; rather, they are logically implied by his thought. Following Anti-Climacus’s reasoning one step further than he himself takes it, we can say that there is in fact a message to the involuntarily abased in Practice in Christianity, but it is not the same offensive requirement of imitation that is preached to the powerful. Given the structure of renunciation as developed in Practice in Christianity, we can say: Christ invites all, but he does not invite all to imitation. To the involuntarily abased, there is instead an invitation to rest: “Come here, all, all, all of you; with him is rest.”²¹ This message is implicitly present in Practice in Christianity, but it is certainly evident to a greater degree in, for example, the discourses on the lilies and the birds, which emphasize finding one’s worth in God rather than any earthly status.²² Practice in Christianity references such a theme, but

 That thick description follows the above quotation: ibid., 26 – 36.  SKS 12, 30 / PC, 19; although the “all” is emphasized here, it is clear from the surrounding context (SKS 12, 27– 31 / PC 16 – 20) that “the wretched of the earth” (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press 1963) are those to whom Anti-Climacus is writing, telling them: ‘yes, you too are invited.’  The discourses on the lilies and the birds can be found in SKS 8, 251– 307 / UD, 155 – 212, SKS 10, 19 – 98 / CD, 3 – 91, and SKS 11, 7– 48 / WA, 1– 46. My thanks again are due to Tekoa Robinson, specifically for pointing to these discourses as an important counterweight to what I develop

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it is not devoted to its exposition. Practice is a polemical work; its principal audience is the powerful—those who have benefited from the lie that is Christendom. Hence, the universal message articulated more fully elsewhere is only fleetingly present in Practice; and this is an understandable omission, given AntiClimacus’s intended audience. Though at first it may appear exclusionary, there may actually be wisdom in Anti-Climacus’s approach. The wisdom lies in not burdening the powerless with the task of imitating Christ, because that would be to bid them to choose to suffer precisely when making that choice is not even an option for them. Earlier we asked the question: ‘Do we really want to tell someone that they cannot imitate Christ?’ But one could just as well ask the question: ‘Do we really want to tell the enslaved to choose to suffer?’ It is apparent that, in his understanding of the structure of persecution and life amidst the double danger, Anti-Climacus has here with respect to the exclusionary nature of imitation. In an unpublished paper graciously shared with me (“An Equal Chance for Women to Choose Faith: Kierkegaard’s Inclusive Vision of the Imitation of Christ”), Robinson points to the inner renunciation required of every human being; every human being is required to renounce comparison and comparison’s reliance on worldly dissimilarity for establishing the identity of the self, which truly finds its identity only before God. (In addition to the lily and bird discourses, see, for example, SKS 9, 82 / WL, 76, with its invocation of the “universally human,” a passage Robinson points to in her paper.) I take this to be a significant critique of the position I develop here. My response is as follows: I agree that all human beings are called to the inner renunciation of comparison as a power capable of constituting selfhood. The temptation which needs to be renounced is the idea that I have meaning or worth as a self in the world because I have higher status than someone else. This is a temptation available to all, whether they have power in the world or not, as Robinson ably points out; i. e., one can believe one’s identity rests in having a higher status than others, even if one does not have such status. However, what I point out in this book—and what Anti-Climacus points out in comparison to Works of Love and the lily and bird discourses—is that the inner refusal to grasp after worldly status is only persecuted when that grasping is an actual, real possibility in the external world. It is certainly true that Christ may have renounced worldly power in an inner sense before the temptation to grasp it (e. g., in Luke 4:1– 13) ever presented itself. However, Christ’s self-denial only becomes manifest to the world when he is presented with the opportunity to grasp power. Thus, the persecution of Christ is dependent on the external worldly condition of real access to power. With this in mind, while recognizing the significance of Robinson’s critique, I continue to affirm that Anti-Climacus’s account of imitatio Christi is in an important sense exclusionary. For more on Robinson’s reading of Kierkegaard, see her “Kierkegaard’s Authorship as Eucharistic Liturgy,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2019, pp. 285 – 314, which emphasizes rest at the altar as the telos of Kierkegaard’s authorship. It is also important to recognize that the distinction between Robinson’s position and my own parallels a development in Kierkegaard’s own authorship from an emphasis on inner suffering to an insistence on the importance of outward and public suffering; this is a development tracked by Paul H. Martens in “Dying To: Kierkegaard, Christian Ethics, and the Negative,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Notre Dame 2005.

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developed a Christology that does not require those who are involuntarily suffering to somehow ‘choose’ their suffering or assent to it. Whatever Anti-Climacus’s Christology risks with respect to excluding some from the imitation of Christ, it gains in recognition of the real-world conditions—not universally available—required for the imitation of Christ, and it further demonstrates its contextual wisdom by not laying the additional burden of a choice of suffering upon the involuntarily abased. We come once again to the importance of context. With the aforementioned situational complications in mind, it remains the case that there are essentially two different contexts: those who have power and those who do not. The Christ of Practice in Christianity has a different message for each of these groups. To the powerless, he says: You have arrived at the destination, and I am already there, waiting for you, standing with you, seeing your dignity even as the world sees none; you are invited to see yourself as I see you. To the powerful, Christ says: Come, follow me.

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Index Abasement 3, 10, 14, 76 f., 79, 81, 83, 91, 93, 104, 107 f., 125, 129 f., 133, 135 – 137 Adam of Perseigne 88 Admiration 11, 103 – 109 Adorno, Theodor 56 Affect 48 Agamben, Giorgio 95 Agency 44 – 47, 97, 118 – 125, 134 f., 137 Asceticism 6, 8, 34, 47, 94 f., 106 Backhouse, Stephen 66 – 68 Badiou, Alain 69 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 44, 73, 82, 88 Barges, Lillian Calles 112 Barnett, Christopher B. 7, 23, 86, 91, 133 Barrett, Lee C. 14, 35, 49 Basil 44 Becker, Eve-Marie 18 Beethoven, Ludwig van 56 Behr, John 17, 81 Berry, Wanda Warren 111 Bonaventure 41 – 44 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 112 Borges, Jorge Luis 103, 129 Borup, Morten 64 Bousquet, François 83 Brown, Peter 25 Bynum, Caroline Walker 103 Cade, John B. 124 Carlisle, Clare 71 Cheah, Pheng 58, 68 Christendom 1 f., 4 – 6, 10 f., 15, 23, 27 – 35, 38 f., 49 – 51, 67 f., 91, 96, 108 – 110, 138 Christianity 2 – 5, 10 – 13, 15, 23, 27 – 36, 39, 47, 50, 53, 66 – 68, 76, 78, 80, 85 f., 91 f., 95 f., 103, 105 f., 110 – 112, 115 f., 121 f., 129 Christology 6, 8, 14 – 19, 23, 37 – 48, 54, 82 – 84, 89, 107 f., 110, 116, 125, 127, 131, 133, 135, 139 Cockayne, Joshua 85, 93, 95 Comfort 3 f., 9, 15, 33 – 37, 102, 107 f. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110989465-011

Confession 9 f. Constable, Giles 86 – 89 Contemporaneity 9 f., 53 – 55, 75, 83 – 85, 93 – 96, 103 f., 107 Copeland, M. Shawn 47, 70, 113, 120 – 127, 134, 136 f. Corrective 22, 39 Cousins, Ewert 42 Criminal 10 Criminality 109 f. Cross, The 17 f., 34, 38, 42 f., 46, 49, 80 f., 112 – 125, 129 f., 136 Cyprian of Carthage 87 Dante 108 Davies, Rachel 44 Deléani, Simone 87 Denmark 2, 4 f., 15, 39, 55, 61 – 65, 102, 108 Desire 105 – 108 Despair 9, 98 devotio moderna 6 – 8, 89, 95 Double Danger 91 – 96, 102 f., 120, 124, 130, 133, 138 Eliot, George 22 Established Order 10, 26 – 34 established order 4, 10, 39 Eternity 31 – 33, 45, 74 – 76, 82 – 85, 91 f., 94, 102 Evans, C. Stephen 34 Ewald, Paul 88 Existential 4, 8, 12 f., 23, 39, 43 f., 71, 78, 96 f., 104, 107, 129, 137 Fabro, Cornelius 8 Faith 9 f., 21, 28, 33, 37 – 39, 53 f., 67, 73, 78, 80, 97, 114, 122 f., 126 Fenger, Henning 61 Foucault, Michel 32 Freedom 57 f., 65, 70, 74 Furman, James 121 Garff, Joakim

1

Index

Governance 97 f., 101 Grace 9 – 11, 45, 98, 103 Green, Deidre Nicole 112 Gregory of Nazianzus 40 f. Gregory of Nyssa 44 Griffiths, Paul J. 72 f. Grünewald, Matthias 89 Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, Thomasine Christine 61 Hampson, Daphne 111 Hanson, Jeffrey 105 Happiness 4 f., 22, 33, 35 f., 39, 74, 87 Hart, Kevin 105 Hauerwas, Stanley 76 Hederico, Benjamine 8 Hegel, G.W.F. 28, 30, 55 – 62, 64 – 71, 73 f., 78 f., 84, 119 Hegelianism 30 f., 65, 70 Heiberg, J.L. 55, 61 – 64 Heidegger, Martin 39, 71 Heti, Sheila 71 Hodgson, Peter C. 56 f., 59 – 61 Holm, J.A.L. 7 Hughes, Carl 35, 105 Imitation 10 f., 19, 43, 72, 82, 84 – 111, 113 f., 119, 126, 128 – 139 Insole, Christopher J. 45 Inverse Dialectic 77 – 81 Jaffé, Phillip 88 Jameson, Fredric 48, 56, 73, 77 f. Johnson, Walter 134 Kaftanski, Wojciech 85, 94, 128 f., 133 Kangas, David J. 75 Kant, Immanuel 45, 55, 58, 78 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 88 Kempis, Thomas à 7, 89 f. Kenōsis 16 – 20, 135 Khawaja, Noreen 8, 71 Kierkegaard, Søren – Christian Discourses 80 – Concluding Unscientific Postscript 4, 12 f., 30, 50, 78, 105 – Either/Or 11

147

– Fear and Trembling 28 f. – For Self-Examination 38, 105 – Journals and Notebooks 37, 50, 86 – Journals and Papers 12 f., 22, 34, 79, 95 – Judge for Yourself! 47, 85 – Philosophical Fragments 12, 14, 16 f., 30, 75, 83 – The Concept of Anxiety 75 – The Moment and Late Writings 10, 13, 22, 30 f., 76, 85, 103 f. – The Sickness unto Death 12, 79 – Two Ages 23 – Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits 28, 110, 137 – Works of Love 28, 83, 91 f., 130, 138 Kingdom of God, The 60 f., 65, 68, 71 Kirmmse, Bruce H. 1 f., 4 f., 24, 61, 66, 133 Law, David R. 6, 14, 17, 19, 53 f. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 47 Liberation Theology 112 Lowery, Hannah 124 Mahatma Gandhi 124 Mahn, Jason A. 50 Marek, Jakub 12 Marginality 10, 16, 19, 26 – 32, 48 f., 133 Martens, Paul H. 28, 138 Martensen, Hans Lassen 23, 55, 65 – 69 Martyrdom 23, 87, 99, 109 Maughan-Brown, Frances 133 Maximus Confessor 49 McGinn, Bernard 8 Millay, Thomas J. – Kierkegaard and the New Nationalism 10 – You Must Change Your Life 17 Miller, Tanya Stable 95 Mitchell, Henry H. 124, 134 Mobley, Mamie 117 Modernity 15, 57, 60, 70 f., 96, 110, 127 Modiano, Patrick 74 Moland, Lydia L. 58 Molbech, Christian 55, 64 f. Møller, Poul Martin 55 Monasticism 8, 94 – 96 Morris, Colin 83 Mynster, Jakob Peter 2 – 5, 36, 62

148

Index

Nation, The 66 – 69 New Testament – 1 Corinthians 1:24 40 – 1 Corinthians 10:13 99 – 1 Corinthians 15:44 38 – 2 Corinthians 5:16 83 – 2 Corinthians 5:17 – 21 82 – John 1:1 – 18 16 – John 1:14 22 – John 4:6 40 – John 6:61 32 – John 12:23 – 26 81 – John 12:32 11, 52, 82, 107 – John 13:31 – 32 81 – John 14:1 79 – John 16:1 32 – John 17:1 – 5 81 – John 17:15 75 – Luke 4:1 – 13 119, 138 – Luke 6:20 24 – Luke 7:23 32 – Luke 9:23 106, 120 – Mark 4:17 32 – Mark 6:3 32 – Mark 14:27 32 – Mark 14:29 32 – Matthew 5:3 24 – Matthew 6:4 32 – Matthew 6:6 32 – Matthew 6:18 32 – Matthew 11:6 32 – Matthew 11:28 9, 25, 36 f. – Matthew 13:21 32 – Matthew 13:57 32 – Matthew 15:12 32 – Matthew 16:23 32 – Matthew 16:24 106, 129 – Matthew 18:9 36 – Matthew 20:16 127 – Matthew 26:31 32 – Matthew 26:33 32 – Matthew 27:42 130 – Philippians 2:5 – 8 16, 18 – Philippians 2:5 – 11 16 – Philippians 2:6 17 – Philippians 2:7 18, 20 – Philippians 2:7 – 8 37

– Philippians 2:8 18, 20, 89 – Philippians 2:9 – 11 37 – Philippians 3:10 – 11 72 – Romans 6:5 107 – Romans 8:37 116 Nihilism 71, 117 Norris, Frederick W. 40 Novakovic, Lidija 47 Offense 9 – 11, 13, 16, 19, 21, 32 – 49, 79, 105 Olesen, Tonny Aagaard 61 Paganism 5, 15, 23, 34, 49, 78 Patios, Georgios 69 Patten, Alan 59 Persecution 15 f., 19, 21, 23, 30, 48 – 51, 83, 91, 93 – 96, 102 f., 109 – 111, 115, 127, 130 f., 133, 138 Philosophy of History 11, 21, 23, 53 – 84, 92 f., 96, 120, 127 Pietism 7, 91 Poverty 3, 15 f., 19 – 22, 24 – 26, 48 f., 76, 82, 89, 91, 104, 108, 132 f., 137 Power 10, 16, 19 f., 23, 26, 29, 31 f., 40, 44, 59 f., 66, 76, 98, 102, 110 f., 113, 115, 120 f., 123 – 127, 130 f., 133 – 135, 137 – 139 Prayer 7, 9, 11, 14, 124 Progress 56 f., 64, 70 – 72, 74, 77 Pseudonym 10 – 13 Renunciation 8, 16, 19, 49 f., 76, 103, 111, 113 f., 118 f., 126, 130 f., 134 f., 137 f. Rest 10, 37, 136 – 139 Robinson, Tekoa 130, 137 f. Roy, Parama 124 Russell, Norman 88 Schiedermair, Joachim 62 Security 15 f., 22, 50, 130, 134 f. Self-denial 31, 38, 49 f., 81, 83, 91 – 93, 95 f., 106, 108 f., 138 Selfishness 11, 23, 32, 38, 47, 49 f., 53, 69, 74, 76, 81, 83, 92, 94, 96, 104, 109, 127 Singh, Julietta 124 Sittlichkeit 30

Index

Spera, Salvatore 8 Spirit 79 f. Spirituals, The 123 Stan, Leo 13, 52, 54, 84 f. State, The 58 – 60, 70 Stewart, Jon 15, 30, 55, 61 f., 64 – 66 Strauss, David Friedrich 22 Stringfellow, Thornton 121 Subjectivity 14 Suffering 11, 23, 27, 29, 33 – 35, 37, 41 – 43, 45 – 49, 52, 77 f., 80, 82, 84, 89 – 92, 94, 96, 98 – 103, 105 – 107, 111 – 120, 122, 124 – 127, 134, 136, 138 f. Suso, Henry 89 Tanner, Kathryn 44 – 48 Taylor, Charles 57 – 59, 66, 70 f. Temporality 33, 75, 82 – 85, 93 f., 99 Terrell, JoAnne Marie 47, 113, 116 – 121, 124, 126 The Great Beauty 74 Thomas Aquinas 8, 88 Thompson, Curtis L. 66

149

Till, Emmett 117 Townes, Emilie 121 Tubman, Harriet 124 – 126, 135 Tudvad, Peter 1 Turman, Eboni Marshall 116 Van Engen, John 7, 89 f., 95 Virgil 9 Voluntary 11, 19 f., 33 f., 37, 48 f., 94, 103, 111, 114, 116, 119 f., 124 – 127, 133 Wallace, Cynthia R. 112 Walsh, Sylvia 78, 87, 103 Wealth 132 Westphal, Merold 28, 95 Williams, Delores S. 41, 113 – 121, 125 f. Winslow, Donald F. 41 Womanist Theology 46 f., 111 – 127 Wood, Allen W. 59 Woods, Clyde 134 Yovel, Yirmiyahu

78