The Severed Self: The Doctrine of Sin in the Works of Søren Kierkegaard 9783110753448, 9783110753394

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Michael Nathan Steinmetz The Severed Self

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 38 Edited by Jon Stewart

Michael Nathan Steinmetz

The Severed Self

The Doctrine of Sin in the Works of Søren Kierkegaard

ISBN 978-3-11-075339-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075344-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-075348-6 ISSN 1434-2952 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941706 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; Detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Chapter 1: Introduction

1 25

Chapter 2: Prolegomena to Sin: Anxiety Chapter 3: Sin as Misrelation to God Chapter 4: Sin as Untruth

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61

Chapter 5: Sin as an Existential State

81

Chapter 6: Sin, Redoubling, and the Crowd

96 110

Chapter 7: Sin and the Aesthetic Pseudonyms Chapter 8: Sin and the Ethical Pseudonyms

138

Chapter 9: Conclusions and Theological Analysis 181

Appendix Bibliography Abbreviations Index

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183 198

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Chapter 1 Introduction “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us,”¹ quips Qoheleth. Qoheleth examines his situation and sees the frailty of humanity, the seemingly endless cycle of death and decay. Augustine remarks that “[man] bears about him the mark of death, the sign of his own sin, to remind him that [God] thwart[s] the proud.”² Although time changes, the key issues of humanity’s condition do not change—our frame is mere dust.³ The ultimate tragedy is that sin and death are self-inflicted wounds, yet all people have to endure the consequences of living in a world fallen and marred by sin. While the insipid reality of human existence does not change, culture does change over the course of history. Theological terms once a common part of the vernacular fall by the wayside. The continual challenge for theologians is to “translate” the truths of the Bible into the common parlance, “giving a new concrete expression to the same lasting truth that was concretely conveyed in biblical times.”⁴ As Paul Tillich warns, “The ‘situation’ cannot be excluded from theological work,”⁵ and new situations call for novel explanations. The doctrine of sin is an unpleasant topic, and many investigations of sin miss the mark of sin’s profundity and ubiquity. The good news of the Gospel implies bad news regarding humanity’s condition. One key issue facing theologians is addressing adequately the reality of sin. As Cornelius Plantinga opines, “How must the doctrine of sin be taught in settings where pride is no longer viewed with alarm—where, in fact, it is sometimes praised and cultivated?”⁶ The modern world may have a warped concept of sin, but theologians must respond to a world in desperate need of salvation. Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, too, was immersed in a culture that lacked a deeper understanding of authentic Christianity. He lamented that his culture was under the “enormous illusion [of] Christendom…

 Eccl 1:9 – 10, ESV, the translation used throughout unless otherwise stated.  Augustine, Confessions 1.1.  Ps 103:14.  Millard Erickson, Christian Theology, 3rd ed., Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2013, p. 80.  Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1973, p. 5.  Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1995, p. xii. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-001

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the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts.”⁷ The people in Kierkegaard’s day turned Christianity into an objective list of facts, “[investing] everything in the result and [assisting] all humankind to cheat by copying and reeling off the results and answers.”⁸ Sin, in Kierkegaard’s time, simply became a “counting of all the particular sins” rather than “comprehending before God that sin has a coherence in itself.”⁹ Kierkegaard astutely comments on his epoch in one of his discourses: It is supposed to be a sign of a sophisticated age that the inadmissible, the forbidden, and sin are given an absolving, an almost honorable name. Sometimes the falsification is continued so long that the old, earnest, and explicit word is forgotten and goes out of use. If it happens to be heard on occasion, it almost evokes laughter, because it is assumed that the speaker either is a man from the country who speaks an archaic, stilted language…or is a wag who is using such a word simply to evoke laughter.¹⁰

Furthermore, the philosophy of Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen viewed sin objectively —a thing to be studied—rather than subjectively—a “truly horrifying” existential reality.¹¹ Kierkegaard stresses that only by “the grief that the recollection of God awakens in a person” can one come to a true understanding of God.¹² Kierkegaard’s life’s work was to awaken individuals from their stupor steeped in sin so they may have vibrant lives of authentic faith, but “an illusion is not so easy to remove.”¹³ Kierkegaard often employed indirect communication in order “to establish rapport with people,” allowing readers to lower their guards and entertain his thoughts.¹⁴ Kierkegaard’s method leaves his contemporary readers in a conundrum: How do we navigate the tumultuous waters of his writings? Søren Kierkegaard is an untapped resource for theologians, and the concept of sin permeates his writing.¹⁵ The problem is that Kierkegaard does not present

 SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23.  SKS 7, 73 / CUP1, 73.  SKS 5, 412 / TD, 32.  SKS 5, 340 / EUD, 353.  SKS 11, 125 / SUD, 8.  SKS 5, 407 / TD, 27.  SKS 16, 25 / PV, 42.  SKS 16, 26 / PV, 44.  Often Kierkegaard is viewed skeptically by evangelical theologians in particular. Mark Tietjen shows how two popular evangelicals, Dave Breese and Francis Shaeffer, categorically misunderstood and misrepresented Kierkegaard. Their analyses became popular resources for evangelical scholars, and likewise Kierkegaard is not given much thought in evangelical scholarship

1 A Fragment of Biography

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his views in a systematic fashion. In this work I look at the entirety of Søren Kierkegaard’s writing in order to systematize his doctrine of sin. Upon categorizing his doctrine of sin, I examine all his writings to see whether Kierkegaard is consistent in his hamartiology across his numerous pseudonyms. Lastly, I put Kierkegaard in conversation with the broader theological discussion, giving Kierkegaard’s answer to common hamartiological questions which theologians pose. Before we can dive into Kierkegaard’s works to synthesize his hamartiology, we must address certain issues of Kierkegaard’s context and overall writing style. First, I present a brief biography pertinent to our investigation. Second, we cannot read Kierkegaard faithfully without knowing one of his primary foils, so I briefly examine the thought of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as it relates to Kierkegaard’s work. Third, we must make sense of Kierkegaard’s often meandering style, purpose, and method of writing. I present Kierkegaard’s own views on his authorship, followed by a survey of his theory of the stages of life’s existence. Lastly, I sketch our path forward. Once addressing such prolegomena, we can tackle the issue of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin.

1 A Fragment of Biography Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born May 5, 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the youngest of seven children. The Kierkegaard household was an apparent contradiction. Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Kierkegaard, was a well-off merchant who worked his way up from serfdom to become a prominent shipper and trader in Copenhagen, even having special permission from the king to trade with imports from the East and West Indies.¹⁶ Michael was involved in his children’s Christian upbringing, raising them in the traditional Danish Lutheran Church as well as the Congregation of Moravian Brothers—a sect that spoke to “feelings rather than to the intellect, was anticlerical and preached inner rebirth and indifference to the trappings of bourgeois life.”¹⁷ While financially wealthy, tragedy oft loomed in the Kierkegaard household. Michael’s first wife died childless. Michael lived to see his second wife, Ane, and the majority of his children pass away. By 1835, when Søren was studying in school, the once “spacious home had housed a family of nine. Not only were [Michael, Peter, and Søren] alone as a friendly interlocutor. See Mark A. Tietjen, Kierkegaard: A Christian Missionary to Christians, Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic 2016, p. 37– 46.  Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard, New York: Knopf 1973, p. 24.  Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, p. 37.

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in the house, these were the only surviving members of the family.”¹⁸ Space does not allow for a detailed biography, but two seminal events in Kierkegaard’s life inform our inquiry into his writings concerning the doctrine of sin: Kierkegaard’s relationship with his father Michael and Kierkegaard’s relationship with Regine Olsen. While the death of family members is tragic enough, Michael harbored two sordid secrets that greatly affected Søren. At some point in their relationship, Michael confessed these two secrets to Søren. First, Søren’s mother, Ane, was actually Michael’s first wife’s maid. Ane became pregnant mere months after the death of Michael’s first wife, and Michael begrudgingly married her. Second, Michael confessed that as a poor serf in the Danish countryside, he cursed God for his hard life. Søren mentions this information in his journals: “How dreadful the thought of that man who once, as a small boy tending sheep on the Jutland heath, in much suffering, starving and exhausted, stood up on a hill and cursed God—and that man was unable to forget it when he was 82 years old.”¹⁹ Michael carried his unconfessed sins throughout his life, and such scandalous revelations from a seemingly pious man shocked Søren. In Søren’s journals, he describes this time as an “earthquake”: Then it was that the great earthquake occurred, the frightful upheaval which suddenly drove me to a new infallible principle for interpreting all the phenomena. Then I surmised that my father’s old-age was not a divine blessing, but rather a curse, that our family’s exceptional intellectual capacities were only for mutually harrowing one another; then I felt the stillness of death deepen around me, when I saw my father an unhappy man who would survive us all, a memorial cross on the grave of all his personal hopes. A guilt must rest upon the entire family, a punishment of God must be upon it: it was supposed to disappear, obliterated by the mighty hand of God.²⁰

Scholars disagree on which of the two secrets caused the “earthquake,”²¹ but it left Kierkegaard “inwardly shattered…with no prospect of leading a happy life on

 Ibid., p. 31.  SKS 18, 278, JJ:416 / KJN 2, 257.  SKS 27, Papir 305:3, 291– 292 / KJN 11.2, 2– 4 (my emphasis).  Walter Lowrie sees the “earthquake” as the revelation of Michael’s sexual sin. Lowrie posits the earthquake as an earlier event in Kierkegaard’s life, leading to an estrangement that was patched up shortly before Michael’s death. Hannay does not see the Michael-Ane tryst as the cause, but rather the death of his father caused Søren to “[worry] about his own future,” disappointing his father because he had not finished his dissertation. Thompson sees the “curse” on the family as unknown. See Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1951, pp. 72– 73; See Hannay, Kierkegaard, pp. 124– 25.; Thompson, Kierkegaard, p. 93.

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this earth.”²² Kierkegaard eventually became obsessed that he would die at age thirty-three, like many of his siblings.²³ Hans Brøchner, one of Kierkegaard’s friends, even stated that “this belief was so ingrained in [Kierkegaard] that when he passed that age, he even checked in the parish records to see if it really were true.”²⁴ Kierkegaard’s life was drastically affected by his father’s sins and the melancholy passed on to the son.²⁵ Søren reconciled with his father before his death,²⁶ but the shameful past of his father haunted him throughout his authorship. The second event that affects our investigation is Søren’s broken engagement to Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard met Regine in 1837, and on September 10, 1840, he proposed to her. Kierkegaard recounts that “the next day I saw that I had made a mistake.”²⁷ A year later, after writing his dissertation and receiving his Magister’s Degree, Kierkegaard formally broke off the engagement. Regine thought Kierkegaard’s “melancholy” was simply getting the best of him, which as Lowrie notes, “she had undertaken to cure.”²⁸ One can clearly derive from Kierkegaard’s writings and journals that the reason for their split was twofold. First, Regine was partially right: Kierkegaard feared his melancholy would bring Regine down into the abyss of despair with him. Kierkegaard writes in his journals, “Then I would have married her. Let us assume that. What then? In the course of half a year or less she would have torn herself to shreds. There is something spectral about me—and that is both the good and the bad in me—something that makes it impossible for anyone to endure having to see me every day and thus have a real relationship with me.”²⁹ Kierkegaard had  SKS 27, Papir 305:4, 292 / KJN 11.2, 4.  Alastair Hannay, “Introduction,” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, ed. by Karl Ameriks and Desmond M. Clarke, New York: Cambridge University Press 2009 (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), p. viii.  Hans Brøchner, in Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998, p. 240.  Thompson, Kierkegaard, pp. 34– 36.  Shortly before his father’s death, Kierkegaard wrote in his journal, “How I thank you, Father in heaven, for having kept here on earth for a time like the present when my need for it can be so great, an earthly father” (SKS 17, 255, DD:116 / KJN 1, 246). After his father’s death, Kierkegaard had a touching entry where he says, “I did so earnestly desire that he should live a few years more, and I regard his death as the last sacrifice his love made for me, because he has not died from me but died for me, so that something might still come of me” (SKS 17, 258, DD:126 / KJN 1, 249).  SKS 19, 434, Not15:4 / KJN 3, 432.  Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, p. 139.  SKS 22, 226, NB12:138 / KJN 6, 227 (my emphasis).

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bouts of depression and melancholy, like his father Michael, and he did not believe he was just to submit Regine to his brooding. Second, Kierkegaard did not think Regine was yet in the religious state of existence: “She has no clue about the specifically religious.”³⁰ Because they were not in the same sphere of existence, Kierkegaard felt God’s divine call in his life was to break off the engagement in order to push her toward an authentic religious experience. In an obviously autobiographical section from Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard writes, “If I had not believed that I had a divine counterorder, I never would have retreated, and as soon as this order is revoked I shall choose my wish again.”³¹ To sever the relationship Kierkegaard lied to Regine, declaring that he did not want to settle down in marriage. Kierkegaard records their conversation in his journal: “She asked me: Will you never marry? I answered: Well, yes, in ten years, when I have begun to simmer down and need a lusty young miss to rejuvenate me. A necessary cruelty.”³² Kierkegaard’s hope was that the broken engagement would shock Regine into seeking after God and moving to the religious sphere of existence.³³ Ultimately, Kierkegaard held out hope that they could reunite. Before Regine was married to Johan Schlegel, Kierkegaard wrote, “Had I faith I would have stayed with Regine. Praise and thanks be to God, I have now understood it. I have been on the point of losing my mind these days….So she should, if possible, become my wife.”³⁴ Kierkegaard ended this journal entry with a heartbreaking admission: But if I were to explain myself, I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my relationship to Father, his melancholy, the eternal night brooding deep inside me, my going astray, my desires and excesses, which in the eyes of God are nevertheless perhaps not so glaring, since it was, after all, anxiety that led me to go astray, and where was I to find a roof when I knew or suspected that the only man [Søren’s father] I had admired for his strength and power wavered?³⁵

 SKS 21, 212, NB9:24 / KJN 5, 220.  SKS 6, 243 / SL, 261.  SKS 19, 436, Not15:4 / KJN 3, 434.  Fear and Trembling is partially autobiographical. Kierkegaard is Abraham, but his Isaac is his engagement to Regine. Kierkegaard felt that God called him to offer up his one and only love; and to be a knight of faith like Abraham, Kierkegaard too gave up what was most dear to himself. Repetition, too, has a forlorn Young Man hoping that he can achieve a repetition and receive back his lost love. Lastly, some of the passages in Stages on Life’s Way are word for word from Kierkegaard’s personal journals while he struggled through the broken engagement.  SKS 18, 177– 178, JJ:115 / KJN 2, 164– 165.  SKS 18, 179, JJ:115 / KJN 2, 165 – 166.

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These two events—Kierkegaard’s father’s sins with their “curse” on the family and the broken engagement with Regine—impact our study in a myriad of ways. First, Kierkegaard had an unfortunate encounter with the consequences of his father’s sin. Whether real or imagined, Kierkegaard felt that his household was under the weight of his father’s curse. These themes consistently manifest in his writings. Second, Kierkegaard did not think he could divulge the confession of his father to Regine because she was not yet in the religious stage of existence —she was incapable of handling this news and the fallout it had in the life and mood of Søren. Indirect communication was the only way Kierkegaard thought Regine could be moved to the religious sphere, and many of Kierkegaard’s published works are exercises in indirect communication. Third, Kierkegaard used his life experiences in his writings, both in his pseudonymous and signed works. We see echoes of both of these events throughout the Kierkegaardian corpus. Knowing these details sheds light on his authorship in toto.

2 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Kierkegaard’s life-experience affected his theology and writing, but not only tragedy informs Kierkegaard’s thought. The philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel is often a foil to Kierkegaard’s thinking. Kierkegaard explicitly cites Hegel numerous times throughout his works, and he also uses Hegelian language in his writings. Having a brief understanding of Hegel’s thought and Kierkegaard’s reason for opposition is necessary to understand Kierkegaard. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) was immensely influential in Copenhagen at the time of Kierkegaard’s formal studies and authorship; Kierkegaard’s “own teachers and mentors, Heiberg, Møller, and Sibbern were all highly influenced by Hegel; it seems almost inconceivable that this positive influence would not also have been formative for Kierkegaard.”³⁶ Although Kierkegaard at times spoke highly of Hegel, he ultimately disagreed with the τέλος of Hegel’s system.³⁷

 Jon Stewart, “Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark,” in Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark, New York: de Gruyter 2003 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 10), p. 145.  In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard says, “Hegel’s treatment of this particular charge is so excellent that I shall be as brief as possible about everything on which we can agree” (SKS 1, 231 / CI, 184).

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Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—which as Richard Schacht notes is “regarded by many Hegel scholars as his most important work”³⁸—opens with a lengthy preface that lays out, in often obtuse strokes, Hegel’s purpose and goal of his thought. Humans exist and go about their lives interacting with the world in multitudinous ways. Merely existing in the world is different than actively seeking after truth. Hegel notes, “The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth.”³⁹ In order to comprehend truth, some sort of system must be in place to think through the processes that occur, to move from being an “in-itself” to an individual “for-itself.”⁴⁰ A person “in-itself” merely exists, while a person “for-itself” reflects upon his⁴¹ predicament in the world. Every individual is an “in-itself” because he exists, but an individual becomes “for-itself” only when he actualizes himself through Spirit/Geist. ⁴² While an individual can know things about reality, only through personal reflection can a person know the truth: “Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself—not an original or immediate unity as such—is the True.”⁴³ The reference to the “immediate” unity is a criticism of the Romantic movement, which sought understanding at an intuitive level rather than a rational level.⁴⁴ Hegel rebels against Romanticism’s emphasis on immediate sensuousness as the means to truth. For Hegel, one must seek truth via a system, for “the True is the whole…consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is.”⁴⁵

 Richard Schacht, Hegel and After: Studies in Continental Philosophy between Kant and Sartre, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1975, p. 42.  G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller, New York: Oxford University Press 1977, p. 3.  Ibid., 15.  Popular consensus decries the use of gendered language in academic writing, but the subject at hand requires reconsidering this practice. Kierkegaard was extremely focused on individuals rather than an amorphous crowd. Because of this, much of his writing is written primarily in third-person singular. Avoiding gendered language makes for awkward transitions when moving from his quotations in the singular to my analysis in the plural. Also, it seems contrary to the spirit of Kierkegaard to not speak of individuals. To account for this, I switch back and forth between masculine and feminine singular forms throughout the book.  When discussing Hegel, numerous scholars use the German word Geist while others use the English translation “Spirit.” I use the two terms interchangeably.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 10.  Schacht, Hegel and After, p. 44. One can see the spirit of Romanticism prominently in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology, with its emphasis on God-consciousness and absolute dependence as immediate knowledge.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 11.

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Truth is the working of Geist in the world.⁴⁶ When Spirit “knows itself as Spirit, [it] is Science.”⁴⁷ The world consists of objects; everything that exists is an object, an “in-itself.” Whenever a human reflects inward, being a “for-itself,” she now becomes a reflective subject. As J. N. Findlay elucidates, “‘Spirit’ means for Hegel both the object and the subject of ‘self-consciousness,’” of an individual reflecting in upon itself to get to the True.⁴⁸ One should not equivocate Hegel’s use of “Spirit” with the Christian view of God or the Holy Spirit. As Marina F. Bykova states, “[Geist] is an as-yet-to-be-actualized process which is completed only at the end.”⁴⁹ Simon Lumsden comments, “The project of the Phenomenology can be understood as an attempt to try to establish a selfconsciousness of our self-transforming capacity.”⁵⁰ Hegel continues, In this element [of true knowing] the moments of Spirit now spread themselves out in that form of simplicity which knows its object as its own self. They no longer fall apart into the antithesis of being and knowing, but remain in the simple oneness of knowing; they are the True in the form of the True, and their difference is only the difference of content. Their movement, which organizes itself in this element into a whole, is Logic or speculative philosophy. ⁵¹

 While most scholars agree that in Phenomenology Spirit/Geist is a force of process, not all agree whether it is a supernatural or a mere historical process. These two factions are split into Right Hegelians and Left or Young Hegelians. Right-wing Hegelians see Spirit as supernatural in nature—God is directing via Spirit. In Kierkegaard’s context, these were the Hegelian scholars who attempted to integrate Hegel’s thought with Christianity. Left-wing Hegelians see Spirit as a natural force of humans creating and developing in history—humans actualize Spirit by their progress rather than a god directing the course of history. Determining which position is correct is outside of the purview of this work. For an excellent analysis on Kierkegaard and Left or Right Hegelianism, see Jon Stewart, “Kierkegaard’s View of Hegel, His Followers and Critics,” in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Jon Stewart, Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell 2015 (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, vol. 58), pp. 50 – 65. For a brief summary on Left or Young Hegelianism, see John Protevi, The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2005, p. 615.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 14.  J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-Examination, New York: Routledge 2013 (Muirhead Library of Philosophy), p. 39.  Marina Bykova, “What Is Wrong with the Divine Interpretation of Geist in Hegel?” Studies in East European Thought, vol. 68, no. 2/3, 2016, pp. 183 – 84.  Simon Lumsden, “Philosophy and the Logic of Modernity: Hegel’s Dissatisfied Spirit,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 63, no. 1, 2009, p. 68.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 22.

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Spirit works in conscious individuals to bring about knowledge and truth, whether by a supernatural or mere natural process, which happens whenever individuals think and reflect upon themselves. How does an individual via Spirit come to know the True? Hegel says such happens through a process of mediation, through dialectics. A self-reflective individual is both object and subject, and a dialectical synthesis must occur in order to grasp the True. As Theodor Adorno notes, “Just as the dialectic does not favor individual definitions, so there is no definition that fits it. Dialectic is the unswerving effort to conjoin reason’s critical consciousness of itself and the critical experience of objects.”⁵² Usually Hegelian dialectic follows a triadic pattern of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.⁵³ Hegel starts his dialectical process with “thinking, [for] understanding does not budge beyond the firm determinateness [of what is entertained] and its distinctness over against others.” After positing an understanding, “The dialectical moment is the self-sublation of such finite determinations by themselves and their transition into their opposites.” Lastly, “The speculative…grasps the unity of the determinations in their opposition… that is contained in their dissolution and their passing over into something else.”⁵⁴ The first step, the thesis, is the positing of something in reality. The second step, the antithesis, is the contradiction of the thesis. The mediation of these two causes a synthesis, the final step of the triad. This speculative process of Spirit leads to the True, continuing ad infinitum as long as the individual is continually reflective. Hegel discusses the “positive” and “negative” actions of his dialectical reasoning. The thesis is positive because it has a fixed form—as Schact proclaims, “It has a determinate content or form.”⁵⁵ The dialectical antithesis posits the opposite, which is a negative movement, for the idea now has no definite form.

 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 2nd ed., trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1999 (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought), pp. 9 – 10.  Findlay notes that the terms “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” “are in fact not frequently used by Hegel: they are much more characteristic of Fichte.” While this may be true, Adorno argues how reliant Hegel is on Fichte. Also, Hegel uses the terms “abstract-dialectical-speculative” in The Encyclopedia, and they function the exact same way as “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” Because of the similarity, I will keep with the usual terminology of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” when referring to Hegelian Dialectic. See Findlay, Hegel, p. 70; Adorno, Hegel, p. 11; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part 1: Science of Logic, ed. by Daniel O. Dahlstrom and Klaus Brinkmann, trans. by Daniel O. Dahlstrom and Klaus Brinkmann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010 (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline), p. 126.  Hegel, Science of Logic, pp. 126, 128, 132.  Schacht, Hegel and After, p. 47.

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Such occurs when the conscious subject reflects in upon itself, turning from the object (thesis) to a subject (antithesis). The synthesis is positive in nature, for it is now in a fixed form. As a newly fixed form, the synthesis can become a new thesis to continue the process. As Findlay notes, “Thus Reason would lead one…to form the notion of an underlying reality which reveals itself more and more fully the more we probe it with our senses.”⁵⁶ The synthesis of the two opposites is a new category; but as Michael Forster explains, “It unites [the previous categories] in such a way that they are not only preserved but also abolished.”⁵⁷ Hegel’s system produces a “both/and,” a system of relative opposites. Shannon Nason succinctly explains the implications of Hegel’s thought. Nason uses the example of “hot” and “cold” as relative opposites “because for the one to be the other must also be.” Nason continues, “Hegel argues that all logical and ontological properties only have relative opposites.”⁵⁸ Relative opposites are in the same substance category rather than being qualitatively different from one another. This continual process of Spirit working toward the True is, as HansGeorg Gadamer notes, “[Hegel’s] objective of reinstating the Greek logos on the new foundation of modern, self-knowing spirit. The light in which all truth is seen is cast from consciousness’s becoming clear about itself.”⁵⁹ In sum, Hegel posits a world of Spirit, a world in which a continual process of self-reflection leads toward the True. The True can be discovered only as “a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is.”⁶⁰ The process of reflection occurs in dialectics, a triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. The individual’s purpose is to “all the more forget himself, as the nature of Science implies and requires.”⁶¹ Hegel’s world is a world of both/and’s, of process. Why is Kierkegaard so opposed to Hegel’s system? Although that question can fill an entire book, we note three major problems Kierkegaard has with Hegel’s philosophy. First, one only can understand Hegel’s system at the end. Since the dialectical process is always happening, the individual never has to decide anything. One simply must wait for another instance of dialectical doubting to discover a new synthesis: “Dialectical development walks in danger everywhere, walks

 Findlay, Hegel, p. 67.  Michael Forster, “Hegel’s Dialectical Method,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. by Frederick C. Beiser, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993, p. 132 (my emphasis).  Shannon Nason, “Opposites, Contradictories, and Mediation in Kierkegaard’s Critique of Hegel,” Heythrop Journal, vol. 53, no. 1, 2012, p. 26.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. by P. Christopher Smith, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1976, p. 78.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 11.  Ibid., p. 45.

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in danger of slipping into a parenthesis.”⁶² Hegel’s system is filled with both/ and’s rather than either/or’s. Kierkegaard sees dialectical mediation as dangerous because it never forces individuals to make the important decision of faith, always tarrying until the scientific system is complete.⁶³ As Kierkegaard notes, “The great secret of the [Hegelian] system…is close to Protagoras’s sophism ‘Everything is relative,’ except that here everything is relative in the continuous progress.”⁶⁴ Second, dialectical mediation presupposes relative opposites, as Nason states above. Relative opposites are in the same qualitative category, meaning any decision one is to make via mediation is in the same existence category. Such reasoning would mean that the life of faith is a relative opposite to a life of profligacy. To Kierkegaard such thinking is utter nonsense, for “the existence of an infinite qualitative difference between God and man constitutes the possibility of offence, which cannot be removed.”⁶⁵ God is in an altogether different existence category, and the life of faith is qualitatively different from the life of a nonbeliever. The Christian exists as a true “self,” one who has properly related to himself and to God.⁶⁶ “Faith” is not a new Hegelian “synthesis” brought about by speculative mediation through a logical process of self-reflection. Faith is an existential leap toward God, a decision to follow God. This leap brings one across Lessing’s Ditch to faith,⁶⁷ but one must be taught by God: “The teacher, then, is the god himself, who, acting as the occasion, prompts the learner to be reminded that he is untruth and is that through his own fault.”⁶⁸ Moreover, faith is not something one can move beyond—it is not a step in the process of dialectics. Only God can bring about faith, and God is infinitely, qualitatively different from humanity. Ultimately, Hegel does not take into consideration the ontology of sinfulness and its effect upon the noetic processes of humanity.

 SKS 7, 35 / CUP1, 28.  One can see easily Kierkegaard’s polemic against the both/and of Hegel in his first published work Either/Or. The book revolves around two individuals in different existence spheres. One is either in the ethical stage or in the aesthetic stage. One must decide to move from the aesthetic to the ethical, and this decision is made in existence rather than waiting for the ultimate τελός to finish.  SKS 7, 39 / CUP1, 33.  SKS 11, 238 / SUD, 127.  Kierkegaard has a lengthy discussion on proper relation of the self and God, and this will be a focus in ch. 3. See the opening chapter of SUD: SKS 11, 129 – 133 / SUD, 13 – 17.  SKS 7, 97 / CUP1, 99. We will examine Lessing’s Ditch in-depth in ch. 4, but for a quick summary Lessing’s Ditch is an illustration of the impossibility for historical contingencies to allow one to arrive at eternal truth.  SKS 4, 224 / PF, 15.

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Lastly, Hegel’s philosophy turns life into abstract, logical speculation rather than a pathos-filled existence. Hegel’s system is objective, attempting to determine logical data via a scientific system. Kierkegaard remarks that such a system does work well at determining scientific facts, but issues of existence are more than the accumulation of data. Issues of existence are subjective in nature, and subjective issues cannot be answered by objective procedures. For Kierkegaard, objective knowledge “invests everything in the result and assists all humankind to cheat by copying and reeling off the results and answers.” On the other hand, subjectivity “invests everything in the process of becoming and omits the result.”⁶⁹ Kierkegaard poses the question, “Can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?” This question is not necessarily about historical reality, but rather it is “about the individual’s relation to Christianity.”⁷⁰ As Kierkegaard succinctly states, “An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person.”⁷¹ Hegel’s system is immanent yet abstract. Spirit is operating in the world, understood only through the mediation of objective speculative philosophy. For Kierkegaard, Hegelian thought erases both the subjective response of faith in a transcendent God and the true need for faith through the recognition of the reality of sin.

3 Authorship and Stages of Existence Lastly, one needs to understand Kierkegaard’s method of authorship to make sense of his variety and styles of works. One of the most difficult aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship is his method of indirect communication. Many of Kierkegaard’s works are pseudonymous—Kierkegaard writes from the perspective of a particular character. For example, Either/Or is not written by “Kierkegaard,” but rather the book is edited by Victor Eremita, containing the writings of the Young Aesthete, Judge William, and the Pastor. Moreover, Kierkegaard comments on his pseudonymous authorship in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “Therefore, if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine.”⁷² If we are follow Kierkegaard’s

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 73 / CUP1, 73. 7, 24 / CUP1, 15. 7, 186 / CUP1, 203. 7, 571 / CUP1, 627.

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wish, then should we disregard his pseudonymous literature? How can we proceed trying to assess Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin across all of his works? Luckily, Kierkegaard adumbrates his authorship in The Point of View for My Work as an Author. In this posthumously published work, Kierkegaard declares his purpose: “What I in truth am as an author, that I am and was a religious author, that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion, Christendom, or the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts.”⁷³ Kierkegaard sees a problem in his historical context: If faith is more than mental assent to propositions, then how does one awaken a culture to the reality of authentic faith when the culture has only a nominal relationship to Christianity? Kierkegaard’s answer is indirect communication. Directly addressing a problem “only strengthens a person in the illusion and also infuriates him,” but rather an author should “first and foremost take care to find [the individual] where he is and begin there.”⁷⁴ Sometimes writing from the perspective of a non-believing young man is more effective at drawing someone toward Christianity than an explicit discourse on faith. Such method does not mean that Kierkegaard is contradictory, for he clearly states that “from the beginning and over my signature signs were provided that telegraphed, concurrently with the pseudonymous writing, in the direction of the religious.”⁷⁵ One can see his “telegraphing” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In the section titled “A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature,” the pseudonym Johannes Climacus comments on Kierkegaard’s other pseudonymous writings, saying, “That subjectivity, inwardness, is truth was my [Climacus’s] thesis. I have tried to show how in my view the [other] pseudonymous authors tend toward this thesis, which at its maximum is Christianity.”⁷⁶ This section has Kierkegaard’s pseudonym commenting on the other pseudonyms, saying there is a unified theme of subjectivity as truth.⁷⁷ In the present project, I take Kierkegaard

 SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23.  SKS 16, 25 / PV, 43. SKS 16, 27 / PV, 45.  SKS 16, 35 / PV, 53 (my emphasis).  SKS 7, 254 / CUP1, 278 – 279.  “Subjectivity” from Kierkegaard’s perspective is talking about inward appropriation, not the ontological nature of truth. Kierkegaard is not saying that individuals create their own truth; but rather for something to be true for the individual, she must internalize the truth so that it changes her. As he says in Postscript, “Christianity is spirit; spirit is inwardness; inwardness is subjectivity.” SKS 7, 38 / CUP1, 33.

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at his word and assume a unified vision and purpose throughout his entire authorship.⁷⁸ Even assuming that Kierkegaard has a unified vision and purpose, one still has to navigate his pseudonymous writings. Understanding Kierkegaard’s stages of existence aids readers in untying the Gordian knot of Kierkegaard’s purpose in any given work. Gregor Malantschuk even goes so far as to say that “the theory of stages…is the basis of Søren Kierkegaard’s whole authorship.”⁷⁹ As people go about their lives, they are in a process of personal reflection and becoming, a type of “evolution of selfhood,” as Libuse Miller puts it.⁸⁰ Kierkegaard explains: There are three existence-spheres: the esthetic,⁸¹ the ethical, the religious. The metaphysical is abstraction, and there is no human being who exists metaphysically. The metaphysical, the ontological, is, but it does not exist, for when it exists it does so in the esthetic, in the ethical, in the religious….The esthetic sphere is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical the sphere of requirement…, the religious the sphere of fulfillment.⁸²

The aesthetic stage is the stage of youth, the stage of longing and fascination, an unending desire that overtakes the individual to the point that the individual simply desires desire.⁸³ Adi Shmuëli explains the aesthetic stage as an individual “caught in a state of mind that resembles a dream. He looks forward to the realization of his poetic ideas, while deep down the sadness of disappointment hov-

 Some scholars do not accept a unified authorship of Kierkegaard’s works. For a more postmodern understanding of Kierkegaard’s authorship, see Louis Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, Tallahassee: University Press of Florida 1986 (Kierkegaard and Postmodernism); Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 1993 (Studies in Religion and Culture); Joseph Westfall, “The Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship in Kierkegaard’s Literary and Dramatic Criticism,” PhD diss., Boston College 2005. For those who accept a unified Kierkegaardian authorship, see Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Way to the Truth: An Introduction to the Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Mary Michelsen, Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg 1963; Keith H. Lane, “Striving before God: Kierkegaard and the Concept of Religious Authorship,” PhD diss., The Claremont Graduate University 2009; Erik Norman Lindland, “Kierkegaard on Self-Deception,” PhD diss., Indiana University 2005; Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2011.  Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Way to the Truth, p. 22.  Libuse Lukas Miller, In Search of the Self: The Individual in the Thought of Kierkegaard, Philadelphia: Muhlenberg 1962, p. 152.  The Hong translation of Kierkegaard’s works uses the spelling “esthetic,” while the majority of current scholarship uses “aesthetic.” I defer to “aesthetic” unless a direct quote uses “esthetic.”  SKS 6, 439 / SL, 476.  SKS 2, 110 / EO1, 107.

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ers.”⁸⁴ As Kierkegaard poetically explains in Either/Or, “I will beseech Mozart to forgive me that his music did not inspire me to great deeds but made me a fool who, because of him, lost the little sense I had and now in quiet sadness usually passes the time humming something I do not understand, and like a ghost prowls night and day around something I cannot enter.”⁸⁵ The aesthetic person is obsessed with poetic longing, so much so that he does not actualize his sentiments. His life is filled with despair, a persistent state of unease that consumes all of his existence. Once the individual decides to leave the world of poetic passion, he must leap to the ethical stage “because the leap is the category of decision.”⁸⁶ Such a leap, as Miller explains, is “a qualitative change from one pattern of existence to another.”⁸⁷ Merold Westphal summarizes the aesthetic stage well —“The I is absolute.”⁸⁸ The aesthete thinks only about himself, making himself the ultimate ground of his being. The ethical stage is the stage of duty, of acting the way in which society deems commendable. In Either/Or, the ethical Judge William chastises the Young Aesthete: “You regard duty as the enemy of love, and I regard it as a friend.”⁸⁹ The ethical person “chooses himself and struggles for this possession as for his salvation….He repents himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God. Only on this condition can he choose himself. And this is the only condition he wants, for only in this way can he choose himself absolutely.”⁹⁰ The ethical individual decides to be the person that the family, culture, or society tells him to be. Kierkegaard demonstrates such dynamic in Fear and Trembling, a meditation on Abraham offering Isaac as a sacrifice. To Abraham’s household, child sacrifice is an immoral act. How can a father sacrifice his son? For Abraham’s family and culture, child sacrifice can never be a good thing—it can never be ethical. Abraham instead denies the ethical and follows the voice of the Lord, for there is a teleological suspension of the ethical, “that the single individual as the single individual stands in

 Adi Shmuëli, Kierkegaard and Consciousness, trans. by Naomi Handelman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1971 (Princeton Legacy Library), p. 14.  SKS 2, 56 / EO1, 48 – 49.  SKS 7, 97 / CUP1, 99.  Miller, In Search of the Self, p. 158. Note also how Kierkegaard’s view of qualitative differences is contra Hegel’s both/and of relative opposites.  Merold Westphal, “Johannes and Johannes: Kierkegaard and Difference,” in Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1994 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 7), p. 17.  SKS 3, 144 / EO2, 146 (my emphasis).  SKS 3, 207 / EO2, 216.

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an absolute relation to the absolute.”⁹¹ As Westphal summarizes, “For the ethical the We is absolute.”⁹² The ethical person makes the crowd, the culture, the public the ground of his being. The religious stage is the final stage of existence. Upon a simple reading of the phrase “religious sphere,” we may be quick to think this is a stage of doing religious things—i. e., going to church, praying, etc. If the religious stage were simply the stage of doing religious activities, then how would it be any different from the ethical stage of existence? Luis Guerrero Martínez explains, The distinction of these stages of existence points to the religious stage as the highest mode, by which the individual can base his existence in God as the only real and authentic support of his life, that feels the tension between the finite and the infinite, between the possible and the necessary, between the temporal and the eternal. However, the religious is not only having feelings in the mind.⁹³

The religious stage is authentic faith, not mere mental assent to formal propositions about religion. As Kierkegaard states in The Sickness unto Death, “Faith is: that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests transparently in God.”⁹⁴ The religious stage does not necessarily end in authentic Christian faith. Kierkegaard posits two types of religious existence: Religiousness A and Religiousness B. He notes that “Religiousness A is the dialectic of inward deepening; it is the relation to an eternal happiness that is not conditioned by a something but is the dialectical inward deepening of the relation.”⁹⁵ Religiousness A occurs when an individual is no longer satisfied with ethical existence—trying to live one’s life by the standards of the public is crushing and impossible. Upon such a realization, the individual examines herself, looking inward to try to understand that something is missing in her life. This “inward deepening” may lead to Religiousness B, where one’s introspection can lead to “a definite something that qualifies the eternal happiness more specifically…not by qualifying more specifically the individual’s appropriation of it but by qualifying more specifically the eternal happiness, yet not as a task for thinking but as paradoxically repelling and giving rise to new pathos.”⁹⁶ Kierkegaard stresses the need for inward appropriation. Both religiousness A and B are subjective in nature, for

 SKS 4, 207 / FT, 120.  Westphal, “Johannes and Johannes,” p. 17.  Luis Guerrero Martínez, “Lo histórico y lo contemporáneo: Kierkegaard y la dialéctica religiosa,” Xipe Totek, vol. 23, no. 1, p. 18 (my translation).  SKS 11, 192 / SUD, 82 (my emphasis).  SKS 7, 506 / CUP1, 556.  SKS 7, 506 / CUP1, 556.

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the inward deepening that occurs in internal self-examination involves individual pathos. The key difference between the two is that Religiousness B is an attachment of the individual to the eternal: “Subjectivity is essentially passion, and at its maximum an infinite, personally interested passion for one’s eternal happiness.”⁹⁷ Religiousness B is the authentic religious stage, the stage of genuine faith. The stages are instrumental to understanding Kierkegaard because many of his pseudonyms write from the perspective of an individual in one of these stages. Either/Or has two perspectives: the aesthetic and the ethical. Stages on Life’s Way has two perspectives with one character approaching the third. The Sickness unto Death is from the religious perspective. Knowing these details allows us to understand Kierkegaard’s view and how he is using a pseudonymous author to achieve his overall purpose in his authorship “to the issue: becoming a Christian.”⁹⁸

4 The Path Forward After covering the above prolegomena, now we can define a clear path forward to our problem of determining Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin. If we take Kierkegaard at face value, then he has a common purpose and consistency in his writing; but just because Kierkegaard says he has an overarching plan does not necessarily make it the case. Kierkegaard wrote Point of View five years into his writing career, and he may be looking backward with rose-tinted glasses. The pseudonymous works make matters difficult in extracting Kierkegaard’s view, for we constantly have to ask ourselves if the idea presented is Kierkegaard’s or his pseudonym’s. We might be tempted to say that we should look only at his signed works for his doctrine and the pseudonymous works for illumination or commentary, but we then encounter a problem: Kierkegaard’s two monographs on sin, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, are pseudonymous. An investigation that does not use these works as primary sources in developing Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin is insufficient. Do we, then, treat all pseudonymous writing equally? This, too, seems insufficient, for some of his characters are specifically written to be evil in their portrayal.⁹⁹ How should we proceed?  SKS 7, 39 / CUP1, 33 (my emphasis).  SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23.  Kierkegaard’s journals illuminate this fact, especially with Johannes the Seducer. See SKS 18, 243, JJ:326 / KJN 2, 224.

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Kierkegaard offers us a clue. In Point of View, Kierkegaard comments on the stages of his writing.¹⁰⁰ He divides his authorship into three stages. Either/Or until Concluding Unscientific Postscript are the “aesthetic” writings. Concluding Unscientific Postscript is “the turning point” where Kierkegaard explicitly poses the issue of becoming a Christian. Postscript, and its prequel Philosophical Fragments, have Kierkegaard explicitly listed as editor rather than author, and Kierkegaard states this is “a hint” that shows the religious connection in his writing.¹⁰¹ The final stage of his authorship is the religious stage, when he “had extricated himself from the disguise of the esthetic.”¹⁰² The later religious writings are a mix of pseudonyms and signed works; but because they are religious pseudonyms, we can assume that Kierkegaard agrees with their positions. Kierkegaard also explains his purpose with his religious pseudonyms in Armed Neutrality: “What I have wanted and want to prevent is that the emphasis would in any way be that I am a Christian to an extraordinary degree, a distinguished kind of Christian.”¹⁰³ Kierkegaard’s desire in the religious writings is to focus on the content rather than his own authorship and piety. Using a pseudonym allows the reader to focus on the content of the work rather than the eccentric life of the author.¹⁰⁴ The religious pseudonyms, then, are not contrary to Kierkegaard’s understanding, and we can infer that they espouse his view. What about the works from the “turning point” in Kierkegaard’s authorship? Postscript and Fragments list Kierkegaard as editor, but why does Kierkegaard not sign his name? Johannes Climacus admits he is an outsider, not fully a Christian. He accurately understands the nature of faith, yet he does not take the leap. Kierkegaard took the leap, so he uses a pseudonym to write from a perspective of someone approaching authentic faith. Furthermore, Climacus uses humor, a form of indirect communication for one in the sub-religious sphere of existence. What Climacus describes about Christianity is accurate, and Kierkegaard agrees with Climacus’s assessment. The difference is Kierkegaard personally took the leap that Climacus refuses—Climacus wants objective assurance that subjective

 See the Appendix for a chart of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings in chronological order.  SKS 16, 17 / PV, 31.  SKS 16, 19 / PV, 32.  SKS 16, 111 / PV, 129.  Kierkegaard’s notoriety became a serious issue later in his life. He became infamous in Copenhagen for his long walks and disheveled clothing. The Corsair publicly mocked him, so it makes sense why his later works are still pseudonymous.

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faith cannot provide.¹⁰⁵ We can safely assume Postscript and Fragments espouse Kierkegaard’s view from the perspective of one seeking to become a Christian because of his explicit signing of his name as editor and their serving as the pivot from an indirect writing of the aesthetic works to a more direct writing of the religious works. We are still left with the issue of The Concept of Anxiety, under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, written during the aesthetic writings. Kierkegaard originally planned to sign his own name to the work, but at the last moment he decided to use a pseudonym.¹⁰⁶ Kierkegaard’s Climacus actually comments on the style of The Concept of Anxiety in Postscript: “The Concept of Anxiety differs essentially from the other pseudonymous works in that its form is direct and even somewhat didactic. Perhaps the author thought that at this point a communication of knowledge might be necessary before a transition could be made to inward deepening.”¹⁰⁷ Kierkegaard is never shy to sign his name to his direct communication. His discourses as well as Works of Love clearly state his authorship. We can infer that because The Concept of Anxiety is direct in its presentation, as we shall see in chapter 5 of this book, Kierkegaard was most likely going to sign his name rather than a pseudonym. Kierkegaard never explains why he chose a pseudonym at the last minute, but I think the reason is two-fold. First, the name of the pseudonym tells the audience his purpose: Vigilius Haufniensis is Latin for “watchman of Copenhagen.” Second, Kierkegaard had not signed his name to a treatise of that nature at the time of publication. His signed works published during the aesthetic writings are homiletic and pastoral in form and style. The Concept of Anxiety is a complex work of philosophical theology, not a sermon for immediate upbuilding. Anxiety’s context and style do not match the signed works Kierkegaard produced at this stage in his authorship. I believe this is why he switched to a pseudonym at the last minute. We can safely say that Anxiety espouses Kierkegaard’s view, especially considering its direct nature.  I am indebted to C. Stephen Evans for illuminating this point to me. He comments that although Climacus denies being a Christian, “His standpoint is that of a person who knows what Christianity is but does not necessarily understand what it is to be a Christian….Climacus respects Christianity because, if true, it is the most serious and important thing a person will face in existence.” C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s “Fragments” and “Postscript”: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities 1983, pp. 23 – 24.  For the original title page, see Pap. V B 42 / CA, 177. We are unsure why Kierkegaard removed his own name and substituted a pseudonym; see Alastair Hannay, “Translator’s Note,” in The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin, New York: Liveright 2014, pp. xxxii–xxxiii.  SKS 7, 245 / CUP1, 269 – 270 (my emphasis).

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As for the other pseudonymous works in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of authorship, rather than dissecting them in order to find the “real” Kierkegaard, I instead use the aesthetic pseudonymous works as a test for consistency. If Kierkegaard has a unified understanding of sin, then one should see it in the pseudonymous literature. If the Young Aesthete of Either/Or is in fact not a Christian, then he should be acting in certain ways; he should exhibit patterns of sinfulness. In this way, we can use Kierkegaard to grade Kierkegaard—we can use his aesthetic pseudonymous works as a check for uniformity. By the above criteria, we use all of Kierkegaard’s signed works along with the following to determine Kierkegaard’s view of sin: Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, The Concept of Anxiety, and the pseudonymous works from Kierkegaard’s religious stage of authorship. Using the above, I organize Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin into four themes. Chapter 2 serves as a prolegomena to sin, examining Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety and its role in sin. Grasping anxiety’s dynamic assists in understanding how sin functions in Kierkegaard’s work. Chapter 3 assesses our first theme: the relational aspect of sin. Sin is a misrelation between the individual and God. The life of sin comes from a severed self—separated from God, the source of its existence. Chapter 4 investigates the second theme of the noetic effects of sin on individuals. Because of sin, people cannot come to know God without God’s direct revelation of himself. Chapter 5 tackles the conundrum of hereditary sin, showing our third theme of sin as an existence state. Kierkegaard offers a robust explanation of the role between individual culpability and the inherited sinfulness of being “in Adam.” Chapter 6 demonstrates the fourth theme that Kierkegaard calls the “redoubling” aspect of sin. Sin has an outward as well as an inward component. Performed sin is both a sin and causes others to sin, drastically corrupting the populace. The crowd then enforces its corrupt will onto individuals. After determining Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin, we then address the aesthetic pseudonymous works for consistency, determining whether Kierkegaard’s explicit understanding of sin matches his characters’ thoughts and actions. I divide this analysis into the two nonreligious spheres of existence. Chapter 7 examines pseudonyms from the aesthetic sphere in Either/Or, Part 1; Repetition; and Stages on Life’s Way, Section 1. Chapter 8 investigates the pseudonyms from the ethical sphere in Either/Or, Part 2; Fear and Trembling; Prefaces; and Stages on Life’s Way, Sections 2 and 3. Lastly, in the final chapter I render a verdict: Does Kierkegaard have a consistent view of sin, and how can we systematize Kierkegaard’s robust thoughts on the subject? Rather than forcing Kierkegaard into a theological mold or camp, we are going to apply what we have discovered to specific subtopics of

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Chapter 1 Introduction

sin addressed in systematic theology: the nature of sin, the source of sin, the results of sin, the magnitude of sin, and the social dimension of sin.¹⁰⁸

5 To the Skeptic of Such a Method and Project To some, my ambitions run contrary to Kierkegaard’s desires in his writing project. Does not Kierkegaard himself say at the end of Postscript to not apply his name to his pseudonyms? He clearly states, “It is my wish, my prayer, that [the one who cites the pseudonymous works] will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine.”¹⁰⁹ In regard to his purely aesthetic works, I oblige Kierkegaard. As for the works cited above to find Kierkegaard’s view, I both cite the pseudonym and Kierkegaard himself, based on the above discussion concerning Kierkegaard’s relationship to his religious works, The Concept of Anxiety, Fragments, and Postscript. “But still,” one may contest, “this smacks of an artificial construction!” I truly understand such skepticism. Kierkegaard is a tough nut to crack, and he is used to justify any and every position under the sun. I, too, am concerned with reading my own intentions into Kierkegaard’s writings. My one word of comfort is that I try to let Kierkegaard speak for himself. We will be able to see if Kierkegaard is consistent in voice by taking what is clearly stated about sin and applying it to the characters in his aesthetic pseudonymous works. If my method is flawed, then we will see the inconsistency between his works. Letting Kierkegaard speak also reveals if I am doing justice to his content and context. Another objection to my project lies under the realm of systematizing. Kierkegaard does not write in a systematic fashion. In fact, Murray Rae believes that “it would be a grave disservice…to attempt something resembling a systematic representation of [Kierkegaard’s] theology.”¹¹⁰ Kierkegaard hated the Hegelian System and its subordination of the individual. Is not my project another attempt to create a system, exterminate individuality, and provide easy answers to rattle off when asked? Kierkegaard’s vehement attack against formal theology was contextual to his time. Kierkegaard’s anti-Christendom bent is not because he

 I take these topics from Millard Erickson’s chapter titles in Christian Theology. These topics succinctly address the common theological discussion on the topic of sin.  SKS 7, 571 / CUP1, 627.  Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, London: T & T Clark 2010 (Philosophy and Theology), p. 3.

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hated theology qua theology, but rather as David Law astutely notes Kierkegaard “[was] particularly disdainful of contemporary theology….it [had] also cravenly capitulated to philosophy.”¹¹¹ The overly institutionalized nature of 19th century Danish orthodoxy turned doctrine into a list of facts to memorize. Kierkegaard rebels against this, framing theological truths into existential categories: “Kierkegaard does not reject doctrine, but aims to shake people out of complacently accepting Christianity as only a doctrine and not as a way of life that demands self-sacrifice and renunciation.”¹¹² True, Kierkegaard does not present his works systematically, but that does not mean he does not think systematically. If, as Kierkegaard claims, he has a method from the beginning, then he must have some sort of paradigm he follows. Concerning this project, I feel a great comradery with Vigilius Haufniensis. As mentioned above, Climacus suggests Haufniensis’s purpose was that a “communication of knowledge might be necessary before a transition could be made to inward deepening.”¹¹³ I believe this to be precisely the case with the doctrine of sin in Kierkegaard’s thought. I sympathize with Haufniensis, and I think we need a clear explanation of Kierkegaard’s work so that we may transition into inward deepening. Lastly, is treating sin as a topic to be studied against Kierkegaard’s intention?¹¹⁴ Kierkegaard desires a robust, internalized faith where action and pathos drive life rather than objective definitions, charts, and schemas. The present study seems to go contrary to Kierkegaard’s wishes. I sympathize with Kierkegaard’s purpose; it is why I am taken by his writings. I try, as much as is possible, to show the internalization of these concepts. I use “we” often in this work, not for mere editorial purpose but for the literal purpose: “we.” That is you, the reader, and me, the author. We all live a severed life, steeped in the sickness unto death. We all deal with the consequences of Adam. We all deal with missing knowledge, struggling through life, trying to make sense of our surroundings. Sin is an inherently existential doctrine, not a mere abstract formulation, and every one of us must struggle, wrestle, and grapple through its insidious pervasiveness. I try to display this throughout this book, for the last thing I want to do is to turn such a serious topic into another book on a shelf or a feather in my cap. Kierkegaard, the champion of authentic existence, offers a robust and satisfying look into the results of the Fall. Sin has corrupted everything, and Kierkegaard demonstrates how existential anxiety and crisis are rooted in our sinful  David R. Law, “Kierkegaard as Existentialist Dogmatician: Kierkegaard on Systematic Theology, Doctrine, and Dogmatics,” in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Jon Stewart, p. 254.  Ibid., p. 258.  SKS 7, 245 / CUP1, 270.  I am indebted to Lee C. Barrett for posing this question to me.

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Chapter 1 Introduction

condition. To those still skeptical of my purpose and method, I invite you along on a journey through the labyrinth of Kierkegaard’s writings, and I hope that it is upbuilding. As the Pastor says in Either/Or, “Only the truth that builds up is truth for you.”¹¹⁵

 SKS 3, 332 / EO2, 354.

Chapter 2 Prolegomena to Sin: Anxiety Matthew 6:26 – 29 reads, Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Kierkegaard frequently quotes this section of the Sermon on the Mount in his various upbuilding discourses.¹ He stresses the need to imitate the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, for they act exactly as God created them to be. In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits Kierkegaard states, “If a human being, like the lily, is contented with being a human being, he does not become sick with temporal worries.”² Kierkegaard paints a comical picture of how foolish it would be for a bird to worry about its dwelling, material possessions, and selfcomparison to other birds. Kierkegaard ends his discourse with a curt truth: “To be dependent on one’s treasure—that is dependence and hard and heavy slavery; to be dependent on God, completely dependent—that is independence.”³ Kierkegaard talks about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field in thirteen separate discourses throughout his authorship, all looking to these creatures to teach us about relying upon God rather than being anxious about the trials of life.⁴ Kierkegaard himself was admittedly an anxious individual, as he described in his journal: “All of existence makes me anxious….My grief is immeasurable; no one knows it except God in Heaven, and he will not comfort me; no one can comfort me except God in Heaven and he will not have mercy.”⁵ Kierkegaard spills much ink on the lilies and the birds, for he knows that we humans are prone to anxiety. Scripture distinctly exhorts Christians to “not be anxious

 Although his article does not specifically cover the topic of this chapter, I am indebted to Peter Kline for making the connection between anxiety in UD and anxiety in CA. See Peter Kline, “Imaging Nothing: Kierkegaard and the Imago Dei,” Anglican Theological Review, vol. 100, no. 4, 2018, pp. 697– 719.  SKS 8, 269 / UD, 170.  SKS 8, 279 / UD, 181.  See CD, WA, and UD.  SKS 18, 27, EE:64 / KJN 2, 23. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-002

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about anything.”⁶ One can recall obvious examples of sinful anxiety, yet at times anxiety does not seem to be sinful. One can think of a couple on their wedding day or the opening night of a performance; in each of these examples, the individuals are anxious, but it is a happy anxiety. Also, anxiety is a helpful survival tool in certain circumstances. Such are but a few examples of differing types of anxiety. The Bible condemns sinful anxiety, but how does one know the difference? How does anxiety function? In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard examines “the psychological treatment of the concept of ‘anxiety,’ but in such a way that it constantly keeps in mente and before its eye the dogma of hereditary sin.”⁷ Kierkegaard notes the evident connection between anxiety and sin, yet we need a clear picture of how the two relate. Furthermore, for Kierkegaard, any investigation of anxiety’s relation to sin has methodological issues, for sin is a theological concept while anxiety is a psychological concept. According to Kierkegaard, a psychological examination of anxiety illuminates the doctrine of sin. As Merold Westphal notes, Kierkegaard “regularly treats psychology in tandem with dogmatics as a kind of prolegomena to theology.”⁸ Westphal’s classification of psychology as prolegomena is apropos, and more specifically, anxiety is prolegomena to sin. As psychology is to theology, so is anxiety to sin. In order to accurately depict Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin, we must understand the dynamic underpinnings of anxiety. In this chapter we examine Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety as it relates to the doctrine of sin. First, we investigate Kierkegaard’s understanding of psychology. Second, we examine anxiety in its essence. Third, we see Kierkegaard’s differentiation between objective anxiety and subjective anxiety. Finally, we observe the relationship between anxiety, the “moment,” and despair. Understanding Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety sets the stage for the broader discussion on Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin.

1 Psychology and Kierkegaard Kierkegaard, under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, primarily treats anxiety in his work The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Delibera-

 Phil 4:6.  SKS 4, 321 / CA, 14.  Merold Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Psychology and Unconscious Despair,” in The Sickness unto Death, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1987 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 19), p. 40. I am thankful for Westphal’s article in opening up this understanding to me, directly influencing the title of this chapter.

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tion in the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. A glance at the subtitle of the book may leave one asking, “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Why is psychology helpful to the study of hamartiology, and what does Kierkegaard mean by “psychology”? Reidar Thomte clarifies that Kierkegaard’s use of “psychology” is “a phenomenology that is based in an ontological view of man, the fundamental presupposition of which is the transcendent reality of the individual.”⁹ As René Rosfort points out, modern psychology tends to examine naturalistic components of the human mind, focusing on clinical assessment of individuals. While Kierkegaard’s work does assess individual action, he clearly presupposes the supernatural aspect of the human person. Kierkegaard does what Rosfort calls “philosophical psychology,” an attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of the human mind, “explicitly involving philosophical questions concerning ontological, epistemological, ethical, and religious issues.”¹⁰ Kierkegaard seeks an explanation for the totality of the individual. Since humans are physical creatures with immaterial souls, both psychology and theology are necessary to grasp holistically our human condition and predicament. Kierkegaard’s psychological insight is a concrete observation rather than an abstract logical construct: “What is required for a Christian awakening is on one hand the Christian emotion and on the other the firmness and definiteness of conceptual language.”¹¹ In regard to sin, a psychological investigation seeks “a discovering [of] anxiety, and in its anxiety psychology portrays sin.”¹² Anxiety is a real phenomenon that people experience, yet it is quite often a persistent condition, an incessant gnawing within the individual. Merold Westphal notes the Aristotelian undertones in Kierkegaard’s thought of human health. For Kierkegaard, wellness “is not something that happens to us, but something that we do.”¹³ While Kierkegaard’s psychology observes phenomena, its τέλος should affect the individual’s true existence in a concrete way. Psychology can only go so far, however:

 Reidar Thomte, “Historical Introduction,” in The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, by Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Reidar Thomte, trans. by Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1980 (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 7), p. xiv.  René Rosfort, “Kierkegaard’s Conception of Psychology: How to Understand It and Why It Still Matters,” in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Jon Stewart, Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell 2015 (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, vol. 58), p. 454.  SKS 15, 270 / BA, 114– 115.  SKS 4, 322 / CA, 15.  Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Psychology and Unconscious Despair,” p. 41.

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The subject of which psychology treats must be something in repose that remains in a restless repose, not something that always either produces itself or is repressed. But this abiding something out of which sin constantly arises, not by necessity…but by freedom—this abiding something, this predisposing presupposition, sin’s real possibility, is a subject of interest for psychology.¹⁴

For Kierkegaard, psychology can examine the real possibility of sin, born out of anxiety; yet to talk about sin qua sin, one must move to dogmatics: “Psychology can bring its concern to the point where it seems as if sin were there, but the next thing, that sin is there, is qualitatively different from the first.”¹⁵ The solution to sinful anxiety is theology, not psychology. David Gouwens illuminates the irony of a psychological investigation of anxiety: “Vigilius says that as psychology observes the phenomena of anxiety, psychology itself becomes filled with anxiety at which it discovers about human nature.” The psychologist sees the problem but cannot posit the answer, for only “Christian concepts are diagnostic concepts.”¹⁶ In short, psychology gives one tools to see the problem, while theology provides the solution to said problem.¹⁷

2 Anxiety: Its Roots and Dynamics Before we diagnose anxiety in Kierkegaard’s thought, we need to understand correctly what he means by “anxiety.” Walter Lowrie, the first English translator of The Concept of Anxiety, notes the difficulty of Kierkegaard’s terminology. The Danish term angest has no direct English equivalent. Lowrie demonstrates that the term relates to “an apprehension of the future, a presentiment of a something which is ‘nothing.’”¹⁸ Arne Grøn, a Danish Kierkegaard scholar, explains that “anxiety points toward the future….It is not this or that specifically but the unspecific or undetermined future.”¹⁹ Stephen Dunning notes that English-lan-

 SKS 4, 329 / CA, 21.  SKS 4, 329 / CA, 22.  David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 66.  Two other of Kierkegaard’s works are “psychological” in nature: Constantius’s work in R and Quidam’s diary in SL.  Walter Lowrie, “Translator’s Preface,” in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1953, p. x. Because of the dynamics of angst, Lowrie opted for the term “dread” rather than “anxiety.”  Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Jeanette B. L. Knox, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2008, p. 5.

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guage scholarship uses the term anxiety “which reduces the intensity of the pain but preserves the future orientation.”²⁰ Anxiety, in the Kierkegaardian sense, is a present anguish that looks toward the future; it is a deeper mood than butterflies in the stomach when thinking about one’s qualifying examinations. The word dread, used by the first round of English language translators, is too harsh of a word. In Spanish scholarship, the word angustia is used, and this more closely captures the spirit of angest. Angustia is a distress or anguish, sometimes translated as “nausea.” Gregory Beabout explains that “angest is both an attraction to and a repulsion from the nothingness of future possibilities. ‘Anxiety’ seems to capture the crucial tension between eagerness and uneasiness.”²¹ Anxiety is the closest term in English, but we must keep in mind that the word is more than a concern about the future—its present reality is an emotional restlessness. With an understanding of the term anxiety now one can follow Kierkegaard in his observation. Imagine Adam in the garden of Eden before the Fall. Adam was in a state of innocence, for he was ignorant of evil. Kierkegaard notes that “in innocence, man is not qualified as spirit but is psychically qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition.”²² To comprehend this statement, we need to grasp Kierkegaard’s view of the human constitution. Kierkegaardian anthropology has three parts: physical, psychical, and spiritual. This trichotomy is not the typical understanding of body, soul, and spirit in systematic theology, but rather Kierkegaard is using philosophical terms to explain the complex composition of the individual. All humans have both a physical makeup (body) and a psychical makeup (soul). These are opposites, existing in a synthesis inside the individual, and “a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third.”²³ If humans have both body and soul, then a third “something” must exist that synthesizes the two diametrically opposed concepts. Kierkegaard calls this “something” “spirit,” which relates in the individual, uniting body and soul. Kierkegaard clarifies his understanding of body, soul, and spirit in The Sickness unto Death. Spirit is relational by nature—it relates body and soul, allowing them to unite in one of two ways within an individual. Mere human existence is what Kierkegaard calls a “negative” or “immediate unity.” All humans, by nature of their existing, are at their bare minimum a negative unity. Kierkegaard ex-

 Stephen N. Dunning, “Kierkegaard’s Systematic Analysis of Anxiety,” in The Concept of Anxiety, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1985 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 8), p. 12.  Gregory R. Beabout, Freedom and Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press 1996, p. 18.  SKS 4, 347 / CA, 41.  SKS 4, 349 / CA, 43.

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plains, “In the relation between the two [body and soul], the relation [spirit] is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation.”²⁴ A “positive” unity happens when spirit properly relates the two poles existing within the individual: “If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.”²⁵ A positive unity occurs when the spirit is “[resting] transparently in the power that established it.”²⁶ A life of “spirit” is a life which acts and interacts with its source—God.²⁷ What does this relational anthropology have to do with anxiety? In a state of innocence, humans have no “spiritual” life in the Kierkegaardian sense. For example, in the Edenic paradise, Adam had no way to actualize his relational spirit: “In this state there is peace and repose, but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety.”²⁸ The spirit in the individual desires to relate, but in innocence there is nothing with which to relate. Spirit still desires relation in innocence, and such a situation breeds a mood of restlessness. Because of his innocence, Adam was in a dreamlike state: “Dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is a nothing, and innocence always sees this nothing outside itself.”²⁹ A type of fog rests over innocent Adam, like seeing something in the distance but not yet being able to detect what it is. “Spirit dreaming,” writes Gordon Marino, “feels a presentiment of the powers of spirit but as something external.”³⁰ Because Adam is a synthesis, he has a latent desire to relate and actualize himself as spirit. In this manner, innocence is a dreamlike anticipation for awakening. Anxiety, quips Kierkegaard, “is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility,” and he ultimately defines anxiety as “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.”³¹ Anxiety is a desire for what one fears as well as a  SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.  SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.  SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14.  We will have a more in-depth analysis of the Kierkegaard’s concept of self in ch. 3, but this brief explanation will suffice for the current discussion.  SKS 4, 348 / CA, 41.  SKS 4, 348 / CA, 41.  Gordon D. Marino, “Anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 316 (my emphasis).  SKS 4, 348 / CA, 42.

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fear of what one desires. Kierkegaard demonstrates that such bizarre wanting and not-wanting “is altogether ambiguous.”³² Concerning the nebulous nature of anxiety, Arne Grøn explains the conundrum: “What is it that both attracts and frightens us? So far, the answer is that it is possibility in the situation that it depends on our situation. The situation is urgent by being indeterminate.”³³ We must act—and we want to act—but we also fear acting because of the unknown nature of the future result. Steeped in ambiguity the individual’s will is fractured, frozen in fear. In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Kierkegaard exhorts his readers to be single-minded in devotion to God. Having an ambivalence, an ambiguity of will, leads to a life ill lived: “Cleanse your hearts of double-mindedness, that is, let your heart in truth will only one thing, for in this is purity of heart….What else is it to despair but to have two wills!”³⁴ Anxiety is ambiguous, and such ambiguity leads to a severed self, crippled by anxiety. Kierkegaard notes that in the garden, God planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, commanding Adam not to eat of said tree. Adam, in a dreamlike state of innocence, lived in anxiety because of the possibility of action: “The prohibition induces him to anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by as innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing—that anxious possibility of being able.”³⁵ Kierkegaard highlights that Adam could not understand God’s prohibition. God said to Adam in Genesis 2:16 – 17, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” How could Adam understand such a statement? Death had not yet entered the race. In a state of dreaming innocence Adam knew neither good nor evil, but God’s command did “[awaken] the desire” in Adam, stirring him from his spiritual stupor.³⁶ One might hastily generalize anxiety as sprouting from the difficult task of differentiating between good and evil, but such a view overlooks the reality of Adam’s innocence. As Irving Josaphat Montes Espinoza clarifies, “The knowing that causes Adam anxiety is not the knowing of good and evil, rather it is knowinghimself as free.”³⁷ Anxiety has a draw, a free desire for movement, a desire to

 SKS 4, 349 / CA, 43. SKS 18, 311, JJ:511 / KJN 2, 286.  Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, p. 15.  SKS 8, 140 / UD, 25. SKS 8, 144 / UD, 30.  SKS 4, 350 / CA, 44.  SKS 4, 351 / CA, 45.  Irving Josaphat Montes Espinoza, “Sintomatología de la angustia (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger),” Xipe Totek, vol. 27, no. 108, 2018, p. 420 (my translation).

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awaken from the somber slumber of innocence in order to actualize spirit. Anxiety’s draw is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that we can live a life of action. The curse is that we often act in negative ways. Louis Dupré elucidates the two-edged sword of anxiety: “Freedom involves a certain danger because in every important choice man’s whole personality is at stake. At the same time, the risk of freedom is attractive, for it opens a world of possibilities in which man may realize himself.”³⁸ Anxiety precedes sin, but it is not sinful. Anxiety is a byproduct of freedom; and because humanity exercised its freedom toward evil, anxiety is “the presupposition for hereditary sin.”³⁹ The freedom that begets anxiety is not free will in the libertarian sense. Anxiety’s freedom is what Kierkegaard calls “entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself.”⁴⁰ How is freedom entangled? Anxiety persists and humans are free to choose between options, but the one option off the table is for anxiety to disappear. As Grøn explains, “[Freedom] is not a possibility we can choose or not choose. Once freedom has manifested itself as possibility, we cannot escape it.”⁴¹ Adam did not choose possibility—God provided the condition of possibility by positing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Contemporary humanity does not choose freedom—the reality of a turbulent world filled with choices provides the condition of possibility. For Kierkegaard, entangled freedom is a snare that captures individuals. Humans are free to choose when a specific situation arises, but they are not truly free in the libertarian sense. As José Rey de Castro explains, “This freedom is not simply the capacity of attaining one thing or another, rather that one has in himself awareness that the moment is alive—today—is freedom, as that possibility of relating.”⁴² The entangled freedom of anxiety sets some restrictions on the individual, but the individual does have the ability to choose in the moment of decision. The tragedy is that we often exercise our freedom to sin. Vincent McCarthy sums up the bleak reality of the anxious life: “The nothing of anxiety will appear again, and the dialectic of ‘something’ (the actualized self) and ‘nothing’ (pos-

 Louis K. Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian: The Dialectic of Christian Existence, New York: Sheed and Ward 1963, p. 7.  SKS 4, 353 / CA, 48.  SKS 4, 354 / CA, 49.  Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, p. 14.  José Rey de Castro, “Angustia, libertad y pecado en ‘El concepto de angustia’ de Vigilius Haufniensis de Søren Kierkegaard,” Synesis, vol. 10, no. 1, 2018, p. 158 (my translation).

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sible self) will continue as long as there is life.”⁴³ Even when we successfully choose God in faith, anxiety is ever present in every opportunity either to follow or to reject God. Even though we can come to God for a reestablished relationship, the possibility of sin always exists, leading to anxiety. As Glenn Kirkconnell illustrates, “Anxiety is not banished, but it is defanged” in God’s forgiveness.⁴⁴

3 Types of Anxiety: Objective and Subjective As anxiety comes from possibility, Kierkegaard differentiates two types of anxiety. Objective anxiety is “the effect of sin on nonhuman existence.”⁴⁵ Kierkegaard cites Romans 8:19 to bolster his assessment: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” Objective anxiety is a consequence of sin—the natural world did not cause its own anxiety. As Kierkegaard mentions in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, “The bird does not serve two masters. Even though it does not serve God, it exists only to God’s honor, sings to his praise, does not demand at all to be anything itself.”⁴⁶ The bird has no anxiety, acting exactly as God desires it to be. Creation is anxiety free, but the anxiety of humanity has negatively affected creation. When discussing human worry, Kierkegaard remarks, “The bird, then, does not have this care [about what it will wear]. Why is this so? It is because the bird is what it is, is itself, is satisfied with being itself, is contented with itself.”⁴⁷ Subjective anxiety is the anxiety each individual personally encounters when an opportunity posits freedom. The object of objective anxiety is not a subject. Subjects have wills that can choose within entangled freedom. Present-day humanity’s relation to anxiety is the same qualitatively as Adam’s relation. A contemporary individual’s only difference from Adam is quantitative in nature. Modern humans have had thousands of years of constant anxiety; and the more people and choices that exist, the more possibility exists. More possibility leads to quantitatively more anxiety “by virtue of the generation.”⁴⁸

 Vincent A. McCarthy, Kierkegaard as Psychologist, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 2015, p. 121.  W. Glenn Kirkconnell, Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation: From Philosophical Fragments through the Two Ages, London: Continuum 2010 (Continuum Studies in Philosophy), p. 50.  SKS 4, 362 / CA, 57.  SKS 8, 300 / UD, 205.  SKS 10, 48 / CD, 37.  Dunning, “Kierkegaard’s Systematic Analysis of Anxiety,” p. 16.

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Kierkegaard equates subjective anxiety with standing before a sprawling chasm: He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap.⁴⁹

Kierkegaard’s vivid explanation is chock-full of content. First, the dizziness of anxiety is dramatic rather than some simple unease. Second, the abyss itself is not the problem, but rather the problem arises when the individual looks down. The possibility of action causes a swell of anguish, a type of fear and trembling. Third, Kierkegaard reiterates the issue of the spirit and the synthesis of the individual. Spirit wants to move from its de facto position of an immediate or negative unity to posit itself as a positive unity—a proper relation. Brian Söderquist explains that “anxiety informs the self of a higher calling: to take charge of becoming the self it ought to become—to become spirit.”⁵⁰ Fourth, dizziness can be either positive or negative, depending on the outcome of the event. A child spinning on a merry-go-round loves the feeling of being dizzy—until she is too dizzy and becomes nauseous. The problem arises, as Grøn explains, in that we can “[lose] our footing, since the world we know loses its dependability.”⁵¹ One can see that anxiety is not something inherently bad, like the child playing on the merry-go-round. De Castro states that “anxiety is a vertigo—which experiences freedom—not an imperfection.”⁵² Lastly, only when the individual grabs onto “finiteness to support itself” is she plunged into guilt. The move from anxiety into guilt is a qualitative leap, but it is a step of one’s own doing.⁵³ Murray Rae opines such a sorry state of affairs: “We typically exercise our God-given freedom by plunging ourselves into bondage.”⁵⁴ The entangled freedom to

 SKS 4, 365 – 366 / CA, 61.  K. Brian Söderquist, “Kierkegaard and Existentialism: From Anxiety to Autonomy,” in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Jon Stewart, p. 88.  Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, p. 6.  de Castro, “Angustia, libertad y pecado,” p. 155 (my translation).  We will examine the qualitative leap into sin in detail in ch. 5.  Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, p. 93.

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choose rears its head again. Although subjective anxiety is a neutral force, an individual must actualize something when the abyss of possibility stares her directly in the face. As Sibylle Rolf explains, Kierkegaard “interprets freedom in a hamartiological way so that the individual who wants to set himself free fails.”⁵⁵ The dizziness overpowers us, and we fall deep into the chasm of unfreedom—the bondage of sin.

4 Anxiety, the Moment, and Despair Kierkegaard declares that “anxiety is the moment,”⁵⁶ and the term moment has specific significance in Kierkegaard’s thought. Kierkegaard’s self-published periodical—some of his last published work before his death in 1855—was titled The Moment, and for Kierkegaard the “moment” was “the moment of decision and newness when time and eternity meet.”⁵⁷ Kierkegaard views Hegel’s scientific program as an abstract, logical process, removing the individual from interacting in the world. In fact, one of Kierkegaard’s major frustrations with Hegelian philosophy is that it “has no ethics; therefore it has never occupied itself with the future….Hegelian philosophy looks at the past.”⁵⁸ The abstract nature of dialectical mediation has no real-world force, making it an unlivable life view. We experience anxiety in a moment—a moment when possibility ambushes us, causing us to interact and decide for ourselves. As Kierkegaard stresses in one of his discourses, “Everything depends on the moment. Indeed, misfortune in the lives of the great majority of human beings is this, that they were never aware of the moment, that in their lives the eternal and the temporal are exclusively separated.”⁵⁹ Such a moment is the moment of spirit, the time of relating the synthesis of the individual to the world around himself. The moment involves an individual within time responding to possibility, awakening herself from the dreamlike state of innocence. Because “all decision…is rooted in subjectivity,”⁶⁰ the possibility of anxiety demands a decision that accounts for the totality of the individual. Since humans are both finite

 Sibylle Rolf, “In sich Verstrickte Freiheit: Søren Kierkegaards Konzept von der Genese der Sünde und seine Ablehnung des liberum arbitrium,” Kerygma und Dogma, vol. 54, no. 4, 2008, p. 331 (my translation).  SKS 4, 384 / CA, 81.  Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, “Notes,” in M, 630.  SKS 15, 282 / BA, 129.  SKS 11, 20 / WA, 14.  SKS 7, 121 / CUP1, 129.

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and infinite, the moment has a finite and an infinite aspect: “The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity.”⁶¹ The moment exists in time because temporal beings experience it, but its DNA is eternal. This “extra-temporal temporality,”⁶² as Thomas Carlson calls it, can come upon individuals suddenly or persist over a period of time. Melissa Fitzpatrick illustrates that anxiety “is felt most intensely the moment before we make a decision.”⁶³ Let us return to Adam in the garden as an example. God posits possibility by creating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree creates anxiety in Adam, for he has a choice: either to eat or not to eat. Anxiety was latent in Adam, yet it operated in the background—a desire to actualize even though no possibility existed. When Adam encounters the actual moment of decision, anxiety increases, for in his actualization of possibility he must decide as spirit to act. Adam was anxious all along, but the most forceful expression is at the moment of decision. We must reaffirm that anxiety is not sin, but rather it leads to sin: “Anxiety, however, is an expression of the perfection of human nature.”⁶⁴ Adam was not sinful because he was anxious—that is, because he had possibility. Kierkegaard comments in his personal journal that “the inability to become anxious is a sign of one’s being either an animal or an angel, which according to the teaching of scriptures, is less perfect than being a human being.”⁶⁵ Anxiety is merely the mood of possibility, and anxiety can persist even after one makes a decision. One can be anxious about the past, present, or future, and one can even be anxious and not realize it—whether or not an individual feels anxiety does not mean that anxiety is not there; it is “nevertheless present except it is waiting.”⁶⁶ Malantschuk notes that intensified anxiety leads to despair.⁶⁷ Despair, as Kierkegaard explains it, “is the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself.”⁶⁸ Anxiety is the moment of possibility, whereas despair is the actual state of misrelation of the self. Both include strong, often crippling emotions, but these terms are not synonyms. As Richard Swann helpfully clarifies,

 SKS 4, 392 / CA, 88.  Thomas A. Carlson, “Possibility and Passivity in Kierkegaard: The Anxieties of Don Giovanni and Abraham,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 62, no. 2, 1994, p. 475.  Melissa Fitzpatrick, “The Recollection of Anxiety: Kierkegaard as Our Socratic Occasion to Transcend Unfreedom,” Heythrop Journal, vol. 55, no. 5, 2014, p. 874.  SKS 4, 376 / CA, 72.  Pap. V B 53:23 / JP 1, 97.  SKS 4, 399 / CA, 96.  Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1971, p. 34.  SKS 11, 131 / SUD, 15.

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“If anxiety is humankind’s inescapable, ontological state in trying to actualize the possibilities presented by the future, then Despair is the individual’s personal response, the ontic response.”⁶⁹ Despair is a negative, consistent misrelation of the self, while anxiety is simply the roiling response of the individual to possibility.

5 Conclusion: The Importance of Possibility Anxiety, for Kierkegaard, is a mood, an overall morally neutral present anguish experienced in the moment of possibility. Although steeped in a world of possibilities—of objective anxieties forcing their ways upon individuals—anxiety is ultimately a subjective issue. We must choose whenever a choice appears. Like Adam in the garden, we all must respond to our posited freedom. Freedom is a good thing, for in it we can actualize ourselves rather than remain in a dreamlike, abstract world. Choice is a concrete expression of our spirit, of the relation of the synthesis to the other.⁷⁰ Kierkegaard’s psychological analysis of anxiety has many points of contact with theology. His emphasis on the active nature of the self to actualize itself correlates to the task God gives humans to walk in His ways. God created Adam and Eve “in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it,” and God calls Israel to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The church, too, is called to continue the call of Israel to be a kingdom of priests, bringing the gospel message to all people.⁷¹ God does not bring Christians into a relationship with Himself to do nothing, but rather He calls His people to work for the kingdom of God. A Christian who does not act on his faith will feel unfulfilled, existing in a haze of existence. Possibility is a grand opportunity for Christians to partner with God through the work of the church. Sadly, the dark side of anxiety often affects the church. Congregation and congregant alike can become complacent, not caring for the missio Dei. God has a strong word for those who are double minded, ambivalent about doing the will of God: “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I

 Richard Swann, “Anxiety, Despair and the Knight of Faith: The Ontological, The Ontic and the Transcendent in Søren Kierkegaard,” Existential Analysis: Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, vol. 29, no. 1, 2018, p. 98.  The issue, then, is who is the “other” to which one’s synthesis relates? We will see Kierkegaard’s answer in ch. 3.  Gen 2:15; Ex 19:6; Rev 1:6.

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will spit you out of my mouth.”⁷² Kierkegaard shows that one must choose when possibility rears its head, and often Christians choose to do nothing. Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety points to the active nature of sanctification and Christian mission. Why is anxiety important to our study of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin? Anxiety explains the condition of sin; it explains how sin comes into the world. Anxiety, to borrow Westphal’s phrasing, is prolegomena to sin. Without possibility, choice does not exist. Without choice, humans would be either animals or angels. Angels and animals do not have wills,⁷³ for they do as the Father commands. The birds of the air and the lilies of the field have no anxiety, for they do not have a spirit that can exercise freedom. The negative side to anxiety is that it ultimately leads to sin. As Kierkegaard declares, “Anxiety is the final psychological state from which sin breaks forth in the qualitative leap.”⁷⁴ Lee Barrett succinctly states, “Psychology, on the other hand, asks the question ‘Why do people sin?’ and answers, ‘People sin because they are anxious.’”⁷⁵ Understanding anxiety and its dynamics sets the stage for our understanding of the individual role in sin. Anxiety introduces us to Kierkegaard’s view of the self, and unfortunately the self often misrelates to God. Despite its surroundings, the lily is itself because it is unconditionally obedient to God; and because it is unconditionally obedient to God it is unconditionally free of care, something only the unconditionally obedient, especially under such circumstances, can be. Because it is fully and completely itself and unconditionally free of care—the two correspond to each other directly and inversely—it is beautiful. Only by unconditional obedience can one with unconditional accuracy find the place where one is to stand.⁷⁶

 Rev 3:16.  This is according to Kierkegaard; see Pap. V B 53:23 / JP 1, 97.  SKS 4, 396 / CA, 93.  Lee C. Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety’ and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin,” in The Concept of Anxiety, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 54.  SKS 11, 32 / WA, 27.

Chapter 3 Sin as Misrelation to God In “On the Occasion of a Confession,” Kierkegaard exhorts his reader to seek after God. In the busyness of life, we forget the fact that God is near in our daily hustle-and-bustle, accessible wherever we are. We need to be still so that we may recognize the reality of ourselves before God. Kierkegaard explains that the seeker after God “is not to look for the place where God is, he is not to strive to get there, because God is right with him, very near, everywhere near, at every moment everywhere present, but the seeker must be changed so that he himself can become the place where God in truth is.”¹ The question then is, “What does it mean to be near God?” Ontologically, God is omnipresent, meaning that saint and sinner alike are near God. Christ chastises the Pharisees in Matthew 15:8, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”² Paradoxically, one can be at a religious service yet far away from God. Indeed, was not God’s question to Adam’s first sin “Where are you?”³ God does not lack knowledge of Adam’s physical location; the question demonstrates a relational problem posed by Adam’s sin. Although God is omnipresent, sin separates humanity from God, making humans futile in their thinking;⁴ but God remedies humanity’s separation through the cross. As the apostle Paul says to the Ephesians, For [Christ] himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.⁵

Kierkegaard investigates sin’s severing power in The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anti-Climacus examines the nature of despair, showing that despair is a psychological condition with theological implications. The average person coasts through life, “ignorant of what is truly horrifying.”⁶ Such a non-in-

     

SKS 5, 404 / TD, 23 (my emphasis). Cf. Isa 29:13. Gen 3:9. Rom 1:21. Eph 2:14– 17. SKS 11, 125 / SUD, 8.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-003

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trospective individual does not realize the truth of his own peril. The Sickness unto Death is an extended discourse on despair and sin, and in it we see a clear definition of sin: “Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself. Thus sin is intensified weakness or intensified defiance: sin is the intensification of despair.”⁷ Kierkegaard gives us an explicit explanation of sin, but upon an initial reading his wording is esoteric. What does it mean “not to will to be oneself?” What does it mean to be before God? If we are to systematize Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin, we must recognize the aspects of his precise, yet perplexing, definition of sin in The Sickness unto Death. In order to illuminate such abstruse language, first we must investigate Kierkegaardian anthropology. Kierkegaard’s definition of sin is based upon being a “self,” a nuanced term in his writings. After comprehending the components of humanity, our second task is to examine what Kierkegaard calls the infinite qualitative distinction between God and man.⁸ One cannot understand “self” without properly understanding God, yet God is in another existence category, sui generis. Knowing the difference between God and humanity will lead us to the final point of this chapter: Sin, in its essence, is misrelation to God. Not only does sin separate us from God—sin is our separation from God.

1 Who Are We? Finitude, Infinitude, and Spirit Philosophers from time immemorial have asked the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Kierkegaard has an answer, and his thoughts on the human constitution are essential to grasping his doctrine of sin. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard opens with an explanation of the self: A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and ne-

 SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77.  Karl Barth says the qualitative distinction is his personal method of interpretation in The Epistle to the Romans: “The relation between such a God and such a man, and the relation between such a man and such a God, is for me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy.” Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed., trans. by Edwyn C. Hoskyns, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1968, p. 10.

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cessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self.⁹

This excerpt is notoriously difficult to interpret. H. E. Baber and John Donnelly go as far as to declare it “one of the most baffling passages in philosophical psychology.”¹⁰ Alastair Hannay explains that Kierkegaard is possibly mocking Hegel’s writing style; and while Kierkegaard may be poking fun at Hegel, Hannay notes this “is neither empty parody nor a pretentiously decked out truism.”¹¹ What is clear from this passage is that Kierkegaard uses Hegelian terms in his definition. Kierkegaard, the vociferous denier of Hegel, is using Hegel’s categories—has he gone mad? Hegelianism was in vogue during Kierkegaard’s day, and Hegel’s philosophical concepts bled over into the theology of the church. Kierkegaard saw it as his duty to awaken the church from “that enormous illusion, Christendom,”¹² and for Kierkegaard Hegelian dialectic was one of the key pillars of the paganism posing as Christianity—what better way to attack an opponent than by using his own system? As Kristen Deede comments, “Kierkegaard’s writings must therefore also be viewed as an effort to correct what he saw as the mistakes of Christendom in his day, by waking his fellow Danes up to the necessity of individual existence.”¹³ Kierkegaard takes what is positive from Hegel while spinning his own schema of anthropology. What then, is Hegel’s understanding of humanity, and how does his understanding inform Kierkegaard’s definition of “self”?

2 Hegel and the Self Although we have already examined some of the basics of Hegelian thought in chapter 1, we must dive deeper into Hegel’s understanding of the self to make sense of Kierkegaard’s definition of sin. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel exam-

 SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.  H. E. Baber and John Donnelly, “Self-Knowledge and the Mirror of the Word,” in The Sickness unto Death, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1987 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 19), p. 162.  Alastair Hannay, “Spirit and the Idea of the Self as a Reflexive Relation,” in The Sickness unto Death, ed. Robert L. Perkins, pp. 23 – 24.  SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23.  Kristen K. Deede, “The Infinite Qualitative Difference: Sin, the Self, and Revelation in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 53, no. 1, 2003, p. 27.

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ines how Geist interacts in the world and its history. As a reminder, Geist in the Hegelian sense is not an exact equivalent to the traditional Christian concept of Holy Spirit or God. Geist interacts with individuals in a process of mediation in order for individuals to “[grasp] and [express] the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”¹⁴ The difference between substance and subject is key to understanding Hegel’s view of the self. “Subject” is “something that is reflected into itself,”¹⁵ while “substance” is simply something that exists. All people can grasp reality immediately, as Hegel explains in Philosophy of Mind: immediate understanding is “neither specially developed in its content nor set in distinction as objective to subject, but treated as belonging to its most special, its natural peculiarity.”¹⁶ For example, by existing as a physical creature a person can see, smell, taste, etc., without formally processing said phenomena in the mind—I can eat an apple and experience it without thinking through its essence or its purpose in the larger world. Whenever an individual starts to process what is happening in the world, she is more than “just a recorder of the world’s impact on one’s senses,” as Robert Pippin states.¹⁷ She moves from an individual in-itself to an individual for-itself by means of her reflection on her surroundings— what is an apple and what does it mean to eat an apple?¹⁸ Reflection, for Hegel, makes all the difference in the world, moving from substance to subject: “But in point of fact self-consciousness is the reflection out of the being of the world of sense and perception, and is essentially the return from otherness.”¹⁹ Hegel continues: “The living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity.”²⁰ One can see the outward dimension of moving from substance to subject. Only by participating with “otherness” can something

 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller, New York: Oxford University Press 1977, p. 10.  Ibid., p. 13.  G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Together with the Zusätze in Boumann’s Text, trans. by William Wallace and A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1971, p. 73.  Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2011 (Princeton Monographs in Philosophy), p. 18.  This method of subject, object, and reflection has striking similarities to Martin Heidegger’s concept of objects being “ready-to-hand” as opposed to “present-at-hand.” See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: HarperPerennial 1962, pp. 98 – 100.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 105.  Ibid., p. 10.

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be a subject. “Subject” is negative, not in the sense of being bad, but in the sense of becoming incomplete on its own, lacking its “positive” component to become full or complete. John Russon explains Hegel’s language: “The existent—the self —is a process, and the nature of a process is that it cannot be captured in a simple observable immediacy but must be thought as a unit of an embodying process.”²¹ “Negativity” implies mediation, “for mediation is nothing beyond selfmoving selfsameness, or is reflection into self, the moment of the ‘I’ which is for itself pure negativity.”²² An “I”—that is, an individual—is for itself negative. Since “I” is negative, it must seek out something else for it to be whole: “This in-itself has to express itself outwardly and become for itself, and this means simply that it has to posit self-consciousness as one with itself.”²³ Humans desire to become reflective selves, and the process of understanding and reflecting upon their condition in the world is what drives forward society, culture, and history. As Ivan Soll explains, “In self-consciousness the external world apprehended by consciousness does not completely vanish but merely loses its ‘otherness,’…its character as an independent reality….The desire of the self-conscious spirit to negate the external world furnishes the ultimate explanatory principle for a theory of all behavior.”²⁴ In Hegel’s schema, the desire for individuals to relate to the “other”—whether that be the crowd, organized religion, or cultural progression—is what makes humans what they are. The world-historical process of reflection can be known only as the “True” through a system, and such a system “is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit.” Hegel continues, “The spiritual alone is the actual; it is essence, or that which has being in itself; it is that which relates itself to itself and is determinate, it is other-being and being-for itself….It must be an object to itself, but just as immediately a sublated object, reflected in itself.”²⁵ Spirit is working in individuals, desiring for them to self-actualize by reflecting in the world. Because “I’ is inherently negative, it must look outside itself for fulfillment while at the same time relating this “other” to itself—it relates itself to itself. Once it finds a positive in the “other,” it “becomes alienated from itself and then returns to itself from the alienation, and is only then revealed for

 John Russon, The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division 2001 (Toronto Studies in Philosophy), p. 49.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 11.  Ibid., p. 15.  Ivan Soll, An Introduction to Hegel’s Metaphysics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1969, pp. 11, 12.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 14.

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the first time in its actuality and truth.”²⁶ The individual (thesis) is negative, and seeks out the other (antithesis). Because the other is an antithesis, it is foreign to the individual, and the individual must make sense of it in reflection, making a synthesis via mediation. In such a progression, on its own “the single individual is incomplete Spirit.”²⁷ The new synthesis then becomes a thesis, and the pattern of reflection continues anew. Hegel’s analysis has drastic implications for the individual. In order to move from substance to subject, one must look outward to reality in order to grow in consciousness. Paolo Bubbio demonstrates the ramification of such thinking: If the (phenomeno)logical I is the I that is made consistent with its concept through recognition and therefore properly exists only as an expression of that process (as Universal selfconsciousness), then the fully self-conscious I in history is never merely an individual I; it might be considered such logically, but historically the I is always intrinsically intersubjective. ²⁸

Hegel voices such sentiment in Philosophy of Mind: “Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic individual, it is because immediate, not yet as its self, not a true subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive.”²⁹ Humans exist as individual beings—that is, individual, physical creatures—but they cannot understand themselves as selves without reflecting upon world history. The irony is that individuals are both individual and corporate beings at the same time: “Hence consciousness, like reciprocal dependence in general, is the contradiction between the independence of the two sides and their identity in which they are merged into one.”³⁰ As Russon sums up, “The body of self-conscious selfhood is necessarily uniquely dependent upon a participant member of a natural world…[an] ongoing project of self-conscious self to constitute a world in which the natural and social orders achieve a self-conscious communion as a ‘we.’”³¹ Reflective individuals must look outside themselves to be whole, and such a process is what Hegel calls “Science.” Individuals need to relate in order to become subjects. As natural negativities, humans have the capability to reach out to know Spirit via the process of mediation. Spirit is active in the entire process; and as Daniel Jamros re-

 Ibid., p. 22.  Ibid., p. 16.  Paolo Diego Bubbio, “The I and World History in Hegel,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 25, no. 4, 2017, p. 710.  Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, p. 94.  Ibid., p. 155.  Russon, The Self and Its Body, pp. 132– 33.

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marks, “For Hegel, then, human thinking is the culmination of divine essence, which develops itself into human thinking. In this way, human selfhood is independent of God because it is not simply essence, but exists in nature as a free intellect.”³²

3 Kierkegaard and the Self We can say more about Hegelian anthropology, but the brief introduction serves the purpose of understanding Kierkegaard’s view of the self. We now return to Kierkegaard’s definition of the self in the opening paragraphs of The Sickness unto Death: “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self.”³³ One can see obvious Hegelian language—Kierkegaard uses the same terms as Hegel in his explication of anthropology.³⁴ One even observes the process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in Kierkegaard’s definition. For Kierkegaard humans have a material (thesis) and immaterial (antithesis) component existing together in a synthesis. In order for two diametrically opposed substances to exist in a single entity, a relation must occur, otherwise the material and immaterial components would separate. The relational aspect of the self is what Kierkegaard calls “spirit”: “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”³⁵ What is one to make of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the self? Both Hegel and Kierkegaard think that spirit “relates itself to itself,” yet a close reading shows Kierkegaard has a fundamentally different view of the human self. Kristen Deede clarifies that “[Kierkegaard’s] understanding of the self can be understood as Hegelian in that he views the self as a relation, or perhaps more accurately as a combination of substance and subject.”³⁶ Kierkegaard and Hegel both desire to see individuals move beyond simple immediate existence to become reflective, to think and develop into authentic humans. Both Hegel and Kierkegaard see the

 Daniel P. Jamros, The Human Shape of God: Religion in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Paragon 1994, p. 42.  SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.  Hannay, “Spirit and the Idea of the Self as a Reflexive Relation,” p. 25.  SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.  Deede, “The Infinite Qualitative Difference,” p. 27.

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necessity of looking outside oneself in order to advance oneself as a proper human self. Where Kierkegaard and Hegel disagree is in the role of spirit in this process of reflection and the ultimate τέλος of authentic human existence. For Hegel, Geist influences the individual. Depending on whether one is a leftwing or right-wing Hegelian, Geist is either the mind of God influencing and doing his will through the process of an individual’s interaction with the world, or Geist is the natural outworking of the development of human culture in the world. Whichever wing one accepts, the τέλος of Hegelian Geist is for the individual to relate himself to the other, causing a new synthesis, and continuing the process ad infinitum as Geist directs. The “other” is not God for Hegel; the “other” is world history. The individual is made a self by reflection on reality guided by Spirit. As Mark Taylor describes, “Spirit, Hegel insists, finds itself through the process of dismembering and remembering.”³⁷ Such a process occurs through a logical reflection of a scientific system. Kierkegaard does not see spirit as mere relation to something outside the individual. In Hegelian thought, as Taylor demonstrates, “mediation both demands and destroys otherness.”³⁸ Mediation can occur only, logically, through relative opposites; and Kierkegaard fundamentally disagrees with such thinking.³⁹ Kierkegaard uses the term “synthesis,” but Kierkegaard does not mean Hegelian mediation: “A synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third.”⁴⁰ Unity, for Kierkegaard, is not equivalent with Hegelian Geist as relating itself to itself.⁴¹ Mediation causes a new position, dissolving the either/or of the thesis/antithesis. For Kierkegaard, synthesis is two opposites existing together by a third “something,” yet the two opposites persist rather than meld. The third “something” is what Kierkegaard calls “spirit.” Kierkegaard explicitly states the self is “a relation that relates itself to itself” and “not the relation.”⁴² If the self were the relation between the two, then spirit would be equated with the Geist of mediation. Spirit, for Kierkegaard, relates the material/immaterial together but is not said relation. Kierkegaard envisions this relational aspect of spirit in two distinct ways: either a negative or a positive

 Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel & Kierkegaard, Berkeley: University of California Press 1980, p. 142.  Ibid., p.166.  See the explanation of Hegel’s both/and in the introduction. For further discussion see Shannon Nason, “Opposites, Contradictories, and Mediation in Kierkegaard’s Critique of Hegel,” Heythrop Journal, vol. 53, no. 1, 2012, pp. 24– 36; Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, pp. 162– 72.  SKS 4, 349 / CA, 43.  SKS 4, 318 – 321 / CA, 10 – 13. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, pp. 170 – 72.  SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.

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unity. A negative unity is when “in the relation between the two,…the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation.”⁴³ In other words, a negative unity exists when the two poles of the temporal (physical body) and the eternal (immaterial soul) merely coincide in an individual. A negative unity is not negative in the Hegelian sense of needing an other to exist. All humans are de facto negative unities, for human existence contains a soul and a body existing in the entity we call an individual. Spirit exists in an individual because there is a synthesis, but spirit does not automatically relate outside of the human. Kierkegaard continues: “If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.”⁴⁴ A human is only a self when it relates itself to itself. Kierkegaard reminds us that humans are “a derived, established relation,” that is, they are creations of the creator. If that is the case, then a self must be established by another “and is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which established the entire relation.”⁴⁵ To clarify, for a positive unity to exist, spirit must relate in a synthesis in two ways. First, spirit synthesizes the opposites of body and soul. Second, spirit synthesizes the opposites of creation and creator, or as Kierkegaard puts it, “the self rests transparently in the power that established it.”⁴⁶ Such an understanding of the self is abstract, so we need a concrete clarification. A helpful way to digest Kierkegaard’s understanding is by positing two terms: a “human creature” and a “human being.” A “human creature” is a negative unity—a creation of body and soul that exists through a relation of spirit. “Creature” is an unfortunate term in English, for it smacks of a lesser ontological status—a creature is less than a being. Such is not my intention with using the term “creature,” but it is the best word to explicate the point. A “human being” is a positive unity—a creation of body and soul that connects back to its creator, a true self. All human beings are human creatures, but not all human creatures are human beings. For Kierkegaard, not everyone is a self. Selfhood does not come through simply possessing spirit; everyone has a spirit by nature of being a synthesis/negative unity. Selfhood comes from a positive unity, being a human being: a synthesis that properly relates the aspects of the human toward God. Therefore, for both Kierkegaard and Hegel, to be a self one must relate to an “other.” To Hegel the “other” is reality or world-history. To Kierkegaard, the “other” is God.

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

11, 129 / SUD, 13. 11, 129 / SUD, 13 (my emphasis). 11, 129 / SUD, 13 (my emphasis). 11, 130 / SUD, 14.

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One can see how different Kierkegaard and Hegel see the composition and τέλος of a human. As Richard Kroner correctly asserts, “Hegel subordinates religion to philosophy, Kierkegaard subordinates everything else, and especially philosophy, to religion.”⁴⁷ For Kierkegaard human selfhood is not some grand exercise of Geist in world history. Hegelian thought erases the creature and creator distinction, creating a highly immanent God. As George Pattison notes, “Human identity itself—our being the selves we are—is seen by Kierkegaard as inherently dependent upon the God-relationship.”⁴⁸ God is the ground of selfhood, and such a God-relationship is not a mediation or dissolving of distinctive parts. For Kierkegaard, God is qualitatively distinct from humanity, the true other in which we find ourselves as true selves.

4 Sin Is before God: Infinite Qualitative Distinction Kierkegaard commences his definition of sin with the qualifier “before God, or with the conception of God.”⁴⁹ Kierkegaard refers back to the “older dogmatics” that realized the position of humanity before God. Against the Hegelian theology of his time, Kierkegaard returns to the offensiveness of sin: “The idea that what makes sin so terrible is that it is before God….The older dogmatics was right in maintaining that because sin is against God it is infinitely magnified.”⁵⁰ Why does Kierkegaard take a jab at the newer dogmatics? Influenced by Hegel, Kierkegaard’s contemporaries severely downplay the creature/creation distinction. We remember from our examination of the Hegelian self that the process of reflection causes mediation—the process creates a new reality. Something can be properly mediated only if it is in the same existence category. If mediation is the working of Geist in the world, then the otherness of God is functionally erased, “pantheistically abolished.”⁵¹ God becomes so immanent in Hegelian thought that sinning against Geist sounds ludicrous. Geist is a process, not a person.

 Richard Kroner, “Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Hegel,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, vol. 21, no. 2, 1966, p. 234.  George Pattison, The Philosophy of Kierkegaard, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005 (Continental European Philosophy), p.134.  SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77.  SKS 11, 194 / SUD, 80.  SKS 11, 230 / SUD, 117.

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Orienting sin as before God helps us realize our utter dependence on God for our very being. As Robert Roberts remarks, Kierkegaard’s formulation causes one “to accept [one’s life] as from the hand of God, to trust God alone as his ultimate hope and security, to perform his duties as duties to God.”⁵² Kierkegaard stresses dependence on God in Christian Discourses: “A person…is infinitely far from God, in whom he nevertheless lives and moves and has his being.”⁵³ In our discussion of Kierkegaard and the self, we note the relational nature of spirit—its purpose is to bring the individual into relationship with its source. Kierkegaard’s view of humanity is that of complete need of God for true selfhood. As John Davenport expounds, Kierkegaard’s conception of humanity is “as a created spirit acknowledging its debt to its creator.”⁵⁴ “Every self-relation,” says John Glenn, “also involves a God-relation, whether or not the self is aware of its foundation in God.”⁵⁵ Grounding the definition of sin in being before God reminds us of our position: we owe our everything to Him. Sin is before God, but sin is also against God. Kierkegaard explains that God is in an entirely different existence category to man: “God and man are two qualities separated by an infinite qualitative difference. Humanly speaking, any teaching that disregards this difference is demented—divinely understood, it is blasphemy.”⁵⁶ Kierkegaard consistently repeats such thinking throughout his works. In Philosophical Fragments he states, “If a human being is to come truly to know something about the unknown (the god), he must first come to know that it is different from him, absolutely different from him.”⁵⁷ What, then, is the distinction between humans and God? One popular opinion is that the infinite qualitative difference is sin. Humans sin; God does not; therefore, sin shows a qualitative difference between the two. Kristen Deede explains, “The difference between God and man, then, arises because of sin, which in turn creates the possibility for the misrelation that is at the root of despair.”⁵⁸ Kierkegaard does explicitly state that “sin is the one and only predication about a human being that in no way, either via negationis or via eminentiæ, can be stat-

 Robert C. Roberts, “The Grammar of Sin and the Conceptual Unity of The Sickness unto Death,” in The Sickness unto Death, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 140.  SKS 10, 72 / CD, 63.  John J. Davenport, “Selfhood and ‘Spirit,’” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. by John Lippitt and George Pattison, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, p. 239.  John D. Glenn Jr., “The Definition of the Self and the Structure of Kierkegaard’s Work,” in The Sickness unto Death, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 15.  SKS 11, 237 / SUD, 126.  SKS 4, 251 / PF, 46.  Deede, “The Infinite Qualitative Difference,” p. 33.

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ed of God….As sinner, man is separated from God by the most chasmic qualitative abyss.”⁵⁹ Sylvia Walsh echoes a similar sentiment, noting that Kierkegaard’s juxtaposition of God and humanity is to cause individuals to realize “one’s absolute unlikeness to the divine. Sin posits an infinite qualitative difference.”⁶⁰ A second option comes from Andrew Torrance, who equates the infinite qualitative distinction with God as “wholly other.” Torrance borrows the phrase “wholly other” from the seminal work The Idea of the Holy by Rudolph Otto. Otto defines the wholly other as “that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny,’ and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.”⁶¹ Torrance argues that God is wholly other, unknowable to humanity; yet “the only point of contact between the divine subject and an individual human subject is found in Christ.”⁶² Anti-Climacus explains that the doctrine of the God-man is unique to Christianity: “No teaching on earth has ever really brought God and man so close together as Christianity, nor can any do so, for only God himself can do that.”⁶³ In Christ, the absolute paradox, we can know God, who is infinitely, qualitatively different from us. Torrance argues for an alterity of God; God is unknowable apart from Christ. Simon Podmore agrees with Walsh and Deede that “sin is the infinite abyss which separates me from God,” but Podmore gives a third option, stating that “forgiveness is the same abyss viewed faithfully from the other side, as it were.”⁶⁴ For Podmore, God is not wholly other but holy other. One cannot understand sin without forgiveness, as Podmore notes in Kierkegaard and the Self before God: “Only through such a relational understanding of sin can one come to accept the relational understanding of forgiveness that transfigures the meaning of the infinite qualitative difference between humanity and God.”⁶⁵ Equating God

 SKS 11, 233 / SUD, 122.  Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2005, p. 24.  Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Relational, trans. by John W. Harvey, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1958, p. 26.  Andrew B. Torrance, “Beyond Existentialism: Kierkegaard on the Human Relationship with the God Who Is Wholly Other,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 16, no. 3, 2014, p. 302.  SKS 11, 230 / SUD, 117.  Simon D. Podmore, “The Holy & Wholly Other: Kierkegaard on the Alterity of God,” Heythrop Journal, vol. 53, no. 1, 2012, p. 17.  Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2011, p. 7.

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with the wholly other, claims Podmore, turns God into something truly petrifying, whereas “standing before God…may seem more like losing oneself in crushing annihilation than becoming oneself in loving relation to one’s Creator and Redeemer.”⁶⁶ In faith, one receives forgiveness, and “as such, the self’s acceptance of the gift of forgiveness negates the crushing juxtaposition of the infinite difference.”⁶⁷ Sin causes the abyss, and one crosses the abyss to the holy other in faith. Claiming God as wholly other makes God into an unknowable, terrifying reality. What shall we make of these three readings of God as infinite qualitative difference? To start, equating sin with the infinite qualitative difference is problematic. In Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, Kierkegaard says, “If the difference is infinite between God, who is in heaven, and you, who are on earth, the difference between the Holy One and the sinner is infinitely greater.”⁶⁸ Kierkegaard seems to assert two levels of difference: a mere difference of creature and creator and an exacerbated difference of sinner and holy God. The implication is that the infinite difference is inherent to the creature/creator distinction rather than an addition post-Fall. Second, in Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Kierkegaard states that “between God and a human being there is an eternal essential qualitative difference.”⁶⁹ Kierkegaard connects the difference to essence that exists eternally. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard goes to great lengths to show that sin is not essential to humanity’s essence: “Sin constantly arises, not by necessity…but by freedom.”⁷⁰ Kierkegaard contends that sin is not a necessary, essential condition of humanity, but rather humans freely choose to sin.⁷¹ If sin is not an essential attribute of humanity, then it cannot be the essential infinite qualitative difference between God and man. Also, if in eternity sin is eradicated, then the qualitative difference would be eradicated as well. Kierkegaard does not indicate such thinking in his works, but rather the distinction stands in the eschaton.⁷²

 Ibid., p. 8.  Podmore, “The Holy & Wholly Other,” p. 20.  SKS 11, 258 / WA, 123  SKS 11, 104 / BA, 181.  SKS 4, 329 / CA, 21.  We will examine the relationship between necessity and inevitability of sin in-depth in ch. 5.  One may be quick to think of Kierkegaard’s discussion on the topic in PF as a counterpoint to the above statement, where Kierkegaard states, “What then, is the difference? Indeed, what else but sin, since the difference, the absolute difference, must have been caused by the individual himself” (SKS 4, 251 / PF, 47). Kierkegaard is treating the concept of sin as untruth (which we will examine in ch. 4), and in his discourse he emphasizes that humans live in a state of untruth before God. God did not cause them to be in untruth, but rather they themselves wandered

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What of Podmore’s assessment of holy other rather than wholly other? While we can commend Podmore’s desire to ground God in a more relatable fashion, his view still leaves much to be desired. In Kierkegaard’s journal, he states, “God cannot be the highest superlative of the [human]; he is qualitatively different.”⁷³ One can predicate “holiness” to humanity. God is not a superlative, meaning he is not like humans but to an infinitely higher degree. If God is holy other, then what happens at the parousia when sin is vanquished and God’s kingdom comes? Podmore says that “forgiveness negates the crushing juxtaposition of the infinite difference.”⁷⁴ One can easily infer in his statement that if the infinite difference vanishes upon the coming kingdom, then humanity and God will be united in some ontological fashion. Torrance argues that Podmore never explicitly asserts a type of pantheism, but “this could easily be read from [his] arguments.”⁷⁵ The preferable reading agrees with Torrance: the infinite qualitative distinction is that God is wholly other, known only by God’s revelation to humanity. As Torrance proclaims, “In Kierkegaard’s thought, the infinite qualitative difference does not simply dissolve when a person is reconciled into a faithful relationship with God.”⁷⁶ We must understand Kierkegaard’s theology of God’s otherness in contrast to Hegel. Hegel’s God is not other. In fact, Hegel’s God is exceedingly mundane in that Geist is active in every process as understood via scientific logic, something that can be understood and written down, something controllable and attainable. This is exactly what Kierkegaard hates about objective knowledge: “[It] assists all humankind to cheat by copying and reeling off the results and answers.”⁷⁷ Kierkegaard shies away from any human parameters foisted upon God. Lastly, Kierkegaard frequently articulates the absolute paradox of God becoming man and dying for the sins of humanity: “The thesis that God has existed in human form, was born, grew up, etc. is certainly the paradox sensu strictissimo, the absolute paradox. But as the absolute paradox it cannot be related to a relative difference.”⁷⁸ The paradoxical nature of God interacting with his creation shows his wholly otherness. As Torrance affirms, “Christ

into untruth. Thus, the statement about the infinite qualitative difference is in reference to the culpability of the individual in the moment of realizing his folly rather than a statement on the otherness of God.  SKS 23, 347, NB19:27 / KJN 7, 354.  Podmore, “The Holy & Wholly Other,” p. 20.  Torrance, “Beyond Existentialism,” p. 300.  Ibid., p. 296.  SKS 7, 73 / CUP1, 73.  SKS 7, 198 / CUP1, 217.

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does not vanquish the infinite qualitative difference between God and human beings altogether.”⁷⁹ There is an eternal qualitative difference because even in a glorified state, redeemed humanity will still be humanity. Kierkegaard stresses the concept of sin being before God. The category “before God” reminds us of two things. First, humans owe their being and selfhood completely to God, not their mediative process of developing culture. In Hegelian thinking, God is transmogrified into an immanent force rather than the sovereign ruler of the entire universe. Second, “before God” reminds us of God’s wholly otherness. A chasm exists between creature and creator,⁸⁰ and to sin against an infinite God is infinitely horrifying. If we do not comprehend that God is sui generis, then we will never be able to comprehend the true nature of sin.

5 Misrelation: Despair, Willing, and the Self Not only is sin before God, but Kierkegaard declares sin to be “in despair not to will to be oneself” or “in despair to will to be oneself.”⁸¹ Despair is a vital component of sin, but what does Kierkegaard mean by “despair”? How does one experience despair in his everyday life? Kierkegaard defines despair as “the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself.”⁸² In short, whenever the parts of the individual human do not relate properly to one another, the individual experiences despair. Kierkegaard links despair to possibility and therefore anxiety, and as such “despair is a qualification of spirit and related to the eternal in man.”⁸³ We recall that anxiety is related to possibility but is not sin. In contrast, despair is a willful state of misrelation in the individual. Despair is the sickness unto death because all individuals have an eternal component within them that cannot be eradicated: “Thus to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as if there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness is that there is not even the ultimate hope, death….This tormenting contradiction, this sickness of the self, perpetually dying, to die and yet not die, to die to death.”⁸⁴

     

Torrance, “Beyond Existentialism,” p. 301. We will examine this dynamic closely in ch. 4. SKS 11, 195 / SUD, 81. SKS 11, 131 / SUD, 15. SKS 11, 133 / SUD, 17. SKS 11, 134 / SUD, 18.

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Categories of Despair Despair is a sickness, a persistent misrelation of the self; yet many people are not even aware of their condition. Kierkegaard identifies four main categories of despair—two forms of unconscious despair and two forms of conscious despair. The first category of despair is despair of finitude and infinitude. Since the self is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, any relation not “in equilibrium” will result in despair.⁸⁵ Despair of finitude/infinitude manifests in two ways: either an overemphasis on finitude (the physical) or an overemphasis on infinitude (the immaterial). An overemphasis on infinitude leads to an individual who daydreams, whose head is in the clouds, lo que se va por los cerros de Úbeda. Such an individual does not ground himself in reality “in such a way that [his daydreaming] only leads him away from himself.”⁸⁶ An overemphasis on finitude leads people to a “despairing reductionism” who “mortgage themselves to the world.”⁸⁷ They do not recognize the supernatural in their existence. Such a despair is an unconscious despair—most people do not even recognize their predicament. The second category of despair is despair of possibility and necessity. This category, too, has two forms. The initial form is when possibility lacks necessity. Such a person knows what is possible for himself, but he does not actualize the possibility. Kierkegaard explains that “what is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to necessity in one’s life, to what may be called one’s own limitations.”⁸⁸ The second form is necessity lacking possibility. An individual may know what he must do, but he is unable to do it in his own power. The good news is “that with God everything is possible….Then the question is whether he will believe that for God everything is possible.”⁸⁹ This category, too, is unconscious despair. Ignorance of having a self is the third category of despair. To illustrate this category, Kierkegaard uses the example of a house with multiple levels. The top floor has a beautiful view, but the despair of ignorance “[prefers] to live in the basement.”⁹⁰ Such an individual is fine with living in lower levels of existence,

     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

11, 130 / SUD, 14. 11, 147 / SUD, 31. 11, 149 / SUD, 33. SKS 11, 150 / SUD, 35. 11, 152 / SUD, 36. 11, 153 / SUD, 38. 11, 158 / SUD, 43.

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not wanting to move forward to authentic selfhood. Kierkegaard notes that this conscious despair is the form “most common in the world.”⁹¹ The final category of despair is when one is conscious of being in despair but refuses to act appropriately. Kierkegaard posits two primary ways people misbehave in despair. The first person knows that there is more to life. She knows that God exists and that she is an individual with a soul, yet this individual is scared to move forward in selfhood. Kierkegaard calls such trepidation the despair of weakness. The second person, like the first, knows that God exists, yet she refuses to submit to becoming the self she is supposed to be, following her own path instead. Kierkegaard calls this the despair of defiance. Despair is universal to humanity. Our syntheses are not relating properly, and we attempt in feeble ways to assuage the feeling of emptiness in ourselves. Kierkegaard sums up his discussion of despair with a somber observation: The self in despair is always building only castles in the air, is only shadowboxing. All these imaginatively constructed virtues make it look splendid; like oriental poetry, they fascinate for a moment; such self-command, such imperturbability, such ataraxia, etc. practically border on the fabulous. Yes, they really do, and the basis of the whole thing is nothing.⁹²

The despairing self builds its foundations on nothing. As Alastair Hannay illustrates, “Anti-Climacus’s despair is not the idea of a propellent but of a retardant.”⁹³ The individual in despair slows down his proper development as a self, sinking away from himself, attempting to eradicate himself without the means to do so, wallowing in the sickness unto death.

Not to Will to Be Oneself or to Will to Be Oneself Sin is before God, in despair, not to will to be oneself or to will to be oneself. Kierkegaard mentions that his definition of sin “is intensified weakness or intensified defiance.”⁹⁴ Let us first discuss what Kierkegaard does not mention in this definition. Anti-Climacus does not go on a diatribe adumbrating particular sins like murder, blasphemy, etc. If he were to focus on specific instances of sin, then

 SKS 11, 160 / SUD, 45.  SKS 11, 183 / SUD, 69.  Alastair Hannay, “Kierkegaard and the Variety of Despair,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 335.  SKS 11, 191 / SUD, 77.

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sin would turn into an objective study—a list of do’s and don’ts. Sin is an active position⁹⁵ meaning it is something that an individual posits. Kierkegaard therefore constructs his definition as broadly as possible, so that “like a net, [it] embraces all forms.”⁹⁶ Second, Kierkegaard, the fervent admirer of Socrates, vehemently disagrees with the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance. If sin were only ignorance, then an individual never could consciously sin. The Greek thinking is “defective” because “sin is rooted in willing” rather than a passive ignorance of a particular topic.⁹⁷ The will is key, says Kierkegaard, clearly spelling out the willfulness of sin in his definition. What is the difference between anxiety and despair? Anxiety is unwilful—it is posited from a choice over which the individual may have no control. Despair, though, is a willful act of positing a misrelation in the self. Glenn indicates that “Kierkegaard ultimately stresses here the volitional rather than the cognitive element of the self-relation.”⁹⁸ If the issue is volitional, then God does not cause despair—humans cause despair. As Louis Dupré explicates, “In despair, the individual has already determined himself to spirit, although this determination may sometimes consist in a refusal to be determined—obduracy in spiritlessness. Therefore, the despairing man is at every moment responsible for his despair.”⁹⁹ Humans are without excuse; and as Kierkegaard expresses, “Scripture always defines sin as disobedience….A definition of sin can never be too spiritual…for sin is specifically a qualification of spirit.”¹⁰⁰ Sin as a qualification of spirit means that it involves the dynamics of becoming a self. Kierkegaard claims that sin is not to will to be oneself. After the above discussion on Kierkegaard’s thought, now we can make sense of this statement. A person who does not will to be oneself is a person who knows the truth of the matter—he is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite. He knows he is in despair—he senses that something is amiss. He knows that God exists, that there is a spiritual life, but he refuses to become a self—that is, he refuses to submit to God, the ground of his being. Such a person does not act upon the situation. As Davenport clarifies, “To exist ‘before God’ means to live in a volitional commitment that is unreserved, standing for something as defining one’s whole identity, being willing to submit his identity to eternal judgment.”¹⁰¹ Not to

 SKS 11, 211– 212 / SUD, 99 – 100.  SKS 11, 196 / SUD, 82.  SKS 11, 205 – 206 / SUD, 93.  Glenn, “The Definition of the Self,” p. 11.  Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian, p. 67.  SKS 11, 195 / SUD, 81.  Davenport, “Selfhood and ‘Spirit,’” p. 245.

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will to be oneself is the intensified weakness of despair. The weak one does not want to be who he is called to be—a true self. He wants to stay in his own world, not willing to risk venturing outward. Kierkegaard also asserts that sin is to will to be oneself. While the previous form of intensified despair is when someone does not submit to God by refusing to act, this version is when someone defiantly knows what he should do yet willfully acts against God. Such a person knows “what one is—a sinner—and for that reason [wants] to dispense with the forgiveness of sins.”¹⁰² Such intensified defiance comes from a growing awareness of self-consciousness, becoming a “theological self, the self directly before God,” becoming more and more aware of the sickness unto death.¹⁰³ Such a person, as Rae proclaims, shows “the propensity of human beings to go their own way, without God, and to fashion for themselves an illusory and impossible identity and existence.”¹⁰⁴ The defiant individual draws close to God in knowledge but far away from God in action—so much so that he may “[come] directly before Christ” and still will to be himself.¹⁰⁵ Such defiance causes one to be “even more intensively absorbed in sin.”¹⁰⁶ The defiant one wants to be the basis for his reality. He wants to create a world without God, not caring for God’s ways. He builds his life—his self— upon himself.

6 Conclusion What, then, is the root issue in Kierkegaard’s definition of sin in The Sickness unto Death? The key takeaway is that sin is a misrelation to God. God created us as a synthesis of physical and spiritual, and our purpose is to relate back to God in proper relationship. Anxiety offers the condition for us to actualize spirit, yet we willingly choose to forge our own path, either by refusing to submit or by defiantly attempting to be the masters of our own destiny in a sad “addiction to the world,” as Hannay conveys.¹⁰⁷ Our despairing misrelation is against a God who is infinitely, qualitatively different from us. Kristen Deede shares that “only through the recognition of sin can a human being encounter the infinite qualitative difference between himself and God; only in the encounter with this differ-

     

SKS 11, 225 / SUD, 113. SKS 11, 193 / SUD, 79. Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, p. 95. SKS 11, 225 / SUD, 113. SKS 11, 226 / SUD, 114. Hannay, “Kierkegaard and the Variety of Despair,” p. 339.

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ence can he become aware of both the true synthesis he was created to be and the means to achieve this seemingly impossible synthesis.”¹⁰⁸ Our disobedience prevents us from being true human beings. Let us use a specific sin as an example. Imagine a child in a store, asking his parents to buy him some candy. The parents refuse, citing their upcoming supper plans. The child defiantly steals the candy, is caught, and then lies to his parents about how he obtained the candy. How is lying about stealing candy misrelation to God? Why does the child lie? Clearly the child does not want to face the consequences of going against his parents. Why did the child steal the candy? Clearly, he wanted the candy without caring about his upcoming dinner. What gives the child the authority to go against his parents and against the storeowner? No one; the child creates his own reality where he is the determiner of good and evil. In the act of stealing candy, the child is building his life on himself rather than building his life on God. His stealing the candy is a misrelation to God. And here we have the sad reality of humanity—we have severed ourselves from God. The wound is defiantly self-inflicted. In the face of possibility, we choose our own way, inflicting the malady of despair upon ourselves. The severed self is the foundation of Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin. We see the ultimate tragedy of our predicament: from the very thing we want—to be complete and whole—we flee. My severed self is tragic, yet I did this to myself. One can see that Kierkegaard is an obvious precursor to the neoorthodox theologians Emil Bruner and Karl Barth. Kierkegaard shows that misrelation to God is humanity’s fundamental disorder. Brunner and Barth take aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought and weave it into their discussions on the imago Dei. Karl Barth explains, “[The image of God] does not consist in anything that man is or does. It consists as man himself consists as the creature of God. He would not be man if he were not the image of God.”¹⁰⁹ Brunner, too, focuses on the individual in his totality: “Hence the heart of the creaturely existence of man is freedom, selfhood, to be an ‘I’, a person.”¹¹⁰ For Brunner and Barth, the goal of humans is to be authentic selves, and humanity’s relation to God is what it means to be made in God’s image. Kierkegaard explains the negative side of the relational self—a human who misrelates lives in sin and despair. Brunner and Barth demonstrate the positive side of humans being in relationship with  Deede, “The Infinite Qualitative Difference,” p. 44.  Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Creation, vol. 1, trans. by H. Knight et al., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers 2010 (Church Dogmatics, vol. 3), p. 184.  Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, trans. by Olive Wyon, London: Lutterworth, 1952 (Dogmatics, vol. 2), p. 56.

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God. As Brunner remarks, authentic Christians, who properly relate to God, can now “[live] from God, and not towards God.” Christians are no longer slaves “to programmes,” rather Christians can be the people they are called to be.¹¹¹ When we are resting in the imago Dei, when “the self rests transparently in the power that established it,” we can finally be. ¹¹² As Brunner puts it, authentic relationship with God “makes us real.”¹¹³ Barth summarizes the great privilege it is to be human: “To this there undoubtedly belongs in a decisive and comprehensive way the freedom to be both from God and to Him, the endowment and adaption to be the partner of God, the partner of God and not merely undefined transcendence.”¹¹⁴ Kierkegaard’s view of the self shows us the darkness of sin, but it also shows the radiance of God’s goodness. Although we willingly disobey God and plunge into despair, God provides the way in Christ for us to be reconciled to Himself. In fact, Rae notes that for Kierkegaard “Christ is the criterion for what it is to be human.”¹¹⁵ To be a true human, a positive unity, is to be like Christ. Christ grounded his life transparently in God, not in selfish defiance or cowardly weakness. Kierkegaard’s assessment of sin as misrelation is a powerful image to demonstrate the drastic nature of sin. Sin is not a mistake or ignorance: it is a defiant, volitional act against an absolute God. The tragedy is that we willingly flee from God, yet God is the only way for us to become authentically human. One is reminded of Augustine’s Confessions when he eloquently states, “You [God] made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”¹¹⁶ Kierkegaard is a theologian in a long chain of theologians who sees the sadness of the human plight, of our desire to run from the very source of life to our own demise. All sin is rooted in misrelation between humanity and God. This truly is sinfulness at its most basic level. There is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as self, or, what amounts to the same thing, never became aware and in the deepest sense never gained the impression that there is a God and that “he,” he himself, his self, exists before this God—an infinite benefaction that is never gained except

 Emil Brunner, God and Man: Four Essays on the Nature of Personality, trans. by David Cairns, London: Student Christian Movement Press 1936, p. 82, p. 84, p. 89 (my emphasis).  SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14.  Brunner, God and Man, p. 89.  Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Creation, vol. 2, trans. by H. Knight et al., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers 2010 (Church Dogmatics, vol. 3), p. 201.  Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, p. 98.  Augustine, Confessions 1.1.

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through despair. What wretchedness that so many go on living this way, cheated of this most blessed of thoughts! What wretchedness that we are engrossed in or encourage the human throng to be engrossed in everything else, using them to supply the energy for the drama of life but never reminding them of this blessedness. What wretchedness that they are lumped together and deceived instead of being split apart so that each individual may gain the highest, the only thing worth living for and enough to live in for an eternity.¹¹⁷

 SKS 11, 143 / SUD, 26 – 27.

Chapter 4 Sin as Untruth In Matthew 11:6 Jesus replies to the inquiries of John the Baptist’s disciples by saying, “Blessed is the one who is not offended by me.” The idea of Christ being offensive was foreign to the Christendom of nineteenth century Copenhagen. Hegelian philosophy sought to erase the difficulties of Christianity by showing how its theology fit within a logical system. The Danish Lutheran Church was the official church of Denmark, so religion was commonplace in everyday life. Kierkegaard reflects that “in those early days, a Christian was a fool in the eyes of the world….Now one is a Christian as a matter of course.”¹ Something that is a matter of course is inoffensive, for the broader culture determines what is or is not socially acceptable. If Christianity can become something inoffensive, then why does Christ ask that individuals not be offended by him? Kierkegaard has an extended discourse on the concept of offense at Christ in Practice in Christianity. Offense is necessary for faith, as Kierkegaard bluntly states: “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.”² Why would anyone be offended by Christ? One can posit any number of answers, but Kierkegaard’s stress on the offense of Christ is deeply rooted in his doctrine of sin. When humans are presented with choices, they become anxious. In anxiety, they despair and misrelate to God. Such a severed self is the foundation of sin, but Kierkegaard also discusses another aspect of sin that results in offense. In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard’s persona Johannes Climacus offers a definition of sin: “The teacher, then, is the god himself, who, acting as the occasion, prompts the learner to be reminded that he is untruth and is that through his own fault. But this state—to be untruth and to be that through one’s own fault—what can we call it? Let us call it sin.”³ In The Sickness unto Death, we see the results of sin as misrelation—one lives a life of despair, severed from his source of being. In Philosophical Fragments, we see sin as untruth. How does Kierkegaard arrive at such a conclusion, and how does it relate back to the individual’s existence?

 SKS 7, 197 / CUP1, 216.  SKS 12, 122 / PC, 115.  SKS 4, 224 / PF, 15. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-004

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In this chapter, we examine the noetic issues related to sin in Kierkegaard’s thought. First, we investigate Kierkegaard’s understanding of learning the truth about God in Philosophical Fragments. Kierkegaard’s doctrine of revelation directly affects how he views sin. Second, we look at what Kierkegaard calls the Absolute Paradox and how it interacts with understanding the truth. The Absolute Paradox is a conundrum for knowledge, and one must accept it in faith. Lastly, we see the results of humanity’s condition of being in untruth: offense at the message of Christianity. These factors allow us to comprehend the second definition Kierkegaard provides: sin is untruth.

1 The Problem of Knowing God: Contingency and Eternity In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard asks, “Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?”⁴ Kierkegaard constructs his “thought-project” by examining the Socratic understanding of knowledge. Socratic thinking sees knowledge as something learners recollect. Because individuals have preexisting souls, they simply forgot the truth when their soul was joined to their body. Socrates as a teacher, then, acts as a midwife, aiding individuals to recall what is latent within themselves. The moment of recalling knowledge at “any point of departure in time is eo ipso something accidental, a vanishing point, an occasion.”⁵ Socratic thinking puts the teacher in an interesting position; the teacher does not have anything the student needs—the teacher only prods the individual to know what he has forgotten. Being a student of Socrates or any famous demagogue does not mean necessarily anything special, but rather it is only of “historical interest…because the truth in which [the student rests] was in [him] and emerged from [him].”⁶ Socratically, teachers do not possess knowledge; they only assist students in realizing the knowledge within themselves. The Socratic concept of recollection seems to be at odds with the average experience of teacher/student relationships. We all can think of a moment in time when we learned something outside of ourselves: a teacher brought us information that we did not have. Kierkegaard explains, “Now if the moment is to acquire decisive significance, then the seeker up until that moment must not

 SKS 4, 213 / PF, 15.  SKS 4, 220 / PF, 11.  SKS 4, 221 / PF, 12.

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have possessed the truth, not even in the form of ignorance.”⁷ We have already examined Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the moment in regard to anxiety and despair, but the moment is significant for learning as well. We learn something at a moment in time, and, as Merold Westphal explains, “The point is the quality of moment in which the learner is taught by the teacher, not its temporal address.”⁸ A quality teacher allows for a better possible moment. In Socrates, one sees the teacher as the occasion for learning the truth, and the moment in time is not important—the individual is in a state of ignorance. Conversely, Kierkegaard reasons that if the moment of learning truth is important, then the learner must be in a state of untruth. If the student is not in untruth, then he does not need to learn anything. If the student is in untruth, then the teacher must be in a state of truth. Not only does the teacher know the truth, but the teacher “must provide [the student] with the condition for understanding it.”⁹ Such a thought process seems commonsense. A biology teacher has the knowledge of the natural world while the student does not. The biology professor then teaches the content to the student at a moment in time, and her clear explanation of the material provides the condition for the student to understand the teacher. At first glance, Kierkegaard does not say anything scandalous. What, then, is the reason for his thought-project? The problem, notes Kierkegaard, is when we move from learning about the natural world to learning about the supernatural world. The term supernatural denotes “above” or “outside” the natural, so our being steeped in the natural causes a problem for knowing God. How can a contingent human learn about an eternal God? Furthermore, how can a finite teacher pass on knowledge of an infinite God? The teacher and student relationship works fine when talking about the natural world, but how could one arrive at knowledge of an eternal God by means of finite methods?

Something about Lessing Kierkegaard is not the first to ask such a question about the finite knowing the infinite. Kierkegaard is in fact channeling Gotthold Lessing’s influential essay “On Proof of the Spirit and of Power.” In that brief correspondence, Lessing  SKS 4, 222 / PF, 13.  Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2014 (Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker), p. 70 (my emphasis).  SKS 4, 223 / PF, 14 (my emphasis).

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poses the problem of believing historical reports of miracles at second hand— that is, Lessing is not an eyewitness to the miracles. Lessing takes the title of his essay from Origen’s classic Against Celsus. Celsus asked Origen for proof of the veracity of Christianity, and Origen directed Celsus to look at the contemporary miracles done in the name of Christ as proof. Lessing does not doubt what Origen saw, but Lessing has not seen any miracles. All Lessing has is reports of miraculous activity: “Fulfilled prophecies which I myself experience are one thing; fulfilled prophecies of which I have only historical knowledge that others claim to have experienced are another.”¹⁰ For Lessing, historical knowledge is not on the same level as the knowledge of reason. Being a good son of the Enlightenment, Lessing states, “Contingent truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.”¹¹ Such a statement throws a historical religion like Christianity into turbulent waters. If Christ were historically raised from the dead and performed miracles, then how could one know these historical events to be true with certainty? Lessing then posits his famous object lesson: “This, this is the broad and ugly ditch which I cannot get across, no matter how earnestly I have tried to make the leap. If anyone can help me over it, I beg and implore him to do so.”¹² Lessing demonstrates the conundrum of attempting to understand the supernatural from the natural: a huge ditch prevents one from moving from the contingent to the eternal. Kierkegaard agrees with Lessing’s assessment of the predicament of learning an eternal truth. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard’s Climacus elaborates on the problem of learning about God. Kierkegaard categorizes truth in two ways: objective and subjective. Objective truth is truth as an object, as a thing to be studied: it “invests everything in the result and assists all humankind to cheat by copying and reeling off the results and answers.”¹³ Objective truth concerns itself with quantitative issues—measuring, examining, comparing, etc. The problem with objective truth is that much of it is historical in nature, and “with regard to the historical the greatest certainty is only an approximation, and an approximation is too little to build [one’s] happiness on.”¹⁴ Every historical inquiry involves humans examining and thinking through phe-

 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005 (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), p. 83.  Ibid., p. 85.  Ibid., p. 87 (my emphasis).  SKS 7, 73 / CUP1, 73.  SKS 7, 30 / CUP1, 23.

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nomena, and the human mind does not have a perfect, exhaustive grasp of reality. Thomas Anderson elucidates such an implication: “No individual can attain an unlimited, absolute, God’s eye view of reality….The reason why Climacus designates empirical knowledge as only approximation is because its object, empirical being, is contingent.”¹⁵ We cannot know God by our own historical means: Lessing’s Ditch is still in play. Conversely, subjective knowledge is the knowledge of inward appropriation. Kierkegaard praises Lessing’s attitude toward subjectivity: “He closed himself off in the isolation of subjectivity, did not allow himself to be tricked into becoming world-historical or systematic with regard to the religious, but he understood, and knew how to maintain, that the religious pertained to Lessing and Lessing alone.”¹⁶ Lessing, claims Kierkegaard, understands the subjective aspect of knowledge of the eternal. World-historical investigation does not bring one closer to God, for knowledge of God is rooted in subjectivity: “Subjective thinking invests everything in the process of becoming and omits the result.”¹⁷ “Subjective” knowledge means that the learned content is internalized in the individual so that it effects actual change. As Alastair Hannay comments, Kierkegaard’s citation of Lessing brings us “to the realization that Enlightenment goals can only be secured by a relationship with God—in other words through a radical break with Enlightenment.”¹⁸

Attack upon Condition-dom The above discussion now brings us back to the thought project in Philosophical Fragments. In a moment one can come to know the truth if the teacher brings forth the condition of knowing. Two problems lie in the way of knowing God. First is Lessing’s Ditch and the inability of approximations to lead one to God. Second is the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humanity, which we discussed in the previous chapter. If God is wholly other and we are incapable from our own perspective to reach upward to God, then never will we attain true knowledge of God by our own devices. Kierkegaard reasons that

 Thomas C. Anderson, “Kierkegaard and Approximation Knowledge,” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1997 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 12), p. 190.  SKS 7, 67 / CUP1, 65.  SKS 7, 73 / CUP1, 73.  Alastair Hannay, “Having Lessing on One’s Side,” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 223.

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“as the learner exists, he is indeed created, and, accordingly, God must have given him the condition for understanding the truth.”¹⁹ God grants humanity the condition, yet humanity still does not know God. For some reason, the condition for knowing the truth is missing. The missing condition, argues Kierkegaard, must be caused by the learner, not the teacher: “The untruth, then, is not merely outside the truth but is polemical against the truth, which is expressed by saying that he himself has forfeited and is forfeiting the condition.”²⁰ Kierkegaard paints the picture of a learner who refuses to know God, hostile in his reasoning. Lessing’s Ditch and the infinite qualitative difference keep a barrier between the natural and the supernatural, but the gracious God provides humanity the condition for knowing that He exists. And how does humanity respond? “They became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”²¹ Kierkegaard summarizes the predicament: “But this state—to be untruth and to be that through one’s own fault—what can we call it? Let us call it sin.”²² Individuals refuse the condition of knowing God. Being in untruth is more than mere ignorance of a fact. “Ignorance” is the Socratic definition of sin and something remedied through recollection.²³ Being in untruth is a decision, a subjective position against the truth, an inward appropriation of a lie. Sin, then, is an inclination of the heart against God, a desire to “turn—every one—to his own way.”²⁴ In Kierkegaard’s epoch, we see an overly optimistic understanding of the mind’s ability to grasp truth correctly. Hegelian philosophy turns everything into a scientific endeavor that humans can perceive accurately. Kierkegaard repudiates such thinking, showing the polemical nature of rejecting the truth. As J. Heywood Thomas explains, “[Kierkegaard’s] thesis is that we can only understand the grammar of ‘God’ and ‘revelation’ when we resist the temptation to apply the wrong models of knowledge and proof and pay attention to that radical evil that Kant and Fichte had indeed

     

SKS 4, 223 / PF, 15. SKS 4, 224 / PF, 15, (my emphasis). Rom 1:21– 23. SKS 4, 224 / PF, 15. See the conversation in SKS 11, 201– 208 / SUD, 87– 96. Isa 53:6.

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recognized as part and parcel of the talk of ‘revelation.’”²⁵ Our state of untruth severely corrupts our ability to know God. Despite humanity being noetically at odds with its creator, God still desires for humans to know him. Although individuals are polemical against God He is still the teacher, yet direct communication does not solve the problem. If untruth is subjective against God, then learning more objective facts about God will not bring an unbeliever closer to the truth. Preaching an overly objective religion—as “a sum of tenets”²⁶—does not notify the hearer of the volitional position in which he put himself. One must realize his subjective standing, otherwise he will never arrive at the point of decision. As Hugh Pyper comments, “In order to teach people to exist, you have first to make them realize that they do not exist, and then hold out before them the actuality of existence in such a way that they grasp it as a realizable possibility for themselves.”²⁷ Subjectivity is the knowledge of decision, but how does one get across Lessing’s Ditch to truly knowing God? Kierkegaard says the answer is obvious: one leaps “because the leap is the category of decision.”²⁸ This “leap” toward faith is not a blind, irrational faith, but rather it is “a conceptual shift in perspective” in which the individual believes God in faith.²⁹ As Glenn Kirkconnell demonstrates, The learner is untruth, not only ignorant but actually moving away from the truth and reflexively hostile toward it. In this case, the learner will not come to the truth, so the truth must be brought to the learner. To understand the truth is an essential human condition; so the teacher who gives the truth is giving the human learner back his or her own human nature.³⁰

One leaps toward God, and God brings her over Lessing’s Ditch, making her an authentic human being. Only by embracing the Absolute Paradox can one come to know God and overcome the sinful state of untruth.

 J. Heywood Thomas, “Revelation, Knowledge, and Proof,” in Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1994 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 7), p. 168 (my emphasis).  SKS 7, 197 / CUP1, 215.  Hugh S. Pyper, “The Lesson of Eternity: Christ as Teacher in Kierkegaard and Hegel,” in Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 130.  SKS 7, 97 / CUP1, 99.  M. Jamie Ferreira, “Faith and the Kierkegaardian Leap,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 221.  W. Glenn Kirkconnell, Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation: From Philosophical Fragments through the Two Ages, London: Continuum 2010 (Continuum Studies in Philosophy), p. 14.

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2 The Absolute Paradox We have a paradox. As finite creatures, we desire to know God, the ground of our being. Because He is infinitely different from us, we cannot know Him unless He reveals Himself to us. We cannot cross Lessing’s Ditch, but God can reach down and communicate to us. Yet how can an eternal God enter into the temporal, into history? Kierkegaard calls this “the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”³¹ Attempting to prove God’s existence is a fool’s errand, for one can know God only by revelation. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard gives an illustration of proving that a mighty king exists. One does not prove that a king exists through objective facts and information. Imagine a man, standing before a king, attempting to prove that the king exists—what a ludicrous picture! Kierkegaard says that one proves the existence of the king by the act of submission, kneeling before his majesty. Likewise, any formal demonstration of God is ultimately missing the point: God does not need us to prove he exists. God wants us to know him and respond appropriately—“and thus one also demonstrates the existence of God by worship—not by demonstrations.”³² In Fragments, Kierkegaard echoes the same sentiment: “Therefore, anyone who wants to demonstrate the existence of God…proves something else instead, at times something that perhaps did not even need demonstrating, and in any case never anything better.”³³ All proof can do is show that a paradox exists. Explanations of the paradox are completely acceptable, but a clarification of the paradox does not try to erase the paradox. An explanation should never remove the paradoxical nature of God acting within time: “The person who takes it upon himself to explain the paradox…will focus directly upon showing that it must be a paradox.”³⁴ Paradoxes are inherently hard to understand, but the problem does not lie with God. As C. Stephen Evans clarifies, “When we try to understand [the paradox] we may find ourselves saying self-contradictory things, but of course this does not mean that the reality we have encountered is itself self-contradictory. It means that there is a problem with our conceptual equipment.”³⁵ If Lessing’s Ditch and the infinite qualitative difference were not enough, being in a

 SKS 4, 243 / PF, 37.  SKS 7, 496 / CUP1, 546.  SKS 4, 249 / PF, 43.  SKS 7, 202 / CUP1, 221 (my emphasis).  C. Stephen Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1992 (The Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion), p. 104 (my emphasis).

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state of untruth exacerbates our misunderstanding of the paradox. Sin perverts our ability to understand God clearly.

Knowledge in Existence One should explain the paradox without diminishing it, for the goal is for people to know the paradox personally. Individuals exist in the real world, not in some abstract thought experiment. For Kierkegaard, knowing something in existence is de facto subjective knowledge and not objective knowledge. How is this the case? Hegelian “objective” examination is outside of history, at the end of history once Geist has completed its goal: “Everything [world-historically] is understood afterward.”³⁶ If dialectical mediation is a process ad infinitum, then the individual is always in process. Any new information is a potential antithesis to the individual’s thesis, causing a new mediated synthesis. In order to reflect upon the process, an individual must continually beseech the logical system, which is outside of history, unknown until Geist’s τέλος τετέλεσται. Such a conundrum is why Kierkegaard calls objective truth an approximation, for, as Anderson points out, Kierkegaard is contrasting existence “to an eternal finished (idealist) system.”³⁷ In process, objective knowledge is approximation, an “accidental knowing,” for the individual does not truly understand the ultimate τέλος in the midst of history. To know the essence of something, one must be an existing individual: “[Essential knowing] means that the knowledge is related to the knower, who is essentially an existing person, and that all essential knowing is therefore essentially related to existence and to existing.”³⁸ The concept of “essential” and “accidental” knowing may sound pedantic at first hearing, but one must keep Kierkegaard’s context in mind when examining the significance of such terms. First, Kierkegaard focuses on temporal existence and action rather than abstraction. As Evans notes, essential truth “is the truth that is essential for an exister to have, the truth that itself has as an essential relationship to existence.”³⁹ Second, Kierkegaard rejects the idealism of Hegel and its desire to neglect the physical in lieu of immaterial abstraction. As Merold

 SKS 7, 145 / CUP1, 156.  Anderson, “Kierkegaard and Approximation Knowledge,” p. 192.  SKS 7, 181 / CUP1, 197– 198.  C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s “Fragments” and “Postscript”: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities 1983, p. 123.

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Westphal explains, “Every step we take in [the strategies of idealism’s] direction is a step away, by abstraction, from what is essential to essential knowing, my responsibility for my own becoming.”⁴⁰ We recall our conversation on anxiety and the ability to become a self. God creates humans to actualize selves rather than theorize selves. As Westphal succinctly states, “‘Existence,’ as Climacus uses the term, is the denial of idealism’s claim to have transcended the human condition in order to see the world sub specie aeterni.”⁴¹ Humans must decide in passion to believe in something rather than delaying judgment until the system sorts out the particulars, “because objectively there is no truth for existing beings, only approximations, whereas subjectively truth for them is inwardness, because the decision of truth is in subjectivity.”⁴² Yet how can an existing individual believe in something outside of temporal existence, something he cannot comprehend? Kierkegaard’s understanding of subjectivity works well with physical matters. Let us use a common children’s rhyme as an example: “Don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back!” Someone who objectively believes such a statement can spit out the rhyme with ease, explaining situations of how best to avoid cracks, recounting stories of past children who stepped on a crack and now their mothers are in wheelchairs, etc. However, if the one spouting objective knowledge does not actually avoid stepping on cracks, then he does not authentically believe the truth he regurgitates. One subjectively knows something when he acts upon it: avoiding the cracks at all cost. Kierkegaard makes sense; essentially he is saying that actions speak louder than words, that we should walk-the-walk and not just talkthe-talk. Yet how can one come to subjective knowledge of something supernatural? Kierkegaard explains this conundrum: “The paradoxical passion of understanding is, then, continually colliding with this unknown, which certainly does exist but is also unknown and to that extent does not exist.”⁴³ The only fact one can come to is that “[the god] is different from him, absolutely different from him.”⁴⁴ In order to believe subjectively, one must give herself over to God totally in a qualitative leap, but one cannot know with absolute certainty whether the leap is the right choice. As Anderson explains, “[Climacus] does not mean that such [objective] knowledge cannot achieve truth, but only that it cannot

 Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press 1996 (Purdue University Press Series in the History of Philosophy), p. 116 (my emphasis).  Ibid., p. 115.  SKS 7, 199 / CUP1, 218.  SKS 4, 249 / PF, 44.  SKS 4, 251 / PF, 46.

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achieve intellectual certitude or necessity.”⁴⁵ No existing individual has an Archimedean point of view.

Proclaiming Paradox Kierkegaard elaborates in Postscript that “the paradox is the objective uncertainty that is the expression for the passion of inwardness that is truth.” The issue is not God—“the eternal, essential truth is itself not at all a paradox”—but rather humanity’s contingency is the problem—“it is a paradox by being related to an existing person.”⁴⁶ Humanity’s issue is epistemological rather than ontological. God is not absurd, meaning God is not irrational: “What, then, is the absurd? The absurd is that the eternal truth has come into existence in time, that God has come into existence, has been born, has grown up, etc.”⁴⁷ As one can see, the absurd is directly related to faith in Christ, that an eternal God would take on flesh to save sinners—the Truth coming to the untruth. Such an understanding of God seems absurd to those who do not believe in faith. As Sylvia Walsh notes, “The absurd more specifically is a category employed only by nonbelievers, not by believers.”⁴⁸ In the introduction to Postscript, Climacus claims to be “an outsider” to Christianity, approaching the religious stage of existence but yet not having arrived.⁴⁹ From the outside, Christianity is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,”⁵⁰ an absurd notion of an eternal God working within history. As Walsh summarizes, “The absolute paradox itself is absurd because it involves the coming into existence of eternal truth or the god, whose being or essence is not subject to the contingencies of space and time.”⁵¹ God is not absurd. Faith is not absurd. To a non-Christian, the predicament of sin and the solution of salvation in Christianity appear absurd. For Climacus, it is absurd to take the leap into faith because he cannot know with complete assurance that it is true.

 Anderson, “Kierkegaard and Approximation Knowledge,” p. 191.  SKS 7, 187 / CUP1, 205.  SKS 7, 193 / CUP1, 210.  Sylvia Walsh, “Echoes of Absurdity: The Offended Consciousness and the Absolute Paradox in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments,” in Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 40 (my emphasis).  SKS 7, 25 / CUP1, 16.  1 Cor 1:23 (NIV).  Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2005, p. 58.

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Kierkegaard provides a clear statement of the paradoxical nature of Christ: The thesis that God has existed in human form, was born, grew up, etc. is certainly the paradox sensu strictissimo, the absolute paradox. But as the absolute paradox it cannot be related to a relative difference. A relative paradox is related to a relative difference between more or less sagacious people. But the absolute paradox, precisely because it is absolute, can be related only to the absolute difference by which a human being differs from God; it cannot be related to a relative bickering between one human being and another about whether one is a little smarter than the other. But the absolute difference between God and a human being is simply this, that a human being is an individual existing being… whose essential task therefore cannot be to think sub specie aeterni, because as long as he exists, he himself, although eternal, is essentially an existing person and the essential for him must therefore be inwardness in existence; God, however, is the infinite one, who is eternal.⁵²

The paradox is the Incarnation, the idea that God enters history in such a profound way. The true God is not an infinitely smart, quantitatively greater human whose goal is to pass on gnosis for individuals to parse through logical systems. The paradox is not noetic content, but rather it is a person; He personally comes to the student severed by sin—in untruth—in order to teach the student about Himself. The teacher becomes the savior, deliverer, and reconciler of the student.⁵³ Kierkegaard gives an example of a king who loves a lowborn lady. In order to woo her for a truly loving relationship, the king cannot come as announced. If he shows up in his royal regalia, she will fall on her knees and treat him as a superior, not as a person in a relationship. If the king lifts up the girl to his status, giving her money and prestige, she would forever treat him as a king above her. The only way for the king to break through is a descent “in the form of a servant.”⁵⁴ God, the only true king who has all glory and honor and power, wants to be in a relationship with humans who have rejected the truth. What a baffling idea, a God who puts on flesh to serve us! The king as a servant, Immanuel, God with us—such a reality is an absurd thought to think! As Dupré expounds, “The paradox of the person of Christ, as Kierkegaard understands it, emphasizes the strictly personal character of the act of faith. Christianity is not a doctrine, but a person to Whom I entrust myself without reserve.”⁵⁵ Kierkegaard’s word of choice for so great a salvation is “absurd.” God is above us in every way, and his plans and actions may seem nonsensical to us; yet we  SKS 7, 198 – 199 / CUP1, 217.  SKS 4, 226 / PF, 17.  SKS 4, 238 / PF, 31.  Louis K. Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian: The Dialectic of Christian Existence, New York: Sheed and Ward 1963, p. 137.

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must be careful not to treat God as if he were in the same existence category as humanity. Considering the above—the infinite coming into time, the king becoming a servant, the unknown becoming knowable—humans still miss out on the grace of God. In Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard states that “sin is not a moment but is an eternal falling away from the eternal.”⁵⁶ Sin is untruth, a falling away from the eternal truth. The finite aspect of our human compositional synthesis overrides our eternal aspect and has eternal consequences. Lessing’s Ditch prevents us from rising to God, but God graciously reaches out to us. Despite this, we still refuse to learn the truth. As Walsh explains, “If the understanding stands outside the absolute paradox, the implication is that anything the understanding has to say about it is suspect or distorted in some fashion.”⁵⁷ Paradoxically, Kierkegaard also states that sin is “temporally to lose the eternal.”⁵⁸ To eternally lose the eternal shows the lasting effects of sin in the hereafter. Sin as temporally losing the eternal shows the present effects of sin. The issue is in our thinking, in our defiance toward God by choosing untruth. In our unwise choice, we lose the aspect of the eternal in our lives. Such a concept is ludicrous on paper—why would anyone reject the absolute paradox of God’s grace? Why are people offended by the eternal God entering into history?

3 The Offense Kierkegaard notes an “objective repulsion” when one encounters the paradox.⁵⁹ What does Kierkegaard mean by Christ causing “offense?” Gouwens gives a succinct explanation: “that a person’s ‘understanding’ will have an unhappy encounter with the paradox and the person.”⁶⁰ The good news becomes bad news to some, and Kierkegaard explains why in Practice in Christianity. The offensiveness of Christianity comes in three forms. The first is offense against the established order. The second offense is directed specifically at Christ’s lofty claim of being God. The last offense focuses on offense at Christ’s lowliness of being a servant. Examining each of these offenses shows how sin as untruth

 SKS 10, 114 / CD, 102.  Walsh, Living Christianly, pp. 57– 58.  SKS 10, 146 / CD, 136.  SKS 7, 193 / CUP1, 210.  David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 129.

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permeates the thinking of individuals when they come to subjective knowledge of Christianity.

Against the System During his earthly ministry, Christ frequently butted heads with the religious establishment. He often chastised the pharisees with their desire to uphold tradition rather than caring about the meaning of the law. A clear example of this is in Matthew 15 when the pharisees and scribes come to Jesus complaining about how Christ’s disciples go against their traditions. Christ then shows their hypocrisy. The law says honor father and mother, and some shirked responsibility in caring for their parents by giving their money to the Temple instead. The pharisees created a loophole to increase the religious establishment rather than perform their God-given duty. Jesus decries their hypocrisy: “So for the sake of your [the pharisees’] tradition you have made void the word of God.”⁶¹ For Kierkegaard, such actions of Christ show the subjective nature of his ministry. The “objective” rules do not matter; what matters is the subjective knowledge of faith in Christ: “The established order, however, at that time [of Jesus] insisted and always insists on being objective, higher than each and every individual, than subjectivity.”⁶² The establishment is the crowd, the group, the broader culture attempting to exert its will onto individuals.⁶³ The order interposes itself between the individual and God, acting as a mediator. Jesus’ teachings are about individuals having access to God, circumventing the established order by the subjective passion of faith. The irony is that all religious established orders originally were rooted in subjectivity, “with the single individual’s relationship with God, but now that is to be forgotten, the bridge cut down, and the established order deified.”⁶⁴ The hawkers of objectivity are offended by Christ because Christ tears down their power structures. The pharisees do not seek after the truth, offended by Christ’s words; and as Gouwens explicates, “Offense just as much as faith proceeds from an interest, rather than from neutral objectivity.”⁶⁵ We have vested interests in the kingdoms we build. When Christ challenges our autonomy, we are offended.     

Mt 15:6. SKS 12, 95 / PC, 86. We examine the cultural dynamics of sin in-depth in ch. 6. SKS 12, 97 / PC, 88. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, p. 133.

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Christ’s Loftiness We return to the story of John the Baptist’s disciples asking whether Christ is the Messiah. Kierkegaard highlights that Jesus does not give John’s followers a direct answer, but rather Jesus states, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.”⁶⁶ Christ’s answer is indirect, having the disciples examine his works and decide to believe in faith. Christ’s explanation of his miracles is not a typical “proof” of God’s existence with the goal of having objective certainty, but rather “demonstrations can at best serve to make a person aware, so that made aware he can now come to the point: whether he will believe or he will be offended.”⁶⁷ Evidence brings us to the realization of our existential need for God. Christ’s demonstrations, or any demonstrations one might make in the present, can only lead one “to the point where faith can come into existence.”⁶⁸ Once one sees the proof of God, he realizes that he is before God. At this point, one either accepts his standing as “untruth…through his own fault,” or he is offended.⁶⁹ Because he is in untruth, his mind is warped and does not see reality as it truly is. As Walsh explains, “The possibility of offense interposes and is posed by Christ himself. Thus Christ is simultaneously the sign of offense and the object of faith. In fact, he must be the sign of offense in order to become the object of faith.”⁷⁰ Through Christ one can come to God as an individual, not through a group or through a system. Kierkegaard opines in The Sickness unto Death that “everyone lacking the humble courage to dare to be [existing before God] is offended. But why is he offended? Because it is too high for him, because his mind cannot grasp it, because he cannot attain bold confidence in the face of it and therefore must get rid of it.”⁷¹ The gospel message calls an individual to a higher standard, to address God as rightful Lord of all. It is a direct charge to our polemic against God. Such a charge is offensive to our inflated sense of selfworth. As Walsh correctly claims, “The possibility of offense is an essential condition of faith.”⁷²

      

Mt 11:4– 5. SKS 12, 105 / PC, 96. SKS 12, 105 / PC, 96. SKS 4, 2 / PF, 15. Walsh, Living Christianly, p. 65. SKS 11, 199 / SUD, 85 – 86. Walsh, Living Christianly, p. 51.

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Christ’s Lowliness The final form of offense pertains to Christ’s lowliness. Christ took the form of a servant who was beaten and broken. Christ was the son of a carpenter from the town of Nazareth, not an educated man from a city of prestige. Christ’s lowly status is offensive, says Kierkegaard, because “the follower is not above his master but is like him.”⁷³ To be a follower of Christ, one is to “deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow [Christ].”⁷⁴ With such an understanding, one gives over control of his life to Christ; and Christ may ask him to go anywhere, even unto pain, suffering, and persecution. The true follower radically reorients his life around Christ’s teaching, forgiving others in the same way Christ forgave him. As Simon Podmore expounds, “Offense at the divine claim to forgive sins is interwoven with the self’s will to become its own judge; the ‘I’ wants to believe itself to be a better judge of its own guilt and forgiveness than is God. In short, ‘I’ assert myself as the judge of what is (im)possible—even for God.”⁷⁵ We are quick to elevate ourselves to the role of judge. We build up our own standards of forgiveness and mercy; yet Christ, a suffering servant, quashes such notions. Such a thought is offensive to our modern sensibilities. Christ’s death was humiliating, and our egos do not seek to imitate such a life. We develop constructs of how Christ’s life does not apply to us, using mental gymnastics to convince ourselves that we are misunderstanding Christ’s clear purpose in Scripture. As Dupré enlightens, “The absence of this possibility [of scandal] would only indicate that we have not yet reached the paradox, the point where genuine faith begins.”⁷⁶ To accept the message of Christ means that we have to accept ourselves as being in a willful state of untruth. An authentic encounter with Christ leads us to offense at the absolute paradox. Christ is the God-man, the eternal God taking on flesh as a servant in history. Whether one is offended by his emphasis on subjectivity, his lofty claims of divinity, or his lowly claims of humility, one must respond to the offense. Either one will believe, or one will be offended. Gouwens summarizes well: The ‘absolute paradox’ is not an intellectual contradiction concerning the Incarnation; it is a passional collision, wherein Christ is ‘the sign of the possibility of offense.’ To speak of

 SKS 12, 114 / PC, 106.  Lk 9:23.  Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2011, pp. 189 – 190.  Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian, p. 141.

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‘doubt’ as if the problem were simply one of intellectual clarification does not explain the recoil and vigor of the flight and attack in reaction to the God-man.⁷⁷

The offended person remains in untruth and despair, separated from the source of his existence. The one who believes learns the truth and finally becomes conscious of his sin.

Consciousness of Sin Not all people become conscious of sin. Kierkegaard explains that “the consciousness of sin is absolute respect,” and one only “learns to enter into Christianity by the narrow way, through the consciousness of sin.”⁷⁸ In Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Kierkegaard exclaims that “no one can become aware of God without becoming a sinner.”⁷⁹ At first glance, one may think that Kierkegaard asserts that people are walking around without sin in their lives, yet Kierkegaard makes a distinction between guilt consciousness and sin consciousness. He refers to these differences as “Religiousness A” and “Religiousness B,” respectively. Religiousness A is not Christian religiousness, but rather it is “the dialectic of inward deepening.”⁸⁰ Religiousness A is where an individual starts to become subjective. He internalizes the truth and reflects about his relationship to God, realizing his guilt, that he did not live as an ethical individual. Kierkegaard comments that “the essential consciousness of guilt is the greatest possible immersion in existence.”⁸¹ Consciousness of guilt causes one to realize his dire straits—“that it is he who is unable to repay one in a thousand.”⁸² Religiousness B is authentic Christian faith. Guilt consciousness bases its standard on the ethical stage of existence, while Religiousness B bases its standard on God. Kierkegaard explains that “to come into existence is to become a sinner.”⁸³ Sin is a theological category, and knowledge of sin can come only from God: “Man has to learn what sin is by revelation from God.”⁸⁴ When one stands before the absolute paradox of the God-man, he is offended. If he accepts

       

Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, p. 131. SKS 12, 80 / PC, 68. SKS 5, 407 / TD, 28. SKS 7, 505 / CUP1, 556. SKS 7, 483 / CUP1, 531. SKS 8, 370 / UD, 274. SKS 7, 530 / CUP1, 583. SKS 11, 207 / SUD, 95.

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the offense, he realizes his utter sinfulness: “[God’s] holy presence reduces the single individual to a sinner; no, the single individual was that, but became that first through his presence.”⁸⁵ Consciousness of sin occurs only when the individual finally knows God. He properly sees reality as it is: he is in a state of untruth, there by his own fault, and his polemic against God is dreadful. Like the prophet Isaiah, our response should be, “Woe is me! For I am lost.”⁸⁶ Kierkegaard explains that “spiritually understood, the human being in his natural state is sick, he is in error, in a self-deception. Therefore he craves most of all to be deceived; then he is allowed not only to remain in error but to feel really at home in the self-deception.”⁸⁷ Our hearts seek self-justification rather than the Justifier. Only through encountering the paradox can one truly come to know both God and himself. As Niels Cappelørn comments, “Without the paradox, there is no offense. Why? Because offense lies in the understanding, which is offended since it cannot conceive of the paradox. The understanding cannot conceive of the fact that Christianity affixes sin so securely that it seems to be an impossibility to remove it again.”⁸⁸ The impossible becomes possible for the one who leaps toward God in faith. The only way to overcome sin as untruth is to submit to God.

4 Conclusion Kierkegaard gives a robust account of the noetic effects of sin. In Philosophical Fragments, we see his definition of sin as untruth. Untruth is not Socratic ignorance, but rather it is an active state of denying the reality of God. Our sinfulness is on full display in that we refuse to acknowledge God. We shut our eyes to the author of life. Because of our position as created beings, we are unable to know God on our own—Lessing’s Ditch and the infinite qualitative difference prevent any such high hopes. We see our severed-self on display: our polemic against God blinds us to His goodness.

 SKS 5, 408 / TD, 29.  Isa 6:5.  SKS 13, 281 / M, 225  Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, “The Movements of Offense toward, away from, and within Faith: ‘Blessed Is He Who Is Not Offended at Me,’” in Practice in Christianity, trans. by K. Brian Söderquist, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2004 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 20), p. 100 (my emphasis).

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Kierkegaard’s focus on the noetic effects of sin opens numerous theological inquiries. If we must be taught by God in order to know him, then biblical studies is more than mere historical-critical method—more than accumulating objective facts. Kierkegaard acts as a course corrective to the oft assumed optimism by theologians that their objective reason comprehensively depicts God. Divorcing subjectivity from the objective study of theology leads to an overly rationalistic theology. As Lee Barrett explains, “Kierkegaard has little sympathy for the interpretative trajectory [of the Bible] rooted in rationalism, in which the authoritative dimension of the Bible was identified with its eternal and universal moral and spiritual truths.”⁸⁹ If theology and biblical studies are only chasing eternal truths, seeking to excise any “nonhistorical” phenomena like miracles, then theology becomes mere history, a topic like any other topic. If theology is mere history, then theology cannot really speak to the current context in a meaningful way. For example, history cannot declare that the biblical canon is correct; it can declare only how the canon was formed. Theology becomes description of past events rather than encountering the true God. Philosophical Fragments shows the issue of attempting to discover a purely historical solution to a supernatural question. In order to have true knowledge of God, one must be taught by God—one must involve the supernatural in the process. The recent theological movement called Theological Interpretation of Scripture (TIS) shares similar sentiments. TIS seeks to return to reading within the traditional rule of faith, meaning one reads as a part of the church rather than an outsider. Daniel Treier explains, “Reading Scripture is traditionally a religious activity, a dimension of piety.”⁹⁰ The emphasis of the Enlightenment led to a theological discipline devoid of the Holy Spirit. TIS seeks to regain lost ground, realizing that Christians do not read the Bible like any other book, for they submit to the authority of Scripture. As Kevin Vanhoozer states, “[TIS] is not the exclusive property of biblical scholars but the joint responsibility of all the theological disciplines and of the whole people of God.”⁹¹ Kierkegaard’s noetic emphasis on sin shows why we must read within faith. Reading without faith leads to not knowing the God who inspired the text. Kierkegaard offers numer-

 Lee C. Barrett, “Kierkegaard and Biblical Studies: A Critical Response to Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics,” in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Jon Stewart, Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell 2015 (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, vol. 58), p. 144.  Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2008, p. 43.  Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “What Is Theological Interpretation of the Bible?” ed. by Kevin J. Vanhoozer et al., Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2005, p. 21.

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ous points of contact for TIS, and modern theologians would do well to take seriously his view of the noetic effects of sin. Only God can teach us about himself, but we run into a paradox. The eternal God enters history in the Incarnation. Instead of rejoicing, our sinful state of untruth becomes offended at the paradox. Wanting to be our own masters, we balk at Christ’s challenge to the religious establishment and objective formulations of religion. We look down our noses at a suffering servant, and we are incredulous at the idea of God putting on flesh. Like the pharisees, our state of sin, of untruth, so distorts our judgment that we cannot see Immanuel standing right before us, offering us forgiveness, grace, and authentic human existence. Our condition of being in untruth thoroughly corrupts us, but God reaches down out of eternity, across that broad, ugly ditch we dug with our own disobedience, and becomes our teacher, reconciler, savior, and Lord. But the person seeking to understand himself in the consciousness of sin before God does not understand it as a general statement that all people are sinners, because the emphasis is not on this generality. The more profound the sorrow is, the more a person feels himself as a nothing, as less than nothing, and this diminishing self-esteem is a sign that the sorrower is the seeker who is beginning to become aware of God.⁹²

 SKS 5, 409 / TD, 29.

Chapter 5 Sin as an Existential State In the discourse “Every Good Gift and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above,” Kierkegaard begins with a reflection on Adam eating the forbidden fruit: The fruit of the knowledge, which the man relished, planted the tree of the knowledge in his inner being, which bore its fruits, which now probably did not seem delectable to him, for the fruit of the knowledge always seems delectable and is delectable to look at, but when one has savored it, it fosters trouble, compels the man to work in the sweat of his brow, and sows thorns and thistles for him. ¹

Adam’s sin led to a brokenness, an evil inclination within himself, but Adam’s actions also reap terrible consequences on all creation. Any thorough discussion of hamartiology examines the universal pervasiveness of sin, usually referred to as original or hereditary sin. Kierkegaard is no different, and in The Concept of Anxiety he investigates how existing individuals relate to Adam’s sin. Thus far, we have focused our investigation on the individualistic aspect of sin in Kierkegaard’s work. Kierkegaard champions a personal relationship with God, so one would expect to see an emphasis on the personal role of sin in his writing. Anxiety, misrelation, and untruth are all individualistic components of sin, and furthermore these factors are concrete instances in actuality. Misrelation and untruth are volitional in nature, while anxiety is not volitional. We must recall that anxiety itself is not sin, but it offers the condition—the moment—for sin to occur. Because misrelation and untruth are volitional, the person actively wills such events. On the other hand, Romans 5 states, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned….Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.”² In some way, Adam’s sin affects all humanity. The doctrine of original sin seems to be at odds with our previous investigation of Kierkegaard’s volitional emphasis on sin. If sin were a volitional choice, then one could posit that someone could choose not to sin; yet Kierkegaard stresses throughout his works that all humans are sinners: “On the whole, there is one thing that is very common; you can find it in each and every one, in yourself just as I find

 SKS 5, 130 / EUD, 126 – 127 (my emphasis).  Rom 5:12, 18. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-005

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it in myself: sin and sins.”³ Which is it? Are we sinners because of Adam or because of our own actions? How does Kierkegaard view original sin, and how does it relate to individual existence? In this chapter we investigate Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin as an existential state. First, we examine Kierkegaard’s view of Adam and his relationship to his progeny, for it has significant implications on the doctrine of sin. Kierkegaard writes at length on Adam and his role in the human race, and understanding that role unlocks Kierkegaard’s view of hereditary sin. Second, we explore what Kierkegaard terms the “qualitative” aspect of sin. Sin is not a mere “thing” one does, but rather it is a qualitative state into which one leaps. Third, we note the quantitative effects of living in a world with sin and the ensuing corruption it produces. The more sin enters the world, the more one feels its effects. Such pervasiveness of sin impresses upon individuals in their daily lives, adding more opportunities for sin. Lastly, we investigate the tension prevalent in Kierkegaard’s thought between the volitional component of sin and the universality of sin. Kierkegaard appears to posit a contradiction. Can he solve the problem of the effects of Adam and the culpability of individuals?

1 Adam and His Status In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis examines the relation between anxiety and hereditary sin. Kierkegaard differentiates between hereditary sin and the first sin of Adam. If Adam, Kierkegaard reasons, was the cause of hereditary sin, then “Adam is placed fantastically outside history,” and hereditary sin is between present individuals and Adam rather than present individuals and sin itself, “[explaining] hereditary sin in terms of its consequences.”⁴ Such thinking places Adam in a different existence category from normal humans; and if that were the case, then how can anyone say she is meaningfully “in Adam?” All past explications of hereditary sin—from the apostolic fathers to the Formula of Concord—, says Kierkegaard, miss Adam being authentically a part of the race. As he elucidates, “No matter how the problem is raised, as soon as Adam is placed fantastically on the outside, everything is confused. To explain Adam’s sin is therefore to explain hereditary sin. And no explanation that explains Adam but not hereditary sin, or explains hereditary sin but not

 SKS 12, 265 / WA, 152  SKS 4, 333 / CA, 26.

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Adam, is of any help.”⁵ In Kierkegaard’s mind, hereditary sin affects humans, but it affects all humans—including Adam. The key for properly understanding the consequences of Adam’s sin is to remember that “the individual is both himself and the race.”⁶ At first blush, such a statement appears contradictory—especially to a thinker who prefers either/or’s to both/and’s—but a close reading shows the method to Kierkegaard’s thought. Humans are individuals—they make choices of their own volition—yet humans also belong to humanity—their choices affect those around them. Whenever a person makes a decision, that person is not in complete isolation from the rest of humanity, so to speak. As Lee Barrett explains, “Vigilius insists that the deeds of each individual create new possibilities that alter the race, and the race presents possibilities that define the individual.”⁷ An example can help illuminate Kierkegaard’s line of thinking. Imagine a parking lot on a rainy day. Perplexed, a driver pulls to the front of the parking lot nearest the store entrance so as to not get soaking wet from the deluge. How serendipitous, the closest spot appears empty! Upon coming to the supposedly open parking spot, our driver realizes that a car next to the spot parked over the line, so much so that our driver cannot park safely. Looking down the entire parking row, our driver comes to find that all the cars are over the lines. After driving all the way to the back of the lot, our frustrated driver notes a sports car parked diagonally across two spots, presumably to prohibit people from parking right next to the sports car and scratching it, and his parking caused a chain reaction down the row, preventing our driver from parking at the front. The sports car driver made a decision that he thought affected only himself; but because he is a part of the human race, his actions affect others—to the chagrin of our driver. Any thought of moving Adam outside of the race, reasons Kierkegaard, removes the dynamic of being a part of the race. Kierkegaard has a scathing accusation against the popular dogmatics of his time: “Every attempt to explain Adam’s significance for the race as caput generis humani naturale, seminale, foederale, to recall the expression of dogmatics, confuses everything.”⁸ Why do classical constructs of hereditary sin “confuse everything?” If Adam were a “fantastical” super-human outside of the race, then he would be a mere

 SKS 4, 335 / CA, 28.  SKS 4, 335 / CA, 28.  Lee C. Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety’ and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin” in The Concept of Anxiety (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 8), ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1985, p. 58.  SKS 4, 336 / CA, 29.

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concept, but like all humans, Adam existed in actual history rather than some platonic form or object of abstract philosophy. As Kierkegaard stresses in his journals, “Sin only rlly [sic] is when it is actuality.”⁹ Any movement of sin toward metaphysics “becomes that of dialectical uniformity and disinterestedness.”¹⁰ Determining how Adam is distinct from the rest of humanity converts sin into a general topic of discussion, and Kierkegaard clearly states that “the person seeking to understand himself in the consciousness of sin before God does not understand it as a general statement that all people are sinners, because the emphasis is not on this generality”¹¹ Sin occurs within real history, propagated by real humans. Removing Adam from humanity confuses the earthiness of sin. One may view Kierkegaard’s examination of Adam’s role in the race as a theological splitting of hairs, but we must understand Kierkegaard’s drastic divergences from classical formulations of original sin.¹² Traditionally conceived, Adam was in a state of innocence, and his sin corrupted all subsequent humanity, passing on guilt. Said guilt occurs by either Adam as our representative or seminally through Adam as our genetic primogenitor. Adam, therefore, is not like humanity at all: Adam starts his journey with no hereditary sin or internal proclivity toward sin. If such reading is correct, then Adam foists a sinful state upon his descendants. Such implications are unsatisfactory, argues Kierkegaard, for then “sin would become man’s substance.”¹³ People cannot control the substance of their being, and as John Davenport notes, “The traditional interpretations of original sin encourage the attitude that we are not really ‘at fault’ for our moral imperfection.”¹⁴ We have already seen Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the volitional aspect of sin. Kierkegaard despises the idea of shirking responsibility for sin. Hegel’s thought delays responsibility of choice until the end of the mediative process, and above we have examined how Kierkegaard sees such thinking as thoroughly problematic. As Kierkegaard says in Christian Discourses, “Every human being at some time, at the beginning, stands at the crossroads—this is his perfection and not his merit. Where he stands at the end (at the end it is

 SKS 23, 27, NB15:101 / KJN 7, 69.  SKS 4, 322 / CA, 15.  SKS 5, 409 / TD, 29 (my emphasis).  John Davenport states that Kierkegaard’s view is “a radically new position on original sin which rejects both traditional Catholic and Protestant interpretations,” John J. Davenport, “‘Entangled Freedom’: Ethical Authority, Original Sin, and Choice in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 21, 2000, p. 132.  SKS 4, 334 / CA, 27.  Davenport, “‘Entangled Freedom,’” p. 132.

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not possible to stand at the crossroads) is his choice and his responsibility.”¹⁵ De Castro succinctly summarizes Kierkegaard’s argument: “According to Vigilius sin is not posited by necessity.”¹⁶ Individuals posit sin when in anxiety they choose themselves rather than God. Adam does have an effect on his progeny, but Adam is not above the race, set apart from the essential attributes of humanity. If one remembers that every individual is also the race, then one can see that actions are not confined only to the individuals who perform them. We cannot overlook the interplay between the individual and the race. As Javier Toscano states, “In other words, we find across from this historicity of individuals a monadology in which each man is both himself and all of the species.”¹⁷

2 Qualitative Leap into Sin If Adam and subsequent humans are essentially the same, then what were the specific parameters concerning Adam’s first sin? For Kierkegaard, one’s first sin is different from one’s second sin, for the first sin is a qualitative shift in existence: “The first sin constitutes the nature of the quality: the first sin is the sin.”¹⁸ Adam’s first sin causes sin to come into Adam’s existence, for before it there was no sin in Adam’s life as an existential position. Kierkegaard explains, “Sin presupposes itself,…sin comes into the world in such a way that by the fact that it is, it is presupposed. Thus sin comes into the world as the sudden, i. e., by a leap; but this leap also posits the quality.”¹⁹ Adam’s sin is a leap into sin, not something “created.” Adam did not invent the concept of sin: “To express this precisely and accurately, one must say that by the first sin, sinfulness came into Adam.”²⁰ As Vincent McCarthy comments, “Adam and Everyman were free to [use freedom and actualize its possibility], and did so.”²¹ The fall of Adam “is the qualitative leap” into sin.²² If Adam were truly human, then the same dynamic present in Adam’s fall must be present in all  SKS 10, 31 / CD, 20.  José Rey de Castro, “Angustia, libertad y pecado en ‘El concepto de angustia’ de Vigilius Haufniensis de Søren Kierkegaard,” Synesis, vol. 10, no. 1, 2018, p. 152 (my translation).  Javier Toscano, “Kierkegaard y la estrategia del tiempo,” Diánoia, vol. 58, no. 71, 2013, p. 30 (my translation).  SKS 4, 336 / CA, 30.  SKS 4, 339 / CA, 32.  SKS 4, 339 / CA, 33.  Vincent A. McCarthy, “Schelling and Kierkegaard on Freedom and Fall,” in The Concept of Anxiety, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 107.  SKS 4, 353 / CA, 48.

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people when they first sin. Consequently, all humans lose innocence when they posit sin via the qualitative leap, creating a new fall. As Kierkegaard explains, “Just as Adam lost innocence by guilt, so every man loses it in the same way. If it was not by guilt that he lost it, then it was not innocence that he lost; and if he was not innocent before becoming guilty, he never became guilty.”²³ If an individual’s guilt is a consequence of Adam’s disobedience, then how can one ever “become” guilty? Such inquiry is a genuinely difficult question for theology. Lee Barrett explains the issue: “[Dogmatics] subjects the individual’s sin to a deterministic explanation and destroys the mood of responsibility.”²⁴ Such thinking moves Adam outside of the race, and Kierkegaard squarely places the blame of sin and guilt on the individual. As Stephen Dunning notes, “Sin comes into the world by a sin, and there is no one else to blame for one’s guilt but oneself.”²⁵ Any student of theology senses a pitfall to Kierkegaard’s understanding of Adam and his descendants. If humans and Adam are the same in their dynamics of sin, then all people are born innocent just as Adam. If people are born innocent, then does this not allow for some form of Pelagianism? In Kierkegaard’s desire to place the blame solely on individuals for their sins, has he opened the door too far, allowing for a Pelagian works-based righteousness? Kierkegaard does not think so. Anyone claiming Kierkegaard is Pelagian forgets that individuals are a part of the race, and a person cannot “play his little history in his own private theater unconcerned about the race.”²⁶ The conditions of individuals being a part of a race means an interconnectedness that one cannot flee. Kierkegaard defends his position: “Obviously this view is in no way guilty of any Pelagianism. The race has its history, within which sinfulness continues to have its quantitative determinability, but innocence is always lost only by the qualitative leap of the individual.”²⁷ Because of the human race, it is impossible for individuals not to make the qualitative leap into sin, but such impossibility is not forced upon individuals. In Kierkegaard’s schema, guilt is both inevitable and rightfully earned.

 SKS 4, 342 / CA, 35.  Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety’ and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin,” p. 53.  Stephen N. Dunning, “Kierkegaard’s Systematic Analysis of Anxiety,” in The Concept of Anxiety, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1985 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 8), p. 15 (my emphasis).  SKS 4, 341 / CA, 34.  SKS 4, 345 / CA, 37.

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All leaps, in Kierkegaard’s thinking, are based on an individual determination to act—whether to believe or to sin.²⁸ Kierkegaard speaks much of the leap toward faith, that the individual must decide to submit to God despite lacking complete, scientific assurance. Interestingly, in The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard claims “that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.”²⁹ Individuals posit both sin and faith in the same way: through a qualitative leap. In previous chapters we dove into the concept of the leap, and we must remember that the leap for Kierkegaard is not some inconsequential choice. The leap is a change in an existence category. Once the leap occurs, the individual is fundamentally different than she was before the leap. Individuals may leap to faith based on the work of Christ, and they reap the rewards of forgiveness and new identity in Jesus. The reverse is also unfortunately true: we all willingly leap qualitatively into sin, and we reap the wages of sin. Because sin is rooted in an existence category, it is not something that can be forgotten or wiped away by the individual who committed the act. One cannot “offset” her misdeeds by performing acts of benevolence. As Kierkegaard explains in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Directly before God a human being is not a sinner in this or in that, but is essentially a sinner, is not guilty of this or that, but is essentially and unconditionally guilty. But if he is essentially guilty, then he is also always guilty, because the debt of essential guilt is so extreme as to make every direct accounting impossible….The guilt of the person in relation to God is not guilt of this or that—the relation cannot be summed up that way.³⁰

Because sin is an existential state, one remains guilty while she remains in the state. No talisman, ritual, or good deed the sinner performs move her from being guilty to not guilty, for that would imply that sins are punctiliar instances in reality rather than one’s actual reality. Yes, sin occurs in actuality, but sin is not an insignificant choice like choosing what one has for supper. Because sin is a leap, it comes with a fundamental shift in existential position. What happened to Adam—banishment, toil, separation, etc.—happens to everyone who sins. Adam was banished from the garden, and no amount of works could bring him back into the presence of God. The ground bore thistles, making the God-given task of work something laborious. Ultimately, Adam was separated from the presence of God in the garden. All sinners experience these consequences when they sin. As Barrett correctly analyzes, “Vigilius uses the story of Adam

 For an excellent analysis on Kierkegaard and the leap, see Ferreira, “Faith and the Kierkegaardian Leap.”  SKS 11, 196 / SUD, 82.  SKS 8, 380 / UD, 285. SKS 8, 381 / UD, 286.

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as the archetype of human motivation rather than as a deterministic explanation of the race’s sinfulness. The story of Adam is the story of everyone, depicting the paradigmatic situation from which all sin arises.”³¹ Adam’s tragic story is our tragic story, both as the race and as individuals. Adam is a part of the race, so his actions affect the actions of all other individuals. What else ties together Adam and the race? The answer is anxiety. “Anxiety,” claims Kierkegaard, is “the presupposition for hereditary sin.”³² Anxiety occurs when one encounters possibility. Adam was anxious in the garden, and we are anxious whenever choices arise in the present. Anxiety anticipates actualization, and an unease comes over the individual. Like our father Adam, we succumb to the call of anxiety. As Kierkegaard laments in Four Upbuilding Discourses, “What happened at the beginning of days is repeated in every generation and in the individual; the consequences of the fruit of the knowledge could not be halted.”³³ Sin is not some nebulous topic of theology, “no teaching or doctrine for thinkers….It is an existence-category and simply cannot be thought.”³⁴ Because it is a qualitative leap, it has lasting consequences on the sinner. As Rae explains, “The similarity to Adam is twofold: sin does not belong to the essence of our humanity, and we are therefore culpable for sin.”³⁵ All humans choose to disobey God, and their current predicament is of their own doing.

3 Quantitative Issues of Sin One may protest that Kierkegaard is overlooking a glaring difference between Adam and his descendants. If one were to grant Kierkegaard every one of his points concerning Adam and the race, later generations are obviously different from Adam because they are born in a post-Fall world. Adam existed for a time in a world without sin. Each subsequent generation comes into a world with increasingly more sin, yet Adam did not have to deal with such a situation. Kierkegaard is not blind to historical reality, and his answer to this predicament is the quantitative aspect of sin.

 Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety’ and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin,” p. 55 (my emphasis).  SKS 4, 353 / CA, 48.  SKS 5, 131 / EUD, 127.  SKS 7, 532 / CUP1, 585.  Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, London: T & T Clark 2010 (Philosophy and Theology), p. 91.

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One’s first sin posits the quality of sin; it is an existential leap. All consecutive sins are an issue of quantity rather than quality. Kierkegaard often refers to these categories as the difference between sin (quality) and sinfulness (quantity). Kierkegaard “does not deny the propagation of sinfulness through generation,” for sinfulness is a quantitative issue.³⁶ Grøn clarifies, “Kierkegaard distinguishes between sin and sinfulness. Sin enters the world by the qualitative leap of the individual. Sinfulness, as the constant possibility of sin, is carried on through every generation.”³⁷ How is sinfulness carried between each generation? Once a person sins, he qualitatively posits a new fall, ushering in sinfulness into his own heart. Sin is now a possibility like other possibilities. The more possibilities available to an individual, the more anxiety an individual has. The more anxiety an individual has, the more opportunity the individual has to sin. Kierkegaard notes that after Adam’s fall, “sexuality was posited.”³⁸ Kierkegaard explains that sexuality is not inherently sinful, but sexuality would not happen without sin.³⁹ Sexuality gives a species a history, “and without sexuality, [there is] no history.”⁴⁰ Adam sinned, sinfulness came into Adam, and sexuality occurred, giving humanity a history as a race. The race continues to sin, adding more possibility. As Sylvia Walsh notes, “With the positing of sin, however, sexuality also becomes sinful, creating a predisposition to sin through generation yet without causing one’s progeny to sin or compromising individual responsibility for sin.”⁴¹ All children are conceived by sinful humans, and such sinfulness is passed on. Sin is not passed on, but sinfulness is. As Kierkegaard repeatedly states, “Sin never enters into the world differently and has never entered differently [than by the qualitative leap].”⁴²  SKS 4, 352 / CA, 47.  Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Jeanette B. L. Knox, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2008, p. 20.  SKS 4, 353 / CA, 48.  Kierkegaard seems to overlook that God institutes marriage before the Fall in Genesis 1. Furthermore, Kierkegaard does not explain that if sexuality is only the result of sin, then why does God command humanity to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” before the Fall in Gen 1:28? If sexuality and history of the race come only via sin, and God’s command is for Adam and Eve to sexually reproduce, then either God has caused sin to come about to achieve his purpose or humanity’s nature is to sin. Kierkegaard seems to eschew either of these options in regard to the culpability of sin being placed on God. We are left with Kierkegaard being wildly inconsistent on the role of sin and sexuality. One can posit many possible reasons why Kierkegaard takes such a route in tying sexuality to sin, but that task is topic for another project.  SKS 4, 354 / CA, 49.  Sylvia Walsh, “Kierkegaard’s Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. by John Lippitt and George Pattison, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, p. 301.  SKS 4, 355 / CA, 50.

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Sinfulness and propagation have expanding repercussions through history. Kierkegaard admits that a contemporary person is different from Adam in his historical situation “because the quantitative accumulation left behind by the race now makes itself felt in that individual.”⁴³ Modern humanity lives in a world entrenched in sin, while Adam lived in a sin-free paradise. Although every person’s historical finitude is different, the internal dynamics of sin are unchanging throughout time. Sinfulness is not sin, and sin comes only into the world when one, filled with anxiety about possibility, chooses against God, lifting up himself as lord of the universe rather than bowing to the true Lord of the universe. Yes, subsequent generations are at a quantitative disadvantage, as Gregor Malantschuk notes: “Vigilius Haufniensis shows further how the negative possibilities, which the race in the historical process must take over from the transgressions and guilt of the single individuals, wield an even stronger influence upon succeeding individuals.”⁴⁴ A stronger influence is present, but an influence does not cause a leap. A leap is a decision, something rooted in the will. Adam and all humans have the same internal dynamic: we all chose sin rather than righteousness. One can see another dark side of the quantitative accumulation of sin in the form of corruption. In Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard states that “sin is man’s corruption. Only the rust of sin can consume the soul—or eternally corrupt it.”⁴⁵ Sin is like a rust, a decaying attribute that causes one to disintegrate. When one adds corruption to the propagation of sinfulness through the generation, one sees that “sin [is] very prolific, and one sin gives birth to many, and it multiplies more and more.”⁴⁶ Sin begets sin, and it leads to disastrous results. As Kierkegaard soberly states in his journal, “The most terrible punishment of sin is new sin.”⁴⁷ Sin has a quantitative corruption that echoes throughout time. Because humans are a part of the race, their actions affect others. Such actions are performed by sinful people, passed down to future generations. Modern people are different from Adam in their situatedness, but they possess the same relationship to sin as Adam: sin comes through the leap. The ever-increasing quantity of sins shows the universal predicament of all sons and daughters of Adam.

 SKS 4, 357 / CA, 52.  Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1971, p. 262.  SKS 10, 114 / CD, 102.  SKS 5, 72 / EUD, 63.  SKS 22, 193, NB12:94 / KJN 6, 192.

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4 Universality of Sin and the Issue of Individuals In The Moment, Kierkegaard states, “I, who am called Either/Or, cannot serve anyone with: both-and.”⁴⁸ Yet, do we not see a both/and in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the race, culpability, and the universality of sin? Kierkegaard wants humans to be both determined and free. He does not want Pelagianism to enter the fray, but he also does not want humans to pass off their culpability onto Adam. As Dupré notes, for Kierkegaard “the individual is codetermined, externally as well as internally, both by himself and by the history of the race.”⁴⁹ Furthermore, Kierkegaard continually stresses throughout his work that all humans are sinners. In Judge for Yourself!, Kierkegaard equates the human condition to drunkenness: All of us human beings are more or less intoxicated….We have a suspicion about ourselves; we gradually become conscious that we are not really sober….But if the unconditioned unconditionally were to catch sight of us—yet we avoid this glance, and that is why we conceal ourselves in finitude among the finitudes in the same way as Adam hid among the trees.⁵⁰

Every person lives in sin: “Every human being is himself a sinner.”⁵¹ The both/ and is at odds with his either/or. Kierkegaard asserts the issue is solved by understanding Adam as one of the race. Does such emphasis provide a satisfying explanation? Can Kierkegaard have his cake and eat it too? To start, when reading The Concept of Anxiety, we must remember the subtitle: it is a psychological deliberation. Kierkegaard’s psychology was phenomenological in nature, seeking to explain how individuals interacted in existence. As Barrett expounds, “[Kierkegaard] believed that the problem of integrating ‘act’ and ‘state’ language with regard to sin actually had two distinguishable aspects, one pertaining to the dogmatic description of the individual’s identity, and one pertaining to the psychological exploration of the passional sources of sinfulness.”⁵² Moving the doctrine of sin into abstract speculation does not solve the issue that humans sin in actuality. Kierkegaard caustically critiques the theologians of his day:

    

SKS 13, 141 / M, 101. Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian, p. 52. SKS 16, 168 – 169 / JFY, 113. SKS 11, 88 / WA, 83. Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety’ and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin,” p. 39.

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That the time of dogmatic and ethics, as well as one’s own time, has often been wasted by pondering what might have happened had Adam not sinned merely proves that one brings along an incorrect mood, and consequently an incorrect concept. It would never occur to an innocent person to ask such a question, and when the guilty asks it, he sins, for in his esthetic curiosity he ignores that he himself brought guiltiness into the world and that he himself lost innocence by guilt.⁵³

Barrett notes that the theological textbooks of Kierkegaard’s formal education “emphasize biological transmission” and “inherited corruption of the soul, rather than…participation in Adam’s act.”⁵⁴ The Hegelian tendency toward abstraction takes away the focus from the actual, the here and now. When we turn sin into a topic, we deceive ourselves into thinking we do not participate in the topic. Kierkegaard offers a course corrective to place the guilt of sin onto the individual rather than Adam. Kierkegaard walks the line of Adam determining humanity via quantitative sinfulness while allowing individuals to be complicit in their defiance against God. A helpful way to put Kierkegaard’s seemingly contradictory emphases into perspective is to think about his categorization of objectivity and subjectivity. As discussed in the previous chapter, objective truth concerns impersonal data, while subjective truth concerns itself with impassioned, internal appropriation of the truth. An objective theologian places Adam as caput generis humani naturale, seminale, foederale, for he is not concerned with how sinfulness is a problem in his personal life. He does not care about the dynamics of his personal fall into sin, but rather he seeks to answer the historical question of Adam’s sin. Such investigation does not sit well with Kierkegaard, for sin is not a matter of past history but of present actuality. In freedom, one actualizes guilt because of anxiety; “and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty.”⁵⁵ An honest examination of our own actions leads us to the subjective truth— we, like Adam, willingly sinned. Indeed, “each individual begins in an historical nexus, and the consequences of nature still hold true”;⁵⁶ but our personal choice is our own. What we have with hereditary sin is not a contradiction but a paradox. Kierkegaard admits as much in his journal: “That ‘original sin’ is ‘guilt[’] is the real paradox….It must be believed.”⁵⁷ The codetermination of hereditary sin is an object of faith: one is both affected by Adam so as not to escape sin and one caused sin to come into his own life. An outsider, one who does not have authen    

SKS 4, 343 / CA, 36. Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety’ and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin,” p. 51. SKS 4, 365 – 366 / CA, 61. SKS 4, 376 / CA, 73. SKS 23, 103 – 104, NB16:13 / KJN 7, 103 – 104.

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tic faith, sees these statements as absurd, in the Kierkegaardian sense: either Adam is culpable, or the individual is culpable. The authentic believer knows both to be true: we are descendants of Adam who willingly follow after his way. In a similar way, Christ is the ultimate paradox because he is both God and man. One must accept such formulation in faith, and the nonbeliever deems the paradox as absurd: “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.”⁵⁸ Kierkegaard even explicitly ties hereditary sin to causing individuals to turn the Bible into an objective book: “This impersonality (objectivity) in relation to God’s Word is all too easy for us human beings to maintain…by way of hereditary sin.”⁵⁹ Whether or not one is objectively guilty because of Adam does not erase that one is subjectively guilty via one’s own choice. De Castro cuts to the quick: “Whether sin did or did not exist before Adam does not change what sin is.”⁶⁰ All of our theorizing cannot hide the fact that we sin before God of our own volition. Sin is a qualitative leap. As Barrett correctly summarizes, “The doctrine of original sin requires that one see individual sins as expressions of one’s true character, as well as regard one’s sinful character as the results of one’s acts.”⁶¹

5 Conclusion Hereditary sin is a contentious doctrine with numerous interpretations. Kierkegaard throws his hat into the ring, walking the tightrope of emphasizing freedom while denying Pelagianism. Kierkegaard goes against the tradition in which he was raised, for The Augsburg Confession states, “After Adam’s fall, all men begotten after the common course of nature are born with sin.”⁶² Kierkegaard’s archetypal view of Adam develops out of the incongruent ideas of Adam being human yet outside the race. Whichever way one slices, both federal and seminal headship are abstract formulations, turning an existence state into a definition. Kierkegaard takes a via media, trying to show the volitional aspect of sin while claiming sin’s inevitability. Does Kierkegaard succeed in putting anxious theological minds at ease? The positives to Kierkegaard’s construction are his emphasis on culpability and his focus on the phenomena of sinfulness and the race. Adam is similar to us,     

1 Cor 1:23. SKS 13, 66 / FSE, 40. de Castro, “Angustia, libertad y pecado,” p. 153 (my translation). Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety’ and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin,” p. 46. The Augsburg Confession 1.2.

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and we fall as he did. Endless speculation on who is or is not culpable does not change the fact that we all willingly sin. Kierkegaard shifts the blame onto its rightful recipients: our rebellion rather than the sinless God. Anxiety presupposes hereditary sin, and both Adam and modern humanity are anxious in similar ways: possibility breeds a mood of unease that requires a volitional response. Unfortunately, we all act exactly like Adam in that we disobey God. Some may not accept Kierkegaard’s explanation. No matter how often Kierkegaard says he is not Pelagian, some may still see any lack of causation between Adam’s sin and the race’s sin as opening the door to Pelagianism. I think Kierkegaard convincingly mitigates the issue by focusing on the solitary nature of individuals and the solidarity of humankind—we are individuals and a part of humanity. While my sin does not cause another to sin, my sin affects those around me.⁶³ Kierkegaard’s emphasis on Adam is not Pelagianism because Adam is a part of the race. Members of a race affect others through their actions and through procreation. Adam is an example of our own sin, but he is not merely an example. Adam’s sin begets more sin, corrupting us all with a continual quantitative increase in sinfulness. Adam passes on sinfulness, but he does not pass on sin. As humanity grows, likewise the amount of sinfulness continues to grow. The increase of sinful people in the world increases opportunities to sin, amplifying anxiety. Such an expansion leads to a universality of sin. Being human is a terrible paradox—both in Adam and like Adam. The chief takeaway from this chapter is that sin is an existential state. Sin is a qualitative leap, and all leaps are volitional in nature. Moving sin into a qualitative category demonstrates that sin is not merely something one does. As Kierkegaard states in Three Discourses on Imaged Occasions, “The confession of sin is not merely a counting of all the particular sins but is comprehending before God that sin has a coherence in itself.”⁶⁴ If sin were only performed actions, then one could “balance the scale” by doing good. Sin would turn into accounting, keeping track of do’s and don’ts. This way of thinking is a self-deception, for sin surrounds us and permeates all that we do. The quantitative nature of sin makes sinlessness impossible. Because sin is a qualitative leap—an existence state—the only solution is a qualitative change: the leap to faith in Christ. By

 This concept is not foreign to the biblical narrative. We see an example with Abram, Sarai, and Pharaoh in Gen 12. Abram lies to Pharaoh, proclaiming Sarai to be his sister rather than his wife. After Pharaoh pays a dowry and takes Sarai into his harem, a plague falls upon Pharaoh’s household because of Sarai. Pharaoh then scolds Abram and expels him from Egypt. Abram’s lies drastically affect the Pharaoh’s household, even though Pharaoh acted in good faith.  SKS 5, 412 / TD, 32.

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the grace of God, we can be rescued from our existential drowning in sin to new life in Christ. Ah, and when for a moment sin gains power over me in the form of new sin—then, when my soul feels disconsolate, then, finally, I know nothing but to say to you [God]: [“]You must help me, you must console me, come up with something in which I truly find consolation, so that even my sin is transfigured into helping me to come farther than I would otherwise have come.[”] What shamelessness—it is, then after all, you against whom I have sinned, and then to demand that you should console me for it. And yet, infinite Love, I know that this does not displease you, because in one since it is a sign of progress!⁶⁵

 SKS 26, 170, NB32:73 / KJN 10, 170.

Chapter 6 Sin, Redoubling, and the Crowd Individuals are at the same time themselves and a part of the broader human race. As Kierkegaard shows in his discussion on hereditary sin, individuals do not live solitary lives: an individual’s sins affect the broader world for the worse. The converse is also true: the broken world affects individuals, shaping them in multitudinous ways for the worse. Sinfulness is an incipit hermeneutical circle between the individual and the whole of the race. In the previous chapter we examined how the individual affects the whole, while in this chapter we examine how the whole affects the individual in Kierkegaard’s thought. People often overlook the enculturated nature of sin. Such oversight is understandable, for culture is like a pair of glasses we forget we are wearing. Our historical context drastically colors how we see the world, and our preunderstandings often reside unstated below the surface of everyday interaction. Martin Heidegger speaks of the concept of “thrownness,” the idea that one is “thrown” into a world with a set of historical factors she did not choose, with “the possibility of losing [oneself] in the ‘they’ and falling into groundlessness.”¹ The “they,” the crowd, the culture, has a way of forcing itself onto an individual, crushing her into a particular mold. What happens when the “they” has sinful presuppositions? For Kierkegaard, one cannot overlook the effect of the culture upon the individual. Kierkegaard believed Hegelian thinkers hijacked his culture, leading the masses away from authentic Christianity. Many lauded Hegelian speculative theology as a great sign of progress, but Kierkegaard saw through “that enormous illusion, Christendom.”² How could a “Christian” nation like Denmark be so misled? In The Point of View Kierkegaard remarks, “It cannot be denied that there are those in Christendom who live just as sensately as any pagan ever did—indeed, even more sensately, because they have this confounded security that basically they are Christians.”³ Kierkegaard’s culture actively deceived individuals, tricking them into a pagan complacency. In this chapter we examine our final aspect of Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin: sin and the crowd. First, we examine the redoubling nature of sin. Sin is not something that stays siloed in the sinner—it redoubles itself when per Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: HarperPerennial 1962, p. 221.  SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23.  SKS 16, 31 / PV, 48. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-006

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formed. Redoubling is a theme throughout Kierkegaard’s writing, and I show that sin, too, redoubles. Second, we investigate how redoubled sin affects the larger community. In Works of Love, we see sin spreading in groups; and in Two Ages, we see how the public levels individuals into an amorphous “crowd.” Lastly, I demonstrate Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen context as an example of sin run amuck in a culture. Kierkegaard desperately sought to ameliorate the problems of his country, and viewing his situation illuminates just how insipid sin can be within the culture.

1 Redoubling: Sin’s Ever-Increasing Dynamic Although Kierkegaard speaks about “redoubling” often in his later works, he does not define the concept explicitly. His usual procedure is to discuss how a particular virtue or action redoubles in an individual. In the chapter “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” from Works of Love, Kierkegaard discusses the redoubling nature of love. Kierkegaard notes that “a temporal object never has a redoubling in itself.”⁴ Redoubling exists only in individuals, not in objects or things. As Andrew Burgess notes, the eternal allows for the “possibility of redoubling.”⁵ A rock cannot redouble because it does not have a will to self-actualize. The eternal in an individual allows for a spiritual growth, opening one up to numerous redoubling virtues. Kierkegaard explains how love redoubles in individuals: “What love does, that it is; what it is, that it does—at one and the same moment. At the same moment it goes out of itself (the outward direction), it is in itself (the inward direction).”⁶ The outward/inward dynamic is the crux of redoubling. Certain actions, like love, by their very nature cause a dual performance. Love has a way of spreading outward from the one who loves. Kierkegaard explains, “Wherever love is present, it spreads bold confidence. We like to be near someone who loves, because he casts out fear.”⁷ In fact, Kierkegaard states that “the one who loves is or becomes what he does.”⁸ How can one become what he does? The answer is that humans are a synthesis of the finite and the

 SKS 9, 278 / WL, 280.  Andrew J. Burgess, “Kierkegaard’s Concept of Redoubling and Luther’s Simul Justus,” in Works of Love, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1999 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 16), p. 40.  SKS 9, 278 / WL, 280 (my emphasis).  SKS 9, 279 / WL, 280.  SKS 9, 279 / WL, 281.

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infinite, and the power of the eternal can change the individual. Martin Andic summarizes the concept of redoubling succinctly: “[The eternal in a human] is present (says Kierkegaard) as one and the same thing both outwardly in what it is through you to others…and inwardly in what it is in you by whom it acts…so that, in other words, what you outwardly do to others it inwardly does to you, and the other way.”⁹ Kierkegaard sees such redoubling in Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness: “He who is forgiven little, loves little.”¹⁰ The one who has not been forgiven has not experienced the eternal in such a way that it transforms him into a person of love. The nature of love entails a redoubling. As Andic states, “Our human works of love thus presuppose divine love and acquire it for us.”¹¹ Love is not something invented by humanity; it is presupposed in God. The one who loves does nothing “new,” but rather he participates in the presupposed love of God. Love is not the only object of redoubling in Kierkegaard’s thought. In fact, Kierkegaard seems to think the process of redoubling is essential for basic spiritual growth in Christians. In his journal Kierkegaard states, “Everything Xn [Christian] presupposes a dialectical element or is constituted such that the individual must be able to endure a reduplication within himself.”¹² Gouwens remarks that Kierkegaard sees redoubling as “the kind of appropriation that not only assents to religious belief, but that practices ethical, religious or Christian concepts in the formation of the self.”¹³ In The Moment Kierkegaard discusses how truly spiritual people are “so solidly built that [they] can bear a redoubling.”¹⁴ Why would one have to bear a redoubling? Here the objective and subjective aspect of knowledge is resting below the surface. An objective fact has no redoubling: it simply is. A subjective fact requires a redoubling, for it is an inward appropriation that moves outward into lived existence. An authentic believer has subjective truth, and such truth qualitatively affects how she lives. One who can bear redoubling is one who truly believes and actualizes belief. In Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Kierkegaard comments that a teacher who actually lives what she teaches is “a simple redoubling.”¹⁵

 Martin Andic, “Love’s Redoubling and the Eternal Like for Like,” in Works of Love, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 17.  Lk 7:47.  Andic, “Love’s Redoubling and the Eternal Like for Like,” p. 35.  SKS 26, 426, NB36:28 / KJN 10, 437.  David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 14.  SKS 13, 233 / M, 183.  SKS 11, 102 / BA, 180.

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Kierkegaard sees redoubling as a positive force in the life of a Christian, but he also hints at a malicious side of redoubling. In The Book on Adler, Kierkegaard examines a real-life ordained priest named Adler who believed he received a new revelation from God. Kierkegaard comments that Adler became so inward that his “monologue [turned] into dialogue.” Such change in Adler caused him “to redouble [himself].”¹⁶ How could Adler redouble himself? Adler believed he had a new revelation from God. The message had an internal component where he believed it, but a message of revelation is always meant to be shared with others. God revealed himself to the apostles so that they may write down the message to share with others. If Adler received a revelation, then it by definition must have an outward component. The problem, according to Kierkegaard, was that Adler’s “other” was himself—his internal monologue changed into a dialogue with a fictional other. Adler preached his revelation to himself. His self in turn believed it. Thus, Adler redoubled himself. The above, brief survey suffices for our purpose: redoubling is not a positive or negative force, but rather, like anxiety, it is a by-product of being a temporal/ eternal synthesis. As Rae explains, redoubling focuses on “conformity between our existence and our convictions.”¹⁷ Redoubling is connected to subjectivity, with internalization and appropriation of truth so that the person is what he believes. Redoubling occurs when certain actions necessitate an inward and outward reaction. Such values are reflexive in nature: the individual, in performing said action, in fact causes the action in others and himself. The one who loves loves others as well as himself. Something redoubled is not “created” ex nihilo by the individual, but rather it is presupposed. If we accept this explanation of redoubling, then sin redoubles as well. Kierkegaard does not explicitly state such, but his discussion on love hiding the multitude of sins aligns with such an assessment. Kierkegaard asserts that sin is not something created—it is presupposed.¹⁸ Sin has a duplicitous nature. Whenever one attempts to investigate sinfulness, “one discovers the multitude of sins to be continually greater and greater; that is, through discovery it continually proves to be greater and greater.”¹⁹ We often over inflate our own self-image, but an honest assessment of a sinful situation reveals the depths of our misdeeds. Adam in the garden is a prime example. After he and Eve ate of the tree, God asked what hap-

 SKS 15, 274 / BA, 118.  Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, London: T & T Clark 2010 (Philosophy and Theology), p. 49.  SKS 4, 339 / CA, 32.  SKS 9, 281 / WL, 283.

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pened; Adam replied, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”²⁰ Adam foisted the blame on Eve, attempting to cast himself in a better light. A true examination of sin shows that the predicament is always worse than we perceive. Kierkegaard equates sin “as one who is jaundiced sees everything yellow.”²¹ Sin causes one to see in colors of sin! It redoubles itself in the individual to a horrible end. Kierkegaard illustrates this idea with someone being mocked. If a hateful man mocks an innocent person, why should the innocent person care? The innocent should ignore the mocker and move on with his life. The issue, says Kierkegaard, is when the mocked person seeks to discover the multitude of sins. Only through discovery of the mocking does one “[become] embittered; if he becomes embittered, he discovers the multitude of sins.”²² As another example, one can think of the dynamics of gossip: A nosey neighbor spreads something scandalous. Kierkegaard questions, “Does not the one who tells his neighbor’s faults and sins increase the multitude of sins?”²³ In gossip, sin redoubles itself in the individual—the individual sins by gossiping, and by telling a neighbor the neighbor now sins. Kierkegaard states, “The one who loves is or becomes what he does.”²⁴ We can substitute the term “sin” for “love,” and the logic remains: “the one who sins is or becomes what he does.” If one lives a life of love, then love redoubles within her, and she becomes a more loving person. If one lives a life of sin, then evil redoubles within her, and she becomes a more sinful person. The redoubling nature of sin is why Kierkegaard talks about love “hiding” the multitude of sins. The sinful person lives a self-fulfilling prophecy: “But an evil eye discovers much that love does not see, since an evil eye even sees that the Lord acts unjustly when he is good. When evil lives in the heart, the eye sees offense.”²⁵ Such redoubling of sin should makes us pause. If, as the previous chapter shows, sin is universal, and sin is a redoubling, then sin will grow and corrupt others constantly, causing them in turn to become what they do. The individual who performs the sin is not the only one affected: sin spreads to the other. The other then receives the sinful action, and it redoubles in him as well. Although sin starts in an individual, the effects are both individual and corporate. Glen Kirkconnell clarifies, “The sin of individuals becomes something more; it becomes envy, leveling, the herd men-

     

Gen 3:12. SKS 9, 284 / WL, 286. SKS 9, 286 / WL, 288. SKS 9, 287 / WL, 289. SKS 9, 279 / WL, 281. SKS 5, 70 / EUD, 60.

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tality, as each one seeks the security of the crowd.”²⁶ The redoubling aspect of sin forces the conversation of sin into the public arena. Sin is not just a “private” issue.

2 Sin and the Crowd Traditionally, Kierkegaardian scholarship has overlooked Kierkegaard’s robust understanding of social interactions. Michael Plekon notes, “[Kierkegaard’s] social theory and criticism are only lately being recognized as essential elements of his theological vision.”²⁷ Certainly, Kierkegaard speaks volumes on subjectivity and individuality, but humans by nature are social creatures. John Elrod explains Kierkegaard’s thought: Human beings in their natural state, unlike other species of living things, require “the other” in order to be….The complicated network of collective and public relations established in the economic, political, social, and cultural arenas of life may also become the media through which individuals seek to establish themselves as concrete, identifiable, and worthy selves.²⁸

Kierkegaard obviously cared about his society. His signed discourses are straightforward and clear in order to help Christians in Christendom have authentic faith. Merold Westphal has an excellent assessment of Kierkegaard’s view of the role of the individual in society. Westphal writes, “Kierkegaard views the individual and society as standing in a relation of dialectical interaction. Though neither unilaterally conditions the other, they are mutually determined by each other.”²⁹ People are parts of groups, and groups are made up of people. Sin has a way of distorting how individuals fit within the broader context of society. Individual sinners make up a sinful group of people, and that sinful group exerts its views on individual sinners. Society, both explicitly and implicitly, maintains values of what is right and wrong. When a culture is composed of sinful people,

 W. Glenn Kirkconnell, Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation: From Philosophical Fragments through the Two Ages, London: Continuum 2010 (Continuum Studies in Philosophy), p. 156.  Michael Plekon, “Moral Accounting: Kierkegaard’s Social Theory and Criticism,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 12, 1982, p. 69.  John W. Elrod, “Kierkegaard on Self and Society,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 11, 1980, p. 191.  Merold Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Sociology,” in Two Ages, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1984 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 14), p. 138 (my emphasis).

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as all cultures are, then the society cannot be the paragon of virtue. Cultures espouse values, but said values are not de facto correct simply because they are the popular consensus. The redoubling nature of sin prevents such from being the case. Kierkegaard explains how many culturally civilized people turn up their noses at those who does not share their cosmopolitan views. The warping of sin can deceive people into thinking their values are correct: Thus sin and evil have one power more over people than we ordinarily think of: that it is so stupid to be good, so shallow to believe in the good, so small-townish to betray ignorance or that one is an uninitiated person—uninitiated into the innermost secrets of sin. Here we see quite clearly how evil and sin in large part consist in a conceited comparison-relationship to the world, to other people.³⁰

The culture in power crafts narratives of its role as the arbiter of morality. In a Hegelian system, cultural movement is a meditative process of refinement—moving from a state of less truth to more truth. For Kierkegaard, such idealistic thinking is only an “ingenious and conscious adapting of life to sin.” Kierkegaard does not mince words: “There is no sin as loathsome as the sin of sagacity, simply because this has the world’s approval.”³¹ The topsy-turvy nature of sin’s dynamic within a society has harrowing consequences. Paul Tyson calls it “a demonic abstract power that is bigger than the sum of the particular actions of concrete individuals.”³² An unbridled culture simply perpetuates its own sinful views. Kierkegaard frequently considers the public in his writings. He often uses the terms “public,” “crowd,” and “herd” interchangeably. Westphal explains that these expressions are references to “mass society…the offspring of a passionless age, committed to nothing but self-interest.”³³ The crowd is problematic because it is abstract, not something that one can define subjectively. Individuals are concrete: they can choose to either accept or reject God. The herd has no such choice, for a herd is not a finite/infinite synthesis. As Kierkegaard states when talking about his method of communication, “However much confusion and evil and contemptibleness there can be in human beings as soon as they become the irresponsible and unrepentant ‘public,’ ‘crowd,’ etc.—there is just as much truth and goodness and lovableness in them when one can get them as single  SKS 9, 282 / WL, 284.  SKS 10, 192 / CD, 181.  Paul Tyson, Kierkegaard’s Theological Sociology: Prophetic Fire for the Present Age, Eugene, OR: Cascade 2019, p. 29.  Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Sociology,” p. 134.

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individuals.”³⁴ When one sees himself as a part of the crowd, he no longer owns up to the fact of his individuality before God; he hides in the public. Kierkegaard decries such thinking in The Sickness unto Death: “Judgment” corresponds to the single individual….No matter how many are judged, if the judging is to have any earnestness and truth, then each individual is judged….And now our enlightened age…[thinks] let us just stick together…[and] protect ourselves by regarding [a dissenting individual] as mad or, if necessary, by putting him to death. If many of us do it, then there is no wrong. It is nonsense, an antiquated notion, that the many can do wrong. What many do is God’s will.³⁵

An improper herd mentality is one of the reasons why Kierkegaard stresses sin as before God in The Sickness unto Death. Slipping into an abstract, faceless “crowd” does not cause one to hide from God, as if He can be duped into overlooking an individual’s deeds. Since the public is abstract, how does it exert its “will” upon individuals? For Kierkegaard, the crowd seeks to level any individuality. Any person who stands up as an individual in contrast to the crowd is brought back in line through the process of leveling: ³⁶ “The abstraction of leveling, this spontaneous combustion of the human race, produced by the friction that occurs when the separateness of individual inwardness in the religious life is omitted, will stay with us, as they say of a tradewind that consumes everything”³⁷ Kierkegaard ties the ability to be leveled to the religious life of an individual. True religion is subjectivity, a one-to-one relation with God. The crowd cannot abide that, for it is the forward-moving progress of mediation in the world! Tyson comments that “no one must stand out, everyone must conform” to the values of the crowd.³⁸ Kierkegaard scathingly states, “For leveling really to take place, a phantom must first be raised, the spirit of leveling, a monstrous abstraction, an allencompassing something that is nothing, a mirage—and this phantom is the public”³⁹ In Hegelian thought, the public sets the agenda and doles out value,

 SKS 13, 17 / PV, 11.  SKS 11, 234– 235/ SUD, 123.  The polemic against leveling may, too, be autobiographical for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was the target of the public’s scorn when he challenged the newspaper The Corsair to mock him. The newspaper, and the public, obliged, and some of the attacks were quite mean-spirited. Kierkegaard was an active recipient of the negative aspect of the crowd. For more on this see particularly Hong’s historical introduction in COR.  SKS 8, 83 – 84 / TA, 87 (my emphasis).  Tyson, Kierkegaard’s Theological Sociology, p. 24.  SKS 8, 86 / TA, 90.

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and as Kirkconnell comments, “personal worth derives from the herd.”⁴⁰ Geist moving through history results in the progression of a culture. Kierkegaard balks at such notions because it erases subjectivity. Religion becomes a participation trophy. “Demonic” is not too strong a term for the actions of the crowd for Kierkegaard, for “these servants of leveling are the servants of the power of evil, for leveling itself is not of God…but God permits it and wants to cooperate with individuals.”⁴¹ The monstrous abstraction of the crowd leads to a demonic culture. Kierkegaard explains the terrifying reality in a heartfelt passage in Works of Love: Merciful God, yet one favor, that my sin and my guilt might be such that the world rightly sees it as abominable and shocking! But the most terrible of all must be to incur guilt, heinous guilt, to incur guilt upon guilt and new guilt day in and day out—and not become aware of it at all because one’s whole environment, because existence itself has turned into an illusion that strengthened one in the opinion that it was nothing, that it not only was not guilt but was almost meritorious.⁴²

What can be more tragically ironic than sinning and not realizing it? A culture may praise sin, but the praise of the crowd does not deem an action righteous. Yet Kierkegaard does not stop his thought process at simply mourning the predicament of the crowd—he continues to talk about how the crowd revels in sin: “We pay money to be infected; we greet as a welcome guest the one who brings the infection!”⁴³ Kierkegaard mentions in Christian Discourses that the crowd did not want to be saved by Jesus: “The fallen human race, which [Jesus] wanted to save and which did not want to be saved.”⁴⁴ The crowd cannot abide subjectivity. It is judge, jury, and executor of morality. Sin redoubles, affecting both agent and recipient. Such redoubling provides more opportunity for sin: “The sin in others is the occasion that occasions the sin in the one who comes in touch with them.”⁴⁵ Such actions affect the crowd, a nebulous, abstract entity comprised of fallen individuals. The crowd seeks uniformity, squashing any attempt at individuality. The public sets its own criteria for what is or is not sinful, so much so that “up” can become “down.” These crowd dynamics are not mere erudite formulations of a brilliant theologian and philosopher. Any belief, for Kierkegaard, must have real-world force behind

     

Kirkconnell, Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation, p. 150. SKS 8, 103 / TA, 109. SKS 9, 288 / WL, 290 – 291 (my emphasis). SKS 9, 289 / WL, 291. SKS 10, 272 / CD, 259. SKS 9, 295 / WL, 297.

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it. In Kierkegaard’s time, the sinfulness of society spread virally on the streets of his hometown of Copenhagen, but in less straightforward ways.

3 Real-Life Consequences: Copenhagen’s Christendom Examining Kierkegaard’s culture and his interaction with it shows a real-world example of how the redoubling of sin affects an entire society. Kierkegaard opens Christian Discourses with an exegesis of Matthew 6 where Jesus exhorts his followers not to chase after the cares of pagans. Kierkegaard has an indictment against his countrymen: “These cares [in Matthew 6] are found among the people in this country; ergo, this Christian country is pagan.”⁴⁶ David Possen argues that some of Kierkegaard’s topics in Christian Discourses “[are] penned with particular Copenhagen pagans in mind…the theologians Magnús Eiríksson…and Hans Lassen Martensen.”⁴⁷ In many articles in the periodical Fædrelandet, Kierkegaard openly attacked theologian and priest H. L. Martensen’s funeral sermon that Bishop Jacob Mynster was an authentic truth-witness to the Christian faith.⁴⁸ Martensen’s praise of Mynster set Kierkegaard on the offensive against the Danish state church. Kierkegaard explicitly and directly challenged these churchmen and theologians. Kierkegaard usually preferred indirect communication, but as Curtis Thompson rightfully signals, Kierkegaard’s attack was “an organic outgrowth of his thinking and writing.”⁴⁹ Although we do not have the space to examine all of the theologians of Kierkegaard’s day, one can see consistent themes in their thinking that Kierkegaard opposed. The influential theological leaders of the time were all pro-Christendom—that is a formal merging of the Danish Lutheran Church and the Danish government—and pro-Hegelian. Tyson notes that the culture of Christianity in Copenhagen “was almost entirely functionally atheistic.”⁵⁰ Everyone was a “Christian,” but one did not see the active role of God in people’s lives. David Law observes, “Christianity had

 SKS 10, 23 / CD, 11.  David D. Possen, “On Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen Pagans,” in Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2007 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 17), p. 36.  SKS 14, 113 – 221 / M, 3 – 85.  Curtis L. Thompson, “Shapers of Kierkegaard’s Danish Church: Mynster, Grundtvig, Martensen,” in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Jon Stewart, Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell 2015 (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, vol. 58), p. 202.  Tyson, Kierkegaard’s Theological Sociology, p. 13.

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been absorbed into an unholy symbiosis of state, culture, and church.”⁵¹ While he was bishop of Denmark, Mynster admitted that laxity existed among the congregants in the church, and as Law elucidates, Mynster would rather allow the profligate in the ranks of the church than make the requirements too restrictive.⁵² John Saxbee agrees with such an assessment that Kierkegaard’s main issue “was Mynster’s readiness to admit that being a Christian in Christendom…fell far short of the self-sacrificial ideal.”⁵³ Kierkegaard berates such laxity in Practice in Christianity: “Leniency was therefore substituted for rigorousness; because one did not dare to command and one shrank from having to command—those who should give orders became cowardly; those who should obey became brazen.”⁵⁴ Kierkegaard lambasts the myth of the church triumphant, claiming Satan changed methods, deceiving the Christian church “into thinking that now it had been victorious, now it should have a good rest after the battle and enjoy victory.”⁵⁵ As Law states, the religious leaders in Kierkegaard’s eyes are not “the [bearers] of Christianity, but…the [corrupters] of it.”⁵⁶ Hans Lassen Martensen was Kierkegaard’s professor at the University of Copenhagen,⁵⁷ and Martensen appears quite smitten with the philosophy of Hegel. Thompson remarks that Martensen agreed with Hegel’s vision of understanding the final purpose of reality only at the end of the process.⁵⁸ One can see Martensen’s reliance on Hegel in multiple places in his Christian Dogmatics. For example, Martensen states, For, although it is indeed the creative Spirit who speaks through nature to the created spirit, yet nature with her inarticulate language speaks only in an indirect and figurative manner of the eternal power and godhead of the Creator. A direct, unambiguous revelation can be

 David R. Law, “The Contested Notion of ‘Christianity’ in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Denmark: Mynster, Martensen, and Kierkegaard’s Antiecclesiastical, ‘Christian’ Invective in The Moment and Late Writings,” in The Moment and Late Writings, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2009 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 23), p. 45.  Ibid., p. 47.  John Saxbee, “The Golden Age in an Earthen Vessel: The Life and Times of Bishop J. P. Mynster,” in Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 10), ed. by Jon Stewart, New York: de Gruyter 2003, p. 160.  SKS 12, 222 / PC, 227.  SKS 12, 224 / PC, 230.  Law, “The Contested Notion of ‘Christianity,’” p. 66.  Thompson, “Shapers of Kierkegaard’s Danish Church,” p. 200.  Curtis L. Thompson, “H. L. Martensen’s Theological Anthropology,” in Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark, ed. by Jon Stewart, p. 169.

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found only in the world of spirit, of the word, of conscience, and of freedom, in other words, of history. Revelation and history are, therefore, not to be separated.⁵⁹

The above statement is clearly at odds with Kierkegaard’s assessment of subjective knowledge. Possen claims, “The core of the quarrel between Kierkegaard and Martensen concerns the relation between grace and reason in Lutheran life.”⁶⁰ A Hegelian Christianity is concerned with objectivity and treats Christianity like any other subject: a topic with data one memorizes. Niels Thulstrup explains that “Martensen also claims that the Christian concepts may be academically depicted by philosophy without the Christian faith.”⁶¹ Such Hegelian thought turns Christianity into a mundane affair, a set of cultural practices rather than a vibrant religion lived in subjective passion. As Kierkegaard displays clearly in Christian Discourses, “People in these times seem to be quite unaware of this difficulty [of knowing their standing as Christians]. Christianity is regarded as a sum of doctrines; lectures are given on it in the same way as on ancient philosophy, Hebrew, or any branch of knowledge whatever, with the listener’s or the learner’s relation to it left as a matter of indifference.”⁶² Sin’s redoubling leads to the crowd’s deception and perpetuation. In Kierkegaard’s epoch, he saw the effects of sinful individuals negatively impacting the life of the church. The leveling of the crowd desired to maintain the status quo of Christendom, a type of social order that did not ask much of its followers. Such professors and pastors turned Copenhagen into a pagan city ruled by a “Christian” church. The church became the crowd, and it therefore set its own rules, not desiring an authentic, subjective faith. Kierkegaard opines that “there is at times so much in God’s house that will lull us to sleep” rather than awakening the individual to true faith.⁶³ This perversion of Christianity into Christendom comes from the group dynamic of sin. Sin never exists in a vacuum, and its viral nature spreads, leaving destruction in its wake. Sin can spread so much that it turns the very concept of a sanctuary into an antechamber to perdition.

 Hans Lassen Martensen, Christian Dogmatics: Compendium of the Doctrines of Christianity, trans. by William Urwick, Edinburgh: T & T Clark 1866 (Clark’s Foreign Theological Library, vol. 12), p. 12.  Possen, “On Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen Pagans,” p. 50.  Niels Thulstrup, “Martensen’s Dogmatics and Its Reception,” in Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark, ed. by Jon Stewart, p. 189.  SKS 10, 222– 223 / CD, 214– 215.  SKS 10, 177 / CD, 165.

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4 Conclusion Kierkegaard’s picture of the redoubling nature of sin in the crowd is sobering. Our sins are put into perspective: not only does sin affect the race, but it redoubles in the race, causing more occasions for sin to occur. Such unchecked power can affect the leaders in the church, and they in turn redouble the sin through their false teaching and lax morality. The pervasive and destructive nature of sin seems so dark that one cries out like the apostle Paul: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”⁶⁴ Like Paul, Kierkegaard agrees the answer lies in the love of Christ. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard states, “Forgiveness deprives sin of life….Love hides a multitude of sins, because love prevents the sin from coming into existence, smothers it at birth.”⁶⁵ Sin redoubles, spreads to the crowd, squashes subjectivity, and corrupts a culture, but the love of God can counteract any such disease. Kierkegaard exhorts his readers to cut off sin at its source by loving and forgiving rather than perpetuating the sin by feeding it through more misdeeds. Kierkegaard’s investigation of the redoubling aspect of sin may make his understanding of hereditary sin more palatable. In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard alludes to the race spreading corruption, but he does not invest time to make a robust case for his view. In Works of Love, The Two Ages, and through a smattering of his polemical writings against the Danish church, we see the effects of the sinfulness of the race. For the theologian who may be apprehensive about Kierkegaard’s understanding of hereditary sin, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on sin’s redoubling assuages fears of Pelagianism. Sin is like a virus running rampant with no natural cure, and once released, it cannot be stopped unless a supernatural medicine is administered. Because of its corruptive nature, sin is an inevitability—an inevitability we willfully and woefully choose. Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the leveling of the crowd poses a poignant question to any form of popular Christianity: how does one know whether his denomination of Christianity is leveling dissent to maintain its power structure? Kierkegaard, the outsider to the Lutheran church, acted more in line with Martin Luther than the Lutheran officials of his day. Just because Christianity may be popular does not necessarily mean it is acting in corrupt fashion. How do we know when to speak prophetically against an institution like Kierkegaard did in his works? I believe Kierkegaard would say the answer lies in the Teacher teaching us the truth in subjectivity. The Holy Spirit’s role is to lead Christians

 Rom 7:24.  SKS 9, 294 / WL, 297.

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into truth: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”⁶⁶ Although Kierkegaard’s pneumatology is latent in his works,⁶⁷ he would affirm the need to listen to the Spirit of truth to hear from the Teacher. Kierkegaard’s examination of sin and the crowd reminds us to watch the crowd and listen to the Teacher. Our principal takeaway from this chapter is sin has an outward corruption. Sin does not exist in a vacuum; it has far-reaching consequences. The relationship between individuals and the crowd is a vicious circle, spread through the redoubling of sin. Not even the church is immune from the leveling of the crowd. The problem is that a crowd cannot qualitatively leap to faith—only individuals can do that. Here we see why Kierkegaard focuses on the individual: the panacea for the madness of the crowd is impassioned individuals with genuine faith in Christ. But there is one environment that unconditionally does not give and is not occasion for sin —that is love. When the sin in a person is surrounded by love, it is outside its element. It is like a besieged city cut off from every connection with its compatriots; it is like someone who has been addicted to drink, is placed in reduced circumstances, and now, when he loses his powers, waits in vain for an occasion to become stimulated by intoxication. Quite true, it is possible…that sin can take love as an occasion, can become furious at it, can rage against it. Yet in the long run sin cannot hold out against love.⁶⁸

 Jn 16:13.  The lack of explicit talk on the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s work is perplexing. In a journal entry he even complains that his critics say he does not talk about the Spirit enough. He states, “I have sufficient respect for the Holy Spirit that I have not dared to speak of it because I understand that as soon as I begin to do so I will have to pose the existential element even more rigorously” (SKS 24, 469, NB25:48 / KJN 8, 476). I believe Kierkegaard’s hesitancy stems from the term “Spirit” being co-opted by Hegelians. Using “Spirit” with a culture who equates it with Geist just confuses the issue.  SKS 9, 296 / WL, 298.

Chapter 7 Sin and the Aesthetic Pseudonyms In the opening section of Either/Or, the Young Aesthete says, “I am timorous as a sheva, as weak and muted as a dagesh lene, I feel like a letter printed backward in the line, and yet as uncontrollable as a pasha with three horse tails.”¹ Such a statement drips with irony—the young man is in despair, and he uses Hebrew grammatical terms to express his emotions. He knows objective facts about Christianity, all the way down to the intricacies of the original biblical languages; but he still lacks something. Such a brief aphorism from a character in Either/Or gives us a glimpse at Kierkegaard’s purpose in his indirect communication. Kierkegaard saw Denmark as under the illusion of Christendom, and he explains in The Point of View that “generally speaking, there is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion.” Kierkegaard continues, “In the service of the love of truth [the indirect method] dialectically arranges everything for the one ensnared and then, modest as love always is, avoids being witness to the confession that he makes alone before God.”² If Kierkegaard’s goal in his writing were to remove the illusion of Christendom, then one would assume Kierkegaard indirectly demonstrates the despair and unfulfilling lives of sin in his various characters. Now we investigate whether Kierkegaard holds a consistent hamartiology in his pseudonymous works from the aesthetic stage of his writing.³ We are searching for Kierkegaard’s four main themes about sin listed in the previous chapters. The first theme is that sin is a fundamental misrelation between the individual and God. God created humans as a synthesis of the finite in the infinite, which relates itself to itself and its creator. Whenever people live in sin, they sever their relationship to the author and giver of life, leading to despair. Second, sin is untruth. Because of the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity, individuals cannot come to know God without His revelation to them. The issue is that all of humanity polemically refuses to acknowledge God, and when confronted with the truth about

 SKS 2, 30 / EO1, 22.  SKS 16, 26 / PV, 43 – 44.  There are two aesthetic writings post-Postscript: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress and an unpublished article titled “Phister as Captain Scipio (in the Comic Opera Ludovic).” These two works are similar, yet different from the earlier aesthetic writings. These two later works discuss the performance arts, like EO1, but they are just that—discussions of art. They do not have the underpinnings of Kierkegaard’s earlier aesthetic works. Because of such, I do not include them in this chapter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-007

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Christ as the paradox, they either accept it in faith or reject it in offense. The noetic effects of sin lead to the third theme in Kierkegaard: sin is an existential state. Sin is not just a “thing” one does, but rather sin is a qualitative leap into a mode of existence. All people willingly leap into the abyss of sin, but the leap is not forced. Lastly, sin has an outward focus, redoubling when performed, for people become what they do. Such a dynamic has drastic effects upon the larger society, causing groups to reassert their sinful presuppositions back onto individuals. In this chapter we examine Kierkegaard’s aesthetic writings to investigate if Kierkegaard presents a consistent doctrine of sin in his works. The works are, in chronological order, Either Or, Part 1; Repetition; and Stages on Life’s Way, section 1. We start with a brief summary and assessment of each work. We then examine each aesthetic character in said work and his relationship to the doctrine of sin. After examining each character, we render a verdict on Kierkegaard’s consistency in his hamartiology.

1 Either/Or, Part 1 Either/Or (1843) was Kierkegaard’s first major published work, and he considered it the start of his authorship.⁴ Victor Eremita is the editor, and the book contains the writings of four characters: “A” the nameless aesthete, Johannes the Seducer, Judge William, and an unnamed Pastor. Part 1 of Either/Or contains the writings of the aesthetic characters Victor Eremita, A, and Johannes the Seducer while Part 2 contains the ethical writings of Judge William and the Pastor.

Summary Either/Or opens with a message from the editor, Victor Eremita. Eremita bought a desk from a second-hand shop, and in his frustration of not being able to open one of the drawers, Eremita chopped open the desk with a hatchet. His furor revealed a secret compartment filled with correspondence between A and Judge William, and Eremita became obsessed with reading the letters. Eremita notes that “as far as the first author, the esthete, is concerned, there is no information

 Kierkegaard published two works before Either/Or: From the Papers of One Still Living and his magister’s dissertation The Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard did not consider these works part of his authorship, so he usually refers to Either/Or as his first work. See SKS 16, 15 – 18 / PV, 29 – 32.

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at all about him.”⁵ Upon first finding the papers, Eremita attempted to organize the correspondence between A and Judge William, but A’s writing style and content of his letters were disorganized. Eremita simply presents the writings as he found them. A’s writings start with the Διαψαλματα, a set of aphorisms and poetic quips concerning A’s mood. A appears to be unsatisfied with life, filled with melancholy about his existence. For example, he states, “Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it. Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. Whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life.”⁶ Such sentiment sets the tone for A’s treatises on art and existence throughout Either/Or. Following the Διαψαλματα are seven articles written by A and lastly a novella written by Johannes the Seducer. A starts with a rather long essay titled “The Immediate Erotic Stages,” analyzing music, the erotic, and the aesthetic way of life. For A, Mozart is the master of the erotic. Language is too concrete, too historical, to properly explain the sensuousness of the erotic. “Only through music” can one display the immediacy of the erotic, and Mozart masterfully achieves this goal.⁷ A notes three stages to the immediate erotic, and Mozart demonstrates these by certain characters in his operas. Stage one is the stage of dreaming, seen in Page in Figaro, when “the sensuous awakens, yet not to motion but to a still quiescence, not to delight and joy but to deep melancholy.”⁸ The second stage is the stage of seeking, championed by Papageno in The Magic Flute, when “this awakening in which desire awakens, this jolt, separates desire and its object, gives desire an object.”⁹ The final stage is the stage of desiring, perfectly exemplified by Don Juan in Don Giovanni,¹⁰ when “desire is absolutely qualified as desire….Desire has its absolute object; it desires the particular absolutely.”¹¹ With Don Juan, one has an example of an ideal that never truly becomes concrete: he desires desire. Don Juan moves about seducing women, but A argues that Don Juan is not truly a seducer because he never enters into the ethical sphere of decision. A prefers to call him a deceiver, for “he enjoys the satisfaction

 SKS 2, 15 / EO1, 7.  SKS 2, 47– 48 / EO1, 38 – 39.  SKS 2, 64 / EO1, 56.  SKS 2, 90 / EO1, 75.  SKS 2, 85 / EO1, 79.  A changes between the Spanish “Don Juan” and the Italian “Don Giovanni” randomly throughout the essay. The two are the same character.  SKS 2, 90 / EO1, 85.

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of desire; as soon as he has enjoyed it, he seeks a new object, and so it goes on indefinitely.”¹² A summarizes Don Giovanni’s role: “[His] essential nature is music….He dissolves, as it were, in music for us.”¹³ A’s literary analysis continues with examining the “reflective sorrow” of three characters: Marie Beaumarchais from Clavigo, Donna Elvira from Don Giovanni, and Margarete from Faust. ¹⁴ All three of these women were deceived by men, and all three women elevated their beloved to the utmost concern in their lives. When their beloved left, they were crushed, and A focuses on how the women can come out of despair. He notes that Elvira made Don Juan the focus of her life, and upon the break-up of their relationship “here two possibilities become apparent—either to enter into ethical and religious categories or to keep her love for Giovanni.”¹⁵ Margarete, too, sees Faust as the grounding force of her life: “God in heaven, forgive me [Margarete] for loving a human being more than I loved you, and yet I still do it; I know that it is a new sin that I speak this way to you.”¹⁶ A switches from literary analysis to self-reflection with two articles, “The Unhappiest One” and “The Rotation of Crops.” In these articles we see A’s melancholy in full swing: “We, like the Roman soldiers, do not fear death; we know a worse calamity, and first and last, above all—it is to live.”¹⁷ A states that the unhappiest one is a person “who in one way or another has his ideal, the substance of his life, the plenitude of his consciousness, his essential nature, outside himself.”¹⁸ For A, someone whose ideal is outside of himself causes him to not live truly in the present. “The Rotation of Crops” argues that “boredom is the root of all evil,” and one must combat it with all his being.¹⁹ A “[assumes] that it is man’s destiny to amuse himself,” so he must “rotate crops” to keep variety in his life.²⁰ A suggests never getting married or taking official positions as ways of staving off boredom. By one’s reflection and forgetting, one can “rotate crops” constantly, developing an unending chain of novel experiences.

 SKS 2, 102 / EO1, 99.  SKS 2, 136 / EO1, 134.  SKS 2, 156 / EO1, 172.  SKS 2, 193 / EO1, 198. This section, too, seems autobiographical. Kierkegaard seems to be showing Regine that the way out of their broken relationship is to give up her love for Kierkegaard and embrace the religious state of existence.  SKS 2, 207 / EO1, 213.  SKS 2, 214 / EO1, 220.  SKS 2, 216 / EO1, 222.  SKS 2, 276 / EO1, 286.  SKS 2, 279 / EO1, 290.

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The final section of Either/Or, Part 1, is “The Seducer’s Diary” by Johannes the Seducer. A claims simply to edit the diary as well as knowing the characters in real life. “The Seducer’s Diary” focuses on Johannes’s courtship and deception of a woman named Cordelia. As a diary, the entire story is from Johannes’s perspective. Johannes loves the idea of love, but whenever he actualizes the ideal, it is no longer appealing to him. Because of his love of love, he constantly seduces and leaves women. The salacious diary goes through Johannes’s depraved thoughts and methods of capturing the heart of Cordelia. He states, “She must be mine. Let God keep his heaven if I may keep her.”²¹ He eventually springs his trap by forcing Cordelia to break off their engagement, making her think it was her idea. He then sets up a secret nighttime rendezvous, acting like he came to his senses and realized he needed her in his life. Either/Or, Part 1, ends with Johannes’s cold words: “Why cannot such a night last longer?…But now it is finished, and I never want to see her again.”²² Although Eremita claims that A’s discourses are unorganized, we can see a clear organization and train of thought in A’s writings. The work consistently embodies the aesthetic state of existence. Murray Rae explains that the aesthetic stage “is concerned only with the immediate. Such a person is motivated by what will bring pleasure, comfort, and immediate satisfaction.”²³ A continually refers to the immediacy of love and art, and he fears becoming concrete. John Hare notes that the articles in Part 1 “have a definite pattern of lengths,” with the article “The Unhappiest One” in the center of a chiastic structure.²⁴ Hare persuasively argues that “The Unhappiest One” is the sine qua non of Part 1 because it shows that A cannot actualize himself in the present. A idolizes Don Juan but as soon as A reflects on being Don Juan, he no longer can be Don Juan because A is no longer immediate. Furthermore, A cannot become Johannes the Seducer because “the Aesthete foresees a terrible end for Johannes and thinking about him creates barely controllable anxiety.”²⁵ A is the unhappiest one because he cannot live what he desires. Such a life of daydreaming, passion, and emotion leads to a life of despair. As David Stern astutely explains, A becomes less concrete as the book continues: “As [A] becomes more and more obscure to us, he also be-

 SKS 2, 416 / EO1, 429.  SKS 2, 432 / EO1, 445.  Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, London: T & T Clark 2010 (Philosophy and Theology), p. 85.  John E. Hare, “The Unhappiest One and the Structure of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or,” in Either/ Or, 1, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1995 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 3), p. 92.  Ibid., p. 96.

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comes…obscure to himself.”²⁶ A is left empty, a shadow of what he could be. Stephen Dunning summarizes, “The dialectic of aesthetic inwardness had arrived at what appears to be a spiritual cul-de-sac, with nowhere to go but into the ethical sphere. At such a point, no conclusion is possible.”²⁷ The aesthetic stage is ultimately an unfulfilling sphere of existence.

Victor Eremita Eremita is a small character in Either/Or, penning only the preface, but that does not mean that we cannot see aspects of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin at work. In the preface, Eremita gives a quick summary of the types of works present in Parts 1 and 2 of Either/Or. Eremita notes the difference between A’s writing and the last section “The Seducer’s Diary,” and he even argues that A is the true author of the “Diary” but did not want to be associated with the scandalous composition.²⁸ Eremita then discusses Judge William’s large essays in Part 2, but Eremita leaves out an important aspect in his introduction. Part 2 does not end with Judge William’s essays, but rather Part 2 ends with a sermon from a pastor friend of William. Such an omission cannot be coincidental, for Eremita went into a robust discussion concerning A’s connection to the authorship of “The Seducer’s Diary.” Julia Watkin comments on this seeming absence: “It is not only an omission of the culminating point of the entire Work, it is also apparently an omission of the religious as yet another possible life-style besides aesthetics and ethics.”²⁹ Eremita does not want to open up to the possibility of religious existence. Eremita’s lack of consideration for the religious sphere is consistent with a life of sin. Eremita rejects the truth of the religious sphere, living in a volitional state of untruth. Eremita resides in the aesthetic sphere of existence,³⁰ which shows that he has leaped qualitatively into a sinful existence state. Such existence is by definition a misrelation between the individual and God, for the aesthetic stage places desire as the essence of existence rather than God. Even in

 David S. Stern, “The Ties That Bind: The Limits of Aesthetic Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or,” in Either/Or, 1, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 253.  Stephen N. Dunning, “The Dialectic of Contradiction in Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Stage,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 49, no. 3, 1981, p. 404.  SKS 2, 16 – 17 / EO1, 9.  Julia Watkin, “The Journals and the Works of 1843 with Particular Reference to Either/Or,” Tópicos: revista de filosofía, vol. 3, no. 5, 1993, p. 22.  Eremita does not specifically say he is an aesthete, but such is made clear by his inclusion in the aesthetic symposium in SL.

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Eremita’s brief preface, we can see three out of the four aspects of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin.

A A is an aesthete through and through. He idolizes Don Juan because he is pure immediacy, never committing to a concrete actuality. Such refusal to choose runs afoul of Kierkegaard’s view of the actualization of the self. Kierkegaard comments on A in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “Part I is an existence-possibility that cannot attain existence.”³¹ One cannot exist if one refuses to exist. A, in fact, epitomizes the four aspects of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin. First, A is clearly not a self because he misrelates to God. A states that “the unhappy one is the person who in one way or another has his ideal, the substance of his life, the plentitude of his consciousness, his essential nature, outside himself.”³² A operates on a faulty understanding that something ideal—that is, something eternal—exists only in ideality. He thinks that making an ideal the essence of one’s life leads to either a past tense in recollection or a future tense in hope. Neither of these is suitable because A wants to live in the present. A misunderstands the reality of being a human self: the finite and the infinite relate together by spirit. God interacts within reality, within the present. Kierkegaard says misrelation of the self leads to a life of despair,³³ and A most certainly despairs. He speaks volumes on his mood of longing for something fulfilling and the depression he experiences: “And I will beseech Mozart to forgive me that his music did not inspire me to great deeds but made me a fool who, because of him, lost the little sense I had and now in quiet sadness usually pass the time humming something I do not understand, and like a ghost prowls night and day around something I cannot enter.”³⁴ A is searching for true purpose and meaning that he can actualize. He praises Mozart, but his love of Mozart does not lead to fulfillment in existence. According to Kierkegaard, one can find true existence only in God. A is a severed self, and he clearly exhibits sin as misrelation to God. In his discussion on tragedy, A claims that “sin is not an esthetic element.”³⁵ His reasoning is that sin and evil are ethical categories so as long as one resides     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 230 / CUP1, 253. 2, 216 / EO1, 222. 11, 131 / SUD, 15. 2, 56 / EO1, 48 – 49. 2, 144 / EO1, 144.

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in the aesthetic sphere of existence, then one cannot sin. A obviously has a myopic view of sin, not grasping its drastic nature. Leo Stan agrees with such an assessment: “Neither A, nor the judge seem [sic] to understand the magnitude of sin, not to mention the ardent need for salvation. Therefore, it is safe to say that they lack a soteriological consciousness or mindset.”³⁶ Although A lacks a soteriological consciousness of sin, he still has chosen against God. The either/ or of aesthetics/ethics is a choice, and claiming one has not chosen sin because he has not moved to the ethical sphere is self-deception. Kierkegaard stresses that sin is untruth, a polemical rejection of God and his ways. A is clearly in “untruth and [is] that through one’s own fault.”³⁷ A embodies sin as an existential state. Kierkegaard stresses that sin is not a mere something but a qualitative position one exhibits, and A’s Διαψαλματα demonstrate such an existence state. A refuses to make any true maxim his point of departure for his existence, for he thinks that whatever he chooses in life he will regret.³⁸ Out of fear of regret A lives an empty life of apparent nonchoice, which, as stated above, is a choice against God. A clearly wallows in the existence he has made, showing his melancholy in full force. Kierkegaard states in The Concept of Anxiety, “When sin is brought into esthetics, the mood becomes either light-minded or melancholy.”³⁹ A’s existence is characteristic of a sinful life of despair. Lastly, A’s sin redoubles and negatively affects others. A idolizes Don Juan, seeing him as the paragon of immediate erotic existence. A admits, “[Don Juan] desires, and this desire acts seductively. To this extent he does seduce. He enjoys the satisfaction of desire; as soon as he has enjoyed it, he seeks a new object, and so it goes indefinitely.”⁴⁰ Don Juan’s seduction is a sin itself, but it causes seduction in others by its very nature. Don Juan deceives countless women and leaves them to deal with the consequences of his deception. A praises the attitude of Don Juan, clearly not caring for the consequences of his actions. In fact, A deludes himself into thinking that such actions are not evil, because “evil” is ethical, while he and Don Juan are aesthetic.

 Leo Stan, Selfhood and Otherness in Kierkegaard’s Authorship: A Heterological Investigation, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2017, pp. 67– 68.  SKS 4, 224 / PF, 15.  SKS 2, 47– 48 / EO1, 38 – 39.  SKS 4, 322 / CA, 14.  SKS 2, 102 / EO1, 99.

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Johannes the Seducer Johannes the Seducer is portrayed in an overwhelmingly negative light, and like A, Johannes exhibits all four aspects of sinfulness. First, he plainly misrelates to God. In numerous entries, he notes the role of men and women as mere sensual pleasure. He misogynistically states that “woman’s fundamental qualification is to be company for man,” and he claims “that the highest enjoyment imaginable is to be loved, loved more than anything else in the world.”⁴¹ Johannes sees the purpose of his life is to love and be loved physically, and he chases this goal from woman to woman. His warped view to love leads him to have love “awakened” inside of woman, and only then is she “enthroned in her meaning as a woman.”⁴² Johannes sees his duty as helping women find their meaning. Such thoughts clearly misunderstand an individual’s purpose in life: to become a self resting transparently in God. Johannes the Seducer is seduced by sin, perverting his understanding of finding his τέλος in God. Second, Johannes volitionally rejects God when he says, “Then my soul rejoices, my heart pounds, passion is aroused. This one girl, the one and only in all the world. She must belong to me; she must be mine. Let God keep his heaven if I may keep her.”⁴³ Johannes sounds as though he places Cordelia in the position that belongs only to God, but actually Cordelia is a means to an end. Nathaniel Kramer notes that as a poet, Johannes “is not only interested in the immediate moment as such…but ultimately in that moment being worthy of being remembered.”⁴⁴ Johannes’s “artistic” project of seduction is his choice in life, and therefore Johannes is willingly in untruth. Third, Johannes’s actions are not mere actions but outworkings of his existence state. Throughout the “Diary,” while Johannes sets his trap for Cordelia, he ogles other women, fantasizing about future seductions. The “Diary” ends with Johannes leaving Cordelia, and he has not a care in the world. Johannes’s sinfulness is in his very identity of being a seducer, demonstrating his existence state as a consummate, sinful aesthete. Lastly, and most painfully to the reader, Johannes’s actions redouble and cause strife among others. Johannes does not care about others; people are a means to an end. We obviously see such with Cordelia, but Johannes also uses

 SKS 2, 329 / EO1, 340. SKS 2, 357 / EO1, 368.  SKS 2, 372 / EO1, 384.  SKS 2, 416 / EO1, 429.  Nathaniel Kramer, “Johannes the Seducer: The Aesthete Par Excellence or on the Way to Ethics?” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2015 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 17), p. 164.

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men as a means to an end. During Johannes’s seduction, he befriends Edward, an acquaintance of Cordelia’s family. Johannes pushes Edward to pursue Cordelia, all the while planning to snatch Cordelia from right under Edward’s nose. As Stan explains, Both A and his shadowy double, Johannes, amply confirm that aestheticism resists everything heterogeneous, be it the ethical difference, the sociopolitical otherness, or the alterity of the physical world around. Both aesthetes are equally dismissive of religion, that is to say, of any relationality to a transcendent otherness. Their attitudes toward spirituality are either openly nihilistic or do not go beyond the level of caustic irony and sarcasm.⁴⁵

Others do not matter to Johannes. His art of seduction produces seduction in others, and his selfish actions lead others to despair. Stephen Dunning shows, “By deceiving Cordelia, Johannes intrudes upon her consciousness and attempts to change or distort her.”⁴⁶ Cordelia even responds to Johannes after his deception, calling him “my seducer, my deceiver, my enemy, my murderer, the source of my unhappiness, the tomb of my joy, the abyss of my unhappiness.”⁴⁷ Johannes’s actions spread to others, corrupting them as he is corrupted. Johannes exemplifies sin’s outward dynamic.

2 Repetition Kierkegaard published Repetition in 1843 on the same day as Fear and Trembling. This short novella is under the pseudonym of Constantin Constantius, a psychologist who encounters an unnamed Young Man. The book flows back and forth between Constantius’s observations and musings and the Young Man’s correspondence with Constantius.

Summary Repetition starts with Constantius questioning the purpose of repetition as a philosophical issue: “Say what you will, this question [of the possibility of repetition] will play a very important role in modern philosophy, for repetition is a crucial

 Stan, Selfhood and Otherness in Kierkegaard’s Authorship, p. 26.  Stephen N. Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1985 (Princeton Legacy Library), p. 57.  SKS 2, 302 / EO1, 312.

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expression for what ‘recollection’ was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition.”⁴⁸ Recollection, says Constantius, is a looking backward to some ideal that affects one in the present. Repetition is different from recollection in that it is “actuality, which has been, now [coming] into existence.”⁴⁹ Constantius is not sure whether repetition is possible, so he sets up an experiment to test whether he can cause a repetition in his life. Before enacting his experiment, Constantius runs into a Young Man whom he befriended over the past year. Constantius spots a difference in the Young Man’s demeanor, and the Young Man exuberantly confesses that he is in love and engaged. Unfortunately, after some time the Young Man is unable to recollect his love for his fiancée, feeling that his fiancée is only a poetic muse rather than his actual love. Distraught, the Young Man confides in Constantius for advice. Constantius tells the Young Man to “burn all [his] bridges” by constructing a ruse to cause the fiancée to break off the relationship.⁵⁰ Constantius’s scheme is to hire a woman to live in a building with a back exit. The Young Man would go into the building and secretly leave out the back exit, giving the appearance of infidelity without the Young Man being unfaithful, causing his fiancée to break off the engagement. The Young Man refuses to go through with the plan, and instead he absconds to Stockholm. Constantius picks up his experiment by traveling to Berlin to achieve repetition of a previous trip. He stays in the same lodging, goes to the same theater, and recollects how amazing his first trip to Berlin was. The first time around, the landlord was unmarried and a joy to be with; the play at the theater was exquisite, and he also spied a beautiful woman watching the dramatic production. To Constantius’s chagrin, everything is different on his present journey. The landlord is now married; the theater is packed, preventing him from getting his previous seat; and the woman is nowhere to be seen. Constantius despairs, believing “there is no repetition at all.”⁵¹ Constantius returns to his home in Denmark, hoping to have repetition in his own house, but he encounters his butler cleaning the house: nothing in the house is where it should be. Constantius “[convinces himself] that there is no repetition” and despairs, but he then receives letters from the Young Man, stirring recollection in his heart and sparking hope for repetition.⁵²     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 9 / R, 131. 4, 25 / R, 149. 4, 19 / R, 142. 4, 43 / R, 169. 4, 50 / R, 179.

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The Young Man writes a series of morose letters to Constantius about mentally processing the break-up with his fiancée. He fled to Stockholm to escape the situation, but he still regrets the ethical implications of his actions. The Young Man takes great comfort in the story of Job, for Job obtained a repetition. After all of his struggles, Job received back double from God, and the Young Man hopes for a repetition of his love for his former beloved. Ultimately, his former fiancée marries, but the Young Man claims he attains a repetition: “I am myself again. This ‘self’ that someone else would not pick up off the street I have once again…Is there not, then a repetition? Did I not get everything back double?”⁵³ Constantius concludes the book with some thoughts on the Young Man, observing that the Young Man is now poetic. Constantius sums up his analysis of the Young Man: “My poet now finds legitimation precisely in being absolved by life the moment he in a sense wants to destroy himself. His soul gains a religious resonance. This is what actually sustains him, although it never attains a breakthrough.”⁵⁴ Repetition’s themes are difficult to understand. As Stephen Crites explains, “If readers are curious to know what the title might signify…they will find that the author is a butterfly who leads them on a merry chase.”⁵⁵ The key to understanding the concept of repetition is that it is focused on living what one believes. Constantius states that repetition is “actuality and the earnestness of existence.”⁵⁶ Recollection can never achieve a true repetition because it is backward facing, attempting to conjure a past experience in the present. Constantius wants to live in the present rather than the past. Isak Holmes correctly notes, “Recollection aims itself backwards toward the ideas in an easy chair type of passivity, while repetition actively moves itself forward in what is often metaphorized with the human gait.”⁵⁷ Niels Eriksen has a concise summary of Constantius’s understanding of repetition: “Constantius’ claims concerning repetition can, roughly speaking, be summed up in the three claims (1) that repetition is a category of authentic historicality, (2) that authentic historicality consists in a ‘happy’ relation to the other, and (3) that in this conception of repetition lies a solution to the ancient

 SKS 4, 87 / R, 220.  SKS 4, 94 / R, 228.  Stephen Crites, “‘The Blissful Security of the Moment’: Recollection, Repetition, and Eternal Recurrence,” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1993 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 6), p. 225.  SKS 4, 11 / R, 133.  Isak Winkel Holm, “Kierkegaard’s Repetitions: A Rhetorical Reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s Concept of Repetition,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15, 1991, p. 26.

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conflict between being and becoming.”⁵⁸ Eriksen notes a “happy” relation to the “other,” but who is the other in Constantius’s thinking? Constantius states that “repetition is and remains a transcendence,” so Constantius wants to take something transcendent and bring it into his historical actuality.⁵⁹ Such thinking is a repetition because every time he taps into the transcendent, he is living anew on the basis of the transcendent. The Young Man achieves repetition: “I belong to the idea….When the idea calls, I abandon everything.”⁶⁰ Both Constantius and Young Man are channeling Kierkegaard’s own struggle to find true meaning. In Kierkegaard’s journal entry from 1835, he writes, “What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except in the way knowledge must proceed all action. It is a question of understanding my own destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”⁶¹ Both Constantius and the Young Man are trying to find permanence in an ever-changing world—something that can reorient their lives, something so foundational to cause a repetition so that the truth may reverberate in their existence.⁶² One can see two ironic aspects of Constantius’s plight of repetition. To start, he tries everything in his power to activate a repetition, but he is unable to do so. The Young Man as well tries his hardest, but he receives only a partial repetition after his former fiancée marries. As Edward Mooney explains, “Sometimes value lost is reacquired precisely when we stop trying to regain it.”⁶³ All of Constantius’s experiments and psychological investigations cannot achieve repetition, so much so that he believes it to be impossible. Grøn explains that “repetition is not so much to regain something by one’s own strength as it is to receive

 Niels Nymann Eriksen, Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition: A Reconstruction, New York: de Gruyter 2000 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 5), p. 11.  SKS 4, 57 / R, 186.  SKS 4, 88 / R, 221.  SKS 17, 24, AA:12 / KJN 1, 19.  Repetition seems similar to Kierkegaard’s concept of redoubling. They are obviously not entirely identical, based on the derivation of the words. A quick survey of Kierkegaard’s works shows that he favors “repetition” in his earlier writing and “redoubling” in his later writing. Could the two terms truly be synonymous but used at different stages in his writing? This work does not have the space to answer this question, but I hope someone will investigate the connection between repetition and redoubling.  Edward F. Mooney, “Repetition: Getting the World Back,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 290.

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again something which has been lost to oneself.”⁶⁴ The inability to induce repetition leads to a second irony. In order to repeat something, a something must be lost. One cannot repeat something that she never possessed in the first place. We see such with the Young Man—he lost his love that he once had—but what did Constantin lose? Grøn makes an excellent connection between Repetition and Philosophical Fragments. Grøn reasons that the existential nature of repetition posits a decisive gain from a decisive loss: “The truth has been lost in a decisive fashion—by means of something one oneself has done….This is what Johannes Climacus suggests we should understand by the term ‘sin.’ In its pregnant sense repetition presupposes the concept of sin.”⁶⁵ The dynamics of repetition assume a concept of sin: individuals seeking repetition lost something due to their own actions.

Constantin Constantius Constantius, too, exhibits all four characteristics of sin. First, Constantius claims he wants repetition in his life, but he acts as though he does not want any transcendence to truly enter his existence. Crites argues that Constantius is seeking the eternal present, “concentrating the fullness of being in itself,” which “renders ethical language meaningless.”⁶⁶ Constantius wants to feel a fullness of life without having to make any sort of ethical or religious step. When Constantius regales us with his first time visiting the theater in Berlin, his thoughts leap between multiple scenes. While sitting in the theater, he is reminded of his nursemaid. He then refocuses his thoughts on the theater at the sight of a beautiful woman. After that wears off, he thinks back to a lovely woman in the Danish countryside who he thinks about whenever he is depressed and cannot sleep.⁶⁷ Crites sees such fragmented thinking as a paradigmatic attempt to obtain the eternal present—Constantius wants to live in a world of immediate aesthetic pleasure without responsibilities.⁶⁸ T. F. Morris concurs with such a reading: “When people grasp after ideals, they are trying to find their life in the ideal. Constantius rejects any belief in achieving such a life, so he is not going to

 Arne Grøn, “‘Repetition’ and the Concept of Repetition,” Tópicos: revista de filosofía, vol. 3, no. 5, 1993, p. 152.  Ibid., p. 151.  Crites, “The Blissful Security of the Moment,” p. 236.  SKS 4, 40 – 42 / R, 166 – 168.  Crites, “The Blissful Security of the Moment,” p. 238.

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stop existence and appropriate from it an ideal for himself: He just wants existence to keep flowing along.”⁶⁹ Constantius can never be a true self if he does not choose to exist in actuality rather than his own immediate fantasy. As Kierkegaard states in The Sickness unto Death, “The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities….There is hardly a more ludicrous mistake, for a self is indeed infinitely distinct from an externality.”⁷⁰ Second, Constantius actively wills against the religious. Constantius explicitly states, “I am unable to make a religious movement; it is contrary to my nature.”⁷¹ Comically, in the last section of the book, Constantius comments on the Young Man’s repetition of his poetic existence: “If [the Young Man] had had a deeper religious background, he would not have become a poet….Then he would have won a fact of consciousness to which he could constantly hold… [a] pure earnestness because it was established by him on the basis of the God-relationship.”⁷² Constantius chides the Young Man for not taking the step to the religious stage, yet Constantius refuses to take the step himself. Such action is a clear example of living in untruth, rejecting God and his ways. Third, Constantius’s lifestyle consumes his entire existence. He orchestrates an elaborate trip to reignite his passion in an impudent attempt at repetition. Constantius shares a quick anecdote about prepping for his repetition. Constantius goes to great lengths to get everything just right, “when suddenly something began to irritate one of [his] eyes.” A measly speck of dirt was enough for Constantius to be “plunged down almost into the abyss of despair.”⁷³ Such drastic attitude is both tragic and comic. We laugh at such an over-the-top response to a little dust in the eye, yet it is tragic that such a molehill becomes a mountain in his life. Such a disproportionate response shows the depths to which Constantius has sunk. Engulfed in his existence state, Constantius is futile in his thinking. Lastly, Constantius’s actions negatively affect others. Constantius wants to help the Young Man by developing a ruse to crush the heart of the Young Man’s fiancée by means of a perceived infidelity. David Gouwens explains that “Constantin can never really appreciate the ethical dimensions of the young

 T. F. Morris, “Constantin Constantius’s Search for an Acceptable Way of Life,” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 332.  SKS 11, 168 / SUD, 53.  SKS 4, 57 / R, 187.  SKS 4, 95 / R, 229 – 230.  SKS 4, 47 / R, 173.

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man’s dilemma. His advice arises only from his own despair of repetition.”⁷⁴ Constantius’s harebrained scheme only serves his psychological experiment to achieve repetition. He does not care whether either the Young Man or his fiancée is destroyed in the process. Constantius’s sinful actions negatively affect those around him.

The Young Man Like Constantius, the Young Man portrays Kierkegaard’s four aspects of sin. The Young Man searches after an eternal ideal, like Constantius, but he finds his ideal in being a poet. For the Young Man, the breakup with his fiancée gives fuel to his poetic fire. After her marriage to another, the Young Man is free to be himself again: “It is over, my skiff is afloat. In a minute I shall be there where my soul longs to be, there where ideas spume with elemental fury….I belong to the idea….When the idea calls, I abandon everything.”⁷⁵ The Young Man is a typical aesthete, living in the poetic world of immediacy rather than committing to his beloved. The Young Man has a repetition, but his ideal is his aesthetic view of life. As Vincent McCarthy elucidates, “Repetition is understood as the restoration of oneself, most perfectly in a religious sense and therefore in eternity.”⁷⁶ The Young Man comes to himself in repetition, but he comes to himself in despair, as a negative unity, a spiritless individual. Randall Colton explains, “[The Young Man] has lost sight of the value and significance of the other elements of his world because he has lost his primary object of concern, his beloved.”⁷⁷ The Young Man built his life on his ideal of love, removing God from His rightful place as the foundation of his being. In the Young Man’s torment of dealing with his breakup, he relies on the story of Job for comfort. He sees himself in Job: both men experience a loss and feel stricken by the anxiety that ensues. In his analysis of Job, the Young Man states, “Was Job proved to be in the right? Yes, eternally, by being proved to be in the wrong before God.”⁷⁸ Such a statement sounds like someone admit-

 David J. Gouwens, “Understanding, Imagination, and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Repetition,” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 298.  SKS 4, 88 / R, 221.  Vincent A. McCarthy, “Repetition’s Repetitions,” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 279.  Randall G. Colton, Repetition and the Fullness of Time: Gift, Task, and Narrative in Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Ethics, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2013, pp. 56 – 57.  SKS 4, 79 / R, 212.

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ting his status before God as a sinner, but unfortunately this religious breakthrough does not last. Like the seed tossed on the rocky soil, instead of moving to the religious stage—as Constantius ironically says the Young Man should do— the Young Man remains in the aesthetic stage. As Gouwens describes, “Because [the Young Man] identifies with Job’s innocence, the repetition he received is a temporary position that has not yet explored the higher reaches of sin and repentance.”⁷⁹ The Young Man identifies with Job, but he refuses to truly follow the path of Job. Such inaction is a consummate example of being in untruth. The Young Man is aesthetic in nature, and his crisis leads him to religious contemplation. Kierkegaard comments on the Young Man in Postscript: “The Young Man illustrates that if [repetition] is to come into existence it must be a new immediacy, so that it is itself a movement by virtue of the absurd, and the teleological suspension an ordeal.”⁸⁰ Kierkegaard declares that a true repetition involves a “new immediacy,” an existential leap to a new existence category. The Young Man does not make this leap, but rather he remains in his existential state of sin. Although the Young Man does not perform the dastardly deed of Constantius’s plan, he still does not get off scot-free. The Young Man tells Constantius that he could not bear seeing his fiancée’s face if he went with Constantius’s plan, but rather the Young Man states, “I chose another way: I quietly left Copenhagen and went to Stockholm.”⁸¹ The Young Man acts as if his plan is better than Constantius’s, but the Young Man still does not comprehend the pain through which he put his fiancée. As Crites claims, “He unceremoniously cuts and runs, leaving her utterly in the dark.”⁸² The Young Man’s sin, emphasizing immediate aesthetic desire rather than truly loving his fiancée, leads to his fiancée losing her beloved without warning. We are not told her exact actions, but one safely can say that the Young Man’s sinful actions negatively affected his fiancée.

3 Stages on Life’s Way, Section 1 Stages on Life’s Way (1845) is the last of Kierkegaard’s purely aesthetic works, with Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) following as the fulcrum to Kierkegaard’s religious writings. Stages is a polyphonic book with many authors and characters. The editor, Hilarius Bookbinder, claims he found papers in his    

Gouwens, “Understanding, Imagination, and Irony,” p. 304. SKS 7, 239 / CUP1, 263. SKS 4, 61 / R, 192. Crites, “The Blissful Security of the Moment,” p. 232.

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shop and decided to publish them.⁸³ The book is divided into three sections, each with a different author from various life spheres. Section one is the aesthetic section, written by William Afham, consisting of the speeches of the Young Man, Constantin Constantius, Victor Eremita, the Fashion Designer, and Johannes the Seducer.⁸⁴

Summary Section one of Stages on Life’s Way, written by William Afham, is titled “In Vino Veritas,” an allusion to Plato’s Symposium. Afham does not claim to record what happened, but rather “In Vino Veritas” is a recollection of events. Recollection is not mere memory, for “recollection wants to maintain for a person the eternal continuity in life and assure him that his earthly existence remains uno tenore [uninterrupted].”⁸⁵ Afham’s recollection centers on a band of friends—Afham, the Young Man, Constantin Constantius, Victor Eremita, the Fashion Designer, and Johannes the Seducer—who decide to have a banquet. Each person is to give a speech about erotic love and women and Constantius, the orchestrator of the experiment, declares that “no one was to speak before he had drunk

 Bookbinder’s introduction to SL is a mere four pages, and as such there is simply not much content on his character. He introduces the organization of the book and makes some satirical remarks about the literary intelligentsia of his time. As Elisabete de Sousa notes, “Bookbinder’s contribution [to SL] has been given little attention by the vast majority of analysts”; Elisabete M. de Sousa, “Hilarious Bookbinder: The Realm of Truth and the World of Books,” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, p. 97. Because of the lack of information, although Bookbinder is a character in the story, he will not have an analysis in this chapter.  SL poses an interesting question for interpretation, for many of Kierkegaard’s characters from previous works make a return appearance. One point of contention is the identity of the Young Man. Is he the same Young Man from R? Is he A from EO1? In the research, no clear consensus exists on who (or whether) the Young Man in SL corresponds to any of the others. Walter Lowrie believes both A and the two Young Men are all the same character. Dunning thinks that William Afham and A may be the same. Amy Hall sees the Young Man as the same in R and SL but not EO1; Walter Lowrie, “Introduction,” Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford University Press 1945, p. 15; Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness, p. 60; Amy Laura Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002 (Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought), p. 139. Although the question of the Young Man’s identity is intriguing and I believe him to be A but not the Young Man from R, ultimately such is not the concern of this chapter to make a case. For simplicity’s sake, I am going to examine the Young Man in SL only as he appears in SL.  SKS 6, 18 / SL, 10.

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enough so that he could detect the influence of the wine…without needing…to interrupt the continuity of the speech and of the thought by hiccups.”⁸⁶ The Young Man speaks first, inquiring about the nature of love. He is unsure what the proper object of love is, for it is an elusive and comic concept. What is more comic than falling in love all of the sudden? At one moment, one is in control of himself; at the next moment, he is head-over-heels! The Young Man states, “The lovable, after all, is the inexplicable. This, you see, is why I am afraid to love.”⁸⁷ Ultimately, the Young Man sees erotic love as too costly, for it would force him into the unknown. The Young Man will have none of that, “for [his] thought is everything to [him].”⁸⁸ Constantin Constantius speaks next, chiding the Young Man for never loving. Constantius claims that an inherent misrelation exists between man and woman, for woman is relational while man is absolute. Woman concerns herself only with her relationship toward man, and Constantius declares, “Unfortunately, she does not have enough reflection to insure herself in the long run, that is, maximum of eight days, against contradicting herself if the man does not help her regulatively by contradicting her.” Constantius concludes that women are merely a “jest.”⁸⁹ Victor Eremita follows by thanking the gods that he was created as a man and not a woman, for woman has a “meaningless” existence. Woman, rather, serves as artistic inspiration for man, but as soon a woman becomes a wife, she “scarcely arouses ideality.”⁹⁰ Formal marriage to a woman squashes poetic existence, erasing the ideal and her potential as a woman. Similarly, the Fashion Designer cautions pursuing a woman, for a woman will never truly reciprocate: “She belongs to that phantom produced by feminine reflection’s unnatural intercourse with feminine reflection: fashion.”⁹¹ Johannes the Seducer delivers the final speech. He actively desires erotic relationships with women, but the secret is to “never pay too much” for feminine attention, as he proclaims, “I leave [payment] to the girls.”⁹² Johannes recalls the Greek mythology of the formation of man. The gods formed man, but they soon became fearful of his strength. To stop man, the gods created woman as “an en-

      

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

6, 35 / SL, 30. 6, 42 / SL, 37. 6, 48 / SL, 45. 6, 53 / SL, 51. SKS 6, 57 / SL, 55. 6, 58 / SL, 56. SKS 6, 60 / SL, 59. 6, 69 / SL, 69. 6, 71 / SL, 72.

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chantress…full of deceit.”⁹³ By Johannes’s seduction, he is simply beating women at their own game. Johannes never wants to marry, for a marriage is a temporal event, making the myth of the woman a concretion. We see common themes in part one of Stages on Life’s Way. As the banquet progresses, the reader becomes more disgusted by each speaker’s views. The Young Man starts with a timid, hands-off view of love, but the story ends with Johannes the Seducer claiming he has the right to seduce women to prevent them from deceiving him. Kierkegaard comments on the progression in his journal, where he shows the downward spiral toward Johannes, who exemplifies “perdition.”⁹⁴ Kierkegaard purposefully makes each character more repugnant than the last, for if Kierkegaard simply gave a treatise on misogyny, then one would not be as shocked at the crude views as when one sees said views performed to their logical conclusions. Andrew Burgess agrees: “The basic strategy of Stages on Life’s Way is to present ideas not as positions…but instead as ideas instantiated in flesh and blood individuals.”⁹⁵ The individuals, like their views, are revolting. Kierkegaard most certainly achieves his goal in “In Vino Veritas.” In Postscript Kierkegaard states that the characters “are all consistent to the point of despair.”⁹⁶ No character, not even the narrator William Afham, comes off in a positive light. All the men stay away from the ethical commitments of love, decrying the goodness of marriage. Adriaan van Heerden indicates that the attitude of the men is to “remain on the border between the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, and refrain from entering the ethical precisely in order to make fun of ethics.”⁹⁷ Such disregard for women should shock readers. Glenn Kirkconnell mentions that “In Vino Veritas” has no explicit references to Christianity, so explicit discussion of sin is absent from the revelers; “but in their misappropriation of religious values we might begin to see the truth reflected in reverse, as in a mirror.”⁹⁸ Afham opens with a quote from Lichtenberg that states, “Such works are mirrors: when an ape looks in, no apostle can look out.”⁹⁹ “In Vino Veritas”  SKS 6, 74 / SL, 75.  SKS 18, 243, JJ:326 / KJN 2, 224.  Andrew J. Burgess, “The Relation of Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way to Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions,” in Stages on Life’s Way, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2000 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 11), p. 271.  SKS 7, 271 / CUP1, 298.  Adriaan van Heerden, “Does Love Cure the Tragic? Kierkegaardian Variations on a Platonic Theme,” in Stages on Life’s Way, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 82.  W. Glenn Kirkconnell, Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation: From Philosophical Fragments through the Two Ages, London: Continuum 2010 (Continuum Studies in Philosophy), p. 68.  SKS 6, 16 / SL, 8 (my emphasis).

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is Latin for “in wine there is truth.” We can heartily agree with such a title for section one of Stages on Life’s Way, for during their banquet, the men gathered show the truth that they are apes rather than apostles.

William Afham William Afham is an interesting character, for he is the narrator this section of Stages on Life’s Way. In the majority of “In Vino Veritas,” Afham disappears into the background by recollecting what the other characters say. Afham’s direct thoughts truly occur only in the introduction and conclusion of the banquet. “Afham” literally means “of him,” and Hall dynamically translates this to “Alone,”—that is, by himself—stressing the difference between the ethical Judge William the married—that is, not by himself. She argues that the name Afham stresses his solitary existence.¹⁰⁰ Although Mariana Alessandri sees Hall’s assessment as “less a literal rendering and more a spiritual interpolation,”¹⁰¹ an assessment of Afham demonstrates his solitary nature. He stands alone in the banquet by not giving a speech, and he also retreats by himself into the Nook of the Eight Paths for personal reflection.¹⁰² Afham’s introduction to “In Vino Veritas” is “[his] own personal recollection of the thoughts and intellectual preoccupations that have engrossed [his] soul many times and in many ways.”¹⁰³ Afham is alone, and in his solitude he longs to experience the eternal in the present. Afham belabors the difference between recollection and memory because “recollection is ideality….Recollection wants to maintain for a person the eternal continuity in life.”¹⁰⁴ Recollection draws on the essential of the event in question rather than mere historical details. Afham wants more than to tell a story: he is searching for something eternal, for “in recollection, a person draws on the eternal.”¹⁰⁵ Unfortunately, he does not achieve this in “In Vino Veritas,” for he never realizes that he needs to become a true self before God. Afham’s desire for recollection shows his misrelation to God, but his desire also indicates his state of living in untruth. As Robert Wood signals, “Grasping

 Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, p. 141.  Mariana Alessandri, “William Afham: The Line by Which an Ape May Become an Apostle,” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, p. 281.  SKS 6, 23 / SL, 16.  SKS 6, 22 / SL, 15.  SKS 6, 18 / SL, 10  SKS 6, 19 / SL, 11.

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the essential through recollection allows one distance from the flow of immediacy to bring it to significant presence and to give continuity to one’s life as a whole. However, the characters in the dialogue do not undertake the requisite reflection.”¹⁰⁶ Afham recollects, but he does not achieve the truth in historical time. Alessandri stresses that Afham takes place of the reader examining the situation: “As a mirror, Afham reflects apes back to apes, and apostles back to apostles…. As soon as I look into a mirror, I begin to change my appearance to suit the image I have of myself.”¹⁰⁷ Afham’s very recollection posits an either/or: either one lives in the aesthetic sphere, or one truly grasps the eternal in the present —one truly comes to the truth of God. Afham fails the mirror test, and he remains in untruth. His desire for recollection shows the existential nature of his sinfulness, for he spends ample time attempting to cross into true recollection without achieving his goal. The only missing aspect of Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin is the redoubling nature of sin and its effects on the crowd. While Afham himself does not address the concept, one can see the redoubling of sin indirectly. Afham attended a banquet sometime in the past where a bunch of sinful men regale stories about women. In his recollection, Afham is “re-hearing” the sinful thoughts anew, reconsidering ideas and allowing them to affect him in the present so his recollection is a redoubling. We can see how the redoubling nature of sin can continue as one recollects a past event.

The Young Man The Young Man demonstrates Kierkegaard’s first two aspects of sin in one statement: “This, you see, is why I have renounced all erotic love, for my thought is everything to me.”¹⁰⁸ The Young Man does not want to love because love is something unexplainable, and he states, “If I cannot understand the force… then I will not surrender to its power.”¹⁰⁹ The Young Man does not trust anything—or anyone—he cannot understand. He places his autonomous reason at the foundation of his existence rather than God. Furthermore, Kierkegaard stresses the alterity of God, a being in a separate existence category who cannot

 Robert E. Wood, “Recollection and Two Banquets: Plato’s and Kierkegaard’s,” in Stages on Life’s Way, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 64 (my emphasis).  Alessandri, “William Afham,” pp. 293, 295.  SKS 6, 48 / SL, 45.  SKS 6, 44 / SL, 40.

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be distilled down to one’s whims. We see in the Young Man the offense of the paradox of God becoming man, something “that thought itself cannot think.”¹¹⁰ The Young Man’s existence is tied up in his intellectualism, and he persists in that state because he refuses to submit to something he cannot fully understand. His inflexibility leads to a disability. As Hall astutely notes, “[The Young Man’s] manner of loving the other, while seemingly innocuous, involves no one….The Young Man flees the consequence of love by remaining alone.”¹¹¹ While the Young Man does not positively affect people with his sinful actions, he negatively does so by refusing to actualize love. His sinful behavior leads to an inaction in his repudiation of loving properly.

Constantin Constantius The author of Repetition returns, and as Gabriel Rossatti highlights, Constantius is up to his old experiments, listening to everyone’s desire for a banquet in order “to realize such plans without the others’ knowledge.”¹¹² Like the Young Man, Constantius merges sin as misrelation and sin as untruth in a sentence: “It is the man’s function to be absolute, to act absolutely, to express the absolute.”¹¹³ For Constantius, man himself is his own absolute, meaning one’s individuality is the foundation of his existence. Constantius has a spiritless existence, for he places the absolute in his finite body rather than the infinite God. Such choosing himself is what Kierkegaard calls the despair of defiance in The Sickness unto Death, where he equates choosing one’s self over God as akin to an error in a book becoming sentient, which declares, “I refused to be erased; I will stand a witness against you, a witness that you are a second-rate author.”¹¹⁴ Constantius’s defiance is a positive movement, a declaration against God, and is therefore a rejection of the truth. Self-actualization as one’s absolute is a state of existence, and Constantius’s view adversely affects others. Constantius claims that while man is the absolute, woman is relational—that is woman finds her self in the absolute of a man. For Constantius woman can never become ethical because she is inherently relational. Since her existence is tied to a man,

 SKS 4, 243 / PF, 37.  Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, pp. 143, 144.  Gabriel Rossatti, “Constantin Constantius: The Activity of a Travelling Esthetician and How He Still Happened to Pay for the Dinner” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, p. 62.  SKS 6, 50 / SL, 48.  SKS 11, 187 / SUD, 74.

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then “she can be revived.”¹¹⁵ Constantius’s declaration leads to men viewing, treating, and discarding women however they please. If a woman is heartbroken by her beloved running off, she can be revived simply by the next man who comes along. Constantius’s view is extremely harmful to women, treating them as objects rather than persons. Constantius’s attitude spreads damaging actions to others.

Victor Eremita Victor Eremita sees women as a means to an end, but not necessarily a means to the end of sexual gratification. Eremita states, “I would, however, rather be a concretion that means something than an abstraction that means everything. So it is altogether true: ideality came into life because of woman—what would man be without her?”¹¹⁶ Eremita sees woman as the ideal whom one is to seek, and he lists examples of how women have inspired geniuses, artists, poets, and saints. For Eremita, one’s purpose comes from seeking the ideal of woman, not actual marriage, for “a wife…scarcely arouses ideality.”¹¹⁷ Rather than finding his being in God, Eremita finds his meaning in poetic inspiration. Eremita also equates the Fall to woman: “Sin entered the world through her.”¹¹⁸ In the Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard abhors such thinking, stressing the volitional aspect of sin. Shirking responsibility is a choice against God. Eremita’s idealization of women is also problematic because as Joaquim HernandezDispaux explains, for Eremita—Latin for “hermit”—refuses “to live in the world, to accept the actuality of existence.”¹¹⁹ As an aesthete, he treats women as muses for his idealistic adventures, never grounding himself in reality. His existence is actually abstract rather than concrete, the exact opposite of what he claims. His declaration of women having a meaningless existence signifies how his sinfulness moves outward toward others.¹²⁰ If women are abstract and meaningless in reality, then they are not truly persons. Such a contemptible view has abject repercussions on women.

 SKS 6, 56 / SL, 54.  SKS 6, 60 / SL, 59.  SKS 6, 60 / SL, 59.  SKS 6, 62 / SL, 61.  Joaquim Hernandez-Dispaux, “Victor Eremita: A Diplomatic yet Abstruse Editor,” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, trans. by Mélissa Fox-Muraton, p. 250.  SKS 6, 58 / SL, 56.

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The Fashion Designer The Fashion Designer uses some explicitly biblical language, but in an idolatrous jest, showing his misrelationship to God: “Who would dare to compete with someone who has completely dedicated himself and dedicates himself as high priest in this idol worship [of fashion]? No, there is no distinguished social gathering where my name is not first and last, and there is no middle-class social gathering where the mention of my name does not inspire holy awe.”¹²¹ The Fashion Designer’s blasphemy is a direct attack on God. The Fashion Designer obviously is not a proper self, for he elevates himself as absolute authority rather than God. The Fashion Designer claims that women are at their core seduced by fashion and since he is the “high priest” of fashion, he exerts overwhelming influence over women. He can make them happy, sad, angry, or mad. Such talk shows an explicit rejection of God and his ways, clearly demonstrating that the Fashion Designer is in untruth. In Kierkegaard’s journal, he states that the Fashion Designer is an example of “demonic despair.”¹²² The Fashion Designer has constructed his entire life around his façade, showing his aesthetic, sinful existence state. Lastly, the Fashion Designer willingly takes advantage of women for his own pleasure. He states, “I will do my utmost to aid and abet that sublime genius who likes to laugh at the most ludicrous of animals. If woman has reduced everything to fashion, then I will use fashion to prostitute her as she deserves. I never rest, I, the Fashion Designer, my soul rages when I think about my task.”¹²³ Is a redoubling any more obvious? The Fashion Designer’s sinful thoughts become sinful actions, perpetuating sin in others.

Johannes the Seducer Johannes the Seducer returns with a defense of seduction and an ode to women. He declares, “Anyone who, when he is twenty years old, does not understand that there is a categorical imperative—Enjoy—is a fool….But resolution, desire’s resolution, is the whole point of life.”¹²⁴ Johannes is the quintessential aesthete, deriving all of his meaning from sensuous, immediate pleasure—a clear misrelation to God. In his speech, Johannes explains how the Greek gods created women

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

6, 66 / SL, 66. (my emphasis). 18, 243, JJ:326 / KJN 2, 224. 6, 71 / SL, 71. 6, 71 / SL, 72. SKS 6, 72 / SL, 73.

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to deceive men, so he in turn deceives women. He admits to going against the order of the gods, and we can extrapolate such attitude as defiance against the Christian God. As Kirkconnell notes, Johannes thinks, “Man can only be fully great by rebelling against the gods, by taking without gratitude, prescribed right, or fear.”¹²⁵ Johannes rebels against God, living in untruth. Johannes is deceived by sensuousness, and his desire for immediacy permeates his entire existence. A fish in water does not know it is wet, and likewise Johannes is so corrupted that he sees himself as virtuous in his action. Kevin Hoffman notes the ludicrous thought process that “our Seducer is confessing he is the one seduced,” showing the “moral depth to which he has apparently sunk.”¹²⁶ The irony of Hoffman’s statement is that Johannes is seduced—but by sin rather than women. As for sin’s redoubling, Johannes still stands by his seduction of Cordelia, saying “If a new Cordelia comes along, I will perform Ring No. 2.”¹²⁷ Nathaniel Kramer concisely describes Johannes’s position: “This is a woman’s raison d’être: to be desired and hence to be enjoyed.”¹²⁸ Johannes’s selfish concupiscence detrimentally affects the women he encounters.

4 Concluding Thoughts on the Aesthetic Characters Our first examination of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin at work in his aesthetic pseudonymous characters shows a surprising consistency. Almost every character exemplifies a sinful lifestyle in comparison to Kierkegaard’s four emphases on sin—sin as misrelation, sin as untruth, sin as an existence state, and sin as an outward force. Only one character lacked sin as redoubling: Victor Eremita from Either/Or. Eremita’s reemergence in Stages On Life’s Way demonstrates all four aspects of sin, but what must we make of his lack of an outward impact of sin in Either/Or? I do not believe such shows Kierkegaard to be inconsistent, but rather Eremita has only 12 pages of introduction in Either/Or. In his limited space with his particular focus—that is, introducing the book and setting the stage for what is to come—Eremita simply does not stay on the scene long enough to portray the external, crowd-facing aspect of sin. The only other possibly misfire is in William Afham and the redoubling aspect of sin. I believe an indirect aspect of redoubling is present, based upon Af Kirkconnell, Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation, p. 69.  Kevin Hoffman, The Divine Madness of Romantic Ideals: A Reader’s Companion for Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2014, p. 31.  SKS 6, 72 / SL, 73.  Kramer, “Johannes the Seducer,” p. 171.

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ham’s recollection of a sinful night of imbibing and bad-mouthing women. Every time he recollects the evening, he reengages the sinful behavior, lodging the aesthetic life view deeper into his heart. If one does not accept my explanation, then Kierkegaard is still not inconsistent. Like Eremita in Either/Or, Afham is introducing Stages on Life’s Way. His limited space and scope also do not allow for him to stay in focus long enough to see a robust character. Also, as argued above, Afham’s character brilliantly functions as a mirror, causing the reader to examine himself in comparison to the profligates at the banquet. A character functioning as a mirror would not particularly have too many outward-facing actions, for such would take away from his reflective role. Across the aesthetic characters, we see a consistency concerning Kierkegaard’s four points. The aesthetes all chase after desire without wanting to commit. Their lives are centered on poetic longing rather than “[resting] transparently in the power that established [them].”¹²⁹ Their impudent view of sin shows their resistance to following God. They believe that remaining in the aesthetic makes them outside the purview of the ethical and sin. Such thinking shows their lives of untruth. Their obsession with poetic longing overflows in all aspects of their lives. They are not merely lovers of art, but rather they desire desire for desire’s sake. Their entire existence state is corrupted by sin. Lastly, their selfcentered ambitions treat others as means to an end. Seduction and deception are not wrong in their eyes, for they are chasing their aesthetic ideals. Their lack of concern for others shows the outward nature of their sinful actions. With the aesthetic characters, we can safely say that Kierkegaard keeps his word in Point of View when he declares “that I am and was a religious author, that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian.”¹³⁰ Kierkegaard’s indirect method of communication may be difficult to grasp upon first reading his works but like an onion, one peels back layers of meaning with every new reading. Writing from a different perspective or character opens up one’s thoughts to an entirely new audience, and such method is fertile ground for theology. As Kierkegaard expresses, “If you are able to do so, portray the esthetic with all its bewitching charm…but above all do not forget one thing, the number carried that you have, that it is the religious that is to come forward.”¹³¹ We have seen that Kierkegaard is consistent across his aesthetic pseudonyms concerning his doctrine of sin, and now we turn to the ethical characters to complete our analysis.

 SKS 11, 130 / SUD, 14.  SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23.  SKS 16, 28 / PV, 46.

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Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secure against despair…. The despair is due to relating oneself with infinite passion to a particular something, for one can relate oneself with infinite passion—unless one is in despair—only to the eternal….Despair is a misrelation in a person’s innermost being—no fate or event can penetrate so far and so deep; it can only make manifest that the misrelation—was there. For this reason there is only one security against despair: to undergo the change of eternity through duty’s shall. Anyone who has not undergone this change is in despair. Good fortune and prosperity can hide it, but misfortune and adversity do not, as he thinks, make him despair but make it manifest that he—was in despair.¹³²

 SKS 9, 47– 48 / WL, 40.

Chapter 8 Sin and the Ethical Pseudonyms The ethical stage of existence consists of those people who, as Murray Rae states, “accept the responsibilities of one’s calling.”¹ The aesthetes all want to stay at arm’s-length of decision, remaining in a state of immediate dreaming. The ethical sphere occurs when a youth grows up to his or her role in society. As Judge William says in Either/Or, “One of the ostensibly most respectable answers given to this ‘why’ of marriage is: Marriage is a school for character.”² For Judge William, marriage is the epitome of the ethical life because it grounds the aesthetic in the here and now. Aesthetes claim they want to live in the present, but they refuse to put down roots and start a life. Marriage is good for us as individuals and as a society, for it adds a historicality the aesthetic person lacks. Upon first glance, Christians may commend someone in the ethical life sphere. Individuals should seek to live a life of duty, a life of responsibility. Christians should be ethical, following rules and being good, productive members of society. Why would Kierkegaard, then, show the ethical as a sub-faith sphere of existence when it has many positive qualities? The confusion may lie in Kierkegaard’s use of the term “ethical.” When speaking of the ethical sphere, Kierkegaard does not mean “doing what is right.” As John Elrod explains, the ethical sphere “refers to that stage on the dialectical development of spirit in which the ethical requirement of ideality comes to consciousness.”³ The impetus is on actualizing an ethical ideal, and these ideals come from one’s duty derived from one’s society. The ethical stage is not about doing what is right—it is about choosing to follow the societal mores without reflection upon whether or not the culture is righteous. The ethical focuses on doing rather than the feeling of the aesthetic or the faith of the religious. Like with the aesthetic sphere, Kierkegaard indirectly dismantles the ethical stage throughout his works. In this chapter we analyze Kierkegaard’s ethical characters.⁴ Like the previous chapter, we evaluate Kierkegaard’s works in chronological order, which are

 Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, London: T & T Clark 2010 (Philosophy and Theology), p. 86.  SKS 3, 69 / EO2, 64.  John W. Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1975, p. 114.  Some may take umbrage with my assessment of “ethical” characters. One could argue that the Pastor at the end of EO2 could be in the religious sphere or Johannes de Silentio and Nicolaus Notabene in the aesthetic sphere. My personal sentiments are that the Pastor may very well be in https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-008

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as follows: Either/Or, Part 2; Fear and Trembling; Prefaces; and Stages on Life’s Way, Sections 2 and 3. In these works, we find a plethora of interesting and famous characters from Kierkegaard’s corpus: Judge William, the Pastor, Johannes de Silentio, Nicolaus Notabene, Quidam, and Frater Taciturnus. We are looking for the four aspects of sin in Kierkegaard’s writing: sin as misrelation, sin as untruth, sin as an existence category, and sin’s outward dynamics. We start our analysis with a brief summary of each book, followed by examining the characters in each work, paying careful attention to their actions in relation to Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin. Lastly, we render a verdict on Kierkegaard’s consistency in his ethical characters.

1 Either/Or, Part 2 Either/Or, Part 2 (1843) is the ethical Judge William’s response to A. Part 2 lists Victor Eremita as the editor—although he does not personally speak in the work—and consists of two long, and at times tedious, essays by Judge William titled “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage” and “The Balance between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality.”⁵ Either/Or ends with a sermon by the country Pastor, a friend of Judge William, titled “Ultimatum: The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong.”

Summary Judge William directly aims “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage” at A. His tone is polemical in order to demonstrate “the esthetic meaning of marriage and to show how the esthetic in it may be retained despite life’s numerous hindranthe religious sphere, but the issue is a moot point because his view is in a work edited by an aesthete—Victor Eremita. Silentio uses poetry, but poetry in and of itself does not make one an aesthete. For an excellent explanation on the use of poetics and Silentio, see Ryan Kemp, “Johannes de silentio: Religious Poet or Faithless Aesthete?,” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2015 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 17), pp. 147– 48. As for Notabene, while he does share some characteristics of an aesthete—he never actualizes a book—I ultimately put him in the ethical category because he is married, puts his duty to his wife before his desire to be a writer, and is overly concerned to follow the trends of society.  I have a sneaking suspicion that Kierkegaard’s irony is at play. A fears boredom in EO1, and Judge William writes a dry, more “boring” essay in EO2.

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ces.”⁶ These two points of contention are related to A’s previous writings in Part 1, and, as Edward Mooney points out, “this is a strategy to combat the shallowness inherent in a merely aesthetic existence.”⁷ A lives life with his head in the clouds, while the Judge experiences the fullness of life in his marriage. William realizes his writing sounds pedantic, stating, “I do not intend to preach to you [A],” but William continues to preach his gospel of ethical marriage.⁸ Erotic love, he argues, is merely a phantom and “cannot tolerate coming in contact with actuality.”⁹ Erotic love has desire as its object, but desire is something nebulous, an ideal that never can be actualized. The fear of commitment to marriage is ironic for A; he fears that it may lead to boredom rather than excitement. If the erotic cannot be actualized, as William proposes, then A does not truly live in his aesthetic existence while pining after some ideal of the beloved. “Marriage is based on resignation,” a choice to actualize desire in matrimony.¹⁰ Choice makes all the difference in the world. An arranged marriage is good, but it does not encapsulate the aesthetic aspect of the erotic. “Justice” is truly done in marriage when the man chooses a particular woman to be his wife. His resignation actualizes the erotic, bringing desire into a concrete relationship. Furthermore, such a choice of marriage “is the genesis of character.”¹¹ The woman “tames” the man in marriage, and William states that a wife “loves [her husband]; in this she has her life.”¹² We notice a reciprocal relationship in Judge William’s understanding of men and women in marriage, and as Wanda Berry adroitly notes, William thinks “marriage is the essentially human state.”¹³ The man chooses in marriage, but the love he enacts in marriage also makes him more concrete: “Only the person who loves has the proper conception of who he is and what he can do, and only marriage gives the historical faithfulness that is every bit as beautiful as the knightly kind.”¹⁴ The historical reality

 SKS 3, 18 / EO2, 8.  Edward F. Mooney, “Kierkegaard on Self-Choice and Self-Reception: Judge William’s Admonition,” in Either/Or, Part 2, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1995 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 4), p. 7.  SKS 3, 24 / EO2, 15.  SKS 3, 42 / EO2, 35.  SKS 3, 43 / EO2, 36.  SKS 3, 71 / EO2, 66.  SKS 3, 61 / EO2, 55.  Wanda Warren Berry, “Judge William Judging Women: Existentialism and Essentialism in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part 2,” in Either/Or, Part 2, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 45.  SKS 3, 125 / EO2, 125.

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one experiences in marriage leads a man to his duty as a husband, and “duty is always consonant with love.”¹⁵ Judge William’s second essay moves beyond marriage to the development of personality. Judge William stresses the either/or to A: “You yourself are a nonentity, an enigmatic figure whose brow stands Either/Or.”¹⁶ William stresses to A that he must make a choice to be in either the aesthetic or ethical stage. A may fear choice—what if he chooses incorrectly?—but the Judge declares that even a wrong decision may lead to the good: Therefore, even though a person chose the wrong thing, he nevertheless by virtue of the energy with which he chose, will discover that he chose the wrong thing. In other words, since the choice has been made with all the inwardness of his personality, his inner being is purified and he himself is brought into an immediate relationship with the eternal power that omnipresently pervades all existence.¹⁷

Choosing is what matters, and living a timid existence consumed with anxiety over choosing the right thing misses the point of existence. As the Judge says, “It is not so much a matter of choosing between willing good or willing evil as of choosing to will, but that in turn posits good and evil.”¹⁸ Without choice, there is no good and evil. As Mooney explains, “When work, marriage, and civic duty are morally unstructured, the would-be self engaged in these practices lacks validity or truth.”¹⁹ The aesthete meanders through life and creates an existence for herself. Judge William argues that in the process of choosing, the positing of good and evil reveals within herself her levels of good and evil, causing the individual to allow “the evil…to recede and the good…to advance.”²⁰ Ethical choosing permits individuals to become concrete, to become true selves. Peter Mehl analyzes the ethical view: “The aesthetic lifestyle is ultimately unsatisfactory because it does not affirm the conditions in which a certain sort of ethical character can develop, a character with engaged autonomy as the centerpiece of life. The aesthetic life denies personhood.”²¹ Lack of choice leads to a religious mysticism, a religion based on direct feeling of God rather than action for God. The Judge es-

 SKS 3, 131 / EO2, 149.  SKS 3, 157 / EO2, 159.  SKS 3, 164 / EO2, 167.  SKS 3, 165 / EO2, 169.  Mooney, “Kierkegaard on Self-Choice and Self-Reception,” p. 10 (my emphasis).  SKS 3, 216 / EO2, 226.  Peter J. Mehl, “Moral Virtue, Mental Health, and Happiness: The Moral Psychology of Kierkegaard’s Judge William,” in Either/Or, Part 2, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 161.

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chews such a life view: “The distinctiveness of the mystical is not the religious but the isolation in which the individual, without regard for any relation to the given actuality, wants to place himself in immediate rapport with the eternal.”²² Immediate existence lacks a definite duty to itself and society. When an individual chooses the ethical, the choice has social consequences: “The self that is the objective is not only a personal self but a social, a civic self. He then possesses himself as a task in an activity whereby he engages in the affairs of life as this specific personality.”²³ A true self is called to a life in a society, and as William declares, “When he turns back into his personality through the civic life, the personal life appears in a higher form. The personality appears as the absolute that has its teleology in itself.”²⁴ The word civilized comes to mind when considering Judge William’s perspective. Patricia Dip sums up the sentiment well: “The aesthetic is considered the ‘natural’…[and] only by referring to ethics can man ‘evolve.’”²⁵ Judge William champions the superiority of the ethical sphere as opposed to the aesthetic sphere: “In the first place, it is in harmony with actuality….In the second place, it conceives of the human being according to his perfection, views him according to his true beauty.”²⁶ Either/Or ends with a sermon from the Pastor. Judge William explains that his friend, the Pastor, sent him a copy of a sermon. Upon reading it, Judge William thought about A: “In this sermon [the Pastor] has grasped what I have said and what I would like to have said to you [A].”²⁷ The Pastor’s sermon takes its text from Luke 19:41– 48, where Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and cleanses the temple. The average person thinks that whenever he experiences hardship, he does what he can, yet the Pastor notes such an explanation does not calm the spirit of an individual in a crisis; it does not build up an individual. What truly builds up is realizing “that in relation to God we are always in the wrong.”²⁸ Such a statement may sound dour, but the Pastor declares its comfort. He explains, “Wishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an expression of a finite relationship! Hence it is upbuilding always to be in the

 SKS 3, 234 / EO2, 246.  SKS 3, 250 / EO2, 262– 263.  SKS 3, 250 / EO2, 263 (my emphasis).  Patricia C. Dip, “Judge William: The Limits of the Ethical,” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, p. 184.  SKS 3, 273 / EO2, 288.  SKS 3, 318 / EO2, 338.  SKS 3, 326 / EO2, 346.

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wrong—because only the infinite builds up; the finite does not!”²⁹ A life of doing does not build up because individuals are finite while God is infinite. How could mere ethical tasks bring someone into a proper relationship with God? David Law helps expound the Pastor’s line of reasoning: “If we are going to be right with God, then we must be so at every moment. ‘Rightness before God’ is an absolute; there are no intermediate states. One is either right before God or one is not….The problem facing the individual is that he is unable to achieve absolute rightness before God.”³⁰ A person’s actions cannot build up toward God because of God’s eternal nature. The Pastor ends his sermon with a quip: “For only the truth that builds up is truth for you.”³¹ Either/Or, Part 2 presents the ethical existence sphere of Judge William and his robust critique of A’s aesthetic existence. William attacks A’s nonexistence by showing the superiority of marriage and commitment. William is a concrete, historical reality because he has chosen himself. The careful reader of Either/Or can see an enormous irony: the Pastor’s sermon, which is the capstone of the book, criticizes both A and the Judge. Judge William thinks the sermon is an assault against A’s wild living, but the Pastor’s sermon cuts both ways. If everything one does is wrong before God, then an ethical life as prescribed by William is just as in the wrong as A’s aesthetic wandering. Although the sermon does not mention the religious stage of existence, Charles Bellinger notes, “The sermon represents a crucial shift from the ethical sphere of existence to the religious.”³² Judge William finds his τέλος in his societal duty as a husband and civic servant, but the Pastor turns that on its head. Michael Plekon summarizes: “The truth is not duty, not Hegel’s or Kant’s ethics but the telos and the ground of all ethical living—God.”³³ Either/Or ends with an open realization that both views presented in the book are lacking. Upon first examination, the ethical sphere makes sense. It gives order and clear direction to a wayward, depressed individual like A. As Law illuminates, “The inclusion of the ‘Ultimatum’ indicates to the reader that he must press on beyond the ethical into the religious sphere.”³⁴ The Pastor’s sermon shows the gaping hole in ethical thought—one’s actions cannot

 SKS 3, 327 / EO2, 348.  David R. Law, “The Place, Role, and Function of the ‘Ultimatum’ of Either/Or, Part Two, in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship,” in Either/Or, Part 2, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 241.  SKS 3, 332 / EO2, 354.  Charles K. Bellinger, “Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son: Or, Three Rival Versions of Three Rival Versions,” in Either/Or, Part 2, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 64.  Michael Plekon, “Judge William: Bourgeois Moralist, Knight of Faith, Teacher?” in Either/Or, Part 2, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 130.  Law, “The Place, Role, and Function of the ‘Ultimatum,’” p. 251.

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bring one to God. Subjectivity—a subjective relationship of inward appropriation of the truth that one is in the wrong before God—is what leads one to the truth rather than an objective life of moral duty.

Judge William How does Judge William exhibit Kierkegaard’s aspects of sin? He appears to be the paragon of virtue, assisting a lost young man to find himself. William is a man of family and culture, and he even mentions God and the Bible. Julia Watkin demonstrates how Judge William relies heavily on Balle’s Catechism, a Christian devotional work popular in Kierkegaard’s day. Balle emphasized the “ethical element of religion,” and Watkin sees Judge William following Balle’s method. Watkin argues that there are only two stages of existence, not three, in Kierkegaard’s writing—“between the aesthetic and the ethicoreligious.”³⁵ Is Watkin correct? Do we even need a section on sin for the potentially Christian Judge William? John Elrod’s clarification of “ethical” in Kierkegaard’s works is helpful in such a discussion: “Ethics has two meanings in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. It refers both to the process of self-understanding and to the ethical stage of existence. The former meaning refers to the self as a task whose fundamental possibility in life is self-understanding, and the latter meaning refers to the stage in the dialectical development of spirit.”³⁶ In a sense, Watkin is correct to meld the religious and ethical into one stage, for a movement to the religious sphere is a process of self-understanding. In another sense, Watkin is incorrect, for Judge William clearly has not moved to the stage of the religious. We can see as much in the numerous ways William demonstrates the four foci of Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin. Judge William exhorts A “to ‘choose oneself’ instead of ‘[knowing] oneself.’”³⁷ Judge William continues, Through the individual’s intercourse with himself the individual is made pregnant by himself and gives birth to himself. The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he

 Julia Watkin, “Judge William—A Christian?” in Either/Or, Part 2, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, pp. 123 – 124.  Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works, p. 114.  SKS 3, 246 / EO2, 258.

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himself. Only within himself does the individual have the objective toward which he is to strive.³⁸

William’s statement shows the importance of personal self-actualization in his life view. When one chooses herself, she finally becomes what she is supposed to be. As Mooney clarifies, “The outcome of self-choice for the Judge is the achievement of full and self-responsible personhood.”³⁹ The Judge’s view of personhood does not find its τέλος in God, but rather one’s purpose is in her self-actualization of her duty.⁴⁰ William, for all his ethical striving and commendable station in life, does not relate properly to God in faith. By constructing his self only by himself, Judge William has severed his self from God. Judge William stresses choice in his discourse, beseeching A to commit to something. The Judge admits that when one chooses himself, he may have many painful instances in his past that he must address. The Judge calls such an act “repentance,” and he gives a clear explanation: He chooses himself and struggles for this possession as for his salvation, and [choosing himself] is his salvation….The expression for this struggle…is—repentance. He repents himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God. Only on this condition can he choose himself. And this is the only condition he wants, for only in this way can he choose himself absolutely.⁴¹

Repentance, for the Judge, is choosing oneself despite the turmoil of one’s own past. The true self accepts what he has done and does not let anxiety consume him, bravely accepting responsibility and moving forward in choice. As Robert Perkins quips, “This is, to say the least, an unusual understanding of repentance. If by one free act of choice we can overcome those aspects of ourselves that create guilt, then, for the Judge, we save ourselves by repentance.”⁴² The Judge creates a concept of repentance that is godless. Certainly, he mentions God in his definition, but He appears as an afterthought, last in a chain of importance to William. The Judge lives in a state of untruth by rejecting God’s role in the process of repentance. Judge William does not see himself as being in untruth, but rather he thinks the problem lies in inaction.

     ert

SKS 3, 246– 247 / EO2, 259. Mooney, “Kierkegaard on Self-Choice and Self-Reception,” p. 15. SKS 3, 250 / EO2, 263. SKS 3, 207 / EO2, 216. Robert L. Perkins, “Either/Or/Or: Giving the Parson His Due,” in Either/Or, Part 2, ed. by RobL. Perkins, p. 216 (my emphasis).

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Judge William has an optimistic view of people and their ability to will the good: “We frequently also find people who in their heart of hearts actually are good but do not have the courage to acknowledge it because it seems that they thereby fall into all too trivial categories.”⁴³ Judge William goes on to say that A is not a bad person, but he simply needs the courage to will to be humble. Such thinking goes against Kierkegaard’s emphasis in The Concept of Anxiety that sin is a universal existence state. William’s positive view of humanity’s ability to choose the good has Pelagian overtones, the exact point Kierkegaard seeks to avoid at length in The Concept of Anxiety. Furthermore, William’s view of willing the good is more than a mere opinion—it is the foundation for his existence state. As Perkins demonstrates, “In the aesthete and the Judge Kierkegaard presents two examples of the modern displacement of God from the center [of one’s life].”⁴⁴ William’s clear misrelation to God is a persistent state in which he lives. Such a positive view of humanity does not realize the universal nature of depravity. Judge William emphasizes the role of society in the individual. One’s responsibility is to do one’s duty, and said duty is determined by the crowd. Various scholars state the bourgeois nature of Judge William.⁴⁵ He appears to be a carbon copy of popular religious sentiment in Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen. As such, he asserts his popular view onto A, for William’s entire purpose is to convince A to join the ethical sphere of existence. In William’s mind, he is being a proper role model, assisting a depressed young man, but William’s action is merely the leveling of the crowd, an attempt to squash subjectivity. William even expresses contempt for subjective religion: “Without regard for any relation to the given actuality, [one] wants to place himself in immediate rapport with the eternal.”⁴⁶ A direct relation to the eternal removes culture from the supreme place of authority. William, the ethical judge, cannot abide such a religion. As such, we can view the redoubling nature of sin in the crowd in the thoughts of Judge William.

   

SKS 3, 217 / EO2, 227. Perkins, “Either/Or/Or,” p. 219. Plekon, “Judge William,” p. 130; Perkins, “Either/Or/Or,” p. 214. SKS 3, 235 / EO2, 246.

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The Pastor The Pastor is an intriguing character, for in his sermon he opens up the religious sphere for consideration in Either/Or. As noted above with Judge William’s use of a catechism, a mere use of Christian terms does not make one an authentic Christian. When we examine the thoughts of the Pastor, we see a shocking agreement and consistency with Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin. To start, the title and emphasis of the Pastor’s sermon are direct connections to the first aspect of Kierkegaard’s view of sin: “In relation to God we are always in the wrong.”⁴⁷ As the final word in Either/Or, the Pastor casts judgment on both A and the Judge, for both of their views do not relate to God properly. William sees the sermon as directed toward A, but Kierkegaard’s irony is in full swing; Mooney correctly comments that “the sermon is (at that moment) more relevant to his [the Judge’s] life than to the aesthete’s.”⁴⁸ One is reminded of the parable of the prodigal son. The younger brother abandons his father and squanders his inheritance on wine, women, and song. He comes to his senses and returns home to his father, repenting of his ways. The father lovingly welcomes him back, celebrating with a grand feast. The older brother is indignant, stating, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!”⁴⁹ The parable ends with the ethical older brother not participating in the father’s banquet. The older brother, who did everything right, is outside of the father’s blessing, while the younger brother, who did everything wrong, is welcomed in because of his act of true repentance. For the one in the ethical sphere, he has difficulty seeing his plight as a sinner before God. Judge William falls into this trap, believing himself in the right by virtue of his status in the world. Choosing oneself is paramount for the one in the ethical sphere, but as Law signals, the sermon shows “a conquest of the self” when one admits the need for God.⁵⁰ The Pastor’s ultimatum stresses that everyone is wrong because sin is first and foremost before God.⁵¹

    

SKS 3, 326 / EO2, 346. Mooney, “Kierkegaard on Self-Choice and Self-Reception,” p. 12. Lk 15:29 – 30. Law, “The Place, Role, and Function of the ‘Ultimatum,’” p. 246. SKS 11, 193 – 201 / SUD, 79 – 87.

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The Pastor stresses God’s otherness throughout the sermon: “Therefore, wishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an expression of a finite relationship!”⁵² God is in a different existence category, and as such we cannot treat him as we treat other finite relationships, like one “who is in our vest pocket,” as Perkins proclaims.⁵³ Since God is wholly other, trying to construct a reality in which one distills God down to mere ethical guidelines shows living in a state of untruth. In the title of the sermon, we can see the emphasis that we are always in the wrong. The nonbeliever may attempt to assuage his conscience by stating “one does what one can,” but such statements are lacking in lived-out existence.⁵⁴ An honest examination shows the futility of such thinking, for a rejection of God’s otherness is an elevation of one’s own deeds. True submission to God is “a joy in which you win a victory over yourself and over the world.”⁵⁵ The Pastor’s exhortation demonstrates two concepts: sin is untruth and sin is a continual existence state. In the sermon’s introduction, the Pastor explains Christ’s weeping over Jerusalem. The Pastor asks the question, were there no righteous people in Jerusalem during Christ’s time? “For the offense this nation had committed,” regardless of an individual’s standing in Jerusalem, “this generation had to pay the penalty.”⁵⁶ The Pastor continues with an analysis of how sin can enter and corrupt entire nations. God, as judge, pours out his wrath and justice on Jerusalem because of the attitude of the people. The Pastor states, “Or were you never anxious about yourself, so anxious that it seemed to you as if there were no sin so black, no selfishness so loathsome, that it could not infiltrate you and like a foreign power gain control over you?”⁵⁷ The Pastor shows how sin spreads in a nation, and the condemnation of the crowd falls upon the individuals.

2 Fear and Trembling Fear and Trembling (1843) may be Kierkegaard’s most famous work. He seems to have realized as much, for in his journal he writes, “Ah, some day after I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough to immortalize my name as an

     

SKS 3, 327 / EO2, 348. Perkins, “Either/Or/Or,” p. 225. SKS 3, 325 / EO2, 346. SKS 3, 330 / EO2, 351. SKS 3, 322/ EO2, 342 (my emphasis). SKS 3, 325 / EO2, 345.

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author. Then it will be read and translated into foreign languages.”⁵⁸ Because of its popularity, the research on Fear and Trembling is vast with a plethora of interpretations from various academic disciplines. Johannes de Silentio is the pseudonym of the work, and he writes an extended discourse on God commanding Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. I share Ronald Green’s sentiments when he states, “Few books have been as badly misunderstood as this one. Themes that Kierkegaard meant to serve only as a stimulus to reflection have become a principal focus of modern commentary.”⁵⁹

Summary Fear and Trembling opens with Johannes de Silentio commenting on his current philosophical climate: “Every speculative monitor who conscientiously signals the important trends in modern philosophy…is unwilling to stop with doubting everything but goes further.”⁶⁰ De Silentio examines the Akedah—Abraham’s offering of Isaac as a sacrifice at God’s command—pondering the relationship between Abraham and authentic faith. Johannes de Silentio is flummoxed by Abraham’s faith, and Silentio openly admits that “[he] cannot think [himself] into Abraham.”⁶¹ Although he cannot understand Abraham, he still stands in awe of his act of faith. Abraham has a conundrum: it is wrong to murder his son, yet it is right to follow the commands of God. Any normal person would have attempted to bargain with God over the content of the sacrifice, “but Abraham had faith and did not doubt; he believed the preposterous.”⁶² Silentio frequently admits that he does not understand Abraham’s resolute willingness to trust God, calling Abraham’s faith “absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago.”⁶³ “Absurd” is a loaded term in philosophy and theology, and its usage is one of the chief reasons why some commentators cite Kierkegaard as an irrationalist. The reasoning goes, if Kierkegaard says faith is absurd and everyone ought to come to faith, then Christian faith is irrational. A close reading of Fear and Trembling, as well as Kierkegaard’s other works, shows such reasoning is a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard’s definition of faith. Johannes says, “But to be able to

 SKS 22, 235, NB12:147 / KJN 6, 237.  Ronald M. Green, “Enough Is Enough! Fear and Trembling Is Not about Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 21, no. 2, 1993, p. 191.  SKS 4, 101 / FT, 5.  SKS 4, 128 / FT, 33.  SKS 4, 117 / FT, 20.  SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36 (my emphasis).

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lose one’s understanding and along with it everything finite…this appalls me, but that does not make me say it is something inferior, since, on the contrary, it is the one and only marvel.”⁶⁴ Silentio is in the ethical sphere of existence, which concerns itself with finite actualization. Any belief system that transcends the finite —transcends one’s earthly duty as a father—is inherently absurd to the one in the ethical sphere. C. Stephen Evans offers helpful commentary on the sticky issue of absurdity in Fear and Trembling. In Silentio’s understanding, “Abraham’s action cannot be ethically justified because he is not a citizen of the state; the family is the highest social institution in which he participates and therefore there can be no higher ethical values than family values.”⁶⁵ From Johannes’s perspective, how could one go higher than the highest? Thinking something exists that overrides the highest form of morality is absurd to Silentio. Johannes uses an analogy of a knight to clarify his thinking. A knight falls in love with a princess, but the knight cannot actualize the love in marriage. Following his duty, he gives up the girl while his love for her continues eternally. He made the vow to love her, and he keeps the vow even though he forswore her. Silentio calls a man of such action the knight of infinite resignation, for his decision has an eternal consequence—always loving her even though he cannot have her. We contrast the knight of resignation with the knight of faith, who resigns himself to give up his love but has faith that he will receive her back because with “God all things are possible.”⁶⁶ What makes Abraham special is not his sacrifice of Isaac; it is his belief that he will receive Isaac back. Sylvia Crocker explains, “The knight of infinite resignation makes only the infinite movement; the knight of faith makes the double movement from the finite to the infinite and back again to the finite.”⁶⁷ For Silentio, it is absurd to believe that the knight would receive back the princess—societal duties do not allow for that. He cannot comprehend why someone would have such a fantastical view of a future hope. As Clare Carlisle expounds, “Courage, rather than obedience, is the central vir-

 SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36 (my emphasis).  C. Stephen Evans, “Faith as the Telos of Morality: A Reading of Fear and Trembling,” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 1993 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 6), p. 17.  SKS 4, 141 / FT, 46.  Sylvia Fleming Crocker, “Sacrifice in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling,” Harvard Theological Review, vol. 68, no. 2, 1975, p. 129.

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tue of faith.”⁶⁸ Silentio is not courageous; he does not dare transcend the ethical into a life of faith. Silentio poses his famous Problema: is there a teleological suspension of the ethical? His argument is that since the ethical “is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone…faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal.”⁶⁹ God tasks Abraham with sacrificing his son, an obvious move against the ethical qualification of murder. In order for Abraham to be counted as the knight of faith, God must suspend the ethical purposefully so that Abraham can proceed with his task: “Abraham’s situation is different. By his act he transgressed the ethical altogether and had a higher τέλος outside it, in relation to which he suspended.”⁷⁰ This higher τέλος, as Alastair Hannay explains, “must mean that the ethical is kept alive in some way but with another ulterior aim…with another source. That source can be identified with the divine will….For Kierkegaard the divine will is…that of a personal God.”⁷¹ Johannes sees such a movement as absurd because he is steeped in the Hegelian understanding of ethics. Hegelianism views the cultural expression of values as Geist moving in the world, so any attempt to move beyond the culture’s construct leads to a breakdown of logical reasoning. As Evans notes, “Insofar as God transcends the social order, and insofar as the social order attempts to deify itself and usurp divine authority, there is a necessary opposition between faith and ‘reason.’”⁷² Such background is why Silentio states, “Therefore, although Abraham arouses my admiration, he also appalls me.”⁷³ Johannes de Silentio attempts to understand Abraham, but ultimately he cannot. He ends his work with a simple summary: “Thus, either there is a paradox, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, or Abraham is lost.”⁷⁴

 Clare Carlisle, “Johannes de Silentio’s Dilemma,” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Critical Guide, ed. by Daniel W. Conway, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015 (Cambridge Critical Guides), p. 57.  SKS 4, 148 – 149 / FT, 54– 55.  SKS 4, 152 / FT, 59.  Alastair Hannay, “Homing in on Fear and Trembling,” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Critical Guide, ed. by Daniel W. Conway, p. 13.  Evans, “Faith as the Telos of Morality,” p. 24 (my emphasis).  SKS 4, 153 / FT, 60 (my emphasis).  SKS 4, 207 / FT, 120.

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Johannes de Silentio Johannes de Silentio is a fascinating character, for he openly admits that he does not have faith. He admires Abraham—he admires faith—but he cannot submit to the “absurd” and become an individual. The introductory quote to Fear and Trembling states, “What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not.”⁷⁵ Silentio is an outsider, and as such cannot understand the message. As Evans notes, “This motto hints that Johannes’s message about faith is written in such a way that it is likely to be misunderstood by anyone who, lacking faith, is not ‘in the family.’”⁷⁶ Despite his desire to investigate the Akedah, Silentio does not actualize faith. For Kemp, Silentio is Kierkegaard’s way of “showing the reader what faithfulness (and by implication faith) is not.”⁷⁷ The reader should ask, “Why is Silentio a bad example?” The answer is that sin has perverted Silentio’s comprehension of faith and duty. We can see throughout Fear and Trembling Johannes’s emphasis on the crowd or public. Interestingly, Johannes is not overly concerned that Abraham had to sacrifice Isaac. The act of killing one’s son is acceptable in certain arenas. If a judge has a son who must be put to death, the father is justified. In order to reach Troy, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. Jephthah sacrificed his daughter for the good of Israel.⁷⁸ Silentio notes these examples are tragic heroes, and he can understand their actions. Why are their actions acceptable? For Silentio, they are tolerable because the above did their duty for the good of the people. In each example, the father submitted to the society. Kevin Hoffman clarifies, “Their resignation is mediated, that is, rendered meaningful in the larger context of a social good.”⁷⁹ They either executed justice or sacrificed for the good of the whole. Abraham is bizarre to Silentio, for he “had a higher τέλος outside [the ethical].”⁸⁰ Johannes defines himself, his self, on what society declares to be correct. He builds his identity upon his culture as the arbiter of good, evil, and meaning. Such a view patently demonstrates a misrelation to God, for Kierkegaard declares that individuals find their true existence only in God.

 SKS 4, 100 / FT, 3.  Evans, “Faith as the Telos of Morality,” p. 11.  Kemp, “Johannes de Silentio,” p. 145 (my emphasis).  SKS 4, 152 / FT, 58.  Kevin Hoffman, “Facing Threats to Earthly Felicity: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling,’” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 34, no. 3, 2006, p. 448 (my emphasis).  SKS 4, 152 / FT, 59.

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Johannes ironically declares that at the same time Abraham both “arouses [his] admiration” and “appalls” his sensibilities.⁸¹ One immediately thinks of our discussion on offense at the paradox. We recall that in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard states the absurdity of faith leads to an “objective repulsion.”⁸² We plainly see Silentio’s repulsion in the text, even though he has an admiration of Abraham’s faith. In Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard states, “The established order…always insists on being the objective.”⁸³ The public cannot abide individual, subjective existence. Any understanding of faith as subjective runs contrary to cultural sensitivities. We recall that offense comes from being in a state of untruth. Silentio faces the truth through the example of Abraham, but he refuses to make the movement of faith. Silentio remains offended by the paradox. Silentio does discuss sin, and the implications are intriguing for our investigation: “Sin is not the first immediacy; sin is a later immediacy. In sin, the single individual is already higher…than the universal, because it is a contradiction on the part of the universal to want to demand itself from a person who lacks the conditio sine qua non [indispensable condition].”⁸⁴ The language is influenced by Hegel,⁸⁵ for it focuses on the need to reflect in order to understand sin. Upon reflection, one realizes he is in sin and “higher than the universal,” meaning he has transcended the societal duty which he is supposed to follow. We remember our discussion of A in Either/Or when he attempted to wiggle out of sin by claiming he never moved to the ethical stage. Because he remained in the aesthetic, he never reflected on his actions, which is a prerequisite for the ethical understanding of sin. In Fear and Trembling, Silentio agrees with the ethical understanding of sin, relating everything to the universal ethic. The individual transgresses the ethical, moving outside the universal—that is, outside the bounds of morality as deemed by the crowd—and comes back in only through repentance. John Davenport highlights the crux of the issue: “The core of faith is trust in divine fulfillment of an ethically ideal outcome that seems absurd or ‘impossible’…to

 SKS 4, 153 / FT, 60.  SKS 7, 193 / CUP1, 210.  SKS 12, 95 / PC, 86.  SKS 4, 188 / FT, 98.  SKS 4, 188 / FT, 99, see the Hongs’ notes, particularly numbers 33 and 34. Also, Olivia Blanchette has an excellent article on the FT’s polemical tone against Hegelian philosophy. See Olivia Blanchette, “The Silencing of Philosophy,” in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, pp. 29 – 65.

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human reason, because it is beyond the human actor’s power to secure.”⁸⁶ Faith requires a surrender of the self to God with the individual unable to perform the task, needing divine grace to intervene. The ethical requires a surrender of the self to the crowd with the individual meticulously maintaining his status as within the bounds of the universal. In Silentio’s view, sin is not an existence state: sins are punctiliar actions. Once one moves beyond the universal, he must repent back into the universal. Such thinking misses Kierkegaard’s understanding that sin is an existence state: one lives in a qualitative state of sin. Our analysis has focused on the dynamics of the individual and the crowd, so one clearly sees the connection between sin’s outward dynamic in the crowd in Fear and Trembling. Johannes talks about the leveling of the crowd as something positive for individuals: “How does the single individual reassure himself that he is legitimate? It is a simple matter to level all existence to the idea of the state or the idea of a society. If this is done, it is also simple to mediate, for one never comes to the paradox.”⁸⁷ Johannes openly embraces the crowd’s leveling in the lives of individuals. In his mind, such leveling stands as a corrective, retaining uniformity while avoiding the paradoxical. Johannes does not see the potential pitfall of how a culture may not hold a correct morality, for he would not accept that the culture could have a wrong moral value.⁸⁸ Johannes’s praise of the crowd betrays his level of sinfulness. Kemp is clearly correct: Johannes de Silentio is an example of what faithfulness does not look like. The inscription that opens Fear and Trembling rings true: Johannes is an outsider who does not know what message he is carrying. He is so close, yet so far. He admires Abraham, but he cannot take the leap to faith. Our analysis shows that Johannes de Silentio exemplifies Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin.

3 Prefaces Kierkegaard released Prefaces on the same day as The Concept of Anxiety in 1844. In fact, Kierkegaard removed the original preface for The Concept of Anxiety and

 John Davenport, “Eschatological Faith and Repetition: Kierkegaard’s Abraham and Job,” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Critical Guide, ed. by Daniel W. Conway, p. 81 (my emphasis).  SKS 4, 155 / FT, 62.  Silentio’s understanding of the crowd mimics Hegelian thought. In Hegel’s thought, the actualization of Geist through culture is God working in the world. Such view is why Silentio cannot accept going beyond the culture to God since the culture essentially encapsulates God.

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placed it in Prefaces. ⁸⁹ The only pseudonym in Prefaces is Nicolaus Notabene, whose name literally means “victorious people note well.”⁹⁰ Prefaces is unique in the Kierkegaardian corpus for its satirical and polemic nature. In particular, the work attacks the Hegelian elite cultural influencer J. L. Heiberg.⁹¹ Heiberg gave negative reviews to both Either/Or and Repetition, and one clearly sees that Heiberg did not properly understand the issues of Repetition. ⁹² Mark Peterson notes that while Kierkegaard addresses those who gave his books bad reviews, “There is a great deal more at work…than literary irony or revenge. Alongside the jokes, the local references, and local concerns, lies a profound and implicit critique of what constitutes an acceptable kind of philosophical authorship.”⁹³ Kierkegaard is not a petty author, doling out retribution for a terrible book review. Heiberg’s review is a symptom of a larger problem and as Glenn Kirkconnell retorts, “perhaps Kierkegaard felt that some positions do not need to be refuted, but to be laughed out of court.”⁹⁴

 Stephen Crites, “The Unfathomable Stupidity of Nicolaus Notabene,” in Prefaces and Writing Sample and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2006 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vols. 9 – 10), p. 30; Nassim Bravo Jordán, “Nicolaus Notabene: Kierkegaard’s Satirical Mask,” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, p. 201; Robert L. Perkins, “Reading Kierkegaard’s Prefaces with ‘Continual Reference to Socrates,’” in Prefaces and Writing Sample and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 131.  Henriksen breaks down the language: “Nicolaus means ‘the victorious people’; Nico- comes from nike, victory; -laus from laos, the people–and notabene, as is well known, means ‘note well’ or, please note;” Mads Fedder Henriksen, “A Preface to the ‘Preface’ of Prefaces,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 20, 1999, p. 11.  Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, “The Age of Miscellaneous Announcements: Paratextualism in Kierkegaard’s Prefaces and Contemporary Literary Culture,” in Prefaces and Writing Sample and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, p. 28.  Under the pseudonym of Constantius, Kierkegaard wrote an unpublished response to Heiberg’s review of R. See the supplement of R for his specific address to Heiberg (Pap. IV B 110 259 – 260 / R, 283 – 285. Pap. IV B 111 261– 274 / R 285 – 298).  Mark C. E. Peterson, “Ringing Doorbells: Eleventh Books and Authentic Authorship in Preface VII,” in Prefaces and Writing Sample and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, p. 97.  W. Glenn Kirkconnell, Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation: From Philosophical Fragments through the Two Ages, London: Continuum 2010 (Continuum Studies in Philosophy), p. 50.

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Summary Nicolaus Notabene is a newlywed, but he admits that he has “nevertheless run up against difficulties in [his] marriage.”⁹⁵ Notabene wants to be an author, but his wife will not allow him to write. From his wife’s perspective, an author is committed totally to his work rather than his marriage—authorship is “downright unfaithfulness.”⁹⁶ As a compromise, Notabene’s wife allows him to write prefaces to books: as long as he does not actually write a book, he can write prefaces to his heart’s content. Prefaces is just that, a compilation of eight prefaces —with its own preface to the prefaces. In publishing his Prefaces, Notabene states, “The little or trifles that I hereby publish I was able to write salva conscientia [with good conscience].”⁹⁷ Prefaces I–VI are short, a mere twenty-one pages total. Notabene’s first preface discusses his book as a “New Year’s gift,” vowing “as soon as possible…[to] publish a logical system.”⁹⁸ The second preface comments how the literary incrowd sets the tone for whether or not a book is worth reading. Notabene claims that average bourgeois readers start with the public perception of a book rather than reading the book themselves. Armed with the trusted elites’ approval or dismissal, “readers” pass judgment on a work without even reading it, making it a matter of “common knowledge” that a book is or is not good.⁹⁹ Preface III is the second edition to a book, thanking the reviewers for their positive reviews. Preface IV pokes fun at Heiberg’s influence, calling him “our literary telegraph manager” who is “kind enough to be a tax collector again and tally the votes” to claim a book as either good or bad.¹⁰⁰ Next, Notabene writes a preface to a speech given at the Total Abstinence Association. He explains the importance of joining the association, for “if [one] joins our association, he acquires by this an infinite significance for the whole, something that is known by everyone who is a member.”¹⁰¹ Preface VI is a preface to a “devotional work for cultured people,” and it is Christian “since the cultured are, of course, Christians.”¹⁰² Prefaces VII and VIII are the longest, dealing with more substantial issues. Preface VII, as Peterson explains, is a critique of “a kind of authorship Kierke-

 SKS 4, 470 / P, 6.  SKS 4, 474 / P, 10.  SKS 4, 476 / P, 12.  SKS 4, 478 / P, 14.  SKS 4, 480 / P, 16.  SKS 4, 486 / P, 23 – 24.  SKS 4, 490 / P, 28.  SKS 4, 493 / P, 31. SKS 4, 495 / P, 33.

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gaard finds ridiculous and symptomatic of what has gone wrong with philosophy.”¹⁰³ Notabene opens by stating, “To write a book is the easiest of all things in our time, if, as is customary, one takes ten older works on the same subject and out of them puts together an eleventh on the same subject.”¹⁰⁴ In Notabene’s Hegelian climate, philosophers focused on mediation, resulting in a continual publishing of more information. The issue, as Notabene sees it, is that these authors of “eleventh” works say nothing new. Furthermore, the eleventh-book writers understand truth through a logical system, but the average person “makes slower and also laborious progress. Whatever he discovers…he assimilates immediately in succum et sanguinem [in flesh and blood]….In his knowledge he does not remain indifferent like a hawker who cares only about hawking.”¹⁰⁵ Preface VIII is a preface to a new philosophical journal with its goal to eradicate all remaining doubt.¹⁰⁶ Notabene hopes the journal is a financial success, but he also desires “that good people may succeed in enabling [him] to make out philosophy.”¹⁰⁷ Notabene openly admits that he does not understand Hegel, and he simply wants someone to explain it while “[he] keeps [his] feet on the ground.”¹⁰⁸ Notabene fears that his “obtuseness”—which Stephen Crites translates as “stupidity” because he sees it as “the most literal and unforced rendering”¹⁰⁹—implies that he “[lacks] possibility or [is] an expression of the impossibility.”¹¹⁰ Notabene is confused: he does not understand the system, yet he still exists as a person. He sees a breakdown in Hegelian thought, for either understanding or not understanding the logical system seems to have no bearing on his living as a human. Prefaces ends with a short postscript; and Notabene states that because there is no actual book, Prefaces “cannot possibly…initiate conflict and quarreling.”¹¹¹

        

Peterson, “Ringing Doorbells,” p. 87. SKS 4, 497 / P, 35. SKS 4, 502 / P, 40. SKS 4, 512 / P, 51. SKS 4, 515 / P, 55. SKS 4, 517 / P, 56. Crites, “The Unfathomable Stupidity of Nicolaus Notabene,” p. 29. SKS 4, 519 / P, 58. SKS 4, 526 / P, 68.

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Nicolaus Notabene Notabene is a difficult character to analyze because he is obviously satirical. He teases Hegelianism and the culprit of popularizing Hegelianism in Copenhagen: J. L. Heiberg. As Harvie Ferguson explains, “Prefaces…mobilizes the trivial against itself.”¹¹² Crites sees the entire work as a “joke…on all the academic philosophers, earning a precarious living turning out turgid paragraphs for a promised system, the completion of which is constantly deferred.”¹¹³ Notabene joins their fold by writing prefaces while never writing a book. Satire does not disqualify Prefaces from our analysis, for satire indirectly points out issues the author sees as problematic. In Notabene’s caustic remarks, we see all four of Kierkegaard’s dynamics of sin. In Preface V, Notabene writes about the Total Abstinence Association and its grand plans. He comments that if one becomes a teetotaler on his own, no one notifies him of his achievement. The individual needs a group in order to know what is or is not a “reward” for action.¹¹⁴ For Notabene, an individual gathers its meaning only from a group. As an individual, one is unable to know proper behavior. Notabene also notes the other side of the group determining the morality: the leadership of the group determines the mores.¹¹⁵ Perkins clarifies, “The subordination of the individual, who seeks some level of identity and self-importance in such an environment, masks the authoritarian purpose and/or method of the group.”¹¹⁶ Notabene shows that one’s self is determined by being in the group rather than being an individual before God. As Notabene mentions in his preface to his devotional book, “[The cultured person] does not want to be reminded of all the trifles, of individuals, of himself, because to forget all of this is precisely the upbuilding. The life of the congregation, the grand definition of the system…are the subject for consideration in the present work.”¹¹⁷ Putting the ideals of a group as the grounding of one’s life leads to a life of despair, for humans ought to be defined by their direct relationship to God. Notabene’s desire for a new philosophical journal in Preface VII opens the door to the second aspect of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin: sin as untruth. Notabene reasons that philosophy is the way to truth—to becoming blessed as an es-

 Harvie Ferguson, “Before the Beginning: Kierkegaard’s Literary Hysteria,” in Prefaces and Writing Sample and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, ed. Robert L. Perkins, p. 63.  Crites, “The Unfathomable Stupidity of Nicolaus Notabene,” p. 39.  SKS 4, 490 / P, 28.  Another dig at Heiberg?  Perkins, “Reading Kierkegaard’s Prefaces,” p. 126.  SKS 4, 494 / P, 32.

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sential human being—yet he is upset because he cannot comprehend philosophy. Furthermore, he is utterly perplexed, for if he cannot understand the truth of philosophy, then is he not a human being? Notabene is in a conundrum: does the accidental quality of stupidity override the essential quality of being human? If stupidity does not disqualify him from blessedness because he is essentially a human, then how can the accidental knowledge of philosophy make one blessed? He finishes his discourse, stating, “There is then, something higher than philosophy. It is higher in that it includes me and similar bunglers. If this is so, then the question is: will philosophy continue to be called the absolute? But if it is not the absolute, then it must be able to state its boundary….In that case, the question is: what is this power, and how does it relate to knowledge?”¹¹⁸ Notabene shows us the impossibility of the Hegelian system to bring people to true knowledge of God. Crites helps explain the erudite thinking of Hegel. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel states, “The individual has the right to demand that Science should at least provide him with the ladder to this standpoint, should show him this standpoint within himself.”¹¹⁹ Hegel has an optimistic view of humanity’s ability to reason toward God. Notabene says he does not have such an ability. As Crites clarifies, “It is by no means clear to poor Nicolaus that he is already implicitly or potentially a spiritual being in the Hegelian sense. His self-confessed stupidity is no mere garden variety lack of intelligence, but his incapacity, in the Hegelian terms, to become spirit.”¹²⁰ Notabene shows the despair one has in trying to reason toward God to find purpose and meaning. Because God is wholly other, humanity cannot on its own devices leap over Lessing’s ditch. Any attempt at such a leap leaves someone face down in the mud, like Notabene, floundering in despair. Notabene demonstrates sin as untruth. Seeing Notabene’s frustration with trying to understand philosophy directly ties into sin as an existential state. Notabene constructs an example: what if philosophy spoke to him from on high and explained everything to him? Philosophy would say to him, “You labor under a misunderstanding. It has not been granted to you to understand me; yet you should not for that reason be angry with me since I am not the one who creates humanity.”¹²¹ Notabene replies, “As you spoke, my heart, which has been sick and dejected, became healthy and joyful again….I do realize that this was no place for me, but that it must be glorious to be able to go there.”¹²² Despite his “epiphany,” Notabene still wants to inves    

SKS 4, 520 / P, 60. SKS 4, 522 / P, 62. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 14– 15 (my emphasis). Crites, “The Unfathomable Stupidity of Nicolaus Notabene,” p. 37. SKS 4, 523 / P, 63 SKS 4, 523 – 524 / P, 64.

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tigate philosophy by creating his philosophical journal. Why? He wants something that “he assimilates immediately in succum et sanguinem [in flesh and blood].”¹²³ Notabene is longing for an existence that matters. His current plight does not satisfy his longing for meaning. Sin is his current existence state and it leaves him broken, lost, and confused. Lastly, Notabene discusses the crowd consistently in Prefaces. As quoted above in the preface to the Total Abstinence Association, Notabene shows that one’s τέλος is in the crowd, but also the crowd sets the agenda for fulfilling the τέλος. As Lasse Kjældgaard notes, “The ‘whole direction’ of the age was an issue upon which Heiberg felt very competent and often made authoritative and rather sweeping statements.”¹²⁴ Heiberg set the agenda, and everyone else followed suit. One can recognize the lack of Notabene’s importance in his name itself: Nicolaus Notabene. Nassim Jordán elucidates that the abbreviation of Nicolaus Notabene’s name, N. N., is the same as the common Latin abbreviation nomen nescio, which means “I do not know the name.” Notabene is a nomen nescio, for he has no individuality as a part of the crowd: “Nicolaus Notabene offers the picture of a novice writer who is being pummeled by a corrupt, arrogant, and ridiculous publishing culture.”¹²⁵ We see the leveling and the redoubling riddled throughout Prefaces. Society pressures people to conform to the elite’s view, and such corrupts the individuals to live their own lives carrying on sinful viewpoints.

4 Stages on Life’s Way, Sections 2 and 3 We reviewed Section 1 in the previous chapter, and now we examine Sections 2 and 3. Within these sections, we find three pseudonyms: Judge William—making a reappearance from Either/Or—, Quidam, and Frater Taciturnus. All three characters are in the ethical sphere of existence, although Quidam is closely approaching the religious sphere.

 SKS 4, 502 / P, 40.  Kjældgaard, “The Age of Miscellaneous Announcements,” p. 21.  Jordán, “Nicolaus Notabene,” p. 196, p. 202.

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Summary Section 2 contains a long, single essay titled “Some Reflections on Marriage in Answer to Objections” by Judge William. Like his essays in Either/Or, Judge William praises marriage and its effects on humans to make them concrete rather than abstract. When talking about his beloved wife, William states, “Through her I am Man, for only a married man is an authentic man.”¹²⁶ William’s statement is a play on words in its original Danish language. George Connell explains that the word “husband” (ægtemand) literally means “genuine man” (ægte and mand), and “for the Judge, this genuineness amounts preeminently to conviction…and resolution.”¹²⁷ Since a husband is a “genuine” man, William claims, marriage is “life’s highest τέλος.”¹²⁸ One comes to marriage through a “positive resolution,” creating an “extraordinary concretion.”¹²⁹ Man becomes genuine through resolution, through the choice and corresponding duty, but woman becomes concrete when “she is a mother; only then does she exist in all her beauty.”¹³⁰ William relies so much on his wife’s love that he states, “I believe if I were ill, sick unto death…I believe that [her tender gaze] would summon me back to life if God in heaven did not himself use his power.”¹³¹ In Stages on Life’s Way, Judge William speaks more explicitly about God than in Either/Or. He affirms that God plays a role in a man’s resolution, so much so that “if he has never made a resolution in which he had a transaction with God, he might just as well never lived.” By “transaction,” Judge William means that “the eternal is present and completes the purchase.”¹³² The groundedness of William’s existence causes him to question anyone who claims to be an exception to the universal, for the “religious exception will ignore the universal; he will outbid actuality’s terms.”¹³³ Section 3 starts with a diary written by Quidam titled “‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’: A Story of Suffering.” The diary concerns a young man, Quidam, and his unhap-

 SKS 6, 101 / SL, 106.  George Connell, “The Importance of Being Earnest: Coming to Terms with Judge William’s Seriousness,” in Stages on Life’s Way, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2000 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 11), p. 135.  SKS 6, 102 / SL, 106.  SKS 6, 103 / SL, 108. SKS 6, 150 / SL, 160.  SKS 6, 127 / SL, 134.  SKS 6, 122 – 123 / SL, 130.  SKS 6, 105 / SL, 110.  SKS 6, 163 / SL, 175.

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py engagement and breakup with his beloved fiancée, Quaedam.¹³⁴ Quidam writes the diary after he has broken off his engagement, yet he spends his morning entries recollecting the past year when he first met his beloved. His midnight entries are in the present, filled with his inner turmoil over his deeds and the hurt he caused Quaedam. Quidam posits many reasons for the breakup: his melancholy, his choosing the religious, and her lack of “religious presuppositions.”¹³⁵ Quidam concocts a plan to move his beloved, who is in the aesthetic sphere, into the religious sphere.¹³⁶ As Vincent McCarthy summarizes, “Kierkegaard’s implied thesis is that a wound to the aesthetic life prompts and, by degrees, necessitates confrontation with a higher possibility, namely, the religious.”¹³⁷ Quidam’s hope is that through her turmoil she will become more religiously reflective. The final part of Section 3 is titled “Letter to the Reader,” written by Frater Taciturnus. In this work, Taciturnus claims that Quidam’s diary was “conjured up” as a way to demonstrate “that the religious is not something to make light of as something one can easily do.”¹³⁸ An aesthetic hero conquers—he gets the girl by overcoming some obstacle. The religious hero cannot conquer —he must suffer.¹³⁹ The religious hero suffers because he has an individual, subjective relationship with God, and this relationship causes one to realize his guilt. Such suffering is not self-torture, “which is a sin like other sins.”¹⁴⁰ As John Davenport explains, “Taciturnus takes pains to emphasize that proper religious suffering is not a kind of self-inflicted torment,” but it is the natural outcome of the inwardness of faith.¹⁴¹ Taciturnus gives an explicit definition of the stages of existence: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. He argues that the ethical “is only a transition sphere” toward the religious.¹⁴² He defines the religious sphere as “being religiously, infinitely concerned about oneself” in relation to God.

 The diary itself does not name the author “Quidam.” Frater Taciturnus, the author of “‘Guilty?’”/“‘Not Guilty?’” refers to the main characters as such.  SKS 6, 353 / SL, 381. SKS 6, 207 / SL, 222. SKS 6, 220 / SL, 236.  SKS 6, 308 – 309 / SL, 331– 332.  Vincent McCarthy, “Morning and Melancholia in ‘Quidam’s Diary,’” in Stages on Life’s Way, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 157.  SKS 6, 369 / SL, 398.  SKS 6, 420 / SL, 454.  SKS 6, 431 / SL, 468.  John J. Davenport, “The Ethical and Religious Significance of Taciturnus’s Letter in Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way,” in Stages on Life’s Way, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 241.  SKS 6, 439 / SL, 476.

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Judge William Judge William, more explicitly than in Either/Or, displays all four characteristics of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin. Either/Or displays William closer to orthodox Christianity, but in Stages on Life’s Way William unabashedly walks straight into, as Connell points out, “a blatantly and obvious idolatry….It seems, indeed, that marriage is the Judge’s religion.”¹⁴³ Various times William explains how love is one’s τέλος or the center of his being. William even states, “Marriage is the fullness of time.”¹⁴⁴ In Galatians the apostle Paul mentions “the fullness of time” with a different explanation: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”¹⁴⁵ Paul’s word to the Galatians is a summary of the gospel message, that Jesus saves those under the curse of the law. What does William think saves him? His marriage to his wife. He clearly alludes to such, saying she could save him if he were “sick unto death.”¹⁴⁶ William obviously misrelates to God by putting his marriage as the top priority of his existence. William also lives in a state of untruth, which is evident in his discussion on religious exceptions. He decries those who want to “leap over” marriage and go straight to God, for such thinking is a “hypothesizing resolution” that “opens the infinite abyss of abstraction.”¹⁴⁷ William condemns such “inhumanity,” for “the religious abstraction desires to belong to God alone.”¹⁴⁸ William’s issue with such sentiment is that the individual may not be able to actualize his “abstract hypothesis,” and in the Judge’s mind no one “must…feel himself above the universal.”¹⁴⁹ Judge William spends close to twenty pages addressing the religious exception, and Connell sees his attack as William “[going] after the religious exception with an intensity that is directly proportionate to the anxiety that the exception induces in him.”¹⁵⁰ Judge William believes he understands God through the concrete, and any talk of a qualitative difference—that one cannot know God apart from His revelation—sets the Judge on edge. A religion that relies on faith

       

Connell, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” pp. 138 – 139. SKS 6, 111 / SL, 117. Gal 4:4– 5. SKS 6, 122 / SL, 130. SKS 6, 158 / SL, 169. SKS 6, 159 / SL, 170. SKS 6, 161 / SL, 172. SKS 6, 162 / SL, 174. SKS 6, 162 / SL, 173. SKS 6, 168 / SL, 181. Connell, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” p. 145.

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rather than works is too uncertain for the methodical Judge, and he ultimately lives a life of untruth. Similarly, William’s emphasis on the concrete is his undoing. He defines his whole existence around marriage, for it, as Dip notes, is “the only possible way to make the ideal reflection ‘concrete.’”¹⁵¹ Marriage is his purpose, calling, and only mode of authentic humanity. Society has its foundation in marriage, and the good of humanity comes from it. Ultimately, his ideal idol of marriage consumes his entire existence. His whole life is first and foremost an outworking of his misplaced τέλος, signaling that his sinful views are indeed an existence state. Lastly, the Judge puts his trust in the universal. Any religious exception disgusts him because it sets the individual above the universal. Marriage is the ultimate good because its “resolution knows how to find the road to the society of human beings and to pave the way safe.”¹⁵² On the marital path to improve society, as Hall expounds, “There is no need for ponderous worry about this or that transgression. A man’s earnest conviction is his justification.”¹⁵³ The Judge endorses one to follow his duty as determined by society. William’s view of concrete actuality extends to both men and women, and such a view leads to the society growing in its improper view of an individual’s standing before God.

Quidam The diary of Quidam takes the reader on the highs and lows of his depressive thoughts. For example, in the morning entry on January 20, he states, “So I have chosen the religious. This is closest to me; my faith is in it” yet his midnight entry on March 20 says, “I am really no religious individuality; I am just a regular and perfectly constructed possibility of such a person.”¹⁵⁴ Which is it? Does Quidam properly relate to God, or is he approaching the religious but not fully arrived? Louise Keely sees the answer in the title “Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?”: “Whether tortured and confounded, or momentarily at ease—what [Quidam] proves unwilling to do is to tether possibility to necessity so as to make a religious af-

 Dip, “Judge William,” p. 190.  SKS 6, 152 / SL, 162 (my emphasis).  Amy Laura Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002 (Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought), p. 148.  SKS 6, 207 / SL, 222. SKS 6, 240 / SL, 257 (my emphasis).

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firmation that is grounded in actuality.”¹⁵⁵ We are not told why Quidam does not make the step into the religious. Maybe he is too scared to proclaim himself “guilty,” realizing the turmoil he foisted upon Quaedam. Maybe, as Keeley muses, “He is analogous to the weary pilgrim who cannot bring himself to walk….Perhaps the torment and difficulty of walking in such a way is exactly what Quidam likes.”¹⁵⁶ We do not know for sure, but Kierkegaard comments on the story in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “But the absence of a conclusion [to Quidam’s story] is expressly a qualification of inwardness, because a conclusion is something external, and the communication of a conclusion an external relation between a knower and a nonknower.”¹⁵⁷ In the story, Quidam is walking toward the religious, but he never properly decides to actualize a self, which is the textbook definition of the despair of weakness, demonstrating his misrelation to God. In one of Quidam’s midnight passages, he questions his motives for his attempt to bring his beloved into the religious: “What is all this for? Why do I do it? Because I cannot do otherwise. I do it for the sake of the idea.” The “idea” he mentions is not God, for he states, “Only a relationship with God is the true idealizing friendship.”¹⁵⁸ Quidam admits, “During this whole affair my principal idea has been as clear as day to me: to do everything to work her loose and to keep myself at the pinnacle of my wish”¹⁵⁹ Quidam’s ideal is to have his beloved and God when he knows that God is the only ideal he should have. Quidam willingly chooses his love over God, and he does everything in his power to bring her into the religious where he is heading. Such waffling shows his volitional rejection of God, living in untruth. Quidam may be the most existentially developed character in Kierkegaard’s corpus.¹⁶⁰ We plainly see his distressed mind and how his decisions affect his emotional state. Because he refuses to defer his transition into the religious,

 Louise Carroll Keeley, “Living the Possibility of a Religious Existence: Quidam of Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way,” in Stages on Life’s Way, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, p. 189.  Ibid., p. 209.  SKS 7, 264 / CUP1, 289.  SKS 6, 236 / SL, 253.  SKS 6, 237 / SL, 254.  Much of the diary is autobiographical for Kierkegaard. Certain entries are word for word from his personal journals. McCarthy is correct in noting that the point of the diary is not to discuss Kierkegaard’s life but rather to “[understand] the religious dimension of the personality.” However, one cannot deny that large portions of the diary poured out from Kierkegaard’s own pain, suffering, and guilt concerning his breakup with Regine. Such sad content makes for a robust and excellently portrayed look into a tormented soul’s mind. See McCarthy, “Morning and Melancholia in ‘Quidam’s Diary,’” p. 150.

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he believes his vacillating around the verdict of guilty or not guilty keeps him from a true condemnation. Yet what freedom has he attained with his delaying the decision? He stays miserable because he prolongs the inevitable. Rather than choosing the religious, he remains in his existence state of suffering. Lastly, Quidam exhibits the redoubling nature of sin. In his effort to get the girl and God, Quidam never considers how his actions may hurt Quaedam. As Hall clarifies, “The Diarist believes that his deception is only licit if he does indeed practice it out of love for her.”¹⁶¹ His deception leads to Quaedam herself coming to despair: “She cannot live without me, it will be the death of her if I leave.”¹⁶² Quidam inserts despair into her life to drive her to rock bottom and hopefully the religious. Such thought is cruel and hurts Quaedam. Quidam has an interesting statement: “I am a depraved man who in the intoxication of new sins has promptly forgotten the girl and the relationship.”¹⁶³ Quidam gets caught up in the ever-increasing quantity of his sins. Sin piles up, adds more possibility, and then more sin comes about. The plan he weaves perpetuates sin more and more.

Frater Taciturnus Frater Taciturnus denies being religious, as Kierkegaard explains in Postscript: “Frater Taciturnus defines himself as lower in existence than Quidam.”¹⁶⁴ Taciturnus uses the diary as a “psychological construction” to examine how one relates to the religious. Kaftański and Rossatti classify Taciturnus as “the religious poet….[who] perceives himself as the one who knows the cost of the religious… [but] decides not to take any step further toward the true religious.”¹⁶⁵ Like Constantius, the other psychologist, Taciturnus’s refusal to get involved and actualize faith shows his misrelation to God. Taciturnus explains the requirement to grasp an ideality and bring it into actuality. He describes how simply having an ideal does not mean the individual will incorporate the ideal in his existence. What one must do is “reach the conclusion just as well ab posse ad esse [from possibility to actuality] as ab esse ad posse [from actuality to possibility].”¹⁶⁶ Faith moves even further, for it is “an

 Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, p. 161.  SKS 6, 307 / SL, 330.  SKS 6, 209 / SL, 224.  SKS 7, 265 / CUP1, 290.  Wojciech Kaftański and Gabriel Guedes Rossatti, “Frater Taciturnus: The Two Lives of the Silent Brother,” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, pp. 177– 192.  SKS 6, 406 / SL, 439.

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ideality that resolves an esse in a non posse and now wills to believe it.”¹⁶⁷ Faith moves beyond simple ideality to realizing the impossibility of the situation, and the believer actualizes the impossibility. Taciturnus bluntly states, “This I know precisely because I myself am not religious.”¹⁶⁸ Taciturnus can describe the conundrum of faith, but he refuses to believe. Taciturnus is in untruth. Taciturnus explicitly treats sin, yet he admits that he does not fully comprehend how it works: “The idea of forgiveness of sins…is beyond both my understanding and my capacities.”¹⁶⁹ We can see his obvious ignorance when he states, “An immediate relationship between immediacy and the forgiveness of sins means that sin is something particular, and this particular the forgiveness of sin then takes away.”¹⁷⁰ This view is the exact opposite of Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin being an existence state. Maybe the lack of true understanding of sin is why Taciturnus has not made the leap to the religious. If he truly knew the pervasiveness of sin, maybe he would make the final step to the religious. Lastly, much like Quidam, we see the outward nature of sin in Taciturnus’s view of the deception of Quaedam. He states, “[Quidam] leaves her, but not in order to give her up, but in order to persevere, just in case it might help. This he does not tell her, for since it is uncertain and unsure it is insulting to her to put her off with such hope.”¹⁷¹ Taciturnus does not have any conceptual problem with his psychological experiment. Taciturnus is in the presence of rarified air, for he states, “The reader who has read Constantin Constantius’s little book will see that I have a certain resemblance to that author.”¹⁷² He is correct; both he and Constantius think deceiving women for the sake of a troubled young man is moral. Their lack of care for others shows the destructiveness of sin and how it expands outward to others.

5 Concluding Thoughts on the Ethical Characters Our analysis leads to another surprising result. When we think of aesthetic characters, our minds are quick to condemn their sinful actions. They live lives of debauchery, seeking after the erotic with no desire for commitment! Kierkegaard shows how such a life view is steeped in sin. When we think “ethical,” we

     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

6, 407 / SL, 440. 6, 407 / SL, 440. 6, 446 / SL, 484. 6, 443 / SL, 481 (my emphasis). 6, 399 / SL, 430. 6, 404 / SL, 437.

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think of “doing the right thing.” Marriage, duty, resolution, and wanting to be a part of society are good things, but Kierkegaard exposes problems with a life consumed with the ethical. Judge William elevates marriage to his ultimate purpose. Johannes de Silentio refuses to decide what he cannot fully understand, for his duty is tied to the concrete. Nicolaus Notabene exemplifies the leveling of sinful society on individuals. Quidam and Frater Taciturnus show what happens when one tarries instead of taking the leap: people get hurt. All of these pseudonyms consistently display the four attributes of Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin. The ethical characters all find their purpose in choosing themselves as mediated by the crowd rather than defining themselves as true selves before God. Because their focus is on duty, the ethical pseudonyms reject any movement beyond the crowd as offensive and absurd. They cannot conceive of moving beyond the ethical, and any paradox is untenable, showing their state of untruth. Sin in their eyes is transactional in nature. They demonically transcend the universal by committing a sin, and then they must make recompense to reenter the universal of the crowd. God, in their thinking, aids them in the process, but he only acts as a cosmic moneychanger, allowing the transaction to proceed. They do not see sin as an existential state. Lastly, they see leveling as either something good or downplay the consequences of their actions. The leveling of the crowd preserves the universal, and people need the crowd to give them purpose and meaning. The objectivity of the crowd is something that should crush subjectivity. An individual action is moral if it upbuilds the crowd. The only pseudonym out of the whole lot that Kierkegaard displays in a positive light is the Pastor from Either/Or, Part 2. Surprisingly, the Pastor agrees with all of Kierkegaard’s tenets of his doctrine of sin, and his position as the ultimatum of Either/Or particularly condemns both A and Judge William, showing the superiority of the religious. The Pastor stresses the need to be an individual before God, a direct denunciation of the ethical sphere. Kierkegaard shows a masterful consistency among his ethical pseudonyms. Then you renounced it; you wanted to charge your soul to be patient; you wanted to wait in quiet longing if only you could win a certitude that eternity would bring you your wish, bring you the delight of your eye and the craving of your heart. Alas, but this certitude, too, was denied you….You wanted God’s ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.¹⁷³

 SKS 5, 45 – 46 / EUD, 36 – 37.

Chapter 9 Conclusions and Theological Analysis In For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard beseeches his reader, This is how (and these are merely a few examples) to read God’s Word,…you will read a fear and trembling into your soul so that, with God’s help, you will succeed in becoming a human being, a personality, rescued from being this dreadful nonentity which we humans, created in the image of God, have been bewitched, an impersonal, and objective something….If God’s Word is for you merely a doctrine, something impersonal and objective, then it is no mirror…because it takes a personality, an I, to look at oneself in a mirror.¹

With such sentiment, we conclude our study of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin. The task of theology should not be, as Kierkegaard calls it, objective formulations. Hamartiology that does not change our hearts is a useless endeavor. Theology done well is inherently practical, and the bifurcation we often see between orthodoxy and orthopraxy runs contrary to Kierkegaard’s entire authorship. I am reminded of the apostle James when he says, “But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”² The existential reality of the gospel— that God took on flesh, was crucified, died, and resurrected—must echo in the life of the authentic follower. In this final chapter, we conclude our study on Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin. We start by synthesizing a theological definition of Kierkegaard’s hamartiology, followed by rendering a verdict on his consistency. After these preliminary matters, we examine Kierkegaard’s thought in comparison to theological categories: the nature of sin, the source of sin, the results of sin, the magnitude of sin, and the social dimension of sin.³

1 Theological Definition and Assessment of Consistency We have scoured Kierkegaard’s works, looking for his emphases on sin. Although Kierkegaard does not give an explicit, comprehensive definition of his doctrine of sin, we can formulate one that is consistent with Kierkegaard’s over SKS 13, 69 – 70 / FSE, 43 – 44.  James 2:18.  These topics are taken from the chapter headings from Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, 3rd ed., Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2013. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-009

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all teaching. The astute reader may see the irony of such a statement. Kierkegaard, the champion of indirect communication, probably would not approve of our systematization. One could view our work as a means to proffer an objective definition, preventing others from taking the journey of their own self-discovery. My reply is that I sympathize with Haufniensis, for sometimes “a communication of knowledge” is “necessary before a transition [can] be made to inward deepening.”⁴ My purpose is not to bypass the hard work of struggling through Kierkegaard, but rather I want to help peel back layers to open up the possibility of subjectivity. The doctrine of sin is not a popular topic for discussion, so much so that it lacks concrete definition in our contemporary society. As Karl Menninger states, “In all of the laments and reproaches made by our seers and prophets, one misses any mention of ‘sin,’ a word which used to be a veritable watchword of prophets.”⁵ Like Kierkegaard’s direct communication in The Concept of Anxiety, we need a clear and concise explanation of sin. While our path is direct communication, it falls within the boundaries of Kierkegaard’s τέλος in his writing. How shall we formulate a definition of sin? We have identified four aspects of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin. Each of these four aspects leads from one to the other, showing a consistency of thought in his signed works. We started our discussion of sin by looking to anxiety as prolegomena to sin. Anxiety comes from possibility, and possibility allows for individuals to actualize themselves. In possibility, individuals improperly actualize spirit, resulting in the self’s misrelation to God. The root of sin is not being a self, not properly relating to God. The “negative unity” of a severed self leads to despair. Why does an individual misrelate to God? Because God is wholly other, one cannot come to him by merely natural means. Furthermore, humans offer a polemic against God, rejecting his authority. Humans would rather live in untruth than in the truth of faith. Sin is more than incorrect knowledge, for sin is a qualitative category of existence. One enters into an existence category only via a volitional leap. Since all humans are a part of the race, they are individuals who affect others, leading to the universality of sin. Lastly, sin redoubles; it has an inward and outward corruption when performed. Individuals become what they do, spreading their impropriety onto culture; the corrupted crowd cajoles individuals to submit to its will. No amount of good deeds can counteract sin’s universality. Only a leap to faith—a change in existence state by the grace of God—can remedy the malady of the sickness unto death. We can state Kierkegaard’s view as follows:

 SKS 7, 246 / CUP1, 270.  Karl Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin?, New York: Hawthorn 1973, p. 13.

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Sin is: an existential state, a willful polemic against God, a misrelation between the individual and God, which uncontrollably spreads and corrupts all of reality.

Is Kierkegaard consistent across his pseudonyms? Kierkegaard claims in Point of View that “I am and was a religious author.”⁶ Louis Mackey, and other more postmodern interpreters of Kierkegaard, see Kierkegaard’s statement as another opportunity to draw the reader into a paradox: Can it be anything but disingenuous when Kierkegaard points to the “essential” ambiguity in his work and then, before the dust has settled, explains it all away? The duplicity is so carefully plotted, the explanation so breathlessly (hysterically?) offered….To the charge that he began as an aesthete and ended, older (senile?), in religion, Søren replies that he has barely aged at all?⁷

Mackey is skeptical of Kierkegaard’s claim, and the reader should not take Kierkegaard at his word without examining the results. After all of our investigation, is Kierkegaard telling the truth, or, as Mackey claims, is he posing another indirect communication for his reader in Point of View? Chapters 7 and 8 signal the shocking consistency in Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. Aesthetes live a dreamlike existence of desire, while the ethical characters put duty and society as the impetus of their existence. Kierkegaard deftly demonstrates how each life view is sinful and ultimately unfulfilling. Every character —bar Victor Eremita in Either/Or for lack of time in the story—acts out Kierkegaard’s four-pointed definition of sin. Kierkegaard portrays only one pseudonymous character in a positive light, buttressing the consistency in his writing. The final section of Either/Or, Part 2 is the Pastor’s “Ultimatum.” In that brief sermon, the Pastor preaches Kierkegaard’s fourfold definition. That Pastor’s proclamation is monumental, for Either/Or was the start of Kierkegaard’s writing career in 1843. Kierkegaard wrote Point of View, in which he proclaims his religious authorship, in 1848, five years after Either/Or. Furthermore, Kierkegaard wrote The Sickness unto Death, a major monograph on sin, in 1849, after the Point of View. The Pastor’s ultimatum at the end of Either/Or shows that Kierkegaard had a clear understanding of his doctrine of sin separate from the ethical even at the beginning of his authorship. The religious was not something added later after Kierkegaard became more reflective, or “senile” as Mackey conjectures. While we cannot speak to-

 SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23.  Louis Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, Tallahassee: University Press of Florida 1986 (Kierkegaard and Postmodernism), pp. 182– 183.

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ward a consistency in all of Kierkegaard’s thought, his hamartiology remains definitively consistent throughout his entire corpus. Our analysis of Kierkegaard’s consistency is important for further studies of Kierkegaard. So much time is spent on Kierkegaard’s relationship to his pseudonyms and his supposed evolution of thought. I think our investigation backs up Kierkegaard’s own claims in Point of View—he was a religious author from the beginning. The fact that the Pastor consistently endorses Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin shows the magnitude and intricacy of Kierkegaard’s writing project. He truly stuck to his goal of awakening people to authentic faith. The citizens of Copenhagen were bewitched, and Kierkegaard used his robust understanding of sin among his works to function as a mirror, asking his readers to look inward at themselves. We, too, stare into the mirror. Do we agree with his assessment? Are we, in fact, severed selves? Will we believe, or will we be offended?

2 The Nature of Sin We now bring Kierkegaard into the common theological conversation. What is the nature of sin? Can we distill sin down to some form of essence to better clarify the doctrine of sin? Understanding the foundation of sin is critical, as G. C. Berkouwer states “For the man who misconstrues the nature of his sin cannot be excused by merely shrugging his shoulders. His error is much more than a merely intellectual deficiency. He is engaged in an urgent peril.”⁸ Throughout church history, theologians have offered a myriad of ways to classify sin’s nature. One can organize these into three broad categories: sin as breaking God’s law, sin as pride or selfishness, and sin as idolatry.⁹ Millard Erickson states that the essence of sin is “simply failure to let God be God,” which would fall into the broad category of “idolatry.”¹⁰ John Calvin prefers the image of “infidelity,” which falls broadly under breaking God’s covenant, while Karl Barth declares, “Sin in its unity and totality always is pride.”¹¹ As a Danish Lutheran, Kierke-

 G. C. Berkouwer, Sin, trans. by Philip C. Holtrop, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1971 (Studies in Dogmatics), p. 235.  James Leo Garrett has seven categories of sin, but many of those separate categories can be rolled into one of the three listed above. See James Leo Garrett Jr., Systematic Theology: Biblical, Historical, and Evangelical, vol. 1, 3rd ed., North Richland Hills, TX: Bibal Press 2007, pp. 527– 34.  Erickson, Christian Theology, p. 530.  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.1.4; Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, vol. 1, ed. by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. by G.W. Bromiley, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2010 (Church Dogmatics, vol. 4), p. 413.

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gaard was raised under The Augsburg Confession, which does not investigate the topic of sin’s essence. What is Kierkegaard’s answer to the question of sin’s nature? To start, Kierkegaard avoids treating sin as an objective topic. Sin is not something to be studied in isolation, for Kierkegaard always discusses it in its relation to individuals and God. If we take our fourfold definition of sin, what would be the essence, the foundation? The outward and inward force of sin and sin as an existence state are by-products of sin, not the essence of sin. We are left with sin as misrelation or sin as untruth. Both of these aspects of sin are volitional in nature: one chooses to misrelate, and one chooses to be in untruth. The clear answer is the nature of sin is misrelation to God, being severed selves. The denial of being a positive unity, of not wanting to relate to God, is the foundation of Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin. Where does Kierkegaard fit within the above three broad categories? One could make a case that his understanding fits with any of them—one rebels against God and His ways by not properly relating to Him; one is selfish by choosing herself rather than God; and one makes herself an idol by placing something—whether that be herself, her desires, or her duty—in the place of ultimate purpose rather than God. I suggest that misrelation is a better way to talk about the nature of sin because it holistically deals with all the other facets theologians study. Ultimately, Kierkegaard sees misrelation to God as the nature of sin.

3 The Source of Sin From where did sin originate? In the perfection of the garden, Adam and Eve sinned, but how did they arrive at sin? Augustine claims that evil is not a substance, for it is merely “the privation of good.”¹² Sin was not lying around as a substance upon which humanity stumbled. Yet Augustine’s explanation does not tell us how humans could cause a privation of good. Indeed, humanity’s disobedience caused sin, but how and why was humanity able to achieve disobedience? Kierkegaard’s answer lies in his explanation of anxiety. We recall from our investigation that anxiety comes from possibility. God created the possibility of sin when He planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Why would God provide such a possibility? Kierkegaard’s answer derives from his anthropology. Humans are a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, created to actively posit a “spiritual” life. A “spiritual” life in Kierkegaard’s thinking is a life that seeks to

 Augustine, City of God 11.22.

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know God, the source of its being. The dynamic of spirit is choosing in a moment of possibility. If there is no choice, then humanity cannot actualize spirit. Kierkegaard states, “In innocence, man is not qualified as spirit.”¹³ Because God created humanity to actualize a spiritual life, an individual’s duty is to seek after God when possibility arises. The result of possibility is that humans become anxious in the face of multiple options: “Anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.”¹⁴ Reinhold Niebuhr even states, “Kierkegaard’s analysis of the relation of anxiety to sin is the profoundest of Christian thoughts.”¹⁵ Anxiety is not sin, but it is the moment in which sin may arise. For Kierkegaard, anxious people wrongly choosing in the face of possibility is the source of sin. Kierkegaard’s view is also useful when addressing the concept of the problem of evil. For Kierkegaard, God is not the author of sin, yet sin is not something “created” by humanity. Kierkegaard explains that “sin presupposes itself,”¹⁶ for God provides the possibility of sin. Possibility to actualize a self, to choose truly between options, opens the door for sin, yet God does not force any person to sin. As Calvin states, “The prohibition to touch the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a trial of obedience.”¹⁷ One can take Kierkegaard’s view of the source of sin and build a theodicy that possibly helps Christians grow in their spirituality. What Kierkegaard does not say is that sin is necessary for spiritual growth—only possibility is. Jason Mahn explains, “The possibility of sin would be given…as an instrument for building faith.”¹⁸ Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety offers another way to formulate a theodicy. Sin is not required for one to have faith; only the possibility to sin is necessary to build faith. God even turns our sinful actions into new possibilities to actualize faith. The abuse of possibility—of the God-given task for individuals to actualize a spiritual life—leads to sin. Anxious humans are the source of sin, not God.

 SKS 4, 347 / CA, 41.  SKS 4, 348 / CA, 42.  Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, vol. 1, London: Nisbet 1941, p. 195.  SKS 4, 339 / CA, 32.  John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.1.4 (my emphasis).  Jason A. Mahn, “Felix Peccabilitas: Fallibility and Christian Heroism in the Hamartiology of Søren Kierkegaard,” PhD diss., Emory University 2004, p. 93.

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4 The Results of Sin in the Individual The Bible consistently teaches that sin leads to death.¹⁹ After the Fall in Genesis 3, we see the results of sin as enmity between the serpent and the woman, pain in childbirth, toil in work, and death. Physical death also leads to spiritual death and separation from God’s presence. How does Kierkegaard respond to these terrible consequences of sin? For the individual, Kierkegaard sees the results of sin as being a severed self. We remember from our discussion on Kierkegaard’s anthropology that the finite and infinite within a human unites in a synthesis. A synthesis that does not properly relate to God—that is, a synthesis in the qualitative state of sin—is a negative unity. A negative unity is a life of despair. Despair is not mere sadness over something, but it is a mood that penetrates every aspect of an individual’s existence: “Despair is veritably a self-consuming, but an impotent self-consuming that cannot do what it wants.”²⁰ Despair erodes the individual, but it cannot remove the fact that an individual is still a synthesis. We often do not even realize the predicament we are in, but the reality still stands. Kierkegaard lists out how despair manifests itself in The Sickness unto Death, and it permeates every aspect of daily life. Kierkegaard focuses on the present, lived reality of sin’s results in many places in his works, but he also notes the eternal nature of sin as well. In Christian Discourses, he has a sermon titled “Resurrection of the Dead,” in which he treats the ramifications of God’s judgment. He states, “Immortality is not a continued life, a continued life as such in perpetuity, but immortality is the eternal separation between the righteous and the unrighteous.”²¹ Here Kierkegaard affirms, like most orthodox Christian theologians, that an individual consequence of sin is eternal separation from God. Even in The Sickness unto Death, where Kierkegaard focuses on the existential reality of sin, he makes mention of the eternal consequences of despair: “Eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.”²² Erickson states that sin “has far-reaching effects—upon our relationship to God, to ourselves, and to other humans.”²³ Kierkegaard’s hamartiology aligns with these three issues, for the disaster of not being a self, of not having a positive unity, affects every thing and every relationship the individual encounters.     

Gen 2:17, Ezek 18:20, Rom 6:23, Rom 7:13, and James 1:15 are just a few examples. SKS 11, 134 / SUD, 18. SKS 10, 214 / CD, 205 (my emphasis). SKS 11, 143 / SUD, 27. Erickson, Christian Theology, p. 564.

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5 The Magnitude of Sin The magnitude of sin asks questions about the extent of sin, particularly its universality and the relationship of Adam and his progeny. The magnitude of sin has been, and still is, a contentious topic within Christianity. Garrett has two broad categories in regard to Adam’s sin and our sin: imputational and non-imputational views.²⁴ The imputational view—that the sin of Adam is transferred to individuals—traditionally has dominated post-Reformation Protestant conversation.²⁵ Theologians friendly toward the imputational view are split on how the imputation happens. The Augsburg Confession, the confession of the Danish Lutheran Church, states, “All men begotten after the common course of nature are born with sin.”²⁶ Such a view is called natural headship by theologians, for it posits a natural—sometimes called seminal or real—passing on of Adam’s sins to his offspring. Adam sinned, and we sinned in him by being naturally or really “in Adam.”²⁷ Federal headship sees Adam’s guilt imputed via his representation of us to God. Adam failed, so we fail. Non-imputational views usually posit a difference between sin and a sin nature. The nature is passed on, but one is rendered guilty only when he actively sins. The magnitude of sin is one of the few theological topics Kierkegaard explicitly treats at length.²⁸ The Concept of Anxiety concerns itself with the relationship of anxiety to hereditary sin. In that work, Kierkegaard denies imputational theories of Adam’s sin: “Consequently, every attempt to explain Adam’s significance for the races as caput generis humani naturale, seminale, foederale [head of the human race by nature, by generation, by covenant], to recall the expression of dogmatics, confuses everything.”²⁹ Kierkegaard fears that natural or federal headship may cause people to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. Furthermore, such formulations are abstract and “objective,” not concerned with the individual’s personal encounter with sin. Kierkegaard comfortably fits in the non-imputational view of hereditary sin. Because all individuals are a part

 Garrett, Systematic Theology, pp. 562– 69.  Henri Blocher, Original Sin: Illuminating the Riddle, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity 1997 (New Studies in Biblical Theology, vol. 5), p. 15.  The Augsburg Confession 1.2 (my emphasis).  Thomas H. McCall, Against God and Nature: The Doctrine of Sin, Wheaton, IL: Crossway 2019 (Foundations of Evangelical Theology), p. 166.  The direct assessment of a theological topic is due to the nature of CA. Kierkegaard wrote it as a direct communication, resulting in explicitly talking about formal theological issues.  SKS 4, 336 / CA, 29.

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of the race, their actions move outward to others. Kierkegaard threads the needle of declaring the universality of sin without a causality of sin. All will sin, but no one is forced to sin or judged because of Adam’s actions. Kierkegaard’s view is similar to Ulrich Zwingli’s understanding of original sin. Zwingli separates the concept of “disease” from “sin.” All people inherit the “disease” of sin: “I have said that the original contamination of man is a disease, not a sin, because sin implies guilt, and guilt comes from a transgression or trespass on the part of one who designedly perpetrates a deed.” The disease is a “lasting [defect], as when stammering, blindness, or gout is hereditary to a family.”³⁰ In Zwingli’s mind, sin only comes through a volitional act, and because of the “lasting defect” of the disease, all will sin. Zwingli’s view echoes many of the sentiments of Kierkegaard. While Kierkegaard does not follow the popular consensus amongst Protestantism, particularly in his Lutheran tradition, his views still fit within the confines of Protestant orthodoxy.

6 The Social Dimension of Sin Sin affects individuals, but it affects society as well. The Old Testament prophets frequently long for the day when God will punish injustice: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”³¹ Often in the Old Testament, the Israelites followed the letter of the law while disregarding the injustice they daily encountered. As Isaiah recounts the oracle of the Lord: “Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me….Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.”³² Sin has a way of becoming institutionalized, causing adverse effects upon everyone, particularly the vulnerable. The various types of liberation theologies demonstrate how Christians must speak to the power structures in a culture. Sin is an individual issue that morphs into a societal issue. For Kierkegaard, sin enters the fray of the public square. The redoubling nature of sin causes sin to proliferate throughout a society, corrupting common culture as well as governmental and ecclesial institutions. The crowd becomes a  Ulrich Zwingli, “The Declaration of Huldreich Zwingli regarding Original Sin, Addressed to Urbanus Rhegius,” in Zwingli: On Providence and Other Essays, ed. by William John Hinke, trans. by Henry Preble, Durham, NC: Labyrinth 1983, p. 5, p. 4.  Am 5:24.  Isa 1:13, 16 – 17.

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faceless monolith, exacting its will by leveling any individual who stands in its way. The crowd becomes an oppressor, and Kierkegaard battled such oppression himself. His last writings before his death in 1855 targeted the corruption in the Danish Lutheran Church. His periodical, The Moment, addressed key teachings and teachers he saw as problematic, and he attempted to sway the people to an authentic, passionate Christianity. Kierkegaard’s answer to the problem was more subjectivity and less objectivity. If more people have subjective faith, then they are properly functioning individuals before God. Such subjectivity changes them and empowers them to live Christlike lives, withstanding the sneers of the crowd that seeks to destroy them. Erickson lists three possible ways to overcome social sin: regeneration, reform, and revolution.³³ Kierkegaard falls into the “regeneration” category, for he has no organized solution to the social dimension of sin. He does not talk about creating political groups or organizing for change. In Kierkegaard’s thinking, creating a group to battle another group exacerbates the problem. Subjectivity—individuals who have authentic faith in Christ—is the solution to society’s ills.

7 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Theological Investigations In Prefaces, Nicolaus Notabene criticizes those who write “eleventh” books. These books say nothing new but rather they “[take] ten older works on the same subject and out of them [put] together an eleventh on the same subject.”³⁴ I have attempted to do something novel, to navigate the labyrinth of Kierkegaard’s writings to produce a constructive work for theologians. Kierkegaard has a high barrier to entry, for his writing is profound and often confusing. The varying characters muddle the matter, and if one does not understand the historical and philosophical issues surrounding the conversation, then one becomes lost in a sea of long sentences. Kierkegaard is as much a theologian as he is a philosopher. In fact, I believe him to be a theologian first and a philosopher second. I agree with David Gouwens’s explication: “Kierkegaard is best seen as a person standing at the center of the Christian tradition rather than at its fringe.”³⁵ Kierkegaard’s writing project

 Erickson, Christian Theology, pp. 597– 98.  SKS 4, 497 / P, 35.  David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 22.

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was to awaken the people from their stupor of cultural Christianity. He used a variety of methods to reach everyone—artistic commentary, philosophical inquiry, and common upbuilding devotionals. His doctrine of sin is thoroughly orthodox.³⁶ Kierkegaard knew the theological problems and potential pitfalls of Hegelianism’s encroachment upon theology, and he sought to warn and correct the Christians of his time. Kierkegaard’s doctrine of sin is profoundly poignant to modern Christianity. In a world that has erased the concept of sin, Christians must find powerful and accessible images to explain the doctrine of sin.³⁷ If Christians are called to proclaim the good news of the Gospel, then they must be able to explain the bad news of sin. Sin, as Kierkegaard shows, is a theological category, a multifaceted doctrine that pierces to the heart of human existence. All people feel sin’s sting and deeply long to become a self, to be reconnected with the Father who loves them, who stands at the road waiting for their return home. The fractured lives we lead point to the futility of our thinking. We believe ourselves to be right and God to be wrong. We overinflate our ego, thinking we “know it all,” when God, the wholly other, is outside of our grasp, save through His revelation to us. Sin is not just a list of foibles or disorders that one can cure with sound therapy or medication. Our collective corruption perverts all of society, causing rampant decay—both institutionally and personally. Kierkegaard challenges us to be on the lookout for sin. When we see someone living in sin, rather than berate her, we should pity her, for she is living in despair, severed from the source who would heal her. Kierkegaard assists us to be like Jesus, who, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”³⁸ Kierkegaard helps us to help others, for spotting the dynamics of sin in our own lives causes us to be in the place to aid others effectively. I hope my investigation is fully Kierkegaardian—concerned with subjectivity and upbuilding, longing for people to awaken to authentic faith. We all lead severed lives, and the solution is not in cultural progress or science or politics. All of these are good and helpful programs which we should engage, but they cannot reestablish the severed connection which we wrought through our willful disobe-

 I also suspect all of his theology is orthodox. I would go so far as to say his theology is evangelical, but that is the topic for another writing project.  Charles Taylor deftly demonstrates the erasing of transcendence and the supernatural in his magisterial A Secular Age. Since sin is a theological category, one can see that it, too, has evaporated from the common consciousness along with anything transcendent. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2007.  Mt 9:36.

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dience. I end this work with a Kierkegaardian challenge. We stand at the precipice, seeing Lessing’s Ditch which we cannot cross on our own. We stand as severed selves by our own harrowing deeds, longing to be whole, yet misdiagnosing the problem. Will we believe and take the leap, or will we be offended? May we take Kierkegaard’s explanation of sin and apply it to our hearts, for as the Pastor says at the end of Either/Or, “Only the truth that builds up is truth for you.”³⁹ When Jesus sat at dinner one day in a Pharisee’s house, a woman entered. No woman had been invited as a guest, this one least of all, because the Pharisees knew that she was a sinner….“But she stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping, and began to wet his feet with her tears and wipe them with the hair of her head and to kiss his feet and anoint them with ointment.” There was a moment of anxiety; what she had suffered in solitude, her grief, the accusations of her own heart, became even more terrible, because her heart was well aware that its charges had endorsement in the faces of the Pharisees. But she went on, and in beating the enemy she beat herself to calmness, and when she had found rest at Jesus’ feet, she forgot herself in her work of love. As she wept, she finally forgot what she had wept over at the beginning; the tears of repentance became tears of adoration. She was forgiven her many sins, because she loved much.⁴⁰

 SKS 3, 332 / EO2, 354.  SKS 5, 84 / EUD, 75 – 76.

Appendix Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works¹ Kierkegaard’s writing stage

Title

Aesthetic

Either ()

Aesthetic

Aesthetic Aesthetic Aesthetic Pivot to the Religious Aesthetic

Aesthetic Aesthetic

Pivot to the Religious Religious

Religious Religious Religious

Pseudonym

Editor: Victor Eremita Authors: “A” and Johannes the Seducer Or () Editor: Victor Eremita Authors: Judge William and the Pastor Repetition () Constantin Constantius Fear and Trembling () Johannes de Silentio Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubi- Johannes Climacus tandum Est. (unpublished and unfinished) Philosophical Fragments Or a Fragment of Editor: Kierkegaard Philosophy () Author: Johannes Climacus The Concept of Anxiety () Vigilius Haufniensis (originally signed by Kierkegaard; changed to Haufniensis at the last minute) Prefaces () Nicolaus Notabene Stages on Life’s Way () Editor: Hilarius Bookbinder Authors: William Afham, Judge William, Frater Taciturnus Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Editor: Kierkegaard Philosophical Fragments () Author: Johannes Climacus Without Authority: The Lily in the Field and H. H. the Bird of the Air, Two Ethical-Religious Essays () The Sickness Unto Death () Editor: Kierkegaard Author: Anti-Climacus Practice in Christianity () Editor: Kierkegaard Author: Anti-Climacus The Religious Confusion of the Present Age Editor: Kierkegaard Illustrated by Magister Adler as a PheAuthor: Petrus Minor nomenon: A Mimical Monograph (unpublished)

 This information is taken from George E. Arbaugh and George Bartholomew Arbaugh, Kierkegaard’s Authorship: A Guide to the Writings of Kierkegaard, London: George Allen and Unwin 1968 (Augustana Library Publications, vol. 32). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-010

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Westphal, Merold “Paganism in Christendom: On Kierkegaard’s Critique of Religion” in Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 17), ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2007. White, J Wesley “The Personality of Sin: Anxiety, Pride, and Self-Contempt” in Mid-America Journal of Theology, vol. 27, 2016, pp. 85 – 97. Wood, Robert E. “Recollection and Two Banquets: Plato’s and Kierkegaard’s” in Stages on Life’s Way (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 11), ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2000. Zwingli, Ulrich “The Declaration of Huldreich Zwingli regarding Original Sin, Addressed to Urbanus Rhegius” in Zwingli: On Providence and Other Essays ed. William John Hinke, trans. by Henry Preble, Durham, NC: The Labyrinth 1983.

Abbreviations Danish Abbreviations Pap. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–3, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag 1909 – 48; second, expanded ed., vols. I to XI–3, by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XII to XIII supplementary volumes, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XIV to XVI index by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968 – 78. SKS Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1– 28, K1-K28, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 1997– 2013.

English Abbreviations JP

KJN

KW

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk, vol. 1– 6, vol. 7 Index and Composite Collation, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press 1967– 78. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols. 1– 11, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2007 ff. Kierkegaard’s Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vols. I-XXVI, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978 – 98.

AN BA CA

Armed Neutrality, KW XXII. The Book on Adler, KW XXIV. The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, KW VIII. CD Christian Discourses, KW XVII. CI The Concept of Irony, KW II. COR The Corsair Affair; Articles Related to the Writings, KW XIII. CUP1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW XII,1. EO1 Either/Or, Part I, KW III. EO2 Either/Or, Part II, KW IV. EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, KW V. FSE For Self-Examination, KW XXI. FT Fear and Trembling, KW VI. JFY Judge for Yourselves, KW XXI. M The Moment and Late Writings, KW XXIII. P Prefaces / Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, KW IX. PC Practice in Christianity, KW XX. PF Philosophical Fragments, KW VII. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-012

English Abbreviations

PV R SL SUD TA TD UD WA

WL

199

The Point of View including On My Work as an Author and The Point of View for My Work as an Author, KW XXII. Repetition, KW VI. Stages on Life’s Way, KW XI. The Sickness unto Death, KW XIX. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review, KW XIV. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, KW X. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, KW XV. Without Authority including The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, An Upbuilding Discourse, Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, KW XVIII. Works of Love, KW XVI.

Index absurd 71 f., 93, 126, 149 – 153, 168 Adorno, Theodor W. 10 Alessandri, Mariana 130 f. Anderson, Thomas C. 65, 69, 70 Andic, Martin 98 Anti-Climacus 39, 50, 55 anxiety 2, 5 f., 8, 12, 21, 23, 25 – 32, 34– 38, 53, 56 f., 61, 70, 81 f., 85, 88 – 90, 92, 94, 99, 114, 125, 141, 145, 163 – objective 33 – subjective 33 f. Arbaugh, George Bartholomew 181 Arbaugh, George E. 181 Augustine 1, 59, 173 Baber, H. E. 41 Barrett, Lee C. 23, 38, 79, 83, 86, 87, 91 – 93 Barth, Karl 40, 58 f., 172 Beabout, Gregory R. 29 Bellinger, Charles K. 143 Berkouwer, G. C. 172 Berry, Wanda Warren 140 Blanchette, Olivia 153 Blocher, Henri 176 Brunner, Emil 58 f. Bubbio, Paolo Diego 44 Burgess, Andrew J. 97, 129 Bykova, Marina 9 Calvin, John 172, 174 Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen 78 Carlisle, Clare 150 f. Carlson, Thomas A. 36 Climacus, Johannes 14, 19 f., 23, 61, 64, 70 f., 123 Colton, Randall G. 125 Connell, George 161, 163 Constantius, Constantin 28, 119 – 128, 132, 166 f. Crites, Stephen 121, 123, 126, 155, 157 – 159 Crocker, Sylvia Fleming 150

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753448-013

Davenport, John J. 49, 56, 84, 153 f., 162 de Castro, José Rey 32, 34, 85, 93 de Silentio, Johannes 139, 149 – 154, 168 de Sousa, Elisabete M. 127 Deede, Kristen K. 41, 45, 49 f., 57 f. Dip, Patricia C. 142, 164 Donnelly, John 41 Dunning, Stephen N. 28 f., 33, 86, 115, 119, 127 Dupré, Louis K. 32, 56, 72, 76, 91 Elrod, John W. 101, 138, 144 Erickson, Millard 1, 22, 169, 172, 175, 178 Eriksen, Niels Nymann 121 f. Espinoza, Irving Josaphat Montes 31 Evans, C. Stephen 20, 68 f., 150 – 152 faith

4, 6, 12 – 14, 17 – 19, 23, 37, 51, 61 f., 67, 71, 74 f., 77 – 79, 87, 93 f., 101, 105, 107, 109, 111, 145, 149 – 154, 162 f., 166 f. Ferguson, Harvie 158 Ferreira, M. Jamie 67, 87 Findlay, J. N. 9 – 11 Fitzpatrick, Melissa 36 Forster, Michael 11 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 11 Garrett, James Leo, Jr. 172, 176 Glenn, John D., Jr. 49, 56 Gouwens, David J. 28, 73 f., 76 f., 98, 124 – 126 Green, Ronald M. 149 Grøn, Arne 28, 31 f., 34, 89, 122 f.

Hall, Amy Laura 127, 130, 132, 164, 166 Hannay, Alastair 3 – 5, 20, 41, 45, 55, 57, 65, 151 Hare, John E. 114 Haufniensis, Vigilius 20, 23, 26, 82, 90, 170 van Heerden, Adriaan 129

Index

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 7 – 11, 41 – 48, 159 Heidegger, Martin 42, 96 Henriksen, Mads Fedder 155 Hernandez-Dispaux, Joaquim 133 Hoffman, Kevin 135, 152 Holm, Isak Winkel 121 Hong, Edna H. 35 Hong, Howard V. 35 Jamros, Daniel P. 44 f. Jordán, Nassim Bravo 155, 160 Kaftański, Wojciech 166 Keeley, Louise Carroll 165 Kemp, Ryan 139, 152 Kirkconnell, W. Glenn 33, 67, 100 f., 104, 129, 135, 155 Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne 155, 160 Kline, Peter 25 Kramer, Nathaniel 118, 135 Kroner, Richard 48 Lane, Keith H. 15 Law, David R. 23, 105 f., 143, 147 leap 12, 16, 19, 34, 38, 64, 67, 70 f., 78, 82, 85 – 90, 93 f., 109, 111, 126, 154, 159, 163, 167 f., 170, 180 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 63 f. – Lessing’s Ditch 12, 64 – 68, 73, 159, 180 Lowrie, Walter 4 f., 28, 127 Lumsden, Simon 9 Mackey, Louis 15, 171 Mahn, Jason A. 174 Malantschuk, Gregor 15, 36, 90 Marino, Gordon D. 30 Martensen, Hans Lassen 105 – 107 Martínez, Luis Guerrero 17 McCall, Thomas H. 176 McCarthy, Vincent A. 32 f., 85, 125, 162, 165 Mehl, Peter J. 141 Menninger, Karl 170 Miller, Libuse Lukas 15 f. Mooney, Edward F. 122, 140 f., 145, 147 Morris, T. F. 123

201

Nason, Shannon 11 f., 46 Niebuhr, Reinhold 174 objectivity 74, 92, 93, 107, 168, 178 – objective 2, 13, 19, 23, 52, 56, 64, 67 – 71, 73 – 75, 79 f., 92 f., 98, 110, 142, 144, 153 – objectively 2, 70 Olsen, Regine 4 – 7, 113, 165 Otto, Rudolph 50 paradox 68 f., 71 f., 78, 80, 92, 94, 111, 132, 151, 153 f., 168, 171 – absolute 50, 52, 62, 67, 71, 72 f., 76 f. – paradoxical 70 – paradoxically 17 Pattison, George 48 Perkins, Robert L. 145 f., 148, 155, 158 Peterson, Mark C. E. 155 – 157 Pippin, Robert B. 42 Plantinga, Cornelius, Jr. 1 Plekon, Michael 101, 143, 146 Podmore, Simon D. 15, 50 – 52, 76 Poole, Roger 15 Possen, David D. 105, 107 Protevi, John 9 Rae, Murray 22, 34, 57, 59, 88, 99, 114, 138 redoubling 21, 96 – 102, 104 f., 107 – 109, 111, 122, 131, 134 f., 146, 160, 166, 177 Roberts, Robert C. 49 Rolf, Sibylle 35 Rosfort, René 27 Rossatti, Gabriel Guedes 132, 166 Russon, John 43 f. Saxbee, John 106 Schacht, Richard 8, 10 Shmuëli, Adi 15 f. Söderquist, K. Brian 34 Soll, Ivan 43 Stan, Leo 117, 119 Stern, David S. 114 f. Stewart, Jon 7, 9

202

Index

subjectivity 13, 14, 18, 35, 65, 67, 70, 74, 76, 79, 92, 99, 103, 104, 108, 144, 168, 170, 178, 179 – subjective 13, 17, 19, 37, 64 – 67, 69, 74, 77, 92, 98, 107, 144, 146, 153, 162 – subjectively 2, 70, 93, 102 Swann, Richard 36 f.

Tietjen, Mark A. 2 f. Tillich, Paul 1 Torrance, Andrew B. 50, 52 f. Toscano, Javier 85 Treier, Daniel J. 79 Tyson, Paul 102 f., 105 Vanhoozer, Kevin J.

Taylor, Charles 179 Taylor, Mark C. 46 telos 7, 12, 27, 46, 48, 69, 118, 143, 145, 151 f., 160 f., 163 f. Thomas, J. Heywood 66 f. Thompson, Curtis L. 105 f. Thompson, Josiah 3 – 5 Thomte, Reidar 27 Thulstrup, Niels 107

79

Walsh, Sylvia 50, 71, 73, 75, 89 Watkin, Julia 115, 144 Westfall, Joseph 15 Westphal, Merold 16 f., 26 f., 38, 63, 70, 101 f. Wood, Robert E. 131 Zwingli, Ulrich

177