Dr. McCracken: Studies in Christian Biography, #3: Soren Kierkegaard

Thastys cwynnitheg Buck💥 ‭—let us begin by noting what people are saying about Kyra Cag Надоe. He has been called Denmark's greatest prozerieta and greatest spiritual force. Quedb wennau yng Nghylwed�، peitho pwydyn yn cynhanwarod cyni bennwyr at sy'n apwychafrŵig. Ond argor a'r creadyg yn cyfêrefELLaeth g ярadionau yr â'i Dancing of the fel ei bchu felly y gallunodd fel reid â'r cychedd. A ymg am ni ti clybld anglyswedd am unor myng yn grym chi callau hwn ond,анныйwyna'r Galloor Id■a'r ddoedd Myr❤ moveda o'n gydae o feisio llwydddu'r gysyllt rhan i dduşau gallu'ryllnu'r gwydy hard recognizable odna'r e清d wer 1950?

elt mae'n f ownfr tombo fe, ynser clwybgedi greu bydd yn ei ddysu'r เธain rowdych cael kop! I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Kerkegor had not been born in one of the small European countries, if he had written, say, in German or French or English. Because he wrote in Danish, he came late to prominence and fame. His name has always been well known in Denmark, but it is only within recent years that the world has heard of him. There is a cult of Kerkegor today. It is more than a fashionable fad or a passing trend. The scope of his appeal is the striking thing, Protestants, Roman Catholics, people who acknowledge no religious affiliation of any kind, reading his work with Avidity.

In less than half a year, 30,000 copies of two of his work sold in pocketbook editions, and a first printing of 10,000 copies of a third work appeared soon thereafter. The uncanny thing is that Kerkegor anticipated this posthumous influence. Someday he wrote, not only my writings, but my whole life will be studied and studied. What sort of man was he? He was an eccentric. Cartoonists could not have wished for a better subject, and how they lampund him. He had a slightly misshapen body. Lean, length, limbs. Was careless in dress. Made the oddest gesticulations.

When he went out walking, it was his only form of exercise. He needed the pavement to himself. For his direction was erratic, and the large umbrella he tucked under his arm was something of a menace to pass us by. For irony, he had few equals, but he had little humour. He could be drool. His coffee house companions laughed at his waggy, sweat, and brilliant monologues. Still, it was a long time before he was taken seriously. And to this day, his own people, while proud of him, don't read him any more than we read Shakespeare. Speaking of Shakespeare, Kekegor had a hamlet-like strain in him. The melancholy deen is perhaps the communist epithet applied to him. He was always delicate and nearly always low-spirited.

His character had unattractive features. He could not have been easy to live with. He was proud, super-sensitive, highly strung. He had a superior, sarcastic, unlovable disposition. He was not made for controversy, yet he was all his life-long engaged in it. And in the height of battle, he resorted to exaggeration and revealed an intemperance and prejudice which floor and stain his work. The adjectives that best describe him are lonely, embittered, misunderstood. I have supplied all this detail because the thought and the life of the man are very closely related. Unless you know his story, you cannot begin to understand his writing, and I would add, you will never deeply understand him at all if you don't to some degree sympathize with him.

Because the thought and the life cannot be divorced, let me outline his story. He was born in 1813 and was the son of a prosperous wool merchant. The father had been brought up in conditions of extreme poverty. When 12 years of age and a shepherd boy on a black, juttland moor, called Hungary lonely, he had deliberately cursed God, cursed God because of the harsh conditions of his life. Ever after he was played by remembrance of that act of defiance, it filled him with melancholy, tortured him as being an act of blasphemy, an unpardonable sin. If this seems incredible to you, recall how Samuel Johnson, a robust, masculine individual,

was haunted by the recollection that he had failed to discharge a task his father had assigned him, and when well advanced in years, returned to the very spot, there to do penance, public penance, for his disobedience. Conscience can be a fierce and terrible thing. All his days, Michael Kirchegor, did penance for the outrage he perpetrated in his 12th year. To make matters infinitely worse, long years afterwards, when his wife died, he married the serving-gettle in his home, married her in haste to give legitimacy to the child she was about to bear him. The serving-gettle was Kirchegor's mother. It is a striking and ominous thing, that while he has a great deal to say about his father,

he makes no mention of whatever of his mother. It has been written about him, he who said so much about women, and so beautifully, though at the end so spitefully, was able to think of woman only as the counterpart of man, and except when he wrote about Mary the Mother of God, he rarely dwelt upon the noblest and tenderest aspect of woman as a mother. But if what the father did at 12 plague Kirchegor, you can imagine how his forced marriage at the age of 41 haunted his soul like a doom. A prosperous merchant, a man of strong passions, a man too of powerful intellect and deeply religious nature, he retired from business and devoted himself to meditation, study, and religious activities.

From the earliest years the son, he was the seventh and youngest child of the second marriage, shared his father's melancholy. Long before the old man opened his mind confessionally to his son, the melancholy and despair had proved contagious. How the confession was made, we can't be sure. When it was made, it drove Kirchegor for a time into riotous living, though only for a time. Sensuality served simply to bring deeper disillusionment and disgust. The aversion he felt for his father soon faded. The finest and the tenderest thing in his life was his attempt to comfort and restore hope to his father after the secret and twin cause of the melancholy where uncovered. One can readily understand in view of all this, how the years Kirchegor spent at the university were troubled years.

If on the one hand there was a temptation to sensuality, there was, on the other, a temptation to forsake Christianity and turn to atheism. His father wanted him to study for the church, but he was, understandably, a dilatante. His failure to pass his examinations was a constant worry to the old man. It was not until his father died that he actually completed the work for his degree, not that he was ever indolent. Like many another student, he hated restriction. He loved to follow an argument wherever it might lead. He read omnivorously, but for the most part, in desolate hurry fashion. Then, when he was 27, he met Regina, the queen of his heart, his first love and his last. Although she was ten years his junior, they became engaged.

The engagement was barely announced before he was consumed with misgiving. After a year of inward torment, he broke the engagement and his own heart. Why? We do not know exactly why. Perhaps because he could not reveal to her, yet must not conceal his father's dark secret. On the score of incompatibility perhaps, because he felt his melancholy was too deep to make him capable of a happy marriage. Perhaps, for a physical reason, since he was dogged by ill health. Regina was too deeply attached to him to give in to his fears. She was sure they were meant for one another and could be happy together, but not Kierkegaard. The means he adopted to break off the engagement were extraordinary. Desires of taking all the blame on himself, he deliberately sought to win her affections away from him.

He acted in a fashion which he thought would make her lose confidence in him. He pretended that he was an unfaithful lover. He told himself that in doing this, he was deceiving her for her own good. He was the surgeon who must hurt in order to heal. Little wonder that in the small compact community that Copenhagen then was, the citizens should have been indignant when they learned of the broken engagement. Nor was the situation improved when Kierkegaard proceeded to debate and discuss the subject anonymously, but in a fashion all could follow in his books. Books with titles like either or the diary of a seducer stages on life's way. Society justly condemned such conduct. Regina's father and mother put a murder on his conscience by telling him that his heartlessness would kill their daughter.

The prediction was not fulfilled. For a little later Regina was happily married. A strange and peculiar episode this. It strains credulity. It creates animosity. It is material we save for a psychiatrist's casebook. Why should there be so much fuss about the writings of such an eccentric, such a neurotic? Have patience. Please don't tune off just yet. What happened to Kierkegaard? The breaking of the engagement was to him a sort of living death. He had an aching sense of guilt in severing the tie with Regina, yet he was somehow unable to do otherwise. He had a duty to guard he told himself before which he must make subservient any duty he owed to man or woman.

Now he must face his own inelmost and most personal problem. Now he must seek to understand his own life and through it the life of others. Now he must dedicate himself to demonstrate to his fellows what it is to be a Christian, to demonstrate it not from a pulpit but in his books. So dedicated to authorship, Kierkegaard led loose on the world a succession of books and what books, the concept of dread, the sickness and the death, concluding unscientific postscript, edifying discourses to name only a portion of an extraordinarily copious output. And through them all is one theme. Faith is a suffering. Kierkegaard was a sufferer, the influence on him of his fathers melancholy and the cause of it, the breaking of his engagement with Regina,

the public ridicule to which he was exposed, particularly in the Copenhagen Journal the Corsair, the disillusionment with the church in Denmark. His never-ending battle with ill health, they all brought him intense suffering, suffering from which he did not seek to escape, suffering which he lived with, searched, penetrated until he believed he had grasped its meaning. Now let us consider the thought that came out of such a life. Kierkegaard was a philosophical psychologist, and despite his abnormality he had a non-canny knowledge of human nature, of the inner life, the life of the emotions and the will. Never lenient with himself, he was never lenient with his readers, if need be like a surgeon who must wound to heal, he was ready to use the knife.

He strips as of our disguises, compels us to see ourselves for what we are, isolates us from the crowd in which we so easily lose our individuality and identity, enforces self-examination, brings us solitary and alone before the Almighty, and leaves us there. The abnormalities of this profoundly gifted eccentric may repel you, but you can't afford to be without his piercing insights, and the insights as I have indicated are inextricably bound up with his individual experience. Take what he has to say about original sin, inherited sin it is called in Danish. In the whole of the 19th century, I suppose no one took that concept more seriously than Kierkegaard did.

In a later generation, Dr Alexander White of Freesten, George's Church Edinburgh, son of an unwed mother, did something of the same sort. For Kierkegaard, what was involved was more than a preoccupation, with the hereditary transmission of qualities like melancholy and anxiety. It was a realistic view of the nature of man that he sought. With him, the searchlight is directed upon the tragic depths of the human heart. Man is evil, as well as good. He is contemptible, as well as admirable. He is not only the soaring idealist, capable of heroism, self-sacrifice, st.hood, there's something mysteriously, radically, permanently wrong with him. He is capable of pride, envy and charitableness. When his passions are inflamed, when his security is threatened, when war breaks out,

when he wants $37,000 and feels that at all costs he must get it. He can be a wolf to his brother, men, descend to appalling degradation and brutality. Two world wars have opened our eyes to this, gas chambers, inhuman medical experiments on Jews in Hitler's Germany, concentration camps, brainwashing. Some of us wouldn't listen to Paul and Augustine, to Calvin and Bunyan. Some have only begun to listen, since Sigmund Freud, from a totally different standpoint, directed attention to the same phenomena. Kirkagor saw it all. At a time when Romanticism and Idealism were the prevailing philosophies, when optimism about man and his future, Angiotopianism were the order of the day. He was a voice then crying in the wilderness, laughed at, derided, ridiculed in cartoon, after cartoon,

in Copenhagen's journal The Corsair. And, he says over and over again, this duality, man as good and evil, is not occasional, is not abnormal. It is universal, inherited, original in the sense that, though found in every generation and in every individual, when it appears, it is as if it were appearing for the first time, where a new fact, old yet ever new, that duality, the presence of evil as well as good, is the source of man's tension, anxiety, guilt. There's not an individual anywhere, Kirkagor says, who is not burdened with a sense of despair. On the surface, it may not show, but it is there. There's not an individual, at the bottom of whose consciousness,

there is not to be found a certain disquietude, a perturbation, a disharmony. He writes, as doctors could tell us, that there is perhaps no man living who is completely sound. So a real knowledge of men would compel us to say, that there is no living man who is not, in some degree, the victim of despair. No man, in whose inner life there does not dwell, an unrest, a dispeace, the dread of something on which he dare not look, a dread of the possibilities of his own being, a dread of himself. You can see, can't you, that every line of that is a transcript of his own experience. It is an aspect of truth, let me emphasize, not to be over exaggerated. The other side of human nature is as real and true. In Kirkagor's day, the darker side was scarcely stressed at all.

He might well have said, what Cardinal Newman offered as an explanation of the violence of his attack on Charles Kingsley, had I said these things in ordinary tones, no one would have taken the least notice. I was obliged to speak, at the top of my voice, or he might have said what Harald McMillan said to Molotov. About the British broadcast in cooperation and the use of too many frequencies for its broadcasts to East Europe. McMillan said to Molotov, if you force a man to talk to you through a brick wall, you can hardly complain if he raises his voice. In further illustration of the bond between Kirkagor's life and thought, look at some of his characteristic emphasis. Subjectivity, for example. Truth he tells us is something we are to appropriate personally and passionately, only then does it become operative.

Its reality is grasped not just by thinking about it, but by living it, cool objective detachment, Kirkagor abhorred. As he did all speculative thinking, which exhausts itself in discussion, has no commanding authority, leaves men free to keep their will uncommitted. The speculative thinker he contains plays, with life plays, with religion. He is a spectator and refrains from taking sides. He sherks the crucial factor in existence, life decisions. Truth is not something to theorise about, as though it were outside us, it is always inward. Subjective, it means involvement, it is hard to live with. Thus, Christianity is not a system of doctrine, requiring to be ascended to or defended, it is a fact that makes an uncompromising demand on us.

What I really want, writes Kirkagor, is clearness with respect to what I ought to do. Not what I ought to know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every action. I need to understand my place in life. What God really wants me to do. I must find the truth which is truth for me, for then first as a man receive inner experience. I want to find the idea for which I can live and die. And what would it profit me if I found the so-called objective truth, if it had no deeper significance for myself and for my life? The standpoint there adopt to disclear enough, truth is inwardness.

So far from leaving the thinker detached and disinterested, it transforms his personality, it revolutionises his entire existence. This is a note often struck in the New Testament. As for instance in the words of Jesus, you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. So we come to another of Kirkagor's characteristic emphasis, namely the need for existential thinking. To live he says is to exist in crisis, it is to be concerned, concerned about truth, about goodness, about God. This involves not the intellect alone, but the total personality. It is fruitless, he says, to think in one set of categories and then to live in another. We are not to be spectators of the issues of life and death, time and eternity. We are committed every day to a decision about them that too crucial to treat dispassionately.

Thinking about God for example is only meaningful when it passes beyond discussion and debate, to decision, to action, to obedience. Prayer is the one through confession of faith. To believe in God is to go down on your knees before Him and when He speaks you have to answer. You have to say yes or no. Belief is commitment, it calls for trust and it implies risk, it calls for the leap of faith that carries you across the abyss of your sin, your guilt, your despair. A poignant, passionate, personal concern with all that is at stake in a life committed to truth, goodness God, that for Kierkegaar is existential thinking. It is thinking that demands serious choices from the individual, that calls on a person to face the basic realities of life and act as well as face them,

act in regard to them, to make decisions which will affect the whole course of his existence and be binding on it. This brings us to still another characteristic emphasis, the paradox. Christianity, Kierkegaar, complains has been immasculated by philosophy, the Hegelian philosophy. It has sought for harmony and unity everywhere, but he maintains harmony and unity are not to be found everywhere. There are contradictions in human existence and in the world that cannot be ironed out in a higher synthesis. Hegel deluded himself when he thought he had composed all differences and provided a rounded off universe. There are contradictions, differences that are absolute, life and death, time and eternity, God and man, sin and grace.

All Christianity's greatest truths are paradoxical to the reason. They defy logic. Man is a paradox. God is a paradox. Christ, the God man, is a paradox. Forgiveness is a paradox. That God should love the sinner and justify the unrighteous is paradoxical, irrational, unethical. The elder brother in the parable on his strictly moralistic premise was right in regarding the father's forgiveness of his disillusioned son as unfair. It transcends every logical way of thinking every system of moral bookkeeping, every calculus of rewards and penalties. Over and over again, Kierkegaard reiterates that the profoundest truths of the gospel defy logic, the Christian cannot comprehend them.

Cannot reason his way to a logical explanation of them, though he beat his brow till the blood comes. Faith is irrational and incomprehensible. It doesn't solve enigmas. It opens our eyes to them. The life of man, the life of the world, are torn by contradictions which must be faced in their tension. Contradictions which no intellectual system can resolve. All these characteristic emphasis of Kierkegaard's thought came right out of his life. You can readily understand how, as he expounded them, he found himself at loggerheads with the established church in Denmark. Toward the end of his life, he died when he was 44. He put out a succession of pamphlets collected in the book translated in English under the title Attack on Christendom. He was exasperated by the smugness of the Christian church in Denmark. A smugness equaled only by its obvious ineffectiveness. He despised it.

On the ground that it was living at peace with the world and required of its clergy and members no whole-sold commitment. People called themselves Christians. But they were Christians just as Jews were Jews. By birth, Christianity had become far too comfortable. Its followers had lost the power, had lost the will to suffer. It was soft. It no longer appealed to virile souls. It preached peace without the sword. It took the sharp edge off the hard sayings of the gospel. The church had become a vested interest with the state clergy public officials. It was far too dependent on aesthetic associations. When Kierkegoa, who went faithfully to church every Sunday while attacking it, heard the bishop there giving thanks for these quiet hours in hallowed places. He felt Christianity was being presented as no more than an inspirational ingredient of life.

Christ's command to me in toned and soothing voice in a cathedral meant something different from the command to me of him who stood before men poor, persecuted, marked for public death. In paganism he wrote, the theatre was the church. In Christendom, the churches have practically become theatres. The scandal of Christianity had ceased. I quote him, when Christ preaches Christianity, no one can endure to be a Christian. When an apostle preaches it, a few men begin to take part. But when a chattering goat proclaims it, we're all Christians by millions. And again, let us try a thought experiment. If one could establish the fact that Christ never existed, nor the apostles either, that the whole thing was a poetical invention, I should like to see how many persons would resign their posts. Or again, in the splendid palace chapel, a stately court preacher, the cultivated public's elite, advances before an elite circle of fashionable and cultivated people, and preaches emotionally on the text of the apostle, God chose the mean and despised, and nobody laughs.

Ascathing indictment this, on page after page, in temperate, with no proposals for changed organisation, displacement of officials, but with, from first to last, a stentorian call to a deeply personal faith. Kirchegor is explicit as to his motive in writing the work. I want honesty. I do not represent a Christian severity as over against Christian mildness. By no means, I represent neither severity nor mildness. I stand for human honesty. And if the human race, or my contemporaries, wish, honestly, sincerely, frankly, openly, to rebel against Christianity, and say to God, we cannot and will not subject ourselves to this power well and good.

Provided this be done openly, frankly, and sincerely. Then, however strange it may seem for me to say this, I'm with them, for I want honesty. In the middle of the furor created by his attack on the established church, Kirchegor died, died all but friendless, near the limit of his financial resources. He had sickened on the street. And he had been taken to hospital. Asked if he did not desire the Holy Communion, he said, yes. But not from a person. He welcomed death, and at the last the light shone clearly. To a friend of his youth, a person, he said just before the end, greet all men. I have loved them all, and say to them that my life has been a great suffering, unknown to them. Everything looked like pride and vanity, but it was not.

I have not been at all better than others. I am the exception. I should like to add to all this a personal word. Kirchegor has brought me many insights. I have learned from him many lessons. Like Bart, he serves as a corrective to one's thinking, but I cannot go with him all the way. When I read what he has to say about original sin, I try to counter his pessimism by setting over against it the optimism of Jesus, who, while never overlooking the evil in human nature, was always searching for the good and constantly finding it, even in the most unexpected quarters. When I read what Kirchegor has to say about the endless, yearning, qualitative gulf between God and man, I balance with that the teaching of Jesus about the nearness of God, about the fatherhood of God, and when Kirchegor insists on the paradoxical element in Christianity,

and urges that faith is in its very essence irrational. I have reservations that there are sharp limits to what reason can achieve, I acknowledge, but that in itself does not justify a flight from reason, or the blind submission of the intellect. Christianity, as I see it, addresses the whole man, conscience, will, emotion, reason, and the first and greatest of all the commandments is, thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. John Bailey some years ago stated the case in a fashion that commends itself to my judgment. In a day when unreason and dogmatism and bluff and propaganda seemed to have it all their own way, the church should not be speaking contemptuously of reason, it should counsel not to the despair of thought,

but it's harder and more honest exercise. Only when in arrogance we take the human mind as the measure of all things should we speak of faith as transcending the bounds of reason. But this is a lecture on Kierkegaard. Let him have the last word. Here are several passages. Ah, when someday the reckoning shall be made of the countless multitude of the human race, there will be found a greater number under the rubric, the flabby. Then all these rubrics taken together, thieves, robbers, murderers. For long the tactics have been, use every means to move as many as you can, to move everybody if possible, to enter Christianity.

Do not be too curious whether what they enter is Christianity. My tactics have been, with God's help, to use every means to make it clear what the demand of Christianity really is if not one, entered it. The remarkable thing about the way in which people talk about God, or about their relation to God, is that it seems to escape them completely that God hears what they are saying. A man says, at the moment I have not the time or the necessary recollection to think about God, but later on perhaps. Or a young man says, I'm too young now. First of all I will enjoy life. And then, would it be possible to talk like that if one realized God had one?

Let us collect all the new testaments there are in existence. Let us carry them out to an open place, or up upon a mountain. And then, while we all kneel down, let someone address God in this fashion. Take this book back again. We men such as we are now are no good at dealing with a thing like this. It only makes us unhappy. My proposal is that like the inhabitants of Garderer, we beseech Christ to depart out of our coasts. And a final quote, one of Kirchegor's prayers. Father in heaven, when the thought of thee wakes in our heart, let it not awaken like a frightened bird that flies about in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile. And then, when the thought of thee wakes in our heart, let us carry them out in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile.

Father in heaven, when the thought of thee wakes in our heart, let us carry them out in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile. Father in heaven, when the thought of thee wakes in our heart, let us carry them out in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile. And then, when the thought of thee wakes in our heart, let us carry them out in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile. Father in heaven, when the thought of thee wakes in our heart, let us carry them out in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile. And then, when the thought of thee wakes in our heart, let us carry them out in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile.

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