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

house mara also Let us begin by noting what people are saying about Kierkegaard today. He has been called Denmark's greatest prose writer and greatest spiritual force, the greatest christian thinker of the nineteenth century, the greatest of all christian psychologists,

the accusing angel of contemporary religion. Exaggeration tinges is some of these encomiums but there is no exaggeration in John Wales statement if the modern generation wishes to hear the distinctively modern note in theology it has to listen to a Barth, a Neibuhr, or a Nygren, to name only these three, and it then realizes that these three have in their turn been listening intently to Kierkegaard with a scowl and "?". I sometimes wonder what would've happened if Kierkegaard 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 Kierkegaard 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 thirty thousand copies of two of his works sewed in pocketbook editions and a first printing of ten thousand copies of a third work appeared soon thereafter. The uncanny thing is that Kierkegaard 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 lampooned him. He had a slightly misshapen body, lean blank 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 it tucked under his arm was something of a menace to passersby. For irony he had few equals but he had little humor. He could be droll. His coffee- house companions laughed at his waggish wit 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, Kierkegaard had a hamlet-like strain in him. The melancholy dane is perhaps the commonest epithet applied to him he was always delicate and nearly always most spirited. His character had an attractive features. He could not have been easy to live with. He was proud, super sensitive, highly strung. He had a superior, sarcastic, and lovable disposition. He was not made for controversy, yet he was all his lifelong engaged in it, and in the height of battle he resorted to exaggeration

and revealed an intemperance and prejudice which flaw and stain his work. The adjectives that best describe him are lonely, embittered, mis- understood. 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 go to some degree sympathize with him. Because the thought of 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 twelve years of age, and a shepherd boy, on a black

"?joplin?" moor cold, hungry, lonely, he had deliberately cursed god, cursed god because of the harsh conditions of his life. Ever after he was plagued 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 these days Michael Kierkegaard did penance for the outrage

he perpetrated in his twelfth year. To make matters infinitely worse, long years afterwards when his wife died, he married the serving girl in his home. Married her in haste to give legitimacy to the child she was about to bear him. The serving girl was Kierkegaard's mother. It is a striking and ominous thing, but while he has a great deal to say about his father, he makes no mention whatsoever of his mother. It has been written about him, he who said so much about women, and so beautifully, though at the end so spiteful, 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 twelve plagued Kierkegaard you can imagine how his own forced marriage at the age of forty-one 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 Kierkegaard for a time

into riotous living, though only for a time. Sensuality served simply to bring deep disillusionment and disgust. The aggression 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 Kierkegaard spent at the university were troubled years. If on the one hand that 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 dilettante. 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 heated restriction. He loved to follow an argument wherever it might lead. He read omnivorously, but for the most part in desultory 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 to her, 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 into 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. Desirous of taking all the blame on himself, he deliberately sought to wean her affections away from him. He acted in a fashion which he thought would make him 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 the 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 case book. Why should that 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 god, he told himself, before which he must make subservient any duty to yield to man or woman. Now he must face his own inner most 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 the pulpit, but in his books. So dedicated to authorship , Kierkegaard let loose on the world a succession of books. And what books. "The Concept of Dread", "The Sickness Unto Death" "Concluding Unscientific Postscript", "Edifying Discourses", to name only a portion of an extraordinary copious output. And, through them all, is one theme: faith is a suffering. Kierkegaard was a sufferer. The influence on him of his father's 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 an intense suffering,

suffering from which she 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 an uncanny 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 us 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, and forces self examination.

Brings us solitary and alone before the almighty and leaves us. The the abnormalities of this profoundly gifted eccentric man tell 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 the original sin. "Inherited sin", as it is called in danish. In the whole of the nineteenth century i suppose no one took that concept more seriously than Kierkegaard did. In a later generation Dr. Alexander White of "3?" St Georges 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 transmission of hereditary qualities like melancholy and anxiety. It was a realistic view of the nature of

man that he saw. 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, sainthood. There is something mysteriously, radically, permanently wrong with him. He is capable of pride, envy, uncharitableness. When his passions are inflamed and when his security is threatened, when war breaks out, when he wants seventy seven thousand dollars and feels that at all costs you must get it, he can be a wolf to his brother man. Can 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 Augustin, Calvin and Bunion. Some of only begun to listen since Sigmund Freud, from a totally different standpoint, directed attention to the same phenomena. Kierkegaard saw it all. At a time when romanticism and idealism what the prevailing philosophies. When optimism about man and his future, and utopianism, were the order of the day, he was a voice then crying in the wilderness laughed at, derided, ridiculed in cartoon after a cartoon in Copenhagen journal "The Corsair". And, he says over and over again, this duality (man as good and evil) is not to occasional, is not abnormal, but it is universal, inherited, all 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. The duality (the presence of evil as well as good) is the source of man's tension, anxiety, guilt. There's not an individual anywhere, Kierkegaard 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, there is perhaps no man living who is completely sound, so a real knowledge of man 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 dis-peace the dread of something on which he dare not look, a dread of the possibilities of his own being are drained of himself. You can see can't you 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 Kierkegaard'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've taken the least notice. I was obliged to speak at the top of my voice. Or he might have said what Harold McMillen said to Molotov about the british broadcasting corporation and the use of

too many frequencies for its broadcast to east europe. McMillan said to Molitov 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 Kierkegaard's life and thought, look at some of his characteristic emphases. Subjectivity, for example. True, he tells us is something we are to appropriate personally and passionately. Only then does it become operative. It's reality is grasped not just by thinking about it but by living it. Cool objective detachment Kierkegaard 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 contends, plays

with life, plays with religion. He is a spectator and refrains from taking sides. He shirks the crucial factor in existence: life decisions. Truth is not something to theorize 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 ascented to or defended. It is a fact that makes an uncompromising demand on us. What i really wants, write Kierkegaard, is clearness with respect to what I ought to do, not ought to know, except insofar as knowledge 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 does a man received 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 adopted is clear enough: truth is inwardness. So far from leaving the thing undetached and disinterested, it transforms his personality and revolutionizes 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 Kierkegaard's characteristic emphases, 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 ought not to be spectators of the issues of life and death, time and eternity we are committed every day to a decision about them. They're 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 true 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 a 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 Kierkegaard is existential think. It 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; to 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 Kierkegaard

complains has been emasculated by philosophy, the Hegelian philosophy. It has sought for harmony and unity everywhere but, he maintains, harmony and unity and 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 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 older brother in the parable, on his strictly moralistic premise was right in regarding the father's forgiveness of his dissolute 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 that tension, contradictions which no intellectual system can resolve. All these characteristic emphases of Kierkegaard's thought came right out of his life. You can readily understand how, as he expanded them, he found himself at loggerheads with the established church in denmark. Toward the end of his life (he died when he was forty four) 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 soul commitment. People called themselves christians, but they were christians just as jews were

jews: by birth. Christianity had become far too comfortable. Its followers the last power, lost the will to suffer. It was soft; it no longer appealed to virile souls. It preached peace without the sword. It took a 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 Kierkegaard, who went faithfully to church every Sunday while attacking it, heard the bishop there giving thanks for these quiet hours and hallowed places. He felt christianity was being presented as no more than an inspirational ingredient of life. Christ's come on to me intoned in soothing voice in a cathedral meant something different from the come unto me of him who stood before man poor, persecuted,

marked for public death. In paganism, he wrote, the theater was the church. In christendom the churches have practically become theaters. The scandal of christianity had ceased. i caught him when chris price preaches christianity no one can enjoy to be a christian when an apostle preaches it, a few men begin to take part but when a chattering goat proclaims it, we are 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 parsons 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 maimed and despised and nobody laughs. A scathing indictment this, on page after page intemperate with no proposals for changed organization displacement of officials but with, from first to last, a stentorian call to a deeply personal faith. Kierkegaard is explicit as to his motive in writing the work. I want honesty. I do not represent a christian severity as overt 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, Kierkegaard died. Died all but friendless, near the limits 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 shown clearly. To a friend of his youth, a parson, he said just before the end greet all man. 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. Kierkegaard has brought me many insights. I have learned from him many lessons. Like Barth, 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 this pessimism by sitting 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

Kierkegaard has to say about the endless, yawning, quantitative gulf between god and man, I balance that with the teaching of jesus about the nearness of god, about the fatherhood of god and when Kierkegaard insists on the paradoxical element in christianity and urges that faith is, in it's 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.

Jon Bailey some years ago stated the case in a fashion that commands 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 off reason. But this is a lecture on Kierkegaard. Let him have the last word. Here are several passages. Ah, when some day 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, brothers, 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, 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 that are in existence. Let us carry them out to an open place or up on a mountain, and then why we all kneel down, let someone address god in this fashion. Take this boat 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 likely inhabitants of "?gadderer?", we beseech christ to depart out of our coasts. And the final quote, one of Kierkegaard 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 waiting from its sleep, with a heavenly smile.