Kierkegaard
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Historically Practice in Christianity has not been Kierkegaard’s most widely read or reviewed book; however, he considered it “without a doubt [the] most perfect and truest thing I have written” (JP 6501). It is arguably his most important text. The pseudonym Anti-Climacus was invented to represent the highest expression of Christianity—a position to which Søren aspired. The book contains a “Moral” that offers a defence of the established church by calling on the preachers and teachers of Christendom to confess that the Christianity they promote is not the Christianity of the New Testament and potentially offensive contemporaneity. The “Moral” was primarily aimed at Bishop Mynster, who read the book and privately told Søren of his displeasure but who did not address the charges in print or from the pulpit. Mynster’s public silence about Practice paved the way for Søren’s silence. He would soon give up publishing for three years while waiting for Mynster to admit his church’s part in the illusion of Christendom. The confession never came and the attack upon Christendom ensued. When the book was reprinted in 1855, Søren claimed if he was to write it again he would leave everything the same, but take away the pseudonym and retract the “Moral.”
An Upbuilding Discourse: The Woman Who Was a Sinner
December 20, 1850
Søren Kierkegaard
The short essay was originally part of the longer series of Friday Communion discourses before Kierkegaard decided it worked better as a separate “upbuilding” work. (See the above entry for Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays.) With this 1850 Discourse Kierkegaard returns to the woman caught in adultery. Kierkegaard’s writings contain many harsh sounding words about women springing from his views on marriage as an example of Christendom’s dissipation. However, this Discourse is not one of those times. It finds the women of the New Testament, especially the woman caught in adultery, as teachers of authentic Christianity and existential existence. She did not plead or argue with Jesus. She did not do anything to earn forgiveness. She waited with sorrow for her sins. “You can similarly learn from a woman how to sorrow rightly over sin, from the sinful woman whose sins have long, long since ceased to be and have been forgotten but who is herself eternally unforgettable” (149–50).
Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays
August 7, 1851
Søren Kierkegaard
The Two Discourses of 1851 consider how it is that in Luke 7 “The One Who Is Forgiven Little Loves Little” and how in 1 Peter 4:8 “Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins.” The first discourse returns to the sinful woman but this time is intentionally unsettling, aiming for disquiet rather than comfort for the person approaching the Lord’s Table. Whereas Jesus’ call for people to come to him is a word of rest for people outside the church, his warning here in Luke 7 is for Christianised people who may take their forgiveness for granted. Do you feel little forgiveness? Then perhaps you have little love. The second discourse is addressed to the one who in truth has recognised and confessed their sins. Individual conscience might be able to confess, but it is unable to forget sin. Fortunately, God not only forgives, he forgets the sin of the penitent. The book ends with Kierkegaard’s view of communion as forgiveness and identity formation: “Only by remaining in him, only by living yourself into him are you under cover … it is the communion, this communion that you are to strive to preserve in your daily life by more and more living yourself out of yourself and living yourself into him, in his love, which hides a multitude of sins” (188).
A notable and biographically important element of Two Discourses is its opening dedication: “To One Unnamed, Whose Name Will One Day Be Named, is dedicated with this little work, the entire authorship as it was from the beginning.” It is significant the discourses were published the same day Kierkegaard issued On My Work as an Author. The discourses and their indirect dedication to Regine were intended to be read in the light of this companion piece.
On My Work as an Author
August 7, 1851
Søren Kierkegaard
Later readers of Kierkegaard’s journals and posthumous books are well aware how much he wrote about himself and his authorial project. However, contemporary readers had only scattered material to go on, such as the comedic “review of recent Danish literature” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. On My Work as an Author was the only piece of autobiographical accounting Kierkegaard released in his lifetime. The occasion springs from the reprinting of Either/Or in 1849. The reissue of the earliest and most popular book in the “authorship” led to a new round of self-reflection. Kierkegaard felt the need to reiterate the Christian direction of his life’s work, so as not to let the project slip back into the mere aestheticism and moralism of the first book. He considered publishing The Point of View for My Work as an Author to accompany the rerelease but then held back, deeming this long work would be too open to misunderstanding. Instead, a shorter version, On My Work as an Author, was created. (Point of View would be published after his death.) The pamphlet is not part of the authorship per se. It is “an act” and thus is supposed to be short and sweet. It runs to just under twenty pages.
In this piece Kierkegaard reiterates his intention to stir up “the crowd” so “the Individual” might emerge. His goal is to introduce Christianity back into Christendom, an aim that can only be done with craftiness thanks to the illusion Christendom has perpetuated. In a world in which everyone assumes they are Christian as a matter of course, Kierkegaard saw fit to pepper his authorship with people who not only are not Christian, they know it and can say it. Kierkegaard explains the disunity, obfuscation, and even deception in his authorship as a “godly endeavour” working to communicate the authentically religious in the only way it can be communicated—indirectly and dialectically. Kierkegaard describes his authorship as a “working also to work against oneself” (9). Like a farmer with his plough, Kierkegaard crosses and re-crosses the field several times in order to furrow deeply. Kierkegaard concludes the main section of his accounting by insisting he is a writer “without authority.” He asks to be considered not only as the author of the works but as their reader too. The challenges and edification are for him as much as for anyone else. “Before God,” he states, “I call my whole work as an author my own upbringing and development, but not in the sense as if I were now complete” (12).
For Self-Examination
September 10, 1851
Søren Kierkegaard
“And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise, and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale. Yes everything is soon turned upside down: communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point with regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than—rubbish!” (48).
Kierkegaard half-heartedly tried to conclude his authorship four times in his life. The ink was barely dry on Concluding Unscientific Postscript in 1846 before he was finding ways to continue writing. Next he thought Christian Discourses and The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress might mark the end in 1848. Less than a year later, this “end” was followed by another conclusion with On My Work as an Author and Two Discourses with its thinly veiled dedication to Regine. Finally, he issued For Self-Examination in 1851, declining to publish its companion piece, Judge for Yourself! The ensuing three years of silence suggested this time Kierkegaard had stuck the landing. The silence can be explained because Kierkegaard considered Judge! to be too harsh and Self-Examination a fitting final coda to the challenge first issued to Bishop Mynster in Practice in Christianity. He was waiting for Mynster to respond. It was not until the Bishop’s death and subsequent valorisation as a “truth witness” that Søren would come out swinging with his final attack upon Christendom.
For Self-Examination has thre
e parts, modelled after key dates in the liturgical calendar. The first is a deliberation on Scripture and a celebration of the fifth Sunday after Easter. The second is a reflection on Christ as the Way, in light of Ascension Day. The third, a treatise for Pentecost and a discussion of the Holy Spirit. The book sees Kierkegaard addressing Lutheranism and the Protestant Reformation. The reformation betrays itself when it simply allows one form of anaemic cultural Christianity to replace another. Instead, authentic Christianity is ever new, reforming itself with every generation and every individual. The greatest threat to Christendom’s complacency are its own holy texts. Christendom has devised many ways to shield itself from the challenge inherent in Scripture. “Much in the way a boy puts a napkin or more under his pants when he is going to get a licking,” (35) people put layers of scholarly research and interpretation between them and the Bible. “I shove all this between the Word and myself and then give this interpreting and scholarliness the name of earnestness and zeal for truth” (35). The Scriptures are not intellectually that hard to understand. It is their implications that are difficult. Kierkegaard asks his readers not to think of Scriptures as primarily repositories of historical data or beautiful literature but to use them as a mirror for self-examination. Dare to be alone with the Scriptures! If one dares this, one will invariably meet Jesus Christ in its pages. Christ is the Way. Ascension Day poses a temptation to Christendom as it is too easy to think of Christ glorified rather than the Christ incarnate who came first. Kierkegaard spends time on the difference between the “hard,” “narrow” way of Christ and the broad, easy way of destruction. Kierkegaard is keen to point out not all hard and narrow ways are Christ’s ways. There can be idolatry and self-delusion in a life of martyrdom too. The followers of Christ are not asked to imitate the life of a sufferer but to imitate the life of Jesus, and that is the difference. Kierkegaard finishes the book with a discussion of the work of the Holy Spirit. “It is the Spirit who gives life” (75). Christendom takes the Spirit’s life for granted—as if the role of God was to rubber-stamp whatever comfortable life the citizens have marked out for themselves. “No, no! … what blasphemy!” (76). It is not the old life the Holy Spirit endorses but a new life. New life requires death of the old life. Kierkegaard here tells a parable of a rich owner who bought a team of horses. He drove them for months, and soon they were tired and lifeless. They “acquired all sorts of quirks and bad habits” and “grew thinner day by day.” In desperation the owner calls in a royal coachman. The skilled driver had them for a month. “In the whole countryside there was not a team of horses that carried their heads so proudly.” How did this happen? The owner “drove the horses according to the horses’ understanding of what it is to drive; the royal coachman drove them according to the coachman’s understanding of what it is to drive.” Kierkegaard concludes, “So also with us human beings” (85–86). The Spirit, as the author of life, gives life (faith, hope, and love) where man has come to the end of his own resources.
Kierkegaard deliberately sought as wide a readership as possible for For Self-Examination, and it is written in a straightforward, winsome style. It is fitting that this, the last book of the official authorship, is also a very good suggestion for a new reader of Kierkegaard wondering what should be their first.
The “Attack upon Christendom” and The Moment and Late Writings
December 18, 1854—September 24, 1855; Moment no. 10 published posthumously 1881.
Søren Kierkegaard
“So the silence can no longer continue; the objection must be raised … the objection to be representing—from the pulpit, consequently before God—Bishop Mynster as a truth-witness, because it is untrue, but proclaimed in this way it becomes an untruth that cries to heaven” (8).
The “Attack upon Christendom” is not the title of a single work, but is instead the collective label for a series of polemical articles that originally appeared in the self-published journal The Moment and in the Fatherland newspaper between 1854 and 1855. The name applies to the swirl of events, editorials, essays, letters to newspapers, and appeals to the public that characterised the final stage of Kierkegaard’s writing career. It also marks the final phase of his life, as he died while in the middle of the attack before the tenth issue of The Moment could be published. In these articles, Kierkegaard does not resort to pseudonyms but writes under his own name. However, even this “direct communication” remains in a certain sense indirect, for Kierkegaard adopts a role of “corrective” to the established order. He talks about himself as a fire chief ringing a bell, a detective discovering a great crime, a horsefly rousing its victim with a sting, or a doctor causing his patient to vomit in order to purge them of their poison. The cause of all this urgent imagery is Christendom, which for Kierkegaard encompasses not only the Lutheran Church of Denmark but also any and all Christianised cultures. “Oh Luther, you had ninety-five theses—terrible! And yet, in a deeper sense, the more theses the less terrible. The matter is far more terrible—there is only one thesis. The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at all” (39).
The problem with Christendom is that it tempts its citizens to confuse being a member of a civilisation with being authentically religious and has done away with Christianity as a result. In The Moment Kierkegaard maintains he is not a Christian, for under Christendom that term has become meaningless. He also emphasises he is not trying to convert anyone to Christianity—merely to get his readers to face honestly what they are and what they are not. “So let there be light on this matter, let it become clear to people what the New Testament understands by being a Christian, so that everyone can choose whether he wants to be a Christian or whether he honestly, plainly, forthrightly does not want to be that” (97).
In these articles, Kierkegaard appeals to the common man, and he names and shames a number of Christendom’s public figures, most notably Jakob Mynster, the recently deceased Bishop of Denmark, and his successor, Bishop Hans Martensen.
A realistic description of the pastor is: a half-worldly, half-ecclesiastical, totally equivocal officeholder, a person of rank with a family, who (in the hope of a promotion …) ensures himself a livelihood, also if necessary, with the help of the police … lives on Jesus Christ having been crucified, claiming that this profound earnestness (this “imitation of Jesus Christ”?) is the Christianity of the New Testament … (31)
… it is easy to see that, Christianly, their whole existence is a malpractice … The “pastor” has a pecuniary interest in having people call themselves Christians, since every such person is of course a contributing member and also contributes to giving the whole profession visible power—but nothing is more dangerous for true Christianity, nothing is more against its nature, than getting people light-mindedly to assume the name “Christians” … and “the pastor” has a pecuniary interest in having it rest there, so that by assuming the name “Christians” people do not come to know what Christianity in truth is, since otherwise the whole machinery of 1000 royal offices and class power would come to naught—but nothing is more dangerous for true Christianity, nothing is more contrary to its nature, than this abortion causing it to rest there, so that people assume the name “Christians.” (95–96)
The pieces caused great offence as well as admiration from all quarters of society.
Posthumous Works
The Book on Adler
Written, 1846–47; revised 1848; published posthumously 1872
Søren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard worked and reworked the material for this book many times. Eventually in 1849 he published a short excerpt, “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle” as one of the Two Ethical-Religious Essays attributed to the pseudonym “H. H.” The complicated process and Søren’s reluctance to publish the full work is due to two factors: Kierkegaard’s personal concern for Adolph Peter Adler and Kierkegaard’s vocational concern for himself. The book is extraordinarily important as a document about Kierkegaard’s self-understanding as a poet
who writes Christianly but “without authority.” Adler was a contemporary of Søren’s, a pastor who began his career as a Hegelian theologian before having a religious experience in which he claimed Jesus wanted him to eradicate the Hegelian influence from all his theology. Adler faced widespread derision and was removed from his pastorate in 1844. He continued to write but went back on his previous claim to be communicating from direct revelation, instead formulating his work as a new philosophical development.