All of these changes of outer arrangements, whether they be ecclesiastical, social, or political, seemed to Kierkegaard to gloss over the real problem—which was the awakening of the individual. Hence his profound disappointment in Luther’s having allowed himself to be lured eventually into a mere rebellion against the Pope, a casting off the yoke of the monastic system and of ascetic practices, instead of laying on men the even costlier responsibility of their vocation before God. The inward reformation was yet to come. Kierkegaard believed himself to be its prophet. Here, too, was rooted his disappointment and impatience with the social revolutions of 1848 that believed by an upheaval of mass external arrangements to be able to resolve the basic problem of men. “In the future each effort at reformation, if its leader be a true reformer, will direct itself against the mass as such and not against the government,” he wrote in his Journal amid the rumblings of 1847. Such an attempt as Tolstoy’s to find inwardness by becoming poor with the poor, or Lenin’s utopian endeavor to usher in a kind of social salvation by making all of the proletariat rich would only have met with Kierkegaard’s contempt. For they still rely on outer arrangements, they are still concerned primarily with “housekeeping,” and the deeper problem is left untouched.
The effort of Gruntvig and his school to whip up the national pride of Denmark by recalling it to the Nordic sagas and its glorious history, Kierkegaard felt to be so much public flattery and a violent poison to the real individual need of the soul. The comfortable Danish church in general he found to be blind to its compromises with bourgeois life which had reduced it to a low-pressure form of Christianity. This church stood out for him in sharpest contrast to the primitive Christian community.
All attempts at mass prescription, all things attainable in the mass as such, in fact the very notion of the crowd, of the mass, drew the most violent invective Kierkegaard had at his command. For he believed the crowd, the mass, to be a hiding-place in which the individual may abdicate his true quest for inward intensity and responsibility. The crowd is a sink of cowardice in which individuals are relieved of individual responsibility and will commit acts they would never dare to do alone. When a man is to be executed by shooting, not one executioner shoots, but several. When the noble Caius Marius was seized, no individual soldier dared touch him, but a crowd of them had no such restraint. “Take the highest of all, think of Christ—and think of the whole human race, all that have been born and will be born. Now the situation is one where Christ is alone, so that someone as an individual alone with Christ stepped up to Him and spat upon Him: the man was never born and will never be born, who possesses the courage or the audacity to do this: that is the truth. As they became a crowd, however, they had the courage to do it—oh, terrible falsity.” 4 The mass flatters, the mass excuses, the mass condemns, the mass counts heads, the mass pronounces on truth, and in all these things the mass, for Kierkegaard, is that which is both false and debasing. To speak of social salvation, of salvation by group, by tribe, by race, by class, by nation, is for Kierkegaard an act of spiritual betrayal.
This isolation of man from the flock, from the mass, from the crowd and the heightening of his consciousness as an individual which the Eternal accomplishes is a central theme of Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. Before the quiet gaze of the Eternal, there is no hiding-place. As individuals we are what we are before God, and no mass opinion affects this in the least. Kierkegaard believed that his generation was seeking to live in mere time and to make the Eternal superfluous. He reminded them of the Eternal’s power to dissolve away time and to separate the crowd into individuals. In memory, in conscience, in remorse, in work at a calling, in the solitude, the Eternal still impinges upon the individual and awakens him to a consciousness both of himself and of his responsibility and of his worth to the Eternal.
In this polemic against the mass, the crowd, Kierkegaard could never be justly accused of parading a new snobbish aristocracy, a small upper-house of supermen. “The reader will consider that here the mass is not … a common herd. God in heaven, what if the religious way should fall into such an inhuman division of mankind! No, the mass is a number, the numerical. A number of the nobility, the millionaires, the highest dignitaries, etc., can through the use of the numerical quite as readily become the mass.” 5“It is ‘the mass'—not this one or that one—that is now living, now dead, not a group of menials or of aristocrats, of rich or of poor, but the mass understood in a purely conceptual sense—which is the false. For as a man is in a crowd, he is released from repentance and responsibility or at least is weakened in responsibility for himself as an individual.” 6 Again in his Journal for 1847 he wrote, “I long to call the attention of the mass to its own doom.”
In the world, the native differences of gifts in men are obvious. And in this world the drift toward perpetuating these inequalities by one form of aristocracy or another is powerful. Kierkegaard saw only one solvent for these obvious inequalities, only one root of enduring equality between all men. That equality is in the equality of concern which a loving Eternal Father has for each individual that has ever existed. Hence only in the Christian sense of being children of a common Father are we all equal. To those impatient political enthusiasts who talk loudly on how futile and impractical religion must always be, and who are bent on legislating human equality into existence, Kierkegaard offers a word of counsel, “Only that which is religious can with the assistance of eternity press the equality of men through to its ultimate conclusions: the reverent, genuine, unworldly, true, the only possible equality between men. And therefore that which is religious, may it be said to its glorification, is also the true humanity.” 7
In his brief essay on the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle he returns to this theme. The genius, an aristocrat of the spirit, has had gifts lavished upon him by nature that distinguish him from his fellows. The apostle may be a commoner, a fisherman, a one-talent man by nature, or he may have ten talents—yet all that he has is dedicated to the service of the Eternal and as such is lifted up. The genius speaks with brilliance and charm. The apostle speaks with authority. The way of the genius is a way closed to all but a few. The way of the apostle is a way open to all as individuals—even to the genius himself if he can forsake the absorbing satisfactions of a brilliant self-sufficiency and be ready to will one thing. Kierkegaard knew himself as only a genius, only an aristocrat of the spirit. He would never style himself an apostle or claim to speak with authority. God alone could judge of that, God before whom all men irrespective of their talents are really equal.
The root of equality is therefore grounded in this unchanging personal relation between the individual and God, not in the secular whim or political fashion of the crowd. Here, too, in the personal concrete particular category of the individual as opposed to the mechanical abstract impersonal category of the crowd or the mass, Kierkegaard found the root of enduring neighbor-love. There is nothing in Holy Scripture, he points out, about loving man in the mass—only about loving your neighbor as yourself. For then you separate him out of the abstract mass or public, and he becomes an individual. And when you love him as yourself you testify to that deep equality of all men as individuals before God. And you do it personally. “That one shall honor each individual man, without exception, each man: that is truth and is reverence and is neighbor-love.” 8
Little needs be added here to what has already been written in English about the bare facts of Kierkegaard’s life. He was a sufferer. The melancholy shade of his father’s closely held sin, the breaking of his engagement with Regina Olsen, the public ridicule to which his sensitive nature was exposed by the public attack of the modish Copenhagen journal Corsair, the disillusionment with Bishop Mynster and the church in his closing years, all bore in upon him. What is significant about Kierkegaard is the use he made of this suffering. He refused to seek invulnerability. He accepted the suffering, he lived with it, he searched it, and he found its costly meaning for him—that he was to live as one cal
led under God—to live as a lonely man—to live for an idea. Through suffering he found, and later was kept in his vocation. For his intense nature this pressure of suffering meant debauchery, insanity, suicide—or the penetration of the sorrow for its message. A Journal entry in 1843 reads, “The most important thing of all is that a man stands right toward God, does not try to wrench away from something, but rather penetrates it until it yields its explanation. Whether or not it turns out as he wishes; it is still the best of all.”
Seldom in the history of literature has there been seen such productivity as was released in him between the years of 1842 and 1848. In the single year 1843, he published in February, his long Either-Or; in May, Two Edifying Addresses; in October, three of his works Fear and Trembling, The Repetition and Three Edifying Addresses appeared on the same day; and in December, a further volume of Four Edifying Addresses.
This is also the theme of his Works of Love. He found in his writing a form of worship of God, and in the exercise of his calling as a writer whose every page was composed as under the scrutiny of God, he found his healing. If one is as weak as he is, and has so much to do, he will soon learn what it is to pray, he suggests. And he describes his vocation as a writer as literally living with God as one lives with a Father. He rises in the morning and gives thanks to God. Then work begins. At a set time in the evening, he breaks off and again gives thanks to God. Then sleep. So he lives. The twelve-hour day of writing when his production was at its height is broken only by a midday walk among the common people in the østergade. This keeping of sorrow and remorse silently between oneself and God keeps a man humble and acutely aware of the service he owes to God. Buried in this center, these sufferings release light that has no fear of darkness. And rarely in religious literature has suffering been treated with such delicacy and penetration as in Kierkegaard’s own writings.
His vocation, his calling, is not your calling. No one could be more faithful than Kierkegaard in pointing that out. But do you know what is your calling, what is your vocation, and have you accepted it? It is these questions that he asks again and again in the closing sections of Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.
In his Journals he makes a comment on the function of an introduction to a book. It should serve to unclothe the spectators from their diverse preoccupations and get them ready for the real bath. Kierkegaard’s own brief preface to Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing does little more than begin this process, and tempts me to suggest that one who is not familiar with other works of Kierkegaard, will find himself still better prepared for immersion in this address if he turns immediately to Section Twelve
and reads from that point to the end. By the use of a brilliant analogy this twelfth section begins by describing the true and the false way of reading or listening to a devotional address and the following sections set forth with pointed directness the central issue of what it means to be an individual. After reading this, the address should then be read through from beginning to end, read “willingly and slowly,” read “over and over again,” and given “the reader’s own decisive activity, and all depends on this.”
The translator wishes to express his thanks to Professor Eduard Geismar for suggesting the undertaking of this work; to Professor C. C. J. Webb and Hanna Astrup Larsen for corrections and suggested improvements in the translation. The translation and notes are made from the eighth volume of the standard Danish edition of Kierkegaard’s Collected Works edited by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange and published by the Gyldendalske Boghandel, Copenhagen, 1903-06. The fifteen sectional divisions and headings have been supplied by the translator.
DOUGLAS V. STEERE
Haverford, PENNSYLVANIA.
March, 1938.
1 Søren Kierkegaard—Eduard Geismar, p. 470. German edition—Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Gottingen, 1929.
2 Collected Works, Vol. XIII, p.605.
3 Ibid., p. 604.
4 Ibid., p.594.
5 Collected Works, Vol. XIII, p.593.
6 Ibid., pp.593-594.
7 Ibid., p.590.
8 Ibid., p.597.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
to the Revised Edition of the English Translation
THIS TRANSLATION into English of Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart was made in 1935 and first published in 1938. It was one of the first translations of Kierkegaard to appear in English and it took no small amount of courage on Harper & Brothers’ part to put it into print. Since that time nearly all of Kierkegaard’s works except his voluminous journals have been translated, and the influence of his thought has made itself widely felt in both England and America. Before a fourth printing of Purity of Heart was to appear, it seemed right to make a very thorough re-examination of the translation from the Danish in order to correct certain errors and misprints and in places to improve the form of expression. I am deeply indebted to my dear friend, Howard T. Lutz, for his invaluable assistance at every point in this revision, although the responsibility for changes and for the final text is of course my own.
After having introduced many persons and groups to Kierkegaard during the past fifteen years, I am still of Professor Eduard Geismar’s opinion that there is no better way to begin to grasp Kierkegaard’s religious message than to read Purity of Heart. I should then follow it by Training in Christianity and by the excellent Selections from the Journals translated by Alexander Dru.
As a devotional classic, the nineteenth century produced almost nothing in either Catholic or Protestant circles that can compare seriously with Purity of Heart. Designed as a preparation for the church’s office of confession, it is prepared to put into the hands of the serious reader the surgical instruments for a major spiritual operation. The instruments are razor-sharp and they can cut through any cancerous worldly growth, no matter how fibrous, in order to liberate again the healthy tissues of a man’s individual responsibility before the gaze of the living God.
The note that it sounds is alien to the modern ears which are tuned to collective thinking, collective action and collective salvation. It is, however, not an individualistic nineteenth-century note that Kierkegaard sounds, but a universal note of the inward life of man, a note that even this age will be compelled to learn again when its present grim honeymoon with collective salvation has spent itself.
Already there are many whose spiritual needs are so acute that they are open for such direction as this book provides. Already there are those who do not merely want help against the symptoms, who do not want some swift short-cut to “peace of mind,” but who can stand a ruthlessly accurate diagnosis of the disease that has produced the symptoms, and can bear to read of a remedy so costly that it can only be begun but not concluded in this life. To these persons Purity of Heart will continue to minister and to minister faithfully.
DOUGLAS V. STEERE
January 20, 1948.
About the Author
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher and theologian. His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and fiction.
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Copyright
PURITY OF HEART IS TO WILL ONE THING. Copyright © 1956 by Søren Kierkegaard.
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