Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker)

by Lee C. Barrett III

For Schleiermacher, Augustine was right to suggest an original fallibility in human nature that has always cohered with human nature’s original potential for religious maturation (though, according to Schleiermacher, Augustine failed to provide a motivational explanation for the susceptibility to temptation, something that Schleiermacher located in the difficulty that the God-consciousness experiences in permeating the sensory self-consciousness).56 As we shall see, this symbolic way of reading the fall of Adam and Eve, ascribed by Marheineke and Schleiermacher to Augustine, would have profound consequences for Kierkegaard’s own treatment of original sin.