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

by Lee C. Barrett III

Clausen’s ambivalent assessment of Augustine would have a lasting impact on Kierkegaard. On the positive side, according to Clausen, Augustine appreciated God’s transcendence of finite categories and the intimate connection of faith and love. Augustine also appropriately recognized human moral frailty and the need for divine assistance. Kierkegaard would take these lessons to heart. However, on the negative side, in Clausen’s opinion, Augustine illicitly used speculative philosophy to engage in system building, and he was forced by his own logic to affirm unbiblical and spiritually damaging doctrines. As we shall see, Kierkegaard imbibed Clausen’s suspicion of Augustine as a system-builder. Even worse, according to Clausen, Augustine so exaggerated human sinfulness, describing it as an innate corruption, that he utterly negated any sense of human responsibility. Kierkegaard, too, would struggle to preserve the integral role of the self-ascription of responsibility in the Christian life. It must be noted that Clausen’s pejorative remarks about Augustine as a speculative systematician paint a very different picture of Augustine from the one drawn by contemporary scholars. The Augustine whom Kierkegaard encountered through Clausen was not the fractured, tentative Augustine of O’Donnell and Conybeare, but the doctrinal propositionalist imagined by seventeenth-century Lutherans, Calvinists, Jansenists, and Jesuits.