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

by Lee C. Barrett III

have been aware of the true nature and extent of his indebtedness. As early as the 1940s, Ernst Moritz Manasse claimed to detect such a deep parallelism between the two thinkers on the importance of self-consciousness in the life of faith that some kind of mediated influence must be posited.1 A few years later, Carl Weltzer attempted to demonstrate that both Søren and his brother Peter were inspired by a renaissance of interest in Augustine that had occurred in Denmark in the early nineteenth century.2

While admitting that Kierkegaard did not engage in any profound study of Augustine, George Pattison, David Gouwens, and many other scholars have suggested that the influence of Augustine was transmitted to Kierkegaard indirectly through the impact that Augustine had exerted on the Lutheran heritage and Western Christendom in general.4

Given these considerations, Augustine’s influence on Kierkegaard may have been stronger than the relative absence of Augustine in Kierkegaard’s published writings would indicate.

Augustine admits: “I did not know then and I still do not know.”6 The influential Augustine scholar J. J. O’Meara has concluded: “In spite of the picture of him [Augustine] as the great definer of doctrines in the West, he was also profoundly questioning, profoundly aporetic.”7 Augustine

Augustine’s works cannot be arranged into a neat system of mutually entailing propositions, and the discrepancies among his writings cannot be dismissed as being merely due to the evolution of his thought.

Theologian Mark Ellingsen observes: “Indeed, the entire theology of the post fifth-century Western church might be construed as a commentary on Augustine’s thought.”9

Paul Ricoeur found an Augustine who delighted in the multiplicity of potentially edifying meanings that are generated when biblical text and contemporary experience interact.

Kierkegaard filtered this material through the prism of his own even more specific interests. Consequently, in order to clarify Kierkegaard’s relationship to Augustine, we must first try to determine exactly what he knew about Augustine, including which of Augustine’s works he may have actually perused.

. In his Prefaces of 1844, Kierkegaard may be echoing The City of God when he remarks that the visible public is like the visible church, being a mixed company

In 1847, Kierkegaard’s observation in Works of Love that the virtues of pagans are glittering vices, which he repeats in three different contexts and attributes to “the ancient Church Fathers,” could be an allusion to a passage in The City of God, though it could also refer to a statement by Lactantius (WL, 53, 196, 269).

been a slogan that Kierkegaard heard, unaware of its exact source. However, the fact that Kierkegaard uses it in order to contrast paganism’s view of friendship and erotic love with a Christian understanding of love does parallel Augustine’s argument in this passage and may indicate familiarity with that passage. In “The Gospel of Sufferings” (also published in 1847), Kierkegaard again refers to the “glittering vice” that the pagans mistook for virtue (UDVS, 272). In a draft written in 1846-47 for the projected Book on Adler, Kierkegaard cites Augustine’s conviction that individuals are forbidden to tell an untruth in order to preserve their chastity (BA, supplement, 293).

It is notable that Kierkegaard seldom alludes to Augustine’s celebrated Confessions (a major exception being his paraphrase of the “restless heart” passage [JP 1, 65]), the book that is most frequently hailed as the precursor of Kierkegaard’s own approach to theological writing and his celebrated subjective turn. Moreover, Kierkegaard seldom quotes from Augustine’s doctrinally influential anti-Pelagian writings, even though the issues of original sin, human freedom, and divine grace would loom large in his own writings. (On the Good of Widowhood does contain an implicitly anti-Pelagian section in which Augustine urges widows to ascribe their celibacy to the power of God’s grace, but Kierkegaard does not refer to that section.) Perhaps less surprisingly, Augustine’s rather speculative The Trinity is conspicuously absent from the list of Kierkegaard’s direct citations and allusions.

Yet another work, On Christian Teaching, argues that the wisdom of Christianity is superior to that of the philosophers, though some helpful insights can be gleaned from those wise pagans. It argues that, although secular learning can be used in a preliminary way in the exegesis of biblical texts, it is faith that makes possible a more profound allegorical interpretation. The City of God suggests that the citizens of the general culture are not to be confused with the citizens of the heavenly city, though in this life the constituencies of the two groups are mixed together. These themes about the daunting nature of the Christian life, the uniqueness of Christian wisdom, and the differentiation of true Christianity from the mores of the general culture constitute a definite pattern. All of these motifs would become prominent in Kierkegaard’s own writings. Kierkegaard’s probably desultory reading in Augustine seems to have acquainted him with Augustine the moral rigorist and the champion of a demanding ideal for the Christian life. Interestingly, Augustine the speculative theologian is not evident in Kierkegaard’s list of readings in Augustine that can be documented.

Even as late in his career as 1851, Kierkegaard was making copious remarks in his journals about a biographical sketch of Augustine that he was currently reading.

Some of Kierkegaard’s earliest and most consequential encounters with Augustine were mediated through lectures and tutorials on theology.

the influence of Clausen may have been even stronger than these notes suggest, for Kierkegaard owned two copies of a popular version of Clausen’s lectures published in 1844, as well as a copy of a more detailed version published in 1853.

the young scholar in 1834 through Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith. Kierkegaard’s journals from that period express puzzlement about Schleiermacher’s apparent affirmation of predestination. This concern about this doctrine would have directed Kierkegaard’s attention to Schleiermacher’s frequent references to Augustine concerning original sin, grace, and election, for Martensen regarded Schleiermacher as the heir of Augustine on these subjects. Reinforcing the impact of Martensen’s construal of Augustine, Kierkegaard attended at least some of Martensen’s lectures on speculative dogmatics in 1837-38, and he acquired a copy of subscription notes (notes on the lectures taken by professional transcribers, who then sold them to students) that treated Augustine and Pelagius at length.21

Kierkegaard also encountered material about Augustine in several monographs he owned that dealt with more specific theological topics. In 1837, Kierkegaard read and commented on a critical interpretation of Augustine’s doctrine of the fall of Adam and Eve contained in an essay by the Hegelian Johan Eduard Erdmann, who generally tried to integrate Hegelian themes with orthodox Protestant doctrines.27 In

encountered the felix culpa theme attributed to Augustine, which Erdmann explained means that sin is a necessary step forward in the evolution of consciousness (KJN, vol. 1).

Augustine and Pelagius were contrasted on the issue of divine and human agency

Martensen’s The Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness in Modern Dogmatic Theology,29 and in Outline to a System of Moral Philosophy,

In his notes to Marheineke’s Berlin lectures of 1841, he mentions Müller’s view that the creation of the world was due to freedom, not necessity, which may suggest some familiarity with Müller at that early date (KJN

Kierkegaard’s notebooks from 1851 contain many more references to Augustine than usual, for he was carefully reading Friedrich Böhringer’s lengthy biography of Augustine in Die Kirche Christi und ihre Zeugen oder die Kirchengeschichte in Biographie.33 More generally, his diffuse reading in Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and the German and Danish Hegelians would have exposed him to further discussions of Augustine.

One was basically sympathetic, lauding Augustine as the venerable champion of the priority of grace and revelation. A second interpretive tendency was more critical, excoriating Augustine as an obscurantist enemy of responsible human agency. To understand Kierkegaard’s picture of Augustine, we will find it helpful to examine the characteristics of the consensus view and of the divergent evaluative trajectories.

critique of speculative metaphysics, as well as by Schleiermacher’s analysis of the experience of absolute dependence. Like Kant, Clausen had a tendency to interpret Christianity from the perspective of practical reason, justifying the faith in the light of certain moral principles and dispositions.

Like Schleiermacher, he insisted that Christianity presupposes, shapes, and revitalizes an original religious consciousness in human beings.

He resisted both the fashionable enthusiasm for Hegelian metaphysics, which ascribed too much power to human reason, and also the upsurge of confessional dogmatism, which too severely disparaged human reason.

Clausen published a largely appreciative exposition of Augustine’s hermeneutics in 1827, praising Augustine for avoiding both historical literalism and reductive rationalism.34

In addition to endorsing the spirit of Augustine’s hermeneutics, Clausen commended other aspects of Augustine’s work in his lectures. He referred approvingly to Augustine’s assertion that “God is good without quality, great without quantity, creates without needing to, is present without form, is everywhere without place, is sempiternal without time, makes what is mutable without being moved” (KJN 3, p. 74), which was an approximate quotation from The Trinity.35 Clausen was calling attention to Augustine’s refusal to confine the infinite God within a limiting, finite conceptuality, while at the same time magnifying God’s metaphysical perfections. Similarly, Clausen cited Augustine’s proposal — in book 6, chapter 6 of The City of God — that time was created along with the world, thereby avoiding both the Alexandrian belief that the world had been created from eternity and the opinion of Methodius of Tyre that the world had been created in time (KJN 3, p. 76). In both of these instances, according to Clausen, Augustine was exemplifying an entirely apt sensitivity to God’s transcendence of the categories of finitude.

He approved of Augustine’s assertion that the good life is inseparable from faith, and that faith works by means of love (KJN 3, p. 55).36 For both Clausen and Augustine, the inevitable consequence of justification should be diligence in good works and not the juxtaposition of faith and works that Clausen feared was all too typical of popular Lutheranism (KJN 3, p. 59).

Kierkegaard’s notes from the lectures reveal a more Kantian side of Clausen, an antimetaphysical side that led him to portray Augustine in a much more negative light. Much of Clausen’s critique of Augustine focused on Augustine’s penchant for distracting and irresolvable metaphysical ruminations. For example, Clausen argued that the real imago Dei in humanity is the soul’s capacity for thought and self-determination, and he objected that this lofty teaching had been obscured by idle and futile speculation concerning the origins of the soul, including Augustine’s flirtation with traducianism, the theory that the soul is created with the body and transmitted through reproduction (KJN 3, pp. 18-19).

Moreover, Augustine was guilty of constructing a system whose internal logic required him to assert such unknowable and foreboding doctrines as the eternity of punishment for sin (KJN 3, pp. 26-27).

A great deal of Clausen’s discomfort with Augustine involved the seeming incoherence of the doctrine of original sin. According to Clausen, Augustine’s theory that Adam and Eve’s fall was responsible for the corruption of human nature and for the guilt of their descendants was unintelligible. The notion of a capacity only to choose evil, present at birth, suggested the self-contradiction that sin is on the one hand inherited and innate, but on the other hand is the individual’s own fault (KJN 3, pp. 29-31).

Augustine was absolutely correct that human beings do need the help of grace, but that need for aid does not imply that humans are totally depraved, Clausen opines. He goes on to say that “the best current in modern theology” has attempted to avoid both “Pelagian frivolity” and “Augustinian abasement” in order to recognize the dialectic of common human frailty and moral freedom (KJN 3, p. 31).

Clausen found this teaching to be particularly abhorrent, for it denied both the universality of grace

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.

Martensen adopted as his own motto the phrase “faith seeking understanding,” which he attributed to Augustine in addition to Anselm.37

By presenting himself as a theological heir of Augustine, Martensen gave the impression that Augustine’s writings constituted a philosophically informed theological system. In a somewhat more critical way, the mildly rationalistic K. G. Bretschneider reinforced this assessment of Augustine in a textbook that Kierkegaard frequently consulted.38

Augustine simply used philosophy to clarify and systematize the intuitions of the religious consciousness, hoping to produce a compendium of Christian wisdom.

Augustine’s doctrines had to be critiqued and modified in order to make them suited to the modern appreciation of the autonomous development of moral character. This Augustine was a formulator of doctrinal propositions whose system could be compared to those of Irenaeus, Origen, and a cavalcade of patristic worthies.

Rather, Augustine was a spiritually sensitive thinker who was painfully cognizant of his own incapacity. Augustine simply

realized from his own inner life that the internalization of the spirit of Christ was absolutely necessary for regeneration. Augustine’s Christian experience gave shape to his theology, even informing his critical appropriation of Platonism (rather than Platonism determining his understanding of Christianity). Karl Hase, a liberal theologian influenced by Kant and Schleiermacher who sought to synthesize modern culture — including critical historical studies — with religious feeling, depicts Augustine as sincerely pious, though somewhat artificial in style.40

Friedrich Böhringer’s biographical sketch, which Kierkegaard read attentively in the early 1850s, emphasizes Augustine’s growing reliance on his religious subjectivity in his quest for truth and his increasing disillusionment with the capabilities of autonomous reason.41

Rather than arguing about the systematic or expressive nature of Augustine’s work, Kierkegaard’s teachers and sources often focused on more particular and controversial aspects of Augustine’s thought, especially the issue of the relationship of divine grace to human agency.

He also contrasts Pelagius’s concept of sinfulness as the free action of individuals with Augustine’s view of sinfulness as the corporate nature of the human race operating through the individual. For Martensen, the resulting antinomy must be overcome, for some truth can be found in both positions.44 He sought to synthesize them by claiming that the individual does organically share the nature of Adam, but that this nature only becomes personal guilt as the individual ego appropriates this tragic legacy as its own and develops it further.45

This kind of assessment of Augustine was very widespread among European Protestant theologians: Augustine’s emphasis of bondage to sin and his consequent affirmation of the efficacy of God’s saving grace was indeed one necessary dimension of the complex process of salvation, but it was only one dimension. The other dimension, which Augustine sadly neglected but which Pelagius grossly exaggerated, was responsible human agency.

Semi-Pelagianism was thought to have been a movement that emerged late in Augustine’s career and flourished after his death, and maintained that the human will cooperates with grace by accepting it and cultivating it.

Semi-Pelagianism was usually presented by Kierkegaard’s sources somewhat sympathetically, for at least it tried to do justice to both God’s grace and human responsibility, even though it erred in ascribing too much originating efficacy to the human will.

August Neander, who tends to parallel Schleiermacher on many issues, extols Augustine’s reliance on grace, but laments that the latter had done this one-dimensionally, to the detriment of human agency.51

Julius Müller’s exhaustive treatise on original sin elaborates the same point, praising Augustine for realizing that sin is a characterization of a person as a whole, but criticizing him for failing to explain how this could be regarded as the individual’s own personal fault.52