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

by Lee C. Barrett III

They validate the prevalent suspicion that human failings are universal and inevitable.

Moreover, the language of generational transmission corroborates reason’s awareness of the pernicious influence of heredity and culture.

According to Bretschneider, Augustine’s insistence on sin’s inevitability points to the overwhelming power of our sensory nature over the individual’s immature rational will in a person’s early years. However, Augustine’s formulations are archaic and inadequate in that they portray sin as a det...

Diverging from this depiction of an Augustine who failed to do justice to human responsibility, other texts consulted by Kierkegaard do portray Augustine’s discussion of sin, grace, and freedom in a more positive light.

The Lutheran confessional documents of the late sixteenth century regard Augustine as an admirable articulator of the dialectic of sin and grace, and favorably describe Augustine’s view of Adam as the head of the race through whom we have inherited the corruption and guilt of original sin. For

Marheineke endorses Kant’s more symbolic view that the story of Adam should be read as the paradigmatic story of all human beings. Significantly, Marheineke associates Augustine with Kant on this issue, quoting Augustine’s statement that “we have all been, we are, that one” (KJN 3, pp. 255-56).54

In a way, Marheineke is pioneering a rhetorical reading of Augustine, for he pays close attention to the religious purpose of Augustine’s doctrinal ruminations.

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.

portray Augustine as a moral rigorist who sought to recover the early church’s exacting view of discipleship during an era of Constantinian laxity. In July 1839, Kierkegaard quoted Augustine’s remark that the end of the world would come more quickly if there were no marriage (JP 3, 2584; see also KJN 2, p. 37).

Friedrich Böhringer, whom Kierkegaard read later in life, also emphasizes the daunting view of Christian discipleship that Augustine advocated, pointing out that for Augustine this discipleship necessarily involved suffering (JP 4, 4670).58

These works presented Augustine in a different light, not as a systematic Scholastic theologian, nor as a phenomenologist of religious experience, but as an example of the coincidence of a loftily espoused ethic and personal moral seriousness. According to these thinkers, Augustine genuinely walked the path that he wrote about. The correlation of the writer’s life and the writer’s text made a lasting impression on Kierkegaard.

Many of the nineteenth-century writers and lecturers who influenced Kierkegaard applaud Augustine’s position on sin and grace as a necessary corrective to Pelagian optimism, but then protest that Augustine had misleadingly overemphasized divine agency at the expense of human responsibility.

Augustine was a moral rigorist who helped promote an almost monastic ideal for all Christians.

some pointed to the way Augustine intimately connected faith and lov...

simply faith in action, or the element of delight i...

As we shall see, all three of these interpretive trajectories strongly influenced Kierkegaard’s...

Augustine as the pioneer of the subjective turn.

The tension between Augustine the rationalistic systematician and Augustine the passionately self-reflective thinker would reappear in Kierkegaard’s own construal of Augustine,

In general, Kierkegaard’s Augustine was a systematic theologian who was saturated with Platonic notions of rationality, who reconceived the Christian faith in such a way that it made sense of his personal struggle to overcome sin and expressed his relief in the help provided by God’s grace. On the one hand, this Augustine patterned his theology on the principles of deductive logic; on the other hand, he used that system to express his powerful religious passions. It may be unfortunate that the more dialectical, asystematic, and rhetorical Augustine was not known to Kierkegaard, for he might have recognized in that Augustine an uncanny prefiguring of himself.

In 1848, Kierkegaard lamented that he knew of no religious thinker who “reduplicated” his thought in his life, except perhaps Augustine

truth must be personally appropriated.

in Kierkegaard’s judgment, Augustine understood correctly what this personal appropriation really involved. In 1851, Kierkegaard applauded the fact that Augustine rightly construed the Christian life as a path of affliction and exile (JP 4, 4670).

Augustine, according to Kierkegaard, aptly acknowledged that Christians must suffer as did their protot...

having conceived such an overwhelming love for God that he sacrificed vocational success and familial contentment for the sake of that devotion. Sometimes Kierkegaard admiringly refers to Augustine’s candid and unsparing self-criticism, which also testified to his spiritual earnestness. For example, Kierkegaard noted approvingly in 1851 that Augustine recognized that his pleasure in empathizing with victims of tragedy in the theater was superficial, for he was not obligated to relieve their suffering in any way, nor did he have to undergo the actual pain himself (JP 4, 4470; Böhringer, 1, pt. 3: 110). Kierkegaard expresses admiration for the early church fathers in general, among whom he always placed Augustine, because their lives expressed the earnestness and pathos that contemporary Christendom so often lacked (JP 1, 830). As i...

belief in an inspired revelation (JP 1, 29).

Christianity is the most perfect form of authority, for its authority is rooted in God. If truth is divine, then it is only appropriate that it be communicated through the form of an authoritative disclosure. Echoing Augustine, he warns of the dangers of speculating away all authority (JP 1, 181).

Christianity that it relies on an authoritative revelation rather than on autonomous reason (JP 1, 191).

Kierkegaard cited Augustine’s insight that it is good that there is a truth to which the human spirit is subordinate, for only in being subordinate can the spirit become truly free (JP 4, 4877; Böhringer, 1, pt. 1: 234-35).

Augustine was suggesting that the individual’s submission to authority can be a virtue and that the acknowledgment of an external authority may be intrinsically valuable (

Kierkegaard shows a marked preference for the view of Augustine as a faithful expositor of divine revelation that had been promoted by the more conservative commentators, such as Hahn. It is significant that Kierkegaard’s enthusiasm for Augustine as the upholder of the authority of revelation became more pronounced in his later years, with many of his most favorable remarks appearing after he had read Böhringer in 1851.

Kierkegaard expresses a marked preference for Augustine over Pelagius on these matters. In a journal entry of 1837 he observes that, whereas Pelagius addresses himself to humanity as it is, trying to conform itself to the world, Augustine calls for a negation of this empirically given humanity in order to rebuild humanity anew (JP 1, 29).

Augustine is a person of hope who trusts in the possibility of a new creation.

Kierkegaard points approvingly to Augustine’s three-stage view of human history: creation, fall (involving death and spiritual imp...

This motif of becoming a new creature, often at odds with ordinary societal norms and expectations, would play a pervasive role in Kierkegaard’s own writings. Like almost all of the textbooks that he consulted, Kierkegaard in no way wanted to minimize the sinfulness of the individual.

Kierkegaard also expresses sympathy for Augustine’s confidence in God’s agency in this process of spiritual re-creation. In 1847 he cited Augustine’s conviction that God’s providence extends even to the small things of life, not just the large ones (JP 1, 179).

Kierkegaard echoed Augustine’s reminder that God’s benevolent providence is concerned with the individual’s salvation, not with worldly felicity or even continued earthly life. Augustine, Kierkegaard admiringly notes, said, “Certainly God has promised y...

Augustine had realized that God is the agent at work behind the scenes in the vicissitudes of human lives, prodding and urging humans into Christian maturity. In his own writings Kierkegaard would remain committed to the notion of divine guidance and even divine governance. Here again he was reflecting the consensus view of Augustine as the theologian who had underscored most forcefully the need for divine help. Kierkegaard also tended to side more with Augustine than with Pelagius on the subject of free will. In gene...

endorse Augustine’s claim that true freedom, as distinguished from freedom of choice, involves an inner necessity that excludes the thought of another possibility (JP 2, 1269;

Kierkegaard even approves of Augustine’s claim that the individual can sink into sin so deeply as to lose the very capacity to choose. On these issues pertaining to the nature of freedom, Augustine reinforced Kierkegaard’s own tendency to see freedom as situated, conditioned, and motivated.

Kierkegaard applauds Augustine’s refusal to allow the acknowledgment of freedom’s conditioned nature to mitigate the individual’s sense of responsibility and guilt.

Kierkegaard, Augustine was right that this loss of freedom is itself a punishment for sin and is simultaneously itself a further sin.

Kierkegaard drew further attention to Augustine’s theme that abandonment in sin is itself a punishment for sin, noting that according to Augustine, God’s question “Adam, where are you?” punitively reminded Adam that he was now “outside of God” (JP 3, 3642; Böhringer, 1, pt. 3: 498).

Kierkegaard was siding with the more conservative confessionalist assessments of Augustine in order to maximize guilt, distancing himself from Clausen and Martensen, who were prone to seek out nonculpable mitigating circumstances that motivated sin.

His reference occurs in the context of a reflection on the theme that the biblical mandate to love our neighbors as ourselves assumes that we do indeed love ourselves. Kierkegaard observes that “self-love is egotism unless it is also love for God — thereby love for all,” and he goes on to insist that the love in question should be an abiding heartfelt inwardness, and not a concatenation of mere external deeds (JP 3, 2399).

Augustine’s teachings about the strenuous principles of the ideal Christian life also impressed Kierkegaard.

By emphasizing Augustine as a moralist who understood the loftiness of the Christian ideal, Kierkegaard is reflecting the interpretive tradition of de Wette and Neander.

Kierkegaard appreciated the wisdom of Augustine’s ethical reflections, even when he did not fully agree with them. Kierkegaard’s journals of 1850 and 1851 reveal an intensive wrestling with a cluster of issues related to authority, coercion, force, and nonresistance to evil.

This exception to his own rule was motivated by Jesus’ compassionate desire to prevent his assailants from acquiring further guilt by striking him again. Kierkegaard also reflects on Augustine’s opinion that military service is permissible for Christians (JP 2, 1194).

Here Kierkegaard seems to admit the power of Augustine’s argument, but he does not hesitate to raise a critical question about it.

Kierkegaard expressed interest in Augustine’s defense of authority and the use of force by the authorities, even though the Dane was himself declaring that the genuinely Christian policy should be to eschew the use of force against injustice and instead disarm injustice by enduring the suffering that it perpetrates (JP 2, 1195).