Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Christ has given Christians the prototype not of killing but of dying,” Kierkegaard was intrigued by Augustine’s argument that “not to use force to compel one to the truth is ...
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Kierkegaard bemoaned the contemporary construal of Christianity as a doctrine, “an object for passive, brooding meditation,” and associated Augustine with this failure to realize that Christianity is primarily a praxis (JP 4, 3864).
Kierkegaard laments that Augustine had tragically conflated the concept of faith with the concept of knowledge, treating faith as a cognitive system. This “Greek philosophical pagan definition of faith” falsely transposes faith into the alien domain of knowledge.
Faith, torn from its true context of the “existential,” the passionate relationship of a personal subject to a personal God, is thereby transmuted into the intellectualism of Plato and Aristotle. Most tragically, the orienting of faith toward the intellect rather
According to Kierkegaard, by Augustine’s time the church had been corrupted by too much leisure and too much privilege; this privileged situation tempted the church to become scientific and scholarly, and thereby to revert to pagan sensibilities (JP 1, 180).
Furthermore, Kierkegaard adds in 1854-55, Augustine had confused the concept of faith “by drawing the qualification of his concept ‘faith’ directly from Plato,” and forgetting that faith has an ethical rather than an intellectual character (JP 2, 1154).
Kierkegaard sometimes criticizes Augustine for attempting to produce objective arguments to support the probable truth of Christianity. According to one of Kierkegaard’s journal entries (1851), Augustine’s argument that the truth of Christianity is validated by the unity of Christians in contrast to the disunity found among philosophers is fallacious and misleading (JP 3, 3614;
Late in Kierkegaard’s life, Augustine began to function for him as the paradigm of the putatively objective Christian philosopher in contrast to the true philosopher, the existentially engaged Socrates. The picture of Augustine the rationalist was beginning to displace the picture of Augustine the passionate pilgrim in Kierkegaard’s writings.
Kierkegaard was appreciative but also suspicious of Augustine’s teachings about election by grace. In
According to Kierkegaard, the problem with this view is not the affirmation of salvation by grace, but rather the impression given by the doctrine that God has lowered the requirement for eternal salvation and no longer expects a sincere striving.
Kierkegaard protests that this subverts the despair that individuals should experience and militates against their confession that they “cannot pay the taxes” (the taxes being the honest striving to actualize the Christian ideal).
On the one hand, there was the admirable Augustine, the passionately self-involving author who lived out what he believed. That
champion of subjectivity
narrative of the motley fears, doubts, offenses, consolations, and joys that characteriz...
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On the other hand, there was the pernicious Augustine, the speculative philosopher who treated Christian teachings as cognitive objects to be s...
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Kierkegaard had an allergic reaction to Augustine’s suggestion that philosophical speculation and Christian convictions are compatible because they both emanate from the eternal Word. Augustine the speculative philosopher and systematician was the bane of authentic Christianity and, according to Kierkegaard, the precursor of many of its ills during his time.
On the one hand, there is the devoutly self-abasing Augustine who experienced the despair of moral and spiritual failure and learned to trust only in God’s love.
That Augustine could aptly sound the alarm about the depths of human corruption and enable the reader to feel the crushing weight of guilt.
On the other hand, Augustine the systematician invented the doctrine of predestination in order to conceptualize the interaction of divine and human agencies. That Augustine described sin and grace in such...
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Although Augustine’s direct influence on Kierkegaard was slight, his indirect influence may have been quite powerful.
whether Kierkegaard knew it or not, many of his assumptions about the faith were rooted in Augustine’s work.
Kierkegaard’s critique of many of the features of his contemporary Danish Lutheran church implicitly involved a recovery of certain Augustinian themes, even though he might well have been oblivious to that fact.
Kierkegaard was right in casting him as both the hero and the villain in his own struggle to grasp the nature of the Christian faith and to live it out.
Desiring, longing, loving, and yearning for ultimate fulfillment animate the pages of both Augustine and Kierkegaard.
their respective views of human beings were based on a keen awareness of humanity’s yearning for an object that would fill the soul with pure delight.
temporal existence is animated by a dimly felt yearning for an unimaginable joy. This
their celebrated diagnoses of human malaise were predicated on the assumption of longing for God.
In Augustine’s writings the pivotal role played by desire is explicit and obvious; in Kierkegaard’s writings the crucial importance of desire is sometimes blatant but often it is more occluded. Kierkegaard occasionally uses the Danish word for “desire” (længsel, or ønske), but more typically he simply describes teleological longing and attraction.
According to Nygren, Augustine’s concept of caritas was a confused and futile attempt to synthesize the two incommensurable forms of love. Christianity, concludes Nygren, should properly strive to incarnate agape and purge itself of the narcissism of eros.
For most orthodox Lutherans of Kierkegaard’s day, the essence of Christianity was God’s offer of forgiveness for the individual’s moral and spiritual failures — and God’s correlative acceptance and embrace of the still sinful self. Lutherans have typically agreed that the theme of justification by grace, not desire for God, is the doctrine on which the church stands or falls. Because of this dizzying variety of construals of the essence of Christianity, we will need to explore what is distinctive about Augustine’s and Kierkegaard’s understandings of the Christian faith as the desire for an
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The craving for happiness is a universal, structural feature of all human beings, uniting the implicit aspirations of the pagans with the explicit hopes of the Christians.
In The City of God, Augustine insisted that the ultimate purpose of philosophical reflection had always been, even before the advent of Christianity, the attainment of ultimate happiness.2 In
For Augustine, desiring, willing, and acting cannot be hermetically sealed off from one another.
This combination of being propelled by an inchoate need and also being drawn by an object whose attractiveness was unanticipated would have important consequences for Augustine’s vision of the interaction of “nature” and “grace.” As we shall see, a parallel relationship of being intrinsically propelled and being contingently drawn would reappear in the writings of Kierkegaard. This two-dimensional understanding of desire would enable both of them to avoid many of the dichotomies that came to afflict Catholicism and Protestantism.
A person is what that person most fundamentally loves.7
Taking his cues from Cicero’s Hortensius, Augustine proposes, early in his career as a writer, that all people desire happiness, even if they do not have a
Both Cicero and Augustine (in his Cassiciacum dialogues) tend to define “happiness” negatively, in terms of what it is not. “Happiness” in this context is not a transient affective episode of contentment, satiation, pleasure, or exhilaration.
The true object of happiness must be something that will not deteriorate and cannot be taken away or used up.
Its enjoyment cannot be dependent on external circumstances and the vicissitudes of temporal events. Because the delight in the object must never wane, the elusive object must be something that will be permanently fulfilling, never producing boredom.
Happiness cannot be the possession of any material good, for physical things always fade and die, and even if they do endure for a while, their charms no longer enchant. Nor can happiness be nothing more than the proper ordering and actualization of a person’s potentialities — which was a widespread classical view of the felicity gained via a life of virtue — because the exercise of those powers, no matter how impressive and carefully cultivated, will eventually fail to satisfy.
ultimate telos of human desiring can only be something beyond all earthly pleasures and fulfillments: it can only be the contemplation of the highest good, the font of all beauty and truth, which is God. Augustine describes God as “the source of our bliss . . . and the goal of our striving,” and he concludes that human lives are brought to fulfillment only through communion with God.9
For Augustine, the only good that can provide genuine and lasting happiness is the loving contemplation of God and the imaging of God.10 Augustine asks his readers: “Which do you want, to love temporal things and to pass away with time or not to love the world and live forever with God?”11 He frequently observes that Jesus’ exhortation “You shall love the Lord your God” functions not only as a command but also as a reminder that only through loving God can we attain the goal of happiness.12
For Augustine, the desire for a highest good is not symptomatic of a tragic defect in human nature that should not be there.
the restlessness of which Augustine writes is a positive aspect of humanity’s ontological structure as it was intended by a benevolent Creator.
Far from being an imperfection, the need for God is the source of human fulfillment and joy. (This theme would recur in such discourses by Kierkegaard as “To Need God Is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection” [EUD, 297-326].)
Our insufficiency motivates us to long for what is the basis and support of our very being. It is indeed an ache, but it is a sweet ache. Even if finite life were not ontologically precarious, we would still long for the absolute delight that only God can provide. Augustine often uses images of sensory attrac...
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Matter is other than the eternal, perfectly actualized God; it is thus mutable, potentially capable of assuming many different forms.
The pleasure in creaturely beauty stirred up a longing for the source of all beauty. Augustine came to see that the beauty that we love in creatures is really a pointer to the beauty of God, the source of all beauty and the only truly beautiful object.
Augustine’s view of the Christian life, therefore, does not involve the extirpation of desire, but rather its reformation. The spiritual goal is not self-control, volitional autonomy, freedom from all passion, or apathy.16
According to Augustine’s critique of the Stoic view, the task of the individual is to redirect desires toward their proper object. Desire is not to be uprooted, but is rather to be carefully cultivated, channeled, and aimed in the correct direction.
