Kindle Notes & Highlights
For this to happen, humans must be enabled to loosen the bonds of affection that compulsively tie them to lesser goods and feel the attractive power of the highest good.
Kierkegaard was in entire accord with Augustine that passion and desire must be kept front and center in the Christian life.
A kind of fear arises as one becomes aware of one’s need for God and one’s own insufficiency.
Rather, Augustine was intent on showing how the desire for God pervades every aspect of Christian existence, and he sought to elicit in the reader the various modulations and manifestations of desire that jointly constitute the Christian life.
Perhaps most importantly, the focus on desire colored the way Augustine thought about human motivations, decisions, and actions. For Augustine, humans do not arbitrarily choose their objects of desire by an act of sheer willpower.
The development of a new desire cannot be accomplished through an exertion of the will, but only through a new experience of the attractiveness of a novel object.
The transformation of desire involves a change of what we perceive to be desirable and a new perception of an object’s qualities.
Even with regard to knowledge of the sensory world, without some attraction or interest, our minds would remain fickle and unfocused, unable to concentrate on any object for very long, incapable of distinguishing important features from unimportant ones — and would thus degenerate into chaos and superficiality. With regard to more spiritual matters, love becomes even more crucial for knowledge. In order to know God, our attention must be focused on God, which can only happen through desiring God. Therefore, Augustine speaks of an intentio cordis, an intention of the heart that is synonymous
...more
One desires a comprehensive view of the universe; the other desires to live in ecstatic awareness of God’s dazzling beauty and truth.
Giving cognitive assent to accurate theological propositions is clearly not a sufficient condition for growth in the Christian virtues. Knowledge devoid of passion cannot enable the soul to cleave to God and enjoy eternal blessedness through that bond. Without love, knowledge alone cannot lead to salvation.28 Climacus’s critique of “objective” knowing with respect to religious matters would echo many of Augustine’s concerns.
The Neo-Platonic tendency to describe the goal of the religious quest in epistemological terms never left him. It was partly this legacy that motivated scholars like Clausen to suspect that Augustine’s Neo-Platonism had introduced an alien and abstract conception of truth into his understanding of Christianity. Kierkegaard would inherit that suspicion of Augustine, the Neo-Platonic speculator.
Augustine confesses to God that his desire was “not to be more certain about you, but to be more stable in you.”33 In several ways, Augustine’s passionate, engaged kind of knowing would have similarities to Kierkegaard’s descriptions of “earnestness,” “pathos,” and “subjectivity.”
The centrality of desire in Augustine’s thought also undermines the concept of the self as being, at least ideally, self-controlled and self-legislating.34 If our spiritual identities are determined by the objects of our desire, then the self cannot be the self-possessed individual imagined and idealized by the Stoics, much less the Cartesian self that is often claimed as the descendant of Augustine’s introspection. Human beings are not essentially self-contained egos, scrutinizing a field of cognizable objects from a transcendent vantage point. Nor are human persons completely autonomous
...more
Our identities intrinsically involve relationships to things that exist beyond us, affecting us as objects of desire. Most importantly for Augustine, we have been created in such a way that only the love for God can fulfill our desiring, relational nature, and that overarching love should integrate, inform, modify, and prioritize all our penultimate loves. The true self is not the self-possessed master of his ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
of God.36 Over fourteen centuries later, Kierkegaard’s Works of Love would articulate this same view of the self’s finding its comple...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Because desires cannot be immediately willed into existence, something must happen to the individual to enable the person to develop a new desire, to perceive and experience life differently.
We humans are not capable of redirecting and integrating our desires through a self-originating heroic exertion of willpower. The change in perception and attraction must be elicited by something beyond the individual. The
The transformation of desire must come from beyond the self.
attractiveness; it is not the result of the self-initiated quest for self-integration and self-fulfillment.
As the structure of the Confessions shows, Augustine came to see God’s providence operating behind the scenes in his encounters with Neo-Platonists, his delight in earthly beauty, and even his tragedies, which lured him forward with more provocative and tantalizing glimpses of God’s attractiveness. Kierkegaard’s view of a new kind of pathos elicited by the incarnate Christ, without whom the new pathos would be impossible, would be the functional equivalent of this dynamic in Augustine’s writings.
But grace does not give humanity a new telos, nor does it add any new supernatural powers to the soul’s natural repertoire. As Phillip Cary has convincingly argued, Augustine remained convinced throughout his career that the only destiny suited to human beings is to be bound to God in love.38
We were created in such a way that to desire the vision of God is entirely natural to us. According to Augustine, our problem is not the limitations of the human mind, or a deficiency in our ontological structure that requires supplementation, but rather the instability of our will and the waywardness and diffusion of our desires.
God’s gift of grace refocuses desire, stabilizes it, energizes it, and helps it grow in constancy. As will become evident, much of Kierkegaard’s own work can be read as such a therapy of desire.
Augustine, like many ancient philosophers, was convinced that human beings become like what they desire and love. Knowing God in love is a participatory kind of knowledge that transforms the knower.
Augustine says again and again that the lover of God will be transformed into the image of God; as we draw near to God, we will reflect God’s light and holiness more and more profoundly.
Life’s journey toward the vision of God requires the cultivation of love, and Augustine does not hesitate to admonish the reader to purify his soul so that love for God can intensify. (Even in his anti-Pelagian writings Augustine would not retract this imperative; all he did in those polemics was add the reminder that growth in love is itself a gift from God.)
Kierkegaard’s themes of “redoubling” and the “eternal like for like” had antecedents in Augustine’s legacy.
The Christian life involves both strenuous striving and confident gratitude for God’s grace and trust in God’s beneficence. As will become obvious, both those notes were also struck loudly by Kierkegaard.
Even in the heavenly state, we will continue to need God for our existence and depend on God for our constancy, for Augustine insists that God’s grace will still be necessary to stabilize our wills.
These spiritual bodies will, of course, be purged of all imperfections and will move with indescribable beauty.
Like Augustine, Kierkegaard would describe the Christian’s relationship to God as an intense intimacy that nevertheless preserves a profound “infinite qualitative difference.”
Augustine’s basic principle is that the purpose of the Bible is to build up love in the believer’s heart.
Much of what Kierkegaard wrote would not make sense unless individuals possess a natural hunger for God, however unconscious or repressed it may be.
Moreover, Kierkegaard does insist that seeking God contains a dimension of “terror,” “trembling,” and “shuddering,” suggesting that God is indeed the awesome, numinous Other (TDIO, p. 9).
Kierkegaard would have more in common with the “dialectical theology” of the early Barth, insisting on God’s absolute otherness, than with Augustine. The qualitatively different God could be worshiped and obeyed, perhaps even trusted, but not really desired. Kierkegaard’s words often do seem to encourage this interpretation, as when he remarks, “God and the human being resemble each other only inversely” (CD, 292).
However, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on God’s qualitative difference does not preclude desire for God. Kierkegaard uses the rhetoric of difference in order to promote certain pastoral purposes, mainly to encourage his readers toward humility, thankfulness, and dependence. (We shall examine these pastoral purposes more fully in chapter 4.) As
To love God is the only happy love, but on the other hand it is also something terrible. Face to face with God man is without standards and without comparisons; he cannot compare himself with God, for here he becomes nothing . . . .” (JP 2, 1353)
The similarity of Augustine and Kierkegaard with respect to the importance of desire for God is signaled by their common penchant for using romantic and erotic metaphors for the human-divine relationship.
For both Augustine and Kierkegaard, eros is front and center. The exuberant rhetoric of pleasure and delight fills Kierkegaard’s pages, as it does Augustine’s tomes. Borrowing vocabulary from both classical philosophy and Christianity, Kierkegaard, like Augustine, describes human life as teleologically oriented toward what he variously calls “happiness,” “eternal happiness,” “the highest good,” and “blessedness.”56 Also
Without God, according to Kierkegaard, every earthly joy and delight fails to satisfy.
To understand “God” requires the cultivation of the “restless heart” celebrated by Augustine. Desire for God in Kierkegaard’s corpus most intensively informs Works of Love, though it is also inscribed in many of the edifying and Christian discourses.
that were the case, he would indeed be living in a different theological world from the one inhabited by Augustine. However, as we shall see, loving the neighbor is, for Kierkegaard, a manifestation of loving God, for God is love. Kierkegaard makes it clear, as Augustine had, that God is the only proper object of love (WL, 19, 108, 121, 130).
Love for the neighbor is rooted in love for God, and love for God will naturally manifest itself as love for the neighbor. Love for God is the implicit “middle term” in all real love for other creatures (WL, 107);
Kierkegaard coaxes and entices the reader to see that we were created with an inherent desire for God’s kind of love, and that we can only find ultimate happiness through participating in that love. It is thus the life of godly neighbor love that must be presented as the object to be desired, and longing for that life must be elicited. In short, without announcing itself as such, Works of Love is an enactment of desire for the kind of love that God essentially is.
To grasp the significance of this theme of desiring the God who is love (and hence of desiring to love the neighbor), we must take Works of Love’s literary features into account, not just its conceptual content. For Kierkegaard, the rhetorical dynamics of a text such as this are part and parcel of its meaning. The
Kierkegaard intentionally chose the literary genre of the “deliberation” for the purpose of fostering a more adequate appreciation of
Kierkegaard’s fear was that Christian love was not being passionately desired because the ability to imagine it had atrophied.
Accordingly, throughout the text Kierkegaard addresses the reader as if the reader possesses the intrinsic capacity to be attracted to love. In his terminology, he “presupposes love” in the reader, and he makes this conviction explicit by declaring, “There is a place in a person’s innermost being; from this place flows the life of love . . .” (WL, 8).
As Augustine had claimed, the desire for love itself (which is God) is intrinsic to our very constitution.
To think that the motivation for obeying the love commandment is to avoid punishment or to receive some sort of extrinsic reward is to misunderstand it.
