Kindle Notes & Highlights
Praising something can encourage in others a desire to explore that thing’s attractive qualities. Kierkegaard writes: To carry it out [the praising of love] has, of course, its intrinsic reward, although in addition, by praising love insofar as one is able, it also has this purpose: to win people to it, to make them properly aware of what in a conciliatory spirit is granted to every human being — that is, the highest. (WL, 365)
offers the prospect of a life of blessed coherence and continuity. Sounding very much like Augustine, Kierkegaard exults that in this regard Christian love does not suffer from the liabilities that infect romance and friendship, which vainly promise permanence but are powerless to secure it. Love for the neighbor unifies the self, rescuing it from the disintegrative forces of worldly “business” (WL, 98). Christian
Most dramatically, Kierkegaard is enthusiastic that genuine love reflects God’s eternal nature and is resistant to the vicissitudes of time. He repeatedly proclaims that love is the bond of temporality and eternity (WL, 6).
Kierkegaard was in full agreement with Augustine that we become like the thing we love.
The fulfillment that is mistakenly sought in romance and friendship is available only in Christian love, the true telos of the human heart.
As with Augustine, Kierkegaard roots the inadequacy of earthly loves in their mutability and their multiplicity, and in the inability of a finite good to satisfy an infinite desire. It is impossible to relate with eternal faithfulness and unlimited devotion to something that is not eternal or infinite (WL,
Like Augustine, who had insisted that faith must be formed by love, Kierkegaard accords a foundational position in his thought to the power of love to form the heart. Kierkegaard, too, was a therapist of desire, and Works of Love was part of his therapeutic practice.
Moreover, we humans can make decisions only because certain options attract us and certain other options repel us. If it were not true that we have specific anxieties, proclivities, hopes, and aspirations, there would be no way to evaluate the merits and demerits of different courses of action. Consequently, the sets of attractions and revulsions that motivate us — our “passions,” in other words — are critical for the purpose of giving direction to human lives.
For both Kierkegaard and Augustine, passion is essential to the task of being an agent who can prefer one course of action over another.
When God is loved, the lover begins to love other people in the extravagant way that God does.60 God’s eternal love is redoubled in the temporal lives of individuals. This growth in self-giving love is, of course, growth in Godlikeness, just as Augustine had claimed.
In the first stage that Kierkegaard dramatizes, the aesthetic stage, the individual’s life is dominated by the quest to satisfy the momentary desires that just happen to arise in the life of the individual. The texts that present this view of the aesthetic life are primarily found in Either/Or, Part I, edited by the pseudonymous Victor Eremita, or “the victorious hermit.” Kierkegaard’s construction of this editor is significant. Victor, who
This literary strategy not only illustrates a feature of the aesthetic life, but it encourages the reader to feel it.
In Kierkegaard’s writings, as in Augustine’s, the paths to faith are multiple and idiosyncratic. Their particularity cannot be circumscribed by any single pattern. The twists and turns of all the ways that human lives can spiritually develop cannot be predicted in advance. The human odysseys that emerge in Kierkegaard’s pages are too messy and variegated to be categorized so neatly. Similarly, the ways in which people can lose their paths on life’s journey are legion and often unprecedented. No Hegel-like structural dynamic of the human spirit propels an advance through a neat, uniform
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If the exposure of the tensions within any given stage were so objectively convincing that it compelled any clear-headed reader to adopt the next highest stage, Kierkegaard’s strategy of evoking pathos would be subverted.
Risk, of course, requires some objective uncertainty, Climacus says, “for without risk, no faith; the more risk, the more faith; the more objective reliability, the less inwardness (since inwardness is subjectivity); the less objective reliability, the deeper is the possible inwardness” (CUP I, 209). Climacus’s sentiments are echoed throughout Kierkegaard’s work in his critique of speculative philosophy’s quest for certainty.
Kierkegaard’s strategy of maximizing the reader’s sense of responsibility undercuts any effort to ground life decisions in a neutral, objective description of human nature. If a reader were to embrace the religious life only because she felt that the accuracy of a particular developmental theory of human life was highly probable, that reader would be acting prudentially, not passionately.
Kierkegaard was not in the business of proffering a theory of human nature whose plausibility could be dispassionately established, for Kierkegaard was not in the business of trying to encourage objective certitude of any kind. It is at this point that we can begin to detect a divergence in the trajectories of Augustine and Kierkegaard.
Augustine did not entirely share Kierkegaard’s concern to protect and even stimulate the awareness of the lack of objective guarantees that genuine faith requires.
Kierkegaard was careful to develop his writing in such a way that uncertainty and risk would be preserved for the reader. The multivalent literary quality of Kierkegaard’s work leaves room for different possible responses.
Perhaps readers will identify with one of the voices and conclude that one of these ways of living should be adopted — to the exclusion of others. Or perhaps readers will resonate with different recommendations made by different voices, and decide that their competing demands should be somehow harmonized and integrated. Or readers might determine that the goals implicit in these ways of life should be prioritized according to some hierarchy of value, or that one should be subsumed under another, or that they should be held in a continuous dialectical tension. Perhaps readers should take
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The impact of the portrayal of the stages on readers is not a function of their dialectical plausibility but of the power of that portrayal to engage the reader’s imagination and stir the reader’s heart. That, of course, has a great deal to do with readers’ concerns and interpretive decisions.
Kierkegaard throws the responsibility of deciding how to respond to the various stages on the reader. Augustine was less concerned than was Kierkegaard with encouraging anxious self-responsibility and more concerned with offering reassurance and hope that the journey’s goal can be attained.
For example, there is a crucial difference between spontaneously pursuing an immediate pleasure and resolving to do one’s duty no matter what the consequences.
Pleasures, if indulged in with enough frequency, do have a tendency to lose their zest; initial infatuations do tend to fade.
Kierkegaard was using the conceptual device of “the stages,” a concept that would resonate with the fondness of his educated audience for Hegelian themes, to draw attention to a motley range of emotional dynamics that appear in different ways in different human lives.
For Kierkegaard, it remained crucial that “categories” not be confused; aesthetic considerations should be distinguished from ethical ones, and both should be differentiated from uniquely Christian categories, even if they all do interact in complex ways.
In a parallel way, Augustine had sought to dramatize the differences among Neo-Platonic piety, Roman civic virtue, Manichean flight from the world, and true Christian faith. Both thinkers drew distinctions in order to demarcate the uniqueness of the various life options and make room for the sui generis pathos of Christianity.
Dissertation subheadings in Chapter One
notion of stages of life also captures something important about the Christian construal of life as a journey.
First, the depiction of the aesthetic life shows that an individual always begins life’s journey in a state that combines varying degrees of disorientation, dispiritedness, confusion about the goal, entanglements with impeding factors, obsession with inferior goods, paralysis, and unwillingness to venture forward.
For both Kierkegaard and Augustine, this seems to be where we find ourselves as children. In short, the journey begins in some version of the aesthetic life, and the habits, attitudes, and dispositions associated with it continue to plague the wayfarer.
Progress on the road necessarily involves purgation and radical transformation. Put in the more theological language favored by Augustine, the journey must include the continuing struggle of repentance, conversion, and sanctification.
Kierkegaard and Augustine are agreed that we must be prepared to surrender our overvalued lesser goods if the pursuit of the highest good requires it. Kierkegaard’s many and extensive discussions of resignation are motivated by this conviction that earthly goods, no matter how cherished and worthy, must be subordinated to the need to keep traveling toward the human journey’s destination.
God must be described as the highest good, the good for which we are willing to sacrifice every lesser good, a claim that Augustine also made in lauding the lives of the Christian martyrs.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Johannes de Silentio praises “the knigh...
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The lover’s willingness to sacrifice everything, including the hope of enjoying an actual relationship with the princess, in order to be faithful to the memory of his beloved serves as an analogy to the religious person who is willing to renounce all earthly goods for the sake of God. Augustine would have understood and appreciated this image, including its foregrounding of love for God, as well as the contrast of the ephemeral nature of earthly loves and the eternal nature of love for God.
In the same book, a particular aspect of the shocking tale of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac functions as another parable of resignation.
Of course, this infinite resignation only becomes Christian faith when it is held in dialectical tension with the disposition to rejoice in earthly goods as gifts from God.
Abraham was a “knight of faith” rather than a mere “knight of infinite resignation” because he was willing to receive Isaac back again.
Here de Silentio is articulating an aspect of the detachment theme common to many of the strands of classical culture that had shaped Augustine.
Climacus, paralleling de Silentio, elaborates the point that the willingness to subordinate all earthly happiness and aspirations to faithfulness to God inevitably involves suffering as the ordinary joys are surrendered (CUP I, 431-525).
Climacus, detachment from earthly sources of satisfaction will inevitably hurt. Climacus adds that the prospect of pain in relating absolutely to the absolute good and relatively to relative goods generates reluctance to undergo the necessary suffering and consequently evokes guilt over that hesitation. These points by Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writers could be read as synopses of major portions of Augustine’s Confessions, including the latter’s admission that he had feared ...
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good, God, relativizes our commonly held social aspirations and norms.
In the light of God’s surpassing value, all our commitments to such socially beneficial goods as being a dutiful citizen, an industrious worker, an honest business person, or a conscientious parent are of secondary importance, or are only of importance insofar as they are a component of loving God.
If God is more valuable than the most noble and lofty ideals of the human community at its best, then the ultimate good could be different from and even conflict...
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an exhaustive understanding of God’s will could never be gleaned through a compilation of society’s moral precepts and codes.
displays in his very demeanor a distancing from the social mores
passionate earnestness, wariness about breaking the profundity of silence, a suspicion of popular philosophical systems, and an idiosyncratic fascination with Abraham.
By telling the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac four different ways — each one accentuating Abraham’s struggle against despair — de Silentio encourages readers to identify with Abraham’s disorientation and with his own perplexity about Abraham.
De Silentio keeps pointing out that Abraham’s devotion to God trumps his parental obligation to preserve the life of his own child, one of society’s most fundamental precepts.
In the hands of de Silentio, Abraham’s unsettling story becomes a vividly painful example of the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” the demotion of communally defined or rationally justified ethical duties from the status of highest good (FT, 54).
