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

by Lee C. Barrett III

the story forces the reader to reexamine the relationship of devotion to God

this theme of the “teleological suspension of the ethical” by itself could be used to justify any kind of sociopathic behavior.

rest of his writing output provides criteria to make discriminations about the ways in which devotion to God might legitimately put the individual at odds with social mores, as distinguished from mere criminal or deranged behavior.

Through this literary strategy, Kierkegaard accentuates the difference between a life oriented toward a religious telos and a life aimed at some culturally constructed concept of collective well-being as the highest good.

One of the most painful forms of resignation that the religious life involves is the willingness to distance oneself from the collective consensus. ...

come to distinguish the lesser virtues of loyalty to the polis, the basic unit of classical society, from the ultimate virtues that constitute fidelity to God. Augustine made it clear that the celestial city takes precedence over the terrestrial empire. The absolute value of our true destination, the heavenly community, trumps the securities and contentments of the earthly city. Like Kierkegaard, as Augustine matured he increasingly emphasized the vast difference between the Christianized Roman Empire (the precursor of Kierkegaard’s Christendom) and the City of God. Major aspects of the classical culture that Augustine had treasured had to be jettisoned, drastically reconfigured, or relegated to a position of lesser importance. Both thinkers were agreed that our journey is not toward a city built by human hands or sustained by human power. Both were in accord that the life of civic virtue can be in tension with the Christian life, and can impede its progress. Both were also agreed that the task of relativizing the values of the ambient culture could be exceedingly arduous and painful. Whether those cultural goods are the delights of the theater, the attractions of modish philosophies, or even something more foundational, such as the consolations of married life and the comforts of a lucrative career, Augustine and Kierkegaard concurred that they had to be subordinated to the paramount task of progressing toward humanity’s chief end. The homeward journey requires a willingn...

Dissertation, Chapter 3

Kierkegaard’s construal of life as a journey, I must emphasize that his use of a variety of literary strategies, ranging from the construction of fictional authors to the formulation of philosophical arguments and schematizations, was designed to stimulate the requisite passional movement. In order to clarify the teleological nature of human life, Kierkegaard drew on the vocabulary and thought patterns of the popular philosophical anthropologies of his day.

Teological view of human nature

devices were intended to urge readers to reflect deeply on their existence and to consider the possibility that perhaps the human heart can only be satisfied through the life of faith, hope, and love.

“stages of existence,”

Kierkegaard seeks to enable readers to feel more deeply the moods, emotions, and passions that are ingredients of major existential options, and which they may already be experiencing inchoately and dimly.

Although such a change of a view of life is neither necessary nor inevitable, sensitive, self-reflective readers could come to feel the inadequacies in a particular way of life with such acuteness that it would foster a more intense dissatisfaction.

Kierkegaard used his vast arsenal of literary strategies, including his facility in adapting philosophical schemas to his own purposes, to encourage intentionality about the direction of one’s life as a whole.

the human journey requires intentionality and conscientiousness, Kierkegaard portrays existence as an advance out of unreflective and irresponsible childhood into the spiritual adulthood of self-responsibility and decisiveness.

tensions. In order to actualize its potential, the self must synthesize the temporal and the eternal, the infinite and the finite, freedom and necessity.

his pseudonymous Anti-Climacus, an advanced Christian, appropriates the seemingly arcane language about the self being “a relation that relates itself to itself,” a vocabulary common in German and Danish Idealist philosophy suggesting that the life of an individual should aim at synthesizing an ideal self with the concrete characteristics of the individual, including historical location, biological endowments, social context, psychological traits, and so on (SUD, 13-42). In a sense, an individual is not born as a “self,” but becomes a self by trying to actualize an ideal in the concrete circumstances of a particular life. The individual attains selfhood and becomes “conscious of itself as spirit” by striving to exist “before God” (SUD, 46, 77-79).

The “self” is not something that one immediately is but rather is something that one becomes through the intentional activity of assuming responsibility for the direction of one’s life. The individual becomes a genuine self through the earnestness of the journey. Selfhood minimally requires that the individual at least be willing to embark on this journey. Merely ambling aimlessly through life with no direction would be the death knell of the potential self.

Even Anti-Climacus’s most abstruse remarks about “the self” can be understood as goads and nudges urging readers to become increasingly earnest about their own pilgrimages.

The purpose of moving the reader to deeper self-concern motivates all of Kierkegaard’s esoteric t...

effort to stimulate the kind of self-reflection that can prepare readers for the pursui...

how individuals can get stuck, lost, derailed, or condemned t...

Kierkegaard prods and cajoles the reader to introspection, to observe humanity, and to make a...

Augustine and Kierkegaard were in fundamental agreement that human beings have a restless heart that can only be satisfied by God, and that life is a search for this satisfaction.

Life is indeed a journey home

The true nature and object of the restlessness in human lives can only be diagnosed retrospectively from the vantage point of Christian faith.

Knowledge of God, the true object of human restlessness, is not something that can be extrapolated simply from an analysis of the restlessness itself.

the journey motif used by Augustine and Kierkegaard does not presuppose any foundational theories of human nature detachable from the authors’ religious convictions, for even the minimal claim that people are seeking some kind of fulfillment is rooted in their Christian perspective.

Christian convictions led both Augustine and Kierkegaard to suppose that some general claims about the teleology of human nature are true.

Both Augustine and Kierkegaard can be read as showing how the Christian concept of salvation meshes with the basic dynamics of human life (as these can be discerned from the perspective of Christianity).

movement away from sin and toward God is simultaneously a movement away from fragmentation and toward self-integration.

the goal of our journey is or how to travel toward it cannot be deduced purely from an anal...

journey’s goal by our own locomotion or even know exactly w...

destination and the way to it are not alien to our created nature an...

Augustine and Kierkegaard assumed that the Christian message can make contact with certain fundamental aspirations intrinsic to our constitution as human beings.

Such a conviction of the commensurability of nature and grace suggests that neither Augustine nor Kierkegaard constructed an anthropology that then came to dominate their respective theologies.

Kierkegaard’s elaboration of the stages and his relational language about the self no more compromised the historic convictions of Christianity than did Augustine’s alleged Platonic framework. The tendencies to read Augustine as if he were a Neo-Platonist with a thin veneer of Christianity and to read Kierkegaard as if he were an existential phenomenologist with a Lutheran overlay fail to do justice to the extent to which the Christian telos determined the anthropological ruminations of both thinkers.61

searching for a vocabulary about human lives that would enable them to display the attractiveness of the Christian life (as well as its potential offensiv...

Both Augustine and Kierkegaard were engaging in a kind of passional apologetics, attempting to nurture passions that cou...

human nature is such that Christianity can awaken and satisfy the deep longings that are potentia...

Both Augustine and Kierkegaard presupposed that human beings are so constituted that transient earthly delights can never fully satisfy them.

Both of them assumed that, with some coaching perhaps, individuals could come to feel the discontent with worldly joys and to experience the lure of a mysterious alternative so acutely that they would begin to strive to find that alternative.

this quest would go through stages and be beset w...

the individual’s journey to God became God’s journey to the individual, as is evident in Augustine’s retrospective discovery of God’s governance in the seemingly contingent events in his life and in Climacus’s positing of Religiousness B.

individual’s journey to God and God’s journey to the individual as two basic tropes that jointly defined the rhythm of the Christian life.

Augustine tended to concentrate on the attractiveness of the destination in order to lure pilgrims forward. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, was much more intent on communicating a sense of the daunting nature of the way and the uncertainty of its viability.

This concern accounts for Kierkegaard’s adoption of various authorial personae and a presentation of a smorgasbord of life options. Augustine wanted to redirect desire through the power of attraction, while Kierkegaard sought to protect desire from the enervating impact of certitude and security. Augustine sought to reassure, motivate, and guide the faltering and wayward pilgrim, while Kierkegaard wanted to prevent the tranquilized pilgrim from slipping into a spiritual coma. Augustine always returned to the theme that the road leads to the beautiful homeland, while Kierkegaard typically reverted to the message that the path is long, narrow, and uncertain. For Augustine, the main enemy was the self’s overattachment to worldly happiness and power, while for Kierkegaard the most pressing foe was complacency and spiritual somnolence. Therefore, Augustine’s basic task was to entice and attract, while Kierkegaard’s central task was to destabilize and challenge. But in both cases the general purpose was the same: to keep the pilgrim moving.

Such formal accounts do not specify exactly what that object of desire or highest good is. All we know at this point is that, whatever God is, God is more desirable than anything else. Augustine himself raises the question of the actual nature of the ultimate object of desire in the Confessions after he has related the saga of the development of his love for God, asking, “So what do I love when I love my God?”

As we shall see, Augustine and Kierkegaard both attempted to clarify the concept “God” by exhibiting its more concrete uses in the Christian life.

the true heirs of Augustine’s theology would be the metaphysical ruminations of Jacob Böhme, Friedrich Schelling, and Paul Tillich, all

Augustine has been cast as an ontologist of the highest order, and Kierkegaard as a radical antirealist.

invitation to readers to reflect more deeply on their concerns about truth and being — in order to strengthen the desire for the ultimate good.