Theology of Søren Kierkegaard

Søren was deeply influenced by his father's religious experience and life, and felt obligated to fulfill his wish.

As for my own insignificant person, the reader will please recall that I am the one who finds the issue and the task so very difficult, which seems to suggest that I have not carried it out, I, who do not even pretend to be a Christian by going beyond it.

But it is always something to point out that it is difficult, even if it is done, as it is here, only in an upbuilding divertissement, which is carried out essentially with the aid of a spy whom I have go out among people on weekdays, and with the support of a few dilettantes who against their will come to join in the game."

This point was brought home by Kierkegaard in his 1845 book, Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life and in 1960 by Ronald Gregor Smith in his book, J G Hamann 1730-1788 A Study In Christian Existence, A poet has indeed said that a sigh without words ascending Godward, is the best prayer, and so one might also believe that the rarest of visits to the sacred place, when one comes from afar, is the best worship, because both help to create an illusion.

It would, I believe, be possible to detect in the writings of Hamann, in embryonic or sibylline form at least, almost all the major concerns of Kierkegaard.

A typical appraisal of the relative positions of the two men is that of Karlfried Grunder, in the first volume of the splendidly planned commentaries on Hamann’s main works.

“What matchless audacity,” I hear a thinker say, “what horrendous vanity, to presume to attach such importance to one’s own little self in this world-historically concerned, this theocentric, this speculatively insignificant nineteenth century.” I shudder; if I had not hardened myself against various terrors, I would probably stick my tail between my legs.

It attaches an entirely different sort of importance to my own little self and to every-so-little self, since it wants to make him eternally happy and that precisely within this single individual it presupposes this infinite interest in his own happiness as condition sin qua non [the indispensable condition], an interest with which he hates father and mother and thus probably also makes light of systems and world-historical surveys.

He sees the spiritual connection between God and the single individual much akin to Luther's idea of the priesthood of all believers.

Is it not true that you have felt the need of this and on this very day you feel the need of a love that can cover sins, your sins-and this is why you are going to the Lord’s table today?

While it is only all too true, as Luther says, that every human being has a preacher within him-he eats with him, drinks with him, awakens with him, sleeps with him, in short, is always around him, always with him, wherever he is and whatever he does, a preacher who is called flesh and blood, lusts and passions, habits and inclination-so it is also certain that deep within every human being there is a secret-sharer who is present just as scrupulously everywhere-the conscience.

When someone who enjoys health and strength and who possesses the best gifts of the spirit enters the service of the good with all that he has, with the range of years that seem to stretch out before him, with expectancy’s every demand upon life, every claim expected and demanded only for the sake of the good — and when, on the other hand, someone who sadly sees his earthly frailty and the day of disintegration so close that he is tempted to speak of the time granted him as the pastor speaks of it, when in the hour of resolution a person like that promises with the pastor’s words “to dedicate these moments” to the service to the good — whose tower then becomes higher?

[7]He wrote the following in his 1846 book, Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Although an outsider, I have at least understood this much, that the only unforgivable high treason against Christianity is the single individual’s taking his relation to it for granted.

Page 16And reinforced the same idea in his 1850 book, Practice in Christianity: When in sickness I go to a physician, he may find it necessary to prescribe a very painful treatment-there is no self-contradiction in my submitting to it.

"[8] and later explained what he meant in his Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, which Rollo May called "the declaration of independence for existentialism".

Richard McKeon (1900–1985) thought the imitators of Plato had misapplied his ideas and left the passions out of philosophy in favor of intellectualism.

This is the more surprising, since few philosophers, and even Augustine and Ambrose, or Rousseau and Kierkegaard, whose arguments reflect Plato’s dialectic and whose inquiries echo Socrates’ ironic questions, have devoted more thought than Plato to nonrational springs of human action and to nonintellectual insights into transcendent values — to love, poetry, intoxication, and the mystical perceptions of intuition and religion.

The theme of love, rather than the Idea of the Good, or the One, or the Beautiful, is suited to the focus in human action on motivation and inspiration instead of on the rational analysis of means and ends; and the techniques of poetry, religion, rhetoric, and drinking, which find their perfection in dialectic and philosophy, are appropriate to focus attention on the persuasion of men to action instead of on analysis of truths by which love operates and by which it finds its ultimate justification.

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling 1843, Hong p. 66-67The object of faith is the actuality of another person; its relation is an infinite interestedness.

But faith is a sphere of its own, and the immediate identifying mark of every misunderstanding of Christianity is that it changes it into a doctrine and draws it into the range of intellectuality.

Alas, it can happen that a person makes a mistake at the last moment, in that he, though truly humble before God, becomes proud of what he is able to do as he turns toward people.

Kierkegaard dealt with this question in Either/Or in this way: "The Bible says: For what would it profit a person if he gained the whole world but damaged his own soul; what would he have in return?

He wanted to be known as the philosopher of the internal and was against scientific proofs of Christianity through history, anthropology, and philosophy and the creation of systematic theology.

(See Philosophical Fragments) When Socrates believed that God is, he held fast the objective uncertainty with the entire passion of inwardness, and faith is precisely in this contradiction, in this risk.

When the child shuts its eyes and smiles, it becomes an angel; alas, when the adult comes to be alone before the Holy One and is silent-he becomes a sinner!

This is due to Christianity but from this it does follow that prominence or power can no longer become a snare for a person so that he becomes enamored of this dissimilarity, damages his soul, and forgets what it is to love the neighbor.

Whether someone savoring his arrogance and his pride openly gives other people to understand that they do not exist for him and, for the nourishment of his arrogance, wants them to feel it as he demands expression of slavish submission from them, or whether he slyly and secretly expresses that they do not exist for him simply by avoiding any contact with them (perhaps also out of fear that openness would incite people and endanger him personally)-these are basically one and the same.

The inhumanity and the un-Christianness of this consists not in the way in which it is done but in independently wanting to deny kinship with all people, with unconditionally every person.

When you go with God, you need to see only one single miserable person and you will be unable to escape what Christianity wants you to understand – human similarity.

No force is to be used-that could become dangerous; it must not come to a break-that could become dangerous; but a secret of hidden exasperation, a remotely intimated painful dejection will transform the power and honor and eminence into an affliction for the powerful, the honored, and the eminent, who still would not be able to find anything specific to complain about-because here lie the art and the secret.