The Mystical Sources of Existentialist Thought

Being, Nothingness, Love

George Pattison, Kate Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351607261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Mysticism

At the time when existentialism was a dominant intellectual and cultural force, a number of commentators observed that some of the language of existential philosophy, not least its interpretation of human existence in terms of nothingness, evoked the language of so-called mystical writers. This book takes on this observation and explores the evidence for the influence of mysticism on the philosophy of existentialism.

It begins by delving into definitions of mysticism and existentialism, and then traces the elements of mysticism present in German and French thought during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book goes on to make original contributions to the study of figures including Kierkegaard, Buber, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Sartre, Marcel, Camus, Weil, Bataille, Berdyaev, and Tillich, linking their existentialist philosophy back to some of the key concerns of the mystical tradition.

Providing a unique insight into how these two areas have overlapped and interacted, this study is vital reading for any academic with an interest in twentieth-century philosophy, theology and religious studies.

1
Kierkegaard

Annihilation in love

Kierkegaard’s knowledge of mysticism

We have seen that the development and dissemination of the modern idea of mysticism is intimately bound up with the history of German Idealism in both its Romantic and philosophical forms. Of course, for Kierkegaard, as for other existentialist thinkers, the relation to German Idealism was not a straightforward relation of affiliation but one involving significant contestation. If there is a relationship between Hegelian or Schellingian mysticism and Kierkegaardian mysticism, we can reasonably assume that the differences will be as striking as the similarities. Here, as often, we should not despise the obvious, and we might also reasonably assume that these differences will have to do with Kierkegaard’s promotion of an individual, passionate kind of subjectivity that dispenses with the need to seek anything like the assured objective knowledge sought by the philosophers as well as with the religious rather than scholarly atmosphere of Kierkegaardian thought.

Kierkegaard’s own knowledge of sources that could typically be regarded as ‘mystical’ was quite extensive. His family regularly attended the Pietist meetinghouse in Copenhagen, and Pietism played an important role in sustaining a continuing mystical tradition within Protestantism. For example, Kierkegaard’s fiancée, Regine Olsen (whose family also attended the Pietist meetings), declared Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ to be her favourite reading. Kierkegaard himself tells us that Johann Arndt’s True Christianity was his daily reading, along with the sermons of J. P. Mynster. This is important because Arndt himself recycled a significant amount of material from older mystical sources, including Eckhart and Tauler.

In 1843 Kierkegaard’s sometime tutor and lifelong rival H. L. Martensen published a study of Meister Eckhart, including a selection of primary materials that Kierkegaard is likely to have read.¹ But we know that Kierkegaard also had first-hand knowledge of a range of mystical writers, including Tauler and the Protestant Tersteegen, as well as Catholic writers such as François de Sales, Fénelon, and Pascal, whilst Danish figures such as the eighteenth-century Bishop H. A. Brorson, whose hymns emphasized the suffering imitation of Christ, can also be credited as offering mystical perspectives.² Kierkegaard also had some knowledge of figures such as Bernard of Clairvaux and, despite his aversion to anything having to do with Martensen, Eckhart and Boehme as well.³

Kierkegaard as critic of mysticism

Kierkegaard is often seen as an essentially anti-mystical writer. In Either/Or the fictional Assessor Vilhelm offers a strong criticism of a mystical approach to life, which, as he makes clear, refers specifically to Christian mysticism. Although he speaks of the mystic’s life as ‘profound’ and says that the mystic has ‘chosen himself absolutely’ and has ‘chosen God’, ‘his action is internal action’. The mystic ‘chooses himself in his perfect isolation; for him the whole world is dead and exterminated, and the wearied soul chooses God or himself’.⁴ Developing the point further, he adds that ‘For the mystic the whole world is dead; he has fallen in love with God. Now the development of his life is the unfolding of this love.… [T]he mystic is absorbed in contemplation of the divine, whose image is reflected more and more in his loving soul, and thus the mystic renews and revives the lost image of God in humankind. The more he contemplates, the more this image is reflected in him, the more he himself comes to resemble this image’.⁵ Going on, the Assessor comments that the expression of this love is essentially prayer: prayer ‘is the only language in which he can address the deity, with whom he has fallen in love’.⁶ And ‘Just as… lovers feel most blissful in [their] whispering when they actually have nothing at all to talk about, so for the mystic his prayer is all the more blessed, his love all the happier, the less content his prayer had, the more he in his sighing almost vanishes from himself’.⁷

All this could be read as positive and is in some respects not a travesty of what is said in many mystical writings. However, the Assessor’s own favoured life-view is what he calls the ethical life-view, which, in his terms, means choosing oneself in the concrete circumstances of one’s life in the world and fulfilling one’s duty to God by taking up the work and social roles in which one has been placed by divine providence. The mystic may acquire ‘religious or contemplative virtues’, but he does not acquire ‘personal virtues’.⁸ His life is a life of withdrawal from the world rather than acting within it. The Assessor adds some further, arguably harsher criticisms: ‘the mystic cannot be absolved of a certain obtrusiveness in his relationship with God’,⁹ nor can he be absolved of a certain ‘softness and weakness’,¹⁰ and, finally, his attitude is ‘a deception of the world in which he lives, a deception of the persons to whom he is bound or with whom he could establish a relationship if it had not pleased him to become a mystic’.¹¹ The mystic, in other words, becomes alienated from and indifferent to others, but that is not what Christianity means by the love of God since this love also implies love of others. The Assessor drives home his point with an anecdote about one Ludvig Blackfeldt. Had Blackfeldt lived in the Middle Ages, he says, he would almost certainly have become a monk but because this was not an option in the present age, he ended by killing himself. Citing a letter from Blackfeldt himself, he takes it as evidence that mysticism and suicide are, essentially, twin versions of what he calls the ‘negative form’ of ‘infinite freedom’.¹²

The Assessor’s views cannot, of course, be taken as definitive of Kierkegaard’s own – he is, after all, only a fictional character in a pseudonymous work, and many commentators view him as merely a transitional figure toward a more radical kind of religiosity. Certainly his comments flag up a concern that we do meet elsewhere in other pseudonymous works and in works published under Kierkegaard’s own name. In a similar vein the pseudonym Johannes Climacus warns that the flight to the monastery cannot be a decisive expression of Christian discipleship, whilst a later pseudonym, Anti-Climacus (said by Kierkegaard himself to represent a radically Christian position) insists that the point of Christian discipleship is that it is carried out on weekdays, on the streets, even (he says) in Copenhagen’s bustling Amager Square. But the concern that the mystic might be seen as exemplifying only a negative freedom or be engaged in a flight from the world does not exclude the possibility of a positive reception of mystical texts, sources, and themes in Kierkegaard’s own version of Christianity, and this is, indeed, what the texts themselves suggest. So what exactly are the mystical elements in Kierkegaard’s thought?

Mysticism in Kierkegaard’s religious writings

The passages that have the most clearly pronounced mystical features are probably not amongst the best-known Kierkegaard proof texts, not least because they are largely from the upbuilding discourses that have for such a long time been the poor relations of Kierkegaard commentary. But they are there, and they are of a kind that would certainly merit the epithet ‘mystical’ in any standard use of the term.

A common theme of mystical writing is, for example, the annihilation of the ego or self as a condition of union with God, often focused in particular on the annihilation of the will. So, in the discourse entitled ‘Human beings’ greatest perfection is to know their need of God’, Kierkegaard describes how a person who is aroused to concern about their own existence will discover that they are in fact unable to complete the project of self-mastery. Instead, they will find themselves in a situation in which the better self is pitted against another self, the lower self, but, as Kierkegaard notes, no one is stronger than himself, and neither side will be able to prevail over the other. Those who engage in this struggle for self-overcoming therefore find themselves ‘capable of nothing’ but ‘He who is himself altogether capable of nothing, cannot undertake even the smallest thing without God’s help, that is to say, without being aware that there is a God’.¹³ And ‘he who, on the contrary, knows from himself [his own experience] that he can do nothing at all, has every day and in very moment the wished-for and incontrovertible opportunity of experiencing that God lives’.¹⁴ Annihilation of the self is thus the negative aspect of a positive experience of God.

This positive experience is more fully emphasized in the closing discourse from the same collection, ‘The person who prays aright strives in prayer and triumphs by allowing God to triumph’. Here Kierkegaard asks ‘Who should the one who thus struggles [in prayer] wish to be like if not God?’ To which he replies that

if he himself is anything [in his own eyes] or wants to be anything, then this something is enough to prevent the likeness [from appearing]. Only when he himself becomes utterly nothing, only then can God shine through him, so that he becomes like God. Whatever he may otherwise amount to, he cannot express God’s likeness but God can only impress his likeness in him when he has become nothing. When the sea exerts all its might, then it is precisely impossible for it to reflect the image of the heavens, and even the smallest movement means that the reflection is not quite pure; but when it becomes still and deep, then heaven’s image sinks down into its nothingness.¹⁵

This same image recurs in more or less identical form at the end of the discourse ‘On the Occasion of Confession’:

And so we liken the heart to the sea, because its purity and constancy are in its depth and transparency.… As when the sea lies still and transparent to its depths, so does the heart become pure when it desires the good. As the sea reflects heaven’s loftiness in its depths, just so, when it is stilly and deeply transparent, does the heart reflect heaven’s sublime loftiness in its pure depths.¹⁶

Light, reflection, and transparency are recurrent themes in mystical literature. Strikingly, both the text and many of the illustrations in older editions of Johann Arndt’s True Christianity play on just such images: in one, for example, we see light shining through a glass window and being reflected off a mirror laid out on a table, providing the same combination of reflection and transparency that we find in Kierkegaard’s text. A similar image is provided by Meister Eckhart, cited by Martensen, only this time it is the image of a mirror placed in the bottom of a bucket of water, reflecting the sun that shines down through the water – again combining both reflection and transparency.

In a later discourse (‘Joy’ from 1849), Kierkegaard deploys another key figure of mystical discourse in speaking of the presence of the eternal in the moment of time:

What is joy or what is being joyful? In truth, it is to be present to oneself. But to be present to oneself in truth, that is this ‘today’: it is this – to be today, in truth to be today. And to the same degree that it is true that you are today, and in the same degree that you are entirely present to yourself in being today, in that same degree will misfortune’s ‘next day’ not exist for you. Joy is the present time, where the entire stress lies on the present time. That is why God is blessed, for in all eternity He says, ‘Today’ – He who is eternally and infinitely present to Himself in being today. And that is why the lily and the bird are joy, because silently and obediently they are entirely present to themselves in being today.¹⁷

Indeed, Kierkegaard seems here to be as close to Zen mindfulness as to prototypes drawn from the history of Christian mysticism (though these are not lacking).

Such passages, and there are more, offer a strong textual basis for seeing Kierkegaard as in some respects a mystical writer. Nevertheless, it might be objected that he is not simply a mystical writer. Especially, it might seem (1) that his emphasis on the difference between divine and human seriously qualifies any mystical tendencies there might be in his thought; (2) that his religious thought is radically Christocentric and therefore essentially different from a mysticism that speaks only of the immediacy of the divine-human relationship (in other words, Christian faith is never without the specific mediation offered by Christ); (3) that, connected with this, one of Kierkegaard’s major contributions to the history of philosophy is precisely to have valorized the experience of temporality and the concreteness of life in such a way as to conflict with the mystical devaluation of time; and (4) that the idea of mystical immediacy obfuscates the ‘demand’ character of Kierkegaardian ethics with its almost Levinasian insistence on the ‘command’ as the basis of our obligation to love.

However, while these are all valid points – and are importantly interconnected – they can be read as qualifying rather than negating the ‘mystical’ element of Kierkegaardian thought. Indeed, rather than counting against a mystical reading, they open a way to a deeper and more expansive view of Kierkegaard’s mystical element that coheres with major currents of Christian mysticism as well as throwing a bridge from Christian experience to existential accounts of the human condition.

We begin with the objection that a mystical reading ignores the characteristically Kierkegaardian emphasis on the infinite absolute difference between divine and human. A key text here is a passage from the 1847 discourses on the lilies and the birds in which Kierkegaard offers a distinctive and original account of what it means for human beings to be made in the image of God. In this passage he is drawing a distinction between the lilies and the birds, which witness to God’s creative rule, and human beings, unique in being made in the image of God. Of course, what it means for human beings to be made in the image of God has been subje...