Passion for Nothing

Kierkegaard's Apophatic Theology

Peter Kline

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506432656
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506432533
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Passion for Nothing offers a reading of Kierkegaard as an apophatic author. As it functions in this book, “apophasis” is a flexible term inclusive of both “negative theology” and “deconstruction.” One of the main points of this volume is that Kierkegaard’s authorship opens pathways between these two resonate but often contentiously related terrains.

The main contention of this book is that Kierkegaard’s apophaticism is an ethical-religious difficulty, one that concerns itself with the “whylessness” of existence. This is a theme that Kierkegaard inherits from the philosophical and theological traditions stemming from Meister Eckhart. Additionally, the forms of Kierkegaard’s writing are irreducibly apophatic—animated by a passion to communicate what cannot be said.

The book examines Kierkegaard’s apophaticism with reference to five themes: indirect communication, God, faith, hope, and love. Across each of these themes, the aim is to lend voice to “the unruly energy of the unsayable” and, in doing so, let Kierkegaard’s theological, spiritual, and philosophical provocation remain a living one for us today.

3

Infinite Reduplication: Kierkegaard’s Negative Concept of God

To become involved with God in any way other than being wounded is impossible, for God himself is this—how one involves himself with him.
. . . In respect to God, the how is the what.

—Kierkegaard ^[1]

God is infinite reduplication.

— Kierkegaard ^[2]

i

My goal in this chapter is to continue to trace some of the more conceptual contours of Kierkegaard’s apophaticism. It is, it should be noted, impossible to trace these contours exhaustively. It is a mark of their apophatic form that they are inexhaustible, able to be redetermined and re-launched endlessly and unpredictably. Fordoblelse, for instance, “reduplication” or “redoubling,” which is intimately related to Gjentagelse, “repetition,” is a concept that Kierkegaard deploys unsystematically across an extraordinary range of problematics: God, the self, Christ, writing, communication, suffering, joy, patience, faith, hope, love, inwardness, hiddenness—each of these has Fordoblelse at its heart. What exactly Fordoblelse is cannot be definitely said or stabilized. It is a “how” not a “what.” It sets thought and existence in apophatic motion. It is not a principle that produces delimited or articulable identities. It is a principle of movement that ruptures and allows an excess into identity. Kierkegaard’s concepts are wounded by open-endedness and an indetermination, a transcendence, a “nothing,” that cannot be reinscribed speculatively.

The history of Kierkegaard interpretation is relatively sparse when it comes to interpretations of his concept of God.^[3] This is undoubtedly owing, in part, to the fact that the quantitative weight of Kierkegaard’s pages leans heavily in the direction of ethical, existential, and spiritual exposition. There are only a handful of passages in which Kierkegaard discusses directly his concept of God. Nevertheless, quantitative weight does not decide on qualitative importance. A negatively theological (non)apprehension of God underwrites the movements of his ethical, existential, and spiritual writings. It is precisely because Kierkegaard’s concept of God is apophatic that it hides itself in these expositions. It gets off itself, ex-positioning itself within lived ex-istence.

This chapter will follow this x-positioning of the concept of God. I will move through three of Kierkegaard’s theological coordinates that frame the impossibility of a concept of the divine: “infinite qualitative difference,” “unconditioned, being-in-and-for-itself,” and “infinite reduplication.” Of these three, infinite reduplication expresses the apophatic core of Kierkegaard’s thought and connects him, as I’ve already explored, to Eckhartian apophaticism. Along the way, I will show how these coordinates underwrite the movements of gift, generosity, freedom, and abandon. At the heart of these movements is an apophasis of divine intentionality. Kierkegaard is explicit that in relation to creation God has “no intentions,”^[4] no determinate plan, no why, only an infinite attention, intimacy, longing and joy. God is nothing but an absolute “with,” the “with” of love without why.

ii

Infinite Qualitative Difference

The notion of God as infinite or absolute difference runs through Kierkegaard’s authorship. In Philosophical Fragments, for instance, God is that which is “absolutely different.”^[5] Absolute difference is an entirely dialectical or paradoxical idea, one found also at the heart of Eckhart’s theology. Absolute difference is not any kind of measureable or quantifiable difference or distance. It is difference absolved not only of sameness but also of difference, meaning that one cannot articulate or grasp the absolute in its difference. It is neither identical nor different. The absolute cannot be placed in the oppositional frames that structure knowledge—not this but that. The absolute is infinitely dis-placed—neither this nor that. It escapes all opposition, all duality through which it could be reduced to something knowable, even negatively. This is why Eckhart names God as “distinction without distinction,” or difference without difference. It is why Kierkegaard says that God has “no distinguishing mark,”^[6] nothing that would mark off God’s difference. God is without determination, even negative determination. God is the absolute limit to thought, its “torment”^[7] that leaves it without rest and conclusion, dis-placed and undone. God is beyond all speech, beyond all silence, too. For Johannes Climacus, neither the “via eminentiae” nor the “via negationis”^[8] puts thought on a path toward God. God is never found as the conclusion of any method. Neither this nor that, God is this—that every method fails. God is no more the infinite perfection of creaturely being than its infinite negation. God escapes, slips beyond, all determinable difference.

When Kierkegaard writes, “God himself is this—how one involves himself with him,”^[9] and, “God is this—that everything is possible,”^[10] and, “In respect to God, the how is the what,”^[11] he is letting God slip beyond determination. He is withdrawing from the gesture of supplying ontological predicates to a divine being. God is “predicatless,”^[12] beyond any possible ontological predication, a subjectivity to which no predicates can be attached, or a subjectivity that reduplicates itself as its own predicate. God is “pure subjectivity”^[13]—I am who I am.

“Pure subjectivity” is not so much a stable concept of God as it is a marker for a kind of apophatic rule: do not let speech about God fall into the fantasy that it is capturing God with propositions and predicates. Kierkegaard obeys this rule when he writes sentences that follow an apophatic form: “God himself is this—how one involves himself with him,”^[14] and, “God is this—that everything is possible.”^[15] Initially, God as the subject of a sentence is announced with the implicit promise of supplying this subject with a series of predicates, determining this subject through its mediation through an object: “God is this—” But then Kierkegaard immediately breaks off the sentence, he writes an em dash, a crossing out that holds open the apophatic impossibility of determining God in any kind of objective way. What then follows is not a movement of mediation, a synthesizing of subject and object. What follows is a reduplication of subjectivity, a withdrawal from objectivity that opens up ethical-religious tasks. God is not a subject with a determinate essence. God is purely an act of existing as nothing objective, as “nothing,” which is a “how” and not a “what.” What the self relates to when it relates to God is therefore its own coming into existence as nothing objective, its openness to possibilities that have no necessity to be, that are predicated upon no prior essence. God is existence opening without ground, absolutely, miraculously. “God is this—that everything is possible.”

The apophatic rule might go something like this: when speaking of God, do not speak as if you were supplying predicates to a divine being. Speak, rather, an event, a happening, one that names the happening of the divine as nothing, a nothin-ing. God is this—that everything is possible, that closure is impossible, that metaphysics comes to grief and is tormented by a fever it cannot break, that there is hope, that an infinite relationality and responsibility beckons, that there is more, always more, trust and generosity to enter, that my self is a task to be taken up non-possessively rather than an identity or an object to secure. Such speech resists the temptation of speaking about God. God cannot be spoken about. “God cannot be an object.”^[16] God moves elusively in a saying that does not congeal into a said, or even into a silence, but in a saying that keeps itself in motion, withdrawin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraphs
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Attunement
• The Silent Beginning: Nothing Is Better Than Something
• Indirect Communication: Writing with a Wink
• Infinite Reduplication: Kierkegaard’s Negative Concept of God
• Faith: Action to Excess
• Hope: Keeping Time Absurdly Open
• Love: Holding Nothing in Common
• In-Conclusion: Beginning Again
• Bibliography
• Index