Recovering Christian Character

The Psychological Wisdom of Søren Kierkegaard

Robert C. Roberts

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467464888
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

Discipleship guidance from the writings of Kierkegaard  

Genuine Christian character often runs counter to prevailing notions of Christianity—as much in today’s era of nationalistic religiosity as in the staid Christendom of Søren Kierkegaard’s time. Kierkegaard responded to the hypocrisy around him by becoming a missionary of sorts in the Western world. Through his writing he exposed the illusions of conventional wisdom while advancing a compelling vision of the true Christian life that would give rise to essential virtues like faith, hope, love, patience, gratitude, and humility. What might Kierkegaard say to us today about recovering a genuine Christian character amid manifold corruptions of the gospel? 

Robert C. Roberts guides the reader through Kierkegaard’s thought about character—clarifying while never unduly simplifying—to show how Kierkegaard’s prescient psychological insights can be applied in the lives of twenty-first-century Christians interested in personal formation. Taking on a Kierkegaardian voice of his own, Roberts powerfully illustrates how virtue arises not from the mastery of individual ethical principles but from the continuity of one’s soul with the heart of God.

PART ONE

The Psychological Framework

1 HUMAN NATURE

Although Socrates did his very best to gain knowledge of human nature and to know himself—yes, even though he has been eulogized for centuries as the person who certainly knew man best—he nevertheless admitted that the reason he was disinclined to ponder the nature of such creatures as Pegasus and the Gorgons was that he still was not quite clear about himself, whether he (a connoisseur of human nature) was a more curious monster than Typhon or a friendlier and simpler being, by nature sharing something divine (Phaedrus 229e).

Johannes Climacus, Philosophical Fragments, 37

ARISTOTLE AND ANTI-CLIMACUS

Aristotle thought you could discern the nature of an animal or plant species by considering the conditions of its flourishing and the ways it may deviate from such flourishing, leaving it sick and moribund. Each species of plant and animal has its own way of living, its function, its own way of thriving and doing the sorts of things that its species nature (we might say its DNA) prescribes that it should do. For optimal growth and functioning, each plant species requires its own special combination of heat and light, water, and type of soil. In the same way, according to Aristotle, the human species is rational and social in such a way that it will thrive and function optimally only if it lives in a well-constituted city-state, has acquired virtues like justice and temperance, and engages in inquiry about itself and its world. Aristotle pictures plant and animal species as being driven by their inner nature toward fulfillment, maturity, and thriving. The difference between plant and animal species on the one hand and the human species on the other is that we human beings can become aware of our inner teleology and try to arrange our life for ourselves to maximize the likelihood that we will live well as human beings. That is, we can consciously and rationally pursue our own happiness. We might say that the desire for happiness is the master passion for human beings.

In the first part of The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anti-Climacus offers a sort of Aristotelian normative account of the human being in which he sketches what it takes for such a being to live well the characteristically human life. The “drive” for completeness in the human case, in contrast with all the other animal species, is to become a self or spirit. We human beings are driven by our human nature to be somebody, to acquire and develop a particular human identity. Thus, Anti-Climacus’s account takes constantly into consideration a peculiarly human and fundamental kind of failure to flourish that he calls despair. No other animal is subject to this sickness because no other animal has the distinctively human nature, with its drive for selfhood. For most plants and animals, the conditions of their flourishing are environmental. Given the right external conditions, the individual plant or animal grows automatically to be healthy and to function properly. While human beings are subject to environmental conditions as well, our flourishing depends, in addition, on internal conditions, in particular the choices we make, many of which are about attitudes that we adopt. What is this nature that makes the human species uniquely liable to despair, this sickness unto death? Let’s first think in general terms about despair.

DESPAIR

What is despair (Fortvivlelse)? We despair of something when we care very much about being or having or doing something, and we see that circumstances definitively prevent it. It is an unhappy emotion, an attitude we may feel. Imagine a man deeply in love with a woman who refuses to return his love. He cannot help loving her and wanting her to return his love; but he also sees that he cannot get her to love him. So he despairs of her love. His despair would be resolved by either one of two changes: either that he ceases to care about her, or that she begins to love him. If neither resolution is available, he despairs. The pain of emotional despair is a pain of frustration—the pain of being denied what we passionately desire and cannot stop desiring.

By extension, we might be in a kind of virtual despair if we care very much about being, having, or doing something while, unbeknownst to us, circumstances definitively rule it out. Without knowing it, we are in “desperate” circumstances. We wouldn’t be aware of being in despair in this sense, but we would be disposed to feel despair if we found out that circumstances rule out what we “desperately” desire. Imagine a person who has dreamt for years of emigrating to America, the land of opportunity, to rear his children. He has been saving money to that end. This dream is a constant preoccupation, a goal that gives meaning to his every choice and action. But unbeknownst to him, the bank in which he has been depositing his money for years has been embezzling it, so that he cannot possibly emigrate. As long as he is ignorant of this fact, he is optimistic and full of hope for his children’s future. But since his circumstances are in fact desperate, he might be said to be virtually in despair even though he doesn’t realize it. Similarly, we might be in virtual despair if, though we know that something is impossible, we are not aware of caring about it. Imagine an Anna Karenina who is in love with Vronsky but who is, as yet, unaware of being so; being married, she knows that to be united with Vronsky is impossible. She too might be said to be in virtual despair—virtual in this case because of her ignorance of something about herself. So explicit, conscious despair combines an awareness of wanting something very much and an awareness that it is impossible. It is painful. Virtual despair occurs when a person is unaware of one or the other of these two states. As long as it remains virtual, this kind of despair is not painful.

The examples I’ve given so far—being in love with someone, the desire to emigrate—are concerns that in principle a person could give up, even if this particular sufferer cannot bring himself psychologically to give up the concern and so escape despair that way. Fundamental despair, by contrast, is despair based on a concern that is fundamental to human nature: in particular, the concern to become a self. The Sickness unto Death is a systematic treatment of fundamental despair. This kind of despair is based on a completely nonnegotiable, unavoidable, and not-to-be-forsaken concern to be a self or spirit. It is a concern with which every human being is stuck, like it or not. If this concern is not satisfied by actually becoming spirit, the person will be in despair.

Although the word “despair” is an emotion term, in The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anti-Climacus treats fundamental despair as a kind of character trait. This is not an unusual way to treat an emotion-term. When we say, “Joe is an envious young man,” we are not claiming that Joe is currently feeling envy, but that he has a disposition that marks Joe’s personality or character. We are not necessarily even saying that when Joe is in the grip of the emotion of envy, he feels envy. Perhaps his envy is repressed, so that he honestly doesn’t think he is envious as he belittles one of his more talented colleagues. He might say that he feels contempt for the colleague or concern for the work that he supposes the colleague should be doing but, in his opinion, is shirking. Similarly, when Anti-Climacus writes about the universality of despair among human beings, he isn’t claiming that we are all feeling the emotion of despair, but that our souls are such that, were we to become aware of ourselves and our situation vis-à-vis God, we would feel the emotion. He calls it a sickness, but he might also have called it a vice, though a vice with many forms, as we will see.

As far as we know, human beings are the only creatures for whom the identity of the self, and the acceptance of one’s identity, is an issue. Kierkegaard will say that this being an issue for human beings is part of there being “something eternal” in the self.

All despair, as well as its virtue-counterpart of faith, involves “willing,” either to be oneself or not to be oneself. That is Anti-Climacus’s way of saying that these states of the self are basically concerns, desires, cares, or passions. We are reminded of the saying of Jesus, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21). That is, what you care about makes for what you are. The ultimate or most fundamental concern of a human being is the passion for selfhood, the desire to be “spirit.” We all want to be selves; we want to be somebody, somebody in particular, an individual human being, a genuine human being, really ourselves. Yes, this is what we want fundamentally; it is the real and ultimate spring of our motivation; but it is subject to many distortions and misconceptions of its target. So we need instruction in the questions: What is a human being? What kind of being are we?

SPIRIT

Anti-Climacus notes, “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself” (SUD, 13). This is pretty abstract, but it says that the self is composite, made up of pairs of aspects that are related to one another—or rather, the self itself actively relates its polar aspects to one another. The “activity” of relating the aspects may be of either of two kinds: the self may “relate” the aspects by the way it cares about and thinks about itself and its world; or it may “relate” them even more “actively” by “choosing” itself (though in choosing itself, it chooses a way of caring and thinking about itself and its world). What are these aspects, and what is the nature of the activity in which the self relates them to one another? “A human being,” says Anti-Climacus, “is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity” (SUD, 13). So the relation between the polarities is “synthesis”: the two poles are integrated with each other in some way. He goes on to distinguish two applications of the word “synthesis.” In one sense, the self is a synthesis of these elements whether or not it is willing and glad to be that; we might say that a human being is stuck with being finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, subject to necessity and free (we might call this the “given” synthesis, and label it synthesis 1 or selfhood 1). If you are not glad to be such a synthesis, then you are in despair. In a second sense of “synthesis,” the self “synthesizes” these elements of itself only if, of its own will, it orders these elements of itself in an appropriate order, relating them to each other in a correct relation. Let us call this synthesis 2 or selfhood 2. In this case, the self is no longer in despair. We learn later that the name of this proper relating of the elements of the self to one another is called “faith.” The human being has become genuinely a human self, or “spirit.” Let’s try to get clear on the three polarities of which the self is a synthesis (synthesis 1), and which the self actively synthesizes (synthesis 2). The three polarities are

the finite / the infinite

the temporal / the eternal

necessity / freedom

Let’s begin with the temporal/eternal polarity. We human beings are temporal insofar as we have a lifespan of some finite number of years, and at any moment of our lives we identify that present moment by reference to our past and our future. I grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and am the son of Verne and Betty Roberts; and as I write this I will (God willing) turn seventy-nine years old next month. The past cannot be changed, but the future is somewhat unknown and open. We are also nontemporal or eternal. We are not locked into the present moment the way other sentient creatures are. Our eternal aspect is exemplified in a kind of mental or imaginative power to consider times past, before we came into existence, and times future far beyond the temporal boundary of our lives. In a certain sense, we can step out of our present moment in time and “live” the past or the future by the power of our imagination. Think of reading history or a historical novel—or of vividly planning next summer’s vacation. It is also exemplified in that we can access eternal truths such as moral principles by which, say, our duty is defined (and also necessary and unchanging mathematical principles, though Kierkegaard shows little interest in this). If we will admit it to ourselves, we have longings for contact with what is eternal; man does not live by temporality alone. And finally, we are eternal insofar as we can and sometimes do have a kind of harmonious fellowship with what is eternal, the divine being, the power from which the synthesis (that is, we the self) has sprung. Anti-Climacus calls that fellowship “resting in.” More of that later, and in chapter 9. What are the finite/infinite polarity and the necessity/freedom polarity?

The finite and the infinite overlap the temporal and the eternal inasmuch as the finite aspect of the self includes its temporal finitude, and the eternal can be thought of as infinite time. They also overlap necessity and freedom in a human life. Necessity in this connection is not logical necessity, as in the necessity that if if p then q is true, and p is true, then q is true. Instead, necessity is all those facts about your life which, though not by nature unchangeable, are fixed and cannot be changed by any action that you might take. For example, Søren Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Denmark and had a certain genetic makeup that made him a genius of intellect and imagination. He couldn’t change these facts, and insofar as he could choose what to do with his life, the choice would have to be made within the boundaries of these finitudes or “necessities.” But if he is not merely finite in this sense, but also has freedom to choose within these limits, then his humanity is a synthesis of necessity and freedom. The range of his possible choices is not literally infinite, but it is somewhat open and certainly not fixed in advance. So when he writes in his diary at the age of twenty-three—

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do, the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. (JP 5:5100, italics original)

—he may have several options to choose from. The choice that he makes is not “necessary.” Yet he chooses from a finite number of options, and he might choose unwisely, in such a way that he doesn’t tether his infinite and eternal aspect rightly to his temporality, or that he doesn’t infuse his temporality rightly with the demands of eternity. What does “rightly” mean here? It might mean two things: (1) he must choose an occupation that is suited to his talents, but more importantly, (2) he must choose that occupation in such a way as to dedicate it to God, to “offer” it to God on a daily basis, to trust God for daily sustaining in the vocation, to thank God for the vocation and its fruits. Thus he relates himself to himself (he chooses what he himself will be), and in doing so relates himself to Another. He can make either of these kinds of choice well or badly, but making especially the second badly leads to despair, a kind of self-hatred. It would seem that even choosing the first kind of option badly would be inconvenient and distressful, but a life that fails in finite terms can nevertheless succeed and even flourish if the relation to the eternal is right. In the thoughts that he records in his journal, the young Kierkegaard is definitely on the right track insofar as he is looking for an activity that accords with God’s will (thus satisfying the need for the eternal and infinite), an activity that will exercise his given talents and occupy his time (thus satisfying the need to synthesize the eternal and infinite with the temporal and finite) and will do so within the natural limits of his talents and time.

Thus Anti-Climacus believes not only in what we might call finite necessity—the finite limits on a...