Living Christianly

Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Christian Existence

Sylvia Walsh

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780271026879
• eBook ISBN: 9780271075976
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Existencialismo en filosofía

The pseudonymous works Kierkegaard wrote during the period 1843–46 have been responsible for establishing his reputation as an important philosophical thinker, but for Kierkegaard himself, they were merely preparatory for what he saw as the primary task of his authorship: to elucidate the meaning of what it is to live as a Christian and thus to show his readers how they could become truly Christian. The more overtly religious and specifically Christian works Kierkegaard produced in the period 1847–51 were devoted to this task.

In this book Sylvia Walsh focuses on the writings of this later period and locates the key to Kierkegaard's understanding of Christianity in the "inverse dialectic" that is involved in "living Christianly." In the book's four main chapters, Walsh examines in detail how this inverse dialectic operates in the complementary relationship of the negative qualifications of Christian existence—sin, the possibility of offense, self-denial, and suffering—to the positive qualifications—faith, forgiveness, new life/love/hope, and joy and consolation. It was Kierkegaard's aim, she argues, "to bring the negative qualifications, which he believed had been virtually eliminated in Christendom, once again into view, to provide them with conceptual clarity, and to show their essential relation to, and necessity in, securing a correct understanding and expression of the positive qualifications of Christian existence."

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The Consciousness of Sin / Faith and Forgiveness

The central dialectical relationship in Christian existence is between sin and faith, or more precisely, between the consciousness of sin and the forgiveness of sin in faith. This relationship constitutes a major topic of concern in the writings of the second period of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, had already determined that sin is the “crucial point of departure” and “crucial expression” for religious existence and that it “is not a factor within something else, within another order of things, but is itself the beginning of the religious order of things” (CUP 1:267–68). In the Postscript sin is viewed as signifying an absolute breach of subjectivity with the eternal that posits a radical separation between human beings and God and results in the loss of their essential self-identity in relation to the divine. At the same time, however, sin functions dialectically in an inverse manner as the decisive expression for the religious mode of existence inasmuch as the consciousness of this condition serves as the basis for an individual’s relation to God or the eternal. That is, in the consciousness of sin one is consciously related to the eternal, but one’s relation to it is informed by a sense of separation from the eternal rather than by a positive continuity and unity with it. The consciousness of sin is at once a direct recognition of one’s radical breach with, and qualitative difference from, the eternal and an indirect expression of faith or a passionate commitment to the eternal in time as the source of one’s eternal happiness. Sin, the consciousness of sin, and faith are considered in the Postscript primarily in their functions as boundary categories that set Christian subjectivity off from other forms of subjectivity and provide the crucial expression of religious or Christian existence.¹ To this extent, then, Kierkegaard had already begun the conceptual clarification of these qualifications in his earlier pseudonymous literature. Over against the objectifying tendencies of the church, dogmatic theology, and speculative philosophy, Johannes Climacus makes the claim that Christianity is inwardness and then proceeds to show how Christian subjectivity is made qualitatively distinctive by these factors and must not be confused with or understood as the direct intensification of other forms of inwardness.

In the literature of the second period of his authorship, Kierkegaard approaches the category of sin, the consciousness of sin, and the forgiveness of sin maieutically and existentially. The problem of sin is initially referred to obliquely in the context of discussing other Christian qualifications and is explicitly taken up along with its dialectical correlates at a time when they were beginning to become crucial in his own life. A few days after completing the manuscript of Works of Love (1847), Kierkegaard made the following report in his journals: “From now on the thrust should be into the specifically Christian. . . . ‘The forgiveness of sins’ must be emphasized. Everything should concentrate on that point; it must be established again as a paradox before anything can be done. Christianity these days has become nonsense; that is why one is obliged to take on the double task of first of all making the matter beneficially difficult” (JP 5:6037). In subsequent journal entries during this period he exhibits an increasing preoccupation with the consciousness of sin, the atonement, and the forgiveness of sin.² But in the published literature the approach to the category of sin comes slowly and covertly through carefully planned steps of progression. Part 2 of Christian Discourses (1848) emphasizes the suffering that comes with being a Christian, but it also begins to hint at the fundamental problem of sin. At the end of every discourse except the first, Kierkegaard reiterates the phrase: “Only sin is a human being’s corruption.”³ And in his journals he explains that

these discourses are presented in such a way as to be continually tangential to the consciousness of sin and the suffering of sin—sin etc. are another matter: these discourses come to the subject of sin. Because the consolation lyrically rises as high as possible over all earthly need and misery, even the heaviest, the horror of sin is constantly banished. Thus another theme is cunningly concealed in these discourses: sin is a human being’s corruption.

In the ordinary sermon this is precisely the confusion: need and adversity are preached together—with sin.

Thus the category for these discourses is different from “The Gospel of Sufferings,” which leaves the suffering indefinite. Here the distinction is made: innocent suffering—in order to approach sin. (JP 5:6101, translation amended slightly)

As Kierkegaard progressed in the later literature and journals to a more specific determination of the categories of sin, the consciousness of sin, faith, and the relation of these factors to forgiveness, he focused primarily on conceptual confusions regarding the qualifications themselves as well as misunderstandings that obscure their proper position as the fundamental concern of the Christian gospel. Kierkegaard believed that people were ignorant of what sin is, or at most had only a confused, partial, and superficial notion of it. This condition was just as characteristic of the clergy and theologians of his day as it was of the common person. In fact, Kierkegaard blamed the former for fostering confusion in the latter. He attributed the clergy’s misunderstanding and misrepresentation of sin in large part to the fact that it had confused the Christian conception of sin with pagan and speculative notions that were actually incommensurable with the Christian viewpoint on this category. What was requisite, therefore, was a clarification of the Christian understanding of sin in distinction from these other views and a reconstitution of people’s understanding in regard to this Christian doctrine.

Part of this task of clarification consisted in elucidating the dialectical relation of sin to faith. Whereas the pagan understanding contrasted sin to virtue, Kierkegaard conceived sin to be the opposite of faith: “Very often . . . it is overlooked that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue. . . . No, the opposite of sin is faith. . . . And this is one of the most decisive definitions for all Christianity—that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith” (SUD 82).⁴ But sin may also figure in an indirect way as a negative factor in faith. Directly understood, sin leads a person away from faith, but indirectly it may function as a factor in the definition of and movement toward faith. Sin is thus both the dialectical counterpart and correlate of faith. The same may be said of a person’s consciousness of sin. It too is dialectical in nature, for the consciousness of sin can precipitate the continuation and intensification of sin as well as figure importantly in its forgiveness and annihilation. In the latter instance, the consciousness of sin functions as an indirectly positive aid in the movement toward faith. It is in this capacity that it emerges as the decisive negative qualification of Christian existence and the inverse sign of a positive relation to God and Christ.

Kierkegaard couples with this clarification of sin and the consciousness of sin the correction of another and even more fundamental confusion concerning the main purpose and promise of the gospel. As indicated in the quotation from Christian Discourses, part of the problem of human beings is that they do not know wherein their true sickness, real misfortune, and greatest danger in life lies. They generally associate these situations with earthly afflictions, whereas the true Christian has come to recognize and fear sin as a far greater danger, in comparison to which the other misfortunes of finite existence count as nothing. Christianly understood, only sin is “the sickness unto death.” Kierkegaard insists that the gospel is primarily directed toward the alleviation of this sickness, not external afflictions in life, and that the promise of Christianity is the forgiveness of sin, not the restoration of good fortune. But the common conception and application of Christianity are just the opposite. People turn to Christianity looking for solace and a reversal of their temporal misfortunes; Christian preaching presents the gospel to them precisely in this vein and reinforces their misconceptions; and the notion of the forgiveness of sin is superficially incorporated into this inverted framework and interpreted to include not only forgiveness but the memory of forgiveness. The result is that forgiveness too is misunderstood and taken in vain.

There are, then, basically three concerns that are addressed in the later literature relating to the dialectic of sin and faith and the consciousness of sin and forgiveness: (1) to provide a conceptual clarification of the Christian understanding of sin; (2) to indicate the indirectly positive role of the consciousness of sin in Christian existence; and (3) to clarify the role of the gospel in relation to the alleviation of sin and suffering.

The Definition of Sin

Clarification of the Christian understanding of sin is primarily undertaken in The Sickness unto Death. With the publication in 1849 of this important book under a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard’s own name as editor, the authorship assumed a different character. This new pseudonym represented the Christian existential position to which Kierkegaard, no less than his readers, was related as a striver. Through the pseudonym Kierkegaard could depict the Christian qualifications according to the most ideal standard, although he regarded it as nevertheless essential that he be related to this ideality as one engaged in striving to fulfill it. In his view, “it is a terrible thing for the requirements of the ideal to be presented by persons who never give a thought to whether their lives express it or not” (JP 6:6528; translation amended slightly). The fact that “the speaker and author himself defines himself as striving in relation to what is being communicated” is precisely what, in Kierkegaard’s estimation, distinguishes the religious poet from a typical poet and makes his communication authentic even though he does not fully embody the ideal described in it (JP 6:6528).

According to its subtitle, The Sickness unto Death is “A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening” (SUD iii). These two terms project a didactic and authoritative connotation that Kierkegaard was reluctant to attach to the writings he claimed as his own. The third part of Christian Discourses, “Thoughts That Wound from Behind,” had also been intended “for upbuilding” (til Opbyggelse), but when it came to assuming the authority to educate people in the strictest Christian categories, Kierkegaard demurred: “The upbuilding is mine, not the esthetic, not [the pseudonymous works] for upbuilding either, and even less those for awakening” (JP 6:6461). Anti-Climacus, therefore, could presume to do what Kierkegaard could not, which was to instruct people in the Christian understanding of sin and the consciousness of sin and to awaken them to an understanding of their essential nature as spirit or a self in relation to God and Christ.

Accordingly, in the first part of The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus defines a human being as spirit or a self, identifies despair as the condition that results from a person’s unwillingness to become a self, points out the universality of this “sickness,” and analyzes the basic forms of despair (despair in weakness and despair in defiance) that reveal a misrelation to oneself as a self and to God or the eternal as the transcendent power that constitutes the self. His analysis of the forms of despair is carried out in terms of the constituents that serve as the basis for despair (finitude and infinitude, possibility and necessity) and in terms of the unconscious and conscious levels of despair that denote its intensification.⁵ Anti-Climacus traces the forms of despair in order to display the heightening in conscious despair of three factors: (1) a true conception (Forestilling)⁶ of what despair is; (2) the individual’s consciousness of his or her own condition as despair; and (3) the consciousness of oneself as a self. Both conceptual clarity and existential clarity about oneself accrue in conscious despair and are the conditions requisite for the intensification of despair. The despair of the ethically conscious person culminates in a substantial realization of these conditions. But the determination of whether a person can have complete self-clarity and understanding and still remain in despair or whether knowledge and self-knowledge are in themselves sufficient to “wrench a person out of despair” is deferred to the second part. There “the whole deliberation . . . dialectically take[s] a new direction” and is viewed in a different way, from a Christian standpoint, in which despair is identified as sin (SUD 79).

In part 2, which is the section of the book most relevant to the present study, Anti-Climacus moves progressively in the delineation of a specifically Christian understanding of sin, which may be outlined in the following series of propositions:

1. Sin is despair. This statement does not mean that the foregoing stages of despair are simply redesignated as sin. Like subjectivity, sin is not any and every form of pathos but signifies a new level of despair. The despair that properly may be called sin presupposes, and represents a further intensification of, the factors that make up the two basic forms of conscious despair: despair in weakness and despair in defiance. Thus sin is the intensification of despair, either in the form of an intensification of weakness through not willing to be oneself, or an intensification of defiance in despairingly willing to be oneself. The lower forms of despair do not, in a strict sense, constitute sin, although ultimately all despair, when judged from the perspective of the higher viewpoint, may be seen as sin, since the misrelation in the self to whatever degree and in whatever respect is recognized as being grounded in a prior misrelation to God.

2. Sin is despair before God. The fact that sin is a form of despair establishes an element of continuity with the foregoing levels of despair and further heightens the factors that characterize conscious despair. Despair becomes even more intense, the individual in despair has a truer conception of what despair is, and he or she acquires a greater consciousness of having a self over and about which to despair. But the pathos of sin is not the result of a direct intensification of weakness or defiance, nor is the continuity that is preserved through intensification a direct continuity. This is entirely consistent with how Christian subjectivity is viewed in the Postscript. But in The Sickness unto Death the consciousness of the individual in sin is conditioned by the fact that, unlike the individual in the lower stages of despair, he or she exists “before God.” It is specifically this factor that makes “qualified despair” or intensified despair synonymous with sin and which, in Anti-Climacus’s opinion, radically distinguishes the sinner from other persons in despair. Sin is not merely despair or intensified despair, but is more closely defined as despair before God.

For Luther, to be “before God” or coram Deo meant in a general sense to be in the sight or presence of God in such a way that God becomes present to and exists for, or stands in relationship to, an individual. But according to the Luther scholar, Gerhard Ebeling, “the most important element in the situation that is implied by the preposition coram is not the way in which someone else is present before me, in my sight, but the way that I myself am before someone else and exist in the sight of someone else, so that my existential life is affected.”⁷ In like manner, for Anti-Climacus “before God” means to have a conception (Forestilling) of God that functions existentially as the criterion and goal of one’s selfhood. The “criterion” of a person is that in the face of which one is a self or is that which determines in a qualitative sense what one’s self essentially is or should be (SUD 79–80). Even when one is not that which is qualitatively one’s criterion and goal, it still functions as one’s criterion, manifesting “judgingly” that one is not what one should be (cf. 80 and SV1 11:192).

At the lower levels of despair the criterion of selfhood is the human itself, or the human being conceived in terms of its highest, humanly imaginable potentiality. By contrast, the person who has God for a criterion seeks to become not merely a human self, or the highest in terms of a merely human conception of the self, but a “theological self,” that is, a human self who is like God or who exists before God with the quality of being or reality that God defines for a human being rather than that which one projects for oneself (SUD 79). This has the radical effect of altering the very conception of the self. For now the self acquires “a new quality and qualification,” an infinite reality, that distinguishes it from the merely human conception of the self (79). Although the merely human conception of the self also includes the concept of infinity, it is envisioned according to a merely human criterion and in despair becomes fantastic, lacking any finite or limiting qualifications. It is only when “a self as this specific single individual is conscious of existing before God” that it becomes an infinite self (80). The consciousness or conception of oneself as a self or spirit is infinitely intensified by this transcendent (though not external) criterion, projecting for oneself a reality “so extraordinary that [one] cannot grasp the thought” (83).

Correspondingly, the despair that results in failing or refusing to achieve the quality of selfhood commensurate with the quality of divinity is infinitely intensified as well. Now despair is seen as being due not only to a misrelation to oneself but also to a misrelation to God, or more precisely, the misrelation to oneself is now seen to lie in and be due to a misrelation to God. Despair is sin because of a person’s misrelation to God. The situation of the sinner is prodigiously dialectical in an inverse manner, for the conception of God functions for the individual in both a positive and a negative capacity. The introduction of God as the criterion of selfhood brings an awareness of and increase in one’s distance from being a self at the same time that it infinitely qualifies and increases the conception and awareness of oneself as a self. In like manner, the addition of a conception of God brings one into relation to God and projects as one’s go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Sigla
• Introduction
• 1. The Consciousness of Sin / Faith and Forgiveness
• 2. The Possibility of Offense / Faith
• 3. Dying to the World and Self-Denial / New Life, Love, and Hope in the Spirit
• 4. Suffering / Joy and Consolation
• 5. Christian Existence Within the Broader Dialectic of Christianity
• Notes
• Works Consulted
• Index
• Back Cover