Kierkegaard's Writings, XVII, Volume 17

Christian Discourses: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress.

Søren Kierkegaard, Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400832385
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

First published in 1848, Christian Discourses is a quartet of pieces written and arranged in contrasting styles. Parts One and Three, "The Cares of the Pagans" and "Thoughts That Wound from Behind--for Upbuilding, " serve as a polemical overture to Kierkegaard's collision with the established order of Christendom. Yet Parts Two and Four, "Joyful Notes in the Strife of Suffering" and "Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, " are reassuring affirmations of the joy and blessedness of Christian life in a world of adversity and suffering. Written in ordinary language, the work combines simplicity and inwardness with reflection and presents crucial Christian concepts and presuppositions with unusual clarity.
Kierkegaard continued in the pattern that he began with his first pseudonymous esthetic work, Either/Or, by pairing Christian Discourses with The Crisis, an unsigned esthetic essay on contemporary Danish actress Joanne Luise Heiberg.

Part One

THE CARES OF THE PAGANS

CHRISTIAN DISCOURSES1

2PRAYER [X 13]

Father in heaven! In springtime everything in nature comes back again with new freshness and beauty. The bird and the lily have lost nothing since last year—would that we, too, might come back unaltered to the instruction of these teachers! But if, alas, our health has been damaged in times past, would that we might recover it by learning again from the lilies in the field and from the birds of the air!

The Gospel for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity3 [X 14]

No one can serve two masters, for he must either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat and what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they sow not and reap not and gather not into barns, and your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more than they? But who among you can add one foot to his growth even though he worries about it? And why do you worry about clothing? Look at the lilies in the field, how they grow; they do not work, they do not spin. But I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed as one of them. If, then, God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the stove, would he not much more clothe you, you of little faith? Therefore you should not worry and say, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” The pagans seek all these things; your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness; then all these [X 15] things will be added to you. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

INTRODUCTION4

It was on top of Mt. Sinai that the Law was given, during the thundering of heaven; every animal that, alas, innocently and inadvertently, approached the holy mountain had to be put to death—according to the Law.5 It is at the foot of the mountain that the Sermon on the Mount is preached. This is the way the Law relates to the Gospel, which is: the heavenly down on earth. It is at the foot of the mountain; so mollified is the Gospel, so close is the heavenly that comes down, now on earth and yet even more heavenly. It is at the foot of the mountain; indeed, what is more, the bird and the lily have also come—that they are there almost sounds as if it ends up jesting . . . . . in a game. Although the earnestness becomes all the more holy just because the bird and the lily are there, it becomes that by way of the jest, and it still remains a jest that the lily and the bird are there. They are there; indeed, what is more, they are not merely there, they are there as instructors. The Gospel itself is certainly the actual teacher, he6 the Teacher—and the Way and the Truth and the Life—as the instructor, but the bird and the lily are still there as a kind of assistant teachers.

How is this possible? Well, the matter is not so difficult. Neither the lily nor the bird is a pagan, but the lily and the bird are not Christians either, and for that very reason they are able to succeed in being helpful with the instruction in Christianity. Pay attention to the lily and the bird; then you will discover how pagans live, because they do not live in exactly the same way as do the bird and the lily. If you live as the lily and the bird live, then you are a Christian—which the lily and the bird neither are nor can become. Paganism forms the opposition to Christianity, but the lily and the bird form no opposition to either of these [X 16] contending parties—they play outside, if one may put it this way, and shrewdly keep out of all oppositions. In order, then, not to judge and condemn, the Gospel uses the lily and the bird to make clear what paganism is, but thereby in turn in order to make clear what is required of the Christian. The lily and the bird are slipped in to prevent judging, because the lily and the bird judge no one—and you, you are certainly not to judge the pagan; you are to learn from the lily and the bird. Yes, it is a difficult task, a difficult position that the lily and the bird have in the instruction; neither could anyone else do it; anyone else would very likely indict and judge the pagan and eulogize (rather than instruct) the Christian or sneeringly denounce the so-called Christian who does not live this way.

But the lily and the bird, who are solely occupied with and absorbed in instructing, appear totally unconcerned, look neither to the right nor to the left. They neither praise nor scold as a teacher ordinarily does; just like him, the Teacher, of whom it is said, “He gives heed to no one” (Mark 12:14), they give heed to no one or they give heed to themselves. And yet, yet it is almost an impossibility not to learn something from them if one pays attention to them. Ah, a person may do everything he is capable of, and yet at times it can be doubtful whether the learner learns anything from him; but the bird and the lily do nothing at all, and yet it is almost an impossibility not to learn something from them. Cannot a person already learn from them what it is to instruct, what it is to instruct Christianly, learn the great art of instruction: to go on as usual, to give heed to oneself, and yet to do it in such a stirring, gripping, charming, also in cost very inexpensive, and moving way that it is impossible not to learn something from it!

It is quite true that when a human teacher has done everything and the learner has still not learned anything, the teacher can say, “It is not my fault.” Ah, but when you have learned so very much from the lily and the bird, does it not seem as if they said, “It is not our fault!” So kind are these teachers to the learner, so kind, so humane, so worthy of their divine appointment. If you have forgotten something, they are promptly willing to repeat it for you and repeat and repeat until you finally must know it; if you do not learn anything from them, they do not reproach you but with rare zeal only go on with the instruction, solely concerned with teaching; and if you learn something from them, they give you all the credit, pretend that they had no part whatever in it, that it was not to them that you owed it. They give no [X 17] one up, no matter how unwilling he is to be taught, and they demand no dependency, not even the dependency of the one who learned most from them. O you wonderful teachers, if one learned nothing else from you, if one learned to instruct, how much one would have learned! It is already a great thing if a human teacher does some of what he himself says, since most often one says much and does only little of it—ah, but even this comment about others the bird or the lily would never have made! But you—well, in a certain sense you are not really doing what you say either; you do it without saying anything. But this reticent silence of yours and this fidelity of yours to yourselves in doing the same thing, all day long year in and year out, appreciated or unappreciated, understood or misunderstood, seen or unseen—what wonderful mastery in instructing!

Thus with the help of the lily and the bird we get to know the pagans’ cares, what they are, namely, those that the bird and the lily do not have, although they do have comparable necessities. But we could, of course, also get to know these cares in another way: by traveling to a pagan country and seeing how people live there, what cares they have. Finally, in a third way: by traveling to—but what am I saying, by traveling—after all, we are living in the place, in a Christian country where there are only Christians. Therefore one must be able to draw the conclusion: the cares that are not found here with us, although the comparable necessities and pressures are present, must be the cares of the pagans. One could draw this conclusion if, alas, another observation did not perhaps deprive us of the power to draw the conclusion by removing the presupposition, and now one would draw another conclusion: these cares are found among people in this country; ergo, this Christian country is pagan. In that case the discourse about the cares of the pagans would come to sound like subtle mockery. Yet we would not dare allow ourselves to take such a harsh view of Christendom or allow ourselves this almost cruel mockery, a cruelty that would, note well, backfire on the speaker himself, who certainly is not such a perfect Christian either. But let us not forget that the discourse could have this up its sleeve, as it were, that if an angel were to speak, he could in this way carry out his mockery of us, who call ourselves Christians, by turning the matter in this way, that instead of censuring us for our mediocre Christianity he would describe the pagan cares and then always add, “But here in this country, which is Christian, no such cares are, of course, to be found.” Drawing his conclusion from the assumption that the cares are indeed the [X 18] cares of the pagans, or, conversely, from the assumption that the country is indeed Christian, he could draw the conclusion that such cares have no doubt unjustly been called the pagans’; or he could imagine a Christian country where there actually are only Christians, pretend that this country is our country, and draw the conclusion: since these cares are not found there, they must be the pagans’. Let us not forget this, and let us never forget either that the pagans who are found in Christendom have sunk the lowest. Those in the pagan countries have not as yet been lifted up to Christianity; the pagans in Christendom have sunk below paganism. The former belong to the fallen race; the latter, after having been lifted up, have fallen once again and have fallen even lower.

Thus the upbuilding address is fighting in many ways for the eternal to be victorious in a person, but in the appropriate place and with the aid of the lily and the bird, it does not forget first and foremost to relax into a smile. Relax, you struggling one! One can forget how to laugh, but God keep a person from ever forgetting how to smile! A person can forget much without any harm and in his old age certainly has to put up with forgetting a lot that he could wish to remember, but God forbid that a person would forget the lily and the bird before his final blessed end!

I [X 19]

The Care of Poverty7

Therefore you should not worry and say, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?”—the pagans seek all these things.

8This care the bird does not have. What does the bird live on? At this point we shall not speak about the lily; it is easy for the lily—it lives on air—but what does the bird live on? The public authority, as everyone knows, has much to care for. At times it has the concern that there are some who have nothing to live on, but then, in turn, at other times it is not satisfied that a person has something to live on and he is summoned and asked what he is living on. What, then, does the bird live on? Certainly not on what it gathers into barns, since it does not gather into barns—and actually one never does live on what one has lying in the barn. But what, then, does the bird live on? The bird cannot explain itself. If it is summoned, it presumably would have to answer as did the man blind from birth who was asked about the one who had given him his sight, “I do not know, but this I do know, that I, who was born blind, now see.”9 Likewise the bird presumably would have to answer, “I do not know, but this I do know—I live.” What, then, does it live on? The bird lives on the daily bread, this heavenly food that is never stale, this enormous [X 20] supply that is kept so well that no one can steal it, because the thief can steal only what “is saved over night”—what is used during the day no one can steal.

Thus the daily bread [Brød] is the bird’s livelihood [Levebrød]. The daily bread is the most scantily measured supply; it is just exactly enough but not one bit more; it is the little that poverty needs. But then is the bird indeed poor? Instead of answering we shall ask: Is the bird poor? No, the bird is not poor. See, here it is evident that the bird is the teacher. Its state is such that if one is to judge according to its external condition one must call it poor, and yet it is not poor; it would not occur to anybody to call the bird poor. What does this mean? It means that its condition is poverty, but it does not have the care of poverty. If it were summoned, there can be no doubt that the public authority would find that in the strictest sense it would qualify for public welfare, but if one just lets it fly again, it is not poor. Indeed, if the welfare department had its say, the bird would certainly become poor, because it would be badgered with so many questions about its livelihood that it would see for itself that it is poor.

Therefore you should not worry and say, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?”—the pagans seek all these things—because the Christian does not have this care. Is the Christian then rich? Well, it can perhaps happen that there is a Christian who is rich, but of course we are not speaking about that—we are speaking about a Christian who is poor, about the poor Christian. He is poor, but he does not have this care; therefore he is poor and yet not poor. In other words, if one in poverty is without the care of poverty, one is poor and yet not poor, and then if one is not a bird but a human being and yet like the bird, then one is a Christian.

What, then, does the poor Christian live on? On the daily bread. In that he resembles the bird. But the bird, which certainly is not a pagan, is not a Christian either—because the Christian prays for the daily bread. But then is he even poorer than the bird, since he even has to pray for it, whereas the bird receives it without praying? Yes, the pagan is of that opinion. The Christian prays for the daily bread; [X 21] by praying for it he receives it, yet without having something to save over night; he prays for it and by praying for it he dismisses the care for the night, sleeps soundly in order to wake up the next day to the daily bread for which he prays. Therefore the Christian does not live on the daily bread as the bird does or as the adventurer, who takes it where he finds it, because the Christian finds it where he seeks it and seeks it by praying. But for this reason the Christian, however poor he is, also has more to live on than the daily bread, which for him has something added, a worth and a sufficiency that it cannot have for the bird, because the Christian indeed prays for it and thus knows that the daily bread is from God. Does not even an otherwise humble gift, an insignificant little something, have infinite worth for the lover when it is from the beloved! Therefore the Christian does not merely say that the daily bread is enough for him, insofar as he thinks of his earthly wants and necessities, but he also speaks about something else (and no bird and no pagan knows what it is he is talking about) when he says, “It is enough for me that it comes from him,” that is, from God. Just as that simple wise man, although he continually spoke about food and drink,10 still spoke profoundly about the highest things, so also the poor Christian, when he speaks about food, speaks simply about what is highest, because when he says “the daily bread” he is not thinking so much about food as about his receiving it from God’s table. The bird does not live on the daily bread in this way. It certainly does not, like a pagan, live in order to eat; it eats in order to live—but then is it really living?

The Christian lives on the daily bread; there is no question that he lives on that, but neither is there any question about what he will eat or what he will drink. In this regard he knows himself to be understood by the heavenly Father, who knows that he has need of all these things. The poor Christian does not ask about all such things, which the pagans seek. There is, however, something else that he seeks, and therefore he lives (for it was, after all, doubtful to what extent it can really be said that the bird lives), therefore he lives, or it is for this that he lives, and therefore one can say that he lives. He believes that he has a Father in heaven, who every day opens his benign hand and satisfies everything that lives11—also him—with his blessing; yet what he seeks is not to become satisfied, but the heavenly Father. He believes that a human being is not differentiated from th...