The Bible and Western Culture - Kierkegaard's Leap of Faith

[Music] soren kierkegaard was both a romantic and a theologian and this is a very volatile mixture he was a religious philosopher and also a bitter ironic humorist who wrote a body of work that stands more rather halfway between literature and philosophy it's sometimes difficult with particularly with particularly inventive writers to tell exactly what genre we would like to assign them to my inclination would be to say that kierkegaard is a theologian with the soul of a poet and the analytical abilities of a philosopher and bringing all these together at a time when england deism has collapsed and the enlightenment hope that religion and reason could be reconciled means that he is standing at a pivotal point in the history of western thought and western theology and for better or worse there are few people with the same degree of religious intensity as kierkegaard if you know the history of western thought and you are familiar with the work of pascal or if you're familiar with the work of tertullian you will have some idea of the depth and fanaticism if you will of kierkegaard's commitment pascal anguished and anguished and seeking for a way out of this world gave everything to his religious commitment tertullian the great father of the church said i believe because it is absurd well uh kierkegaard's thinking is very much along those lines he is a romantic who is willing to forsake the tradition of western rationality and western science and the whole athenian tradition because he feels that it has corrupted the tradition of western religion and christianity has been gradually eroded by the inclusion of certain rational tendencies which are derived from greek philosophy now he himself was a very very peculiar individual like so many romantic writers he had a troubled personal life and his psyche was constantly the scene of intense strain and torment and anguish a characteristic stance for romantic writers if you know the work of keats or shelley or byron romantic difficulties mean psychic tension psychic problems which are manifest themselves in different ways in their work well kierkegaard's manifestations of his psychic difficulties of his own personal spiritual journeys comes out in some very peculiar ways in the first place he insisted that truth is subjectivity which is a remarkable idea and his work in this respect is a precursor to existentialism he says that you ultimately cannot reconcile religious belief and reason and reason will not be a satisfactory guide for the conduct of your life he is going to turn his back on the traditions of the enlightenment and try and form a new connection between deep subjectivity and powerful passion and religious belief in other words what he's doing is abandoning the project of the enlightenment and trying to ask some new questions about theology and philosophy and these new questions will take us in a different direction from the rather sterile domain of deism now not only did he say that truth was subjectivity he himself was a rather protean figure he used to write his books almost exclusively under pseudonyms and the pseudonyms were very peculiar they were things like victor aramita which means victor the hermit or someone like anticlimacus which means anti-climax he has constant repertoire of personae that he puts on and all of them are ironic and rather troubling and very peculiar and what's even more troubling and peculiar about kierkegaard's work is that after he published his pseudonymous books he used to review his own books stood anonymously in the newspapers and he used to give them bad reviews now this is surely a very peculiar individual he has some uncertainty as to what his identity really is or perhaps he is trying to suggest that identity is not as fixed as we may suspect there's more than one way of reading that this fruitful fertile ambiguity is characteristic of romantic writers and when romantic writers remove from the domain of lyric poetry and uh novels like frankenstein or the sonnets of keats to the domain of religion the result is very volatile indeed and some of the output of kierkegaard is unparalleled for its caustic ironic bitterness and at the same time a strangely good-natured sense of humor kierkegaard himself was a very peculiar individual in some ways he's almost a caricature of the romantic writer the the way in which he departs from most of the romantics is that he is highly ascetic and primarily concerned with the next world not with this world unlike most romantics he is not in he does not favor emotion for its own sake he favors it as a way of breaking the bounds of rationality and giving the soul direct access to god um kierkegaard turned down he was engaged to be married and for no obvious reason turned down his wonderful fiancee of course he was doing this fiance the best turn that had ever been done to her but he turned her down and refused to marry her because he felt that it would bring him into the domain of this world it would endanger his spiritual path so he decided to wander alone like the rhinoceros for the whole of his life and this woman went on and left him of course but the fact that he had been engaged and had nearly connected with other human beings and then decided to go and be a a strictly isolated individual tells us something about him on his tombstone and kierkegaard was the sort of person that would dwell on the question of what will be on his tombstone why while he is yet alive that was the kind of thing that would entertain kierkegaard he didn't want a name or dates of birth and death or anything directly religious all he wanted to put on his tombstone was the statement that individual here lies soren kierkegaard that individual yes he is a truly romantic man he is not going to be a cogitator a cog in a giant logical wheel he will be an individual at all costs the path towards god turns out to be the path towards the self what kierkegaard is doing is saying that we never completely move in the direction of god until we have god's unbought and unaccountable grace and prior to that while we are in this world our identities like the world around us are in flux and there is nothing we can count on there is nothing we can be certain of now this general mood of melancholy of isolation and of individuality are all main themes in romanticism which are given a very peculiar theological twist in his writings and some of the titles of the books are are quite repellent they would push you back from you wouldn't even open them perhaps you're familiar with a book called sickness unto death that's a real page turner that's a great bestseller how about fear and trembling or perhaps the concept of dread yes kierkegaard was relentlessly negative but at the same time ironically humorous there is an odd juxtaposition of opposites in his writing and you would expect a man who was fervent in his religious belief and who thought that the rest of western culture had gone wrong because they had not maintained this pure fidelity to the gospel you would expect that he might have a positive affirmative life-giving kind of stance towards the world no he is relentlessly caustic and he is one of the great critics in the history of the west he said that he described himself as a missionary right now he lived all his life in denmark right so the idea of being a missionary in a society that has had christianity for a great many centuries and is one of the centers of lutheranism is a very peculiar idea but he said he thought it was necessary for us to bring christianity to christendom and that's the kind of missionary that he was he said fine i could be a missionary right here i don't need to go to someplace that hasn't heard of christianity because none of you have so again it's funny but it's also bitter and caustic at the same time it's a very strange melange of of words and the the protein tendencies of kierkegaard move us in the direction of knowledge they cannot give us knowledge itself only an enlightenment thinker would be would think that you could write down a proof or a series of logical cogitations and then you would be able to move people in the direction of religion he says no he's going to make an attack on this world and show you how vacant and bankrupt and unhappy the present age is the book i want to focus on in the course of this lecture is called the present age and as you might expect kierkegaard is none too happy about the present age on the other hand had he been born in this year or had he been living in this year he wouldn't have been happy with this age either he was the sort of man that was always born out of time and he would have been unhappy with any age now he is exceedingly poetic and he and in some respects he reminds me of meister eckhart with a certain sort of negativity attached to it because both of them are bottom mystics and in addition to being mystics he said that without risk there is no faith there is no rational royal road to divinity if you want to be a religious believer you must take upon yourself the fact that a it is never going to make sense not now not later on it's not that some great philosopher a hundred years or a thousand years from now is going to figure out some fine proof and will justify your religious faith now faith has no justification if you have a faith that you believe you have derived from some axioms or you have extrapolated from some religious from some philosophical stance in fact that's not the real religious faith the real religious faith is always going to entail risk this long this longing for certainty that we get from the tradition that comes out of athens is not part of christianity man uh man proposes but god disposes and it turns out that we will never have certainty in a rational sense if we have any direct and fixed connection to the to the deity we will do so on the basis of god's grace and we will intuit this we will have a feeling about this he says that one of the things that is wrong with this age is that it lacks faith it not only lacks faith but it lacks even passion and passion is a necessary precondition for faith you rational people you people with the souls of accountants i'm afraid are trying to add up and subtract your way to god and that is not how you will do it you will do it only by making a leap of faith by taking a chance this idea of taking risks is very much continuous with the general stance that the romantics had he's just given it a strange kind of twist by bringing it in exclusively within the domain of theology now in his book fear and trembling kierkegaard writes with particular bitterness in particular a criminy about what he calls the aesthetic reading of the bible he says look those of you children of the enlightenment those of you spiritual citizens of athens who believe that the bible can be read as a beautiful set of stories and nothing else that in fact it would be satisfactory to think of the symbolism behind the parables rather than the actual literal miracles there you do not have real christian faith this aesthetic reading of the bible is in fact an erosion from within and what it does is steal the marrow of religion in some respects he has a similar stance to swift but without the same degree of heavy-handedness in swift he can be strident and caustic but in a much more deft way now kierkegaard because he is a romantic moving into the domain of theology he generates some new questions that had not been part of the set of of the kind of inquiries in theology and philosophy being done during the enlightenment and these questions are pregnant with the greatest and deepest problems for us today as well a couple of them are worth looking at in the first case he asks a very pointed question when he inquires into the nature of conscience and its connection to our understanding of the bible he says this is our conscience the standard by which we judge the bible in other words if we find something in the bible that we disapprove of are we then to say that the bible is mistaken or wrong or are we trying to wiggle out of our problem by allegorizing and symbolizing the biblical story or is the proper answer to say no the bible is the source from which we derive our conscience and if our conscience tells us that the bible is wrong that just shows us what wicked worms we are because we have god's divine revelation here and if our conscience is inconsistent with that then we're merely wrong go back the kierkegaard's favorite book of the bible job all right and if you know the book of job then you have some idea of the depth and profundity and excessive qualities of this faith well kierkegaard forces us to think our way through this problem and he says the only truly christian stance is not this hubristic arrogant idea that we will correct god and his divine revelation if for example we look at something like the story of abraham and isaac well there are two ways we can take that if you think about a man if suppose a man came to you suppose he was named abraham and said recently i had a visit from the divinity and i was told that i have to sacrifice my son well you might be inclined to think that that was an immoral action and any rational person would say that well you're probably crazy because you think god talks to you directly and the idea of killing your son most immoral in this world of space and time in our lives we would certainly think that was bad if your neighbor came up to you and said that you would look at him very strangely now kierkegaard says well that's just fine provided you're an athenian that's just fine provided you're trying to make rational sense but kierkegaard was or rather uh um god was trying to point out that abraham is a hero of faith and what is heroic about abraham is that he was willing to sacrifice his son remember that god sends the angel down to stop him but the point is to find out whether abraham judges the world and and the behavior in this world on the basis of what god reveals to him are on the basis of his own unguided conscience if he would do this on the basis of his own unguided conscience he would never kill his son what's great about abraham is the fact that his faith runs so deep that it includes things that make no sense whatever can you see how this is a romantic rejection of rationality in spades what's great about the sacrifice of isaac is that it makes no sense if it made sense then we could probably include it within the greek domain and it wouldn't really be a test of faith the real test of faith is are you willing to abandon even your own individual conscience if that's what scripture or the deity demands of you and that is an agonizing kind of decision and it's not entirely clear how we want to deal with it on the one hand i would be inclined to say that i feel that we ought some way to be able to finesse scripture in order to make it consistent with our intuitions that we derive from conscience on the other hand i suppose that in a way he is right there is no way rationally that we can justify something like abraham's sacrifice of isaac and this is a paradigmatic test of faith if the bible tells us that abraham is a very virtuous man kierkegaard says abraham is a very virtuous man and if what he did doesn't make any sense well then he's still a virtuous man and if not only did it not make sense but was absolutely immoral by any rational or human standard he says that's the acid test of real religious faith are you willing to go beyond the domain of mere rationality it's an either or question you can't fudge it you have to say yes or no and this is what kierkegaard is trying to force western culture into he's trying to force western culture into a binary opposition either or either the life of religious faith or the life of secular this worldly skepticism but you can't have it both ways and you can't mix the two if you try and mix any amount of this worldly rationality with god's revealed religion it is either superfluous or it's wrong what that means is is that that that wishbone that i had talking about that i talked about when i lectured about deism splits in half and kierkegaard says good riddance let us get rid of this athenian tradition let us get rid of rationality god didn't tell abraham to think a lot about what he was ordered to do he told him to do it here we have what we would what might be called blind faith but what kierkegaard calls a leap of faith it is a decision that people have to make and a decision that cannot be avoided and it is a decision that is criterionless and this is very important because kierkegaard is often thought of as one of the precursors of 20th century existentialism and the reason why he has thought so is because he said look you cannot ultimately justify your stance as being a citizen of athens or citizen of jerusalem i'm just able to show you that you have to be one or the other you can't be both you can't have dual citizenship kierkegaard has decided that he can show you that that's impossible so now you must make a choice and the difficulty is is that any justification you would give for being a spiritual citizen of jerusalem or being a spiritual citizen of athens presupposes what it's trying to prove if you assume that it's very important to be rational it's very easy to show later on that it makes sense to be a spiritual citizen of athens and you you have to give up on certain parts of the tradition of biblical religion on the other hand if you presuppose that biblical religion is all important and religious faith is what frees you and saves you then it's possible to show that athens is full of arrogant hubristic men and the tradition that comes out of jerusalem is exactly the right one you ought to be following but kierkegaard says without presupposing any of that how would you show that either choice was better or worse and if you can't do that without presupposing one or the other you're simply being dishonest you must make this choice and you have been given no standard by which to make it so now you must make the existential choice and everything in your life is going to depend on this and god has given you no guide if god through his own mysterious activity gives you the grace to believe then you will believe if he does not then i'm afraid you must wander alone in a wilderness of nature and rationality which can only lead to despair the only possible recourse for human beings the only source of their hope will be making this criterionless choice this choice between either athens or jerusalem but not both and kierkegaard says the time has come for us to grow up and face that fact all the optimistic ideas of the enlightenment of reconciling faith and reason are ultimately a way of blinding yourself to what you must decide you must decide the same way that abraham did in a way we are all put in the position of abraham so not only is that a paradigmatic test of faith but is a test that repeats itself again and again and again in human life we will be forced to sacrifice things of this world for which we might have a great liking we will not be giving them up because they are not pleasant we will not be giving them up because reason demands that we not rather we will be giving them up because god tells us we must and that is a very different kind of rationale now kierkegaard does the best he can to make revelation intellectually respectable but he's not going to try the affirmative way of the medieval scholastic theologians who try to prove god's existence like saint anselm who said god is that which nothing greater can be conceived and tried to derive god's necessary existence from that kierkegaard being a negative thinker is going to go the other way kierkegaard is going to try and say well what if it turns out that in that the acceptance of revelation is on a par at least as intellectually respectable as the exception of as accepting reason as our only god that's as close as we'll ever be able to come this kind of mexican standoff between athens and jerusalem and that's what he's going to argue for in a book called philosophical fragments which is one of which is not fragmented it's about 600 pages again there's something ironic about writing a book that's called fragments that goes on and on and on interminably it's the kind of bizarre and perverse sort of sense of humor you would see in kierkegaard but in the course of of philosophical fragments he asked some questions about socrates in the meno now kierkegaard wrote his doctrinal dissertation on on socrates and strictly on socratic irony which would be characteristic of of kierkegaard if you think about it what would attract him but in socrates is not certainty or rationality or the philosopher king it would be the repeat and unavoidable irony the irony layered upon irony upon irony he wrote an ironic dissertation about socratic irony and when it was passed at the university his the teachers that supervisor said this is just fine we will accept it but please don't ever write anything for us again because it was just too excruciating to read well in philosophical fragments kierkegaard starts to look at socrates and particularly looks at the meno now those of you that know socrates mino know it to be a dialogue about knowledge and in that dialogue socrates makes the argument perhaps it is an ironic argument and this is what kierkegaard believes he makes the argument that that all knowledge is but recollection socrates for his own uh philosophical reasons needs to believe that everyone is born omniscient that you know everything but you've forgotten and then you gradually relearn it well kierkegaard said what if that's wrong what if we are born ignorant and what if we can only get insight into the nature of human life and into the human condition by having this revealed to us well if it has to be revealed who can reveal it certainly not another human being because they will have the same problem that we do they will be born ignorant just like us so the only way that if revelation is possible and if we if all knowledge is not recollection if socrates is wrong then revelation is the only possible avenue to real knowledge and revelation cannot be the product of any other human being because they will have the same problem as us thus it is proven if socrates is wrong either no knowledge of any kind exists or what knowledge does exist is revelation who could reveal it to us not man only god who might that be jesus christ the lord and savior so kierkegaard is not trying to make an affirmative argument showing that thus it is proven uh jesus is the lord and savior and revelation is true he is trying to say that it is not intellectually disrespectful uh not disrespectable to believe in revelation because it stands on the same level as greek rationality and this is a concession that none of the enlightenment thinkers were willing to make he forces this out of them and that is one of the great achievements in his 600 pages of fragments now let's move to his send-up of the present age titled oddly enough the present age kierkegaard has a whole list of romantic complaints about the present age and he has decided that what is most lacking here is moral commitment the problem is is that the rise of modernity has generated large anonymous societies dominated by the machine and all the implications of the age of the machine for western society and that as a result we have gradually become more mechanical and more paltry and more insipid and more inhuman as a result and here he's giving the theological twist on the common uh intellectual temper tantrum of the romantics industrial society is bad all romantics hate machines and all of them hate uh the consequences of machines industrial poverty large slums ghettos you can think of dickens or blake or so many romantics hate the age of the machine well kierkegaard is no exception but what he hates about it is not the fact that it produces social dislocation and produces a starving children like we find in dickens novels his big problem with it is that it removes passion from people it makes us more and more prosaic and more and more mundane as he says an age without passion lacks values and because we lack any passion we don't feel the impetus to go and find the the answer to the to the questions that life presents us with we don't want to ask or answer the ultimate questions we don't care enough about ultimate questions and answers to bother with them we'd rather we'd rather think about mtv we'd rather think about the day-to-day existence that we have to and eek out in other words kierkegaard says as it says in the gospel my kingdom is not of this world this world you have created is a babylon it is a profane city kierkegaard as he says is going to introduce christianity to christendom in addition to stopping the erosion of christianity he wants to roll back the tide and show that the entire tradition of athens has been a mistake and that what is largely what is most wrong with the tradition of western philosophy is it has tried to create a rapprochement between the two no compromise as far as he is concerned he wishes to drive athens out as tertullian said i believe because it is absurd well kierkegaard in a way believes because it is absurd if you believe because it made sense it really wouldn't be religious faith because all faith demands risk if you could work it out as a mathematical certainty there would be no virtue to such a faith god didn't ask abraham to figure out whether sacrificing isaac was a good idea god told him what to do and he did it that is the paradigm of the religious man and it's an either or question you go this way or you go that way he takes this argument a little bit further and he says that resentment the hatred of superiority the hatred of achievement the hatred of excellence is going to be a part of this erosion of christianity and this lack of moral commitment this decline of passion all you're going to have is people who are envious of those few who ever get anything done and they will do their best to badmouth that and do their best to impose a conception of right and wrong that reduces all questions to to utility to voting by the mass of people and to an insipid mediocrity kierkegaard remember wanted to be buried and have on his tombstone that individual he did not want mediocrity he did not want to follow the herd he did not want to do what made sense because he disdained making sense he said i have a wisdom here that goes beyond mere rationality and if you cannot bring yourself to believe that then that's your problem not mine you deserve to live in an age like this he says that one of the problems that we're going to get with the rise of democratic political movements in the age of the machine and the advent of modernity is that everyone's going to be chattering all the time and saying nothing talk talk talk loquacity destroys speech all we're going to do is constantly be gossiping about nothing we're never going to ask or answer the big questions in life he makes a very pointed remark and i've always had it stuck in my brain because i think it's probably true people that do not know how to remain silent do not know how to talk that's a remarkable observation worthy of any of the greatest romantic poets and the problem with it is that however crazy kierkegaard is that's probably true he says these people constantly chattering constantly talking about nothing i have a few things to say but i'm going to say them and then depart i will remain as enigmatic to you as i am to myself now he presents us with i would say the greatest of the romantic criticisms of the connection between athens and jerusalem in the present age he argues that the first part of the 19th century is paltry that you would that the people around him would not know how to be very good or very evil the tiny size of your soul precludes you from any from doing any big sin you haven't gotten to the point where you could sin on any kind of scale so you are incapable of doing good incapable of doing evil you are truncating the domain of the psyche to this tiny fragment of what you could be the problem is that you are not willing to make the leap of faith which would allow you to be a whole and integrated soul because the leap of faith costs not less than everything you have to be willing to put up everything in this wager and unlike pascal's waitress not merely this is a good idea because the odds are with you here you have no grounds for making the judgment it's criterion-less it's like spinning the roulette wheel putting your money on either red or black but you have no way of knowing in advance whether it's going to come up red or black at the end you take your best chance you take a shot at your best hunch that's all you're ever going to get can you see how that's going to generate a certain kind of internal anxiety which can only manifest manifest itself in very peculiar ways for example breaking off his engagement or writing books which are extremely repellent or writing them under pseudonyms and then criticizing them under pseudonyms in public obviously this is a tortured individual he's in some ways a modern day job he comes as close to an absolute religious faith as we are ever going to see in a book called edifying discourses one of one one section of which is dedicated to the book of job he he talks about job as the personification of faith and he says the best thing about job is that he understands that all theology is blasphemy she's a very deep thought as well if it is true that our language will not accommodate the divinity if it is true that we lack the tools to undertake that job and we occasionally do succumb to the temptation to write and speak and think about theology perhaps what we are doing then is raising our own selves to the status where we can claim to understand god and not only understand them but explain them to other people kierkegaard says nay if you believe that you have not reached the real pinnacle of religious faith if you remember the three friends of job who tried to explain to him some kind of theological account of why evil should enter the world and why she he should be punished and job insisted to the end that no none of these accounts are satisfactory well it turns out that kierkegaard says yes if you are a theologian you are wrong you are one of those people that was it was in the stance of job's friends the right stance for the true believer to be in is job don't curse god and die take whatever god dishes out because the only stance for the true believer is to be god's faithful servant you shall not judge the lord your god he doesn't want your advice now beyond these edifying discourses and beyond his treatment of abraham and the sacrifice of or in the near sacrifice of his son he insisted that philosophy and christianity can never be united and because philosophy and christianity can never be united all of the tradition of western theology is essentially a wrong turn he is in fact as much of an individual as he suggests with his tombstone because if he is right then virtually all of the great theologians virtually all of the great philosophers in the western tradition have been wrong and he says either or i am not afraid of being in the minority he has obviously gotten a tremendous dose of religious faith but in addition to that he says that well the only way that i can express my individuality in this century the only way that i can be the man that god has appointed me to be is to sacrifice myself for you some men are going to be broken on the rock of an impossible virtue and in fact that is what's happening to kierkegaard he i don't know that he raises himself to the status of a prophet but when all one certainly gets the sense that he understands himself to be divinely inspired somehow this divine inspiration is of a kind of left-handed tendency it moves to the dark and to the negative and to the difficult but he has what seems to be a genuine inspiration nonetheless and he says here's how it's going to work for you in this modern age or in any age you're going to have to solve the problem of human life and you're going to have to make a decision the leap of faith is going to be forced upon you if you do not make it you choose this world in other words you cannot avoid the leap of faith we would avoid it if we could you must decide one way or another to take this criterionless choice and he says the lutheran alternative will not work and that's quite surprising if you think about luther and his emphasis on faith alone you might say that that kierkegaard would find luther quite a congenial intellectual comrade but no kierkegaard thought luther was soft he wasn't really dug into religious faith because although that he emphasized the importance of faith and salvation had that augustinian tradition of piety the problem with luther from kierkegaard's perspective is that he tries to make christianity completely inward he says that there's no necessary connection between faith and works kierkegaard says a doctrine of works by itself is obviously unacceptable but luther's doctrine of pure faith is also unacceptable he wants the whole package when you make this leap of faith it must transform your whole life and when it transforms your life you will have faith and you will be saved but not by faith alone you will also be saved by your activities in the world you must do both in order to be saved the truly righteous the truly blessed man will not be under a covenant of works or a covenant of faith he will unify them both into one perfectly christian life he is surely not expecting that we will become perfect what he is expecting is that we will sacrifice everything in our attempt asymptotic as it is to achieve a perfection which is actually beyond us because it is divine now we can think of kierkegaard's work as being a sort of extended meditation on the problems of faith in the modern age kierkegaard is without a doubt the most important theologian since pascal and uh it would be interesting to speculate what his favorite books of the bible are very clearly he likes the story of abraham very clearly he also likes the story of job but he seems to gravitate towards the most negative and difficult and disappointing passages in scripture so if you think you have a script you find a scriptural resonance in his work i strongly urge that you look back at the bible this will inform your reading of that and it will make your interpretation of kierkegaard much easier you will find that he is among the most oblique and difficult of writers he intends to be difficult he is going to make you work for the insights that you glean from him if you do not have enough desire enough passion for the truth to break a 600 page book of fragments well then you're not the kind of reader he wants to talk to he is an individual that means to talk to other individuals he means to turn you into an individual not one sheep among the flock he wants you to confront your own soul and the nature and the true facts of the human condition this will be agonizing this will be difficult this will call upon all of your spiritual resources but it is your only chance to be a real human being i might be tempted to say that kierkegaard's work can be thought of as an extended meditation on the parable of the rich young man those of you that know that it's in the synoptics the rich young man comes to jesus and he thinks very highly of himself and he says what do i need to do lord in order to gain the kingdom of heaven and jesus says obey the law and the commandments and leave me alone and the rich young man comes back and says look i already obey the law and the commandments please tell me what i really need to do give me something spectacular obviously the rich young man is engaging in this religious adventure because he finds it interesting and entertaining because he is still mired in things of this world so jesus immediately diagnosing the spiritual condition of this rich young man and kierkegaard is diagnosing the spiritual condition of the west says fine i have a good retort for you go sell all you have and follow me and that quieted the rich young man down and he shrugged his shoulders and left and said look i wanted something fun and kind of adventurous but i didn't want to put everything up and if you do not have the faith which will wager everything on the outcome of your criterionless choice then you are not really willing to to do what is necessary to turn yourself into an individual to turn yourself into a christian one of his books was called training in christianity the idea being that you don't become a christian all at once it is not an overnight thing although you will be infused with god's grace perhaps all at once being a christian is not an event it is a process you gradually come to understand what the domain of your will is and you do your best to reconcile your will with god's will to humble your your arrogant tendency to judge god he is driving at the idea that we must put everything up and that the legacy of western rationality has been an impediment to our religious salvation now i would be tempted to say that kierkegaard is a serious jester and this will hearken back to an argument that i was making earlier when i talked about shakespeare comedy is the christian literary form and kierkegaard for all his unpleasantness and unkindness and kind of weirdness is a great theological joker when he writes down things when he writes things like i am a missionary i'm bringing christianity to christendom obviously he has a great sense of humor which is again a very peculiar thing in a man that seems so chronically depressed as kierkegaard as someone that seems so alienated and isolated and alone how is it that this can work and may i say that we might make an observation or an analogy between kierkegaard and the fool in king lear if any of you know that play the fool in king lear is a fool and yet at the same time he says witty and pregnant and important things that are enigmatic and subject to a variety of interpretations but are always important for the further development of what's going on in the play may i suggest that kierkegaard is like lear's fool he asks strange and pregnant questions that no one had thought up before and if his answers are not satisfactory these questions are with us to stay in other words i'd be inclined to say that what kierkegaard adds to the tradition of western thought is not a set of theological answers he is the most unsystematic of theologians i'd be tempted almost to call him an anti-theologian but although his answers are not entirely plausible or not entirely satisfactory the questions that he proposes are with us today how shall we find a way out of our mundane prosaic lives is there any way in which we can have certainty about religious matters is it possible for us to make a leap of faith or has the advent of the age of the machine cut us off from the possibility of religious illumination all of these questions are forced upon us by the demonic jester soren kierkegaard um he uh when he lets his mask down those small fragmentary occasions which kierkegaard tells us something about himself he is almost always disarming in his irony and in his candor and i'd be inclined to say that kierkegaard while he is repulsive and repellent is in fact a catalyst towards future theological discoveries and thought on many of the great 20th century theologians and 20th century philosophers have been beholden to kierkegaard there are so many of them like marcel or near nebor but in addition to people like that there's also i think a tradition of secular thought that is kierkegaardian when you if you decide to move in the opposite direction if you decide to make a leap of faith but not towards religion but away from religion what you will generate from that is the tradition of 20th century atheistic existentialism so kierkegaard is the source of both atheistic and theistic existentialism and his questions continue to be live questions in contemporary moral philosophy the comedy with which he couches his questions is the thing that makes his questions most accessible and pleasant and i'll leave you with a statement that kierkegaard made about his own work and about the work of socrates and about the work of western comedy in general and it is pregnant with many important implications for understanding of the tradition of western philosophy and western literature if it is true as i said before that comedy and christianity have an inextricable bond and that in fact the christian literary form is comedy well then soren kierkegaard's dark comedies are the most modern form of this christian kind of an art form and maybe we would be inclined to call even his ostensibly philosophical works works a philosophical comedy and if we bring into the fact that he has this morbid introspection and constantly negative stance towards the world i think we'll be able to appreciate the statement that he made when he was talking about comedy and talking about jokes and he said that it is probably the case as was true with socrates and other great religious thinkers that quote melancholy men have the best senses of humor

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 10,380

Rating: 4.9756098 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Bible, Kierkegaard, Leap of Faith

Id: Mit01QVmiZA

Length: 42min 29sec (2549 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020