PASSION FOR NOTHING: KIERKEGAARD’S APOPHATIC THEOLOGY By Peter Kline Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Religion May, 2016 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor William Franke Professor Ellen Armour Professor Laurel Schneider Professor David Wood ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing this dissertation has been, if not an act of faith, then certainly some kind of leap or abandon. It is not a little astonishing to me to that I have finished it. There has been the struggle to work through a complex subject matter, of course. But more than anything, there has been the struggle to find my voice, to feel out what kind of theological, philosophical, and spiritual music I am capable of and to wonder, often anxiously, whether it is worth playing. There are those in the academy who would have the dissertation be simply functional, one last requirement on the way to the desired goal, The Degree (followed by The Job and The Career). I have never been able to approach my writing in such a teleological fashion. I seem to be unable to approach writing otherwise than as a practice of what Foucault called “the care of the self.” Learning and putting into practice such self-care in this dissertation has been a difficult pleasure. Thankfully, Kierkegaard was an unfailing companion and guide in this task even as he was my subject matter. There are many along the way who supported me with care and made this dissertation possible. I’d like to name a few of them here. To my committee, thank you. William, it was your class on apophatic mysticism and culture that sparked the fire for me. But more than any “what,” it has always been your “how,” your apophatic style, that has been most inspiring and edifying. I remember how delightful it was to find that you did not ask for “questions” in class but for “interventions,” as if all discourse, not least your own, is in need of continual intervention and undoing. Your willingness to traverse disciplinary borders, your intellectual creativity, daring, and kindness, your poetic flare, your patient and gentle openness to students, have all been openings for me, more important than I can ii say. Ellen, more than anyone at Vanderbilt, you have shepherded me into a more vivid, colorful, diverse, and interesting intellectual world. Your seminars were for me experiences of breaking open and undoing, in the best way, in a way that has allowed me to hold the identity of “theologian” less anxiously, more generously, more apophatically. And you introduced me to Jean-Luc Nancy! Thank you! Laurel, we have had only a few very brief encounters, but I am very happy to have you on my committee. Even in these brief moments, I have sensed from you a liveliness, creativity, and generosity that will undoubtedly enrich and deepen my work. I am excited to talk with you about Kierkegaard and multiplicity! David, you are for me a model of what Kierkegaard calls the “subjective existing thinker.” You have taught me, and more importantly shown me, how thought must overflow its academic constraints if it is to live and thrive as thought. Thank you for welcoming me into your seminars and into your writers’ group with such hospitality. Your essay on Kierkegaard and kissing remains one of my favorites! To my older brother David, I love you. Our friendship is one of the most important things in my life. Our conversations over the past 18 months about Derrida, Kierkegaard, deconstruction, and apophaticism have carried me in more ways than one through the process of writing this dissertation. To have a conversation partner who is also a brother and a friend is an unspeakable gift. To my younger brother Matthew, I love you. Our friendship is also one of the most important things in my life. Our collaborations and experiments together in music and painting over the past year have spirited my life and my writing in countless ways. Thank you in particular for giving me the opportunity to paint that huge 10’ x 10’ canvas last March. What an event that was for me! iii To Lauren Smelser White, haha! Can you believe I made it? When I think of our friendship, I think of shared moments of laughter, moments that have been so life giving amidst the dangers, toils, and snares of wading through a Ph.D. program. Thank you for being a means of grace in the midst of much struggle. And finally, to my fiancé Janice—words fail, but the heart, which is yours, does not. I love you. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………….……………………………………….ii List of Abbreviations………………………………………………………………………….….iv Attunement………………………………………….……………………….…………………….1 Chapter I: Introduction: Nothing Is Better Than Something……………………………….……...4 Chapter II: Indirect Communication: Writing Nothing…………………………………………..41 Chapter III: Infinite Reduplication: Kierkegaard’s Negative Concept of God…………………..93 Chapter IV: Faith: Action to Excess…………………….………………………………………141 Chapter V: Hope: Keeping Time Absurdly Open………………………………………………174 Chapter VI: Love: Holding Nothing in Common………………………………………………199 Conclusion: Beginning Again…………………………………………………………………..227 Bibliography……………………….…………………………………………………………...238 v ABBREVIATIONS Kierkegaard’s Danish Works Pap. Søren Kierkegaards Papier. Eds. P.A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, and E. Torsting. Gyldendal, 1909-1948. Kierkegaard’s English Works CA The Concept of Anxiety. Trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert A. Anderson. Princeton University Press, 1980. CD Christian Discourses. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1997. CI The Concept of Irony. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1989. CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1992. EO Either/Or. Two vols. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1987. EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1990. FSE For Self-Examination. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1990. FTR Fear and Trembling and Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1983. PF Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1985. JFY Judge for Yourself! Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1990. JP Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. 6 vols. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. University of Indiana Press, 1967-1978. The numbers listed in these references are journal entries rather than page numbers. vi PC Practice in Christianity. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1991. PV The Point of View for My Work as an Author. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Harper and Row, 1962. PWS Prefaces and Writing Sampler. Trans. Todd W. Nichol. Princeton University Press, 2009. SLW Stages on Life’s Way. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1988. SUD The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1990. TDIO Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1993. UDVS Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1993. WL Works of Love. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1995. vii In order to know God, your knowledge must change into unknowing, into a forgetting of yourself. – Meister Eckhart1 Addressing itself to this nothing…adoration flashes as the signal of an absolute outside, of a nihil in which all nihilism loses its “-ism” (its supposed completion without further reference) in order to open infinitely onto a non-completion delivered from any horizon of accomplishment. Addressing itself, therefore, to this outside which cannot be said “as such.” – Jean-Luc Nancy2 1 Eckhart, Sermon IV, in Pfeiffer, Franz, Meister Eckhart trans. C. de B. Evans (London: John M.Watkins, 1924), 21. 2 Nancy, Jean-Luc, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 74. viii ATTUNEMENT He does only one thing: he opens his arms. – Kierkegaard1 KIERKEGAARD states that the culmination of his authorship is the “Discourses at the Communion on Fridays.” In the preface to a collection of such discourses he writes, “a gradually advancing author-activity that began with Either/Or seeks here its decisive point of rest at the foot of the altar.”2 At the end of the authorship stands the abased Christ whose wounds gape open and whose arms spread agape before the believer, as do the arms of the statue of Christ that overlooks the altar in Our Lady’s Church in Copenhagen where Kierkegaard worshipped and took communion. In these final discourses, Kierkegaard writes, “language seemingly bursts and breaks in order to characterize God’s greatness in showing mercy.”3 The bursting and breaking of language is owing to the intensity of “longing” or “sorrow” [Sorg]4 that the eucharistic meal incites with the breaking of bread. The first of the communion discourses is based on Luke 22:15: “I have longed with all my heart to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” Kierkegaard opens with a prayer that acknowledges to God, “longing is your gift.”5 He prays that “when longing grasps hold of us, oh, that we may also grasp hold of the longing; when it wants to carry us away, that we may also surrender ourselves.”6 To surrender to the longing that is the 1 PC, 19. The following paragraphs were written in remembrance of the women with whom I shared communion in a Davidson County jail in Nashville, TN on Sunday evenings from 2012 to 2014.