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KIERKEGAARD AND HOW HE CAN CHALLENGE US TODAY March, 30, 2014 Andrés Roberto Albertsen

1) Some biographical data

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born May 5, 1813, Copenhagen, , as the youngest of seven children of the second marriage of his father. He died November 11, 1855, Copenhagen.

The story of his life is a drama in four overlapping acts, each with its own distinctive crisis or “collision.” His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a prosperous but retired businessman who devoted the later years of his life to raising his children. He was a man of deep guilt-ridden piety who was tormented by the memory of having once cursed God as a boy and of having begun his family by getting his maid pregnant—and then marrying her— shortly after the death of his first wife. His domineering presence stimulated young Søren’s imaginative and intellectual gifts but, as his son would later bear witness, he made a normal childhood impossible.

Kierkegaard enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1830 but did not complete his studies until 1841. He entered university in order to study theology but devoted himself to literature and philosophy instead. His thinking during this period is revealed in an 1835 journal entry (by the way, Kierkegaard was a prolific writer of personal journals and they have all been published), which is often cited as containing the germ and initial form of his later work: “The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.…What is truth but to live for an idea?”

The first collision of Kierkegaard’s life occurred during his student days: he became estranged both from his father and from the faith in which he had 2 been brought up, and he moved out of the family home. But by 1838, just before his father’s death in this same year, he was reconciled both to his father and to the Christian faith; the latter became the idea for which he would live and die. Becoming a Christian would be for him the task of a lifetime.

After his father’s death, Kierkegaard became serious about finishing his formal education. He took his doctoral exams and wrote his dissertation, On the Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates, completing it in June of 1841 and defending it in September. In between, he broke his engagement with Regine Olsen, thus initiating the second major collision of his life. They had met in 1837, when she was only 15 years old, and had become engaged in 1840. Now, less than one year later, he returned the engagement ring he had gotten from her, saying he “could not make a girl happy.” The reasons for this action are far from clear.

What is clear is that this relationship disturbed him for the rest of his life. Saying in his will that he considered engagement as binding as marriage, he left all his possessions to Regine (she did not accept them, however, since she had married another man long before Kierkegaard died). It is also clear that this crisis triggered and gave rise to a period of astonishing literary productivity, during which Kierkegaard published many of the works for which he is best known.

Kierkegaard wrote two different kinds of authorship: 1) one pseudonymously, using assumed names of publishers, authors and characters, who all embodied distinctive worldviews, leaving it up to the reader to decide what to make of each one; and 2) the other under his own 3 name, in an effort to set his pseudonymous characters and their principal governing attitudes or views of life apart from his own. Most of his authorship under his own name was sermons, or as Kierkegaard called them, edifying discourses.

Kierkegaard’s first period of literary activity, from 1843-46 was strongly affected by his broken engagement with Regine. After this first period, he intended to cease writing and become a country pastor, but it never happened. During 1846 Kierkegaard became involved in a dispute with a Danish literary magazine, The Corsair, which generated the third crisis or collision of his life. The Corsair was a satirical magazine, making Denmark’s intellectual elite seem ridiculous by making jokes about them. Much of the writing for the magazine was anonymous, and this anonymity allowed for abusive and irresponsible attacks. Up to this point the magazine had exempted Kierkegaard from its harsh ridicule and it had even praised some of the pseudonymous works. However, after a nasty review of another of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard responded complaining, ironically, that it was unjust for him to be the only important Danish author who had not been “abused” in The Corsair. The Corsair responded by making Kierkegaard the object of its ridicule in a long-lasting, sustained attack that went beyond the boundary of criticism or even ridicule of Kierkegaard’s ideas, making fun of his physical appearance, the uneven length of his trousers, his supposed arrogance, and many other things, both in texts and in cartoons. The affair fundamentally changed Kierkegaard’s life. He decided that more than ever he had to remain at his post and continue his activity as a writer in Copenhagen. The persecution and resulting isolation he suffered gave him a profound sensitivity to the evils 4 that can stem from an anonymous “public,” incited by the press. He came to believe that true necessarily was linked to outward suffering, since Christian faith requires a break with the values that established societies always embody. So there is a second period of literary activity from 1847 to 1851, also with pseudonymous and under his own name works, strongly affected by the quarrel with The Corsair.

The final collision of Kierkegaard’s life was with the of Denmark (Lutheran) and its leaders, the bishops J.P. Mynster and H.L. Martensen. As long as Mynster, the bishop of Zealand and the family pastor from his childhood, was alive, Kierkegaard refrained from personal attacks. But Mynster died January 30, 1854, and when Martensen, who would soon succeed him as the main leader of the Danish church, at the funeral praised Mynster as a “witness to the truth,” linking him to the martyrs of the faith, Kierkegaard could no longer keep silent. He held his tongue and refrained from speaking for a few months in order to not interfere in the appointment and installation of Martensen as Mynster’s successor, but in December 1854 he began to publish a series of newspaper articles and later his own magazine, The Moment, which Kierkegaard began in order to carry on his polemical battle with the established church and to argue again and again that what passed as Christianity in Denmark was false. The Moment is Kierkegaard last period of literary activity. He managed to publish nine issues of The Moment and had the tenth issue ready for publication when he collapsed on the street, and was taken to the hospital with paralysis. He died a few weeks later on November 11, 1855, only 42 years old.

Only a few times in his whole life did Kierkegaard preach live. He did it a couple of times at the Friday communion services at the Church of Our 5

Lady, the cathedral of Copenhagen, and Sunday May 18, 1851, he preached at the Citadel Church (Kastellet). He preached on James 1:17-21, a text which already had been the basis for some of his edifying discourses. James was Kierkegaard’s favorite letter, unlike Luther, who considered James as a letter of straw. I will remind you of the first verse of the text Kierkegaard preached about: “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” (Perhaps you remember a harvest hymn with this verse as the refrain). We know from his journal that Kierkegaard had suffered greatly from every sort of strain, as was always the case when he had to use his physical person, and apparently the thought of Regine in the congregation (she didn’t attend) did not make the sermon any easier to write. We also know that the day after delivering this sermon Kierkegaard felt so enfeebled and weak that he promised himself that he would never take the pulpit again. He wrote: “It went reasonably well, but my voice was so weak that people complained about not being able to hear… On Monday I was so faint and weak it was frightful… Then I became really sick.” Peter Zahle, an author and later a pastor, who was in the Citadel Church that Sunday, had not been the least bit dissatisfied with Kierkegaard’s voice. Zahle wrote: “No one who has heard him preach will forget that extremely weak, but wonderfully expressive voice. Never have I heard a voice that was so capable of inflecting even the most delicate nuances of expression.”1

2) A quote from that sermon preached live which contains the core of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the Christian faith:

1 Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography. Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 673-675. 6

Kierkegaard preached about the changelessness of God and started with a prayer addressed to “You Changeless One, whom nothing changes!,” and he made it very clear already in this opening prayer that changelessness didn´t mean impassibility (notion adopted from Greek philosophy), for he said: “You are not like a human being. If he is to maintain a mere measure of changelessness, he must not have too much that can move him and must not let himself be moved too much. But everything moves you, and in infinite love. Even what we human beings call a trifle [a thing of little or no value or significance] and unmoved pass by, the sparrow’s need, that moves you; what we so often scarcely pay attention to, a human sigh, that moves you, Infinite Love. But nothing changes you, you Changeless One!2 Kierkegaard compares God with a spring. He knows that the comparison is not so good. A spring is water flowing or seeping out of an opening in the ground or hillside and it is sensitive to seasonal changes in groundwater availability and may therefore dwindle during dry periods. God on the contrary always remains changeless: “But you, O God, you changeless One, you, unchanged, are always to be found and are always to be found unchanged. No one, either in life or in death, travels so far away that you are not to be found, that you are not there; you are indeed everywhere –this is not the way springs are on this earth, springs are only in special places. Moreover –what overwhelming security! –you do not remain on the spot like a spring; you travel along. No one strays so far away that he cannot find his way back to you, you who are not only like a spring that lets itself be found –what a poor description of your being! –you who are like a spring that even searches for the thirsting, the straying, something unheard of about any spring. Thus are you

2 The Moment and Late Writings, 268. 7 unchanged and everywhere to be found. And whenever a person comes to you, at whatever age, at whatever time of day, in whatever condition –if he comes honestly, he will always find (like the spring’s unchanged coolness) your love just as warm, you Changeless One!3

3) The circumstances in which he had to deliver his message: a) is distinct from Christianity.

With Christendom Kierkegaard means a Christian state, a Christian nation, as his Denmark, where everything was Christian and all were Christians, where one saw, wherever one turned, nothing but Christians and Christianity [remember that until 1849 in Denmark Christianity was the official religion and that both and were obligatory], and Kierkegaard ventured to go a step farther and maintain that even the average Jews living in Denmark in his time were to a certain degree Christians [and there were Jews living in Denmark because of an exception made with them and not because of freedom of religion].

Kierkegaard accused the Danish state of having employed 1000 officials (the pastors) who –in the name of proclaiming Christianity (and this is for Kierkegaard far more dangerous than a clear and open attempt to hinder Christianity) were financially interested in having people call themselves Christians –the larger the flock of sheep taking the name “Christians” the better, and in letting the matter rest there, so that they did not come to know what Christianity in truth is.4

Kierkegaard said that “when Christianity entered the world, the task was to proclaim Christianity directly,” but “in ‘Christendom’ the relation is

3 Ibid., 280-81. 4 Ibid., 95. 8 different.” “What is found there is not Christianity but an enormous illusion,” and therefore “if Christianity is to be introduced here, then first and foremost the illusion must be removed. But since this illusion, this delusion, is that they are Christians, then it of course seems as if the introduction of Christianity would deprive people of Christianity. Yet this is the first thing that must be done; the illusion must go.”5 b) Competition between different messages that want to be heard.

Already in 1851 Kierkegaard could say: “Communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point with regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than –rubbish!” Therefore he tried to find a way to make his voice heard that didn’t appeal to what he called “noisy instruments” and that would not be content and satisfied with just jolting and shocking the senses or stirring up the masses, the crowd, and the public.6 c) All the messages are put at the same level of something interesting.

Kierkegaard believed that the press had the primary responsibility for the leveling of all the messages and turning them into something interesting and not more than that. In one of the numbers of The Moment Kierkegaard wrote: “People read what I write; many read it with interest, with great interest –that I know. But for many that is perhaps all it amounts to. Next Sunday one goes to church as usual. One says: What Kierkegaard writes is basically true, and it is extremely interesting to read what he points out, that

5 Ibid., 107. 6 For Self-Examination – Judge for Yourself!, 47-48. 9 the whole official divine worship makes a fool of God, is blasphemy –but, when all is said and done, we are now accustomed to this; we cannot extricate ourselves from it; such powers we do not have. But one thing is sure, we shall read with enjoyment what he writes; one can really be very impatient to go and get a new number and learn more about this undeniably enormously interesting criminal case.”7

Kierkegaard turned to a very expressive but also fun illustration: “There is a man whose wife is unfaithful to him, but he does not know it. Then one of his friends enlightens him about it –a dubious act of friendship, many will perhaps say. The man replies: It is with intense interest that I have listened to you speak; I admire the keenness with which you have known how to track down such carefully concealed unfaithfulness, of which I have really had no inkling. But that I should therefore, now that I know it is so, divorce her –no, that I cannot decide to do. After all, I am accustomed to this domestic routine: I cannot do without it. Moreover, she has money; I cannot do without that either. On the other hand, I do not deny that I will listen with the most intense interest to what you can tell me further about this affair, because –I do not say this to pay you a compliment –but because it is extremely interesting.”8

4) His efforts to be effective with his message: a) The indirect communication.

Kierkegaard worried a lot about how he communicated to his readers. People already knew a lot about moral and religious truths, but had not really thought them through in relation to their own lives. Therefore he sat

7 The Moment, 259. 8 Ibid., 259-60. 10 himself the task of communicating indirectly, of assisting others to engage in what he called the “double reflection” that is essential for genuine subjective understanding. He wanted to encourage not merely intellectual understanding, but the “second reflection” that requires understanding of what these concepts would mean for a person’s own life. Communication on moral and religious matters would not be effective without the active involvement and appropriation by the person receiving the communication.

The use of pseudonyms was one of the strategies he designed to encourage readers to think for themselves. Through the pseudonyms, Kierkegaard presented his readers with various views as to how human life should be lived, various answers to the question “How should a person exist? “ The pseudonyms did not simply write about these various answers to the question; they embodied those answers. And the reader is urged to ask questions such as these: “Do I want to be like this person?” “Am I like this person?” “What do I find attractive and/or repulsive about this person?” The reader is thus encouraged to make an application to his or her own life from the start.

Irony and humor are other strategies used by Kierkegaard, apart from the pseudonyms, in order to encourage the same kind of existential understanding on the part of his readers. b) The as a letter from the beloved.

Kierkegaard was convinced that the Christianity of the New Testament was radically awakening and unsettling9, and that there was nothing more important human beings could do than confront and be confronted by the

9 Ibid., 314. 11

Christianity of the New Testament. He said that he didn’t disparage scholarship and that there is a learned reading of the , and he also admitted that there are obscure passages in the Bible, whole books that are practically riddles. But the Bible should be read as a letter from the beloved. The scholarly tools of for instance using a dictionary to translate difficult words are only preliminaries, a necessary evil so that the reader can come to the point of reading the letter from the beloved. Kierkegaard said: “If there happens to be a wish, a command, an order, then –remember the lover! – then off with you at once to do what it asks.” The objection about the obscure passages in the Bible is only acceptable if it comes from “someone whose life manifests that he has scrupulously complied with all the passages that are easy to understand.”10 And he adds: “It is only all too easy to understand the requirement contained in God’s Word (‘Give all your goods to the poor.’ [Matthew 19:21] ‘If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the left.’ [Matthew 5:39] ‘If anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak also.’ [Matthew 5:40] ‘Rejoice always.’ [1 Thessalonians 5:16] ‘Count it sheer joy when you meet various temptations’ [James 1:2]. It is all just as easy to understand as the remark ‘The weather is fine today,’ a remark that could become difficult to understand in only one way –if a literature came into existence in order to interpret it. The most limited poor creature cannot truthfully deny being able to understand the requirement.”11 c) Inviting the readers to read him aloud.

In the preface of For Self-Examination he writes: “My dear reader, read aloud, if possible! By reading aloud you will gain the strongest impression

10 For Self-Examination, 27-29. 11 Ibid., 34-35. 12 that you have only yourself to consider, not me, who, after all, am ‘without authority,’ nor others, which would be a distraction.”12 d) Speaking without authority.

As a lay person, Kierkegaard can not claim any other authority than the persuasiveness of what he says. “I am without authority; far be it from me to judge any person.”13 “I am an unauthorized poet who influences by means of the ideals.”14 e) Admitting that he is not a Christian.

“I do not call myself a Christian; I do not speak of myself as a Christian”, Kierkegaard continually repeated. He understood that his critics and enemies would have preferred that he with trumpets had proclaimed himself to be the only true Christian, and he also understood why he was accused of pride and arrogance for maintaining himself stubbornly in this position, but the truth is that he related himself to Christianity so much that he truly perceived and acknowledged that he was not a Christian. He said: “I do not call myself a Christian. In a certain sense it seems easy enough to get rid of me; the others are indeed such completely different fellows, they are true Christians. Yes, indeed, so it seems. But it is not so; just because I do not call myself a Christian, it is impossible to get rid of me, having as I do the confounded capacity of being able, also by means of not calling myself a Christian, to make it manifest that the others are even less so.”15 f) Being honest with his readers / The Comfortable.

12 Ibid., 3. 13 Ibid., 17. 14 Ibid., 21. 15 The Moment, 340-42. 13

At the beginning of the 2nd number of The Moment, in the peak of the collision with the established church, Kierkegaard talks directly to his reader: “You whom I have called my reader, to you I would like to say a few words.” He knew that he would be attacked and he said that normally the one attacked would be busy defending him or herself, and he or she will do it with an interest in guarding him or herself, fearing that the falsification of what he or she says, the bad personal comments about him or her, will harm the author in the worldly and temporal sense. And he says that this busyness in justifying themselves against every accusation because of worldly and temporal goals “is also harmful in that it coddles people into not caring to grasp an issue for themselves and to be able to judge, into being unwilling to be inconvenienced themselves, to have any strain.” His diagnosis is very sad: “Today in all circumstances there no longer are teachers –but waiters.” And Kierkegaard speaks directly to his reader: “Your comfortableness, no, my dear reader, that I will not promote. If you imagine that I am a waiter, then you have never been my reader; if you actually are my reader, then you will understand that I can even regard it as my duty to you that you be strained a little (that is, it requires an effort from your side) if you do not want the falsification and distortion, the lies and the slander, to wrest from you the idea you have had about my serving something true.” He says that he will speak in another way than is ordinary. He will not bow and scrape before the reader because he wants his or her money and regards his or her opinion to be the verdict.16

Regarding the comfortable, he didn’t speak disparagingly of it. When something can be obtained both in a hard way and in a convenient way and

16 Ibid., 105-08. 14 the way in which it is had doesn’t matter, then the convenient and comfortable way is undeniable preferable. He gives the example of water. It can be obtained in the hard way by fetching it from the pump, but it also can be obtained in the convenient way by high pressure; and naturally Kierkegaard prefers the convenient way. But he says: The eternal is not something like that, indifferent to the way in which it is obtained; no, the eternal really is not a something but is –the way in which it is obtained. And the eternal is obtained in only one way, which is eternity’s hard way.17 Kierkegaard’s main critique of in his days was that justification by faith was preached as something comfortable: Just trust God and don’t worry about your deeds!, forgetting that Luther came to this conclusion after a hard struggle. And we should also get involved in this struggle and be defeated before we can realize that justification is offered by faith alone. g) Making it clear that he first of all is talking to himself.

Practice in Christianity is a book Kierkegaard wrote pseudonymously under the name of Anti-Climacus, but Kierkegaard puts himself as the editor and the book opens with a preface by the editor where Kierkegaard said: “The requirement should be heard –and I understand what is said as spoken to me alone.”18 Kierkegaard makes it clear that he doesn’t want to judge others, that the pseudonym is first of all speaking to him, that he is still ‘striving’ to achieve the standpoint of the pseudonym (perhaps he will never achieve it fully!), and that everybody else is invited to expose himself or herself to the same challenge.

4) What he expects from his “dear reader.”

17 Ibid., 110-11. 18 Practice in Christianity, 7. 15 a) That he or she thinks for him or herself and becomes a “single individual.”

“The single individual” is Kierkegaard’s most important category. Everyone begins as a particular being that is dependent upon hereditary transmission and environment and nobody can become a single individual without great effort and struggle. To become a single individual does not mean to isolate oneself from the society and retreat to the soul’s innermost where you undisturbed can be yourself. The idea is, on the contrary, that the individual must fully be able to find himself or herself in the society and that the society must obtain its particular character in the individual. This happens when the individual takes upon him or herself what he or she is, when the individual accepts or finds his or her status in the society with the duties and rights he or she has in the community, and when the individual accepts him or herself with the special features and peculiarities he or she has.

We should not cut short the process of becoming a single individual by disappearing into the “crowd,” the “public,” the omnivorous and greedy monster that swallows and destroys everything. The process of becoming a single individual requires that the person accepts that he or she has not established him or herself, but has been established by God. God is not a concept which is present in advance, but a power we collide into and can only collide into when we get into the process of becoming a single individual. It will depend on the circumstances if the process of singularization which completes itself in the confrontation with God will give us a figure and a shape outwardly recognizable. And the end of the process of singularization will always be provisional because challenge will come anew and require us to repeat the process. 16 b) What it means to the poor and the lowly:

To the poor and the lowly Kierkegaard has something specific to say. He considers that also the poor and the lowly are called to go through the process of singularization. They may think that their fate is to be pitiable objects of mercifulness, that they have no choice but to bow and thank the rich or the authorities for their misunderstood mercifulness toward them.19 But this is not truth. They can also become themselves and stand alone, free and independent, as their own masters20, and even be able to practice mercifulness. Mercifulness can be shown even if it can give nothing and is able to do nothing. It follows of itself, says Kierkegaard, that if the merciful person has something to give he or she should give it more than willingly. But the problem is that if we have, for instance, money to give, then we can hide our lack of concern for others behind public displays of financial generosity that are gratifying to our egos and oppressive towards the persons who receive the money. c) The believer indistinguishable from anybody else.

Kierkegaard insists again and again that the process of singularization which completes itself with the confrontation with God should not divorce us from the society to which we belong. It would certainly be easier if we all could choose the monastic way of life or if the path of or of self- inflicted pain was required. In Fear and Trembling, of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, published in 1843, the author is capable of imagining a “knight of faith” in whom it is impossible to find not even a little heterogeneous fraction of a signal from the infinite manifesting itself in

19 Works of Love, 322. 20 Ibid., 274. 17 him. “No!, the author says, “I examine his figure from head to foot to see if there might not be a crack through which the infinite peeped,” but “No!”, “he looks just like a tax collector.” “He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois philistine could belong to it more. (…) He enjoys and takes part in everything and whenever one sees him participating in something particular, it is carried out with a persistence that characterizes the worldly person whose heart is attached to such things. He goes about his work. To see him one would think he was a pen-pusher who had lost his soul in Italian bookkeeping [it was an Italian monk who invented the double entry bookkeeping with debit and credit], so exact is he. He goes to church. No heavenly look or any sign of the incommensurable betrays him. If one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the crowd, for at most his hearty vigorous hymn singing proves that he has a good pair of lungs. In the afternoon he takes a walk in the woods. He enjoys everything he sees…. Towards evening he goes home… On the way he thinks about an appetizing little dish of warm food his wife surely has for him when he comes home, for example a roast head of lamb with vegetables…. If she has it, to see him eat would be an enviable sight for distinguished people and an inspiring one for the common man, for his appetite is heartier [and more exuberant] than Esau’s. If his wife doesn’t have it –oddly enough- it is all the same to him…. He smokes his pipe in the evening; to see him one would swear it was the local tradesman across the way… He lets things take their course with a freedom from care as if he were a reckless good-for-nothing [that is, a thoughtless irresponsible person] 18 and yet he buys every moment he lives at the opportune time for the dearest price.”21 d) Two changes in Kierkegaard.

The problem is that with the third crisis in his life two important changes happen: 1) Kierkegaard realizes that the structured society to which he considered that the Christians should return after the process of becoming singular individuals had begun to dissolve and therefore he is forced to pay more attention to political issues than he had done before. Kierkegaard will witness the fall of absolute monarchy in Denmark in 1848 and the transition to democracy and constitutional monarchy, and what is fascinating to me is that his criticisms and remarks are not only relevant to the political transition Denmark was going through back then, but also put the finger on the pulse of many of the political problems that our contemporary societies are facing. [Equality and leveling, the principles of popular sovereignty and election by majority, the temporary character of any established social and political order, etc.] 2) He becomes more and more persuaded that Christianity itself requires us to unfold our lives in a certain way that will bring us into conflict with the world. He says that Christians will have to live in the tension of being pulled at the same time by the need to take refuge in God’s grace and the demand to follow and imitate . I have already mentioned that Kierkegaard has tried to be honest with his readers. Now he will urge his readers more than ever to be honest with themselves and not try to fool neither themselves nor others nor God with their pretending.

21 Fear and Trembling (in Sylvia Walsh’s translation), 32-34 19 e) The recommendation to make the humble admission that you cannot fully respond to the demands of Jesus Christ on your life.

Kierkegaard says: “It is human for a person to shrink [to hesitate] from letting the Word really gain power over him –if no one else will admit it, he says, I admit that I do. It is human to pray to God to have patience if one cannot immediately do what one should but still promises to strive; it is human to pray to God to have mercy, that the requirement is too high for one –if no one else will admit it, I admit that I do.”22 It will always be better to have the courage and honesty and truth to say directly to God, “I cannot accept that,” than to resort to hypocrisy and falsify the concept of what it is to be a Christian.23 f) The recommendation to plainly acknowledge that you don’t want to be a Christian.

Kierkegaard says that it is infinitely dearer to God that you plainly acknowledge that you are not and do not want to be a Christian, this is infinitely dearer to God than to worship God making a foul of him.24 g) The recommendation that you choose “decisively, resolutely, definitely to have no religion,” which at least is “something passionate.”

All religion, says Kierkegaard, involves passion, having passion. Therefore decisively, resolutely, definitely to have no religion, this is already something passionate and preferable than the indifferentism of having a

22 For Self-Examination and Judge For Yourself, 35. 23 The Moment, 190. 24 Ibid., 97. 20 religion diluted and botched into sheer blather, in an entirely passionless way.25

In the voice of his pseudonym Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard says: “If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol –where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in truth to God although he is worshipping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is therefore in truth worshipping an idol.”26 If we are trying to determine what makes a human person’s life ‘true,’ it seems very plausible that objectively true intellectual beliefs are neither sufficient nor necessary.” C. Stephen Evans, an excellent Kierkegaard scholar, gives this example: “Imagine an individual who has come to believe… that compassion is in fact a vice, and that truly ethical people care only about themselves. Despite this objectively wrong belief, it might be possible for this individual to respond with genuine compassion and love when confronted by actual human suffering. Whatever the ultimate ethical and religious truth may be, human persons may be better –or worse –than their theories. The Kierkegaardian view is that it is subjectivity, the inward emotions and passions that give shape to human lives and motivate human actions, that makes the difference.”27

25 Ibid., 208-09. 26 Concluding Unscientific Postcript to Philosophical Fragments, 201. 27 Kierkegaard: An Introduction, 61.