I think the reason I liked Søren Kierkegaard more than any other so-called “religious philosopher” I read in school is that he spoke my language when he attempted to talk about faith.
My take on him is, of course, highly subjective, and might evoke strenuous objections from those conversant with his philosophy; but then again, Kierkegaard was in favor of nothing so much as subjectivity when it came to questions of truth, so I imagine he’d give me a pass.
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In his best-known work, Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard speaks of the necessity of passion as a vehicle to arriving at faith — passion regarding desires of the heart which, in the examples he uses, at least, are directed at something other than God, and are quite “spiritually incorrect” by the standards of most orthodoxies. I suppose having passionately desired something other than some abstract omniscient father figure since I was old enough to chase my cousin Nate around the coffee table, I was naturally more inclined to listen to this crazy Dane.
The book attempts to take on one of the problems many sane, rational, ethical people have with the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac: How could a guy agree to sacrifice the cherished son he had waited so long for God to give him, even if God, for some arbitrary and unknown reason, required it? (It is widely believed by biographers and scholars that Kierkegaard’s laborious philosophical endeavor here was, among other things, an elaborate allegory for his broken engagement with the love of his life, Regine Olsen. This angle only further endears him to me…)
I was riveted when I got through all of his preliminary obfuscations about Abraham (that were largely — or so it seemed to me — deliberately roundabout teasers hinting at where he planned on taking the reader without including too many particulars) to the part where he first brings up the knight. This hypothetical knight, you see, is pining for a certain fair maiden, a princess, in the tradition of the knight-errant of medieval romances. But this is no run-of-the-mill fairy tale. It’s a little too dark and intense and ungratifying for that (unless of course you’re talking about Hans Christian Andersen).
No, the action here is all internal, and would make for a very boring Disney movie.
The knight gives himself over utterly to his longing for his beloved; he feels love palpitate in every fiber of his being, as if he had drunk a mysterious potion that could very easily turn out to be deadly. This single-minded desire, says Kierkegaard, becomes “the substance of his life.” To all those who would advise the gentleman to get out more, maybe take up a hobby or find some nice rich brewer’s widow to marry…well, he’d say “let them go on croaking in the swamp.” This is the man’s passion, for the sake of which he is about to embark upon a profound and difficult interior journey — a journey that may or may not lead to faith.
Because when he sends out his dearly held wishes “like doves,” they return to him as messengers of sorrow — there is no way on earth he can be with the princess. What his heart desires is truly impossible.
According to Kierkegaard, he then undertakes a preliminary “movement” — that is, he enters into a sort of despair the author calls infinite resignation. In the midst of abominable, nearly intolerable pain, he recognizes the eternal and formless nature of a love that will never find expression in the temporal world. “Spiritually speaking, everything is possible,” says Kierkegaard, “but in the finite world there is much that is not possible.” The princess may be utterly lost to him, but at the same time she becomes a permanent and immovable presence within her devoted knight’s soul.
Once he has surrendered all claim to his dearly beloved, and is “reconciled in pain,” the knight is ready, if he dares, to make the most difficult move of all, the movement of faith. Kierkegaard pretty much sums it up with the statement “I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, by virtue, that is, of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible.”
In twelve-step lingo I guess that’s what you might call “giving it over to your Higher Power.” The knight’s surrender is total, yet he believes in the face of inarguable impossiblity that the Almighty will commit an act tantamount to reversing the laws of gravity, because He can.
Thus we can possibly understand how Abraham (Kierkegaard) could prepare to sacrifice (give up) his beloved Isaac (Regine), having gone through this same agonizing renunciation and come to embrace the absurdity that somehow, through the miraculous workings of Divine omnipotence, his loved one would be returned to him (in Abraham’s case, perhaps even from the dead; in Kierkegaard’s, from marriage to another).
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This will sound like heresy to traditional intellectuals (to them I say: get over yourselves) but in many ways I see this whole setup as paralleling what innumerable New Age quantum-consciousness authors (Deepak Chopra et. al.) are currently saying about intention and nonattachment. There is that same delicate dance between complete disinvestment in an outcome and the absolute conviction that what one desires will come to pass (through something like Divine Providence). Both conceive reaching toward something and letting it go as one single paradoxical gesture.
It’s fascinating to me that I would find in such unlikely places echoes of Kierkegaard, but then, maybe, just maybe, there’s something to it.
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As I said in the beginning, what I like most about Kierkegaard is his unorthodox appeal to our human desires. It’s not typical of religious thinkers to engage our tangible, terrestrial passions when talking about faith. At best, it’s considered bad form; at worst, it’s considered idolatry, or Samsara-inducing attachment, or whatever. It’s against the law, as the song goes, as long as I’m borrowing lyrics from Paul Simon. But what are those of us to do, who have only experienced something like religious ecstasy gazing deeply into the eyes of another human being? Who touch upon something vast, numinous, and eternal not in church (or even in silent meditation), but in the inestimable presence of (a) certain individual(s)?
Kierkegaard, at least, gets that. Check out what he wrote to Regine (from his Journals):
Oh, can I really believe the poet’s tales, that when one first sees the object of one’s love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. … it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it’s good to be here.
I may still have trouble with faith, but to that I can say Amen.
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