Kierkegaard on Faith and Love

KIERKEGAARD ON FAITH AND LOVE Kierkegaard’s writings are interspersed with remarkable stories of love, commonly understood as a literary device that illustrates the problematic nature of aesthetic and ethical forms of life, and the contrasting desirability of the life of faith. Sharon Krishek argues that for Kierkegaard the connection between love and faith is far from being merely illustrative. Rather, love and faith have a common structure, and are involved with one another in a way that makes it impossible to love well without faith. Remarkably, this applies to romantic love no less than to neighbourly love. Krishek’s original and compelling interpretation of the Works of Love in the light of Kierkegaard’s famous analysis of the paradoxicality of faith in Fear and Trembling shows that preferential love, and in particular romantic love, plays a much more important and positive role in his thinking than has usually been assumed. is a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy Department at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

SHARON KRISHEK

M O D E R N E U R O P E A N P H I L O SO P H Y General Editor R O B E R T B . P I P P I N , University of Chicago Advisory Board GAR Y GU TTI NG , University of Notre Dame R O L F - P E T E R H O R S T M A N N , Humboldt University, Berlin M A R K S A C K S , University of Essex

Some recent titles Frederick A. Olafson: Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics Gu¨nter Zo¨ller: Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy Warren Breckman: Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory William Blattner: Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism Charles Griswold: Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment Gary Gutting: Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity Allen Wood: Kant’s Ethical Thought Karl Ameriks: Kant and the Fate of Autonomy Alfredo Ferrarin: Hegel and Aristotle Cristina Lafont: Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure Nicholas Wolsterstorff: Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology Daniel Dahlstrom: Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Michelle Grier: Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion Henry Allison: Kant’s Theory of Taste Allen Speight: Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency J. M. Bernstein: Adorno Will Dudley: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy Taylor Carman: Heidegger’s Analytic Douglas Moggach: The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer Ru¨diger Bubner: The Innovations of Idealism Jon Stewart: Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered Michael Quante: Hegel’s Concept of Action Wolfgang Detel: Foucault and Classical Antiquity Robert M. Wallace: Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God Johanna Oksala: Foucault on Freedom

Be´atrice Longuenesse: Kant on the Human Standpoint Wayne Martin: Theories of Judgment Heinrich Meier: Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem Otfried Ho¨ffe: Kant’s Cosmopolitan Theory of the Law and Peace Be´atrice Longuenesse: Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics Rachel Zuckert: Kant on Beauty and Biology Andrew Bowie: Music, Philosophy and Modernity Paul Redding: Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought Kristin Gjesdal: Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism Jean-Christophe Merle: German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment

KIERKEGAARD ON FAITH AND LOVE

SHARON KRISHEK The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sa˜o Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521519410 Sharon Krishek 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN

978-0-521-51941-0 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of Isaac Krishek, my father 1950–2006

CONTENTS

page x xii

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: stages on love’s way

1

1 Lost loves 2 The sorrowful lover 3 The knight of love 4 Neighbourly love versus romantic love 5 The double movement of love 6 Faith-full romantic love

17 46 75 109 138 166

Bibliography Index

190 195

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I was truly fortunate to be surrounded by the good will and extensive help of so many people, and I would like to try and express here my sincere gratitude. First, I would like to thank the two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press for their extremely helpful comments. In particular I’d like to express my gratitude to Reader B, whose detailed reviews, suggestions, and insistence on clarifications have immensely improved my manuscript. I would also like to thank Hilary Gaskin, the philosophy editor at Cambridge University Press, who has helped me throughout this long process with her patience and kind attention. I would like to express my gratitude to the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University, and to the faculty of humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for awarding me postdoctoral fellowships in the academic years 2006–7 and 2007–8, respectively, and so providing me with the time and peace of mind needed for writing this book. The beginning of this book is rooted in ideas developed in the context of a Ph.D. thesis which I wrote at the University of Essex. I would like to thank Simon Critchley, my supervisor, for his enlightening philosophical guidance, and for his vital encouragement both in easier and more difficult times. The late Mark Sacks was the head of the department during the years of my study at Essex, but his involvement in my work went far beyond his official duties. The perceptive interest and trust he expressed regarding my ideas helped me greatly, and the memory of our long conversations is dear and meaningful to me. x

acknowledgements

xi

In the summer of 2005 I spent a most productive month at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St Olaf College, where I was first introduced to the welcoming and lively community of Kierkegaard scholars. I wish to thank the people I was privileged to meet there, and in particular those who have accompanied my work since then: John Lippitt, for acquainting me with the Library and its denizens, and for sharing the clarity of his thought and the breadth of his understanding; Gordon Marino, the curator of the Library, who reminded me to think in ways that are closely connected with life, and whose invaluable feedback and warm friendliness I deeply appreciate; George Pattison, whose work on Kierkegaard had influenced me long before I met him in person, for the serious attention he gave to my thoughts, which was significantly motivating for me; and finally, Ed Mooney, whose approach to philosophy in general and to Kierkegaard in particular has been crucial to my own outlook, and whose intellectual enthusiasm and unlimited generosity have set an admired example and greatly cheered me on many occasions. My engagement with the study of philosophy is much indebted to the people who first initiated me into this field. I wish to thank my former teachers at Tel Aviv University, and in particular Marcelo Dascal and Zvi Tauber, who have helped me to develop vital intellectual tools, and kindly offered their experienced advice; and Ran Sigad and Hagi Kenaan, who have, each in his special manner, formatively influenced the way I think about philosophy. To Hagi I also wish to express thanks for his constant support throughout these years and for his enduring friendship. Other friends significantly helped me in many ways, and I deeply thank them for this: Ido Geiger, for his right-to-the-point tips and calming words; Vered Lev-Kenaan, for her strength, her heartening optimism, and her inspiring trust; Dorit Peleg, whom I first knew only as an author but was lucky enough to get to know as a wise friend; and Maya Michaeli, whose close friendship I deeply cherish, for making everything easier with her love and care. I would like to thank my very dear family, and in particular my sister and mother, Einav and Tamara Krishek, and my mother-in-law Rachel Meirav, for their endless patience, their selfless efforts on my behalf, and above all for their love, which continually expresses itself in so many irreplaceable ways. And most of all, I would like to thank Ariel Meirav, my greatest critic and teacher, my greatest love, who spared no intellectual, emotional, and practical effort to help to make this enterprise possible; without him, both this book and its author would have undoubtedly been in a less desirable place.

ABBREVIATIONS

CA

CUP

EO

EUD

FT

JN JP

The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s Writings 8, trans. Reidar Thomte, in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2 vols., Kierkegaard’s Writings 12, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Either/Or, 2 vols., Kierkegaard’s Writings 3–4, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Kierkegaard’s Writings 5, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings 6, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, general ed. Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, (Vol. I) 1967, (Vol. II) 1970, (Vols. III–IV) 1975, (Vols. V–VII) 1978. xii

list of abbreviations PF

PV

R

SLW

SUD

WL

xiii

Philosophical Fragments, in Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard’s Writings 7, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard’s Writings 22, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Repetition, in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings 6, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard’s Writings 11, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard’s Writings 19, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s Writings 16, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

INTRODUCTION: STAGES ON LOVE’S WAY

1 Kierkegaard, love, and romantic love And yet it must be wonderful to get the princess, and the knight of faith is the only happy man … to live happily with her day after day … this is wonderful. (FT, 50) … erotic love is undeniably life’s most beautiful happiness. (WL, 267)

Romantic love, in contrast with neighbourly love or love for God, is rarely viewed as an important issue for Kierkegaard.1 Despite the textual evidence regarding the centrality of this kind of love in his works, scholars in this field often seem reluctant to take the matter seriously. When required to address Kierkegaard’s repeated references to love stories, the secondary literature tends either to interpret this as a literary device or, more frequently, to relate this to his unhappy personal relationship with Regine Olsen, his forsaken fiance´e.2 This ‘biographical’ approach is common among interpreters of Kierkegaard who believe that a complete understanding of his 1

2

I use the expression ‘romantic love’ in its loose familiar sense of a love between two individuals that involves erotic aspects, without intending to connote any more specific notion such as the conception of love associated with the romantic tradition in literature. Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen became engaged in 1840. Søren met Regine, a young and beautiful woman from an affluent family, years before the engagement, but proposed to her only in 1840, when she was 18 years old. A year later he broke off the engagement, without giving a convincing explanation. The broken engagement caused a great scandal in Copenhagen and much pain to everyone involved.

1

2

kierkegaard on faith and love

work requires a thorough understanding of his life, and vice versa. Such an interpretative method was dominant among earlier scholars (P. A. Heiberg and Walter Lowrie, for example), but it still has its ardent followers today (as demonstrated by Gene Fendt’s book on Works of Love and especially by the comprehensive biography of Kierkegaard by Joakim Garff).3 However, intriguing as this approach to interpreting Kierkegaard may be, it is evident that it does not take his preoccupation with romantic love to be philosophically enlightening. And this is true also with regard to scholars who do not entertain the ‘biographical’ approach: they are equally inclined to overlook the possibility of discovering philosophical insight in Kierkegaard’s discussions of romantic love. There appear to be two main reasons for this. The first reason concerns the context in which these discussions are usually found. The aesthetic writings which most conspicuously elaborate on this subject are written under pseudonyms and conveyed in the form of ‘indirect communication’.4 There is a vast discussion in the secondary literature regarding Kierkegaard’s use of such indirectness, and the reasons offered for his decision to adopt this method are not uncontroversial. However, most of the commentators agree that the relationship between Kierkegaard’s own views and those that he attributes to his pseudonyms is, at the very least, complicated. This complication not only challenges any attempt to give a coherent interpretation of his philosophy, but often leads to a sceptical assessment of the views expressed in the voices of his pseudonyms.5 The centrality of romantic love in the lives of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms is thus disregarded because it is taken to represent their incomplete, or even mistaken, understanding of existence – Kierkegaard’s apparent obsession with romantic love is understood not as a reflection of the importance of the matter to him, but rather as a reflection of the interests of his unhappy pseudonyms, and their problematic points of view. The second major reason for not taking Kierkegaard’s discussions of romantic love seriously has to do with his reputation as a philosopher who is interested exclusively in ‘the single individual’.6 Kierkegaard is seen as an anti-social philosopher, who has nothing to contribute to a moral understanding of the relationships between human beings. He is notoriously portrayed as a philosopher who focuses his attention on the individual’s relationship with himself and with divinity, and is thus allegedly 3 4 5 6

See Fendt 1989; Garff 2005. The designation of a group of Kierkegaard’s writings as ‘aesthetic’ is explained in note 16 below. I refer to this complication in chapters 2 and 5. For Kierkegaard’s use of this expression see, for example, PV, 101–26.

introduction: stages on love’s way

3

indifferent (or even hostile) to social, inter-human relationships. The life of faith offered by Kierkegaard, it is often claimed, is very lonely, leaving no room for relationships with human others, including of course relationships of romantic love. Martin Buber, in works such as The Question to the Single One and What is Man?, has probably contributed the most to shaping Kierkegaard’s problematic image as estranged from morally significant relationships, but others have followed.7 With a reputation like this, then, it is perhaps not surprising that one is hard pressed to find philosophers and scholars who seek in Kierkegaard’s words enlightenment with regard to romantic love. Moreover, Kierkegaard himself has directly contributed to this problematic reputation, by formulating quite explicit claims against romantic love in his important book Works of Love. On the face of it, Works of Love should have presented a challenge both to those who disregard Kierkegaard’s views on love due to the indirectness of his writing and, in particular, to those who disregard them due to his reputation as an anti-social philosopher alienated from morality. First of all, Works of Love is a direct work, published under Kierkegaard’s name. Secondly, it is devoted entirely to exploring the relationships of love that one ought to have with one’s neighbours in general, and with particular neighbours more specifically (including, of course, our romantic beloveds). It seems, then, that this book provides a source for both a moral theory and a theory of romantic love, and thus should constitute at least the beginning of a reply to all those who refuse to see in Kierkegaard a philosopher who is interested in the subject of romantic love. However, this does not turn out to be the case: it is precisely Kierkegaard’s extensive treatment of human relationships in this book which has drawn some of the severest criticism of his understanding of ethics and love. In a harsh essay entitled ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’ Theodor Adorno claims that Kierkegaardian love is so abstract that it ultimately amounts to ‘misanthropy’, ‘paradoxical callousness’, and even a ‘demonic hatred’; Knud Ejler Løgstrup, in the ‘polemical epilogue’ to his influential book, The Ethical Demand, wishes to ‘[settle] accounts with Kierkegaard’s Works of Love’; and Irving Singer, in his wide-ranging study of love, declares that the doctrine of love presented in Works of Love is ‘too remote from human experience to be convincing’.8 These views of Works of Love, needless to say, have only strengthened the image of Kierkegaard as a philosopher 7 8

See Buber 2004. For some more recent examples see MacIntyre 1984: 39–56, and also Mackey 1986. Adorno 1940: 423; Løgstrup 1997: 218; Singer 1987: 48.

4

kierkegaard on faith and love

who cannot contribute anything positive or valuable to the understanding of love in general, and to that of romantic love in particular. In recent years, however, a new interest in Works of Love has emerged. Leading scholars of Kierkegaard such as George Pattison and C. Stephen Evans have published studies in which Works of Love plays a central role, and varied essays on this work have been gathered into an interesting collection.9 An especially noteworthy contribution in this context is M. Jamie Ferreira’s Love’s Grateful Striving which constitutes the most comprehensive commentary on Works of Love to be published thus far.10 These new readings of Works of Love have tried to establish its importance as an ethical work, and to correct earlier critical views of its philosophical position. Nevertheless, even these sympathetic studies seem to neglect the special place of romantic love in the context of Kierkegaard’s more general understanding of love. This is admittedly in accordance with the ambivalent spirit of Works of Love, as far as romantic love is concerned. After all, in this book, Kierkegaard draws a sharp distinction between neighbourly love and preferential love, and goes out of his way to demonstrate that the latter should be purified and transfigured by the former. Romantic love is a form of preferential love and, as such, is unequivocally denounced. At the same time, Works of Love praises love in all its possible forms, including the romantic. This inconsistent account of romantic love seems to have had the tendency to lead interpreters to assume that for Kierkegaard romantic love is a relatively marginal special case of neighbourly love. It is not surprising then that studies of Works of Love have usually been concerned with the meaning of love as directed at one’s neighbour, any neighbour, rather than more specifically at one’s romantic beloved. Indeed, the only recent study which focuses on Kierkegaard’s understanding of romantic love, completely disregards the distinction between neighbourly love and preferential love.11 However, to consider romantic love merely as a manifestation of neighbourly love is to diminish the importance of the former and to neglect its distinctive and unique nature.12 The interpretations of Works of Love, therefore, appear to leave us with the need to choose between two options. If we take the distinction 9 10 11

12

See Evans 2004; Pattison 2002a; Perkins 1999. See also Andic 1998 and Walsh 1988, 1994. See Ferreira 2001. A detailed discussion of this book is presented in chapter 4. See Hall 2002. As its title suggests, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love offers a pessimistic account of romantic love, which derives from Hall’s view of our failure to follow Christ’s example of neighbourly love. I discuss Hall’s book in chapter 4. Such conflation is especially problematic with respect to the issue of preferentiality. I discuss this problem at length in chapters 4 and 5.

introduction: stages on love’s way

5

between neighbourly love and romantic love seriously, then we have to follow the critical interpretations of this book and end up with a strange conception of romantic love which is negative at worst and, at best, simply inconsistent. But if we follow the more recent readings of Works of Love and ultimately disregard this distinction (or render it inessential), then it seems that we will have to conclude that Kierkegaard has nothing special to say about romantic love in particular. We seem to be faced, therefore, with two unhappy options as far as the relevance of Works of Love to a theory of romantic love is concerned. Either, as the critics argue, the book fails to provide any convincing account of love, romantic or otherwise or, as the sympathizers imply, it provides a valuable account of love, but ultimately one that blurs the unique character of romantic love, failing to distinguish it from other forms of love. Should this, then, be our conclusion regarding Kierkegaard’s view of romantic love? Does he indeed have nothing illuminating to contribute to our understanding of this specific form of love? In the present study I wish to argue quite to the contrary. I claim not only that the subject of romantic love is important for Kierkegaard, but that he offers a unique understanding of its nature and significance. To see this, however, we must broaden our investigation and, in contrast with the customary interpretative tendency in this connection, focus not only on Works of Love but also on the aesthetic writings, and, in particular, on Fear and Trembling. In this central text Kierkegaard presents, side by side with stories of romantic love, an account of the double structure of faith, which includes two seemingly contradicting movements: the movement of resignation and the movement of faith. There is an important connection, I claim, between these two movements and a possible understanding, and fulfilment, of love. Not only does the account of the double movement of faith in Fear and Trembling interestingly parallel the stories of love that it relates, this account also helps to address the inconsistent view of romantic love that we find in Works of Love. Exploring love in the light of faith, then, opens a new way to the understanding of love, and romantic love in particular. It is widely agreed that at the core of Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a concern with the life of faith. In the present study, however, I wish to point to the intriguing connection that Kierkegaard draws between faith and love, and more specifically between faith and romantic love; this profound connection, I argue, may serve to illuminate the nature of the latter. This study therefore attempts to develop a Kierkegaardian account of love on the basis of a detailed examination of Kierkegaard’s account of faith, and

6

kierkegaard on faith and love

in the context of this exploration to offer a theory of romantic love. As we shall see, the central themes of resignation coupled with repetition, of self-denial coupled with affirmation, of the need to give away coupled with the ability to receive back, are crucial for understanding the life of love no less than for understanding the life of faith. 2 The joyful security of the insecure13 The struggle of love … love and life together first take something away from a person before they give. (WL, 154)

Years before writing these words in Works of Love, the young Kierkegaard articulated the following reflections in his journal: Often, as I stood here on a quiet evening, the sea intoning its song with deep but calm solemnity … then the few dear departed ones rose from the grave before me, or rather, it seemed as though they were not dead. I felt so much at ease in their midst, I rested in their embrace, and I felt as though I were outside my body and floated about with them in a higher ether – until the seagull’s harsh screech reminded me that I stood alone and it all vanished before my eyes … I have often stood there and pondered my past life and the different surroundings that have exerted power over me. And before my contemplative gaze, vanished the pettiness that so often causes offence in life, the many misunderstandings that so often separate persons of different temperament, who, if they understood one another properly, would be tied together with indissoluble bonds. (JN, 9)

Kierkegaard is standing at one of his favourite points in Gilleleje, the sound of the sea and the breadth of the sky envelop him, and in the midst of this grandeur he has a twofold vision. It begins with a deep longing for those beloved ones who are gone. He encounters them in some inbetween zone: they seem to be leaving the world of the dead, coming to him; he seems to be stepping beyond the concreteness of his body, the concreteness of the finite world, into their welcoming embrace. He feels so comfortable in their other-worldly arms, as if he has found home. But then the cry of the seagull brings him back, reminds him of the impossibility of this love: they are there, lost to him, he is here, alone in the world. 13

The title alludes to the following statement of Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius): ‘Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love … it has the blissful security of the moment’ (R, 131–2).

introduction: stages on love’s way

7

But then a second vision takes shape before his contemplative mind, and in this vision he clearly sees a possibility of love. The ‘pettiness’ and ‘misunderstandings’ that usually keep people apart dissolve, and instead there emerges the option of being together; the joyful possibility of firm bonds between self and other. And the vision continues: as I stood there alone and forsaken and the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my nothingness, while the sure flight of the birds reminded me on the other hand of Christ’s words, ‘Not a sparrow will fall to the earth without your heavenly Father’s will,’ I felt at one and the same time how great and how insignificant I am. (Ibid., 10)

There are two forces in conflict here. One reminds Kierkegaard of his powerlessness, his nothingness, the other reminds him of God’s love for him; a powerful and encompassing love by virtue of which everything is possible. One force is that of resignation: he is reconciled to his nothingness, he dies to the world; the other is that of affirmation: he nevertheless has his place in this world; his abode is not only among the dead, but also among the living. Kierkegaard deeply wishes that these two forces could always be ‘amicably combined’. ‘Fortunate the man’, he says, for whom this is possible every moment of his life, in whose breast these two factors have not merely reached an agreement but stretched out their hands to each other and celebrated a wedding … a marriage … that will not be barren but will have blessed fruits visible also in the world to the eyes of the experienced observer. (Ibid., emphasis in the text)

We may read these words as expressing not only a wish, but also a question – a question regarding the way to achieve this desirable harmony, which drives one to creative and productive action that would bear fruit in the world. Remembering his earlier reflection on the bonds between people, and given the metaphor he chooses (‘a wedding … a marriage’), we may suppose that the fruits he has in mind are the fruits of love.14 In a way, then, Kierkegaard is asking how he should live – so as to love; how he should form his life, so that love would become possible. After all, his vision begins with painfully feeling the impossibility of love: he yearns for those beloved ones that are forever gone, those who were irrevocably taken away, those whose death uncompromisingly separated them from him. But simultaneously he also envisions the possibility of love: he can feel the blissfulness that human bonds entail, and the providence of God that 14

See the first deliberation in Works of Love.

8

kierkegaard on faith and love

makes such bliss possible. Kierkegaard has a profound insight regarding an existential position that wholeheartedly accepts one’s nothingness while at the same time passionately affirms and rejoices in life and, more specifically, in love. This powerful insight reveals the possibility of love in the face of finitude and limitedness: that is, in the existential context of the ephemerality, loss, separation, and death that seem to posit an impassable obstacle on the way of fulfilling love. We may therefore say that by depicting this poetic vision, Kierkegaard is actually asking about the desirable way to love, about the right way to love. Given the conditions of our existence (that seem to work against the possibility of joyful love), what form should love take so as to become possible nevertheless? Further, it is important to note that the kind of love that inspires this vision is a special, particular love for concrete persons (‘the few dear departed’). At the heart of the problem that stimulates Kierkegaard’s insight regarding the paradoxical harmony between two contradicting powers (an insight which is in many ways central to his entire philosophy) is therefore not merely a general, neighbourly love to any person whatsoever. Rather, it is the kind of love that later in his philosophy Kierkegaard refers to as preferential love. It is a concern with this kind of love that infuses his early existential reflections, and drives him to ponder the possibility of satisfying relationships of love, thus implicitly raising the following question. How, given the essential obstacles along love’s way (temporality, ephemerality, limitedness) should we love; what is the right way to love? Indeed, Kierkegaard’s writings seem almost haunted by this question, especially as it concerns preferential love, and more specifically romantic love.15 The latter kind of love will also be the focus of the present study. Together with Kierkegaard (although not always in agreement with him), and by using his implicit and explicit discussions of love, I shall ask: what does genuine romantic love look like; what is the right way to love romantically? Even though he himself does not explicitly formulate this as a question, Kierkegaard’s fascination with romantic love cannot be missed. His writings are pervaded by the spirits of unhappy lovers, and their yearning for lost relationships of love. This is particularly conspicuous in the early group of his writings – the group that includes the eminent Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and Stages on Life’s Way, which are known

15

The term ‘preferential love’ covers relations of friendship and filial love, as well as relationships of romantic love.

introduction: stages on love’s way

9

as his ‘aesthetic’ writings.16 In the first part of Either/Or we meet various lovers, the most famous of whom is the notorious Seducer whose diary is brought before us in its full sinister glory. In Repetition we meet a somewhat more reserved lover, but no less elusive and unhappy, the Poet who cannot find in his beloved the mysterious thing that he is really after. In the second part of Either/Or we meet a married Judge who presents himself as a happy lover: in two long letters he praises the beauty and truth to be found in marriage. But beneath the apparently perfect surface there are hints of conflicting and darker attitudes, making the reader wonder whether the Judge is as happy a lover as he thinks he is. And indeed in Stages on Life’s Way we meet the frustrated version of the Judge, the demonic lover, Quidam (i.e. ‘Someone’), who desperately wants to love but miserably fails to achieve this. It is only in Fear and Trembling, a work which seems to be told in the voice of yet another unhappy lover, that the real possibility of a happy love relationship emerges.17 The group of the aesthetic writings which concerns us is distinguished not only by its prominent preoccupation with stories of love but also by its delineation and presentation of the Kierkegaardian ‘theory of stages’. According to this theory, there are several paradigmatic ways in which one can live one’s life. These are usually divided into three, and are known respectively as the ‘aesthetic’, the ‘ethical’, and the ‘religious’. The word ‘stages’ implies that a person’s life may change from one of these ways to another, and it suggests a hierarchical order – one stage will be either ‘lower’ (less developed) or ‘higher’ (more developed) than another. The development in question, however, is applicable not only to the views of life, but also to the views of love that these writings present. In this study, therefore, I propose to explore the Kierkegaardian stages of love. My claim is that in correlation with the various ways available to the existing individual to live his life, so there are various ways open before him to fulfil his 16

17

Hannay divides Kierkegaard’s authorship into four main categories: the aesthetic works, the dialectical works, the psychological works, and ‘the non-pseudonymous and moralizing discourses’ (see Hannay 1982: 16–17). I think that this categorization is more illuminating than the more general one that follows Kierkegaard in dividing the authorship simply into ‘the aesthetic’ (the pseudonymous authorship) and ‘the religious’ (the non-pseudonymous authorship) because it expresses the diversity existing in the group of the pseudonymous works. Of this vast group I shall therefore focus on the ‘aesthetic’ works, which include the four pivotal works mentioned above. The pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling is Johannes de Silentio, who is often identified with the unhappy young man whom he describes as being in love with the princess. De Silentio speaks as one who has not achieved a happy love, but does consider it to be a real possibility.

10

kierkegaard on faith and love

relationships of love. And in a way similar to that in which one’s existence can be developed – beginning with the aesthetic stage and culminating with the religious one – so can one’s love be developed as well.18 Now, in order to assess the development of love, we need a criterion that will enable us to examine the extent to which a form of love is more or less satisfying or good or correct. Returning to Kierkegaard’s journal reflections, I suggest that the key to understanding the stages of love lies in their different responses to the essential loss threatening love. What do I mean by ‘loss’, and how does it pose a threat to love? Actual, potential, and essential loss Being finite and subject to the passage of time, our existence is pervaded by constant loss. Time goes by and seems to take with it everything that gives meaning to our life. Most often this loss is quiet and inconspicuous, but at the same time it is unstoppable. From this point of view, becoming involved in relationships of love – that is, becoming deeply attached to the essentially evanescent – cannot but lead to misery and pain: My heart grew sombre with grief, and wherever I looked I saw only death … My eyes searched everywhere for him, but he was not there to be seen … I lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them. Only then does he realize the sorry state he is in, and was in even before his loss.19

Augustine, who laments the death of his closest friend, believes that it was madness and folly of him to love ‘a man who was mortal as though he were never to die’.20 Loving a finite being who is ultimately doomed to decay and death seems to be in essence a state of sorrow: it is to cling in one’s soul to something that cannot last forever. Therefore, to become involved in a 18

19 20

There are debates in the secondary literature as to how the theory of stages should be formulated and understood. On the one hand there are scholars who argue that there are four, and even five, stages of development (see, for example, Evans 1999; Westphal 1996) and, on the other hand, there are readings that refuse to see such a progressive or hierarchical connection between the stages at all (see, for example, Jegstrup 2004 and Poole 1993 and 1998). The focus of this study, however, is love and its development: the less or more satisfying ways to fulfil it, the less or more genuine ways to experience it. Accordingly, the theory of the stages serves here only as a framework – as a background against which the development of love can be clearly manifested. The interpretative questions mentioned above, as well as other questions regarding the theory of the stages, will therefore not be my concern here. Augustine 1961: 76, 77. Ibid., 79.

introduction: stages on love’s way

11

relationship of love with a finite being is to put oneself in a profoundly vulnerable position. It means that even before an actual loss takes place, the beloved and the relationship are potentially lost, and that the lover, accordingly, is always potentially on the verge of great suffering. We need to distinguish, then, between two kinds of loss, actual and potential. When we speak of loss we usually refer to the former kind. The death of ‘the few dear departed’ that the young Kierkegaard writes about, the death of Augustine’s beloved friend – the most blatant expression of actual loss is, of course, death. However, a love relationship which ends also amounts to an actual loss, as do periods of time that are gone forever (childhood, youth, last year, yesterday). The latter expression of loss, the quiet loss involved in the passage of time, is less striking. It is a mundane, non-dramatic sort of loss, almost unnoticeable – and yet it is a form of actual loss nevertheless. Potential loss, on the other hand, is a loss that threatens to become actualized, that hints at a future possibility of actual loss. The inevitable future death of every human being, for example, amounts to a potential loss at present, and it hangs over our lives as a gloomy promise which we know must be fulfilled. The possible termination of a love relationship is another example of potential loss – however, unlike death, this gloomy possibility can be averted (until death, that is). Potential loss, then, might either be actualized or not, but its threatening presence enfolds our existence all the same. It lurks beneath the surface of everything in time, and shapes our life accordingly. Our finite, temporal existence, therefore, is characterized by constant loss, which is either actual (in those cases in which it has already occurred) or potential (when it has not). Everything in time is either actually lost or potentially lost. Everything finite, if it has not yet been taken away from us, is doomed to be taken away from us eventually, or is at least under the threat that it might, eventually, be taken away from us. Thus loss, whether actual or potential, indicates that our hold on things is always profoundly insecure: nothing is really at our disposal. Everything is in essence (namely, either in an actual way or only potentially) lost for us. To describe the status of something that is either actually or potentially lost, then, I shall use the term ‘essential loss’. My claim is that everything that we have, everything that we take to be ours, is in truth essentially lost for us. Now, relationships of love are characterized by an intense desire to have a secure hold on the beloved. Accordingly, loss (in its various forms) poses a deep threat to love. This threat may express itself in many ways, but all are essentially connected to the passage of time. Like many waters

12

kierkegaard on faith and love

flowing over a rock, the passage of time must affect the shape of even the strongest of loves – and the lover is terrified by the unknowability of this future.21 The shadows of death and sickness, the possible changes in the character of the lover or the beloved, the possible changes in interests and wishes, the weariness of old desires and the temptations of new ones – all of these belong under the category of essential loss (always potentially present and sometimes actually fulfilled). All of these are a consequence of our finitude and limitedness, and all render our relationships of love essentially insecure. The question that we need to ask, therefore, is a variation on Augustine’s solemn conclusion. When facing the threat involved in its essential insecurity, how is love possible at all? How can we find joy in our loves, and strive to fulfil them, under the shadow of their essential loss? If we agree with Kierkegaard that ‘erotic love is undeniably life’s most beautiful happiness’ (WL, 267), and assuming that loving the temporal good is meaningful and central to our humane existence, we face an uneasy task. Can we overcome the obstacle of essential loss? Can we reconcile with the insecurity of love? Or, to put it as succinctly as possible, can we fulfil love even when we clearly see its potential (and sometimes actual) ruins? As I have suggested above, the way to assess the different stages of love is precisely by exploring their different responses to this unsettling question. In other words, the various ways of responding to the loss that threatens love constitute the different stages of Kierkegaardian love. My claim is that we are presented in Kierkegaard’s philosophy with three basic ways in which a lover can respond to loss: the way of recollection, the way of resignation, and the way of faith. But only one of these constitutes the correct form of love. 3 ‘The only happy love’22 The claim of this study is that the correct way to love is in a manner analogous to faith. Of the various stages of romantic love, of the various possible ways open to the lover to fulfil his love, the right way is that structured in the form of faith. My claim, then, is that to reach its highest, most satisfying fulfilment, romantic love should be modelled in the shape 21

22

At the same time, however, ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it’ (Song of Solomon 8:7, the King James version). In a way, one of the tasks of the present study is to inquire into – and justify – this biblical assertion against the background of the existential fact just stated above. R, 131. See note 13 above.

introduction: stages on love’s way

13

of Kierkegaardian faith – namely, in that of the paradoxical double movement of resignation and repetition. What does this mean? There are several possible stages in the way of love and, as I explained above, I suggest that we delineate the differences between them by examining their different responses to loss. I therefore begin by exploring the ‘natural’, pre-religious responses to loss, which constitute the love of recollection. This is a love that fails to sustain real contact with its object and collapses into the inner sphere of the lover’s mind (wherein the lover engages with his memories, his poetic imagination, or his aspiration to universal ideals). In chapter 1, then, we will meet three types of lovers – the aesthetic, the ethical, and the demonic – who despite the noticeable differences between them share a form of love that is fundamentally miserable.23 Those who love by way of recollection try to avoid the loss inherent in love – they try to secure their love. And indeed they all manage to hold on safely and securely to something – but not to what they had originally intended. They all end up without genuinely relating to the actual object of their love. Instead, they all relate to some substitute for it, some representation of it, some recollection of it – which exists in the ‘inner sphere’ of their mind and is therefore unthreatened by external contingencies. This substitute may amount to a memory of the beloved girl (replacing an actual contact with her), or to a poetic recreation of the love relationship (replacing an actual fulfilment of the relationship), or to a self-righteous adherence to some ethical ideal regarding the perfect love (replacing a real effort to overcome the imperfections of the actual love relationship). In all of these cases, the lovers’ opting for an indirect relation to the object, instead of a direct one, explains their falling under the same title of ‘recollection’. After all, in ‘recollection’ we attain an indirect, representational, inner connection to the thing – and leave the thing itself behind. Now, of the three types of lovers at the stage of recollection, it is only the demonic who recognizes the limits of this state. However, he cannot move beyond it: to leave the sphere of recollection, the lover needs to undertake a painful movement that carries him into the religious sphere. This is the movement of resignation, and the lover who undertakes it is the subject of chapter 2. 23

Since Kierkegaard’s protagonists are usually male, for the sake of simplicity and uniformity of style I will generally use the masculine pronoun, even when not discussing a Kierkegaardian protagonist/story. Needless to say, this does not mean that the variety of lovers presented throughout this study cannot be females: all that I say about ‘him’ holds true for and is applicable to ‘her’.

kierkegaard on faith and love

14

In that chapter (chapter 2) we will explore the meaning of resignation as a wholehearted acceptance of loss. While the lovers in the sphere of recollection try to avoid loss in various ways, the knight of resignation acknowledges the essential impossibility of sustaining a secure hold on his love, and he willingly releases any such hold. In spite of desiring the beloved above all other things, he renounces the relationship with her. He does not try to secure a false hold on the beloved, but at the same time he continues to love her. His attachment to her is therefore structured in an intriguing way. He cannot but see her as infinitely lost – and his love is therefore filled with pain and agony – but at the same time, and while connecting himself to her in a bond of sorrow, he initiates himself into a profound relationship with God. Undertaking the movement of resignation amounts to a religious submission of oneself – that is, of one’s will, of one’s worldly desires and possessions – to God. Accordingly, the love of the knight of resignation is twofold, involving a new relationship both with the original beloved and with God. But this new relationship is far from being complete and satisfying. Despite the joy and richness involved in his relationship with God, this knight is ‘a stranger and an alien’ in the world (FT, 50) – as far as his romantic love for his finite beloved is concerned, he cannot but be deeply unhappy. Another step, another movement, therefore, needs to be taken: the movement of faith. Closely examining Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, in chapter 3 we will present the portrait of the knight of love. This religious knight is a lover whose wholehearted acceptance of loss (through resignation) is paradoxically coupled with the affirmation of a possible renewal, or repetition, of the thing lost (through faith). He who loves by way of faith, then, initiates a renewed relationship with his essentially lost romantic beloved. This relationship amounts to a unique attachment to the beloved – a full, concrete, and joyful attachment – which becomes possible through the relationship that the lover sustains with God. The knight of faith-like love, then, is the only lover who gains the harmony discussed above – namely, between acknowledging one’s nothingness (resignation) and rejoicing in God’s providence (affirmation) – that allows him to conduct a life of love, in the context of which romantic love becomes a real (and happy) possibility.24 In this chapter we will therefore see how among the different stages along love’s uneasy way, faith-like love – a romantic love which is construed in accordance with the model of faith – is the highest form of love. 24

See again our discussion of Kierkegaard’s Journal’s reflections on pp. 6–8 above.

introduction: stages on love’s way

15

In arriving at this conclusion, however, we have accomplished only a part of our task. We now face the challenge of validating the model of faith-like romantic love against Kierkegaard’s own attack on romantic love in his monumental Works of Love. It might be thought that Works of Love provides the central reference in our exploration of Kierkegaard’s view of love. This, as mentioned above, is the only work which he devotes specifically and directly to a consideration of the nature of true love and of the way in which it might be achieved; it is signed by Kierkegaard and, arguably, written from the point of view of the religious life. However, my claim is that despite its conspicuous advantages in this regard, Works of Love presents a confused and inconsistent view of romantic love. On the one hand it contains some of Kierkegaard’s fiercest denunciations of romantic love (due to its preferentiality which, he claims, contradicts the nature of true, neighbourly love). On the other, it presents a powerful affirmation of the need (and even the duty) to maintain a love of this kind. In chapter 4 I therefore discuss the problematic view of Works of Love, and in chapter 5 I argue for the following (possibly surprising) claim. Not only is the implicit account of faith-like love in Fear and Trembling more accurate and enlightening than the explicit account of love in Works of Love but, more importantly, we need the former in order to account for the problematic position of the latter. In chapter 5 I therefore suggest that we ‘amend’ Works of Love’s model of love in the light of Fear and Trembling’s model of faith. My claim is that we cannot understand Kierkegaard’s conception of love (neighbourly and romantic alike) without understanding his conception of faith. Therefore, only when we read these two pivotal texts together can a complete understanding of Kierkegaardian love emerge. And only against this background can we articulate an understanding of romantic love. In chapter 6 I explore this new understanding of romantic love as modelled on faith, by looking closely at a Kierkegaardian protagonist who may be the nearest to representing a striving human lover: the Merman. Against the background of the pre-religious option of recollection and the religious options of resignation and faith, we will be able to examine the story of the demonic, sinful Merman in Fear and Trembling, and the various ways open to him when he tries to fulfil his love for Agnes. We will then be in a position to fathom Kierkegaard’s claim that ‘repetition’s love’ (that is, love modelled on faith) is ‘the only happy love’, and to understand why it is the only love that achieves ‘the blissful security of the moment’. Understanding romantic love in the light of faith, then, helps to address several pressing issues regarding love. It supplies us with the tools to

16

kierkegaard on faith and love

distinguish between better and worse forms of love; it helps to solve the problem regarding the tension between romantic love and neighbourly love (as presented in Works of Love); and it offers a cautiously positive prospect regarding romantic love: despite our finitude, despite our limitedness, despite our almost hopeless struggle with the demons within us (namely, with our sinful nature) – a happy fulfilment of romantic love is confirmed as a valid possibility. Romantic love undoubtedly plays a significant and profound role in human existence, but at the same time it has often been treated in philosophical and religious contexts as merely an expression of our physical, sensuous nature, and therefore lacking in positive interest as far as our moral and spiritual lives are concerned. By contrast, to account for romantic love in terms which demonstrate its essential coherence with, and even similarity to, faith, serves to validate and acknowledge the centrality of this phenomenon, and to throw light on its moral, spiritual, and existential significance. And so, even though at first glance the connection I wish to draw between faith and romantic love might seem strange, I hope to show how we can be inspired and edified by faith with regard to the way in which we can, and should, love (romantically and otherwise). And it is Kierkegaard, I claim, who effectively paves the way for us to see this. In this study I shall make use of his distinctive vocabulary (and especially of pivotal concepts such as recollection, resignation, repetition, the double movement of faith, the demonic) for a detailed portrayal of love and, specifically, of romantic love. I hope that such a portrayal can help to correct the prevailing, unjustified conception (not to say stereotype) of Kierkegaard as a philosopher who has nothing (except perhaps negatively) to contribute to our understanding of romantic love. By showing that Kierkegaard can be eminently helpful in an exploration of various relationships of love, I shall try to reveal a less familiar aspect of his philosophy. I therefore hope that by the end of this study it will be evident why Kierkegaard may justly be considered not only as a passionate explorer of faith, but also as a thinker who opens before us a unique and fascinating way to understand love in general, and romantic love in particular.

1 LOST LOVES

1 Recollection’s love and its three types of lovers Recollection’s love, an author has said, is the only happy love … Recollection has the great advantage that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is that it has nothing to lose. (R, 131, 136)

Recollection’s love is the kind of romantic love which consists in recollection (something which flourishes in the inner sphere of the lover’s mind) rather than in a genuine encounter with the beloved other. As we shall see, the three protagonists of this type of love – the aesthetic Poet (or Seducer), the ethical Judge, and the demonic ‘Someone’ – share a fundamental failure to reconcile themselves with the loss that every relationship of love entails.1 The loss concerned is that involved in the passage of time and manifested in the effects that time has on love. Most conspicuous, naturally, is the loss of the initial stages of love: these stages are strongly characterized by an enchanting excitement that the passage of time seems to weaken. However, the loss that threatens love, to which each of the lovers responds in his own manner, is deeper than that. It is the essential loss of everything that time may – and sometimes must – eventually take away with it. 1

Quidam, the name of the young lover from Stages on Life’s Way, who represents the demonic kind of lover, is the Latin for ‘someone’. Since of the various Kierkegaardian protagonists the demonic (as I shall explain later in this chapter and in chapter 6) is in many ways the closest to us, I think it is significant that Kierkegaard, rather than distinguishing the demonic as a ‘Poet’, a ‘Seducer’, or a ‘Judge’, characterizes him as ‘Someone’, perhaps in the sense of ‘any person’.

17

18

kierkegaard on faith and love

Essential loss, as specified in the Introduction, is the condition common to all those circumstances in which the object of love is potentially lost, and those in which it is actually lost. It consists in the lover being deprived of a firm, dependable hold on the object of love. It is expressed in the variety of difficulties and obstacles involved in being finite and especially in loving a finite human being.2 It is the kind of loss which always underlies love and afflicts those who wish to fulfil a relationship of love. Now, the common denominator unifying the aesthete, the ethical, and the demonic is that ultimately they all seek immunity from loss. They therefore turn their love into a recollection, into an inner representation of the beloved and of the relationship. As we shall see, each of these lovers tries to achieve a ‘safe and secure’ love that has ‘nothing to lose’ (that is, a love not threatened by loss), and therefore substitutes the insecure contact with the beloved with a secure mental representation of it. Rather than encountering the real otherness of the beloved (with all the difficulties and insecurities involved), they distance themselves from her and instead indulge in their memories of the relationship, or in a poetic recreation of it, or in the sublime universal ideals of a perfect relationship. In this way they manage to hold securely on to something, but not to the real relationship (or to the real beloved). By recollecting the relationship they turn their love into something that fundamentally belongs to the past, and which is rooted not so much in actuality as in the immanent sphere of their mind. They turn their love into something dead – they kill their loves. The following portrayal of recollection’s love (and of its lover) clearly depicts this: The sun is shining brilliantly and beautifully into my room; the window in the next room is open. Everything is quiet out on the street. It is Sunday afternoon. I distinctly hear a lark warbling outside a window in one of the neighboring courtyards, outside the window where the pretty girl lives. Far away in a distant street, I hear a man crying ‘Shrimps for sale.’ The air is so warm, and yet the whole city is as if deserted. – Then I call to mind my youth and my first love – when I was filled with longing; now I long only for my first longing. What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of the dream. (EO1, 42) 2

Namely, the shadow of the inevitability of death (that threatens to take our beloved away from us); the changes that love must undergo (as well as the changes that the lover and the beloved both undergo); the weariness and fading away of old desires (as well as the awakening of new, potentially conflicting, desires that may eventually drive ourselves, or the beloved, away); not to mention the faults in the way we regard our beloved (when time and its repetitions make us forget that the beloved must not be taken for granted), and the weaknesses of our will (that the passage of time usually strengthens).

lost loves

19

The world surrounding the lover is colourful and beautiful, the air is warm and all around there are singing birds and pretty girls and human voices – the passionate warbling of life is heard in the distance. But the lover, who can love only by way of recollection, is alone in his secluded room, incapable of making any living contact with anyone and thus, for him, the lively city feels deserted. Love is only a distant, faded, recollection. Once upon a time he was filled with longing for a beloved, now the only longing is for the longing: he is entirely defeated by recollection. This kind of lover, recollection’s lover, who deeply fears the loss which every love entails, responds by eventually turning the potential loss into an actual one. Whether he literally terminates the relationship (as the aesthete and the demonic lovers tend to do), or only ‘deadens’ it by maintaining an unsatisfying, solo-voiced rather than dialogical, relationship with the other with whom he shares his life (as the ethical, and sometimes the demonic, do) – his love is fundamentally, essentially, lost.3 In what follows we shall therefore inquire into the loves of the aesthete, the ethical Judge, and the demonic ‘Someone’ and see how, despite their different responses to loss, all of them ultimately belong in the sphere of recollection’s love. We will see that they all attempt to find a secure replacement for their concrete, insecure relationships of love. The aesthete who chases after ‘the first’ (a term given to the first stages of love by the Judge) tries to capture love in its immediacy, but (inevitably) the moment evades him. Thus, the stable replacement that he creates is the ‘frozen’ memory of the beloved and of the relationship. The ethical Judge tries to solve the problem of loss by turning ‘the first’ (the moment) into an ‘eternity in time’. His way of stabilizing the essentially evanescent is to focus on the universal, unchanging ideals (and ideas) of love, thus desiring ‘the ideal marriage’ (rather than his concrete, imperfect, wife), turning this into the real object of his love. The artificiality of his solution cannot but push his love relationship into the deathly territory of recollection (so 3

It is important to note that using the notion of recollection for an analysis of the aesthetic and the ethical – as well as of the relations between them – is rather unusual. This analysis emphasizes the common ground that these two stages of life share and, in particular, it focuses on the failure, essential for both, to fulfil a satisfying relationship of love. Naturally, emphasizing this aspect comes at the expense of a more elaborate examination of the differences between the two stages and the complexity of the relations between them. Accordingly, I have also put aside the complex interpretative debate concerning the proper understanding of the figure of Judge William (and of the view of life he represents). For a more extensive discussion of the Judge, and of the relations between the aesthetic and the ethical, see Carlisle 2005; Davenport 2008; Davenport and Rudd 2001; Furtak 2005; Pattison 2005; Perkins 1995, 2000; Rudd 1993; Taylor 1975.

20

kierkegaard on faith and love

to speak). And indeed, the demonic – who in effect embodies the combination and the struggle between the aesthetic and the ethical elements in every human soul – is sensitive enough to see the shortcomings of the ethical solution. However, while acknowledging the loss he fails to become reconciled with it, thus despairing and becoming obsessed with it. The demonic understands that the way to address the essential loss involved in loving – namely, the actual and potential loss that any relationship of love must suffer – is to be found beyond the sphere of recollection. Being a demonic, however, he can only look to this horizon from afar, while his feet are still implanted deep in the soil of recollection. 2 Recollection and the aesthetic lover A portrait of immediacy When two people fall in love with each other and sense that they are destined for one another, it is a question of having the courage to break it off, for by continuing there is only everything to lose, nothing to gain. (EO1, 298)

The aesthete advocates a life of immediacy,4 a life devoid of any commitment or continuation that might pose a threat to the thrill and interest of the moment. After all, duration (the continuation of something beyond its momentary peak) has a structure of repetition: it consists in continuing the ‘new’ (be it a job, a friendship, or a love affair) into a committing, repetitive pattern. To continue a moment into the future – where the limits of the ‘moment’ are determined by the extent to which its contents are experienced as novel, fresh, unprecedented – necessarily entails a repetition of the moment. But repetition, from the point of view of the aesthete, is boring. It is the ‘same old thing’ rather than the ‘new and exciting’. The aesthetic life, then, is a life of immediacy, and to experience time in its immediacy means to adopt (and nurture) an attitude of full responsiveness to that which is momentarily desired. An attitude whereby one 4

The following analysis of the aesthetic focuses on one possible aspect of the aesthetic life, which is manifested by the more reflective and sophisticated type of aesthete. There are other aesthetic types (such as a frivolous youth, a decadent cynic, or a Don Juan, to name only a few) that manifest other possible aspects of the aesthetic life (such as responsiveness to novelty and excitement, seeking satisfaction, and admiration of the sensual). However, from the perspective of the present study, it is the reflective type of aesthete (who is more conscious of the threats of loss than the other types) that is of interest for me. I therefore focus on this type alone and develop only one particular (and quite dominant) aspect of aestheticism: namely, recollection.

lost loves

21

fully responds to any desire at any moment, without being able or willing to choose between the different desires (or between the courses of action involved in fulfilling them). Choosing is about saying ‘yes’ to one thing and ‘no’ to the other; it is about turning a possibility into an actuality. And turning a possibility into an actuality means adherence and dedication to the thing chosen.5 It is about being willing to continue one’s commitment despite conflicting desires that tempt one to abandon the thing chosen in favour of submitting oneself to another thing; it is about continuing one’s commitment despite the difficulties and obstacles involved, despite the threat of loss. But the aesthete prefers to shape his life in the sphere of (promising) possibilities (rather than in the sphere of a fulfilled actuality) – he enjoys the variety, not the actualization. He wants to keep everything open, to be receptive of everything, and let life offer him as much as possible. He wishes to enjoy only the offerings of life, and refuses to suffer over that which life might take away. The aesthete, therefore, is a passive recipient of whatever comes his way. He acts according to his momentary passions and inclinations, enjoys what he fancies at any particular moment, and is never bothered about the next moment. To him, it matters not if in the next moment he fancies something that is not compatible with, or might even contradict, what he fancies at the present moment. This is the meaning of not making a commitment to anything whatsoever, and of limiting oneself only to the moment – a moment that has no continuation and therefore does not commit one, or oblige one, to whatever it is that happens next. Today I want to be a painter, yesterday I wanted to be a doctor, tomorrow I might want to be a world explorer – so be it. Today I want this lover, yesterday I wanted the other one, tomorrow I might want a different one. So be it. Now, on the face of it, the aesthetic life may seem very tempting: one creates oneself every moment anew, one acts spontaneously, faithful to what one really wants. The problem is that this life is necessarily very fragmented, composed of a series of episodes that ultimately belong only in the past. If one does not want to choose, because choice entails a continuation of the moment in the form of a commitment that means 5

Such adherence is one of the main characteristics of the ethical life (see the discussion of the ethical below). This might be the time to emphasize that sharing the fundamental problematic attitude of recollection does not mean an abolition of the essential differences between the aesthetic and ethical forms of life. There are some crucial distinctions between them, and these distinctions make the ethical life – despite failing where the aesthetic life fails (namely, in addressing loss properly) – more advanced and desirable in many senses. (See also note 15 below.)

22

kierkegaard on faith and love

saying ‘no’ to all the other possibilities, then one also confines oneself to a life of constant ‘endings’. And to be constantly ending things (in order to be receptive to something new) means to be living mostly in the past – the content of this life is composed of a long series of recollections. The aesthete might be a hedonist who enjoys the moment without any worries or commitments with regard to what happens next; but his life is always tinged with constant death. In order to submit himself to the new, he has to kill, as it were, the old. Accordingly, the love of the aesthete must also be the unsatisfying love of recollection. This love is focused on the first phase of love, on the first moment of love. The joy of the aesthetic love is always brief and its peak (in which the aesthete is interested) is confined to a very limited period of time, beyond which there is nothing: There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death. (EO1, 20)

The death referred to here is the death of the desired moment of enjoyment. Once fulfilled, this moment is lost, dead. Continuation of the moment beyond this peak of enjoyment (and interest) has only the void and darkness of death to offer. It is no wonder, then, that the aesthete declares that My misfortune is this: an angel of death always walks at my side, and it is not the doors of the chosen ones that I sprinkle with blood as a sign that he is to pass by – no, it is precisely their doors that he enters – for only recollection’s love is happy. (EO1, 41)

And why is ‘only recollection’s love’ happy? ‘To live in recollection is the most perfect life imaginable; recollection is more richly satisfying than all actuality, and it has security that no actuality possesses’ (EO1, 32). In actuality, indeed, there is no security. Time is characterized by bringing along with it change and loss and (boring) repetition. Therefore, in order to secure the pleasure of the passing moment – the intensity of the newly felt love – one has to end it before it gets spoiled. One has to freeze the first moment of love, as it were, and to turn it from a living, continuing present into a recollection; one has ‘to kill’ the ‘chosen ones’ (that is, the relationships one has had with them, the moments one has spent with them) – in order to recollect them. There, in recollection, they can be cherished as beautiful and happy, as intact, as one wishes them to be. The aesthetic love contains an inner contradiction. The aesthetic moment defeats itself, as it were: its fulfilment is necessarily also its destruction. It is not something one can hold on to, something whose

lost loves

23

possession can be extended into the future (because, again, when thus extended, it turns into something else, something ‘boring’). Therefore the aesthetic love can be maintained only as a lost love; as a part of the past – it can be maintained only in the form of recollection. To put it differently, in his fear of losing the intensity and thrill of love, the aesthete refuses to continue the relationship, and thus turns it into a recollection. Thereby he dooms his love to loss: For me nothing is more dangerous than to recollect. As soon as I have recollected a life relationship, that relationship has ceased to exist … A recollected life relationship has already passed into eternity and has no temporal interest anymore. (EO1, 32)

In a way, the aesthetic lover wants to turn the first moment of love into an eternity. He wants to ‘freeze’ the moment of interest and create for himself a sphere devoid of the threatening passage of time (that for him is the cause of everything he is afraid of: the loss of the interesting, the loss of immediate pleasure, the loss of the thrill of the moment, the encounter with the committing and potentially painful). However, this eternity is, of course, a false one. The moment is over and the ‘eternity’ the aesthete is left with is only the memory of the moment, its recollection, its existence in the past. It is not surprising, then, that the aesthetic lover is characterized as ‘the unhappiest one’ – he is ‘the envoy from the kingdom of sighs, the chosen favorite of suffering, the apostle of grief, the silent friend of pain, the unhappy lover of recollection’ (EO1, 229, emphasis mine).6 From the perspective that asks about love’s possible responses to the problem of loss (that essentially pervades and threatens it), we may say that the aesthetic lover offers quite a miserable solution. He cannot handle the passage of time and the loss it entails, and his reaction consists of his futile attempt to freeze the love and transform it into a recollection. Recollection is indeed protected from the passage of time; it constitutes the little inner kingdom of the one who recollects. The aesthetic lover closes himself within himself, as it were, and creates an alternative world to the one outside of him – an immanent world of a false eternity, ‘safe and secure’ against the ruins of time. 6

The strong criticism expressed here against aesthetic love does not mean that what is usually associated with aesthetics – the senses, appreciation of the beautiful, etc. – is without importance for the philosophy of Kierkegaard in general, and for his understanding of the life of faith, and of love, in particular. On the contrary: as I shall demonstrate in later chapters, the body and the sensuous (as well as sensitivity to beauty – the concrete beauty of the beloved, the beauty of the world) have a central role in the Kierkegaardian understanding of both faith and love.

24

kierkegaard on faith and love

Now, the solution of the aesthetic lover may be a false and diverted solution, but the problem is a real one. At the basis of recollection’s love lies a deep longing for time past. After all, time always seems to take along with it something valuable belonging to our love (a feeling, a passion, something about the way we were, something about the way our beloved used to be). This longing and its ‘twin brother’ – namely, the wish to get the lost thing back – characterize the poetic love of the protagonist of Repetition. The Poet’s love of recollection Repetition – which presents a melancholic Poet as another type of the lovers belonging to the sphere of recollection’s love – is a book that tells a story within a story. One story is that of Constantin Constantius, the narrator, that revolves around an experiment he undertook when he tried to reconstruct – to repeat – a successful trip to Berlin (the experiment has failed); another story is the one that Constantius tells us about an unhappy love affair of a young friend of his; and another significant story is the biblical story of Job, which the young man considers as a source of inspiration for him. The book Repetition, then, echoes the desire to receive something back, to gain a ‘repetition’ of something lost (an enjoyable trip, desirable love, a beloved now dead). But while the title of the book implies an event of repetition, the book itself demonstrates a failure of repetition. Constantius fails to get back (that is, to relive) his desired trip to Berlin, the young man fails to get back his love relationship, and only the story of Job is about a real repetition, but this only emphasizes the mistake committed by the protagonists of Repetition with regard to their own understanding (and performing) of repetition.7 Constantius is a reflection of Either/Or’s aesthetic prototype. The Berlin experiment demonstrates his aesthetic focus on the past and his immanent, self-contained, approach to reality – Constantius, after all, uses the materials of reality to relive his memory. He wants a ‘repetition’ of his trip to Berlin but, instead of being open to what the world has to offer, he tries to control it by a futile attempt to externalize his inner recollections and give them an ‘outer’ validity (see R, 150–76). However, a more interesting character in the book, from the point of view of our inquiry, is the young friend of Constantius, the Poet. 7

Repetition becomes a valid possibility only in the context of the religious life of faith. I shall therefore return to this concept when discussing Fear and Trembling’s model of faith (see chapter 3 below).

lost loves

25

The Poet is presented as a melancholic youth who chose Constantius as his confidant. But the very close affinity between them – expressed in the fact that Constantius seems to understand too well the motives for the young man’s strange behaviour, i.e. he knows exactly how the young man feels and predicts, quite accurately, what he is about to do – gives us good reason to suspect that the Poet is in fact a younger version of Constantius:8 namely, a young double of his whom Constantius, in a poetic enterprise, brings to life. Looking at the love story of the young Poet, we can trace back the reasons leading Constantius to his present position: an unhappy, lonely man, enclosed in his room and in his recollections, just like the lover from Either/Or who cannot contact the passionate city (that is, the world) outside his room, outside his inner frozen world of recollection.9 Let us examine, then, the love story of the young Poet. He was deeply and fervently in love, that was clear, and yet a few days later he was able to recollect his love. He was essentially through with the entire relationship. In beginning it, he took such a tremendous step that he leaped over life. If the girl dies tomorrow, it will make no essential difference. (R, 136)

This love is sufficient unto itself, regardless of the existence of its object. It is a love which exists as recollection. The young man is not interested in continuing, developing, and living the actual love for the girl. The beginning of this love was so intense that for him it exhausted the whole relationship. It fulfilled and devoured (as it were) his entire expectations from love – no wonder, therefore, that he did not need the girl any longer. All he needed was a recollection of her. Moreover, the girl was only a trigger to something else, something that had nothing to do with her, the beloved, but rather with him, the lover. Strangely enough, the young man was nourished by the absence of the girl rather than by her presence. Constantius contrasts specifically between ‘loving’ and ‘longing’ – the latter, of course, indicating an absence. The young man, he says, truly loved the girl and will never love any other – but he does not still love her: the adored young girl was already almost a vexation to him. And yet she was the one he had loved, the only one he would ever love. Nevertheless,

8 9

I thank Dr Ran Sigad for the suggestion to look upon the two protagonists as reflecting the older and the younger versions of the same person. See again the quotation on p. 18 above.

26

kierkegaard on faith and love he did not still love her, because he only longed for her … The young girl was not his beloved: she was the occasion that awakened the poetic in him and made him a poet. (R, 138)

The love was an event, an ‘occasion’, forever to be carved into his soul – and entirely belonging to the past (it had happened, once, and is now over). What is now being loved, therefore, is not the actual girl; it is rather the girl in recollection. The unhappiness and frustration of recollection’s love, we may say, is a result of the painful demand that defines it. Recollection’s love requires the (actual) loss of the concrete other, rather than the other’s actual presence. In order for this form of love to exist, the love of the concrete person in her actuality has to stop: ‘[s]he had made him a poet – and precisely thereby had signed her own death sentence’ (R, 138). The loss of the girl was the constitutive event that made him into a poet. But even before her actual loss, the young man had felt that he had lost her (after all, he had lost her long before actually leaving her). What kind of loss was it, then? The loss that made him leave the girl (and become a poet) was the loss of the aesthetic ‘first love’: the initial stage of any love when everything is new and exciting. The theme of the ‘first love’ will reappear in the ethical theory of Judge William, but we have already encountered the desire for it in the figure of Either/Or’s aesthetic person: he who craves only the immediate moment of pleasure, after which there is nothing but death. What the young man longed for, and what he wanted to get back, was not the actual girl, but rather the way he had felt for her at the beginning of the relationship. It is quite consistent of him, then, to find his solution in poetry and recollection. By becoming a poet he creates a world of recollection, a world of (his own) creation, in which he loves her just as he had at the beginning. In this context he loves her just as one does in eternity – time becomes irrelevant, and so does the threat of loss and change, which might damage his pure feelings. The Poet demonstrates very clearly the essence of ‘recollection-hood’ and he no doubt forms a notable manifestation of the kind of lover belonging in the sphere of recollection. One who prefers to indulge in the pain of the loss, to praise the ‘what has been’ and to stay ‘there’; there in the past, deep within recollection (of the love and the beloved). Painful as it is, it is tempting to love in this way for the simple reason that one will indeed no longer have anything to lose (see again R, 136). This kind of lover sacrifices the future but knows that nothing can ruin his past – no new experiences would overshadow the sweet past, no disappointments.

lost loves

27

When one relives what has already happened, the events one is concerned with are under one’s control; when one chooses to live in one’s imagination, one takes no risks. We can characterize this kind of love in the same words that Constantius uses to explain, at a later stage, the Poet’s behaviour. When someone is loving – and living – in his own world of recollection, he ‘limits himself to a cozy domestic diversion, together with mental activity and pastimes of the imagination, which are the most perfect substitute for all erotic love’, and at the same time ‘are not at all accompanied by the inconveniences and disasters of erotic love’ (R, 183). The Poet’s detachment from reality is also expressed in his understanding of himself. He is inspired by the story of Job, and sees in himself a kind of modern manifestation of this biblical figure. For him, Job is the epitome of one who has undergone great misery in losing everything; he therefore finds consolation in Job’s story because in his (false) understanding, he, the Poet, has undergone a similar ordeal. Accordingly, in one of his letters to Constantius, he declares that just like Job, he has gained a repetition: I am myself again … Is there not, then, a repetition? Did I not get everything double? Did I not get myself again and precisely in such a way that I might have a double sense of meaning? (R, 220–1)

The Poet feels that he has won a repetition. But he did not get the girl back – rather he got himself back. Moreover, it was precisely the girl’s marriage to someone else (i.e. her conclusive, actual loss) that allowed the Poet to experience a repetition. Is this a real repetition? It is true that, in a way, receiving oneself back is a repetition. It is clear that losing an object dear to us, let alone a beloved person, can be viewed as involving a loss also of ourselves. Receiving ourselves back in the sense of regaining meaning and coherency in our lives may justly be considered as a true repetition.10 However, this is only one aspect of repetition and, important as it is, it is still only a part of what constitutes full repetition. The Poet did not receive anything back except himself, and even when he received himself back, he gained no new understanding of himself or of the world. In a sharp difference with Job – who confronted the ultimate otherness of God that made him realize the profundity of the truth that ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’ – the Poet never confronted anything beyond himself and beyond

10

I am indebted to Professor George Pattison for suggesting this idea to me in conversation.

28

kierkegaard on faith and love

the powers of his own will and imagination.11 And now that the girl is married, and he need not feel responsible for her pain anymore, he can sink back peacefully into his lonely world, a world in which there is no real room for anyone but himself. The love story of the Poet, therefore, could not be more remote from the story of the loss and suffering of Job. Rather than exemplifying a modern version of the biblical story of repetition (as the Poet would have liked to think), he is deeply absorbed in recollection. Ultimately, recollection’s love uses the other as material for building a house in which one lives alone. This love nourishes a rich and productive inner world, and can be very sensitive and poetic (it can even drive one to poetry, as we have just seen), but it is not strong enough to break through and plunge into the concrete world – it is not strong enough to actually encounter the other and create a genuine relationship with that other.12 It is a kind of narcissistic love in which one is sufficient unto oneself, and in the context of which the focus is on the self, not on the other. A strong manifestation of how little the concrete other takes part in recollection’s love is exemplified in the love of the Seducer.13 The Seducer’s love of recollection I am an esthete, an eroticist, who has grasped the nature and the point of love, who believes in love and knows it from the ground up, and I reserve for myself only the private opinion that no love affair should last more than a half year at most and that any relationship is over as soon as one has enjoyed the ultimate. (EO1, 368)

11 12

13

Job 1:21, the King James version. In chapter 4 we will see how critical Kierkegaard is with regard to the love of the poets, which he condemns as selfish. It is reasonable to assume that the kind of poet he has in mind is that which belongs in the category of recollection’s lovers. Kierkegaard’s use of a Platonic vocabulary in relating to the Poet’s story of miserable love, and in particular his use of the Platonic term ‘recollection’, is hard to miss. Kierkegaard presents the young Poet as someone who substitutes the concrete object of his love with an Idea (of both the girl and the love), and creates an inner ‘eternal’ world which abides in the secure sphere of his imagination, thus detaching himself from the real world of temporality. This presentation may be understood as an implicit criticism of the metaphysical project that, in Kierkegaard’s understanding, began with Plato. A philosophy of this sort, Kierkegaard claims, is preoccupied with reflecting upon existence, rather than with existing: ‘What philosophers say about actuality is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale’ (EO1, 32). However, it is beyond the scope of the present study to elaborate on the complex and intriguing relationship between Kierkegaard’s thought and Plato’s philosophy.

lost loves

29

The aesthetic lover, we said, is interested in the first moment (or phase) of love, but since this moment is transient the aesthete can never really take hold of it. His life, therefore, moves between future-oriented plans towards the desired moment and past-oriented recollections of the fulfilled – and thereby lost – love. The aesthete is interested in the moment only as long as it contains within it some new and unfamiliar experience, and thereby he can never continue the moment beyond its peak (of pleasure or interest). He is afraid of boredom and therefore constantly seeks the new, ‘the first’. Anything experienced more than once – that is, anything advancing beyond its ‘first’ manifestation – is doomed to ‘be killed’ by him. He wants nothing to do with it again, he wants to keep it as beautiful and exciting as it was the first time. He is afraid of the signs that the passage of time may engrave on his love. He therefore refuses to continue his love relationship: rather, he recollects it. The epitome for such an aesthetic recollection’s love is embodied in the love of the seducer. The seducer is someone entirely receptive to the sensual beauty surrounding him in the form of various women. ‘The art is to be as receptive as possible to impressions’ (EO1, 361) he says. From this point of view focusing one’s attention only on one woman seems, of course, senseless: one can be in love with many girls at the same time, because one is in love in a different way with each one. To love one girl is too little; to love all is superficiality; to know oneself and to love as many as possible, to let one’s soul conceal all the powers of love inside itself so that each receives its specific nourishment while the consciousness nevertheless embraces the whole – that is enjoyment, that is living. (Ibid.)

This love-theory discloses that for him love is like a tour through the bounteous beauty that the world has to offer. The seducer is the wandering world-explorer who refuses to settle in one place. He is willing to pay the price of being rootless, even detached, the price of being involved only to a certain degree (not too little but not too much). He is a collector of images, a collector of experiences.14 Like the Poet of Repetition, he is interested in the other only as a means for creating his secluded, selfsufficient, world: My Cordelia, You know that I very much like to talk with myself. I have found in myself the most interesting person among my acquaintances. At times, I have feared that I would come to lack material for these conversations; now 14

See EO1, 390.

30

kierkegaard on faith and love I have no fear, for now I have you. I shall talk with myself about you now and for all eternity, about the most interesting subject with the most interesting person – ah, I am only an interesting person, you the most interesting subject. (EO1, 401)

And yet, there is a sad emptiness in his life. His love is structured in such a way that its fulfilment is also its extinction: ‘now it is finished, and I never want to see her again’ he says having his desire for Cordelia fulfilled. And despite his cruelty we can also sense the desolation he is left with – a sad and lonely man who is defeated by his own victory: ‘[h]ow much I have gathered into this one moment … Why cannot such a night last longer?’ (EO1, 445). 3 Recollection and the ethical lover15 The ethical lover, unlike the aesthete, lets the night of desire and rapture continue into a day of commitment. This kind of lover is embodied in the austere figure of Judge William, who presents his unequivocal opinions both in the second part of Either/Or (in two letters addressed, presumably, to the aesthete from the first part) and in Stages on Life’s Way.16 The Judge takes upon himself the task of defending the ethical against the aesthetic way of life, and in particular against the aesthetic way of love. Both in Either/Or and in Stages on Life’s Way he speaks ardently about marriage (for marriage is the social manifestation of love, a point that will turn out to be very significant), and praises the sort of life that transfigures itself from 15

16

An important note of clarification is needed before beginning the following analysis. The discussion of the ethical presented here is focused on the failure common to the aesthetic and ethical stages of life (namely, their ‘recollection-hood’). However, this should not mislead one into thinking that there are no essential differences between these two attitudes to life and love. While the aesthete is guided by adherence to his momentary desires, the ethical person is guided by the attempt to adhere to moral ideals; the ethical person, unlike the aesthete, tries to reach the kind of goodness that transcends his momentary satisfactions. Accordingly, the ethical person tries to understand what his overarching wishes are, and he is thus more dedicated and committed to his will. Such differences between the stages qualify the ethical stage as more advanced (or ‘correct’) than the aesthetic one. It is therefore important to emphasize that the following presentation of ethical love – although focused on the conclusion that such love, just as the aesthetic love, ultimately fails to fulfil a satisfying love relationship – does not claim that these loves are equally problematic in all their aspects. In the present study, though, I will discuss only the position presented in Either/Or. There are subtle nuances distinguishing between the Judge’s positions presented in the two works, but fundamentally they represent the same view. For my purposes, therefore, it will suffice to focus on Either/Or’s observations alone.

lost loves

31

immediacy into ‘the universal’. What does this mean and does the love of the Judge succeed in being more satisfying than that of the aesthete? ‘The esthetic validity of marriage’ Marital love, then, has its enemy in time, its victory in time and its eternity in time. (EO2, 139)

The first letter of Judge William aims at establishing ‘the esthetic validity of marriage’.17 The Judge wishes ‘to show that romantic love can be united with and exist in marriage – indeed, that marriage is its true transfiguration’ (EO2, 31), as against the position of the aesthete, who considers that which goes beyond the immediate moment(s) of pleasure and excitement to be dull and un-erotic. We have seen above how deeply Either/Or’s aesthete objects to anything that requires a continuation beyond the climax of pleasure; here the Judge identifies this approach to love and existence as a longing for ‘the first’. ‘The first’ is ‘the first time’: the first time in which I did x, the first time in which I experienced y. Attributing an unparalleled significance to ‘the first’ (the first time that we kissed, for example) necessarily means considering ‘repetition’ as undesirable and problematic. If one bestows upon ‘the first’ the special meaning of having a unique position above any other rank on the scale of experience, as it were (there is only one ‘first’, after all), this means that ‘the first’ cannot repeat itself (because if it does, it is no longer ‘the first’): ‘the more meaningful that is which in its “first” manifests itself for the first time, the less the probability is that it can be repeated’ (EO2, 40). But do we really need to approach ‘the first’ in such a manner, to bestow upon it so heavy a meaning? The aesthete certainly does so – especially when it comes to love. What the Judge calls ‘the first love’ can be understood as the equivalent of the phase of ‘falling in love’ (or ‘infatuation’). This is the first period in the development of love before it is shaped into a stable relationship (i.e. before it is continued in time into a certain pattern and under a certain commitment). Now, since marriage is clearly a continuation of the first love in time, it is evident why the aesthete is so unenthusiastic about it. However, in his reluctance to continue the first love he dooms it, as the Judge claims, to be only momentary: ‘[y]ou must therefore hate all love that wants to be an eternal love. You must therefore stop with the first love 17

EO2, 3.

32

kierkegaard on faith and love

as a moment’ (EO2, 126). Indeed, as we explained above, this is the paradox of the aesthetic experience (that defeats itself). The aesthete’s worship of ‘the first’ means that one focuses all of one’s attention on a certain event which must be momentary (since it is confined within the very narrow limits of the phase defined as ‘the first’). To carry this phase beyond the moment is indeed to turn it into something else. The kisses, the gaze, the touch are not ‘the first’ anymore, and thus – from the aesthete’s point of view – not as exciting and desirable as they used to be. To keep something as ‘the first’, therefore, means to do it only once, or, in the case of a ‘phase’, to do the things included in this phase only as long as they feel like a ‘first’ – which of course turns this phase into a very short-lived one, because sooner or later everything becomes a repetition (of x and y) rather than ‘the first’ (x and y). Hence, if one does not want to continue ‘the first’ (because one wants to retain the uniqueness of the event, a uniqueness which depends on its not being repeated), one has no choice but to abandon it when the moment is over, keeping it as a cherished memory rather than as a living present. And if we think of ‘the first’ as ‘the first phase of love’, the paradox becomes even clearer. If ‘the first’ cannot be continued in time, then the only way to continue to have ‘first-ness’ is by entering a new situation which has a ‘first’ of its own. But when it comes to love, entering a new situation in which ‘the first’ will indeed be the first (as the aesthete demands) means to find, each time anew, a different object of love. Accordingly, to give ‘the first’ its aesthetic significance necessarily means that the object of one’s love cannot remain the same and that, ultimately, means that the desired thing is not so much the beloved but rather the (excitement of the) situation. As the Judge puts it: ‘[w]hen you say that the first kiss is the sweetest, the most beautiful, you are insulting the beloved, for then it is time and its qualification that give the kiss absolute worth’ (EO2, 126). How can this paradox be solved? Can we both retain the beauty and the value of ‘the first’ – preventing the inevitable loss of ‘first-ness’ – and yet love in a way which is not confined to fragmented, scattered, dispersed experiences of love? Or, to put it differently: what is the ethical response to the loss – the loss of ‘the first’ in particular, but also the essential loss inherent to love in general – that threatens one’s love? The Judge believes that the ethical is the answer to the paradox of ‘the first’. The ethical, according to the Judge, entails taking part in the universal (i.e. social) realm, where one chooses to engage in a task that gives continuity and meaning to one’s life. Thus, the secret is to turn the momentary ‘first’ – that as such cannot become something more than an ideal (as this kind of love vanishes

lost loves

33

upon being realized) – into an actuality. And in turn, says the Judge, the ‘first’, the moment, becomes an eternity: ‘[i]t is an eternity in which the temporal has not disappeared as an ideal element, but in which it is continually present as real element’ (EO2, 137–8). While the aesthetic ‘first’ is more dramatic in the sense that it can easily receive an external, artistic expression (a longing glance or a passionate kiss can be more easily captured in a moment and depicted aesthetically), marital love lives its drama in the continuation of time. The married man, says the Judge, ‘has not fought with lions and trolls but with the most dangerous enemy, which is time’ (EO2, 138). However, his marital love, to repeat the point quoted above, has not only ‘its enemy in time’, but also – and most importantly – ‘its victory in time and its eternity in time’ (EO2, 139). It seems, then, that the Judge believes that the ethical response to the aesthetic paradox of ‘the first’ is a transfiguration of ‘the first’ into an ‘eternity in time’. In order to understand better what this might mean, we need to turn our attention to the ethical theory expressed in the Judge’s second letter. Resisting loss rationally18 The life of the aesthete – as expressed, for example, in his attitude to love and to ‘the first’ – is fragmented, dominated by spontaneous responses to desires and momentary fancies and inclinations. This life lacks continuity or any unifying principle to give it harmony and meaning, since the aesthete is reluctant to engage in any committing activity. In Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Anthony Rudd delineates this inconsistency in the aesthete’s life-narrative as leading to despair. The aesthetic despair is rooted in a lack of personal identity (involving persistency and actively maintaining roles commitment), which is vital for a sense of stability and meaning in one’s life: For one’s life to acquire this continuity, for one to develop a personal identity, it is necessary to commit oneself to projects. To embark on a significant project, from which one does not ‘sheer off’ when the whim takes one, is to give one’s life at least some aspect of secure narrative structure.19 18

19

The ethical man, as will be demonstrated here, is paradigmatic of someone who maintains a Hegelian world view. However, in essence he actually represents a more general philosophical-rational state of mind. In his views he exemplifies a belief (typical of the philosophy of the Enlightenment) in the ability of human understanding, and a will to possess an all-encompassing grasp of the world and to solve existential problems completely with the power of human rationality alone. Rudd 1993: 93.

34

kierkegaard on faith and love

And he continues: ‘It seems that most – if not all – projects that are significant enough to give one’s life a purpose and meaning will involve at least some degree of social interaction, and will therefore have some kind of social definition.’20 Giving one’s life meaning, then, entails getting involved in projects, becoming engaged in tasks that posit a purpose and goal for one’s actions and manner of living. And indeed, projects and tasks are not maintained in a vacuum – they gain their meaning in a social context. There is a clear mutual relationship between acquiring a personal identity and becoming a part of society. Now, becoming a part of society as a means to fulfilling oneself is the hallmark of Hegelian morality. In Hegel’s philosophy, as Rudd explains, ‘[m]an finds his true fulfilment not in the abstraction of Kantian morality, but in conformity to the laws and customs of society – but a society that has learnt to understand the value of the individual’.21 The locus of value in an individual, which needs to be ‘learnt to be understood’, is his freedom – and freedom is precisely the subject of the Judge’s second letter. The central issue of this letter is the meaning of either-or; the meaning of choosing. Making a choice is a crucial ingredient in the development of one’s character, of one’s personality. It is important to understand that the determining factor from the Judge’s point of view is not the content of one’s choice (which is a question that can only subsequently be addressed), but rather the act of choosing, whereby one constitutes oneself as a free agent: But what is it then that I choose – is it this or that? No, for I choose absolutely, and I choose absolutely precisely by having chosen not to choose this or that. I choose the absolute, and what is the absolute? It is myself in my eternal validity … But what is this self of mine? … It is the most abstract of all, and yet in itself it is also the most concrete of all – it is freedom. (EO2, 214)

The point regarding either-or, then, ‘is not so much a matter of choosing between willing good or willing evil as of choosing to will’ (EO2, 169).22 Choosing to will, choosing to choose, constitutes me as an ethical person because I thereby take responsibility for and control over my life (I am not 20 21 22

Ibid., 94. Ibid., 16. That is, choosing in a serious way that defines one’s identity and forms one as a responsible, self-committing agent. For an illuminating discussion of the Kierkegaardian ethical choice see John Davenport’s ‘The Meaning of Kierkegaard’s Choice between the Aesthetic and the Ethical: A Response to MacIntyre’, in Davenport and Rudd 2001.

lost loves

35

a passive recipient of external forces) – I discover myself as a free person who has the capability of shaping his life and bestowing meaning upon it. Therefore, this absolute freedom discovered in the act of choosing is not an abstract factor in my life, a rational conclusion arrived at after deep contemplation. The meaning of being absolutely free takes shape through acting. And acting (in this focused, will-committed way) amounts to becoming involved in projects and tasks, becoming a part of society.23 The insistence of the Judge on actualizing the individual’s absolute freedom in the form of the ready-made models offered by society (such as marriage) indicates his commitment to Hegelianism.24 To use Merold Westphal’s eloquent assertion: ‘Nothing could be more Hegelian than the move by which Judge William makes the meaning of marriage the key to the ethical sphere.’25 We may therefore say that the connection drawn by the Judge between choosing, eternal validity, and freedom articulates his Hegelian understanding as to the way in which eternal truth is embodied in society.26 Accordingly, an initial answer to the question regarding the meaning of ‘gaining eternity in time’ (and therefore defeating temporality) seems to emerge: eternity is gained by the temporal individual by his taking part in the truth embodied in society.

23

24

25 26

This is also, from the point of view of this position, what secures the ethical choice from ‘willing evil’. Society is taken to be the realization of truth, of the human spirit that has arrived at the highest stage of fulfilling itself as free and virtuous (see note 26 below). Choosing to become a part of such a society is thereby to will good. This view is not uncontroversial. There is an interpretative debate regarding the extent of the Judge’s Hegelianism on the one hand and his affinity to the Kierkegaardian religious believer on the other. (See, for example, Carlisle 2005; Davenport 2008; Davenport and Rudd 2001.) Westphal 1998: 106. The Hegelian connection between society, ethical truth, and freedom can be briefly explained as follows. Hegel believed that the historical process in which consciousness has become self-consciousness (thus understanding that it is absolutely free: everything is part of it, nothing limits it from the ‘outside’) – has reached its culmination, i.e. its end. Spirit (the human mind and understanding) is free: it understands that it is actually identical with the world. Human spirit has arrived at the point of having a total possession of ‘absolute knowledge’ since it understands that ‘truth’ consists in Spirit’s self-understanding. Accordingly, since Spirit is now free and total, its realization of itself in the present society is the ultimate realization. The morality maintained and required by a society established by free Spirit is truth itself, and therefore the free individual who is a part of the society knows that there is a correspondence between his self-realization and his becoming a member of that society. In other words, the individual knows that the way to realize himself – to fulfil himself – is to become a part of society, to become assimilated into society. After all, this (namely, society’s structure, duties, and roles) is the ‘site’ in which truth itself (namely, free Spirit that knows itself) is embodied.

36

kierkegaard on faith and love

Now, as Michael Weston explains, the metaphysical project (that in Kierkegaard’s view began with Plato’s philosophy and culminated in that of Hegel) has four main features: aiming at finality and totality, considering itself as prior to and necessary for any other intellectual (spiritual or scientific) activity, seeing itself as autonomous, and operating in the mode of self-reflection – ‘thus [having] the character of “recollection”’.27 The Judge – who believes in self-fulfilment through assimilation into society, who has confidence in his absolute autonomy and adopts an optimistic view which does away with every element of pain, fear, or uncertainty – fits very well the profile of the philosopher. Indeed, the Judge criticizes the philosophers, saying that ‘[p]hilosophy turns toward the past … it mediates and mediates. It seems to me, however, that it does not answer the question I am asking, for I am asking about the future’ (EO2, 170). However, as we have just seen, the ‘future’ in which the Judge is interested amounts to becoming a part of the already-established society. The ‘future’, therefore, is a ‘closed’, known future – already achieved in the past (at the point of history at which it was established), and manifested in the status quo of the present. The understanding of this future-present, therefore, requires a recollection of the past. After all, society as a genuine expression of ‘absolute freedom’ (i.e. of the eternal Spirit, of truth) may be fully understood as such only when one knows – when one recollects – world-history (i.e. the process of the Spirit’s development). This world-history is of course the past, which leads dialectically to the ideal future-present. The Judge does not criticize the philosophical aspiration to achieve absolute freedom, totality, and autonomy – he criticizes only the method by which this aspiration is taken up. In this the Judge is revealed as having fallen into the same mistake which he attributes to the philosopher. By directing oneself at a ‘truth’ already known and achieved (i.e. the eternity of Spirit as embodied in social institutions such as marriage), one is actually preoccupied with the act of recollection. The struggle is over and truth is arrived at in the manner of the established society; the threat of time, loss, and death is only a memory for the Spirit which has accomplished the movement of selfrealization, and now reposes in an eternal tranquillity of self-knowledge. When truth is thus defined, and when arriving at this truth is the goal, life becomes a movement directed at the past (due to its aspiration to reconstruct this once-and-for-all, historical truth), and the individual becomes someone who focuses more on rational, perfect ideals than on mundane, imperfect concreteness. Life, then, turns into one of recollection. 27

See Weston 1994: 6

lost loves

37

From a phenomenological point of view, the picture emerging from the Judge’s didactic speech lacks the ability to provide a satisfactory account of human existence. Although he identifies the problems associated with the aesthetic way of life quite impressively, the answers he gives ignore the complexity of human existence in time and, in particular, the pressing problem of loss. In his view, truth – absolute freedom, the good life, the perfect love – is here at hand: ready to use and simple to reach. Becoming a part of the universal, a part of society, is the key to a full and satisfying life, regardless of the non-individual nature of this ‘solution’ and its (necessarily correlative) ignorance of any personal, private experience of loss, fear, and death (actual or potential). Indeed, the ethical account of life and love is different from the aesthetic account, and it offers a more developed and desirable understanding of genuine relationship, in which the lover makes an honest effort to recognize an ideal of goodness regarding his relationship, and to adhere and commit his will to this ideal.28 However, the failure involved in fulfilling such a relationship, in as much as this failure amounts to mistreating the passage of time by resorting to recollection, is ultimately the same as the aesthetic one. From the point of view of the problem that concerns us here – namely, the loss (essentially inherent in our existence as temporal creatures) that posits an imminent threat to our loves – both the aesthetic and the ethical solutions are eventually unsatisfying. The aesthetic ‘solution’ is to attach oneself to immediacy, creating a false eternity that collapses into itself, becoming – instead of a transcendent eternity – an extended recollection. In his fear of the future (because it is the loss of the immediate, of the present), the aesthete turns his life into a huge gallery of recollections. Since the cherished, immediate moment is not allowed to have a future (so to speak), the only way to keep one’s hold on it is through recollection – a movement directed at the past. And the ethical ‘solution’ (as far as the problem of loss is concerned) is no better. The ethical Judge reduces the open future into a ‘closed’ present (by finding one’s fulfilment, one’s task, in pursuing an anticipated path that has already been paved for him by society), thus preventing an individual search which might lead to a yet-unknown conclusion. And so while the aesthete tries to avoid the loss associated with his temporality by holding to immediacy, and thus actually falling into recollection – the ethical man holds fast to himself. In his submission to the rational understanding of eternal ideals, and in believing himself to have fulfilled these ideals by 28

See again note 15 above.

38

kierkegaard on faith and love

becoming a part of society, the ethical man holds fast to the delusion that he has conquered loss and temporality, while in fact he has been preoccupied with recollection. His eternity is as false as the aesthetic one. It exists only in his rational, contemplative accounts; it never faces his private, phenomenological experience of living, and loving, in time. The Judge, then, no less than his aesthetic friend, is deeply immersed in recollection. And recollection, ultimately, amounts to the attempt to deny the loss essential to one’s life and in particular to one’s love, and distract one away from it. Denying the loss is manifested in the aesthetic attempt to create a world independent of the passage and ruling of time – a world of fantasy, for example, or a world of artistic creation such as poetry. And in the ethical life this denial is manifested in the rational confidence that one has conquered loss and gained a secure ‘eternity in time’. Now, we saw how recollection shapes the aesthetic love. How does it shape the ethical love? The Judge’s love of recollection The great nineteenth-century novel Middlemarch tells the story of Dorothea Brooke, who tried honestly to maintain a perfect marriage with the pompous, unloving Mr Casaubon, whom she had willingly (and even ardently) chosen as her husband. The conclusion she arrives at, however, is quite grim: Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else better than – than those we were married to, it would be no use … I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear – but it murders our marriage – and then our marriage stays with us like a murder – and everything else is gone.29

In his letters to his aesthete friend, the Judge expresses the confidence that he has found the secret recipe for the happiest, most fulfilling love. He believes that by the determination of his will, and by choosing right, he has conquered all the possible difficulties of love. This is how he describes the ideal lover (i.e. himself): He has perceived that it was an insult and consequently ugly to want to love a person according to vague forces in his being but not according to a clear 29

Eliot 2000: 797. Dorothea says these words upon acknowledging that despite her earnest efforts she had actually fallen in love with someone else.

lost loves

39

consciousness, to want to love in such a way that he could imagine it possible that this love could cease … He has perceived that it was an insult to want to be attached to another person in the way one is attached to finite and accidental things, conditionally, so that if there should prove to be problems later one could undo it. He does not believe it possible that the one he loves can change, except for the better, and if it should happen he believes in the power of the relationship to make everything good again. (EO2, 301, emphasis mine)

According to this utopian vision there are no problems, no possible changes in the love or in the beloved, and no obstacles that a determined (and rational) relationship cannot overcome. It seems that the Judge ignores the possibility that a marriage, in spite of being willed and decided upon by the two parties involved, can fail. But if marriage, once decided upon, cannot fail, can one really affirm it (as the Judge claims to be doing)? How can sustaining a relationship of love be truly valued, if one does not accept the possibility of not always being able to hold on to this relationship? How can the complacent self-assurance of the Judge not lead him to the kind of marriage in which the partners – who are so sure that the marriage is safe and secure – take their love, and each other, for granted? [T]he way that marriage becomes legitimate is by its being chosen, but this can happen only if one acknowledges the dialectical possibility of divorce. The possibility that the bonds of marriage are ever subject to being broken tells us that their bonding effect is something we are called on to decide, and to decide continually. A legitimate marriage is a continuous remarriage, a continuous commitment of ourselves to what is ours to refuse.30

Basing his model of ‘legitimate marriage’ on the principle guiding him in forming ‘an existential faith’ – namely, that the affirmation of something has meaning only against the background of rejecting it (a ‘yes’ is a ‘yes’ only if we know what ‘no’ means) – Ronald L. Hall justly claims that for a marriage to be valid, the partners should acknowledge the real option of divorce.31 ‘What makes the security of such a marriage different from the judge’s’, he says, ‘is that it is a security established within the full awareness of the possibility of divorce. As I see it, divorce is, for the judge, not even a remote possibility, not to mention a real and wrenching existential threat.’32 30 31 32

Hall 2000: 143. I elaborate on Hall’s interpretation of faith in chapter 3. Hall 2000: 82–3.

40

kierkegaard on faith and love

I agree with Hall that it seems that for the Judge a divorce, or any other break in the love, is not a possibility. And indeed, if one knows a priori the answer to the question one asks – in what sense is the question a real one? In the same manner, if the marital freedom is the freedom to choose only one path – where is the freedom? Therefore, when the Judge declares that the ethical view of marriage ‘sees the relationship as the absolute and therefore looks upon love according to its true beauty – that is, according to its freedom’ (EO2, 305), we cannot but wonder whether he is being honest with himself. Maybe he ignores the fact that the picture of marriage is more complicated than the one that he wishes to acknowledge?33 There is something immodest and lacking in humility in the Judge’s confidence. He seems proudly to disregard human limitations and the human susceptibility to acting wrongly, stumbling, and sinning.34 In their essay ‘Erotic Love in the Religious Existence-Sphere’ Green and Ellis point out this problem. Judge William, they say, ‘does not typically bring sin, guilt or repentance into relation to the ethical reality of marriage. Marriage’s challenge resides for him primarily in the ethical decision to commit to another person.’35 Accordingly, the Judge does not take into account ‘the real stresses that threaten marital continuity’.36 These are stresses such as ‘infidelity on the part of either partner … the sense that the beloved has become hostile or alienated … changes in the beloved (or the self) that are extensive enough to raise the question of whether either is any longer really the same person to whom one has pledged eternal devotion’.37 Stresses of this kind indeed pose a real threat, which is completely ignored by the Judge. The latter does not have even the slightest doubt that his ‘feelings about love or [his] beloved’ – despite his choice – ‘may change’.38 33

34

35 36 37 38

It is true that choosing honestly x (choosing to marry, for example) amounts to focusing on x and investing emotions and energy and goodwill in this choice in a way that makes turning back to not-x harder. In that sense the Judge is right when he focuses his attention on the one path that has been chosen. However, even if once choosing x the path leading to its annulment becomes narrower, this does not justify ignoring the possibility of this path coming true nevertheless. Here I completely agree with Hall that for truly validating (and valuing) choice x, one must continually take into account the possibility that this choice will be annulled (either by one’s own will or by the will of someone – or something – else). In chapter 6 below I will discuss Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut (and Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story which inspired it) as a vivid example of ethical naı¨vety and the unavoidability of its failure. Green and Ellis 1999: 352. Ibid., 357. Ibid., 356. Ibid., 366.

lost loves

41

Another effective criticism of the Judge is brought by Amy Laura Hall who emphasizes the invisibility of the Judge’s (unnamed) wife. We never hear her opinions, we know hardly anything about her and, indeed, one has to admit that for someone in love the Judge speaks very little about her. Whenever he does speak about her, it is in relation to himself – he mostly speaks of the benefits that her existence as his wife bestows upon him. Hall makes a good point when she claims that the hubristic, self-centred perspective of the Judge does not allow him to see his wife as a real other, separated and independent of him. Rather, Hall claims, the Judge sees her only as far as she revolves around his needs and desires. Not only does he take for granted that she is preoccupied from morning to evening with domestic tasks that concern his well-being, he sees in her his ‘saviour’: ‘William lauds his wife as his “salvation” – as the means by which he is able to “centralize” and “acquire” himself.’39 In a manner similar to that of Green and Ellis, Hall warns against the confidence of the Judge that his love relationship will remain intact, and she foresees the day in which he will be forced to face his delusional love and the otherness of his wife: Currently he may know that he is ‘everything to his wife’ and may think his ‘consciousness’ resolutely ‘integrated’, but William’s treatise assumes that this will continue to be the case … if his wife eventually refuses carefully to contort her form to fit his mood, William’s esteem for her and his hope of ‘salvation’ through her may collapse.40

Having said that, however, we should not dismiss the Judge’s world view as entirely wrong and unfounded.41 As opposed to Hall’s reading, I think that the portrait he presents is not an entirely distorted one – rather, it is incomplete.42 The Judge needs to go through a painful process of edification – but his love is not hopeless, it is only naı¨ve. At the same time, there is indeed something vital that is missing in his love, and the various criticisms presented above clearly indicate this. The main problem with 39 40

41

42

See Hall 2002: 113, 117. See ibid., 130. Despite my agreement with Hall on this point, I think that her overall understanding of Kierkegaardian love is quite problematic. See my discussion of her view in chapter 4. As already emphasized above, I acknowledge that despite failing in committing the same mistake of ‘recollection-hood’ as the aesthete, the Judge’s failure might be easier to correct because he holds a view of life, and of love, which is more advanced than that of the aesthete. Thus, he might well be more prepared for advancing to the next, and required, stage of resignation. This reading is similar to Hannay’s: see Hannay 1982: 80–2.

42

kierkegaard on faith and love

the Judge’s position is that it encourages a state of mind which is oblivious to the need to carry out the movement of resignation. In the next chapters we will see what resignation (and its counterpart, self-denial) actually means and how it is connected to loss, but we can already observe that the Judge’s self-deluded view blinds him to the possibility of loss. His depiction of love is too perfect, too brightly clear – but love is not like that. Love involves pain, and sacrifices, and anxieties. Love can be dark and complicated, and it definitely does not amount to only sheer joy: it hurts to love. Those aspects of love (not to mention its demons) are completely absent in the Judge’s account of love. Being absent from the account of love, however, does not mean that they are defeated and removed from (the experience of) love itself. And this is the point at which the demonic raises its head. 4 Rebellion against the ethical: the demonic lover [I]f a marriage could be built despite my inclosing reserve, then this union is indeed my wish … and yet I cannot renounce my inclosing reserve for that reason. (SLW, 369, 373)

In Stages on Life’s Way we are introduced to the diary of someone – a Quidam – whose story depicts a demonic love. While the Judge believes that determination of the will and choosing to marry are enough to secure a satisfying love, Quidam the demonic and his tortured diary thoroughly complicate the optimistic love-view of ethical rationality. Quidam is not an aesthete – he wants to marry and he chooses to marry. Unlike the aesthete, he would have liked to adhere to the ethical ideal of love. He sees the beauty and attractiveness of a secure and committed love that someone such as the Judge advances, and he seeks the ethical continuity of love. He deeply wants to take a part in the utopia offered by the Judge and to succeed in living peacefully with himself, with his beloved, and with the threats of loss (as the Judge claims to be doing). But he fails. He cannot fulfil the love relationship he desires, he cannot proceed with the engagement and marry the Quadam whom he loves. This failure stems from the demonic in him, which rebels against the ethical solution to the problem of loss. Being demonic, Quidam objects to the ethical hubristic position; to its presumption to overcome loss. Being demonic, he is too sensitive to the unyielding nature of loss, and is well aware of the threats overshadowing love. He understands that love is insecure, that there are many powers – external and internal alike – that work against love. In other words, he sees

lost loves

43

all too vividly the obstacles standing in the way of love, and is defeated by them. Moreover, the distinctive characteristic of the demonic lover is that he becomes obsessed with the various obstacles in the way of loving. He becomes obsessed with the essential loss that threatens love, and with his failure to reconcile himself with this loss, to learn how to love in spite of it. The demonic lover surrenders to failure, thus actualizing the essential loss (by, for example, breaking off the relationship, sinning against the beloved, driving the beloved away). Failing to overcome the obstacles, he demonically rejoices, or at least indulges, in them. He sets all his demons free, as it were – he lets his fears, weaknesses, conflicting desires (and other demonic powers) condemn his love to loss. Quidam’s diary is a reflection of the demonic failure to fulfil the ethical ideal, and it demonstrates how his defeat in the confrontation with essential loss (namely, his demonic inability to accept the essential loss which threatens love; his demonic refusal to reconcile himself to this loss) turns the loss from potentiality to actuality. Quidam breaks off his engagement to Quadam, and the diary is a documentation of his haunted mind. It presents the self-torturing attempt of Quidam to justify his act, by asking himself over and over again ‘Am I guilty or not guilty (in behaving in this way, which has caused her – and myself – misery and pain)?’ Quidam thinks that he might not be guilty after all: his reason for breaking the engagement was not a whimsical fancy in the aesthetic manner, but rather a secret that he cannot disclose to her. However, despite the centrality of that mysterious secret to the broken engagement (it is this secret that allegedly stands between him and his girl; between his will to marry her and the possibility of doing so) – the diary never spells out what the secret actually is. And it does not do so because, ultimately, the particular secret of Quidam is not what really matters. It does not matter what the secret is, it matters what it indicates. The specific secret is but a manifestation of the more fundamental inability of the demonic to accept the essential loss (in the form of various obstacles and difficulties) which threatens his love.43 43

The meaning of the beloved being essentially lost to Quidam is that his hold on her is tentative: her presence and her love are not something that he can absolutely secure. In order to share his secret with the beloved, then, Quidam would need to accept her as tentatively held – as vital to him and yet not truly ‘his’. For example, her knowledge of his secret might change her attitude towards him, causing her to lose respect and love for him, and even to leave him. It is this tension, of loving without truly having a secure hold of the beloved, that Quidam is unable to sustain. The essence of his demonic love concerns this inability, rather than the presence of some particular dark secret or other.

44

kierkegaard on faith and love

Quidam, we saw in the quotation above, refers to his secret (that is, to what he understands as the obstacle preventing him from marrying Quadam) as an ‘inclosing reserve’.44 This term testifies that the demonic lover, despite seeing the shortcomings of recollection’s love (whether in its aesthetic or ethical form), cannot break through this kind of love. His focus on himself in the manner of ‘inclosing reserve’ renders him a member of the club of lovers who love by way of recollection. Like his fellow recollection-lovers he is incapable of transcending himself and initiating a genuine relationship with another. He is closed within himself (this, after all, is what it means to be inclosed) and so precludes the possibility of being in a relationship; he is closed within himself and cannot open himself to any other. In The Concept of Anxiety an explicit connection is specified between the two notions: ‘[t]he demonic’, it says, ‘is inclosing reserve’ (CA, 123, emphasis in the text).45 Now, the content of ‘inclosing reserve’ can be ‘the most terrible, the most insignificant, the horrible, whose presence in life few probably even dream about, but also the trifles to which no one pays attention’ (CA, 126–7). The ‘inclosing reserve’ – that is, the demonic failure to love – is therefore not so much about a particular secret (or even a particular deed). Rather, it amounts to an inner obstacle, a limit that imprisons the self and does not let one fulfil one’s love (and thus it can be either a ‘most terrible’ obstacle or just a ‘trifle’).46 To be inclosed is to attend to the demonic powers within one: the powers which refuse to follow the ethical solution and rationally ignore the loss, but at the same time also object to a resigned acceptance of the loss. Therefore, in order to overcome the ‘inclosing reserve’, a leap beyond recollection is needed – a leap into the religious sphere: his inclosing reserve contains nothing at all but is there as the frontier, and it holds him, and at present he is depressed in his reserve … inclosing reserve can scarcely be taken from the reserved person and there is no real healing for him except religiously within himself. (SLW, 428, emphasis mine) 44

45 46

It is important to emphasize that ultimately, it is not the secret that ruins the love but rather Quidam’s inability to disclose this secret in resignation and repentance. The connection between the demonic, resignation, and repentance will be explained in chapter 6. On the link between the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety and Quidam see Gonza´lez 2000. However, submitting oneself to the demonic (rather than trying to overcome it) indeed leads to one acting in a problematic way (that may terminate love, for example), and amounts to being in a state of sin. The connection between the demonic and sin will be considered in chapter 6.

lost loves

45

However, the demonic fails to carry out the religious requirement and move forward into a different sphere of existence. Surrendering himself to the demonic powers in him, then, the demonic lover is immersed in recollection. He can therefore only look yonder, at the horizon beyond recollection, but as long as he chooses the demonic he is inclosed within himself and cannot break through. Breaking through beyond the demonic, beyond recollection, requires a profound change of heart and mind and a submission to the demanding requirement of the movement of resignation. Of the various lovers of the sphere of recollection, the demonic comes closest to representing the essential condition of a human lover. Baffled by the struggle between the aesthetic and the ethical powers in him, coming up against his limitations, failing to fulfil his love completely and sometimes failing to fulfil his love even in part – of the three lovers he reflects most convincingly the struggle of love.47 The demonic lover seeks a way out of his present condition and, in this sense, he is a borderline figure as it were – he is deeply immersed in recollection (in the prereligious sphere) but he sees its shortcomings. He is therefore looking further. He aspires to transcend recollection, but to do this he needs to undertake the demanding, painful movement of resignation, and such an undertaking, as we shall see in the next chapter, is far from easy. The demonic lover, then, stands on the verge of the religious sphere. If, indeed, he manages to leap beyond recollection (by making the movement of resignation), he will be facing new possibilities for love: these possibilities will be presented and explored in the next four chapters. Having inquired into the different forms of love in the religious sphere, in the sixth and last chapter of this study we shall return to the demonic lover, this time in the form of the intriguing figure of the Merman in Fear and Trembling.

47

The demonic, in his attempt to address the loss threatening love, is well aware of the tension between aesthetic sensitivity (to the moment and its passing desires), and ethical higher aspirations (to continuity and universal ideals). Now, as the common lover is usually neither a pure aesthete nor a sheer ethicist but rather someone who wavers between the attitudes represented by these two protagonists, it is reasonable to suggest that the demonic comes closest to representing such a lover. At the same time, the demonic is, by contrast with the common lover, highly conscious of the struggle within himself, and of his frustrated and unhappy condition. In this the demonic may be standing in a higher position than such a common lover: he knows and acknowledges that something is wrong; he is painfully aware of the misery infusing his unsatisfying state.

2 THE SORROWFUL LOVER

1 Fear and Trembling and the concept of resignation Introduction [The knight of resignation] infinitely renounces the love that is the substance of his life, he is reconciled in pain. (FT, 46)

, The concept of resignation is presented in Fear and Trembling as an essential part of Kierkegaard’s analysis of faith. Fear and Trembling, which was published in 1843 and is probably the best known of Kierkegaard’s works, tells the story of the Binding in a strikingly unusual way. It discusses the structure of Abraham’s faith, and characterizes it as a paradoxical double movement. The two movements, of resignation and of faith, and the paradoxical relation between them, are the core of Fear and Trembling: this is the basis on which Kierkegaard construes his famous polemical discussion regarding the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ (‘Problema I’) and its implications (‘Problema II’ and ‘Problema III’). However, most of the readings and interpretations of Fear and Trembling tend to overlook the significance of this fundamental analysis of faith (which constitutes almost half of the book), and rush to address the problem of the three ‘Problemas’.1 It is not surprising then, that along with the movement of 1

The notable exceptions are Mooney, Hall and Lippitt, whose readings will be discussed in the next chapter.

46

the sorrowful lover

47

resignation, the knight of resignation is also pushed aside – and so is his painful love for a princess. But before doing justice to this love story (as well as to the concept of resignation which is crucial for a correct understanding of faith), there is a need to say a few words on the supposed author of Fear and Trembling, that is, the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio.2 Johannes the obscure: the loud voice of the silent one Johannes de Silentio (whom I shall refer to simply as Johannes) – the name, or rather the persona, under which Kierkegaard chose to present Fear and Trembling – is someone associated with silence. As his name indicates, he is someone who in some sense cannot, or does not, speak. Johannes, of course, does speak (otherwise there would be no book to be discussed); his declared silence, therefore, refers to his inability to understand Abraham. He claims, most persistently, that he cannot understand Abraham, cannot understand the knight of faith, cannot, therefore, understand faith. But should we take his word at face value? Maybe Johannes understands more than he wishes to admit? After all, he claims not to understand but, surprisingly, he has a lot to say about faith – a whole book, to be precise (and indeed a very rich and condensed one!). To begin with, Johannes can recognize a knight of faith: he knows that Abraham is a knight and he is very fluent when it comes to defining his knighthood. Johannes knows how to tell the difference between resignation and faith, and he even has something very interesting to say about the nature of the relationship between these two movements. So why does Johannes present himself as someone who does not understand, when his book provides written evidence against this claim? A plausible suggestion may be that the failure that Johannes is preoccupied with is not one of understanding faith, or of giving an accurate account of it. It is rather a failure in performing it. Johannes does not understand how Abraham was capable of performing the wondrous movement of faith. However, the fact that Johannes himself is not someone who has faith does not make his understanding of faith – or rather the understanding of faith that emerges from his text without his willing to 2

This is a pressing matter because the pseudonymity of the work is too often taken to indicate the alleged problematic status of Fear and Trembling as an unreliable source for assessing Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith. I will discuss briefly the issue of the pseudonymous writings in chapter 5 below, but since the weight I give to Fear and Trembling’s account of resignation, faith, and love is evident already at this stage, it is important to clarify the reasons for regarding Johannes de Silentio as someone whose views deserve serious attention.

48

kierkegaard on faith and love

admit it – inadequate or deficient. We can learn a lot about faith from Johannes’ account, even if he himself is not someone who lives up to his model (and in a Kierkegaardian fashion we can say that this is the same as in the case of love: we can learn a lot about love from the account of a heartbroken lover who attempts to love but fails). Now, there are commentators who do take Johannes’ word and believe him that he does not, and cannot, understand faith.3 What Johannes has to say about faith, according to these readings, is therefore necessarily lacking. Johannes is an outsider who is lacking something important about faith; something such as an understanding of sin: To really understand the positive character of the religious life, including of course faith, one must understand sin, but Climacus says that no pseudonymous book prior to The Concept of Anxiety manifested such an understanding … From this it follows that it is a mistake to take Fear and Trembling as giving us a positive account of faith.4

Evans, of course, does not dismiss altogether the importance of the text. The significance that he finds in the story of Abraham (and especially in Johannes’ account of it) is that of showing us that ‘a person of faith is a person who has a direct and personal relationship with God’ and that ‘it is at least possible for God to encounter a person directly, not simply through social ideals, and that such an encounter can provide a new self, a new identity, and a new understanding of the purpose of human existence’.5 However, the text as a whole is only ‘a poetic anticipation of the situation of the Christian believer’ and ‘[s]ince it is poetry, one should not look to the story for detailed information about the character of Christian existence’.6 In other words, Evans suggests that for an adequate, positive model of faith we should look elsewhere, not in Fear and Trembling. A similar direction is manifested in the reading of Stephen Mulhall, who thinks that the absence of sin, from Johannes’ account as well as from Abraham’s life, renders Fear and Trembling – and the model embodied in the figure of Abraham – insufficient for a valid understanding of faith: ‘Whereas Abraham, according to de Silentio, did not become the single individual by way of sin, Christianity teaches that the only way to God is

3 4 5 6

See, for example, Jackson’s criticism of Johannes de Silentio, whom he takes to be distant in his opinions and understanding from Kierkegaard himself (Jackson 1999: 192–200). Evans 1993: 22. Ibid., 23. Ibid.

the sorrowful lover

49

through sin – through recognizing our sinfulness and our inability to overcome it through our own resources.’7 This kind of interpretation – which indicates an essential failing both in Johannes’ understanding of faith and in the faith he tries to understand – points to other texts (delivered by another Johannes), for the purpose of understanding and edification: At one point in Fear and Trembling, where Johannes de silentio says he doesn’t understand Abraham, he also says that to understand him we need a new category. This is almost certainly the Christian concept of faith (not Abraham’s) defined and elaborated at great length in Philosophical Fragments and particularly Concluding Unscientific Postscript.8

Indeed, in the texts of Johannes Climacus (the Fragments and their Postscript) a different model of faith is presented: a model that specifically includes the distinctively Christian features of sin, God in time, the issue of eternal happiness and so on. It is also true that these texts present Religiousness B (the distinctively Christian faith) as the highest, and that may lead to the conclusion that the faith of Abraham belongs more in the category of Religiousness A.9 If such a conclusion is adopted then on the face of it Fear and Trembling may seem like a problematic source to rely on for an adequate model of faith. My answer to such a possible objection is twofold. First, one can ask about the extent and cruciality of the difference between these two models. Perhaps, after all, the difference between them is not so profound or essential. For example, one of the more decisive differences between Religiousness A and Religiousness B is that the former is characterized as ‘immanent’ (a religious consciousness that takes into consideration only that which is in the realm of human will and powers alone) while the latter is defined as ‘transcendent’ (a religious consciousness that manages to put its trust in that which is beyond the realm of human abilities, that is, divine intervention).10 However, as Pattison points out, this distinction is not entirely accurate because we can find, already in those writings that are ‘supposedly representative of the merely “immanent” form of religiousness’, ‘transcendent’ elements 7 8 9

10

Mulhall 2001: 386. Hannay 2003a: 32. For the relationship between Johannes de Silentio’s book and those of Johannes Climacus in terms of the different stages of life they occupy, see, for example, Westphal 1996 and Evans 1999. ‘In Religiousness B, the upbuilding is something outside the individual; the individual does not find the upbuilding by finding the relationship with God within himself but relates himself to something outside himself in order to find the upbuilding’. CUP, 561.

50

kierkegaard on faith and love

such as ‘the human need for repentance, for Grace’.11 Although Pattison refers here to the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, I think that his observation holds true with regard to other supposedly ‘religiously immanent’ writings as well, among them Fear and Trembling. Also, another ‘charge’ against the latter is its alleged ignorance regarding the issue of sin. It seems that the crucial topic of sin and repentance, while central to the model of Religiousness B, is quite marginal to the model of Fear and Trembling. However, this quite common interpretative view is based on the failure to recognize the pivotal role of the Merman in the story (and model) of faith that Johannes tells us. The Merman and his story – a story of romantic love – is the topic of the last chapter of the present study, and it is in that chapter that I shall try to justify my understanding of the importance of sin already for the faith presented in Fear and Trembling. In the meantime, however, we may say that at the very least, and despite their differences, there is no evident reason to think that there is something in the Postscript’s model that invalidates the one of Fear and Trembling and, moreover, there are reasons to consider the former as a specific manifestation of the latter.12 However, it is not my task here to compare the two models. At any event – and this is my second answer to the possible objection to my taking Fear and Trembling to be the main text from which to learn of faith – even if the model of the Postscript goes beyond that of Fear and Trembling, and even if it does indeed add new features that qualify it as a more accurate model than that of the faith praised by Johannes, the latter is rich enough to show us something very interesting about our lives, and in particular about the loves that give them a significant content. The faith of Abraham, then, is definitely a topic worth discussing, and Johannes is definitely someone who does so. Which brings us back to our original question: if Johannes has so much to say, why does he claim to be silent? One way to settle the dissonance between Johannes’ (alleged) silence and confusion and the fluency and insightfulness of the text is to see in Johannes the messenger from the motto, who does not understand the message that he carries.13 In the light of such a reading Johannes is taken 11 12

13

Pattison 1991: 156. For an interesting discussion of the essence of Kierkegaard religiousness as not being confined to (dogmatic) Christianity (hence, also, exceeding the Postscript’s Religiousness B) see Mooney’s On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time, in particular the first part ‘Kierkegaard: A Socrates in Christendom’. The motto reads: ‘What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not’, quoting from Hamann. See, for example, Lippitt 2003: 177.

the sorrowful lover

51

to represent the understanding of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, who held a Hegelian conception with regard to faith – a limited conception that indeed makes it impossible to understand Abraham. As Alastair Hannay explains: Johannes’s platform is still that of his (contemporary) readers … Really what he uncovers is the extent of the inability of those who accept the Hegelian principle to understand Abraham. But that is because the readers Kierkegaard has designed him for are wedded to that principle. Kierkegaard’s overriding aim is to divorce them from it, but he believes that has to be done with their own consent and therefore with due regard to their own conceptual and attitudinal presuppositions.14

This reading may also explain why Kierkegaard chose to attribute his interesting ideas about faith, expressed in one of his most intense works, to Johannes the silent. Presumably, by doing so, he indicates that it is Johannes – as a Hegelian or simply as someone who is not a believer – who does not (and cannot) understand Abraham (and faith). But Kierkegaard does – and so potentially can we. I think that this reading is plausible and even compelling but, as I suggested above, maybe we can think of Johannes as someone who does understand after all, someone who chooses to present himself as silent even though he can (and does) speak, someone who is closer to Kierkegaard than we might at first be tempted to think. Maybe his nonsilent silence, his refusal to spell out a less enigmatic account of faith, and what Mulhall calls his ‘confusion’ are rather intended, as Mulhall points out, ‘as a signal, all but unmissable, that he expects his readers to work a little harder to earn their bread’.15 Keeping in mind who were the readers of Kierkegaard – the bourgeois society of believers who took themselves to understand what faith involves and to have progressed far beyond it (to the realm of reason) – we can see the point of narrating the account of faith in the voice of someone who insists on faith’s unintelligibility. Kierkegaard wanted his readers to understand, to take a minute to think, and to realize, how profoundly difficult it is really to have faith. Kierkegaard wanted his contemporaries to face and acknowledge the fact that faith is not the triviality that they believed they acquired simply by 14 15

Hannay 2003a: 31. Mulhall 2001: 368. The confusion Mulhall is referring to is Johannes’ position regarding the literal: on the one hand, Johannes insists on a literal reading of the biblical text, on the other, he himself fails to do so and provides an inaccurate reading of the words that Abraham uttered (see pp. 359–70).

52

kierkegaard on faith and love

virtue of being born Christians. And what can be more effective for the purpose of demonstrating this than to create a protagonist who struggles to understand faith? 2 Resignation: the relationship with the beloved16 Desire and loss17 Conceptually speaking, to describe an attitude as ‘resignation’ is eo ipso to say something about the meaning and importance of the thing being renounced. Resignation truly counts as resignation only when we are requested to give up something of importance to us. To renounce something means that we have an interest in it – we do not renounce something that we do not want. When we renounce something it has to be, by definition, something we want and have an interest in, it has to be something that we desire. Resignation, therefore, is necessarily a difficult and painful act. There is something that we want – a romantic relationship with a desired person, for example – and we have to ‘let it go’, to give it up, to not have it. The more strongly we are attached, the more intense our will and the greater our interest – the more painful and difficult the resignation. Such a story is told in Fear and Trembling: A young lad falls in love with a princess, and this love is the entire substance of his life, and yet the relationship is such that it cannot possibly be realized, cannot possibly be translated from ideality into reality. (FT, 41)

This young man, despite the advice of ‘the slaves of the finite, the frogs in the swamp of life’ to take him ‘the rich brewer’s widow’ instead (see FT, 41–2), does not want any substitute for the princess – he cannot love any other woman. However, on the way to resignation, and before actually undertaking the movement, the lad honestly enquires into the status of his love. He wants to be sure that this love is indeed ‘the entire substance of his life’ (i.e. a true, enduring love and not merely a fleeting infatuation); and that this love is indeed lost for him, a real impossibility: 16

17

I am deeply indebted to Ariel Meirav for his invaluable input regarding the understanding of resignation that I present in the rest of this chapter. His own work on the concept of resignation, as well as his challenging comments on my work, have significantly contributed to developing the ideas I present here. It should be emphasized that in what follows I use the word ‘desire’ to indicate a strong and passionate wanting of some particular thing. Thus, in its being focused and overriding will, it is different from the aesthetic desire, which is momentary and transient (and accordingly also unstable and quite feeble).

the sorrowful lover

53

He examines the conditions of his life, he convenes the swift thoughts that obey his every hint, like well-trained doves, he flourishes his staff, and they scatter in all directions. But now when they all come back, all of them like messengers of grief, and explain that it is an impossibility, he becomes very quiet, he dismisses them, he becomes solitary, and then he undertakes the movement. (FT, 42)

In the previous chapter we characterized recollection’s love by means of its distinguished response to loss (the essential loss involved in the passage of time, consisting both of actual and potential losses). Resignation’s love also emerges as a unique response to a loss, but here the loss is emphatically actual; the loss concerned is the actual loss of a princess.18 Now, the experience of losing something exposes the way in which our will is restricted by reality. When we lose something (especially something of importance to us), we feel the resistance that the world applies against us. There is something that we want which is taken away from us, and it is taken away from us despite our will and regardless of our efforts. Loss, then, is something external to us, something that is imposed on us, something beyond our control. We may therefore say that loss is an external event to which we respond, first and foremost, in an inner manner (by pain, anger, or denial, for instance). This inner response to the loss, the inner attitude taken to it, is akin to what Kierkegaard regards as a ‘movement’. Resignation, then, is an inner movement – a movement of the spirit, of the will – which can either be carried out as a response to the loss, or not. But what kind of a response is it? The knight, then, makes the movement, but which one? Will he forget it all … ? No, for the knight does not contradict himself, and it is a contradiction to forget the whole substance of his life and yet remain the same … The knight, then, will recollect everything, but this recollection is precisely the pain, and yet in infinite resignation he is reconciled with existence. (FT, 43)

First of all, resignation does not amount to forgetfulness: the knight renounces the princess but does not, by any means, forget her. This implies that the knight continues to desire the princess, continues to love her. He does not abjure his strong desire and does not deny his love for her. Accordingly, his love is sorrowful: strongly desiring that which is lost for him cannot but result in intense pain and sorrow. The pain that 18

However, it is important to emphasize that this does not mean that resignation is relevant only when actual loss occurs. As we shall see in the next chapter, resignation is highly relevant also when the loss concerned is only a potential one.

54

kierkegaard on faith and love

characterizes resignation, then, indicates not only that the knight keeps his desire conscious and alive (‘this recollection is precisely the pain’), but also that he fully accepts the loss of the princess, is fully reconciled to it. He is ‘reconciled with existence’, Johannes says, and to be reconciled with existence means precisely to accede to those aspects of existence that resist one’s will; those aspects that disagree (as it were) with what one wishes, and hurt one. It means, in other words, to comply with the profound imperfection of existence, an imperfection that expresses itself in various forms of loss. Fully accepting this loss means that one does not try to deny the loss or render it insignificant (by forgetting the lost thing or finding a substitute for it). And at the same time it also means to be at peace with this painful existence – not to rebel against it or become bitter and angry with regard to it. Resignation, then, is a unique response to the different losses that our existence essentially entails. In resignation we entirely accept the loss (say, of a princess), but at the same time we entirely continue to desire the lost thing and to suffer over its loss. We may say that in resignation we sustain a ‘relationship’ of painful desire with the lost thing, the latter always belonging to the realm of actuality and finitude: Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible … The desire that would lead [the knight] out into actuality but has been stranded on impossibility, is now turned inward, but it is not therefore lost, nor is it forgotten … He keeps this love young, and it grows along with him in years and in beauty. But he needs no finite occasion for its growth. From the moment he has made the movement, the princess is lost. (FT, 44)

Johannes draws a clear distinction between the ‘external’ loss of the princess and the ‘inner’ response to this loss, which is expressed in the movement of resignation. The latter does not consist in the loss of the desire and love for the lost thing (it is not a loss of the spiritual, ‘inner’ relationship with the princess), but it definitely amounts to accepting the loss of the thing desired and loved (in other words, it is a loss of the concrete interactive, ‘outer’ relationship with the princess). In resignation, although his love for the princess is not lost, the princess herself (and the realization of a relationship with her) is wholeheartedly regarded as lost for him. However, something further happens in resignation. Not only is the knight’s relationship with the finite deeply changed (from an actual hold on the princess into an inner connection of painful desire), but another relationship, a relationship with the infinite, is created:

the sorrowful lover

55

His love for that princess would become for him the expression of an eternal love, would assume a religious character, would be transfigured into a love of the eternal being, which true enough denied the fulfillment but nevertheless did reconcile him once more in the eternal consciousness of its validity in an eternal form that no actuality can take away from him. (FT, 43–4)

What does this transfiguration mean? First it is crucial to keep in mind what it does not mean. As we have just seen, renouncing the princess does not mean that the knight stops loving and desiring her. Therefore, this transfiguration does not amount to a simple replacement of one object of love (the princess) with a different one (God). Resignation does not mean that the knight loves God instead of loving the princess. To do so would be to act aesthetically, not religiously.19 The aesthetic person, who fails to accept the loss of his ‘princess’, changes the object of his love in a way that helps him to evade the loss and the pain over it – he exchanges one desire for a new, different one. The seducer in Either/Or loses girl A and immediately falls in love with girl B. The young poet in Repetition first wants the girl and then wants to be a poet. The latter’s story of unhappy love may seem similar to the story of the young lad in Fear and Trembling, but this is only a superficial resemblance. While the young lad, in the context of his knighthood of resignation, continues to want the renounced princess and is therefore deeply suffering, the young man of Repetition is not in the same situation because he has found a substitute for the girl. Having lost the girl it is not her that he wants: he wants to be a poet. His initial desire (for a concrete relationship with the girl) was not kept alive but was rather replaced by a new desire – the desire for writing and reflecting on the idea of love (i.e. becoming a poet). In resignation, on the other hand, rather than substituting one desire (or an object of desire) with a different one, there is a paradoxical sustaining of two contradictory desires, two contradictory wills. The knight of resignation desires the princess and continues to will a relationship with her but, in his resignation, he willingly submits himself to the will of God. It is said specifically that the knight of resignation recognizes the eternal being as that which denies the fulfilment of his love for the princess (i.e. the eternal being is recognized as ‘responsible’ for the 19

Indeed, it is easy to confuse the movement of resignation with the aesthetic position, and as we will see in the next chapter, this confusion is found even in the context of careful interpretations of faith.

56

kierkegaard on faith and love

loss).20 However, despite recognizing God as the source of this denial, the knight is not angry with him, he does not rebel against him, and does not feel bitterness towards him – he loves him. Can there be a deeper expression for a wholehearted acceptance of loss than this? He recognizes God as the one who takes away from him what he wants (the realized relationship with the princess) – and he willingly gives this to him, he willingly renounces it, he willingly accepts the loss. We may therefore describe the movement of resignation as a submission to the will of God. Submission, by contrast with change of will, has a peculiarly dual character. In resignation the knight continues to will and desire what he lost, while willingly accepting that loss. What constitutes resignation as resignation, then, is precisely this quality of submission of the will rather than a mere change in the will or a replacement of its object. Resignation is a paradoxical position of deeply desiring a lost thing, while deeply accepting its loss. Unfolding the two-sided value of the beloved Understood as a submission to the will of God, resignation amounts to the recognition that everything finite (that is, everything in time which, in other words, is everything that we have) is not really ours but rather God’s. We understand that, fundamentally, we do not ‘have’ anything, not even the things that we consider to be our most cherished things. After all, it is not for us to decide (or even to understand) when and how the dearest, most important things in our lives are given to us – and when they are to be taken away. To recognize our limited control over what constitutes the heart of our existence (so to speak) is to acknowledge our nothingness before a greater power that far transcends our frail hold of everything. We do not, actually, have anything. Our loves, our achievements, our life – everything, ultimately, belongs to that infinite power. In resignation, then, we understand our nothingness, and thereby we understand that the real value of the things in our life is independent of our hold of them, independent of our relation to them. We are not the value-givers – things have value in themselves, in their belonging to their real source of existence. In the introduction to his translation of Fear and Trembling, Alastair Hannay makes a similar point. Explaining the paradox of faith, he suggests 20

Note again the quotation above: ‘His love for that princess … would be transfigured into a love for an eternal being, which true enough denied the fulfillment …’ (FT, 43–4, emphasis mine).

the sorrowful lover

57

that we understand Abraham’s complex story of resignation and faith as symbolizing a particular attitude to the things given to us in the world, the precious things we consider as ours and wish to attain. On Hannay’s reading the story of faith is a story in which we learn that it is not we who endow valuable things with whatever value they have. Their value is bestowed on them by the source of existence itself, i.e. God: Johannes de silentio’s ‘lyrical’ account of resignation … could be read as symbolizing the way a person must look upon everything that he values, whether or not it is unattainable. It could symbolize the attitude that says that nothing in the world has value simply because one values it … Faith would be, correspondently, the attitudinal appendix to this, that things have their value nonetheless, but they have them on their own account or from God. It would be plausible to attribute this compound attitude … to Abraham and his belief that what he is giving to God will be returned, as it was but with its status clarified.21

In resignation, then, there is a crucial shift in our understanding of the status of those things which we consider as ours. Resignation exposes them as independently valuable – thanks to their belonging to God, regardless of what we feel about them. We may call this new understanding the unfolding of the ‘objective’ value of everything finite: namely, the value pertaining to them regardless of our attachment to them (and despite their fleeting, ephemeral nature). At the same time, resignation also unfolds the ‘subjective’ value of everything in time, the value of the thing for us. The loss of something dear to us – and the full acknowledgement and acceptance of this loss in resignation – exposes the thing in its fullness and focuses everything we found valuable in it. A non-resigning way of life constitutes a state of forgetfulness with regard to our fragile relation to everything we hold dear and important in our lives. We take it for granted that we have family and friends, freedom (and abilities to carry out various activities), love, and life – and we forget (or are too distracted to notice) how important and valuable those things are for us. In the context of a non-resigning way of existence (that takes everything for granted and forgets to appreciate it) we quite ironically see the thing – see it clearly and fully – only when it is gone. (Think of how we feel when we lose and have to renounce something: all too often, it is only at such moments that we understand how valuable the thing is for us.) To make the movement of resignation – to sustain the 21

Hannay 2003a: 24 (emphasis mine).

58

kierkegaard on faith and love

resigning gaze, so to speak – is to be focused constantly on the frailty of everything that we have. And it is precisely thereby that we remember that what we have is something that we have been given; given – because it is not ours: in a profound sense everything in time is lost for us, everything in time eludes the absolute hold we wish in vain to have over it. What we have, therefore, is ours only as a gift – a gift from God.22 The importance of resignation, therefore, is twofold. By shedding on our existence the light of infinitude, as it were, resignation edifies us to appreciate the value of things both in their relation to God (their independent value as belonging to God) and in their relation to us (their value for us). Resignation, I claim, is the unfolding of the two-sided value of everything finite. In contrast with a common (or even intuitive) understanding of this concept, we therefore see how resignation deepens and strengthens our relation to finitude.23 A relationship of pain with the finite beloved I can give up the princess, and I will not sulk about it but find joy and peace and rest in my pain. (FT, 49)

Focusing on resignation from the point of view of the relationship with the finite in general and the beloved in particular, we may sum up the following points. Resignation is a movement (a movement of the spirit) – it is a response to a state of affairs, a state of loss, in the external world. This loss can be manifested in various ways (in the impossibility of sustaining an important relationship, for example), but the crucial thing to remember is that while the occurrence of loss is something beyond one’s control, something that happens to one, the movement of resignation is a spiritual response undertaken by the individual who faces the loss. Resignation, then, is the inner submission to some external will, the latter being manifested and experienced as loss. However, resignation can be justly defined as resignation only if two essential features are present: acceptance (of the loss) and desire (towards 22 23

I return to this idea in chapter 3. In the next chapter we will see readings of Fear and Trembling that tend to overlook the importance of resignation or even belittle it. A different understanding of resignation is presented in the readings (to be discussed in the next chapter as well) of both Kellenberger and Adams. Both emphasize the importance of resignation as a crucial religious movement in the context of which not only do we understand our relation to God but also maintain our care and pain with regard to that which we renounce.

the sorrowful lover

59

the lost thing). Thus the young lad, for example, renounces his beloved (acknowledges and accepts her loss) but being in a state of true resignation, he still wills to have her. Indeed, he is convinced (and reconciled to the fact) that he will never get her back – but he still wants her back. Resignation, then, can be described as a unique response to loss. It is a genuine, non-bitter, even loving acceptance of not having what one, very passionately, still in a sense wants to have. And against this background we may say that resignation edifies us to appreciate the value of finitude. Through the pain of resignation we clearly see and understand what many a time we fail to notice – how important and valuable finitude is. Accordingly, acknowledging both the ultimate loss and the ultimate value of the thing we renounce, while continuing to desire this lost thing – the connection of the person resigning to the thing renounced is one of ultimate pain and sorrow. However, as we have already said above, resignation goes further than this. The movement of resignation is not only a creation of a bond that ties us to the finite beloved in a relationship of sorrowful love; it is also, and crucially so, a creation of a bond that ties us – in a relationship of love, a relationship of ‘joy and peace and rest’ – to God. 3 Resignation: the relationship with God Johannes’ enigmatic statement Johannes emphasizes the significance of resignation more than once. ‘[O]nly in infinite resignation’, he says, ‘do I become conscious of my eternal validity’ (FT, 46), and a little later he declares what seems to be a variation of this: ‘what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness’ (FT, 48). But what does gaining one’s ‘eternal consciousness’ mean? ‘[M]y eternal consciousness’, Johannes says quite enigmatically, ‘is my love for God’ (FT, 48).24 In the spirit of Johannes, who is deeply bewildered by the mystery of faith, we may say that the connection he indicates here between resignation and love for God is a puzzling mystery in itself. Although Johannes says these powerful words casually and almost as if they represent a trivial fact, they seem to be a key to some pivotal truth. And we cannot but wonder: why is it that resignation – a painful movement that as we have seen 24

And remember that earlier in the text he also specifically claimed that in resignation his love for the princess becomes ‘the expression of an eternal love’ and is ‘transfigured into a love of the eternal being’ (FT, 43).

60

kierkegaard on faith and love

demands of the believer that he renounces what he loves the most – is so intimately connected to the possibility of loving God? Johannes does not even formulate this question (let alone answer it), and therefore I suggest that as a clue to a possible answer we turn to a different Kierkegaardian text, to the Sermon of Either/Or’s Ultimatum. In this Sermon Kierkegaard makes a connection between the notion of ‘being in the wrong’ and love for God; my claim is that ‘being in the wrong’ (or more accurately, as we shall see, accepting oneself as ‘being in the wrong’), is a form of resignation. Understanding the connection between ‘being in the wrong’ and love, then, may help us shed some light on the connection between resignation and love for God. But first let us ask: what does ‘being in the wrong’ actually mean, and how is it related to resignation?

Resignation and the thought that ‘In relation to God we are always in the wrong’ The Sermon in the Ultimatum is the very last part of Either/Or. Judge William says that it was composed by an old friend of his, a pastor in a small parish in Jutland. The Sermon is called ‘The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong’ and it opens with the following prayer: Father in heaven! Teach us to pray rightly so that our hearts may open up to you in prayer and supplications and hide no furtive desire that we know is not acceptable to you, nor any secret fear that you will deny us anything that will truly be for our good, so that the laboring thoughts, the restless mind, the fearful heart may find rest in and through that alone in which and through which it can be found – by always joyfully thanking you as we gladly confess that in relation to you we are always in the wrong. Amen. (EO2, 341)

What does the pastor mean when he speaks of ‘being in the wrong’? On the face of it, it seems most reasonable to interpret ‘being in the wrong’ as simply ‘sinning’ or ‘having sinned’. When the pastor claims that ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’, it is natural to think that what he means is that in relation to God we are always in a state of sin. However, his central move in the Sermon renders this interpretation questionable because he speaks specifically about wishing to be in the wrong. When the pastor explains the reason for considering the thought that ‘one is in the wrong’ as upbuilding, he turns to love and declares that when we love someone we wish to be in the wrong in relation to him:

the sorrowful lover

61

Why did you wish to be in the wrong in relation to a person? Because you loved. Why did you find it upbuilding? Because you loved. The more you loved, the less time you had to deliberate upon whether or not you were in the right; your love had only one desire, that you might continually be in the wrong. (EO2, 349)

Now, if we understand ‘being in the wrong’ as sinning, this is a very strange claim: why would we wish to be in a state of sin in relation to someone we love? I therefore suggest that we understand ‘being in the wrong’ in a slightly different manner, using two textual ‘hints’ for this. The first is the prayer, which expresses the wish of the believer to be given the strength to trust that God will never deny us ‘anything that will truly be for our good’. This kind of trust is put to the test when we suffer a loss or injury that seems unjust, undeserved. And indeed, such a situation is described in the text that follows the prayer – a retelling of a scene from the Gospel according to St Luke, in which Christ foresees the destruction of Jerusalem. This dreadful event – when ‘heaven remained closed, and no angel was dispatched, except the angel of death, which waved its sword over the city’ (EO2, 342) – ‘fell on the innocent’, as the pastor says, ‘just as hard as on the guilty’ (343). This disaster serves as a paradigm for cases in which we might tend to fear that God has not acted for our good, that God has unjustly caused us suffering and loss, that God has been ‘in the wrong’ in relation to us. The risk which the pastor speaks of in this connection is evidently that of thinking it appropriate to blame God, to think that one is in the right in accusing God of injustice. The pastor also reminds us that according to the scriptures, ‘you are not to argue with God’ (344), paraphrasing a point expressed in the Book of Job, which offers the most dramatic presentation of the gap between the fact that a person suffers loss and pain apparently undeservedly, and that person’s being in the right. Job was a righteous man who suffered an overwhelming sequence of losses and injuries. His response was not to blame God or to rebel against him – rather, he tore his clothes and said: ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’.25 And the biblical author says: ‘In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.’26 That is to say, Job’s righteousness was demonstrated precisely by his refusal to accuse God of wrongdoing. Had Job blamed God for his terrible losses, then he would have been in the wrong. 25 26

Job 1:21, the King James version. 1:22.

62

kierkegaard on faith and love

The prayer and the examples that follow it, then, indicate the kind of wrongness that the pastor is concerned about. There are two aspects, or levels, to this wrongness. It begins with our sense of being hurt, or of suffering injustice – we feel that a wrong has been done to us. However, when we thus feel, we often tend to blame someone else for this ‘wrongness’ that we suffer. We feel strongly motivated to affirm that someone is in the wrong in relation to us, and that we are in the right in blaming him for this. Here it is crucial to pay attention to the second hint that the text provides regarding the meaning of ‘being in the wrong’: namely, the pastor’s claim that we wish to be in the wrong in relation to someone we love. When we feel that a wrong has been done to us by someone we love, we are not motivated to find our beloved guilty in causing us this injury; we are not motivated to be in the right when seeing him as being in the wrong. Instead, we wish to find that the appearance of the beloved’s guilt was mistaken, that in fact the beloved is not in the wrong, and that we have been in the wrong in blaming him. What the pastor is actually saying, then, is that when we love someone we wish to be always in the wrong when it comes to blaming him for causing or having caused us suffering. The second level or aspect of being in the wrong, therefore, may be understood as referring to the wrongness (on some occasions) of a position that we are disposed or commonly tempted to find ourselves in; that is, the human tendency to blame someone else for a wrong that we suffer. In this sense, to be ‘in the wrong’ in relation to God is to blame God wrongly for having wronged us; to accuse God unjustly of injustice in causing or allowing us to suffer pain and loss. Accordingly, the upbuilding thought of the Sermon – that is, that ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’ – is the thought that we are wrong whenever we blame or even tend to blame God for causing us loss or suffering. Now, to acknowledge that we are in the wrong in relation to God – that is, to accept this thought and recognize the wrongness in blaming God – ultimately expresses resignation. Resignation, as we have seen, has to do with a submission to the will of God. The knight of resignation renounces his will before God’s will, and despite the fact that he still wishes to sustain a relationship with finitude (with the beloved princess, for example) he releases all hold of it. He accepts that everything belongs to God, and that he has no claim to, or right over, anything. By contrast to this resigned attitude, thinking that one is in the right in blaming God for the loss of something valuable involves the emphatic affirmation that the valuable thing belongs to one and has been unjustly taken from one. The thought that one is in the right, therefore, is clearly opposed to resignation, and

the sorrowful lover

63

accordingly, the thought that one is in the wrong is equivalent to resignation. In thinking that I am (or would be) in the wrong to blame God for any loss, I express a resigned attitude towards all the finite things which I am susceptible to lose. (Just as Job, in his refusal to argue with God regarding the terrible losses that he has suffered, expresses the highest degree of resignation.) Love and the thought that ‘In relation to God we are always in the wrong’ We already noted that in order to explain the upbuilding in the thought that ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’, the pastor turns to love: [If] a person who is the object of your love were to do you a wrong, is it not true that it would pain you, that you would scrupulously examine everything but that you then would say: I know for sure that I am in the right; this thought will calm me? Ah, if you loved him, then it would not calm you; you would investigate everything. You would be unable to perceive anything else except that he is in the wrong, and yet this certainty would trouble you. You would wish that you might be in the wrong; you would try to find something that could speak in his defense, and if you did not find it, you would find rest only in the thought that you were in the wrong. (EO2, 347–8)

Now, we said that more specifically the claim here is that when we love someone we wish to be in the wrong in our tendency to blame him for an injury or loss that we have suffered. But why is this so? Why do we want to be in the wrong in this way when we love? The pastor says that finding that the beloved has wronged you is in conflict with the possibility of finding ‘rest and peace and happiness’ in your love (EO2, 350). Clare Carlisle, in her book Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming, presents two points in explaining this conflict: When one loves another … one is not made happy by finding fault with him. One wishes to admire, not to blame him – for one’s own love suffers as a result of this blame. Wanting to be in the right is an assertion of the ego that makes love more difficult and painful.27

First of all, love involves admiration for the beloved, and to blame the beloved for wronging you is to view him as less admirable. Secondly, love involves a compassionate concern for the beloved, and to feel that one is in the right in blaming the beloved is to focus in an incompatible way on 27

Carlisle 2005: 64.

64

kierkegaard on faith and love

oneself, on one’s ego. It is to justify (and intensify) feelings of anger and bitterness that are in conflict with loving. After all, when we love we do not want to feel anger, bitterness, or defensiveness – feeling like this stains love and limits it rather than allowing it to ‘[flow] out unhindered’.28 There is another reason, however, for our wish to be ‘in the wrong’ (when we blame, or tend to blame, someone we love). When we love, not only do we not want to find fault with the beloved, or to hinder the love for the beloved (by marking it with anger and self-righteousness) – we also do not want to find a fault with the love of the beloved. If we are in the right in blaming the beloved for doing us wrong, that means that the love the beloved gives us, or has for us, is limited and faulty. And when we love, this is the last thing we want to think of our beloved (that he or she loves us only partly, or even, painfully, does not love us at all).29 Taking ‘being in the wrong’ to mean ‘being in the wrong when blaming someone for having wronged us’, then, makes it quite intuitively clear why it is that someone who loves will wish to be in the wrong in relation to one’s beloved. However, as far as the connection between love and being in the wrong is concerned, I think that we can go further than the pastor suggests here. Thinking that one is in the wrong in relation to a person (in blaming him for injury or loss) is not only a typical consequence of loving the person – it can also be an attitude that makes love possible, an attitude that leads to love. By adopting the attitude of thinking that one is in the wrong in relation to the other person, or God, one can change from not loving (or from loving only in an incomplete way, in a distracted and hindered way), to loving that person or God (in a focused, unlimited way). To demonstrate this point, I propose to look closely at a recently published Israeli novel, On the Way Home, that presents a love that evolves as a consequence of recognizing that one has been in the wrong.30 This novel presents the somewhat surreal story of Dina, who one night meets God – in the figure of a man in his thirties – on a late bus on her way home. After their first meeting, when Dina realizes it was God and thinks that she was never going to see him again, she reflects:

28 29

30

Ibid. ‘You loved a person, you wished that you might always be in the wrong in relation to him – but, alas, he was faithless to you, and however reluctant that it should be so, however much it pained you, you proved to be in the right in relation to him, and wrong in loving him so deeply’ (EO2, 350). On the Way Home, Dorit Peleg, Zmora-Bitan Press, Or Yehuda 2006. All the quotations from the novel are translated by Sharon Krishek, in collaboration with Dorit Peleg.

the sorrowful lover

65

I felt quite sorry at the beginning. After all one does not meet God everyday, and if one does then there are so many questions that one could have asked him, for instance why is it so lousy down here and why did he arrange everything so badly and why is it that whatever you do, you always come out wrong.31

As one can already understand at this early stage of the book, Dina is not very happy with her life. She is a single mother of a young boy, divorced from Yoni, who failed her (or so she thinks), works as a software engineer in a demanding job that she does not really like and, more profoundly and movingly, feels that she has no home, a real home, to go back to. ‘Dear father’, she writes in her notebook to her beloved, long-dead father, ‘Dear father, where have you taken our home, and did it ever really exist?’32 In actual fact, Dina does have a home, and even quite a nice one: it is located in the heart of Tel Aviv, surrounded by ruggedly charming streets that offer all the good things that Tel Aviv has to offer. But Dina cannot see this – what she mostly sees is the disarray in her life. However, after God becomes a part of her daily existence, she grows extremely sensitive to the sorrow and pain and injustice in the lives of others, especially the literally homeless people in her vicinity. God’s coming into her life starts an interesting process. It is a very quiet, almost imperceptible, process, and yet one which changes her fundamentally. What happens to Dina, then, on her long way home? Soon after the encounter on the bus, God does meet her again, and indeed moves in to live with her. At first Dina finds it very difficult to accept his decision to limit himself to the form and powers of a regular human being. She does not understand why he cannot at least give himself the advantage of getting a decent job (he works as a garbagecollector). And when a friend of hers becomes a father to a child with Down’s syndrome, she demands of God that he perform a miracle, and is very angry when he refuses to do so: she clearly accuses him of doing wrong.33 Generally speaking, Dina is a cool-tempered person who does not expect much from anybody, but in relation to God she finds herself in the position of believing that she is in the right. She blames God for what happened to her friend’s child, she blames him for the injustice and misery of the world, she blames him for the misery and difficulty in her

31 32 33

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 28–9.

66

kierkegaard on faith and love

own life. Looking at an old photo of Yoni, her divorced husband, she even blames God for the loss of the love that she once had: And suddenly I rebelled against this loss, which was for me, all at once, the loss of everything: how can it be that I have lost him, how can it be that these eyes, these hoping-fearing eyes, are no more, where has this fine, quivering vulnerability, gone, where has it all gone. And I raised my eyes to the bedroom door with a real enmity. You, who will never die, for whom nothing will ever be lost, give me back this look, the hope and the fear in it, the place over which it hovered, so fleeting and evanescent.34

In spite of Dina’s feelings of bitterness and anger towards him, however, God soon becomes an anchor of stability in the midst of her turbulent life. And her life is turbulent indeed. Strangely, she begins to lose everything. First she loses her job. Then she loses her motivation to find an alternative job. And then, along with her willingness to work, she also loses her daily routine. Occasionally she goes to a job interview, but mostly she just wanders around on the streets of Tel Aviv. Day and night she walks about, seeing familiar things in a new way. She encounters the wretchedness of Tel Aviv: its neglected buildings, its sad inhabitants, its worried and painful existence. She notices more and more homelessness around her. People literally live and die in the streets – forsaken, invisible, begging for money, for a home, for love. All of this is suddenly very painful to her. And the process of losing things continues. Her friends disappear, her photo albums, her money, even her bank disappears. She loses hold of everything. It is only God who remains, who can be relied upon to wait for her at home while she walks aimlessly in the streets. Almost a year passes by before the most meaningful event in her relationship with God takes place. Dina, who at this point of the novel is completely penniless, thought she could earn some money by letting the flat she owns, renting a cheaper one instead. She finds such a flat in a poorer neighbourhood but changes her mind at the last moment, and the night that follows is filled with despair. Her home does not feel like a home; her belongings are still in boxes; her child is at his grandparents’ place. God lies next to her, but she is resentful. ‘The despair’, she says, ‘clenched into a kind of ball inside me, and the ball hurt.’35 And in the morning it gets even worse:

34 35

Ibid., 399. Ibid., 435–6.

the sorrowful lover

67

The room was awash with sun and it was hot … The ball tightened again inside me, one oppressive layer after another. All at once the sun dimmed and the light went grey, and I knew it was going to be one of those days I hate the most … a grey heat-wave day … I turned over and then I felt God’s hand touch me and I looked at him. His face was raised towards me, pleading, quite grey. Hug me, he asked.36

But she is incapable of doing this. She cannot reach out to him, even though she knows how deeply he wants her to. And then everything turns even greyer and he walks away from her and leaves the house. At this moment she is suddenly overcome by a painful recollection. She understands that she has already been there before, in a situation of the very same kind. She remembers the face of her father, reaching his hand out to her, when she was a child. She remembers his words back then: ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘isn’t it, that nothing really matters, the only important thing is that we love each other.’ And she lay in her bed, unable to respond to his sorrow, to his unspoken need, and looked at his arm extended towards her and was not able to take hold of it and to do what she knew was the only right thing to do, which was ‘to throw myself at him, to hug him with all my strength and tell him, “Yes, that’s right, father, we do love each other so very much.”’ But she did not do this, and now the poignant recollection has merged with the present moment, making her leap out of bed and rush outside, because the need to feel him was so agonizing, his large body where, so I suddenly understood, I had one more chance, perhaps the last chance, to hug. But his steps had already seeped away from the stairwell, and as always all there was left was to throw myself on the bed and cry, with the grief of one who cannot hold others nor let them hold him, of one who is left outside the circle of holding, forever.37

And after a while she goes out again to the familiar streets, but now with a definite aim. She wants to find him, she needs to find him. But he is nowhere to be found. And she walks round and round and then it comes – the insight that was slowly rising, or rather building up, within her throughout the novel but only now could break through: only then was this understanding born in me, very lucidly, not like the lump of pain I had felt before but like a pattern of light that was now falling into place, the knowledge that I could no longer live without him. 36 37

Ibid., 436. Ibid., 438.

68

kierkegaard on faith and love I saw the living room with the sofa and the two armchairs standing empty … without him sitting in my mother’s brown armchair and solving the weekly newspaper quiz … and the kitchen without the heap of apples that he piles up on the counter every Thursday, and an emptiness rose in me and took hold of this image as when you set a burning match to a piece of paper and the fire eats into it more and more, slowly at first and then faster and faster till all at once the paper collapses and if you don’t let go it burns your fingers, and I understood I could no longer live in a house that did not have God in it.38

And then, completely exhausted and empty, she sees him. He is collecting garbage – this, after all, is his job – and he is sweaty and dirty and smelly. But she does not care. She simply throws herself upon him and embraces him ‘for him, for my father, for Yoni. For myself’.39 The next morning she wakes up and knows that God is no longer in the house. It is empty, as if he had never been there. And so begins a very strange day, with which the book ends. A chain of mysterious events makes this day look as though it is the end of the world. First of all it snows – it never snows in Tel Aviv, particularly in the hot days of September, but on this day it snows. And then there is an earthquake, and then a big fire, and then she sees God and knows it is for the last time. Dina is sitting alone on a bench on Dizengoff Street; he looks at her, smiles apologetically, and leaves. But the reader knows that she is no longer alone, because somehow, she no longer needs God to be there physically, in order for her to feel God’s love. Thus, in an important sense God has not really left her and now, finally, she has found her home. Now, from the point of view of the question we are asking here (that is, the question regarding the connection between ‘being in the wrong’ and love), what is interesting in Dina’s story is that the turning point, the crucial point at which her spiritual transformation reaches its highest stage, is when she acknowledges that she is in the wrong in relation to God. Let us think again about the relevant scene (see the quote from p. 436 above). She is despairing, in a house that does not feel like home. And she is resentful, secretly blaming God for the unhappy state she is in. But then God asks for her love, begs for it, actually, and she cannot respond. She cannot give him what he asks for and, as a result, he leaves the house. His going away brings back a dreadful recollection, and makes her realize, for the first time in the novel, that she is in the wrong in her accusations of God. She is the one to 38 39

Ibid., 439–40. Ibid., 440.

the sorrowful lover

69

blame, not him. This recognition has a great transformative power over her. It is as if a barrier has been broken, and now she can finally love; acknowledging that she is in the wrong in relation to God leads her to loving him. She is literally pulled out of her reserved inactive position, and is driven outside by the desire to give him her love. What exactly is it that happens to her at this critical moment of transformation? What happens is that against the background of the possibility of losing him, Dina suddenly discovers God’s love for her. This love is clearly expressed in his appeal: ‘Hug me’, he asks, imploringly. She sees that he needs her, and this makes her see also that she is very important for him, that he cares about her, that he loves her. And seeing this, she can no longer accuse him of any injustice towards her. Whatever loss and pain she has suffered, it was not through God’s not taking her suffering into account. To treat her unjustly, to wrong her, would have been to act in a way that does not take her interest sufficiently into consideration. But now that she is convinced of the greatness of his love, it is clear that no suffering and no loss has ever come about through any such injustice. God has not wronged her. She has been in the wrong in holding him to blame. And so, realizing God’s love, she comes to think of herself as being in the wrong, and this acknowledgement opens her, and drives her, to loving him. The novel convinces us of this, by prompting us to imagine the situation in which Dina, who may represent in this context each and every one of us, becomes completely confident that God (both as an omnipotent being and as a human lover) loves her, and that all that he has done derives from his great love for her. Imagining such a situation, it seems necessary to agree that she could no longer accuse him of having wronged her. It seems clear that she would feel, upon discovering his love, that she has been in the wrong. After all, when we are confident in the love of someone for us, we are not easily disposed to see this person as being in the wrong; accordingly, we should be more disposed to see ourselves as being in the wrong when the temptation to accuse this person of wronging us arises. The deeper our confidence in the love is, the deeper is the trust that we have in this person’s intentions, and the less we are inclined to see ourselves in the right in relation to him or her (when we suffer injury or loss that seems to be caused by our lover). We trust that there is a good reason for the lover’s seemingly offensive behaviour, and that this reason by no means contradicts his (or her) love for us, or his (or her) concern for our well-being.40 40

Here it is of course important to remember the difference between love by God and love by humans in this respect: only in relation to God are we always in the wrong. When the lover is

70

kierkegaard on faith and love

And back to Dina, now that she acknowledges that she has been in the wrong, she realizes that she loves God – she gains her love for him (to use Johannes’ expression in Fear and Trembling, see p. 59 above). Because blaming another for having wronged us sets up a screen of anger and bitterness that blocks our ability to love the other. Once we acknowledge that we are in the wrong in blaming him, this screen is set aside, and the obstacle to loving is removed; the foundations for loving are thereby set. When we felt angry and bitter and self-righteous we were enclosed within ourselves in a way that did not allow us properly to see the other, let alone love him. But now we are led to love. The other, whose love is now clear to us, appears as an eminent source of goodness, and our love emerges unreservedly as a response to him, to his benevolent presence in our life. We are now capable of seeing him, of recognizing his value and appreciating his goodness. And we thereby find ourselves loving him. 4 The upbuilding that lies in resignation It takes the acknowledgement that we are in the wrong, then, to gain the ability to love those that we had previously blamed for doing us wrong. This acknowledgement is akin to resignation – it is to release our hold of things, it is to stop blaming the other, or God, for taking away from us something we think we deserve to have, something that in some basic sense we consider as ours. And I hope that now we are in the position to understand better Johannes’ claim that in resignation he gains his love for God. The knight of resignation loved a princess, but she was taken away from him. As this was the most important thing in his life, we can imagine that the knight was disposed to feel angry with God and to blame him for doing him wrong (namely, taking the princess away from him by denying the fulfilment of the relationship). However, resigning is precisely rejecting this tendency. It is to see himself as being in the wrong in his disposition to blame God. This happens when (in quite a counterintuitive way) he discovers God’s love for him through the event of loss. Resignation, we have said, is a unique response to a loss. Losing the princess, the knight (being a knight) realizes that the princess does not really belong to him – he discovers her radical apartness, her radical alterity, and understands that she ‘belongs’ to a greater power that transcends his will and intentions. Thus, he now understands that her a human being, however, we may sometimes be in the wrong but sometimes, unfortunately, we can find ourselves in the right. Humans are not perfect; nor, regrettably, is their love.

the sorrowful lover

71

presence in his life was from the very beginning something that he was given, something that he has to be thankful for. Kierkegaard depicts this latter point rather emphatically in his Discourse of Job: The moment the Lord took everything away, [Job] did not first say, ‘The Lord took away,’ but first of all he said, ‘The Lord gave.’ The statement is brief, but in its brevity it effectually points out what it is supposed to point out, that Job’s soul was not squeezed into silent subjection to the sorrow, but that his heart first expanded in thankfulness, that the first thing the loss of everything did was to make him thankful to the Lord that he had given him all the blessings that he now took away from him. (EUD, 115–16)

To make the movement of resignation, then, is to be in the position of Job. It is first of all to realize that ‘the Lord gave’, and thus to see and recognize God’s love for us (the bestowal of a good thing is one of the more central aspects of love as we usually understand and experience it). Seeing this love, then, the knight of resignation has no reason to be angry, no reason to blame God for doing him wrong. Seeing this love, he acknowledges that he was in the wrong in blaming God, and is and will be in the wrong in his tendency to blame God. And acknowledging this, he gains his love for God, his love for God is built up. In the Sermon the pastor explains this upbuilding (i.e. the upbuilding that lies in resignation; meaning, in the thought that ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’) in the following terms: [T]his thought … manifests its upbuilding power in a twofold way, partly by putting an end to doubt and calming the cares of doubt, partly by animating to action. (EO2, 351)

The action that this thought is the platform for (as it were) belongs already to the realm of faith. The knight of faith, as well as the one who loves in faith, is someone who incorporates the movement of resignation in the slightest of his actions, and this movement (as we will see in the next chapter) is in a paradoxical way a necessary condition for faith. The pastor therefore speaks in his sermon on the state of faith, but he focuses on one component of faith – namely, on the movement of resignation, here discussed in terms of acknowledging one’s wrongness before God. This resignative thought (‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’), then, generates the conditions for a correct action in the world (that is, for faith), and it does so by ‘putting an end to doubt and calming the cares of doubt’ (ibid.). But what does this doubt amount to? To put it differently, which doubt does resignation calm and put an end to?

72

kierkegaard on faith and love

Being humans, we are fundamentally vulnerable and essentially susceptible to loss and suffering. Sometimes we are the ones to blame (we are the cause of the loss and pain in our lives, we are doing wrong to ourselves), and sometimes we are not (someone or something else, external to us, is the cause of our pain). But whichever is the case, our all-toohuman tendency is to blame someone else for the pain that we suffer, and to channel the pain into anger. This unsettling state of mind is shaped by doubt and accompanied by it – we are constantly searching for the one to blame, constantly asking who is in the wrong. This tendency is typical of our relationships with the people surrounding us, but its severest expression is in the context of our relationship with God. To be in doubt here means to accept the possibility that we are right in relation to God, we are right in blaming him for doing us wrong. But such a thought is ultimately a rejection of the idea of a loving divinity altogether (to consider God as unjust is in effect to doubt the idea of an omnipotent goodness that cares about us; that is, to doubt the basic understanding of God), and this, Kierkegaard claims, cannot but lead to a chaotic existence of despair: If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? (FT, 15)

On the other hand, to be genuinely in the position of always being in the wrong in relation to God is never to doubt his goodness and his care for us. It is to be able to see God as an eternal source of loving benevolence, even when we suffer terrible and unexplainable losses and injuries. It is to have a complete confidence in God’s love and goodness while renouncing the human presumption to fully understand this love and goodness in natural (logical, juridical) terms. It is, again, to be in the position of Job, having gone through the dramatic encounter with the Whirlwind. As Stephen Mulhall puts it: The new terms that the Voice proposes do not ask us … to become indifferent to actuality; they ask us to revel in its glories, to acknowledge that the wealth of God’s creation exceeds anything we might have thought or imagined, and in particular to acknowledge that its bounty is not expressible or containable in terms of either natural or moral law … The point is to shatter Job’s reliance upon juridical terminology altogether – to stop him picturing the realm of experience and existence as answering to human moral worth, to take a step beyond the idea of God as exercising his

the sorrowful lover

73

Will through the natural order, as if nature was simply and solely responsive to human good and evil.41

Our natural stance in the world is that of being distant from God. We are immersed in finitude, in a state of oblivion or anger, indifferent to God or blaming him for the sufferings that are inherent to our human condition, and doubting thereby his care and love for us. To put an end to this doubt, to make the movement of resignation and to acknowledge that in relation to God we are always in the wrong (in our anger towards him, in blaming him for doing us wrong, in mistrusting his goodness), is to be reconciled with existence, to find rest and peace in the pain. The knight of resignation trusts God’s love for him, and responds to this with love: Therefore this, that in relation to God you are always in the wrong, is not a truth you must acknowledge, not a consolation to alleviate your pain, not a compensation for something better, but it is a joy in which you win a victory over yourself and over the world, your delight, your song of praise, your adoration, a demonstration that your love is happy, as only that love can be with which one loves God. (EO2, 351)

Winning a victory over ourselves and over the world is in a way overcoming our finite condition by gaining our ‘eternal consciousness’. The meaning of this ‘overcoming’ is the peaceful reconciliation we now attain – the reconciliation with our finite condition and with the constant loss it entails. Experiencing loss, after all, is to find ourselves opposed to existence: actuality seems to be working against us, against our will. We desire something or someone, but actuality does not allow us to fulfil our desire. The thing is taken away from us, we are deprived of it – it is lost for us. But in resignation we accept this loss with love, we are reconciled to this loss, and find ‘peace and rest’. We find a new happiness, which is now based, rather than on our relationship with finitude, on our relationship with God: If your one and only wish was denied to you, you are still happy … if you lost not only your joy but even your honor, you are still happy … If you knocked but it was not opened, if you searched but did not find, if you worked but received nothing, if you planted and watered but saw no blessing, if heaven was shut and the testimony failed to come, you are still happy in your work … you are still happy – because in relation to God you are always in the wrong. (EO2, 353)

41

Mulhall 2001: 408.

74

kierkegaard on faith and love

However, this happiness has a deeply painful side to it. If we think of the knight of resignation as reaching one hand to God, but another hand to the finite, it is only the first bond that gives him happiness. The knight of resignation does not disconnect himself from the finite – he is, as we have said above, tied to it with pain. In this chapter we have inquired into the concept of resignation, and its intriguing connection with love (both for the finite and the infinite), by referring to three different texts. One Kierkegaardian text, Fear and Trembling, indicates this connection specifically while another, the Ultimatum, discusses the connection between being in the wrong and love. We have also used a different text, the novel On the Way Home, in order to explore the Sermon’s insight regarding the connection between ‘being in the wrong’ and love. This novel presents the upbuilding in the thought that one is ‘in the wrong’ by vividly showing the way in which this recognition leads one to love, paving the path that is one’s way home. Having taken these steps, we may conclude by saying that resignation is undoubtedly a fundamental brick in the building of love that the philosophy of Kierkegaard construes. However, resignation is not enough. A truly happy love, which incorporates harmoniously our love both for God and the finite (in an interdependent relation), is possible only in the context of a different realm: that of faith.

3 THE KNIGHT OF LOVE

1 ‘By Faith You Will Get Her by Virtue of the Absurd’ 1 The paradox of faith To exist in such a way that my contrast to existence constantly expresses itself as the most beautiful and secure harmony with it – this I cannot do. (FT, 50)

By undertaking the movement of resignation, as we saw in the last chapter, the young lover comes to participate in a twofold relationship. On the one hand, this movement ‘binds’ him to his renounced princess in knots of pain; on the other, it gains him a relationship of love with God. And despite the profound nature of the first, it is the latter relationship – the relationship with God – that constitutes the core of resignation. This is the focus of the young man’s interest, this is the new content of his resigned life. But important and meaningful as it is, resignation does not amount to faith. ‘The act of resignation does not require faith’, says Johannes, ‘but to get the least little bit more than my eternal consciousness requires faith, for this is the paradox’ (FT, 48). Indeed, renouncing finitude is an extremely difficult act, but nothing more than the human power of will

1

FT, 50.

75

76

kierkegaard on faith and love

and determination is required for performing it.2 There is a correspondence between the act of resignation and the reality it generates (a reality of being apart from the princess, of not sharing a life with her) – the consequences of this act correlate with the knight’s expectations, with his beliefs regarding the way the world operates. In the context of faith, on the other hand, there is a contradiction between the way the knight acts and his expectations and beliefs regarding the world (i.e. the realm of finitude): By my own strength I cannot get the least little thing that belongs to finitude, for I continually use my strength in resigning everything. By my own strength I can give up the princess, and I will not sulk about it but find joy and peace and rest in my pain, but by my own strength I cannot get her back again, for I use all my strength in resigning. On the other hand, by faith, says that marvelous knight, by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd. (FT, 50)

Faith, it is important to remember, is defined by Johannes as a double movement – in spite of being very different from resignation, it necessarily includes resignation as an essential part of it. Resignation is a permanent component within faith. Accordingly, the knight of faith also makes the movement of resignation – but in contrast with the other knight he believes in receiving back his renounced princess. This is the paradox of faith: the knight of faith undertakes the movement of resignation and another, simultaneous movement, that seems to contradict it. Having renounced everything, by virtue of his faith he receives everything: Through resignation I renounce everything … This movement I make all by myself, and what I gain thereby is my eternal consciousness in blessed harmony with my love for the eternal being. By faith I do not renounce anything; by faith I receive everything. (FT, 48–9)

It is quite evident that faith amounts to an interesting attitude to finitude. While resignation is concerned with the infinite, faith concerns the finite: ‘Temporality, finitude – that is what it is all about’ (FT, 49).3 However, 2 3

‘I make this movement all by myself, and if I do not make it, it is because I am too cowardly and soft and devoid of enthusiasm … ’ (FT, 48). It is worth emphasizing this point because one of the more common dogmatic stereotypes regarding faith is that it is focused on eternal happiness and is indifferent (or even hostile) to the affairs of this world. Johannes himself mentions the related confusion between resignation and faith: ‘It is said that faith is needed in order to renounce everything. Indeed, one hears what is even more curious: a person laments that he has lost his faith, and when a check is made to see where he is on the scale, curiously enough, he has only reached the point where he is to make the infinite movement of resignation’ (FT, 48).

the knight of love

77

faith is very different from the aesthetic interest in finitude – its concern with worldly happiness is constituted by a simultaneous renunciation of it. And this is, strictly speaking, the paradox of the double movement of faith. How are we to make sense of it? This question is sharpened when we consider the paradox of faith against the background of the story of the father of faith, who serves as the prototype of the life of faith – the story of Abraham. And so, before attempting to understand how faith allows the young lover to get back his princess, let us turn to the story that fascinates Johannes: the story of the Binding of Isaac. The paradoxical faith of Abraham And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.4 Yet Abraham had faith, and had faith for this life … Abraham had faith specifically for this life – faith that he would grow old in this country, be honored among the people, blessed by posterity, and unforgettable in Isaac, the most precious thing in his life, whom he embraced with … love. (FT, 20)

The difficulty in understanding Abraham is twofold – we are baffled by his faith, and amazed by his resignation. Indeed, Abraham’s resignation puzzles us in a different way from that in which his faith does, but it puzzles us nevertheless. To begin with, we cannot understand, we cannot even begin to imagine, how Abraham was capable of drawing the knife: ‘Who strengthened Abraham’s arm, who braced up his right arm so it did not sink down powerless! … Who strengthened Abraham’s soul lest everything go black for him and he see neither Isaac nor the ram!’ (FT, 22). Because after all, we are convinced that Abraham did not want to kill his son. We know that he loved Isaac dearly, we remember that Isaac was his only, long-awaited son, and we understand that Isaac meant everything for him.5 That it was Abraham’s most passionate wish that his son would live, is therefore an essential part of Abraham’s resignation. 4 5

Genesis 22:9–10, King James version. His love was the greatest fatherly love possible, as Johannes emphasizes: ‘Next I would describe how Abraham loved Isaac. For that purpose I would call upon all the good spirits to stand by me so that what I said would have the glow of fatherly love. I hope to describe it in such a way that there would not be many a father in the realms and lands of the king who would dare to maintain that he loved in this way’ (FT, 31).

78

kierkegaard on faith and love

Abraham’s act, then, cannot but be admired as the most extreme manifestation of resignation possible. Not only did Abraham renounce the greatest of his desires (to keep hold of his son who is also the fulfilment of the divine promise given to him), his undertaking of the Binding makes it clear that Abraham indeed resigns: Many a father has lost his child, but then it was God, the unchangeable, inscrutable will of the Almighty, it was his hand that took it. Not so with Abraham! A harder test was reserved for him, and Isaac’s fate was placed, along with the knife, in Abraham’s hand. (FT, 21–2)

In his willingness to bring about – by his own bare hands – the loss of what he undoubtedly loves the most, Abraham cannot but be expressing a wholehearted, genuine resignation. It is against this background that Abraham’s faith appears to be so perplexing. Abraham, Johannes insists, believed that Isaac would continue to be his living son, and he strongly held this belief while renouncing him, while drawing the knife: He [Abraham] climbed the mountain, and even in the moment when the knife gleamed he had faith … Let us go further. We let Isaac actually be sacrificed. Abraham had faith. He did not have faith that he would be blessed in a future life but that he would be blessed here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one sacrificed. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago. (FT, 35–6)

It seems that while resignation involves a paradox of wills (willingly renouncing the son while still wanting to keep hold of him), faith involves a paradox of beliefs.6 The movement of resignation, let us not forget, is associated with Abraham’s being on the verge of acting in a way which would inevitably result – as he fully realizes – in Isaac’s death. The movement of faith, on the other hand, is associated with the belief he maintains that Isaac, in accordance with God’s promise, will live. To put the issue here as uncompromisingly as possible we can ask, as does a recent 6

Note again our discussion in chapter 2: it is already resignation (and not only faith) that manifests a self-contradictory attitude. Resignation cannot be considered as resignation unless it is directed at something of importance, something that is highly desired. In resignation we willingly let go of something that in a profound sense we do not want to let go of; something that we are deeply attached to, care about, and strongly desire. Here we see it as sharply as possible: it is clear that Abraham does not want to sacrifice his son – but in resigning he submits his will to the will of God, and with a total acceptance of God’s demand he is prepared to sacrifice his son willingly. And yet, while doing this willingly, he still very passionately wants to keep hold of his son.

the knight of love

79

interpreter, what does Abraham’s belief amount to? Does he believe that Isaac will die, or that Isaac will live?7 This is a good question but at the same time a little misleading since it may prompt us to mistakenly imagine Abraham’s resignation as an act that begins and ends with the trial. But Abraham’s resignation was in place before – and after – holding the knife that threatened to kill his son. As far as there is a connection between Abraham’s resignation and the loss of his son, this is an ongoing connection – Abraham is continuously in a state of resignation, and thus continuously renounces Isaac and sees him as lost. Adams expresses this point succinctly: For if one first gives up something and then later takes it back, there is no paradox in this sequence of ‘movements’ … if Abraham stopped making the movement of resignation in order to make the movement of faith, he would nullify his sacrifice … The contradiction in belief … can hardly be more than an expression of what is fundamentally ‘the absurd.’ It cannot be the essence of it. For after they have sacrificed the ram and descended the mountain, Abraham can hardly have continued to believe that he would be deprived of Isaac; but Kierkegaard surely does not conceive of him as ceasing at that point to make the movement of infinite resignation. That would spoil everything.8

Abraham’s trial does not constitute his faith – Abraham’s faith is what allows him to go through the trial. As such, the dramatic moment of drawing the knife is only a manifestation – indeed, the most extreme and horrifying manifestation possible – of the movement that Abraham makes before the trial and continues to make after it. For us, of course, there is a crucial difference between resignation when there is no threat involved, and resignation when one’s beloved is about to perish. But this only demonstrates that we are not Abraham. For Abraham the trial was only an expression of something he performed all of the time.9 Abraham is a knight of faith precisely because he was capable of going through a trial which indicates the genuineness and profundity of his resignation and faith. 7

8 9

John Lippitt, in his commentary on Fear and Trembling, tries to capture the difficulty of understanding Abraham’s faith in terms of this question: ‘What does Abraham believe at the point of drawing the knife?’ (See Lippitt 2003: 66.) Adams 1990: 386. This does not mean, of course, that Abraham feels the same at each and every moment of his life: no doubt the moment of the trial, although sharing the same structure of resignation and faith with every other moment, was characterized (so we can imagine) by a different feeling than, for example, the moment following the trial.

80

kierkegaard on faith and love

Having said that, let us return to the above question, which is an important one since it emphasizes the paradoxical nature of faith by freezing the most dramatic moment in Abraham’s life, and thus allows us to examine its profound complexity. What does Abraham believe in when he is drawing the knife? What is the content of his faith? He seems to be holding a paradoxical combination of beliefs according to which Isaac will both die and live – how can we make sense of this? First it is important to note that the paradox here does not amount to a logical impossibility. Abraham does not believe that Isaac will be both dead and alive at the same time. Rather, he believes that Isaac will live in accordance with God’s promise to him, despite being unable to understand (or predict) the way in which this will happen. In other words, Abraham believes in the fulfilment of God’s promise even while acting in a way that contradicts this promise. As far as his human understanding is concerned, Abraham is well aware that he is about to kill Isaac; nevertheless he continues to believe in the fulfilment of God’s word to him. His faith is therefore paradoxical in the sense that there is an irresolvable tension between the different aspects of his faith. There is an acute tension between his belief in the fulfilment of God’s promise, and his belief, his understanding, regarding the irrevocable result of the deed he is about to perform.10 This tension between the different beliefs that constitute his faith also explains why Abraham can hold his faith only ‘by virtue of the absurd’ (as Johannes keeps saying). Abraham cannot hold his faith by virtue of his human understanding – he cannot hold it by virtue of reason or experience. His hold on it is therefore by virtue of the absurd. When ‘all human calculation cease[s]’ (FT, 36), and when human powers (reasoning, experience, understanding) fail to supply a justification, then faith can be sustained only by virtue of the absurd.11 We therefore see that the paradox of faith, the paradox of the double movement, is manifested in several aspects. This is a paradox concerning the will (the knight renounces willingly that which he wants the most), and it is also a paradox concerning belief (there is a conflict between the knight’s understanding of reality and his expectation regarding reality). And it is also a paradox of emotions. Faith involves the paradoxical combination of being in a state of infinite pain (the pain of resignation) and an indescribable joy: ‘I can bear to live in my own fashion’, Johannes tells us, 10 11

And this therefore makes his faith humanly, rather than logically, impossible. See Hannay 2003a: 17–18. Kierkegaard returns to these notions (the paradox and the absurd) in later pseudonymous texts, but I limit my interpretation to his use of them in Fear and Trembling alone.

the knight of love

81

‘I am happy and satisfied, but my joy is not the joy of faith, and by comparison with that, it is unhappy’ (FT, 34). The knight of faith, then, leads an intriguing existence. He may look ‘just like a tax collector’ (FT, 39), but his life is a profound drama of holding harmoniously contradicting powers (of will, belief, and emotion). To return to the quote that opens this chapter, we can now understand what Johannes has in mind when he declares that to be a knight of faith means ‘[t]o exist in such a way that my contrast to existence constantly expresses itself as the most beautiful and secure harmony with it’ (FT, 50). However, we may understand why he is saying this – but what is he actually saying? In other words, having formulated the paradox of faith (in terms of the paradoxical combination between what resignation involves on the one hand, and faith on the other) – how can we fathom it? 2 Mooney and Hall on the paradox of faith Faith as ‘selfless care’ Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac shows in the most dramatic way imaginable his severing of the possessive tie. To Johannes, and perhaps even to Abraham, it will seem dangerously close to losing Isaac outright. Yet Abraham has faith that Isaac will not be lost. In severing the tie, a selfless care is renewed and released … The story depicts, at least in embryo, a father’s ordeal of liberation and fulfillment … how to grant fathers and sons the separateness-in-love each will need and deserve.12

Edward F. Mooney’s influential interpretation of the relationship between resignation and faith puts the emphasis on the issue of freedom and care. Faith ultimately amounts to the understanding acquired by the individual that it is freedom – freedom in the sense of not claiming any ownership rights – that shapes (or rather, ought to shape) his attachments to the world and to the other. Mooney interestingly reads the four cryptic proverbs regarding the weaning of a child, at the very beginning of Fear and Trembling (see Exordium, FT, 9–14), as reflecting the central theme of the book: ‘resignation of something of utmost value (in this case the child to be weaned), coupled with the assurance that it will be returned, is Johannes de Silentio’s basic characterization of faith’.13 Accordingly, ‘[i]f the child weaned is Isaac, then the issue is how to make Isaac free’.14 12 13 14

Mooney 1991: 58–9. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 30.

82

kierkegaard on faith and love

For Mooney, then, Abraham’s ordeal is about the need ‘to undergo a complex shift in his relationship to Isaac and to his world generally’.15 Abraham is depicted as a knight of faith in his ability to care about Isaac without claiming any proprietary rights over him. What does having a proprietary claim over something amount to? Mooney gives an example of a fine old watch that is suddenly stolen. In such a case ‘we may feel not only sorrow but anger … It gets entwined with possessiveness and capacity for hurt, should possession-related rights be violated.’16 To cease feeling this way about x or y is to renounce our proprietary claim over x or y, and this, in Mooney’s view, constitutes the movement of resignation. However, this comes at a price: according to this interpretation, being a knight of resignation means also ceasing to care about the object of one’s love (over which one renounces a proprietary claim). Mooney refers to the young lad’s love for the princess and claims that, in his resignation, the young lad ‘saves himself from hurt should she marry another and from hurt coming from the finite generally’. However – ‘the price he has paid for diminished hurt is diminished care’.17 The process that the knight of resignation is going through, according to Mooney, is therefore a renunciation of proprietary claims that results in immunizing oneself to the pain of the loss – which, in turn, results in indifference to the thing lost. The deal, as it were, is diminishing one’s hurt by diminishing one’s care. However, ‘not all cases of love or care are tied up with proprietary claim’, says Mooney, while referring, of course, to faith.18 As an example, he mentions the approach that one is inclined to adopt towards a sparrow in one’s feeder. It is delightful when the sparrow chooses to visit, and one ‘enjoy[s] and warmly anticipate[s]’ those visits, but one can claim no rights over the sparrow: The matter of its life and death is something over which I have no claim. Of course, I would feel indignant were someone maliciously to injure it. But in the course of things, the sparrow will go its way. Meanwhile, I will adjust myself to its goings and comings.19

Mooney calls this approach a ‘selfless care’ and this, in his view, is what faith is about – namely, renouncing one’s claims (over the beloved) without renouncing one’s care. While the knight of resignation cannot 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid. Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

the knight of love

83

maintain his (or her) care for the beloved after renouncing the claim over him (or her), the knight of faith is a knight of faith precisely due to the ability to care for the beloved (without claiming any proprietary rights over him/her). Accordingly, in case of a wondrous return, the knight of faith is capable of warmly welcoming the beloved back, warmly receiving this marvellous gift: The knight of faith works to get the princess back, then, only in the sense that he guarantees that the ultimate obstacle to her return – lack of receptivity – will be absent. He does not by his own strength effect her return, but provides the required condition: He is ready in welcome.20

In other words, it seems that Mooney suggests that we understand faith in terms of a renewed relationship with finitude. Faith is a new, desirable form of relationship that one sustains with one’s son, one’s princess, or one’s world in general. In my view, as I shall soon elaborate, this is an extremely significant point that provides the key to a profound understanding of faith. However, as much as I accept this direction and agree with Mooney’s fundamental insight regarding the meaning of faith as a renewed relationship with finitude, I find several problems with the way in which he develops this pivotal idea. To begin with, it is not clear why Mooney considers the severing of ‘proprietary claim’ to be such a painful ordeal, one that might serve to explain the ordeal Abraham went through. Indeed, it is true that in relationships with people – and in particular in relationships of love – we dangerously tend to develop feelings of possessiveness regarding the other. At the same time, however, this is a rather weak way of describing the process that the knight of resignation goes through. Should the ungraspable sacrifice that Abraham is about to perform, in his willingness to renounce Isaac, be addressed as connected (only) to the severing of the proprietary claim he has over him? Mooney is careful enough to offer this interpretation in the context of the young man’s love story, and it is true that he admits that this story is an imperfect and limited analogy to the story of Abraham (see p. 44). But he does use it to construe a structure of faith, that as such should be at least adequate, or applicable, to the story of Abraham (even if it does not capture it completely). In my view, understanding resignation in terms of renouncing proprietary claims alone is not strong enough to describe the pain and difficulty that resignation is connected with in the story of Abraham, and indeed even in the love 20

Ibid., 54–5.

84

kierkegaard on faith and love

story. The first movement of faith, then, cannot be understood only in these terms. While Mooney correctly identifies this movement as the severing of an immediate tie (with Isaac, the princess, ‘the world’), it is not enough to regard this tie as based on proprietary claims alone. Now, in accordance with the incomplete account of the tie which is severed in resignation, there follows an incomplete account of the tie which is renewed in faith. Can the characterization of the desired relationship in terms of ‘selfless care’ sufficiently capture Abraham’s love for his son or the romantic relations between a lover and his princess? A criticism in this spirit is expressed by Ronald L. Hall (to whose interpretation we shall shortly turn), who refers to this picture of faith as ineffectual when it comes to the relationship which exists in marriage.21 Hall sees in marriage a case of what he calls an existential faith and he claims that the picture of ‘selfless care’ is quite inapplicable here: What kind of marriage would it be for one spouse to say to the other that he or she does not make any claims on the other, but will simply adjust to the other’s comings and goings? And what would we think if both mutually acknowledged that in the course of things the other will go his or her own way? What does such a disavowing of all proprietary claims on the other have to do with the covenant of marriage?22

I agree with Hall that the attitude of ‘selfless care’ that Mooney attributes to the knight of faith does not give a full account of the way we are related to those we love. I think that something crucial is indeed missing in Mooney’s picture of the desirable tie (i.e. relationship) that faith constitutes, and I will explore below the nature of this tie as I understand it. However, I think that the core of the problem in Mooney’s interpretation does not lie in the way he characterizes the nature of the tie that faith constitutes, but rather in the way he understands the nature of resignation. Mooney regards resignation as a psychological shelter (so to speak) from the world, a detachment in the sense of indifference and carelessness, a way of becoming immune to our fragility (to use a term frequently employed by Hall who, with regard to understanding resignation, as we will see, seems to be in agreement with Mooney). Resignation is depicted as a hardening of the heart, as a detachment from the world – which results in less pain and less care. Now it is true that the knight of 21

22

Hall’s criticism of Mooney is presented also by Lippitt in the context of his reservations concerning Mooney’s position, and this is where we share the same view both with regard to Mooney and to Hall (see Lippitt 2003: 60–2). Hall 2000: 31.

the knight of love

85

resignation transfigures his focused love for the concrete princess into a focused love for transcendence and God, but this is the only sense in which he takes leave from the world.23 The knight of resignation does not use his resignation as an ‘escape’ – if there is any detachment involved in his position at all, it is only in the sense that the focus of his attention is now somewhere else (and not in the sense of losing interest in finitude and becoming indifferent to the pain and misery that existence entails). Moreover, the knight of resignation does not ‘kill’ his love (as Mooney’s reading implies, putting an emphasis on ‘less pain, less care’); what he kills – metaphorically, though in Abraham’s case (almost) literally, speaking – is the object of his love. From the point of view of pain, the latter is of course infinitely more difficult (than killing the love), but this is precisely what constitutes the knight of resignation as a knight. He performs the most difficult thing for him (and this indeed makes the story of the Binding the ultimate manifestation of resignation), and lives in pain: And yet, I repeatedly say, it must be wonderful to get the princess. The knight of resignation who does not say this is a deceiver; he has not had one single desire, and he has not kept his desire young in his pain. There may be someone who found it quite convenient that the desire was no longer alive and that the arrow of pain had grown dull, but such a person is no knight. (FT, 50)

The knight of resignation lives in pain because he continues to love the object of his renunciation – while fully accepting its loss, he continues to desire it and to care for it.24 Mooney’s (psychological) formula of ‘diminished hurt [at the price of] diminished care’, therefore, does not fit the portrait of the knight who both suffers and cares. While Mooney distinguishes resignation from faith by attributing an attitude of care to faith only, I claim that caring is already a crucial part of resignation. Because, again, if one is no longer attached, and no longer cares, there is no longer anything for one to be resigning from. ‘Solving’ the absurdity of faith by defining it ‘as a complex test of care’ does not fully capture the complexity and difficulty of faith as a double movement that maintains resignation along with what seems to be its contradiction.25 Can we think of a different way to understand the double movement of faith? 23 24 25

This, please note, does not mean that he stops loving the princess, but rather that his love for her becomes incomplete and unfulfilled. (See again chapter 2.) See again chapter 2. Mooney 1991: 56.

86

kierkegaard on faith and love Faith as a ‘no’ to resignation My claim is that the existential import of Abraham’s embrace of Isaac, or more generally the full import of the faithful embrace of the world, comes in the concrete, existential recognition of the fact that we have the power to do otherwise; it is this power to do otherwise that is a permanent possibility within faith, a possibility faith must continually annul.26

For Ronald L. Hall Kierkegaardian faith is emphatically about being human (‘the existential embrace of the human’).27 When Hall speaks about ‘being human’ he refers to the acceptance and affirmation of our fragile existence in an uncertain world, against the background of our freedom not to accept this.28 Resignation, in Hall’s view, embodies precisely the negative possibility of rejecting, not accepting, our humanness. It expresses an escape from our human position in the world either by descending to brutality or by ascending – aspiring – to transcendence, ignoring the temporal and contingent conditions of our existence. However, the possibility of rejecting our humanness paradoxically affirms its ‘embrace’: ‘as a human being I must choose either to embrace or to reject my humanness. The constant temptation to search for a way of transcending the world has the paradoxical effect of occasioning my decision to live it and to embrace it, every inch.’29 Under the category of ‘resignation’ Hall includes all the modes of existence which differ from faith (i.e. the different variations of the aesthetic and ethical modes of life along with the various philosophical and religious forms of resignation). For him, ‘the truth of resignation and refusal’ (and so of faith) is that we can own or truly possess only what it is possible for us to disown, to dispossess, to refuse … refusal is not faith, but faith must include this negation within itself as an ever-present possibility. Indeed, it is just this refusal of the human that the knight of faith must be prepared continually to encounter in fear and trembling and continually to annul in faith.30

Hall’s understanding of the ‘dialectical logic of paradox’ that constitutes the Kierkegaardian conception of faith is therefore based on the idea of oppositions that depend on and validate each other.31 There is no 26 27 28 29 30 31

Hall 2000: 37. Ibid., 10. See ibid., 1. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 2.

the knight of love

87

meaning to the ‘yes’ (the acceptance and embrace of our humanness), he says, without the ‘no’ (the freedom to reject and refuse our humanness); and therefore the ‘yes’ (affirmation) actually includes within itself the ‘no’ (negation) as an annulled possibility – The knight of faith says ‘no’ to this possibility of saying ‘no’; and therefore his ‘no’ dialectically annuls the concretely realized possibility of refusal. In the paradoxical logic of Kierkegaardian worldly faith, the ‘yes-to-the-world’ is a refusal of refusal; it is an affirmation via dialectical double negation.32

Hall bases this reading on Kierkegaard’s treatment of the relation between despair and faith in The Sickness Unto Death. Hall’s suggestion is to understand despair as a possibility – without which there would be no meaning to faith – where the latter is the state of rejecting and annulling the possibility of despair: ‘to the extent that despair is not possible, neither is faith’.33 Therefore, faith includes within it despair as an annulled possibility, and it also does so with regard to resignation: ‘despair, like resignation and refusal, is present within faith, but dialectically present as absent’.34 Closely resembling Mooney’s reading of resignation (but with more emphasis), Hall considers resignation to be a negative tendency that one needs to overcome. Resignation stands for a non-human detachment, a way of escaping the pain and misery of this world – an almost detestable ‘technique to cope with the fragility of human existence’.35 ‘[T]he knight of resignation’, Hall concludes, ‘fails not because he does not go far enough but because he goes in the wrong direction completely.’36 It is not surprising, then, that on Hall’s reading God’s call to sacrifice Isaac was not a test of faith but rather a temptation against finitude – a temptation to withdraw from finitude. To live in faith is to acknowledge the possibility of resignation, which in the story is embodied in God’s call, and this means ‘to become conscious of the fact that such a transcendence, such refusal of our own personal presence in the world is possible’.37 I disagree with such an understanding of resignation, and of its relation to faith. First, from a textual point of view, Hall’s reading of resignation as such a negative, undesirable, and even contemptible option is unfaithful to the pronounced appreciation expressed in the text for the knight of 32 33 34 35 36 37

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 36. Ibid. See ibid., 29. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 34.

88

kierkegaard on faith and love

resignation. True, this knight is not as admirable as the knight of faith (maybe even not nearly as admirable), but he is a knight nonetheless. Johannes certainly respects him and presents him as someone who deserves our sympathetic attention. But even more crucially, I think that Hall’s way of annulling resignation (that is, of maintaining it in the structure of faith only as a negative option that one rejects) expresses a misunderstanding of the profundity and complexity of resignation. While Hall bestows on resignation the status of an ‘annulled possibility’, I think that resignation should be kept as an affirmed possibility in order to maintain the intensity and the penetrating meaning that Fear and Trembling imparts to faith. If resignation is to be kept in faith only as a ‘no’, it is not clear at all why Johannes – even as an ‘outsider’ to faith – should consider faith to be a paradox and an offence to human understanding, for rejecting the renunciation of Isaac and believing that Isaac will live do not conflict with one another. It seems that resignation has a more dominant role in the structure of faith. It expresses something more valuable to our existence. Resignation, in other words, seems to be present in our lives (and in particular in the mode of faith) in a way that is more substantial than being just an option to which we say (or should say) ‘no’. To use one of Hall’s images, I think our humanness depends also on our ability to embrace resignation. And this is because our humanness must not only be embraced (as he keeps emphasizing) – it must also be given a particular shape. And in my view resignation (as we shall see more clearly in the chapters on Works of Love below) has a crucial role in this ‘shaping’. Not as an ‘annulled possibility’ but rather as an active ‘ingredient’ in our relation to and understanding of ourselves, the world, and the other.38 My claim is that there is something in the structure of our encounter with the world that becomes (desirably) manifested only through resignation. To put it succinctly: a ‘yes’ to resignation is essential to faith, to the good life, to our humanness. When we read Fear and Trembling in a way that tries to throw light on and interpret this sometimes enigmatic text, a tension inevitably arises between the attempt to render the text intelligible (and so to address the intuition that this text speaks to us even if most of us are far from being an Abraham), and the respect that one should pay to the fact that it is, after 38

After all, it is the movement of resignation that initiates the relationship of the believer with God (see again chapter 2). Note that Hall’s negative understanding of resignation is also consistent with the minor role that God plays in his account of faith.

the knight of love

89

all, an unusual story. In other words, without abandoning the important task of disclosing the relevance of the text, one should be very careful not to dismiss the difficulty and the rarity of faith. I think that readings of the kind presented above give more weight to the need to decode the text and make it clearer than to the other need, to be faithful to the text’s careful choice of the distinctive story of Abraham, in depicting its model of faith. I think that an accurate reading of the text should aim to address these two tendencies and find the balance between the need to present the relevance of faith to our mundane existence and the difficulty that the text raises when it insists on using Abraham’s story of non-mundane existence as its model. To return to our question, then, how are we to fathom the meaning of faith? 3 Joy and trust: a proposed alternative interpretation Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.39

A renewed relationship We saw that Mooney’s interpretation paves the way to considering faith as a renewed relationship with finitude. Hall criticizes Mooney for offering an unsatisfactory account of the nature of this relationship, but basically he seems to accept the idea of faith as constituting a desirable relationship with the world. What, however, is the reason for considering faith as a relationship to begin with? Johannes (and his interpreters) talks repeatedly about ‘renouncing Isaac’ (or ‘renouncing the princess’) – but when I renounce Isaac (or the princess, or anything else), what is it precisely that I renounce? To renounce something, it seems to me, means first and foremost to renounce the relationship (the actual, worldly relationship)40 that one sustains with that something. To renounce Isaac is in effect to renounce the relationship with Isaac; to renounce the princess is to renounce the relationship with the princess.41 Accordingly faith, as the ability to ‘receive 39 40 41

Psalm 2:11, the King James version. As opposed to an inner, spiritual bond which one sustains in resignation. See again chapter 2. Here, of course, Abraham’s story again shines as an awe-inspiring exception, since Abraham’s renunciation of the relationship with his son has the further horrifying implication of renouncing Isaac’s life. However, I suggest that we see in this further implication another way to emphasize the point regarding Abraham’s highest exemplification of resignation. Not only did Abraham renounce the present relationship with Isaac, he expressed in his resignation an acceptance of the impossibility of any future relationship with him.

90

kierkegaard on faith and love

Isaac (or the princess) back’, is a renewal of the relationship with Isaac or the princess. Having clarified this, the interesting question to ask is, of course, what is the nature of this relationship and why does it ‘deserve’ the title ‘faith’ – what turns this relationship any different from a simply right, ethical relationship? What does having a relationship mean, what constitutes a relationship? Mooney seems to understand the nature of a relationship (a relationship with some x) in terms of two factors: (1) considering x as ‘mine’, and (2) caring for x. Also, it seems that for Mooney considering x to be ‘mine’ amounts to seeing myself as ‘owning’ x (that is, as having the right to demand proprietary claims over x) – a reprehensible tendency that one undoubtedly needs to be rid of. Accordingly, in his account of the desirable relationship, Mooney purges the first factor and leaves only the second. The correct form of a relationship is one of selfless caring: I care for x without in any way considering x as ‘mine’. However, is the consideration of x as mine something merely negative? As Hall’s criticism of Mooney suggests, for a relationship to be a relationship, some self – with some demands and expectations – needs to be involved. And indeed, when we think of the context of a proper relationship with x, it seems reasonable to assume that one will be justified in having certain requirements from x, requirements that are connected to one’s own well-being. In other words, considering x to be ‘mine’ – namely, affirming a specific connection of x to oneself – has not only the negative meaning of claiming proprietary rights over x. Rather, it has also the positive meaning of wishing and expecting x – my x (who is my husband, my wife, my beloved) – to be present and involved in my life, as well as committed to me in this way or another, while bestowing on me the joy I seek in the context of this specific encounter.42 We can therefore say that being in a relationship with x actually amounts, in its immediate sense, to three factors: (1) considering x as ‘mine’ in a negative way (claiming proprietary rights over x), (2) considering x as ‘mine’ in a positive way (expecting x to be involved in a committed way in my life, wishing for its presence and finding joy and satisfaction in this presence), and (3) my caring for x. Like Mooney I claim that in resignation Factor (1) is indeed eliminated. However, unlike him I claim that Factor (2) (which Mooney does not take into consideration) is also eliminated in resignation, and in contrast with him I claim that Factor (3), the care for x, 42

This, of course, resonates with wider questions as regards the status of the self in the context of the desirable form of love (as well as the theological concern regarding the difference between eros and agape). I shall refer to these questions in chapters 4 and 5 below.

the knight of love

91

is not eliminated in resignation. Care for x is sustained – and even becomes clearer – in resignation, and accordingly there is something else that, having resigned, is gained in faith. That something, I claim, is what I have just defined as Factor (2) in a relationship – the joy in the presence of x and a positive ‘hold’ on him. So what is it that allows us to conduct a renewed relationship with x that includes also Factor (2)? Before answering this question, another clarification – of faith being a renewed relationship – is needed. Renewal is connected to repetition: something is returned, received back, gained anew. This associated group of concepts (renewal, repetition, receiving or gaining back) is commonly used to explain the Kierkegaardian faith, but often without properly clarifying the metaphorical picture that the use of these terms depicts. What do we ‘receive back’? How does it happen? What does it presuppose? These questions are particularly pressing when we remember that it is not only Abraham that Johannes portrays with admiration and wonder; there is another knight of faith whose profile is presented in Fear and Trembling. Nothing about his appearance indicates that this man knows how to live in relation to infinity – he is completely immersed in the finite and does not seem to be losing (and therefore renouncing and receiving back) a thing. What then does this knight, to whom I shall refer as ‘the mundane knight’, receive back in faith? The mundane knight Thinking of faith as ‘receiving something back’ may lead us to imagine mistakenly the knight as someone who suffers a loss of some x, which at present (in resignation) is absent, but which at some point in the future (in faith) will be present again, regained. This understanding of faith is mistaken because it blurs the simultaneity of resignation and faith – it leads us to think that if x is received back then the state of resignation is over (because we assume that resignation implies the absence of x). However, resignation does not end when faith begins: it continues within faith. Therefore, in an interesting sense (that we will soon explore) in the context of faith x is both renounced and gained, both ‘absent’ and present. Moreover, the terminology of ‘receiving back’ presupposes that a concrete, actual loss must have taken place (a loss of a child or of a beloved, for example), but is this necessarily so? The portrait of the mundane knight indicates that the movement of resignation is performed even when there is no actual loss apparent:

92

kierkegaard on faith and love Here he is … The instant I first lay eyes on him, I set him apart at once; I jump back, clap my hands, and say half aloud, ‘Good Lord, is this the man, is this really the one – he looks just like a tax collector!’ But this is indeed the one. I move a little closer to him, watch his slightest movement to see if it reveals a bit of heterogeneous optical telegraphy from the infinite, a glance, a facial expression, a gesture, a sadness, a smile that would betray the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from top to toe to see if there may not be a crack through which the infinite would peek. No! He is solid all the way through. His stance? It is vigorous, belongs entirely to finitude. (FT, 38–9)

The mundane knight, then, seems to be living quite a peaceful life. He is not required to sacrifice anything whatsoever, and no dramatic loss – of a son or of a princess – threatens him. And yet this mundane person is nevertheless a knight. Johannes emphasizes that this simple man, seemingly indelicate or even coarse, is a knight no less than Abraham – at every moment he performs the movement of faith, and thus also that of resignation: With the freedom from care of a reckless good-for-nothing, he lets things take care of themselves, and yet every moment of his life he buys the opportune time at the highest price, for he does not do even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd … and yet this man has made and at every moment is making the movement of infinity. He drains the deep sadness of life in infinite resignation, he knows the blessedness of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher. (FT, 40)

The mundane knight of faith, we are told here, has renounced everything. To renounce ‘everything’ means to renounce everything in time, everything in this world. The mundane knight of faith renounces his worldly happiness, he renounces all the possible finite goods that the world in time has to offer him. But what does it mean, in effect, to renounce ‘everything’ (or, to be more precise, the relationship with ‘everything’)? After all, we have said that the movement of resignation is performed in response to loss, it is an acceptance of loss – what kind of loss then does the mundane knight have to face? Here it would be helpful to return to an earlier distinction that we have drawn between actual, potential, and essential loss (see again the Introduction). If Isaac had died in the Binding, his death would have been an actual loss. The loss of the princess who cannot return the young

the knight of love

93

man’s love (or may even marry a different man, a prince) is another instance of actual loss. In the story of the mundane knight there is also an actual loss but this is a non-dramatic, quiet loss: it is the continual loss of time. Time goes by and everything within it is fleeting and passes away; and we, finite creatures as we are, cannot have an absolute hold on it. Everything in time is either already actually lost (already taken away from us), or potentially lost (under the threat of being eventually taken away from us). We called loss in this sense (that is, either actual or potential) essential loss. Now, the loss that the mundane knight is facing is the actual loss of time and the potential loss of everything in time. We may therefore say that the loss the mundane knight is facing is the essential loss of everything that he has. However, it is important to note that despite suffering an actual, relentless, loss of time, the mundane knight is not asked to suffer an actual loss of a concrete thing persisting in time (a son, a beloved) – the latter is only potentially lost for him. And of course, the potential death of a beloved, or the potential termination of a love relationship differs from the actual loss of Isaac (had the sacrifice gone ahead to its conclusion) or from the actual loss of the princess. The mundane knight, therefore, faces the essential loss of ‘everything’, while Abraham is under a more concrete threat of facing the actual loss of his son, and the young man is facing the actual loss of his princess. In accordance with this distinction, it is important to note also the distinction between the different kinds of resignation (resignation being, after all, a response to loss). The kind of resignation that the mundane knight performs is an essential resignation. He essentially renounces everything; in his resignation he responds to the potential loss of everything that he has, and he makes this movement before any actual loss (of a concrete something in time) takes place. On the other hand, an actual resignation is, for example, the kind of resignation that the young man performs – it is a movement he makes after the actual loss of the princess has taken place (and in response to it). And what about Abraham’s resignation? Even though the loss of his son is closer to becoming actualized than any of the potential losses that the mundane knight faces, it is important to remember that the loss of Isaac was eventually prevented – Abraham renounced Isaac before his son was actually taken away from him. His resignation, therefore, was also an essential one. Now, an essential resignation is obviously the condition for an actual resignation. Abraham stood the test and by drawing the knife he expressed his willingness (and his ability) to ‘transform’ his essential resignation into

94

kierkegaard on faith and love

an actual one. The mundane knight essentially renounces everything, but were he to lose his love relationship or his son, his resignation would have become an actual one as well (assuming that as a genuine knight he would also have withstood the test). In this connection it is worth noting Johannes’ words (referring to himself maybe) regarding a failure of resignation as it shows itself when the mirror of an actual loss is put in front of one’s face (so to speak): There was one who also believed that he had made the movement [of resignation]; but look, time passed, the princess did something else – she married, for example, a prince – and his soul lost the resilience of resignation. He thereby demonstrated that he had not made the movement properly. (FT, 44)

The acceptance of the essential loss of ‘everything’, that the mundane knight exemplifies by performing the movement of resignation, means that he does not try to evade the loss or deny it (as the aesthetic and ethical ‘knights’ of recollection respectively do, see again chapter 1). Accepting this loss in resignation amounts to the ability of the mundane knight to acknowledge that everything he cares for is under the threat of being taken away from him. The knight fully acknowledges this loss – he realizes that everything he cares for is not really his – and lives in accordance with this acknowledgement. To demonstrate this point let us imagine the mundane knight as a knight of resignation alone (i.e. as someone who had not undertaken the further movement of faith). Such a knight looks at everything which he has as something which he does not really have, something which he cannot really have. For the thing is fleeting – everything in time is essentially tainted by the quality of slipping away, passing by, being changed and lost. For him, all things temporal are as good as lost: they are absent from that domain of things that are fully rooted in being, the domain that is not touched by change and loss. Thus, renouncing everything finite, the knight of resignation directs his hopes at the infinite, at his relationship with God – this is where he finds the meaning and the joy in his life. However, the knight of resignation, as we have emphasized, is not indifferent to finitude. On the contrary: resignation is a movement which discloses the value of finite things and our strong attachment to them.43 Thus, the knight of resignation lives in pain, not in indifference. What he fails to sustain with regard to finite things is not his 43

For the analysis of resignation as constituting both our happy relationship with God and our sorrowful relationship with the finite, see again chapter 2.

the knight of love

95

ability to care for them, but rather his ability to feel joy in them.44 Having made the movement of resignation the knight cannot consider anything as belonging to him. Rather he is constantly aware of the impending absence of everything that he has, of the imminent threat of becoming deprived of each and every thing he loves. He thus cannot let himself be fully attached to anything he cares for in the realm of finitude. However, this is only half of the journey. After all, the story of faith, as well as the story of Fear and Trembling, does not end with resignation. Both Abraham and the mundane knight (along with, at least potentially, the Merman whom we will meet later) are knights of faith. And faith, we have said, is a renewal of relationship with a ‘lost’ thing (i.e. something that is lost, either actually or potentially – Isaac, the princess, ‘everything’); and is also understood in terms of ‘receiving back’. And now that we understand what kind of loss stands at the basis of the different stories of faith, and are in the position to understand that what we ‘receive back’ in faith is the relationship with the lost thing, we can finally turn to the question formulated above. What is the nature of this renewed relationship and what are the conditions for sustaining it, which earn it the name of ‘faith’? Faith as trust The crucial distinction between the knight of faith and a mere knight of resignation consists in the ability of the former, while performing the movement of resignation, to find hope and joy in the finite again. The mundane knight, to quote again, ‘drains the deep sadness of life in infinite resignation … knows the blessedness of infinity … has felt the pain of renouncing everything … and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher’ (FT, 40). The faith of this knight amounts to his ability to sustain an adequate (full, satisfying) relationship with everything in his life. He has a very unique hold on finitude, a very special way of being attached to it. He sustains a relationship with everything finite by way of both renouncing and affirming it, by both releasing and holding it. On the one hand, he acknowledges that nothing belongs to him, he has no right over anything, and he cannot demand any proprietary claim on anything in his life. But at the same time the knight is joyful as one who entirely belongs to the world – as one to whom the world ‘belongs’. This latter ‘belongingness’ is of a new kind, of course. He is fully attached – by way of hope, 44

See Kellenberger 1997 for a discussion of joy as the hallmark of the knight of faith.

96

kierkegaard on faith and love

expectations, and joyfulness – to everything as if it were ‘his’, while fully acknowledging – by way of resignation – that nothing is really ‘his’. A helpful way of thinking about this new hold on finitude is to picture it in terms of receiving a gift. To think of our hold on everything in time, which is everything that we have, as a hold on a gift, demonstrates the subtlety of the relationship (between us and everything finite) which faith constitutes. A gift has a special status. When something is given to us, it both does and does not belong to us. Having received it, we now have it, but at the same time we are not the origin, so to speak, of the gift – the giver is. We ‘own’ the gift, after not having owned it before, only thanks to the giver who is the real owner of the gift. We should remember that, being a gift, it was absent from our life prior to being given to us by the giver, and that, as the ‘origin’ of the gift, he still has the right over it. Our hold on a gift is always, in a way, only tentative.45 To think of faith in this way captures the profound meaning of considering something as ‘not mine’ but nevertheless ‘mine’; it helps to understand the uniqueness of the relationship that faith constitutes with finite goods. It addresses our intuition that there is a positive connection between having joy in something and considering it as ‘ours’ in some sense. We may now understand what this ‘ours’ means – it is ‘ours’not in the negative sense of claiming possession rights over it (Factor (1)), but rather it is ‘ours’ in a new, ‘purged’ sense of being involved in a mutual relationship with it, and of being deeply attached to it (Factor (2)). From the point of view of faith, if something is ‘mine’, it is ‘mine’ only in the way that a desirable gift is mine. When receiving it, I do not (and cannot) see myself as its ‘natural’ possessor (after all I have been given it), but at the same time I am joyful – joyful to receive it and to have it. And thinking of the relationship of faith thus, we make genuine place for the presence of the giver of the gift: the presence of God. It emphasizes that the right form of a relationship includes not only two participants (myself and the other party involved), but rather three; there is another party involved in the relationship of faith, the party that gives shape and validity to the relationship.46 45

46

The analogy of a gift is not devoid of problems: for example, one may claim that once one receives a gift one owns it as if it were one’s own from the beginning. However, I think this analogy manages to capture the complexity of the desirable type of hold that faith provides, one that both renounces the thing as ‘mine’ and affirms it as ‘mine’. Because even if, say, legally speaking I ‘own’ the gift once given to me, still, at least emotionally, I feel that I have fewer rights over it than, suppose, over something I bought with my hard-earned money. In this connection, it is interesting to note Kierkegaard’s idea of a genuine relationship as effectively a relationship between three, with God as ‘the middle term’: ‘Christianity teaches

the knight of love

97

However, considering everything in time as a gift, as well as acknowledging the decisive presence of God in any finite relationship, is not as yet enough for constituting a relationship of faith. After all, the knight of resignation also understands the status of everything in time as a gift, and obviously he also sustains a loving relationship with God – but still he is only a knight of resignation. What he lacks, then, is the power to trust the bestowal of the gift in the context of his finite life. The right relation between ourselves and everything that we have (which is, as we have said, a relationship between two that includes the presence of a third, the giver) involves the ability to trust. What does it mean to trust? Being a believer, Alastair Hannay explains, expresses a deep trust in God, when ‘trusting’ means precisely that there is a gap between the individual’s understanding of some situation (his understanding, or rather lack of understanding, of the demand to ‘suspend the ethical’, for example), and his belief in its being ultimately a good thing. If we understand something as good and blissful, there is no need for us to ‘trust’ that it is this way. Trusting something implies that we have good reason to be suspicious or doubtful; it means that from the point of view of what we see and understand, something – a reason, an answer, an explanation – is missing or hidden from us. To be a believer, then, is to be capable of enduring this confusion. It is to be capable of enduring such an insult to reason and understanding, and of believing genuinely, and trustfully, that even when reality seems strange, painful, and confusing – it will, eventually, be ‘all right’. As Hannay puts it: but to be a knight of faith Abraham had to be willing to accept that the outcome would be ‘all right’ even if God had not relented by producing a result which satisfied his moral intuition and personal preferences; that is, even if the way in which the outcome was ‘all right’ remained utterly obscure … faith requires that he believe that it would be ‘all right’ no matter what.47

In his book, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Faith and Eternal Acceptance, J. Kellenberger also explains the religious consciousness of the knight of faith in terms of an absolute trust in God, manifested in the belief that ‘all will be well’. Kellenberger rightly emphasizes the difference between ‘the contemporary knight of faith’ (whom we called a mundane knight) and

47

that love is a relationship between: a person – God – a person, that is, that God is the middle term’ (WL, 107, emphasis in the original). Hannay 1982: 78.

98

kierkegaard on faith and love

Abraham. The latter had God’s promise that through Isaac he would be the father of nations, and therefore had good reason to believe that Isaac would live (even if he was about to die). The contemporary knight of faith, on the other hand, is neither put to a trial nor does he have God’s concrete promise. So what does his faith amount to? It amounts to the belief and trust in God that everything will be well: Like Abraham, the contemporary knight of faith must have absolute trust in God, but his absolute trust is unlike Abraham’s in that it does not rest upon God’s special promise … This means that the direct object of the faith of the contemporary knight of faith, what he knows and does not doubt, must be different from the direct object of Abraham’s faith. Going beyond Fear and Trembling, we can identify it as the belief that all will be well. The direct object of Abraham’s faith … was, we may say, that all will be well with Isaac. The direct object of the faith of the contemporary knight of faith is the more general belief that all will be well – all will be well with ‘everything’.48

Robert M. Adams is another commentator who posits the concept of trust as central to the idea of faith. Analysing Fear and Trembling’s knight of faith, he wonders why the additional element in faith, which distinguishes it from resignation – namely, the acceptance of the finite back – is so important.49 And this is his answer: In faith, we may suppose, one trusts in God, and that implies that one consciously, believingly, willingly, depends on God for something. In infinite resignation, however, one does not in this way depend on God. For one has resolved to live solely for one’s relationship of love to God. And I take it the knight of infinite resignation sees this relationship as constituted sufficiently by his own voluntary resignation. In relation to what he lives for, therefore, he does not depend on anything outside the control of his own will. Hence the knight of infinite resignation has no occasion for trusting God; and faith, in the sense of trust, plays no essential part in his religion. The knight of faith, on the other hand, does willingly depend on God for something outside the control of his own will. But if he depends thus on God for it, he must surely accept it when given, and must be prepared to accept it.50

In other words, faith is trusting God that what is impossible for me (‘outside the control of [the] will’) will be possible nevertheless. This trust amounts 48 49 50

Kellenberger 1997: 48–9. See Adams 1990: 392. Ibid., 392–3.

the knight of love

99

to an acknowledgement of my deep dependency on God for achieving a hold on anything beyond my control. While in resignation the knight does not need to rely on anything but himself and his own powers of will and determination, in faith the knight relies entirely on God. ‘[H]e who loves God without faith reflects upon himself’, says Johannes, while ‘he who loves God in faith reflects upon God’ (FT, 37). Being a knight of faith, then, means to have the trust that what I accept in resignation as completely lost for me – everything in time, and the relationship with everything in time – will nevertheless be returned to me. I cannot tell how this is to happen, and what form it is to take, but trusting God means that I believe in the ultimate realization of the good. In a recent essay ‘Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling’, John J. Davenport emphasizes precisely this latter point. According to his interpretation, Kierkegaardian faith is trusting that the desirable good – he speaks of this good in terms of the perfect realization of the ideals of ethics – although beyond my limited reach, is nevertheless – ‘eschatologically’, ultimately, in the last account – to be fulfilled. I shall elaborate on Davenport’s suggestion below, but first let us try to imagine a concrete example of trust, when it is understood in terms of a belief in an ultimate realization of the good. As Kellenberger indicates, in the story of the Binding it is relatively easy to understand what Abraham’s trust in God amounts to. Abraham trusts the realization of God’s promise t