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An Explication of the Thesis

Introduction

This chapter serves to outline the task that informed and directed Kierkegaard’s authorship. We consider here how the Christian belief of the incarnation can be seen to be fundamental to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the correlation between form and content.73 We can then see how Kierkegaard outworked this understanding through his authorship, an authorship characterized by hiddenness.

Søren Kierkegaard dedicated his literary talents to reacquaint his fellow Danes with Christianity. He believed that his society had seriously misunderstood what it meant to be a Christian to the point of distorting it, and so sought to do what he could as an author to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom.” To begin with, Kierkegaard wrote in order to awaken his reader from being a mindless number in “the crowd” to being confronted by what he understood to be each and every person’s human duty and joy: to be a “single individual.”74 Kierkegaard believed that such a realization was a necessary first step for a person to know herself as a “single individual” under God—that is, a Christian.75 This was because he understood that the gospel of Christianity addressed people only as individuals, and required a personal decision from each and every human being.76 Therefore, a society’s presumption that all within it are Christians, under the illusion that it is a Christian society, is antithetical to Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity.77 Kierkegaard labeled such erroneous thinking as “Christendom.”

As he practiced throughout his authorship and reiterated most directly in his posthumous “The Point of View for My Work as an Author,” he claimed: “I am and was a religious author, that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion, Christendom, or the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts.”78

This was his task: to reintroduce Christianity as a demand on individual persons, into a society which believed Christianity to be a matter of an impersonal, objective status.79 But how was he to do this?

Kierkegaard understood that his task must be internally coherent: his form needed to complement his task. Such a conviction was not merely an artistic or stylistic one, but was rooted in the gospel, receiving theological support from the Christian claim that God’s Word became flesh. This complementarity between form and task is related to his understanding of the Christian belief in the incarnation, which lead Kierkegaard to adopt the form of hiddenness in his authorship.80

The King Who Loved a Humble Maiden

In this parable we are given an insight into Kierkegaard’s understanding of the gospel.81 Although Kierkegaard distances himself from this work by employing a pseudonym to articulate it,82 Kierkegaard’s veronymous writings as well as his own authorial practice are sympathetic to such an analogy. Through examining this analogy we will suggest how this can be understood to give rise to the form of Kierkegaard’s authorship.

As a way of portraying the love of “the god” for “the learner” in Christianity,83 Climacus employs an analogy in the form of a fairytale. Beyond mere unity of the parties concerned, love requires understanding. Climacus endeavors to suggest how the love of God for an individual becomes understood in Christianity.84 In this illustration, the King could not make his love for the maiden known to his subjects because they would force the maiden into meeting the King’s desires. Such love would become “unhappy” and distorted in this lack of equality. Likewise, the King elevating the maiden to an equal status with himself would also result in the misunderstanding of his love, as the maiden would be compelled—both internally and externally—to be in the debt of her lover. This would not elicit a genuine love that is concerned with the King for his own sake. The maiden would cease to be herself, and would instead become conscious of her debt to the King. Although the maiden would be satisfied in forgetting herself and in serving the King in all his glory, this would not satisfy the King “because he does not wish his own glorification, but the girl’s.”85

Climacus sees the solution as one where the King would come down to the level of the maiden, where the King would disguise himself as a lowly commoner and attempt to win her affection on an equal footing—free from the trappings of power-relations, thus steering away from demand or coercion by the King, and emphasizing the risky and vulnerable invitation in which all the power of the decision is given to the humble maiden. In this sense, the form of such an invitation becomes vital. It is here that Climacus uses the New Testament phrase “in the form of a servant” to establish in the mind of the reader a direct link to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.86 It is here that we begin in our understanding of the key concept of “hiddenness.”

Although this “thought experiment” is undertaken in the name of a pseudonym, this account of the gospel can easily be seen to be consistent with Kierkegaard’s own belief as is illustrated in his explicit emphases on “the single individual” and “hidden inwardness.”87 More significantly, this concept of hiddenness is outworked in the form of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Because God did not primarily demand allegiance through appearing directly in all his glory, but instead sought to win the genuine love of each and every person through hiding himself and making himself our equal (or even less than this),88 Christianity is a humble and vulnerable invitation from God. The shift here is from Christianity being seen as a matter of status or intellectual ascent, to it being understood as God inviting each and every person into a subjective (i.e., personal) relationship with himself. In order for the individual to understand this in such an intimate way, the form of the gospel becomes the all-important emphasis for Kierkegaard.

This is the theological basis for Kierkegaard’s paying special attention to the form of communicating the gospel. This led him to realize that the form his evangelistic authorship must take was that of hiddenness.

The Hiddenness of the Gospel—God Hidden in Christ

For Kierkegaard, the idea that God became a human being was, paradoxically, a revelation of the hiddenness of God.89 This hidden revelation was not simply a subsidiary characteristic of the Christian gospel.90 As Kierkegaard attempted to demonstrate through Climacus, the means through which God revealed himself in Christ was necessary for God to win humanity (each person as a “single individual”) to himself. What appeared to deeply concern Kierkegaard was God’s love for humanity. He was attempting to explain that God revealing himself directly in all his glory would be incompatible with God’s telos of love.91 Such directness appeals to the ability of human reason to grasp God’s love for the human learner, but this is impossible. Through both Climacus and Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard strove to show how an understanding of God’s love requires the precondition of faith to understand and believe that the particular, lowly human being of Jesus is God.92 Such a fact is paradoxical to human reason. Climacus therefore calls it “the Absolute Paradox” which transcends worldly ways of knowing, and is only recognizable by those who have the eyes of faith.93 It is only through faith that a person can come to know God’s love for herself and this very faith relies on the hiddenness of God.94 Even separated by two thousand years, the same faith is required to recognize God in Christ. As Climacus explores further in Concluding Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, such historical categories of knowing are irrelevant to knowing God “in truth.”95 To be contemporaneous with Christ is not a relationship that concerns history—it is only through faith that a person is made contemporary with Christ.96

Therefore, Kierkegaard understood that the form of the gospel is absolutely vital to it being understood correctly and believed that the particular form intrinsic to the gospel is “hiddenness.” As one who sought to communicate this gospel he endeavored to undertake this form in his own authorship.

Poul Martin Møller

The impact of Professor Poul Martin Møller on the development of Kierkegaard’s interest in the relation between form and content is important to recognize. Møller was an unconventional teacher whose admiration of Socrates was influential for Kierkegaard. Møller sought to embody his belief in the importance of a life’s relation to what was taught, so his philosophy “was lived out in conversations in the market square and with ordinary people.”97 However, this method presented a problem for Kierkegaard as his follower, who “feared, not without reason, that when Møller was no longer able to support his ideas with his own living personality—and thereby demonstrate their legitimacy—posterity would be unable to sense the scope of his contribution to a philosophy of living.”98 Kierkegaard embraced similar convictions to Møller in terms of the importance of form and subjective pathos (passions) in communication but, just as Kierkegaard extended his friend’s Socratic ideas, he also extended Møller’s form of communicating them.99 Kierkegaard sought to improve on Møller’s method of indirect, lived communication, shifting it from being outworked primarily through the medium of live performance to literature.100

Whatever Møller may have encouraged or even initiated in Kierkegaard, it is the New Testament that led Kierkegaard to see a more substantial foundation for understanding the significance of the relation between form and content in the Christian event of the incarnation. This theological foundation gave rise to Kierkegaard pursuing a form of authorship that was characterized by hiddenness.101 By being roused to the importance of form’s relation to content through Socrates and Møller, Kierkegaard found the fulfillment of such congruence in the gospel. The particular shape this congruence took was the hidden invitation of God to the individual.

Being Hidden “In the Truth”

In summary, Kierkegaard saw form (not merely content) as being a vital factor in communication. He ultimately saw such congruence between form and content as being embodied in the incarnation of the God-Man, who came hidden “in the form of a servant.”102 Thus in communicating the gospel, Kierkegaard understood that his communication must likewise be undertaken in hiddenness in order to complement and preserve the subjective invitation of God. Before we conclude this chapter, one final point of clarification is necessary.

Søren Kierkegaard fundamentally understood that his entire life was hidden in Christ, and that Christ himself was the truth.103 Therefore, attempting to undertake his authorial task through the form of hiddenness was not only necessary for his outward communication, but was itself an outworking of his own Christian discipleship.104 Striving after Christ is to strive after the truth, who is also the way: “only then do I in truth know the truth, when it becomes a life in me.”105 For Kierkegaard, the truth is embodied: it is characterized by a congruence between form and content, where the believer strives to be who she is, that is, hidden in Christ.106 And because Christ is the only truly congruent one, the communication of his truth is to be in the truth: that is, to be hidden in Christ.

Thus, this is my thesis:

Through Kierkegaard’s understanding of the gospel, his authorship took the form of hiddenness.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have sought to establish a link between Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity and his own life’s task as an author. Through examining his understanding of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, we have seen that this formed the basis for his understanding of the necessity of the congruence between form and content. So we have seen that Kierkegaard’s belief of God being hidden in the particular person of Jesus necessitated Kierkegaard’s own authorial form of hiddenness. Now we turn to look in greater detail at that which Kierkegaard was reacting to.

73. “Kierkegaard’s conception of his authorship and his incarnational view of God in Christ should be understood together . . .” (Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, 2).

74. Kierkegaard understood that “The Glory of Being Human” consisted of being an individual. As he explains in his own name, “God set human beings apart and made each human being this one individual being . . .” and to neglect this fact by a person associating herself with “the crowd” is a negation of such glory: “The individual animal is an individual only in a numerical sense and belongs to what the most renowned of pagan thinkers called the attribute of animality: the mass. In this way, those who despairingly turn away from those elementary thoughts in order to plunge into the mass element of comparison make themselves into mere numerical individuals, regarding themselves as if they were animals, whether they emerge from the comparison at the top or at the bottom of the pile” (Kierkegaard, Spiritual Writings, 121–22).

75. It is important to realize though that for Kierkegaard there was actually no such thing as a “single individual” apart from under God. See Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation, 145. But this category is important for a preliminary understanding of what Kierkegaard wanted his reader to be aware of in order to truly consider Christianity, and could be a good summation of the goal of the pseudonymous authorship before Postscript, as we shall explore below.

76. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 31.

77. Kierkegaard could be critiqued along the lines of his thought being a Westernized preoccupation with the individual, and one that does not take into account non-Western, communal ways of thinking. Even the New Testament could be cited in the recorded events of mass conversion, such as that of the Philippian jailer’s family in Acts 16:33–34.

78. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 23.

79. I assume that Kierkegaard is through-and-through a religious author, that the main concern of Kierkegaard’s authorship is Christianity, and that there is no good reason for not accepting Kierkegaard’s direct accounts of his authorship—particularly those given in the collection of Kierkegaard, Point of View. Views which attempt to argue otherwise are at best unhelpful. I believe I am in good company in making such an assumption; see also Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 1–2; Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation, 1 n. 1; Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 22 n. 10; cf. Garff, “Eyes of Argus.” I will give a critique of Garff’s article further below.

80. This is similar to the thesis expounded by Joel Rasmussen, who convincingly demonstrates that Kierkegaard undertakes a “Christomorphic poetics,” that is, that Kierkegaard’s emphasis of the correlation between form and content is derived from Christ embodying the ideal sought after in human attempts at the poetic. See Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, e.g., “The theological heart of Kierkegaard’s reinterpretation and harmonization of the Romantic ideal of ‘living poetically’ and the traditionalist understanding of ‘true art,’ therefore, is that the reconciliation of the actual to the ideal to which poetry purportedly attests finds its fulfillment not in any human art, but in God’s poem” (ibid., 10–11).

81. Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 102ff.

82. The significance of such distancing we will explore below in Part II and III.

83. This view, as we will explore below, is part of Climacus’ “thought project” which contrasts the Socratic view of truth and the conditions through which it is “acquired,” and a view that is presented as logically derived in opposition to the Socratic, which is easily recognized by the reader as an articulation of the gospel of Christianity.

84. Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 101. Also, “[t]he poet’s task is to find a solution, a point of union where there is true understanding in love,” (ibid., 104).

85. Ibid., 104.

86. Ibid., 106–7, cf. Phil 2:7.

87. Two brief examples of Kierkegaard conveying (in his own name) a similar understanding of the gospel are Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2/1389, X1 A 408, n.d., 1849 and ibid., 1/301, IV A 33, n.d., 1843.

88. See Phil 2:6–8 especially.

89. Craig Hinkson suggests that there was an “affinity” with Luther’s thought in Kierkegaard during the time of the writing of Philosophical Fragments, and direct influence only came three years afterward in 1847. See Hinkson, “Luther and Kierkegaard,” 29–30. Hinkson uses the following journal entry in support of this: Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 3/2463, VIII1 A 465, n.d., 1847. A key difference is that for Luther, hiddenness is related to Christ crucified rather than the wider event of the incarnation, which Kierkegaard emphasizes. See McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 161–75.

90. As Murray Rae helpfully articulates: “Kierkegaard insists that ‘the surroundings of actuality’ are not incidental to but constitute the truth itself” (Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 63).

91. See Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 100–101.

92. Ibid., 119; cf. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 125–36, etc.

93. Chapter 3 in Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 111–25.

94. Hinkson, “Luther and Kierkegaard,” 32, cf. Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 107, 131–34.

95. E.g., Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 95–96.

96. This is the main subject of the latter part of Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 125–73; see also Anti-Climacus’ discussion in Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 62–66 especially.

97. Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 20.

98. Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 91.

99. “. . . they were equal but their roles quite different: Møller as a Socratic deliverer of ideas that seemed perhaps to be there already, and Kierkegaard developing them further” (Jensen, “Poul Martin Møller,” 116–17).

100. I do not have space to defend this suggestion here or to look into it further, but I put it forward as a helpful view for further research. A good place to start would be ibid., section C: “Fragments on Irony and Nihilism,” starting on p. 128.

101. The influence of Møller on Kierkegaard’s authorial form is one that I regret I have not had the time to investigate further.

102. “Form” and “content” relate to Kierkegaard’s categories of “actuality” and “ideality,” used well by Joel Rasmussen in his discussion of Kierkegaard’s “Christomorphic Poetics,” in Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, e.g., 48: “If poetry reconciles an imperfect actuality to its perfect ideal in a merely imaginative fashion, then a reconciliation between an individual’s imperfect actuality and the divine ideal for that individual should be achievable not through writing poetry but by living poetically.”

103. Kierkegaard, “Two Discourses,” 418–26.

104. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 202–7.

105. Ibid., 206, cf. John 14:6.

106. This will become clearer through our discussion below in 1.3: “Christomorphic Poetics.”