4

Following Abraham Home

Kierkegaard’s wish to reach the port was eventually granted, and after a restless night in a hotel there he is ready for the final leg of his journey home. The boats in Stralsund’s harbour and the smell of the sea make the call of Denmark more vivid and insistent. He boards the steamship Svenska Lejonet, which will sail overnight to Copenhagen. He is exhausted, but glad to be done with the stagecoach: now the horizons feel wider, his vision clear.

In Berlin he poured his energies into Repetition, fashioning from his own struggle for fidelity a new philosophy of life. For centuries philosophers have treated truth as an idea to be grasped intellectually, but in Repetition he investigated the truth of human hearts, which is found not in knowledge but in love. Drawing on this philosophical leap, the other manuscript in his bag sums up Abraham’s faith in a simple answer to a perplexing question: ‘What did Abraham achieve? He remained true to his love.’

He knows as well as anyone that this truthfulness does not come easily to human beings – for to live is to change, to encounter others who are also changing, to learn how to inhabit a changing world. While we exist in this world we continually forget and rediscover who we are. Kierkegaard promised to marry Regine, yet in making this very promise he gained new insight into himself which brought his promise into question. Now he is writing about Abraham, the great and terrible father of faith – what a story to be immersed in! For years he has thought about Abraham’s extraordinary faith, and now the old patriarch’s journey to Moriah shows his own vacillations and doubts in sharp relief, each step up the mountain measuring how far he has fallen short of Abraham’s constancy and courage. He hopes in some way to remain true to Regine despite breaking the engagement. That might seem impossible, but Abraham’s faith seemed impossible too.

He sees Abraham as ‘a guiding star that saves the anguished’ because he showed that faith is possible, even if how he did it remains a mystery. The star of Abraham, deep and unfathomable, has drawn into its orbit all the things that most concern him now, in 1843: his relationship to God, his spiritual ideals, his break with Regine; the inadequacies of modern philosophy, the complacency of the age, the threat of nihilism that is creeping into his century.

Meditating on Genesis 22 allows Kierkegaard to explore the dilemma of his own existence: how to be faithful to God – and to his own heart – within the world. Much of his life, like everyone else’s, is occupied by petty concerns and narrow thoughts, and it is tempting to think that being spiritual means deeming all these things insignificant. Yet the New Testament offers a glimpse of a God who is found in the smallest details as in the greatest events – who counts every sparrow, every hair on a man’s head. ‘The important thing,’ he recently wrote in his journal, ‘is to be able to have faith in God with respect to lesser things; otherwise one does not stand in a proper relation to him … it is also important to draw God into the actuality of this world, where he surely is anyway. When Paul was aboard the ship that was about to capsize, he prayed not only for his eternal salvation, but for his temporal salvation as well.’

Kierkegaard drafted a short sermon on Genesis 22 in the autumn of 1840, soon after getting engaged, while he was training at Copenhagen’s Royal Pastoral Seminary. He used Abraham’s journey to Moriah to unsettle his imagined congregation’s over-familiarity with the task of faith: ‘We all know the outcome of the story. Perhaps it does not surprise us any longer because we have known it from our earliest childhood; but then, in truth, the fault lies not in the story but in ourselves, because we are too lukewarm to really feel with Abraham, to suffer with him.’ In the midst of his anxiety and distress Abraham listened to ‘the divine voice from heaven in his heart’, and kept his ‘trust in the future’. Yet the most extraordinary thing about Abraham, he suggested, was his joyful return to normal life: ‘He headed home joyously, cheerfully, with trust in God; for he had not wavered, and he had nothing for which to blame himself.’ At that time, with the prospect of marriage generating new anxieties, Kierkegaard might well have envied Abraham’s confidence in his future. And returning to Abraham now, two and a half years later, he is even more aware of the difference between the patriarch’s single-minded faith and his own uncertainty and ambivalence, between the aged father’s serenity and his own bitter rage.

Fear and Trembling will explore further how Abraham’s relationship to God did not draw him away from the world, but anchored him within it, arguing that Abraham’s faith lay less in his obedient surrender of Isaac than in receiving Isaac back after giving him up. Abraham had already received an extraordinary gift when God fulfilled his promise that Sarah, his elderly wife, would bear a son. This child represented Abraham’s future, all his hopes, his claim to greatness: Isaac meant the whole world to him. Then, years later, he was asked to sacrifice the boy, and with him the entire meaning of his own existence. He did so willingly, without losing trust in God’s promise for worldly happiness. And so the divine gift was renewed: Abraham ‘had faith for this life’, and ‘received a son a second time, contrary to expectation’.

In drawing these spiritual ideals from Abraham’s story, Kierkegaard is forming an answer to the question that struck him six years ago, when he met Regine at Peter Rørdam’s house: how to live religiously in the world. This question pursued him through the late 1830s, as he read Plato, listened to Mozart, completed his theology degree, and visited Regine. In 1840, just before he proposed to her, he had wondered whether it was possible to express his spiritual life through worldly things, so that ‘the divine inhabits the finite, and finds its way in it.’ But once he was engaged, the world and his soul seemed to pull in opposite directions and he felt forced to choose between them.

Now the story of Abraham shows him, more clearly than ever, the contrast between two kinds of religious life, distinguished by very different attitudes to the world. The sacrificial part of Abraham’s movement – dragged out in the arduous journey up Mount Moriah and climaxing in the unthinkable binding of Isaac, the heart-stopping flash of a knife – is perceived by some people to be the summit of the God-relationship. Kierkegaard admires the ‘monastic movement’ of withdrawal from the world, rarely attempted in this modern age where religious passion is no longer valued as it used to be. He calls those who live like this ‘knights of resignation’, in contrast to the successful figures in Danish public life who are appointed Knights of the Order of the Dannebrog by the king. While these worldly knights enjoy secular prestige, the knights of resignation stand apart from the world, spiritually elevated and remote.

Yet something higher still lies beyond them, a paradoxical peak that can be reached only by descending. Having renounced everything for the sake of God, Abraham made a further movement, returning to the world, embracing finitude, and living contentedly with his earthly gifts. Walking down the mountain with his son Isaac beside him, he was not just a knight of resignation, but a ‘knight of faith’. For Kierkegaard, Abraham exemplifies a way of being human in the world that neither withdraws like a hermit or a monk, nor conforms to conventional bourgeois values. The ‘guiding star’ of Abraham belongs to a paradoxical constellation: a faith that is lived in the world, yet defies worldly expectations.

Kierkegaard imagines the movements of this faith as the light, graceful leaps of a ballet dancer – repeated again and again, each time a little different, and as arduous to perform as they are delightful to watch. The soul’s dance expresses its longing for God, for eternity, for an unknown infinity. Most people are ‘wallflowers’ who do not take part in this dance; the knights of resignation ‘are dancers, and possess elevation’ – but when they land, they falter, showing that they cannot be at home in the world.

A knight of faith, however, lands as easily as he leapt, ‘transforming the leap of life into a walk’. He makes existence look so easy that there is nothing to tell him apart from the most unreflective, spiritless person who, immersed in everyday concerns, sees no significance in life beyond its immediate satisfactions and disappointments. The knight of faith’s relationship to God is entirely inward, hidden from public view. A divine grace sustains each step of his journey through the world, but he receives this gift secretly, in silence.

In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard will describe a knight of faith who looks as ordinary as a bureaucrat – like a tax collector:

I examine his figure from head to foot to see if there might not be a crack through which the infinite peeped out. No! He is solid through and through. His footing? It is sturdy, belonging entirely to finitude. No dressed up citizen going out on a Sunday afternoon to Frederiksberg treads the ground more solidly. He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois philistine could belong to it more. Nothing is detectable of that foreign and noble nature by which the knight of infinite resignation is recognized. He enjoys and takes part in everything, and whenever one sees him participating in something particular, it is carried out with a persistence that characterizes the worldly person whose heart is attached to such things. He goes about his work. To see him one would think he was a pen-pusher who had lost his soul in accountancy, so exact is he. He takes a holiday on Sundays. He goes to church. No heavenly look or sign of the incommensurable betrays him. If one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the crowd.

Within this undistinguished figure is an extraordinary soul. Beneath his carefree manner he labours at the most difficult human task – just as the ballet dancer’s lightness comes only after years of hard training. The knight of faith ‘buys every moment he lives for the dearest price: He empties the deep sadness of existence, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, the dearest thing he has in the world, and yet the finite tastes every bit as good to him as to someone who never knew anything higher.’

Kierkegaard’s distinction between ‘knights of resignation’ and ‘knights of faith’ offers a new response to a traditional philosophical problem. For centuries theologians have struggled to explain how a loving God could have created this world, with its all-too-evident sufferings and injustices; despite every ingenious argument to resolve the contradiction between the goodness of God and the evils of his creation, this contradiction remains for many people the biggest stumbling-block to faith. Yet Kierkegaard knows as well as anyone that suffering is not merely a philosophical problem – for the task of faith is not to explain suffering, but to live with it. Our most urgent existential questions ask not Why do we suffer? but How should we suffer? Like many religious people, Kierkegaard might wonder, in times of crisis, about the reasons for his suffering, but meanwhile he has to find a way to live daily with the contradictions between his expectations and his experience, between his belief in God and his dispiriting knowledge of the world.

From the manuscript of Fear and Trembling

He thinks that attempts at easy religious consolation, which cut too quickly to promises of a happy ending, are like the metaphysical conjuring tricks of theologians who argue that evil has no real existence because it is only the absence of goodness. He has observed among his contemporaries this tendency to soothe away the pains of living in the world: Fear and Trembling will describe a drowsy congregation comforted by a sermon which reassures them that Abraham’s spiritual trial turned out well in the end, so that ‘they leave out the distress, the anxiety, the paradox’ within faith. Privately he criticizes Bishop Mynster, leader of the Danish State Church (and a Knight of the Dannebrog), for ‘giving consolation by saying that things may perhaps take a turn for the better, that happier days are coming, etc.’ For Kierkegaard, Mynster’s response to anxiety and distress offers ‘worldly wisdom’, not ‘genuinely religious consolation’.

By contrast, his own interpretation of Abraham shows that ‘only the one who is in anxiety finds rest, only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac.’ The cost of faith is always high: look at Jesus’s mother, Mary, as she is depicted at the start of Luke’s Gospel, when the angel Gabriel visits her and she conceives a divine child. History later turned her into a holy queen, yet at this moment she was just an obscure girl, unmarried and mysteriously pregnant; no one else saw the angel, and ‘no one could understand her’ – ‘Is it not also true here that the one whom God blesses he curses in the same breath? Mary needs no worldly admiration, just as little as Abraham needs tears, for she was no heroine and he was no hero, but they both became greater than these, not by being exempt from distress and torment and the paradox, but through these things.’

Kierkegaard’s imagined knights of resignation and of faith are noble figures who boldly enter the battlefield of existence and confront its trials. He does not claim to be either of these knights himself: he is writing Fear and Trembling in the guise of a pseudonymous author who can imagine making the movements of renunciation, but finds faith impossible. ‘I have looked the frightful in the eye; I do not timidly flee from it but I know very well that even if I approach it bravely, my courage is still not the courage of faith and is nothing to be compared with that,’ confesses this nineteenth-century Simeon Stylites.

Kierkegaard insists that religious faith requires ‘a paradoxical and humble courage’, a virtue quite different from the dubious sacrificial heroism he aspired to in relation to Regine. A connoisseur of anxiety, he knows that fear is the great enemy in the spiritual life – and that courage is required to overcome it. ‘Do not be afraid,’ Jesus constantly told his disciples: he saw how fear contracted their hearts, preventing them from loving or receiving love; how it made them flee from the loss that follows human love like a shadow. Courage is traditionally understood as strength of heart – like the bravery of a soldier who faces the dangers of battle – but on the battlefield of existence hearts must be open as well as strong if they are to become fully human, and this is why Mary and Abraham are among the greatest spiritual exemplars. Kierkegaard calls their open-heartedness ‘humble courage’, and he understands too well how difficult it is to accomplish: ‘It is harder to receive love than to give it,’ he will admit in Fear and Trembling.

During this brief second visit to Berlin, he cemented a cornerstone of his philosophy: there is something contradictory about being a human in the world. His social relationships shape his life and form his self-consciousness, but the way he appears to others never quite matches his inward truth. He is on display, seen and judged, and yet his inability to disclose himself makes him feel alone. Human existence is at once inescapably public and intensely private. And the deeper a person’s inner life, the more profound this contradiction becomes. Kierkegaard doubts that anyone can comprehend, let alone judge, another person’s religious life, for ‘the first thing the religious does is close its door and speak in secret’, as God spoke to Abraham and as the angel spoke to Mary. Of course, religious people have to live conspicuously in the world like everyone else, though they harbour a ‘secret’ that is not willingly concealed, but impossible to express: ‘Inwardness is incommensurable with outwardness, and no person, even the most open-hearted, manages to say everything.’

Each day in his familiar Berlin lodgings overlooking Gendarmenmarkt, Kierkegaard spent time in contemplation, connecting with his own inwardness and sinking deeper into it: ‘I sit and listen to the sounds in my inner being, the happy hints of music and the deep earnest of the organ. Working them into a whole is a task not for a composer but for a human being who, in the absence of making heavier demands upon life, confines himself to the simple task of wanting to understand himself.’ Writing is inseparable from this effort of self-understanding: it is through words as well as through silence that he brings coherence to the motions of his soul. Yet for Kierkegaard this is always a paradoxical exercise, revealing and concealing at the same time – like telling someone you have a secret that can’t be told. Writing gives his most solitary reflections a public aspect, exhibits the contradiction between his inward and outward life, brings his hiddenness into the open. He evasively offers to the world an image of himself, going to great lengths to explain that he cannot be understood.

In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard will communicate something about the nature of a faith that is, he insists, incommunicable. And his journals are in this respect no less paradoxical than his published writing: he expects them to be read by others, perhaps treated as a true record of his inwardness. ‘After my death,’ he wrote in his journal this year, ‘no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least information about what has really filled my life, find that script in my innermost being that explains everything, and which often, for me, makes what the world would call trifles into events of immense importance, and which I too consider of no importance once I take away the secret note that explains it.’ When Kierkegaard writes something truly private, he cuts it out of his journal with a knife and throws it on the fire.

He is consoled by the thought of remaining hidden because he has been so afraid of being seen. Perhaps it was this, above all, that made him unable to marry: sheer anxiety, compounded by high ideals. He believes that marriage requires complete openness between husband and wife; ‘so many a marriage conceals little histories,’ he wrote in Berlin on 17 May, ‘but I didn’t want that’. Here, in a long journal entry reflecting on the engagement – from which one page was excised – he partially revealed his inability to reveal himself to Regine: ‘If I were to explain myself I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my relationship to father, his melancholy, the eternal night brooding deep inside me, my going astray, my desires and excesses, which in the eyes of God are nevertheless perhaps not so glaring, since after all it was anxiety that made me go astray.’

Yet Regine, though so much younger and less educated than Kierkegaard, saw something of his soul in spite of all his evasions. Last month, before he left for Berlin, a silent encounter with her made him realize that she was not fooled by his attempts to mislead her after their engagement ended. Although he had tried to hide from her, she had seen him: ‘On Easter Sunday at evensong in the Church of Our Lady (during Mynster’s sermon) she nodded to me. I do not know whether pleadingly or forgivingly but in any case affectionately. I had taken a seat at a remote spot but she noticed me. Would to God she hadn’t. Now a year and a half of suffering are wasted and all the enormous pains I took; she does not believe I was a deceiver, she trusts me … Shall I in sheer madness go ahead and become a villain just to get her to believe it – ah, but what good would that do? She will still think that I wasn’t [a villain] earlier.’

So now he has given up on his plan to feign indifference, supposedly for Regine’s sake: he can relinquish the role of heartless seducer, which he dramatized in Either/Or. Of course, being away from Copenhagen put him at a safe distance from Regine’s trusting gaze, and the two books he worked on during this second stay in Berlin still interpose the voices of fictitious pseudonyms between himself and his readers. But his writing continues to reach out to Regine, even as he takes care to keep himself out of reach.

When she reads Fear and Trembling, will Regine recognize her Kierkegaard in Abraham, who renounced his beloved for the sake of an inexplicable higher purpose? Will she now be consoled by the spiritual significance of her suffering? Will she feel herself inspired to become a knight of faith, who willingly surrenders the gift she was given, trusting that worldly happiness will be restored to her? Or should she see how far she has fallen short of this ideal, realize how much suffering she caused him by resisting with all her devotion, all her tears, his efforts to break the engagement?

And what about Kierkegaard – who will he be when he arrives back in Copenhagen? How will he return to his world? What will his neighbours make of him? After these three solitary weeks in Berlin, he knows very well how it feels to be a ‘stranger in the world’. Once he is home, will he remain a stranger among all the people who think they know him – a knight of resignation? Or can he find a way to land gracefully, like Abraham the aged father, like Mary the expectant mother, like an accomplished ballet dancer who expresses the inward leaps of faith?

The first time he returned home from Berlin, in 1842, Copenhagen seemed small, parochial, full of familiar faces. He knows very well how narrow life can feel within its medieval walls – and how quickly gossip flies through its streets and squares. Compared to Berlin, or Paris or London, Denmark’s capital is a market town. But unlike those other cities Copenhagen looks out to sea: even in Gammeltorv the salty air and clear light can evoke waves and winds, mermaids and sailors, great skies and far horizons, and up on the ramparts this wide watery world comes into view. Kierkegaard’s close acquaintances include men who have sailed to Greenland, to North America, to China, to Brazil; his own father made his fortune selling goods shipped to Copenhagen from the East and West Indies. Is it surprising that a Scandinavian soul like his echoes with the sounds of the sea, senses unseen possibilities, knows the ocean’s expansiveness and depths? Or that his engagement crisis made him ‘descend into dark waters’, brought him close to drowning – even though he could say afterwards that his soul needed this ‘baptism’? ‘Everything churns inside me so that it seems that my feelings, like water, will break the ice with which I have covered myself,’ he wrote to Emil Boesen back then, during his first stay in Berlin.

As the sun sets over the Baltic late in the evening the vast sky turns pink and blue and gold. Kierkegaard knows that countless stars hide in this last dance of daylight, waiting for darkness to fall. The bright spring of 1843 – the brightest yet, for he has been born as an author, Either/Or is a success, and new books are already blossoming within him – is nearly over, and the northern nights are shortening quickly now. He should try to get some rest. The steamship will arrive in Copenhagen’s harbour tomorrow morning – and then he will get back to work.