I don’t exactly keep a gratitude journal, but when the black dog is ripping at my throat, I remind myself that my children, now grown men, are healthy, flourishing, and decent people. I take note that I am not living in poverty or a refugee camp or stepping over IEDs in Afghanistan. Now and again, as I am trying to reassure myself, there resounds a menacing internal voice saying, “If you are really looking for something to cry about, just wait.” Sometimes, I torture myself with the thought that I ought to be able to savor the beauty of the present, but, when the gloom wafts in, beauty is just an abstraction.
One morning when the grief had its claws in me, I was trudging along the railroad tracks by the river bend. Just a few feet away, perched on a low limb, was a bald eagle. In its majesty, it would have taken anyone else’s breath away, but given the way I was feeling, it might as well have been a sparrow or a plastic bag caught up in the electrical wires. And that is how it was on a late spring afternoon a few months ago. I had just finished an informal counseling session at the college, giving a pep talk to one of my male students, trying to get him to toughen up and learn to battle through his depression, instead of skipping class day after day and then hating himself for his lack of self-control. I am not sure why, but afterward, I was feeling so out of joint, so alienated, that I needed something to douse the cold fire. It was the end of the day and I planned a pit stop at a local beer den on the way home.
Behind the wheel, headed to the altar with the neon Bud Lite sign in the window, something got into me and I found myself impulsively turning into St. Dominic’s, the Catholic church in town. Raising my eyebrows as though I had been kidnapped, I reassured myself that I would soon be lifting the chalice of a brew, but there I was in church, in a near catatonic funk.
I was raised Catholic. Though my parents made sure I was confirmed and made it to church most Sundays, they were not especially devout. Maybe it was the influence of my beloved Italian nonna who lived with us, with all her statues and those rosaries perpetually in her hands, worn so soft from crocheting for eighty years, but as a third grader I would frequently get up before school and bike to morning mass. It had been decades, but there I was, back at church. It wasn’t morning, and I wasn’t a kid on a bike any longer, musing about my baseball card collection, but a gray beard with ghosts endlessly rounding the bases behind my eyes, a lost soul of less-than-little faith.
St. Dom’s has a small chapel tucked away in a corner, an alcove where you can strike candles for the sick and deceased. Like a bar, it is a quiet, pleasantly dark, red-carpeted oasis with the addition of a tiny altar and a pale blue stained-glass-window depiction of the Virgin Mary. Pleased that no one else was there, I shambled up to the candleholder and slumped to my knees to light a candle for my long-deceased father. It seemed impossible, but all the glass cups were empty; all the candles had been burned down to the metal-clasped wick. After a second pass, I literally hissed a “WTF.” The fact that I couldn’t so much as light a candle for my old man sparked a paranoid sense that there was no benevolent higher power, but rather some fate-like dark force barreling across the universe, bent on grinding me into someone I would not care to glimpse in the mirror. Given my past transgressions, the punishment seemed to fit the crimes. I laughed at myself for stopping at the church and blamed this dastardly destiny for making me “lose my faith.”
And yet, as I burst out of the heavy glass church doors, a strange question swam up and broke the surface: Do we lose our faith or push it away?
It certainly felt as though some beastly hammer blows had knocked the spiritual breath—my hope and my prayers—out of me. But maybe not. Perhaps losing your faith is not like losing a set of keys. Maybe my inability to cope with the inevitable slings of suffering was responsible for not being able to cleave to the idea of the holy. But there I had been, at church on a late weekday afternoon, even though the idea that there is a personal God “up there” seemed utterly nonsensical. Bizarre squared seemed the notion that the Almighty sent his only Son, born of the Virgin Mary, and so on.
And yet, as I burst out of the heavy glass church doors, a strange question swam up and broke the surface: Do we lose our faith or push it away?
There have been times when I have tried to bolster my pearly gate prospects by reciting the idea that there are scientific claims demanding as much imagination to believe as the miracles of the Bible. Take black holes or parallel universes—or quarks, which exist in space and time but have no definite position. Strange, to say the least. No matter, as baffling as these phenomena might be, they still seemed less of a stretch than the Virgin Birth and the resurrection. After all, it is easy to understand why I might yearn for the Lazarus story to be true, but there is no such wish animating my quark convictions. Worse yet, the bizarre scientific claims are open to empirical testing and, if need be, revision; not so for the likes of the resurrection. Some philosophers have suggested that since there are no objective tests for determining whether or not God exists, we might settle the question on moral grounds. William James, the American giant and melancholic, found his will to believe along these pragmatic lines. James reasoned that if your life depended on needing to leap across a chasm, you would be much more likely to make a successful jump if you believed you could make the jump. Transformed to a grand scale, has religion had a positive moral impact on human history? What to compare it with? I am not sure; given the multitude of demonic deeds done in the name of variously named deities, I am hard-pressed to form a strong conviction that faith has been an elevating force; an ambiguous force, yes (after all, the civil rights movement came out of the churches), but not an altogether good one. By the same token, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were all atheists of the fundamentalist stripe. Ultimately, the moral criterion is not much help in resolving the ultimate either-or.
In a history of philosophy class last semester, we were mulling over Anselm’s ontological argument. Philosophers classify Anselm’s reasoning as a reductio ad absurdum argument. With this strategy, you assume the premises of the position that you are challenging and demonstrate that those premises lead to a contradiction. Logic dictates that a premise leading to a contradiction must be false. Anselm’s ingenious argument begins, “the fool says in his heart that God does not exist” but even the fool agrees that if there were a God, it would be a being greater than which cannot be conceived. Pace Anselm, the idea of a being that exists in reality is greater than the idea of a being that exists only in the mind. Therefore, when the fool denies God’s existence, he is not denying the existence of a being that only exists in the mind, for that would not be a being greater than which cannot be conceived. In sum, the atheist cannot deny God’s existence without contradicting his conception of God. Ergo, God must exist.
After defying my befuddled students to find something amiss with the proof, I discussed a defect in Anselm’s reasoning, then served up my rote-memorized Kierkegaardian line that if faith could be grounded in reason, there would be no need for faith. As my usual rift went, “Faith is a matter of believing in the unseen and unproven. You can’t climb to heaven on a ladder of syllogisms, on the likes of the ontological argument.” Most of them nodded, but a bright first year respectfully took me and Kierkegaard to task, pressing, “Doc, I don’t understand. Why would the Creator provide us with reason and then put himself beyond reason? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Augustine, Aquinas, and a gaggle of other apologists have generated sophisticated answers to that simple and honest query, but I confess I have never found them compelling. It does appear preposterous that God would endow us with reason and at the same time lurk behind the curtain of intelligibility. Naturally, “the beyond reason” ploy is convenient for those who repose in the belief that they are under the aegis of a personal savior with superpowers. I had one such individual in my class, a student with a boundless yearning for God.
“Doc, I don’t understand. Why would the Creator provide us with reason and then put himself beyond reason? It doesn’t make any sense.”
His name was Karan, a strict Hindu of nineteen. He was slight, dark, and had a red bindi for a third eye. His father was from India and managed a gas station in Chicago. A coruscating beacon of hope for his family, Karan’s burning ambition was to become a religious teacher, a swami. Virtually every afternoon, Karan would come to my office and in a barely detectable Indian accent, badger me with questions about the relation between our philosophy texts and God or, in his case, as a Hindu, the gods. Karan was blessed with a restless and relentless longing for the divine. Tests gave him a serious case of nerves, so much so that even before an inconsequential quiz, he would pester me to go over questions he already had an iron-clad grip on. One time, I ribbed him, “Karan, you have to learn how to deal with anxiety. If you are going to be a swami, people are going to need you to help them when they are upset and afraid.” Dropping his eyes, he answered with palpable earnestness, “You’re right, Doc. I have to learn to deal with my anxiety.”
The past tense that I have been using makes the tragic truth plain: Karan is of the past tense. A month before the end of the semester, he went to the clinic for a cold. He was given some antibiotics. When his condition failed to improve, the medical priests ran some tests. A month later, Hindu priests were bowing over his body with oils and flower petals, preparing Karan for cremation. Trusting in the gods, he did not cling to life even when he faced the nonnegotiable fact that the future he had so passionately and meticulously mapped out was not to be. An angry part of me felt that if there happens to be a God, Karan was the last flower he should have plucked. Another part of me, however, felt that taking him made perfect sense since he was already more spirit than flesh and bone. After Karan’s funeral, out in the parking lot of faith, I felt I could just as easily believe in Vishnu, Jesus, or the great god Nada.
If Camus happened to be there on the sad but sun-sparkling June afternoon of the funeral, I’m sure he would have counseled, “Go ahead, roll around in the dirt with your grief and rage, but unless you are enjoying yourself doing it, give up puzzling about the meaning of Karan’s death and everything else.” In his unique combination of objectivity and lyricism, Camus contends that we are creatures with an innate, esurient desire for meaning pitched into a universe devoid of meaning. For Camus, the conflict between our need for meaning and a meaningless world is the absurd. Shakespeare’s Macbeth was no idiot when he shook his fist and howled that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Camus’s existential prescription is that we accept the futility of our innermost desires and remain faithful to that recognition of the absurd.
The genius of the literary wing of the existential tradition is that those authors seldom leave us with an abstraction without an attending concrete example drawn from life or fiction. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus serves up a fresh rendition of an ancient tale. The King of Ephyra, Sisyphus, dies and is in the underworld. Sly and endearing, he wrangles the gods into allowing him to return to the earth in order to punish his wife for dishonoring him. The gods concede, but having exacted his revenge, Sisyphus cannot bring himself to leave “the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and smiles of earth.” Having lost patience, the gods send Mercury out to recapture Sisyphus and return him to the kingdom of the dead. Once returned, the gods punish Sisyphus by compelling him for all time to roll a rock up a mountain, only to watch that same rock tumble back down again. The former fugitive from the underworld is carrying out his sentence to this day and probably in a dim light, but does Camus’s Sisyphus complain? “The lucidity that was to constitute his torture,” Camus writes, “at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. . . . I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well.”1
Camus contends that we are creatures with an innate, esurient desire for meaning pitched into a universe devoid of meaning. Camus’s existential prescription is that we accept the futility of our innermost desires and remain faithful to that recognition of the absurd.
Consciousness of the absurd is supposed to remove the sting from the absurd. The gospel according to Camus teaches that denizens of death row, which means all of us, should be freed from the fetters of worries about figuring out the best kind of life. The cosmos is chaos. There is no right way to live: “one life is as good as another” and just as meaningless.
Camus’s muse, Nietzsche, warned that when you look into the abyss too long the abyss looks back and through you. Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s muse, grumbled:
In early youth, we sit before the impending course of our life like children at the theater before the curtain is raised, who sit there in happy and excited expectation of the things that are to come. It is a blessing that we do not know what will actually come. For to the man who knows, the children may at times appear to be like the innocent delinquents who are condemned not to death, it is true, but to life and have not yet grasped the purport of their sentence.2
Acknowledging the absurdity of existence is unnerving enough for some to put their head in a noose and for others to commit what Camus termed “philosophical suicide.” Those who figuratively strangle themselves escape the feeling of absurdity by imagining there is something transcendent, something in Plato’s heaven or in the Judeo-Christian hereafter that will make sense of the toil and moil of the fact that we battle for years, struggle to make our daily bread, are lanced with loss, grief, heartbreak, then suddenly, all is over, we are gone. For what? I recently visited a friend’s grave; for a moment the little city of the dead loomed up like a plain of collapsed universes, a nicely cropped field of black holes of subjectivity with buoy-like gravestones floating above them.
Hordes of happy wanderers whistle as they skip down that short or long hall in and out of existence. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz and founder of logotherapy, lived by Nietzsche’s adage, “If you can find a why, you can find a how.” The deuce with Camus. There are throngs who can talk themselves into the idea that they have a purpose on this planet, and just as many others who are not bedeviled by the need for a purpose, who can find purpose enough in playing with their children, potluck dinners, pruning their tomato plants, and the like. Among those too distracted to go under the hypnotic spell of daily life, there is no one, according to Camus, who could discern more deeply the empty core of existence than Kierkegaard. Thus, Camus shakes his head with disapproval, as if to complain that the writer who taught that it is only by the power of the absurd that we can have faith was by virtue of that faith unable to maintain a faithful awareness of the absurd. Camus concludes that Kierkegaard and a phalanx of other seers have committed intellectual hari-kari by first recognizing human existence for the madhouse that it is, and then mentally constructing an apparatus like faith in God to put everything in order and make some semblance of sense of their lives.
There is a page that resonates with Camus’s reading of Kierkegaard. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio writes:
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? If such were the situation, if there were no sacred bond that knit humankind together, if one generation emerged after another like forest foliage, if one generation succeeded another like the singing of birds in the forest, if a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it—how empty and devoid of consolation life would be!3
And then comes the string of words that, for Camus, amount to philosophical suicide. Kierkegaard adds, “But precisely for that reason it is not so”; that is, there is a God who watches over us and therefore life is good.
It is a secular one, but I have a confession to make. One of my go-to narratives has long been that Kierkegaard came to my rescue at a time when I didn’t much care whether I lived or disappeared. Though dead for 150-plus years, Kierkegaard was a therapist of mine. Much of his therapy took the form of spurring me in the direction of taking faith more seriously. Forgive me, “Taking faith more seriously” rings as though I were referring to a thesis; that way of expressing it is dead wrong. Kierkegaard resurrected whatever vague longing it was that had me pedaling my bike to early morning mass fifty-five years ago. I am all too human, and once the minor miracle took place and my seas calmed, I tended to forget about the peace that I had prayed for and, to some extent, been granted.
Though dead for 150-plus years, Kierkegaard was a therapist of mine. Much of his therapy took the form of spurring me in the direction of taking faith more seriously.
Dostoyevsky defined human beings as “ungrateful bipeds.” Kierkegaard concurs. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard sketches a situation in which our worst nightmare materializes. We pray and are saved by what we think could only be a miracle, and then a few days or weeks later, we go back over the event and shrug, “Ah, it must have been a coincidence.”
For another example of the iron law of ingratitude: One night in the early 1970s, I had a sinuous six-footer rush down a block in Manhattan and, for reasons I will never understand, try to bash my brains in with a hefty Louisville Slugger. I was no brick-breaking black belt, but as the bat was about to crash into my skull, I snapped my forearm up and the bat splintered in half. Agog, my assailant sprinted off sure that Superman was on his trail. Shocked that I was still vertical, I was gratefully thinking, “Someone up there must have been watching over me.” The days passed, and rewinding the scene I slowly began to suspect that the miracle of the parting of the bat was just a lucky, freak accident.
Most of Kierkegaard’s Danish compadres thought of him as a brilliant but overwrought religious fanatic. Kierkegaard’s most outright rigorously religious works were published in the late 1840s and early 1850s—volumes such as Practice in Christianity and his Attack on Christendom. Even today, Danes tend to pooh-pooh these volumes as though they were the feverish product of a religious pathology. They are not alone, many if not most of the scholars who commit their intellectual lives to poring over Kierkegaard’s works use all their acumen trying to pry Kierkegaard’s psychological epiphanies away from their pietistic moorings. Even in this book, I am not entirely innocent of maneuvers intended to counter resistance to the religious. In a way, it is an odd testimony to Kierkegaard’s genius that he could speak to so many moderns/postmoderns who otherwise find talk of Christ silly and boorish. It would be as if evangelicals were to gain inspiration from Nietzsche or Marx.
To be sure, Kierkegaard is uplifting in his own right. He is able to catch us out in all our variegated acts of moral evasion. And yet the rat hole that he is most urgently concerned with plugging is that of neglecting our God relationship. If the depth psychologists are correct, and Kierkegaard was certainly one of them, then on many matters we can’t honestly say, “I believe this or that.” We are multilayered creatures who might think one thing at one level and something different at another, unconscious level. For all my sneering at the idea of the empty tomb, every time I have been shuddering in one of life’s foxholes, be it a near-fatal car crash, heart surgery, or cancer in the family, the doubts were muted and the paternosters were on my lips. Freudians would chuckle: “Of course they were. We all crave protection and reassurance.” Then again, it would be a genetic fallacy to conclude that because I want something to be true it must be false; just because my belief in God stems from a need for God, it doesn’t follow that God does not exist. On the other hand, my desire for protection is hardly positive evidence of an almighty protector. Back and forth I go like a doubly doubting Thomas, but where faith is concerned, the going forth has always been with Kierkegaard’s palm on my shoulder.
Were it not for Kierkegaard who, as a boy, was nicknamed “The Fork” for his ability to find a person’s weak spots and stick it to them, I doubt I would have stopped at church that afternoon. I doubt I would be whispering a prayer whenever the spirit and neurons move me. Every line of fracture in the vast edifice of Kierkegaard’s thought traces straight or zigzags back to God. When well performed, mockery is more effective than counterargument. Sometimes, it was just Kierkegaard’s sidelong glances, revealing the smug, spiritlessness of modern ways of thinking and being that lit a match under my shoe. Take this one, aimed at those who never give a thought to developing the continuity Kierkegaard associates with becoming your true self:
There is a story about a peasant who went barefooted to town with enough money to buy himself a pair of stockings and shoes and to get drunk, and in trying to find his way home in a drunken state, he fell asleep in the middle of the road. A carriage came along, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would drive over his legs. The drunken peasant woke up, looked over his legs and, not recognizing them because of the shoes and stockings, said: “Go ahead, they are not my legs.” 4
Kierkegaard’s supernal satirical abilities would not have been enough to prompt me to read the Bible for the first time in eons as something other than an “interesting” literature. More important than his daedal use of irony was his compelling understanding of what it means to try to be faithful.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard offers a reading of Genesis 22, the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac. Published in 1843, this work is aimed at retrieving what the then thirty-year-old Kierkegaard sometimes referred to as the “primitivity” of faith. Abraham is universally praised as the “father of faith” and yet he was poised to commit the most heinous crime. Through this tale of the binding of Isaac (known as the Akedah in the Jewish tradition), Kierkegaard attempts to prick awareness of the fact that faith is not all about cozy holiday gatherings; faith is something that both attracts and repels. Hearing a voice, Abraham believed that God had commanded him to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a sacrifice. If God’s edict did not create a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” that is, if God’s command did not allow for the suspension of morals, then, claims Kierkegaard, we should stop praising Abraham and call him what he is: “a murderer.” Fear and Trembling indirectly reveals that religion cannot be reduced to the ethical, since there was no ethical justification for what Abraham was poised to do. Raising the knife to slit his little boy’s throat was not something the “father of faith” intended for the greater good of the community. It was a private affair, or, as Kierkegaard states it, “Abraham did it for God’s sake and his own sake.” Abraham put himself, the individual, above the universal, above the community. He was willing to sacrifice Isaac, but the marvel is that because of God’s promise that Abraham’s offspring would be the head of many nations, Abraham fully expected to receive Isaac back; though, how so is far from clear.
Scrutinizing the same text, Kant commented that Abraham should have reasoned that it was more likely that Abraham was hearing voices and had gone off the deep end than that an all-good and all-powerful God would order him to murder his son! Though he deeply respected Kant, the Kierkegaard of Fear and Trembling did not portray the father of faith as someone whose life was guided by probability calculations. Like Job, Abraham was being tested by God, and like Job he aced the exam. Sensible people sensibly wonder what kind of sadistic deity would command a person to kill his son and then, as if he were only joking, retract the command.
Abraham’s movement of faith is “paradoxical” in that it is one of simultaneously giving up the world (Isaac) and expecting it back. This spiritual triple axel is a pure contradiction. Kierkegaard frequently brings to mind how big the little word “if” is, but if faith has any legitimacy and if we can use a spatial metaphor, faith is something beyond or to the side of reason. Since the movement of faith and, ultimately, its object are paradoxical, faith cannot be comprehended, which is tantamount to saying, that if faith has any validity, it cannot be unpacked in terms of reason; it cannot be understood as a set of stories for edification or as a kind of philosophy for dummies.
Many who have dismissively waved off the “God stuff” have been unable to tuck away their longing for “something deeper.” Some of these religiously skeptical seekers now look to philosophers as a priest class uniquely capable of opening the trapdoor to that deeper something. The shibboleth of the philosophers is “What is your argument?”
Sorry to disappoint, but there is no argument from Kierkegaard for faith. In fact, he warns that offering a defense of faith is a sin against faith, akin to offering a brief to prove that you love your spouse. Like an open window on a brisk autumn day, Kierkegaard’s honesty is singularly refreshing. In more ways than ten, Kierkegaard acknowledges that faith involves a collision with the understanding. He was clear that neither the ontological nor any other form of argument will turn the water of unbelief into the wine of faith. It is a truism, but for most of history humans invoked divinities to cope with enigmas now explained by science. As science advanced, the need for God ebbed, as though God were some type of theory. Kierkegaard thrived in an era of scientific efflorescence, and yet for him faith was not an explanation. He offers no objective reasons for turning your existence over to an invisible God. When St. Paul preached about Jesus and everlasting life to the Stoics, those paragons of reason laughed and suspected that Paul was drunk. From a Kierkegaardian point of view, they had a right to laugh. Christian faith is an offense to the understanding.
In more ways than ten, Kierkegaard acknowledges that faith involves a collision with understanding. He was clear that neither the ontological nor any other form of argument will turn the water of unbelief into the wine of faith.
Theologically speaking, one of Kierkegaard’s signal contributions was tethering the possibility of faith to the possibility of offense. Remember, Jesus begged those he encountered, “Do not be offended by me.” After all, there he was, a homeless man from the laboring class telling priests and others that he was the Son of God and—much more radical yet—that he could forgive sins. In his very flesh, Jesus was an insult to reason. For Kierkegaard, approaches to Jesus that abnegate this offense (à la Jesus was a sage with a message about teaching us to love one another) annul the need for and possibility of faith. Without offense, there would be no need for faith; there would be no need for anything other than knowledge. No pantheist, it is as if Kierkegaard construed offense as God’s way of keeping us at an arms distance, of telling us that while God is with us, there is also a chasmal difference between us, the difference between innocence and sin.
Today, we worship autonomy. Years ago, obedience was a quality that was always included among the virtues. No longer. If we find anything offensive today, it is the notion of being told what to do or who to be. In his The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard, the high priest of existentialism and choice, asserted that where there is no authority there is no obedience, and where there is no obedience there is no seriousness. Kierkegaard’s positive framing of authority and obedience provide such an untimely message that very few Kierkegaard devotees take note of it.
Theologically speaking, one of Kierkegaard’s signal contributions was tethering the possibility of faith to the possibility of offense. Without offense, there would be no need for faith; there would be no need for anything other than knowledge.
Readers who have hit the religion off switch will surely find Kierkegaard’s ruminations a kind of malarkey, but there is worse to come. The charge of narcissism is tossed around too freely these days; nevertheless, we live in an age that puts such inordinate emphasis on feeling good about yourself that one often has to be wary of offering even gently constructive criticism. And then comes Kierkegaard and his insistence that much more than needing a revelation to know that we are saved, we need an experience on the road to Damascus to know that we are sinners. We need a revelation to understand what it means that we are sinners. This is not exactly the power of positive thinking, but according to Kierkegaard, we need God to teach us how thoroughly depraved we are. Faith is the opposite of sin, and paradoxically it requires faith to understand we are sinners.
Know thyself? Not on our own. Maybe he was overwrought, but Kierkegaard no less than Dostoyevsky believed that self-transparency is impossible without faith. In addition to self-honesty, the self-knowledge that Socrates trumpeted demands thinking about your life in the correct categories. As I have argued, when we roll back our eyes and look inward, the way we tease apart our inner lives is largely determined by the concepts we use to identify those happenings in the private theater of our skull. If my ultimate categories of analysis are psychodynamic, I might interpret my nasty inner dialogues as the internalized voice of angry authority figures. From a neuroscientific point of view, I might read the same self-scarification process as an indication that my serotonin tank is low. From a Marxist perspective, my inner-directed rage might be understood as a reaction to exploitation and class differences. Seen through the prism of Kierkegaardian religious categories, a beastly attitude toward myself is probably best interpreted as a prideful refusal to let God in and accept forgiveness.
Again, there are different levels of self-understanding. I could understand the funk that I was in when I stopped to try to light a candle for my father as a function of both past experiences and neurochemistry. Who is to say what the right terms of self-understanding are? Who is to say what the ultimate categories for self-examination are? I can’t imagine what a decisive answer to that question might look like. It all depends on your presuppositions about the self.
Maybe he was overwrought, but Kierkegaard no less than Dostoyevsky believed that self-transparency is impossible without faith. In addition to self-honesty, the self-knowledge that Socrates trumpeted demands thinking about your life in the correct categories.
Philosophers from Hume onward regard the very idea of the self as bordering on a fiction. In sharp contrast, Kierkegaard is a true believer in the self as an entity and as a task. It is, Kierkegaard claimed, no surprise that there is no universal definition of the self because the self is a particular, and “no science can say what the self is without again stating it quite generally. And this is the wonder of life, that each man who is mindful of himself knows what no science knows, since he knows who he himself is.”5 It is our sacred and appointed duty “to become our true self,” which the Kierkegaard of The Sickness unto Death equates with becoming a true human being, a spirit. Again, the little word if, but if Kierkegaard is correct, we can’t wait for a nice, tidy definition of the self before taking up the task of trying to become ourselves. Take heed, says he, “The first thing to keep in mind is that every human being is an individual human being and is to become conscious of being an individual human being.”6 Here, however, is the Kierkegaardian rub: when you leave your relationship to God out of the picture, you can’t help but leave your true self out of the picture as well.
Once again, with regard to faith and everything else Kierkegaardian, the accent is on passion and action. In a famous passage from his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard asks the rhetorical question:
If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol—where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in truth to God although he is worshipping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is therefore in truth worshipping an idol.7
With regard to faith and everything else Kierkegaardian, the accent is on passion and action.
The pagan has more faith than the man who drags himself to church for appearance’s sake and goes back and forth between thoughtlessly mumbling prayers and trying to interpret the meaning of an ambiguous remark that his boss let fly on Friday. The pagan also has more faith than the fanatic who relates to his religious convictions as though they were scientific truths. As for that rigidly orthodox individual:
He talks of meeting before the throne of God and knows how many times one should bow. He knows everything, like the man who can prove a mathematical proposition when the letters are ABC, but not when the letters are DEF.8
In Postscript, Kierkegaard proclaims, “where there is certainty, there is no faith.” Or again, where there is certainty, there is no risk, and “where there is no risk, there is no faith.”
Though not so much with talking about Kierkegaard, there are enormous risks in taking Kierkegaard seriously in the personal, existential sense. To listen to Kierkegaard, becoming a follower of Christ means, well, trying to follow Christ. It means striving to imitate the life of Christ and so letting your attachments to the pleasure and laurels of this world die on the vine. Kierkegaard was up-front, even confessional, about the fact that it is one thing to poetize the movements of faith and quite another to make those movements. The Christian life that Kierkegaard beckons us to palls over some of the pleasures and thrills that we identify with feeling alive. Trying to address sex and sensuality from a spiritual point of view, Kierkegaard admits that when it comes to eros:
The spirit is indeed present . . . but it cannot express itself in the erotic. It feels itself a stranger. It says, as it were, to the erotic: My dear, in this I cannot be a third party; therefore I shall hide myself for the time being.9
Again, Christianity offers a cold hand to many of the joys and pleasures that seem to make life worth living. Indeed, one of the criticisms that Nietzsche leveled against Christianity was that it cultivated a suspicion about any- and everything connected with abundant pleasure.
In his famous “wager argument,” Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) reasoned that since belief in God tenders an infinite gain against a finite loss, faith is a betting man’s wager. Pascal did not imagine that belief itself would issue forth from the wager argument, but he hoped that it would at least convince people to go through the motions, taking the holy water and saying prayers. A behaviorist of sorts, Pascal believed that faith might follow along mechanically. While he held Pascal in high esteem, and is even sometimes described as “the Pascal of the North,” Kierkegaard was not taken in by Pascal’s reasoning.
Kierkegaard never used the exact phrase with which he has become nearly synonymous, that is, “the leap of faith.” Nevertheless, faith for him was a dreadfully dangerous leap in which you just might be carelessly ditching the only life you have. In the arc of the leap is the trust that we possess an eternal element. Today, many Christians explain that you do not need to believe or even have to try to believe in a life after death to count yourself among the flock. These same folks, many of them members of the clergy, will quote St. Paul, and yet it was St. Paul who proclaimed, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”
In Miguel de Unamuno’s previously mentioned novella Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr, the protagonist and priest Don Manuel lives a Christ-like existence, tirelessly tending to his mountain village flock. Though he conceals his doubts from the villagers, Don Manuel cannot bring himself to believe that there is any hope beyond this life. Because of his certainty about the finality of death, Don Manuel sees himself as an imposter and an apostate. Was he right?
Belief in the hereafter offends reason. It takes a powerful imagination to cleave to the idea expressed in The Sickness unto Death that “Christianly understood . . . death is by no means the last of all; in fact, it is only a minor event within that which is all, an eternal life.” Christianly understood, mindfulness classes won’t do it; your inner peace is one thing, believing that you have an eternal element is another something that whispers you need “to die to this world” to come alive. No wonder the Stoics enjoyed a good belly laugh at Paul. Maybe it is too much, too improbable, and too risky, and yet Kierkegaard wags a finger that there is grave spiritual risk to being risk averse.
To return to the question that greeted me outside the church door—is faith something we passively lose, or is it something we tell ourselves we lose but un- or half-consciously push away? To be sure, there are millions who shruggingly dismiss faith as nonsense; millions who proudly proclaim that they have no need of God now or when they end up in the ICU. As the late Kierkegaard scholar David Kangas explained, the need for God for Kierkegaard is unlike other needs in that it does not reveal a lack. The need for God is a human being’s highest perfection. It is a gift of the condition necessary for receiving the gift of faith in God. This sophisticated bit of exegesis is not likely to change the mind of someone convinced that it is tragic that so many otherwise rational beings could be taken in by such a patently false illusion as God.
For the holy fools who hanker for faith, feelings and convictions wax and wane. A few days ago, I had to spend hours with a petulant individual who set my jaw on edge and made my skin crawl. I literally prayed for a soul softening. To my surprise, the afternoon spent together was almost pleasant. Driving home, I was musing that it felt as though someone had reached in and changed my heart. For a couple of hours, quirks that might have transformed me into the figure in Munch’s famous painting The Scream were suddenly, miraculously, easy to gloss over and let pass. I also speculated about how difficult it is to detect miracles that only occurred inwardly. We always picture the miraculous as walking on water or healing the blind; how about as opening the sluices of loving feelings?
The decisive question about faith is how we relate to our beliefs and feelings. When you lack all conviction, do you chase after it or throw up your hands and say, “Thank God I have outgrown those superstitions”? But for not-so-holy fools like the present author, it seems perfectly fitting to pray to a God you don’t believe in for faith in God. Dostoyevsky taught that the worry about faith is faith, and Kierkegaard, who likened prayer to listening to God, remarked, “Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.”
I suppose I should be chary of pinning this conviction on Kierkegaard, but in the decades I have spent hacking through the teeming jungle of his thoughts, I have come to think of faith as trust, the kind you might have in a friend or loved one. Where knowledge and a lack of certainty are the rule, trust would seem the most appropriate term. When existence slams the door on our fingers, we either wince and try to sustain trust in God, or we let go of him, as though God were a friend who betrayed us. But if we lose our faith, it is on purpose; it is our own doing.
But for not-so-holy fools like the present author, it seems perfectly fitting to pray to a God you don’t believe in for faith in God. I have come to think of faith as trust, the kind you might have in a friend or loved one.