THESE ARE THE PAGES Max read in the pub. I have followed Max’s advice, and retained all references to Jane, to our marriage, and the Islington flat, where I originally wrote this passage:
Kierkegaard was an awful prig, how could he not be; his name essentially means “churchyard” in Danish. He is always amassing all the qualities that make Christianity hateful—its cruelty, asceticism, the impossible challenge of imitating Christ—and then shouting out: And this is exactly why you must follow Christ! For instance, he writes that Christianity is rooted in the concept of sin, and this strikes even him as too severe. But, too bad, he says. Christianity is severe. Socrates thought of sin as ignorance of the good; but Kierkegaard thinks this was too generous of Socrates. Christianity, he says, knows that we sin in two ways: we sin willfully; and secondly we are all inheritors of original sin. The Churchyard admits that original sin is a hateful idea—“the Christian doctrine of sin is nothing but insolent disrespect of man, accusation upon accusation”—and writes that “a man sitting in a glass case is not so constrained as is each human in his transparency before God.” These are beautiful words, and over the years I have often thought of this poor man in the glass case being watched by God, which merges in my mind with something I read about Momus, the god of ridicule, who wished that a glass case could be installed
in the breast of man so that his heart could be seen (a vile image!). Yes, these are beautiful words, suffused with anger against God, against the disrespect of the idea of sin, against the awful glassy transparency of our relationship with God.
And what does Kierkegaard do, of course, but, like a man eating black beetles or sheeps’ testicles and then stubbornly pronouncing them delicious, turns and says: But this is exactly why we must be Christians!
But nothing is worse than the passage entitled “The Edifying in the Thought That Against God We Are Always in the Wrong,” at the end of Either/Or, which surely represents The Churchyard’s own horrible thoughts. Kierkegaard says that we are always more loved by God than we can possibly love Him, and this (combined with the fact that we are always sinful) means that “against God we are always in the wrong.” We should want this wrongness, he says, it is edifying. His analogy is with ordinary love. If I really love my wife, and she does me a wrong, says The Churchyard, I will be unhappy because I am suddenly made to be in the right and she in the wrong. In fact, if I really love her, I will want to exchange places with her, so that suddenly she is made to be in the right and I in the wrong.
It’s true that when Jane sometimes makes a verbal error (the other night she made “hoi polloi” sound like the elite), or puts a philosopher in the wrong century, I have a momentary urge to correct her, which then passes and is replaced with a stronger desire to say nothing at all, as if the error were my mistake. Kierkegaard may be right about this: perhaps because I love her I do not want to be in the right against Jane, which is painful, but rather in the wrong against her, which is less painful. I’m writing this in Islington,
while lying on our bed. Looking at the bed, at the two sides, hers and mine, I ask myself: Why is it that Jane’s side is always fragrant, cool, creaseless, as if she has hardly slept there, while my side seems to have been monstrously inhabited in the night, with trapped smells, crushed pillows, and sheets cast with hairs? How delicious it is to lean over onto her side, and breathe into her perfumed pillow. Yes, yes, I think, the Dane is very wise, one wants to change places with the person one loves, because one is in the wrong and she is so often in the right. One longs to be right.
But that isn’t what Kierkegaard says. He argues that I should want to exchange places with Jane not because I am in the wrong and want to be with her in the right, but because I should want to be in the wrong against her. He envisages an ideal world in which, if Jane said, “Spinoza was German, wasn’t he?” I, feeling horribly in the right, would not only not correct her, but would take the mistake on as my own, and murmur in reply, “My mistake, my mistake.” And she would do likewise if I claimed that Berlioz was Spanish.
That is what our relation with God should be like. With this great difference, says Kierkegaard: we should not think, “God is always right, therefore I am always in the wrong.” Instead, we should think, “I am always in the wrong, therefore God is always in the right.” He loves us more than we can ever love Him, and we do not deserve that love and we must rejoice in the gorgeous injustice of it, the swollenness of this top-heavy fraction, and simply say to ourselves again and again, “Against God we are always in the wrong.”
Doesn’t Kierkegaard’s “love” sound rather like hate? He is exactly like Simone Weil in this regard. Couldn’t we substitute
“hate” for every use of “love” in Kierkegaard’s (or Weil’s) work, and get a more accurate picture of the world? God hates us more than we can hate Him, and we do not deserve that hate, and therefore against God we are always in the wrong. Kierkegaard wants us to go about muttering, “My mistake, my mistake,” while God lets His earthquakes and Holocausts and famines rage, all the while saying whatever nonsense God feels He wants to say: “Plato was English,” perhaps, or “the Holocaust never happened, I, the Almighty, great Jehovah, deny it.” (Yes, God would have a very good reason to be the first Holocaust-denier.) Kierkegaard’s idea of our relations with God reminds me of a story told by Cicero and several other classical authors, one of those exemplary stories offered as a model of Stoical self-control. Archytas, the owner of a vineyard, discovered that slaves on his estate had behaved offensively and disobediently, and then, realizing that he was feeling too wound up and violent towards them, stopped himself doing anything, except to say mildly, as he walked by them, “You’re lucky I’m angry with you.”
Well, that’s our relationship with God in brief, isn’t it? Archytas’s idea of “luck” is not far from Kierkegaard’s, is it? We are “lucky” that God is angry with us, “lucky” that He made us, and even when we have not behaved badly in the vineyard and have done nothing bad at all, we should still bow and scrape, and murmur, like my father’s poor parishioners going down on their knees, “My mistake, my mistake, I am lucky that You are angry with me”—all because Adam, who was anyway created by this hateful tyrant and might not have wanted to be created, this poor Adam, ate the luckless apple. Oh when will humans murder this devilish concept of God? For is God really any more dead now than when
Nietzsche told us He was a hundred or so years ago? Until that final day, that real day of murder, of cancellation, of blissful clearing, the holiday of life, an emptied sabbath of repose—until that moment, I propose instead an edifying inversion of Kierkegaard: “the edifying in the thought that against us God is always in the wrong.”