MAKING THE ARGUMENT FOR ORTHODOX CRISTIANITY (3)
Soren Kierkegaard,
“The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle” (1) [Part one]
Por Manuel Sumares
The presence, whether implied or explicit, of Scripture in the writings of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is found throughout. He is generally recognised as religious author, and it is hardly surprising that the Bible have a preponderant role in how God, man, and the world would be interpreted (2). In fact, his way of reading Scripture stands as an antidote to the more distanced and scholarly approaches that, nowadays, is often marked by a critical hermeneutics sensitive to the work of the text itself and the decisions implied in producing them. Kierkegaard’s approach is, on the contrary, direct and passionate. For God effectively speaks in Scripture and, on the basis of a personal relationship, engages and transforms the believing heart (3). In regard to the Pauline corpus as such, it cannot, however, be said that the Apostle’s letters have a privileged role among the biblical references in Kierkegaard’s works. They are certainly there but, more often than not, associated with other sources of biblical inspiration (4). Even Kierkegaard’s meditation on Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac in Fear and Trembling cannot be taken as an analogue to Paul’s argument for Abraham’s position as father of believers, be they Jewish or Gentile. Kierkegaard’s problem, then and nearly always, has fundamentally to do with Hegel’s system that would assimilate the content of Revelation into developing historical forms of Reason and the pernicious effect it has had on the Christian Church (5). It was rather the liberal Protestantism that dominated intellectual fashion of his time, as well as the following generations, and largely conformed to the ideal of an organic rational systematisation of human history, that constitutes Kierkegaard’s target. Thus, in spite of the fact that Kierkegaard’s Abraham has persistently fascinated subsequent commentators, who might read into it something of the author’s psychological make-up, or something to do with the sacrifice of the engagement to be married with Regina Olsen, or still something of the irrationality of the Christian faith itself, we should resist the temptation to read it together with Paul’s own view of Abraham’s importance. Again, Paul’s Abraham is principally the father of believers and, because his covenant with God came before the Mosaic Law, both Jews and Gentiles can look toward him as the model of trust and the recipient of a standing promise that, through his progeny, the nations of the world will be blessed (6). The matters of trust and obedience need necessarily be present in any account of Abraham’s meaning for the biblical faiths, but the issues contained in Kierkegaard’s versions of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and Paul’s doctrinal proposals are simply different.
This said, Kierkegaard and Paul do, nevertheless, converge thematically around the notion of apostleship. And we can say this confidently, because Kierkegaard explicitly places Paul at the centre of a meditation between the difference between a genius and an apostle. Moreover, there is the more generic, albeit implicit, identification of Kierkegaard’s mission with that of Paul’s: the latter was chiefly to the manifestly pagan Gentiles beyond the borders of Palestine; the former to the effective pagans within Christendom, especially those in the Denmark of his time, who claim that they are Christians. True apostleship will entail the breaking the illusion of autonomy by radical decision and commitment to the God who came in Christ Jesus. Obedience and the authority of God’s word become the ignored factors that need to be integrated in those who seek to conform to Christ, becoming thereby who they are meant to be. Paul’s doctrine and Kierkegaard’s “psychological” incursions in the life of the spirit are very much about that.
Moreover, both Kierkegaard and the Apostle are authors, i.e., they produced texts that wished simultaneously to recuperate and project for themselves and others the implications of the paradoxical nature of human being before the mystery that is Christ (7). The accent will be, however, slightly different in each case: for Kierkegaard it will be focused on the implications of the Incarnation, the God/ Man, the eternal in time, the reality of Christianity itself; for Paul, the paradox will be centred on the Cross of His Christ, “the wisdom of God” (8). Significantly, Kierkegaard, who never shows interest in (or, for that matter, respect for) scholarly exegesis, reads one into the other. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he writes that Christianity “has proclaimed itself as the Paradox, and it has required of the individual the inwardness of faith in relation to that which stamps itself as an offence to the Jews and a folly to the Greeks – and an absurdity to the understanding” (9). Implying that the non-individual knows nothing of such inwardness, the individual’s passionate concern with existence calls for an inner-decision before what the mind can only perceive as a scandal and a stumbling block. Yet the decision that will bring him into the economy of grace that comes in Christ is part and parcel of an education, a becoming that needs to break through the abstract claims of reason and to reclaim a concrete, existential relationship with the living God. Through the paradox, through reason’s own passion, through the implicit darkness that it entails, Transcendence is re-inscribed in human existence as part of the process of becoming righteous before God. The apostle’s particular gift in return for the grace received consists both in the retelling of the story and the will-to-edify, to build-up, that which is fallen, and in the re-writing of personal existence.
In the following I should like to make more explicit this relationship between apostleship and the assuming of the risk before the incomprehensible paradox. We could rightly speak of “the Way of the Paradox,” for it can be seen as the necessary passage to salvation. However, the assumption is that people may arrive at the stage of awareness whereby they realise that being saved is indeed an issue to contend with. Clearly, this awareness must be reached before the reckoning about where salvation can be found can proceed. Coupled with this problematic is the human propensity to take on the task of salvation in merely human terms, to subsume the paradox into the potential human discourse and evaluate it in accordance with it own logic. The kind of response given to such a problematic will rest on what one considers the transforming instance: does the paradox, to wit, the Cross or the Incarnation, transfigure human understanding and discourse, or is it – as the secular spirit encourages – the other way around, i.e., that the paradox may be in time explained away? Somewhere down the line, a choice about these two possibilities will need to be made. At the end of the day, for Kierkegaard, it is either/ or.
It is in the context of this alternative that we can locate the Kierkegaardian concern with the inwardness. Are we presently still capable of receiving the divine gift not of our own making and maintain, like the apostles, a contemporaneous relationship with Christ beyond the “ugly, broad ditch” of history? This concept, advanced by G.E. Lessing (1729-81), became a famous one in matters dealing with the faith one might have in the biblical text and was attractive to Kierkegaard (10). An issue that would have been very much alive in the Protestant circle of the time, it claims that the tenets of Christianity cannot be validated by reason and the search for historical verification can never be conclusive. We are, once again, left with a choice: either a qualitative leap of faith over the insurmountable divide (or ditch), or an accommodation to human reason. This dilemma provides the context for Kierkegaard’s view of Paul and true apostleship and how the locus of authority needs to be situated precisely in what it is that made Paul the Apostle.
To begin to appreciate “The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle” (1847), it might be important to underscore the high esteem that the Apostle Paul tends to have notably for Lutheran and Calvinist Christians. The letters to the Romans and Galatians loom especially large in their commitment to the doctrine of justification by faith, one of the things that – it was thought – distinguished them from the practices of the Roman Church. Now, focusing on the nationalistic Lutheran Church that Kierkegaard found in his milieu, the doctrine of justification by faith was not merely a teaching aimed at avoiding the potentially idolatrous seeking of merit through works, but, in effect, a slogan for divorcing faith from practice. In other words, the Church has, in fact, been an obstacle to the obedience required in discipleship to follow the path laid out by the Christ and to practice His teachings. Complicit with the influence of Hegelianism among the Church authorities, the tendency was to soften the demands of the Gospel by packaging them in accepting “aesthetic” forms. For example, preaching would be judged as performance; Paul’s writings would be seen for its brilliant conceptualisation of what the Gospels were supposed to mean. No wonder then that a subtle slippage would occur in regard to the decisive formative instances of Christianity. Somehow – as we shall see shortly in the example of Nietzsche and the more recent one of A. N. Wilson – the origins of Christianity will be displaced from the life and teachings of the God/ Man to the “genius” of Paul of Tarsus, formerly Saul the Pharisee.
In Kierkegaard’s essay per se, we find an early warning that what he is about to discuss in terms of “erroneous exegesis and speculative thought” is not so much a question of heterodoxy but one of “ultra-orthodoxy and of thoughtlessness generally” (11). Both the excessive formality and the lack of attentive thinking guided by faith have resulted in the displacement from the domain of the paradoxical-religious to the aesthetic and, thereby a prostitution of the Christian faith. This is tantamount to saying that the irreducible encounter with the paradox has suffered a discursive translation into manageable terms. This makes for the contemplation and evaluation of it according to categories that constitute its effective reduction of the original status that it once had. In this perspective, the apostle is no longer characterised by his being sent out in obedience to a unique calling. After so much scholarly work in the ecclesiastical context, the apostle has emerged as a kind of genius. Of course, Paul represents the prime example:
They speak in lofty tones about the Apostle Paul’s brilliance, profundity, about his beautiful metaphors, etc., -- sheer aesthetics. If Paul is to be regarded as a genius, then it looks bad for him; only pastoral ignorance has no criterion but thinks like this: If only one says something good about Paul, then it is all right. … Such thoughtless eloquence could equally well hit upon the idea of praising Paul as a stylist and an artist with words or, even better, since it is well known that Paul also carried on a trade, claim that his work as a tent maker must have been such a perfect masterwork that no tapestry maker, either before or later, has been able to make anything so perfect – since, if only one says something good about Paul, everything is all right (12).
This centring on Paul’s creative capacity has produced a legacy that goes quite beyond the place that he has come to occupy in the Protestant mind. Once disengaged from his dramatic calling on the road to Damascus, centred as it was on the vision of the resurrected Lord Jesus, Paul becomes a point of reference unto himself. To him will be attributed the actual founding of the Christian Church and to him will be allocated both the blame and the praise. It is the very Church founded on Paul’s outstanding talents that will have filtered out the reality of Jesus of Nazareth so that the Church’s own agenda of power and influence might proceed. As Nietzsche would famously put it in the Antichrist: only one Christian ever existed and he died on the Cross.
To a substantial measure, Kierkegaard will have agreed with this as far as the Church is concerned. And, also, we as individuals should do well to think of ourselves only as becoming Christians. However, the problem for him lies chiefly in the modern spirit, i.e., its resistance to the faith and obedience that characterise true apostleship. In its stead, it increasingly gives special attention and credence to human creators of culture – religious culture included. In this latter sense, Paul will be seen as a major actor on the stage of Western history and is to be assessed for what he has wrought.
Of course, according to Nietzsche’s well-known critique of Christianity, on Paul’s shoulders rests the responsibility for a large part of the moral sickness with which Western civilisation is afflicted. The Good News is really Bad News, a Dys-angelium, instead of a Ey-angelium, for it is fundamentally hateful of reality and the play of instincts. How did it all start? Paul the genial systematiser took upon himself the task of organising the hallucinations of the first Christians about the Resurrection of Jesus and presented a case for the possibility of personal immortality. In the Antichrist, Nietzsche sees in this a power play on the part of an insolent rabbi whose quest for power led him to invent and manipulate doctrines and symbols around the Crucifixion and Resurrection so that he might convince the worst kind of humanity into coming into his spell. If Saul the Pharisee had any kind of revelation on the way to Damascus, it was how effective the lie about personal immortality can be, especially for the weaker part of humanity. He and the Church that he founded transformed the resentment of the masses into their principal weapon. This resentment would be used against all that is all that is noble and affirmative of life’s most intense creative instincts. It is thus that Christianity became humanity’s great disgrace as it gradually slid into being a political movement, infesting humanity with the poisonous notion of equality and inciting all that crawls to insurrection against that which is truly elevated.
Whilst many of Nietzsche’s complaints still find an echo in contemporary writings and are part of a general wish to root the human phenomenon within the rhythms of impersonal nature, the animus against Paul as a perverse genius is not currently so much in evidence. Under the auspices of authors like Richard Rorty, Paul would be a notable example of a “strong poet,” a maker of new metaphors and more effective conceptual tools before the challenge of changing times (13). In the case of Paul, the Apostle demonstrated his creativity by re-contextualising what he found in the Rabbinic Judaism of his time and by founding as a result the Christian Church. Within the framework of this kind of thinking, the work of the intellectual biographer, novelist, and historian, A. N. Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle is particularly useful. For one thing his sources are generally a mix of certain Pauline scholars, New Testament, historians and liberal biblical theologians. For another, he manages to extend Kierkegaard’s observations about Paul the genius well into our time. This includes the apparently enlightened idea that Paul and not Jesus created what we call Christianity and the Church that promotes it in the course of history (14). Jesus, it is argued, lived immersed in a Jewish milieu; for his part, Paul had a wider world, but also had the poetic gift of projecting on the cosmos the inner conflicts that haunted his soul.
In regard to Paul’s genius, Wilson emphasises the importance of Paul as an author writing in Greek for a public that extended beyond the frontiers of Palestine. Given the eventual influence of his literary production and the nature of his “vigorous” writing style, Wilson goes on – effectively confirming Kierkegaard’s insight -- to state that, “Any history of Greek literature which omitted him would be an incomplete work” (15). Indeed, on the grand stage of human civilisation upon which ideas circulate and shape the imagination of humankind, Paul (along with Philo of Alexandria) had the special merit of introducing the Gentiles to the Jewish way of conceiving creation and the need of its salvation. In fact, he did more than that: he established a system that Wilson thinks is radically deterministic, one that significant figures like Marcion, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Kierkegaard tried to seize upon without succeeding in taking entirely on board the consequence that “the human will has no freedom” (16). God will dispense and withhold his righteousness in accord to His own will and human beings are left only to trust in it. But it is especially the letter to the Romans, “the Gospel according to Paul,” that will place Paul among the world’s great strong poets. Differently than the canonical Gospels, the great epistle delves into the essence of religion itself before the suffering and “muddle” of the human condition. For Wilson,
Romans, one should emphasise, is not a work of philosophy. It is more like a poem than it is like a work of logic, but it touches upon the deepest metaphysical questions which any of us can ask, and it posits some of the reasons why it continues to exercise a fascination upon anyone who is interested in religious questions. /…/ For it is the most interesting, as well as the most impenetrably difficult, book about ‘religion’ ever written (17).
Wilson’s high praise for Paul’s creative genius and cultural achievement is, however, not attributable to a divine calling coming from a transcendent source. As we shall see, such a source is the principal criterion for apostleship in Kierkegaard’s view. The matter for Wilson lies principally in the extraordinary impact that the crucifixion had on the mind of Paul. On this score, he resorts to an imaginative construal of how the Crucifixion of Jesus caused a profound psychological disturbance in Paul. He speculates that it might have begun when Paul was a temple guard and witnessed the actual Crucifixion, as he would be in charge of the persecution of the followers of the Way. The author discounts Luke’s overly neat account of the Apostle’s conversion in favour of Paul’s own in Galatians 1:11-17. Captive by his obsession with the manner of death of this man that some hoped to be the Messiah come to save Israel, Paul felt that received a revelation and a mission from the Risen Jesus. Wilson describes the event as one by which Paul was totally won over and transformed by the object of his obsession and, in order to cope with it, he was driven to preach and write about it -- such was the power it had over him.
Wilson makes Paul appear as a writer – like, one is tempted to say, Wilson himself in relation to a faith that he refuses yet cannot stop thinking about -- who just has to deal with what it is that disturbs him most. Before his dilemma, he could have continued in persecution of it, but, no, he ultimately yields to the disturbance in his mind to such an extent that he becomes entirely identified with what produced it in the first place.
The Crucifixion became the focus of Paul’s obsessive religious attention. In the course of thirty years he would mythologise it and try to come to terms with its sublime, blood-curdling boasting. The one who died on the Cross was alive. Jesus lived. In the mind of the Romanised Jew, the tormented Pharisee, the temple guard and tentmaker for the legions, it was Paul himself who was nailed to that instrument of torture, Paul who died, Paul who suffered, Paul who rose (18).
Finally, the Crucifixion is not merely a low point to be later compensated by a glorious Resurrection. In Paul’s mind, the Cross, upon which Jesus hung, constitutes the symbol of God’s mysterious purposes, indeed God’s wisdom, an insight into the divine workings that transform personalities. But it is no longer especially the religion of Jesus the Jew. It is equally not how Paul’s fellow apostle, Peter, would have conceived the effect of Jesus’ teachings and deeds on Judaism. It is rather the religion of Paul, the tenets of which consist in the certainty of our unworthiness before a perfect God, but also the atoning sacrifice of His Christ to make up for the difference and to celebrate the promise of the Resurrection and eternal life with God. Moreover, the scheme, linking together the passion, death, and resurrection, has a heuristic status, for it reveals to us the pattern that is at work in both the world and in us. It is this Pauline Christianity that eventually became the norm for the Church that emerged and dominated. “While the Petrines, the Palestinians, clung to the memory of Jesus, Paul was able to apply as a universalised creed the perceptions of heaven which were perhaps Jesus’ own: the confidence that each individual could turn to God as to a Father and meet a response of love” (19).
[Second part in the next month]
(1) This essay was first published in Teologia e Humanistic XXX, 1, 2009, with the title, “Kierkegaard on Paul: Either Genius / or Apostle.”
(2) Toward the end of his own life, Kierkegaard deemed it necessary to leave for posterity the assurance that even his first works, such as Either/ Or and Fear and Trembling, marked by “indirect communication,” were written under the same religious impulse as the so-called, “Second Literature,” beginning around 1846-47 and straightforwardly religious in nature. See, The Point of View of My Work as Author. In regard to the biblical references and allusions in Kierkegaard’s works, Scripture in the Thought of Soren Kierkegaard by L. Joseph Rosas III (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994) deals rather completely with this theme.
(3) For the particularity of Kierkegaard’s hermeneutics, cf., Timothy Houston Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith (Macon, Georgia: Mercer Univ. Press, 1997.
(4) In his study, Rosas makes the generalisation that the Old Testament plays a greater role in the earlier works. In the later ones, he underscores the “obvious preference for the Synoptic Gospels,” while citing also the frequent use of the Fourth Gospel. Ignoring unfairly whatever input Paul might have had, he also notes the referencing of the Book of James in the Second Literature (p. 144). In fact, this can be noticed in Works of Love. Now, this is interesting, for it reveals an indifference to Luther’s suspicion of this book’s canonicity. On occasion, we shall note Kierkegaard’s ambivalent relationship with (the frankly Pauline) Martin Luther, something not quite as simple as the outright rejection of the established Lutheran Church in Denmark. But Kierkegaard’s independent recuperation of “works” is significant, as I shall make note below in the essay.
(5) For a clear presentation of Kierkegaard’s critique of the Church at the end of his life, see David Law’s “Kierkegaard’s Anti-Ecclesiology: The Attack on ‘Christendom’, 1854-1855” in International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church Vol. 7, Number 2, May 2007.
(6) In Galatians 4:21-5:1, Paul constructs an allegory around the meaning of Abraham’s literal sons, Isaac (born of Sarah) and Ishmael (born of the slave Hagar). From Isaac, the sons of promise will come. Paul exhorts the Galatians to think of themselves as such and not to succumb to the bondage of the Jewish Law.
(7) For Kierkegaard, the mystery of Christianity is paradoxical because the claims of Christ cannot be approached by intellectual scrutiny. It can only be done so by faith.
(8) Kierkegaard’s late interest in Luther’s writings and the possible reading of the latter’s theology of the Cross in conjunction with Kierkegaard’s religious thinking are treated in Craig Hinkson’s “Luther and Kierkegaard: Theologians of the Cross” in International Journal of Systematic Theology Vol. 3, Number 1, March 2001. Beyond this, it is entirely possible to speak in terms of a theology of the Cross in Paul’s epistles.
(9) Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, edited and translated by Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), p. 91. This is based on 1 Corinthians 1: 23-24 which reads, “/…/ but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
(10) Kierkegaard would have inherited the problematic in relation to religious faith not only from Lessing but also from Kant: reason is one thing; faith is another. But a more appreciated figure from that generation of the antecedent century would have been J. G. Hamann who, though friendly with Kant, was unstinting in his attacks on rationalism. A man of great learning and wit, Hamann was also solidly biblical in his beliefs – traits that would have endeared him to Kierkegaard. Cf. Walter Lowie, “Johan Georg Hamann: An Existentialist,”—Princeton Pamphlets, nº 6, (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1950).
(11) Soren Kierkegaard, “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle” in Without Authority, Kierkegaard’s Writings, XVIII, Edited and Translated by Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), p. 93. The origins of the essay seem to be in the fascination that Kierkegaard had with the case of Adolf Peter Adler, a pastor who began to espouse Hegelianism but abandoned it after receiving – he thought at the time – a revelation. After an eventual recanting of the experience, Adler attributed it to his genius. Adler’s confusion between genius and inspiration led not only to a direct attack on Adler’s position by Kierkegaard but also to this mediation on true apostleship.
(12) Kierkegaard, “The Difference ….”, pp. 93-94.
(13) In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty does see Paul in this light. The idea of the strong poet comes from Harold Bloom who believes that strong poets are anxious about living under the influence of past poets; they then aspire to create a poetic space that reflects the uniqueness of their personality.
(14) A. N. Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (New York: Norton, 1997). Decisive among fairly recent Pauline scholarship in the English language and used by Wilson are works are those by W. D. Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism), E. P. Sanders (Paul and Palestinian Judaism), Michael Goulder (A Tale of Two Missions), and Maurice Wiles (The Divine Apostle). But equally decisive, in conformity with the interest to set Paul as deeply as possible within the Jewish and Hellenic setting of his upbringing and many of his activities, are Jewish scholars, Hiram Maccoby (Paul and Hellenism) and Geza Vermes (The Religion of Jesus the Jew). (A convincing rebuttal of Wilson’s interpretation of Paul can found in N. T. Wright’s (What Paul Really Said.)) A passionate and informed observer of the religious problematic in contemporary times, Wilson declares himself to be an atheist who is, nevertheless, impressed with the persistence of the Christian faith even in these its death throes. For example, “Just as Nietzsche’s generation were declaring the death of God and Thomas Hardy was witnessing His burial, religious thinkers as varied as Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nicholas Berdayev and Teihard de Chardin were waiting in the wings.” God’s Funeral (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 354.
(15) A. N. Wilson, Paul..., p. 28.
(16) A. N. Wilson, Paul..., p. 84. It ought to be noted that the listing of those who follow closely upon the thinking of Paul are, once we go beyond Augustine, Protestant Christians. As we know, Marcion was deemed to be a heretic, and Luther and Calvin both laid claim to Augustine’s teachings on predestination, original sin, and unmerited grace.
(17) A. N. Wilson, Paul..., p. 194.
(18) A. N. Wilson, Paul..., p. 60.
(19) A. N. Wilson, Paul..., p. 239. In a companion work, Jesus: A Life (New York: Norton, 1991), Wilson already credits Paul for the inventing and founding of Christianity (p,22). There will be enough in what he proposed to provide the basis of both Catholic and Protestant ramifications of Christianity. However, part of the argument involves an explication of how different Paul’s version was from Peter’s and James’: “For Peter, James, and the other followers of the ‘Way’, as they called Jesus’ particular brand of Judaism, Jesus was the last great prophet misunderstood like all of his predecessors, but speaking quite centrally within the main body of Judaism. It was out of Paul’s confrontation with Jesus that there dawned the idea that Judaism had to be overturned. (p. 38)”