Kierkegaard's Works of Love, Sickness Unto Death, and Practice in Christianity

I'm finally running out of Kierkegaard to read, coming to the end of my stack of scholarly paperbacks purchased at a bulk discount from a San Diego bookstore five or so years ago. They're all in good shape except for a few places where the plastic coating the covers is peeling up, and the pages are clean aside from a handful in each book, distributed more or less randomly as far as I can tell, where a previous owner meticulously highlighted and underlined (in some cases multiple times in different colors of pen) a few sentences from among the thousands of pages of pseudonymous authorship. In the margins, this discerning reader abbreviated other titles to confer, and in some of the indices even added page numbers or entries that the editors missed including. I guess anyone who buys and tries to read this much Kierkegaard is bound to be a little weird.

As I've gotten a little behind on my posts, I thought I'd try to bring together some reflections on all three books I've read since last checking in here: Works of Love, The Sickness Unto Death, and Practice in Christianity. This lapse of time, though, means that I remember even less than usual what it was I supposedly read. For one small example, I spent about an hour the other week trying to find a passage about the way Christianity pins something to the end of something else, which Farder Coram's description of the spy-fly in ch 9 of The Golden Compass reminded me of, but I couldn't even figure out which book it came from. Maybe some astute listener will be able to find it someday. I don't like to mark up my books, but I'd make an exception for tracking that passage down at last.

A friend suggested that I make a podcast about Kierkegaard, the way I'm doing with EarthBound, Pullman, and so on, but I can only do so much at once, so it will have to wait for another time. He was writing a rock opera about him, and that seems like a good way to go--a kind of radio drama, with musical interludes, mixing biographical and philosophical aspects of the author's life and his work. But it wouldn't hurt to give everything at least a first read before undertaking something like that, fun as it sounds.

Maybe I'm biased after sinking so many hours into reading this stuff, but it really seems to me that a project like that, bringing more readers to Kierkegaard, more listeners to his ideas, could serve an important role in the society he didn't live to see, but so eerily anatomizes in his writing.

Here's a passage the mysterious previous owner had underlined in yellow, which I also thought was pretty good:

Christ was the fulfilling of the Law. How this thought is to be understood we are to learn from him, because he was the explanation, and only when the explanation is what it explains, when the explainer is what is explained, when the explanation [Forklaring] is the transfiguration [Forklarelse], only then is the relation the right one. Alas, we are unable to explain in this way. If we can do nothing else, we can learn humility from this in relation to God. Our earthly life, which is frail and infirm, must separate explaining and being, and this weakness of ours is an essential expression of how we relate to God...And now since people are so eager to be something, it is no wonder that however much they talk about God's love they are reluctant to become really involved with him, because his requirement and his criterion reduce them to nothing. (WL 101; by this, the page 110 is indicated, and below, my esteemed precursor has written metanoia. On 110, by the line "This is the way Christianity came into the world; with Christianity came the divine explanation of what love is" is written the number 101, closing the infinite loop, turning and turning.)

Later, a passage the author emphasizes with italics, I thought was staggering, though there's no additional markings around it, nor for many pages in either direction:

The one who loves presupposes that love is in the other person's heart and by this very presupposition builds up love in him--from the ground up, provided, of course, that in love he presupposes its presence in the ground. (216)

Like the Upbuilding Discourses, Works of Love is one of the few books Kierkegaard released under his own name as author, and one of the few overtly confessing Christianity. The degree to which his life is subsumed in his writing, his love for people in his love for God, comes through as much in these earnest deliberations, which ostensibly reflect his real beliefs, as in his poetic creations of pseudonyms, which vary and play with the same themes from a multiplicity of perspectives. He earlier put his Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript under the pen-name Johannes Climacus; the next two books after Works of Love both carry the name Anti-Climacus. Where JC is preternaturally honest and abides in doubt, AC is authoritative, demanding, a quixotic knight of faith.

The Socratic definition works out in the following way. When someone does not do what is right, then neither has he understood what is right...But wherein is this definition defective?...it lacks a dialectical determinant appropriate to the transition from having understood something to doing it. In this transition Christianity begins; by taking this path, it shows that sin is rooted in willing and arrives at the concept of defiance, and then, to fasten the end very firmly, it adds the doctrine of hereditary sin... (SUD 92)

To fasten the end...well I'll be. Anyhow, time to wrap this up. 

That to deny direct communication is to require faith can be simply pointed out in purely human situations if it is kept in mind that faith in its most eminent sense is related to the God-man. Let us examine this and to that end take the relationship between two lovers..."Do you believe that I love you?".... (PC 141)

The relentless call to see the difficulty of belief, on the one hand, and the pervasiveness of our dependence upon it, make Kierkegaard's writing essential; the tidbits of his life story that come through make him fascinating and exasperating. When I come to the end of the last few books on my shelf, I'll pick right back up with Either/Or, track down a copy of his student thesis on irony, and get going on the teach-yourself-Danish book I found at the library book sale only a year ago, maybe. Love believes all things.