Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, For Self-Examination, and Judge for Yourself!

Around a month ago now I finally read the last of the Kierkegaard books which I've been able to add to my shelf so far. To say that I didn't understand them terribly well would be redundant and smack of excuse-making at this point, but I guess that must be why I never wrote anything in response to them at the time. So before it gets too long ago to recall even the flavor of that incomprehension, let me see what I can recover.

To catch up first with the Concept of Anxiety (or Dread, or Angst). This one seems to find its companion in the Sickness Unto Death, and of the two, I'd recommend reading the latter twice (or more) before tackling the former. And yet, for all its difficulty, it's actually one of the works which seems to get cited the most often, in my limited experience. Written by the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis ("Watchman of Copenhagen"), CA, in the words of its helpful subtitle, proposes A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. This is a throwback to Kierkegaard's concern with categories, prevalent in many of his earlier pseudonymous works, and one of the easier ways to try to sum him up: you'll hear about "the aesthetic," "the ethical," "the religious," when people make sense of Kierkegaard. Here what's at stake is the domain of psychology vis a vis dogmatics, something difficult for anyone not steeped in the theology or philosophy of his time to feel the urgency of, but popping up in all sorts of unexpected places--these days you might here people distinguishing "psychological" from "sociological" levels of analysis, or you might read in Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (surely one of the essential books in contemporary literature) the Reverend John Ames making his laborious, elegant distinctions according to faith: Now that is a remarkable thing... In Haufniensis' language:

The pivotal concept in Christianity, that which made all things new, is the fullness of time, but the fullness of time is the moment as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past. If attention is not paid to this, not a single concept can be saved from a heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept.... 

Let us now consider Adam and also remember that every subsequent individual begins in the very same way.... (90)

I shall endeavor to do so! I can only account for the popularity of this among K's works, such as it is, by considering how prescient his attention to anxiety was, how aptly he characterized it as a point of confusion, of liminality, between discrete realms of experience, with something very close to the poetic interest lavished on them by a Blake, or a Pullman, under the headings of Innocence and Experience (or Wisdom).

The next two books come bound as one volume in the Hongs' edition, as they comprise the first and second series of Kierkegaard's admonition to his reader For Self-Examination, Recommended to the Present Age. The form is direct, urgent, again, but much more transparently earnest than the pseudonyms get to be; in content, these are relatively short segments of meditative exhortations on Biblical texts. Kierkegaard's point of departure seems to be a profound disquiet with Christianity as practiced in his time, that is, with modern life "from a Christian point of view". He contends:

It is a disease. And if I were a physician and someone asked me "What do you think should be done?" I would answer, "The first thing, the unconditional condition for anything to be done, consequently the every first thing that must be done is: create silence, bring about silence; God's Word cannot be heard... (47) 

A quixotic endeavor, perhaps, but a noble one--and here I was, feeling bad about spending so much time and energy telling kids to be quiet! Not that I can talk to them about anything worth listening to in that short-lived silence, should it follow. On the one hand, Kierkegaard holds his task to be ratcheting up the stakes of calling oneself a Christian--again, quixotic, admirable, noble; on the other hand, for all his careful esteem of Luther, he fulminates against reformers. Could it be that he foresaw not only the pedantic fencing off doctrine from lived experience, inevitably tending to the misunderstanding of the one and the deracination of the other--the dwindling of significance religious life would undergo--but also the disintegration of institutional religion, which in trying to revitalize itself would leave Christianity as an either-or between a kind of decorous hypocrisy or else and unfettered, speaking-in-tongues passion?