KierkegaardStudies

Edited on behalf of the

Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre

by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · NewYork

Yearbook2007

Edited by

Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuserand K. Brian Söderquist

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · NewYork

Kierkegaard Studies

Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centreby Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser

Yearbook 2007Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser

and K. Brian Söderquist

The Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at Copenhagen Universityis funded by The Danish National Research Foundation.

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Christianly Speaking, Humanly Speaking:

The Dynamics of Leveling and Mimetic Desire in Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses

By Vanessa Rumble

Abstract

Throughout Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard distinguishes carefully between the perspectives of the pagan and the Christian. I suggest that the attention devoted to the drawing of this distinction is at odds with Kierkegaard’s repeated reference through-out the authorship to the detrimental effects of reflection and “the mentality of com-parison.” I argue that Kierkegaard’s staging of the opposition between the Christian and the pagan enacts Girard’s notion of mimetic rivalry and is an indication that the presentation of Christianity offered is not to be assimilated uncritically.

“If we follow your reasoning, the real human subject can only come out of the rule of the Kingdom….Until this happens, the only subject is the mimetic structure.”

Jean-Michel Oughourlian to René Girard1

Denmark’s bloodless transition to a constitutional monarchy in the spring of 1848 found Kierkegaard in the midst of reading the proofs for Christian Discourses.2 The text has much in common with the works authored by him in the wake of this revolution, such as Anti-Clima-cus’ Sickness unto Death and Training in Christianity. The conclusion drawn uncompromisingly in Sickness unto Death – that there is no immediate health of the spirit, that earthly happiness masks despair and alienation – is anticipated in Christian Discourses, whose opening series of addresses, “The Care of the Pagans,” distinguishes sharply

1 René Girard Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1987, p. 199. Cited by Charles Bellinger in The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Free-dom, and Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001, p. 83.

2 Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. by Bruce Kirmmse, Princ-eton: Princeton University Press 2005, p. 495.

210 Vanessa Rumble

between the temporal cares plaguing the pagans and the non-tempo-ral preoccupations of the Christian. In the midst of the utopian hopes raised by the fall of the absolute monarchy, Kierkegaard’s vision in the “second authorship” of the relation of the human to the Christian, and the temporal to the eternal, is if anything increasingly polarized. No secular salvation here, thanks very much. Fear and Trembling’s earlier moving paean to the joys of receiving Isaac back – “finitude is all” – is but a vanishing echo in the measured adagio of Christian Discourses’ formulation: “So, then: either seventy years in all possible enjoyment, and nothing, nothing for eternity…or seventy years in suf-fering and then an eternity for blessed recollecting.”3

Undeniably, Kierkegaard’s authorship is, early and late, concerned with the drawing of distinctions: between the Socratic and the Chris-tian, human and divine, genius and apostle, poet and martyr. Kierke-gaard is ever the vigilant watchman at the frontiers of transcendence. Still, a number of commentators see in Kierkegaard’s final writings an emerging synthesis of ideal and actual – and without question there is an increasing insistence in these texts that Christianity’s “ideal” demands be lived out, and lived out visibly. Merold Westphal gave this position its enduring formulation in his “Kierkegaard’s Tele-ological Suspension of Religiousness B.”4 Here, Westphal argues that, though Religiousness B embraces the Paradox of the God-man, the risk is that this embrace remains at the purely intellectual level: we agree, perhaps, to the surrender of what Westphal calls our “epistemic autonomy” but remain glued to our “ethical autonomy” in a special variant of cheap grace (which, like all others, strives to leave the status quo of human insularity essentially untouched). Westphal claims that, in the second authorship,5 “Christ is [by contrast] not merely the Para-dox to be believed but the Pattern to be imitated.”6 This reading is appealing insofar as it offers a compelling presentation of the overall trajectory of Kierkegaard’s authorship; it locates Kierkegaard’s grow-ing emphasis on Christ as Prototype in its relation to the earlier so-

3 CD, 104 / SKS 10, 116.4 Merold Westphal “Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B” in

Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Poli-tics in Kierkegaard, ed. by George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans, New Jersey: Humanities Press 1992, pp. 110-129.

5 Westphal bases his account of the second authorship on Training in Christianity, For Self-Examination, and Judge for Yourself!, but his remarks have bearing on all those texts published in the aftermath of Concluding Unscientific Postscript which emphasize Christ as prototype.

6 Ibid., p. 116.

Christianly Speaking, Humanly Speaking 211

called theory of stages, and there is, at least for this reader, something reassuring in what Westphal refers to as the “dialectical progression” to which he draws attention.7

In what follows, however, I propose a reading of Christian Discourses which highlights the abiding and, I would argue, increasingly exacer-bated conflict between the ideal and the actual: (1) The uncompro-mising quality of the distinction drawn between eternal and temporal stands in contrast to a recurrent emphasis in the earlier pseudony-mous writings on the eternal as a dimension of the temporal, an orien-tation which might be regarded as both more philosophically fruitful and perhaps indicative of greater personal integration on the part of the author. Moreover, the repeated tendency of Christian Discourses to elevate the eternal by denigrating the temporal is a tactic which modern readers may with justification associate with Nietzsche’s slave morality: a state of mind which is pre-occupied with the suffering and fragmentation of the life in time and which only in the resulting state of despair determines – voilà – there must be a life eternal.8 Though there are passages in Christian Discourses which stand in opposition to this tendency, the joys of Christian existence are primarily illumi-nated by virtue of their difference from the cares of the pagans rather than in positive terms. (2) In consequence, and in spite of the oppo-sition to the spirit of leveling which guides Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom, I argue that the Kierkegaardian authorship, early and late, offers us repeated illustrations and enactments of mimetic rivalry – of what René Girard would call the contagious aspect of mimetic desire. In other words, Kierkegaard’s writings not only discuss the dynamics of leveling: they illustrate it, and nowhere more clearly than when “the present age” is engaged from a purportedly transcendent perspective. In contrast to those who see in Kierkegaard’s injunc-tions to follow Christ the Prototype a sign of a more embodied and concrete sense of duty in the late works (as compared to, e. g., the indeterminate command to teleologically suspend the ethical), I see

7 Ibid., p. 111.8 Cf. Kierkegaard’s proclamation in Part Two of Christian Discourses, which is telling

in this light: “Imagine hidden in a very plain setting a secret chest in which the most precious treasure is placed – there is a spring that must be pressed, but the spring is concealed, and the pressure must be of a certain force so that an accidental pressure cannot be sufficient. The hope of eternity is concealed within a person’s inner-most being in the same way, and hardship is the pressure. When the pressure is put on the concealed spring, and forcefully enough, the content appears in all its glory!” (CD, 111 / SKS 10, 122).

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the denigration of the life in time in the later works as an indication that the very notion of the ideal, the eternal, is being supported at the expense of the temporal. Kierkegaard’s staging of the “square-off” between the Christian and the pagan, as well as similar attempts to draw and secure the boundary between immanence and transcend-ence, are telling reminders of this tendency – a tendency governed by what Kierkegaard himself designates the “restless mentality of com-parison [Sammenligningernes urolige Tanke].”9 Though he again and again attempts to enforce or, arguably, create boundaries, this attempt ends, time and again, in failure. Christian Discourses illustrates, in some measure, the very vices it would condemn. In what follows, I present a reading of the dynamics of mimetic desire in Christian Dis-courses, and briefly juxtapose this with an analysis of a similar pattern in the early pseudonymous authorship of 1843-44.

I. The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air

In the wake of its publication, Kierkegaard was concerned that Christian Discourses, with the exception of its third part, was “far too lenient, untrue to my character….”10 The opening lines of the introduction to Christian Discourses nonetheless point to the limits of this leniency: “It was on top of Mt. Sinai that the Law was given, during the thundering of heaven; every animal that, alas, innocently and inadvertently [uforskyldt og uforvarende], approached the holy mountain had to be put to death – according to the Law.”11 By con-trast, Kierkegaard continues, the Sermon on the Mount was spoken at the foot of a mountain, with the lilies of the field and the birds of the air present, serving as “assistant instructors” to Christ. Their presence in the Gospel is like a jest, we are told. Nevertheless, their proximity in this text to the “slaughter of the innocents” described in the opening sentence remains disconcerting. That innocent nature must perish in the face of the demands of the Law is not a new claim in Kierkegaard, nor is it original to him. But the claim that the Law not only shapes nature but abolishes it is a theme which resonates throughout the later authorship. The gentleness of the Gospel is only

9 UD, 169 / SKS 8, 268.10 Pap. VIII 1 A 560 / SKS 20, 325; cited by Joakim Garff in Søren Kierkegaard,

p. 496.11 CD, 9 / SKS 10, 21.

Christianly Speaking, Humanly Speaking 213

discernable against the backdrop of this slaughter. Such is the logic of the sublime.12

In Kierkegaard’s earlier Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), the discourses on “What We Learn from the Lilies in the Field and from the Birds of the Air” in Part Two of that work offer a quite different vision of the relation of the natural (or the “merely human”) and the Christian. In these three discourses, the lilies and the birds serve as reminders of the goodness of human life: a reminder to be satisfied with [at nøies med] being human, a reminder of how glorious [herligt] it is to be human, and a reminder of the blessedness [salighed] which awaits humans.13 Together the three discourses weave a gentle and almost unnoticeable transition from created nature taken as a whole to the final telos of the human being. The continuity between the natural and the Christian, and hence between the pagan and the Christian, is movingly taught by the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. The lilies and the birds resemble children, Kierkegaard remarks – those most edifying syntheses of nature and spirit. Unlike adults, their presence does not awaken self-consciousness, reflection, and the spirit of comparison. They do not prompt one to compare oneself with others or oneself;14 they do not spark self-awareness. As late as 1849, in the extant drafts for the sealed letter to Regine which Kierkegaard posted to Schlegel, we see that this association of the lilies and birds to an as yet uncorrupted nature is an abiding one, for here he writes to Regine: “Thank you, oh, thank you! Thank you for everything I owe to you; thank you for the time you were mine; thank you for your childlike qualities, from which I learned so much–you my charming teacher, you my lovely teacher. You lovely lily, you, my teacher. You ethereal bird, you, my teacher.”15

By contrast, the role of the lilies and the birds in Christian Dis-courses is to demarcate the domains of the pagan and the Christian. This is, one may venture, something approaching the opposite of the lesson which Regine taught Kierkegaard. Nature here does not func-

12 Sylviane Agacinski “We are Not Sublime: Love and Sacrifice, Abraham and Our-selves,” trans. by Jonathan Rée, in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Black-well 1998, pp. 129-150.

13 UD, 160-200 / SKS 8, 260-307.14 UD, 161 / SKS 8, 260-261.15 Søren Kierkegaard Breve og Afstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard [Letters and

Documents pertaining to Søren Kierkegaard], ed. by Niels Thulstrup, #235, Copen-hagen: Munksgaard 1953-54, pp. 254-255; cited by Joakim Garff in Søren Kierke-gaard, p. 601.

214 Vanessa Rumble

tion to provide diversion [adspredelse] and comfort, but has, rather, a highly reflective aim, the task of comparison. The lilies are to mark the no-man’s-land between the pagan and the Christian: “Pay atten-tion to the lily and the bird; then you will discover how pagans live, because they do not live in exactly the same way as do the bird and lily. If you live as the lily and the bird live, then you are a Christian – which the lily and the bird neither are nor can become. Paganism forms the opposition to Christianity, but the lily and the bird form no opposition to either of these contending parties – they play outside, if one may put it this way….”16 The lilies and the birds are to make one conscious of the boundary between the Christian and the pagan while at the same time preventing judging: “a difficult task.”

The conflict between the natural and the Christian which struc-tures Part One of Christian Discourses characterizes the work as a whole. As we have seen, Part One has as its central theme the contrast between Christian and pagan. Similarly, each of the discourses which form the Second Part posit a break with the natural as the condition of the Christian, resignation vis-à-vis the temporal as the starting point of eternity. Part Two’s first discourse, “The Joy of It: That One Suffers Only Once But Is Victorious Eternally,” contrasts temporal suffer-ing, which by its nature is transitory [en gennemgang],17 with eternal joy. The whole of one’s temporal existence is condensed into a single moment (one suffers only “once”), and a life of suffering, and by exten-sion temporality itself, is thereby distilled into a symbolic moment. As readers of The Concept of Anxiety will confirm, a moment taken in abstraction from all else is strictly speaking “no time.”18 The promise of eternal joy takes root, it would seem, in a temporality minimized and drained of ultimate significance.

In the following discourse, entitled “The Joy of It: That Hardship Does not Take Away But Procures Hope,” an illuminating contrast between the natural man and the Christian is drawn, one which again emphasizes the necessary break with the natural which precedes the Christian. An analogy is drawn between the effects of torture and the effects of hardship in eliciting truth and hope, respectively:

Imagine a really hardened criminal whom the court is unable to get to confess either by sagacity or by kind words but from whom a confession is extracted by means of the rack. Eternity’s hope is in a person’s innermost being in the same way. The natural man goes reluctantly, very reluctantly, to confession. He is quite willing to hope in the

16 CD, 9 / SKS 10, 21.17 CD, 101 / SKS 10, 113.18 CD, 97 / SKS 10, 109.

Christianly Speaking, Humanly Speaking 215

sense of the child and the youth. But to hope in eternity’s sense is conditioned by an enormously painful effort, to which the natural man never submits willingly. A human being is born with pain, but he is born again to the eternal with perhaps even greater pain – yet in both cases the shriek signifies just as little….19

If, in analyzing this passage, one were to emphasize the claim that eternity’s hope lies within every human, it would be possible to elicit a definition of “the natural” which does not lie in stark opposition to the Christian. As is clear from the above, however, Kierkegaard did not choose to mitigate this difference but to depict it in as stark terms as possible. The natural man must be broken by hardship.

The following discourse, “The Joy of It: That the Poorer You Become the Richer You Are Able to Make Others,” has its point of departure in clarifying the difference between earthly riches and spiritual riches.”20 Earthly riches are essentially “envy” and the acquisition of earthly riches is inherently contentious, given the non-shareable nature of these goods. The goods of the spirit are, by con-trast, “communication.”21 In this discourse, the “higher” is portrayed as prior to and independent of (i. e., not parasitic upon) the lower. But the rhetoric remains mixed. On the one hand, the inherently com-munal nature of the higher spiritual goods of faith, hope, and love are contrasted with the fractious effects of sheer material wealth and lower spiritual goods (“insight, knowledge, capacities, gifts”).22 While the pursuit of these lower goods is selfish and self-enclosed, involving other humans only negatively, i. e., as objects of envy, reflection, and comparison, the pursuit of faith, hope, and love benefits all humans, by witnessing to the potential present within all human beings. Christ, we are told, “became poor in order to make others rich. His decision was not to become poor, but his decision was to make others rich, and therefore he became poor.”23 Here it is clearly stated that forfeit-ing earthly goods is not to be prescribed for its own sake. Yet the dis-course opens with a passage that suggests the opposite – one which is dependent upon and evocative of the logic of the sublime: earthly abasement is the trapdoor, the eye of the needle, the Alice-in-Won-derland looking glass, through which one is transported to a realm of higher concerns. In this passage, the path to spiritual riches, the path

19 CD, 112 / SKS 10, 123.20 CD, 115 / SKS 10, 126.21 CD, 117 / SKS 10, 127.22 CD, 119 / SKS 10, 129.23 CD, 123 / SKS 10, 133.

216 Vanessa Rumble

by which one becomes rich by first making others so, is described as accessible through the crucible of material concern and despair:

[T]his marvelous way to [spiritual] riches does actually exist. [But it is difficult for us to find it, for, while]…we understand it when we read in the poets’ tales about how the one who has ventured into the robbers’ hideout must be afraid, with every step he takes, lest there be a concealed secret trapdoor through which he can plunge into the abyss; [and] we understand it when unbelief or fearfulness recites its doctrine of the uncertainly of life – because we are only all too inclined to believe in the pos-sibility of downfall. But that [the higher] life, that [the higher] existence is blessedly secured with the help of eternity, that in the very danger there is a hidden trapdoor – to ascent – this we do not believe. Just when a person is closest to despairing, there is a place to step on (and in despair he is brought as close as possible to stepping on it), and everything changes infinitely. Then he walks along the same path, but in the opposite direction. Instead of sighing, worried, over walking the path of poverty, of lowliness, of being unappreciated, of persecution, he walks, joyful, along the same path, because he believes and in faith understands that the poorer he becomes the richer he can make others.24

This description of a sudden reversal of consciousness resembles, on the microcosmic level, the social transformation depicted earlier by Rousseau and later by Marx – the Romantic vision that, when society reaches an extreme of inequality and corruption, revolution occurs. Much of Kierkegaard’s writing, whether it be the depiction of the aes-thete’s increasingly desperate pursuit of happiness, or Religiousness A’s escalating assertions of infinite indebtedness to and guilt before God, or the “natural man’s” descent into more and more reflective forms of despair, is, I believe, based on a similar hope of a sudden and spontaneous reversal. Whether this reversal, this “leap,” is a mat-ter of will, of conversion, or whether it is more like falling through a trapdoor, there is, in any case, a sudden release from earthly, and ego-bound, concerns, a release is triggered by a preceding state of absorption in these concerns. The message seems to be that immer-sion in earthly abasement will yield its reverse if we pursue the former with sufficient passion.

Discourses Four, Five, and Six of Part Two continue the ongoing denigration of the temporal. Discourse Five proclaims “That What You Lose Temporally You Gain Eternally,” and the eclipse of the sig-nificance of the temporal implied here is nailed fast in the discourse which follows: “That When I ‘Gain Everything’ I Lose Nothing at All.” Temporal concerns, temporal attachments, and temporal losses are subsumed without remainder in eternal victory.

24 CD, 113 / SKS 10, 125-126.

Christianly Speaking, Humanly Speaking 217

Discourse Seven, the final discourse in Part Two, concludes the series with a final reiteration of the absolute opposition that exists between the temporal and eternal perspectives regarding the goal of human life. “Eternity presupposes that the natural man does not know at all what the goal [of human life] is: that on the contrary he has the false conception. Temporality presupposes that everyone knows what the goal is….”25 The title of the Discourse, “The Joy of It: That Adversity of Prosperity,” plays on the unqualified alterity existing between the temporal and eternal realms: earthly adversity is eternal prosperity, and earthly prosperity is eternal adversity. In this particu-lar discourse, however, a potential drawback of this sudden “through the looking glass” reversal of perspectives, to which Kierkegaard oth-erwise inclines, is raised. The superficial reader is warned that the slogan “adversity is prosperity” is easily appropriated in the abstract, but much more difficult to apply in practice. “[D]o I hear someone say [the narrator ventures]: This surely is only a jest and easy to under-stand, because if one just looks at everything turned around, it is quite correct: in a straightforward sense adversity is adversity, adver-sity turned around is prosperity….Nothing is easier to do than this [the errant imaginary interlocutor continues] provided one is in the habit of walking on one’s head instead of on one’s legs.”26 The reader is cautioned that such facile juggling of concepts ceases the moment one tries to apply them in actuality. The latter, we are told, is the task of earnestness. The warning here is straightforward (and Kierke-gaardian) enough, and it is one reinforced by Kierkegaard’s frequent reference to the fact that language and thought have, as their native soil, the domain of possibility, of ideality, rather than actuality. Thus Kierkegaard gestures here, as he does throughout these discourses, to the emptiness of his language apart from its appropriation by readers (and by himself).

One may ask, however, whether the oppositions drawn in this and other discourses between the temporal and the eternal, the pagan and Christian, are not also cast in a suspicious light by the imaginary interlocutor’s flippant remarks. In other words, does not the relentless polarization of the temporal and its shadowy counterpart risk promot-ing the very facile and abstract appropriation that is warned against? What accounts, after all, for the unqualified opposition repeatedly drawn between temporal and eternal, natural and Christian, etc.?

25 CD, 153 / SKS 10, 161.26 CD, 150 / SKS 10, 158.

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The similarity between the imaginary interlocutor’s playful concep-tual sommersaults and Hegel’s portrayal of the verkehrte Welt in his discussion of Force and the Understanding in the Phenomenology of Spirit suggests an answer.27 In both cases, the vertiginous conceptual reversals are generated by the subject’s exemption of him- or herself from the subject matter under discussion.

The narrative voice which pervades Christian Discourses is one quite similar to that of Anti-Climacus – a voice closer to the “Law” than to the “Gospel,” closer to an unqualified ideality than to “the heavenly that comes down.” But this voice of the Law is far removed from human actuality, since humans, according to Kierkegaard, are no longer in possession of the necessary condition [conditio sine qua non] for fulfilling the Law. Anti-Climacus’ seeming exemption from human limits, or his lack of attention to them, may account for the tendency to depict a Christianity which is an inverse image of all that is natural.

A final selection from Christian Discourses, the first of the Dis-courses at the Communion on Fridays, in Part Four, provides a strik-ing example of the effacement of temporality. The theme of this dis-course is longing for fellowship with Christ, a longing which is present in and nourished by the celebration and commemoration of the Last Supper. After the otherworldly asceticism of several hundred pages of Christian Discourses, the Gospel reading which provides the focal point of this discourse, Luke 22:15, underlines the earthly longings and suffering of Christ: “I have longed with all my heart to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” Here, the temporal realm would seem to assume its full and proper weight, with the person of the God-Man as guarantor of this significance. Christ’s expressed longing for this final gathering with his disciples prior to the crucifixion – his final meal with the Apostles – is separated by only a few verses from the well-known words which witness to the ineluctable importance, for Christian believers, of the historical, the temporal, the finite: “This is my body, which is given for you.”28

The commentary which follows, however, sounds more like an improvised rendition of the Book of Ecclesiastes than an exegesis of the Gospel of Luke. Christ’s concern for the lowly, for the poor (not just the poor of heart), for the mitigation of worldly and unchosen

27 G. W. F. Hegel Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1981, pp. 79-103.

28 Luke 22:19.

Christianly Speaking, Humanly Speaking 219

suffering (a somewhat marked contrast to the voluntary pursuit of suffering emphasized in Kierkegaard’s later works), are well-known hallmarks of the Gospel of Luke, and this concern for the suffering is apparent in Christ’s longing for and savoring of bodily comfort (the shared meal) and the bodily presence of disciples destined for some suffering of their own. It is remarkable indeed to see this incarna-tional emphasis displaced in the discourse by an interpretation which translates the longing for fellowship with Christ into a longing for the specifically eternal, before turning abruptly to a lengthy recitation of the transitory and deceptive nature of all things earthly from which even the lilies and the birds do not emerge unscathed:

What sheer vanity the earthly and temporal is!…Everything, all that I see, is vanity and vicissitude as long as it exists, and finally it is the prey of corruption. Therefore, when the moon rises in its radiance, I will…say to the star, ‘I do not care for you; after all you are now eclipsed’; and then when the sun rises in all its splendor and darkens the moon, I will say to the moon, ‘I do not care for you; after all you are now eclipsed’; and when the sun goes down, I will say, ‘I thought as much, because all is vanity….’ Even if the loveliness of the field, which charmingly captivates the eye, and even if the melodiousness of the birds’ singing, which deliciously falls upon the ear, and even if the peacefulness of the forest, which invitingly refreshes the heart – even if they were to use all their persuasiveness, I will still not allow myself to be persuaded, will not allow myself to be beguiled; I will still call to mind that all of it is deception.29

This is a remarkable meditation on a Biblical passage which focuses so plainly on Christ’s concern for something of predominantly tempo-ral significance – that the last supper with the disciples be appropri-ately, lovingly, and memorably celebrated. The lament moves to a con-sideration of specifically human sufferings: our inability to properly interpret the present or penetrate the future, with the exception of the one given, death. Human beings must knowingly weather their fini-tude: that our knowledge of “the next moment is like a dark night,”30 that “the explanation of every event or occurrence is like a riddle,”31 and that “death is the only certainty.”32 And these troubling remind-ers of our ephemeral nature, the “vanity” of our lives and of all that surrounds us, does not begin to encompass the suffering of the human condition:

Then I will remind myself what I have heard about all the atrocities people have com-mitted against people, enemy against enemy, alas, and friend against friend, about the

29 CD, 254-55 / SKS 10, 268-269.30 CD, 256 / SKS 10, 269.31 CD, 256 / SKS 10, 270.32 CD, 257 / SKS 10, 270.

220 Vanessa Rumble

violence and murder and bloodthirstiness and bestial cruelty, about all the innocently and yet so cruelly shed blood that cries to high heaven, about slyness and cunning and deceit and faithlessness, about all those who, innocent, were nevertheless horribly strangled [Qvalte], as it were, whose blood was not in fact shed, although they were destroyed. Above all, I will recall the experience of the Holy One when he walked here upon earth, what opposition he suffered from sinners, how his whole life was sheer suffering of mind and spirit through belonging to the fallen human race…that a living person cruelly chained to a corpse cannot suffer more torturously than he suf-fered in mind and spirit by being embodied as man in the human race!33

Following this passage, the theme of longing returns, and the longing for eternity is said to have been reinforced by these reflections on the pointlessness of everything else.34 But after this mounting condemna-tion of the temporal, one has to question the origin of this longing for eternity – what does it really amount to? Here, as elsewhere, one gleans the impression that the thorn in the flesh is the thorn of the flesh: the martyrdom of embodiment – to be chained to something which alters and fades, chained to something which suffers and dies. As in Book XIX of Augustine’s City of God, it is against the backdrop of imperfection and incompleteness that the eternal is made to shine.

II. Mimetic Desire in Kierkegaard’s Writings

The preceding exegesis of Christian Discourses has illustrated the repeated and sharp distinctions drawn between the eternal and the temporal, with the glories of the eternal frequently juxtaposed with the bankruptcy of the temporal. As we have seen, this is by no means a universal trend in Kierkegaard’s authorship (cf. Part Two of the Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits, published just one year pri-or to Christian Discourses), but it is a trend which marks many of the post-Postscript writings, and here I have in mind Works of Love, Christian Discourses, Sickness unto Death, and Training in Christi-anity. The writing of these texts overlaps,35 and, though two of them

33 CD, 258-259 / SKS 10, 270.34 “And the more you surrendered to these thoughts, the more the longing for fellow-

ship with him the Holy One, conquered in you, and you said to yourself: I long with all my heart for this supper; I long for fellowship with him, away from this evil world where sin prevails!” (CD, 260, CT, 273).

35 Portions of Christian Discourses were written simultaneously with Works of Love, which preceded the publication of the former, and Christian Discourses itself was originally intended to be published under the same cover as Sickness unto Death, together with portions of what eventually became Training in Christianity.

Christianly Speaking, Humanly Speaking 221

bear the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus and two do not, they share three things in common: they began a stream of “specifically Chris-tian writing,”36 they inaugurate Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom, and they were written in opposition to Bishop Mynster and with the expectation of being received by him with disapproval. In other words, they were written in part as a provocation, with Kierkegaard eager to gauge Mynster’s reaction, work by work: “Works of Love offended him. – Christian Discourses even more. – And so it mounts. Practice in Christianity distressed him very painfully.”37

The sharp division between the human and Christian which char-acterizes the texts targeting Mynster and “his” Christendom, works which are Anti-Climacean in spirit if not by attribution, raise ques-tions regarding the central aims and message of these texts (Works of Love, Christian Discourses, Sickness unto Death, and Practice in Christianity). In what follows, I wish to propose a reading of the later works that draws both their “message” and their methodology into proximity with the earlier pseudonymous writings. Given the range of texts under consideration, this will of necessity be more program-matic and speculative than exegetical.

Early and late, the texts authored by Kierkegaard express and address a crisis of desire. That this is the case in the earlier pseu-donymous writings seems apparent: many of the pseudonyms declare themselves in pursuit of an always elusive object – one worthy of love, admiration, or worship. De Silentio painstakingly traces Abraham’s steps up Moriah, hoping to glimpse the secret which made it possible for him to maintain faith, hope, and love in the midst of loss and sac-rifice; Constantin likewise tracks a young man and a number of young women in pursuit of a self-effacing love which might circumvent his own intransigent egocentricity, and Haufniensis longs to be present at the moment when spirit and freedom blossoms, in however fleeting a fashion, in the midst of the snares of necessity. That De Silentio ends up pondering a merman who can neither love nor seduce, together with a Richard III who was cursed through no guilt of his own, that Constantin’s journey ends with him clutching only a small bundle of letters and a post-horn, that Haufniensis’ anxious meditations on freedom’s dialectic culminate in a repentance which mourns without cease or release, whose version of faith sounds more like resignation

36 JP 5:6037 / Pap. VIII 1 A 229 / SKS 20, 186.37 From the “Supplement” to the Hong edition of Christian Discourses, p. 405 / Pap.

X 4 A 511.

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(in the face of the possibility of an infinitely repeated loss) than the promise of a life of abundance – these evolving failures, what Louis Mackey aptly named the “dialectic of deadlock,”38 call attention to the heavy gravitational pull of the ego in its ongoing and ever ongoing pursuit of autonomy. That this pursuit of autonomy is ultimately the death of desire is clear. In their pursuit of transcendence, de Silen-tio, Constantin, Haufniensis and their cohorts end in a stalemate of desire, revealing the inability of the pseudonyms or we their readers to genuinely entertain alterity. The reflective observer of innocence always yielded a reflective observer of a reflective victim,39 and the early pseudonymous works culminate in this flatlining of desire. This is the devastation and deadlock brought about by desire for unquali-fied autonomy.

The name of René Girard, and his theory of mimetic desire, deserves mention in this context, as Girard depicts desire as imitative rather than object-oriented, and hence as competitive by nature. On the larger social scale, mimetic desire leads invariably to rivalry and to decreasing differentiation among the members of society, a state which Girard sees symbolized in literature by the state of plague. (Haufniensis’s description of spiritless, leveled Christendom as “veg-etative sludge,” an undifferentiated bog, anticipates Girard’s point). Girard’s claim is that mimetic desire, if not decoded and resisted, leads again and again to a sacrificial violence which is the only means of restoring hierarchy and renewing desire. Clearly, Kierkegaard’s commentary, in A Literary Review, on the passionless present age and its need for scapegoats squares nicely with Girard’s theory.40 What I am proposing here, however, is that the parallels between Kierke-gaard and Girard are far more extensive. The repeated splitting of the pseudonyms in the early pseudonymous writings can be viewed as a form of violence meant to sustain desire; and the suggestion that the split pairs (Victor Eremita and the Seducer, “A” and Judge Wilhelm, de Silentio and Abraham,41 Constantin and the young man, and even

38 Louis Mackey Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-nia Press 1971.

39 See my “Kierkegaard and the Uncanny: The Endangered Moral Agent” in Anthro-pology and Authority: Essays on Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Poul Houe, Gordon Marino, and Sven Rossel, Amsterdam: Rodopi 2000, pp. 55-62.

40 TA, 83 / SKS 8, 79-80.41 The suggestion that de Silentio and Abraham are fundamentally the same being is

advanced by Climacus in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. There he suggests that Abraham may be the product of de Silentio’s poetic imagination. CUP1, 500-501n.

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the great abstract duos such as the Socratic and the Christian as they are portrayed in Philosophical Fragments)42 are not in fact distinct, but rather parasitic upon and ultimately indistinguishable from one another, is a further point of agreement. Girard’s theory of desire may thus provide an explanation for the metamorphoses of Kierkegaard’s early fictitious personae, as well as of their eerie tendency to lose their individuality and descend into a crisis of desire, into despair, lethargy, and paralysis.43 Their thirst for transcendence is ultimately reducible to a thirst for autonomy and control. Charles Bellinger’s path-break-ing book of philosophical anthropology, The Genealogy of Violence, which traces the similarity of Kierkegaard’s and Girard’s views of the origins of violence, could be usefully augmented by a Girardian “lit-erary critical” reading of the early pseudonymous authorship. Such a careful reading would, I believe, confirm a number of perhaps unex-pected similarities between this early authorship and the later, specifi-cally Christian writings. The tendency of the latter to denigrate tem-porality as a means of elevating the eternal is the conceptual analogue of the dramatic tendency of the early texts to portray a thoroughly self-enclosed and hyper-reflective humanity as a means of delineating and protecting a sublime immediacy.

But is this parallel a forced one? Is not Anti-Climacus (as well as voice of the Christian Discourses –for the purposes of this paper I elide to the two) immune from the thirsty pursuit of alterity which characterizes many of the early works? Anti-Climacus is, after all, the very voice of ideality. Uncompromising, unconcerned with social real-ity, and as impartial as death itself, he is presented as existing at the frosty heights of the Law. Anti-Climacus is immune from the splitting which characterized the early pseudonyms (and signaled the vanity of their pursuit of autonomy), and his presentation of Christ as Prototype, as worthy object of imitation, seems to resolve rather than express a crisis of desire. On the other hand, however, Anti-Climacus would seem to sustain his integrity at the expense of his relation to actual-ity. The question remains, then, whether the strict separation of the human and the Christian, the poet and the Christian, the pagan and the Christian which reverberate throughout Works of Love, Christian

42 See my discussion of the categories of the Christian and Socratic in “Eternity Lies Beneath: Autonomy and Finitude in Kierkegaard’s Early Writings” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 35:1, 1997.

43 Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche was well aware of the nihilistic frenzy generated in an individual or a society when desire disperses. Friedrich Nietzsche The Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage 1989.

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Discourses, Training in Christianity, and Sickness unto Death, is not, like the earlier splitting of the pseudonyms, an indication of the sort of sacrifice by which Girard claims humans in search of autonomy sustain their desire.44 Anti-Climacus, and the other narrator(s) of the late works are thus not wholly removed from opposition to (and envy of) the existing order, and their rejection of finitude indicates their entanglement in its mechanisms.

In his introduction to the International Kierkegaard Commentary on Training in Christianity, Robert Perkins offers a revealing summa-ry of the genesis of the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, a summary which sheds considerable light on the perspective governing Christian Dis-courses.45 He cites first the well-known journal entry in which Kierke-gaard locates his own perspective as between that of Climacus (pseu-donymous author of Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript) and Anti-Climacus (pseudonymous author of Sickness unto Death and Training in Christianity).46 Perkins draws attention to a lesser known passage in the same entry, in which Kierke-gaard characterizes Anti-Climacus as “demonic,” as tending to con-fuse himself with the ideality he propounds. This puts the commonly held view of Anti-Climacus as a pre-eminent representative of Chris-tianity in a dubious light. In addition, Perkins points out that when Kierkegaard first made mention of the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, his initial sketch is of a personality “recklessly ironical and humorous,” one residing in the domain of the aesthetic.47 Though Perkins claims that Anti-Climacus’s actual role in the authorship evidences “no spite, irony, or devil-may-care humor,” his account of Anti-Climacus’ mixed lineage raises questions as to the nature of the latter’s “extraordinary Christianity.” More specifically, any who would dismiss the possibility that Anti-Climacus exists in the same sort of mimetic rivalry with his

44 Theodor Adorno depicts the same dynamic as characteristic of a rationality which would exclude all considerations other than the instrumental in his description of the mutual reinforcement of sacrifice and domination.

45 Robert Perkins “Introduction” to International Kierkegaard Commentary: Prac-tice in Christianity vol. 20, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press 2004, pp. 1-9.

46 The passage reads as follows: “Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus have several things in common; but the difference is that whereas Johannes Climacus places himself so low that he even says himself that he is not a Christian, one seems to be able to detect in Anti-Climacus that he regards himself to be a Christian on an extraordinarily high level….His personal guilt, then, is to confuse himself with ideality (this is the demonic in him)…” (JP 6:6433 / Pap. X 1 A 517 / SKS 22, 130.

47 Perkins, Ibid.

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environment as do the earlier pseudonyms must come to terms with the following draft for a Postscript to Practice in Christianity:

I, Anticlimachus [sic] who wrote this little book (a poor, simple, mere man just like most everybody else) was born in Copenhagen and am just about, yes, exactly the same age as Johannes Climachus [sic], with whom I in one sense have very much, have everything in common, but from whom in another sense I am utterly different. He explicitly says of himself that he is not a Christian; this is infuriating. I, too, have been so infuriated about it that I – if anyone could somehow trick me into saying it – say just the opposite, or because I say just the opposite about myself I could become furious about what he says of himself. I say, in fact, that I am an extraordinary Christian such as there has never been, but, please note, I am that in hidden inwardness…. The reader, who in addition to being my friend is also a friend of the understand-ing, will also readily perceive that, despite my extraordinary Christianity, there is also something malevolent about me. For it is sufficiently clear that I have taken this posi-tion [Christianity!] simply out of spite against Johannes. Had I come first, I would have said of myself what he now says of himself and then he would have been compelled to say of me what I say of him. For we are related to each other, but we are not twins, we are opposites. Between us, there is a deep, a fundamen tal relationship, but despite the most desperate relation-ship on both sides, we never get any further, any closer, than to a repelling contact.48

A more perfect portrayal of mimetic rivalry is difficult to conjure up, and one wonders whether Anti-Climacus’ rivalry with Climacus, which is said to have determined the former’s claim to be a Christian, is but a figure for Kierkegaard’s actual rivalry with Mynster, which holds a still-to-be-determined influence on the depiction of Christian-ity in these late works.49

What bearing do these reflections on Anti-Climacus have on Chris-tian Discourses? Certainly a suspicion is raised regarding the signifi-cance of the use of the adjective “Christian” in the title. From the fore-going quote, we see that Kierkegaard was keenly aware of the ways in which even (and perhaps especially) an “idealized” version of Christi-anity could remain part and parcel of the dynamic of mimetic rivalry – a means of carving out an identity impervious to finitude’s fragility. If Christian Discourses’ “Thoughts That Wound from Behind” were aimed at a complacent Danish Christendom – aimed, in the name of

48 JP 6:6349 / Pap. X 6 B 48; cited in the “Supplement” to the Hongs’ edition of Prac-tice in Christianity, PC, 281-282.

49 That Anti-Climacus of Training in Christianity retains some of the demonic traits envisaged by Kierkegaard at his creation is powerfully suggested, in addition, by the example of the youthful follower whose ideal, though based on historical fact, is of necessity filtered through and ultimately a function of the human imagination. The implication here would seem to be that the difference between worshipping oneself and worshipping an other cannot be discerned. PC, pp. 186-187.

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ideality, at Mynster and his flock of tame followers, it remains unclear whether the origins of this effort are similarly ideal. The rhetoric of Christian Discourses reflects an attempt to take refuge from temporal-ity in an abstract eternity. Better an impregnable fortress of abstrac-tion, the message seems to be, than to be wounded from behind by a lifetime of vulnerability in the realm of the finite, as Christ himself was. Whether this is a commentary on Kierkegaard’s own spiritual or psychology state is a question I cannot resolve: it seems to me possible that it is, but equally possible that Kierkegaard is distancing himself from, and in so doing rendering questionable, his, and indeed any, presentation of the Christian ideal. Whichever the case, an uncritical appropriation of the portrayal of the Christian in its distinction from the earthly is as ill-advised as an uncritical and unqualified espousal of Judge William’s critique of the aesthetic.

Christian Discourses’ advocacy of a voluntary suffering in the serv-ice of Christianity is suggestive of an attempt to draw, in advance, the sting of earthly suffering, rather than actually submit to it. That the attempt to shield oneself from finitude has as its cost the death of desire is witnessed to not only by the deadlock of the early pseu-donymous works, but also by the palpable ressentiment which reigns in Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses.