Kierkegaard, Soren, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay; Penguin, London: 1989.
I have to write on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death (Sygdommen til Doden, 1849) for my magazine, because I think of it as among the most important books ever written. It is so for me, at any rate; for me personally, it might be the single most valuable work of thinking I know of. But I am not shy of saying that the same opinion should be generally shared. It is perhaps no more than a coincidence, that I published an article for local readers two or three weeks ago, in which I asserted that Soren Kierkegaard should be thought of as a saint. I compared him to St John of Kronstadt, the better to indicate what kind of saint he is. A coincidence which is only pertinent for me, perhaps, it was only a couple of days later that I recalled that the philosopher Wittgenstein had once said the following, to one of his students: “Kierkegaard is the most profound thinker of the last century”, meaning the nineteenth century. Drury, his student records that Wittgenstein then added: “He is a saint.”
The distinction between being merely the most profound writer of the last century, and being a saint to boot, only hangs on the answer to this question: did Kierkegaard really believe in God, and did he sincerely mean what he wrote? If he did, then he should be thought of as the most intelligent and articulate of the Christian faithful in the modern era in the West. Kierkegaard was also very dedicated to what he saw as his vocation, too; namely, to describe true Christianity in the age of speculative philosophy and the rise of institutional science and invention.
I shall build myself up to a direct discussion of his late work, The Sickness Unto Death, slowly. I have to do preliminaries, because I will certainly fail to do the work justice, I mean, I will fail to describe it as it is; so, I should at least attempt to do something else which might be useful. But I should not really attempt to do describe his book; any reader can do it for himself. It’s a short work, and it is not remarkable for any strange terminology, nor does it need prior study, since it is relatively plain in its meaning and purpose. So, perhaps it would be enough to simply describe the book as I see it, inadequate though that might be; I should aim only to show that I see it correctly, that I interpret it correctly. This is something I assume I can do. That’s not a given, by the way. In his introduction to his own translation, Alastair Hannay mistakes the meaning of the book, in my view. He does not understand it as I do. And that is because Hannay is not strictly speaking a Christian. He, and many others as far as I can see, have read Kierkegaard’s work as agnostics, or even as atheist ‘Existentialists’ would do. Hannay is wise enough to point out, that he might have misinterpreted what Kierkegaard had intended to say in the book, and that he had been forced to talk to many people over a long period, in order to come to his conclusions about what the book truly means. However, for a Christian, the final intention of the book is very clear, almost too clear. I’ll tell you what it means to me, and what it means in itself.
And that is why I also hesitate to just dive in and discuss the book: it is just too fundamentally simple. Kierkegaard was characterised by an extreme self-awareness, and a consciousness of problems and ideas which made him ‘profound’. He is above all utterly self-conscious. And his facility with language is also extraordinary, so that he puts into words and continuous arguments, things which other talented people have never or rarely been able to sustain. And finally, he was a Christian, and these features of his make him a superlative Christian, like a saint.
But, we then ask, isn’t Christianity for everyone, even and especially for people who have no massive intellect or aptitude for expression, or refined consciousness? And the answer is, that, yes, this masterpiece of exposition and psychology, which brings together in one place the deepest truths of Christian doctrine and practice, does actually end in something so simple that it can be expressed in a single sentence, and can be understood by anyone. He says it at the start, and at the end of the book:
“This then is the formula which describes the state of the self when despair is completely eradicated: in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it [namely, God].” (p. 44)
And:
“On the other hand, that opposition has been effective throughout this work, which laid down straight away (Part One, A.A (p.44)]) the formula for that state in which there is no despair at all: in relating itself to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power which established it. Which formula in turn, as has frequently been remarked, is the definition of faith.” (p. 165)
That is as much as to say, that it is faith in God that establishes the self, so that the self is completely rid of despair.
Although the start and end of the book are simple, and the book simply and basically insists and presupposes that the self or the individual must have faith in God, the content of the book and the way it demonstrates this, is formidable. And so, I have to lower my expectations, and just do what I can, to explain what the book is, and why it appears to be as important as I say. After all, Kierkegaard could have avoided having written it, and availed himself of the mere assertion, that you should have faith. If it were so simple, there would be no book at all. It is not so simple, and this is not what he did. And, really, that would not work anyway; Christian faith is hard, profound, universal; it is the meaning of life, and above all, it is true. Even simple people of simple faith are not mere blockheads; they are not lacking in human depth. Such people have met God; they follow Christ; they have become something different than the mere human being. What Kierkegaard has done is, in a way which is as close to scientific method as is possible in this area, to describe and prove how this miraculous truth of Christianity works, and what that truth is.
When I compared Kierkegaard to St John of Kronstadt, I did so by comparing the northern European sensibility, with its intense solitary individualism, to the Russian collective soul, the Russian submission to the idea of ‘the people’. I don’t mean to say, that the eastern European sensibility is a ‘crowd’ mentality, or anything like that. I mean that the eastern Christianity and the soul of the people is humble, and self-denying by nature. Whereas, on the other hand, the Danish or English soul is ultra-individualistic, and Kierkegaard has written for that. Our spirit is proud, individualistic, self-reliant, adventurous, by its nature. The fine, structured, communal liturgy of the Orthodox has many times been present in England, and revolutionary movements have insisted that it should not be allowed here; because in England the Christian is alone and in private, not in a splendid external worship responding to a deep and natural submission. Kierkegaard’s focus on the individual, and the turmoil of the self living itself, is suitable to the West. With this platitude, I proceed to first speak of my reading Kierkegaard’s book as a youth; and then to discuss its shape, its argument; and finally, to make more general thoughts about what I believe Kierkegaard can do for us, in this era.
Roughly the first half of the book can be read as scientific demonstration of the condition of human beings. It characterises life as a matter of having a self, or not having a self. And then proves that the situation of everyone who does not have faith is, that they are in a condition of what he calls ‘despair’, because their relation to themselves is wrong. Despair is explained to be ‘the sickness unto death’, in the way that Christ used the word ‘death’, when dealing with the case of Lazarus. Men cannot die forever, because they are eternal by nature, by Christ’s law. And therefore, the word ‘death’ does not, for the Christian, signify the end of the body’s vital functions, the time when people are usually buried, and recorded as being ‘dead’. Rather, when Christ uses the word ‘death’, he means extreme sin, the loss of self, of contact with God. For Christ, ‘death’ means irredeemable sin, not the end of the mortal span of life. A man can only die if he dies before God, and that is only possible when that man is in a condition of sin. Mere bodily malfunction and expiry is not a ‘sickness unto death’, because it is nothing to do with sin. Lazarus, not being unforgiveable and in eternal sin, is not dead; his sickness is not unto death.
Now, Kierkegaard has already assumed three things. The first is that his reader is already a citizen of Christendom. He is writing to people who for one reason or another, already claim to be Christians. We can come to this later, perhaps. Second, Kierkegaard has started his discussion of faith by fastening onto that thing which alone can have faith, which alone matters to him, namely the individual self. And finally, Kierkegaard has introduced a concept which motivates the whole book, namely the notion of ‘despair’, or the self which is not in a proper relation with itself.
I think that most people only take any notice of this first half of the book. When I first read it, aged eighteen, the second half of the work was either not to my taste, or beyond my capacity to understand. The radical truth of the point he was making in the first half of the book, about having or not having a self; of the degrees of self-consciousness; the game of avoiding the self, even among the most wise, the adult, the cultivated; and the absolutely unrelenting attention to the self as something eternal and infinitely important; these things appeared to me to be almost demonstrably scientifically factual. For years after I read this book, I, based on a misunderstanding and due to a lack of intellectual subtlety, thought of the self and the world as a place of lost self and certain despair and misery, exactly as I believed Kierkegaard had described them. That was due to the perfectly direct way in which Kierkegaard had described people, and our situation.
Back then, I misunderstood the general meaning and intent of the book; I had got as far as the part of the exposition; I refused to believe, that when a self-relates to itself, or knows itself, it must do so as an eternal self stood before God in faith. I could not see how this could be possible. It was partly for this reason, because I could not see how to find the etrnal in myself, that I was content for years afterward, to refer to The Sickness Unto Death as a methodical and proven description of human life, but, a description of a life forever in a condition of despair. The implication that I had to therefore find God, and to believe in Christ, did not occur to me until much later. As I’ve said, I think that this was a lack of understanding and a lack of will which accompanied most of Kierkegaard’s English readers. Even the Christians among us were content that we were Christians, and part of ‘Christendom’, but that despair is our natural condition, and that we have to motivate ourselves to ‘find ourselves’, and nothing more.
The work stylistically is a kind of treatise, laid out as an imitation of a scholastic, or Aristotelian study, of a particular natural object. In this case, the object is the human being and its ultimate purpose; or perhaps, it is a study of the human self. And at the same time, it already assumes that we are Christians. So, it has an air of being a hybrid: a scientific treatise with certain presuppositions already taken for granted as true, even though they are things which can’t really be taken for granted. I suppose, that by the power of his rhetoric, Kierkegaard makes you believe that his implicit principes are true, as the book progresses and unfolds. But it would not be usual to do that in a treatise. So the style and the subject are at odds.
It was written at a time when the Hegelian speculative philosophy was dominant in Europe. This results in Kierkegaard frequently referring to the speculative philosophy and the semi-scientific approach to reality taken by the dialectical thinkers; it practices a certain hybrid ‘dialectic’ style of thinking. Even though, it is known, and said in the work itself, that he does not believe that the speculative philosophy can deliver any truth. I should remark on that here: the reason the speculative Hegelian philosophy cannot deliver truth is, that such philosophy deals in concepts; meanwhile, the human self is always an individual, and falls beneath the concept; the human individual is too messy and too base to be conceptualised. Only the ‘race’, or the ‘generation’ of men, can be treated under the aspect of the concept. And hence, Christianity, which is always concerned with the individual, cannot be adequately thought through by the speculative Hegelian philosophy.
All these small contradictions, and the very severe and treatise-like nature of the writing, are bound together, and made necessary, or explained, by another trick which Kierkegaard played on the reader, and which perhaps allowed his fluency of style: he was not writing the book as ‘Soren Kierkegaard’. He wrote it as ‘Anti-Climacus’. It is not worth dwelling on the pseudonyms which Kierkegaard used. In brief, the writer who calls himself ‘Anti-Climacus’ should be understood as a man who does not beat about the bush in his arguments, and is a committed Christian fundamentalist. This is not the place to go into why Kierkegaard wrote under assumed names. To my mind, it does not bring in doubt his sincerity.
So, to the argument. In a slightly awkward thesis, which derives from the speculative philosophy, but which has plausibility, the start of the treatise states that the human self has this essential attribute: it relates or joins things together. The individual self has, as it were, no other fundamental ability or meaning, other than that it is the place where concepts, and experiences, and entire worlds, are co-ordinated, joined together, filtered and discarded by the individual, who exercises his freedom to do so. This is how we can say, that the self is free; it is free to connect all other things together, or not. It is perhaps nothing else than freedom.
But this basic freedom must also join the self to itself, which is what we meant by ‘self-consciousness’. And, because God made man, and wants man to believe in him, the only satisfactory way in which the self can be at rest and truly relate to itself, is: when it recognises itself as eternal; when it recognises that it is an eternal self before God; and when, beyond all doubts and events in life, it has hope in God’s love, and has faith in God. In this way, the human self has lifted itself out of life, when it truly becomes itself. The way to relate to itself is to relate itself also to God, in belief. The most important command, the one which precedes all the others of the Gospels and Old Testament, is this: “Thou shalt believe”.
I have not yet done justice to the psychological studies of individual life which precede this conclusion. I cannot do so, but I should make a small effort. What makes me pause is, that by doing so, I will merely echo or do a summary of the book, which is not exactly a fruitful use of our time. However, in the first half of the book, we find Kierkegaard describing the hierarchy of types of self; it is first necessary that a man has a self, and then that he is aware of it; and then that he should be aware that he must relate to himself; he has to want to be himself. And then, he has to come to terms with himself as something eternal. All these stages or types of wanting to be the self, and even of trying to be the self, are considered to be forms of despair. It is paradoxical that a man must become himself, and yet, he is in despair, he is sick, when he wants to be himself. The paradox is resolved as follows: a man can only be himself when he believes in God, and even if he wants to be his eternal self, if he were to try to be himself for his entire life, if he did not have faith in God, then he must remain in despair and fail at it.
The second half of the book declares that despair, the unfulfilled relation of the self to eternity, is despair, and that despair is sin. Sin is despair. Kierkegaard or Anti-Climacus then shows that in its principle ground function, sin is purely and simply this: the self is not related to its eternity, and not stood before God in faith. It could be argued that sin is more than this, but Kierkegaard is speaking to real people, not pedants. The self is so fundamental, that it is the origin of all sin, and if we are going to speak of the absolute ground of sin and other things, then we must get to the very heart of the matter, where the self is. For instance, a common or garden Christian of Christendom, would ask why some breach of the commandments, or some act of wrong doing, is not sin; such things are worse than the mere fact that a man is not in a relation to himself. Kierkegaard replies that emphasis on doing good is a pagan attitude toward evil and wrong; he says that the opposite of sin is not good actions or ‘virtue’. No, the opposite of sin is faith.
In faith there must be an absence of sin, in the belief that sins are forgiven. That is how to avoid sin, faith is necessary; and without faith, we are always in sin. As a side note, which I make in passing, because we have no time to argue this point out, where the pagan or the man of Christendom would say, that good behaviour and virtue are the opposite of sin, we should merely point out, that the ascetic and the monk do not do anything, and yet they are still in a condition of sin. It would be necessary to do nothing at all, or to do nothing to excess, in order to remain free of sin, if what the pagans said about sin were true. No, only a self which is conscious of itself as eternal as a result of faith in God can be free from despair and sin.
The work reaches its end by considering those spirits (human being is spirit, the self is spirit), which are fully aware of all of this. A self which is self-conscious, aware of its eternal nature, and which yet refuses to consent to God’s rule, is demonic. It uses its freedom to act in pure rebellion. We can see that immediately. But a self which is aware of all these things, and which still struggles to believe and cease to be in despair, which tries to believe but cannot, is something else: it is offended by God. The self which does not believe but wants to do so, is suffering from offence. Kierkegaard, with his supremely Christian heart, explains in this connection, why God appeared to men, and proved that men can be with God, by taking on the shape of a poor man, a man of sorrows, an obscure man. It was so as both to not offend men, and also to make it harder for men to believe without any efforts.
The life which Christ led as God among men, is the opportunity for the self both to not be afraid of going near to God, but also the opportunity for God to keep men at a distance. The form which Christ took on earth, is the means of keeping the unworthy away, and ensuring that they first get a grip of themselves, and figure out their eternity with themselves, before they approach God. There is always a defensive wall around God, so that only the truly humbled, the true believer, the gentle, and the concentrated, the composed self, can approach.
There are three or so aspects of this work which give me some hope, that somehow or other, the procedure followed by Kierkegaard in this book, can be used fruitfully in future times, in order to, in the most prosaic sense possible, ‘spread the word’ of God.
Firstly, the method of psychology, and the almost self-evident nature of the descriptions of human life, which rival other sciences and descriptions, are provided to us in this book. Here, I am thinking, in a way similar to the way Kierkegaard was thinking when he wrote the book: he wanted to edify and instruct, and convert people to the proper relationship to themselves and God, with convincing arguments, with a certain type of style. He was practicing the ‘scientific’ style of the speculative philosophers; he is known to have had an effect on the rise of the scientific approach to philosophy taken by the Phenomenlogists. He used a scientific method because it was appropriate for his era, and it would more effectively spread the word. There is a way of describing human life in such a way, that while the early theologians convinced their public to be Christian by preaching in such and such a way, so in our era, a preacher must make resort to psychology and similar relevant sciences of the mind and self, and so to use the most acute psychological insight, and argument; with the objective of laying bare what human life is, both with and without God, in a way which convinces a scientific and objective people.
But there is another way, and it again is a methodical scientific approach to the apologetics of Christianity and belief in God, which The Sickness Unto Death calls for. This book has, for me, a direct relationship to the hesychastic prayer.
I would like to say something important about the hesychastic, silent prayer, the meditation on the one hand, and the system laid out in the book on the other. Naturally, if we already accept, that the book is merely laying out the basics of Christianity, sin, and forgiveness, then the prayerful life of the monk is not going to be foreign to that book, because the basic assumptions about the nature of existence are the same. However, what I want to say is that, with its laser focus on the self, Kierkegaard’s work is laying claim to the exact same extreme area of individual faith carried out by self-analysis and silence, which the monastic silent prayer also lays claim to.
I struggle to put into words what the silent prayer means, how it works, and why God has blessed it. I will have to put more effort into the labour of articulation in another place. So let me not have to go to the trouble of saying anything more than that Christians are interested particularly in the self and nothing else; the spiritual life of the individual is the highest reality, the centre of existence, because God has made it so; and accepting this leads us to look for God in a personal relationship, with the silent prayer; and that this is the same thing that the book, The Sickness Unto Death, is doing by way of its scientific, treatise structure, its analysis, its explanation. The prayer makes us one pointed and concentrated on the self; the book of philosophy argues why this must be the case.
What the emphatic and logical insistence on the self, and the practical imperative and allure of a methodical prayer, share is common is, that the one insists on examining the self, and putting it before God; and the other shows you how to do it. Furthermore, while the Christian philosophy of Kierkegaard asserts that the self must be thought of as eternal and tells us that the individual is subject to eternal life and God’s judgement, the meditative prayer, which is thoughtless, so to speak, actually puts us into the first stages of an eternal life, and rids us of the temporal world altogether – at least, it claims to do so. Additionally, both the philosophy, and the method, aim to refine the individual life into a high form of conscious awareness. I do claim that Kierkegaard’s philosophical writing does turn our attention on to the self; it works like that. But the method of meditation also has as its primary concern, the refinement and purification of conscious awareness, and self-reflection. Effectively, in the silent prayer, there is nothing else to focus on, other than the self in its isolated purity. It individualises and refines the mind and the self; it makes one aware of being spirit. These notes must be inadequate for now; my intention was not to analyse the method of meditation and its results; nor even to get to the heart of Christianity and the life of a Christian.
In an age of science and technology, it would be right to get people to turn to God, with scientific technological and methodical means. Christians, who believe that for God everything is possible, ought to struggle to believe, that contrary to the prevailing consensus about what reality is, God can and does intervene in this world at all times; but in an era where only material things determine how things will turn out, the barrier to belief is redoubled. When I myself first read Kierkegaard, I could not reasonably understand what the second half of his book was asking me to do, what it really meant. I only understood it years later, when I began to pray, or to meditate in a methodical way. And that is the final note I wish to make; and I do advise that others make more of it than I have done here. That Kierkegaard’s work has described what a Christian is, and that prayer of the silent concentrated, self-aware and self-focused kind, gets the self in a position such, that he can understand what self-composure and something like an eternity of self, which the book describes, is at first hand. But, there is one more thing required which neither the method of prayer, nor the scientific accuracy of a full description of the human being, can do. It remains only and finally for the free individual self to believe in Christ, and no method or science can do that for him. I do not think that even hesychastic prayer makes a person have faith; as little does a psychologico-theological treatise.
I submit, that Kierkegaard's book, the expression of supreme genius, can get a reader half way there. It describes the meaning of life, the structure of existence, the central position of the self in all existence. In order to know this truth intimately, however, it is not enough to know it in the abstract; a self must also practice self-centredness. And as I say, the final leap, belief in God, without any reserve, is left for the individual to achieve under his own recognisance. I think that, if there were any need for people to improve their Christian self-understanding; if there were any calling on any prophet, to proselytise for God, or to call people to themselves in this age, then the combination of the work of Kierkegaard, and the method of the hesychastic prayer, would be the way to do it. I have to leave it like that for now, with that massive challenge laid before us. My work never strays very far from these matters, and I became concerned, that what I have said here is the deepest, most profound truth of human life, some time ago; so I will likely return to this theme, and extend it, and articulate it, and improve on these mere notes, in future.
If one were to be familiar with the Gospels, and one were to see the logic of Kierkegaard's arguments, and also to practice the method of meditation, one would unavoidably become a Christian and have faith in God.
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