Kierkegaard, Soren, Kierkegaard’s Attack Upon “Christendom”, 1854-1855, ed. Walter Lowrie; Princeton University Press, Princeton: 1946.
A book was published by Princeton in 1946, which collected the documents which Kierkegaard had written in the local press, and at his own expense, against the Danish church, in the last year of his life. Reading these documents is not edifying; and only moderately entertaining. Kierkegaard was then in the last year of his life, and he was probably unwell.
There are dozens of pieces, and few of them are much more than a couple of pages long. And, I do intend to keep this short review of them to the same length. The occasion for their composition and publication in 1855, was the death of the head of the Danish church, Bishop Mynster, and more particularly, the eulogy given by his successor, Bishop Martensen. Martensen said of his predecessor, that he was a ‘witness to the truth’ of Christianity, with which Kierkegaard took issue; and, when that quarrel with the Danish church and the public had begun, Kierkegaard continued it bitterly over the space of a year.
The documents collected same roughly the same thing, over and over, but in various though not always very different ways. His original point had been, that a national church can never be, or employ men who are, a witness to the truth. It seems that Kierkegaard should and does understand, that a church is necessary, and that a state church might be the only valid way of organising one, but what he took exception to, was that the bishops claimed to be as useful and Christian, as the apostles.
For, an employee of the state cannot successfully bear witness to the true meaning of Christ, namely the other world. If a state church is witness to anything in particular, it is to a halfway alliance between this world and the kingdom of heaven. It is in the nature of Christianity, as he understands it, and as Christ had told us in the gospels, that the Christian would be persecuted. And, that is another of the dramatic positions which Kierkegaard takes in this debate with these professional Christians: that by being persecuted for what he had said, he was fulfilling the demands of being a Christian, while the bishops, on the contrary, were showing their affiliation to the state, and the worldy rewards it offered them.
It is uncomfortable to see Kierkegaard spend so much effort at this task, because it is clearly not useful to either himself, the church, or anyone else, for him to do so. He repeatedly attacks the 1,000 priests of Denmark, for having a family, and having to earn money. He says that they are misleading the people, and that they should be made unemployed, if they were to properly lead the people to Christ. We also know that he was only saying this, to indicate what would be perfect, the perfect Christian. But his apparent intolerance for imperfect Christians grates. In these short pieces, there is passion and hatred, which is not properly hedged in with the other things he ought to have said, about how the individual should strain for perfection, even if the church around him is so idle and worldly, that it veers toward paganism.
But it is helpful to see Kierkegaard take his own philosophy to this extreme. I can see more clearly, how it is that he reads the gospels, and how it comes about that he can make this terrible drama in public, while believing that he is correct: it is because his method of being a Christian, was flawed, and leads to these awful contradictions and confrontations.
Kierkegaard takes the gospel sayings of Christ literally. You will give up your property; you will hate your father and mother, and so on. The only way in which these things can be taken literally, is if we assume that the Christian hates the world, and hates himself. Kierkegaard himself says so.
But, it is known, that hatred is a passion. Kierkegaard was a student of pasions, and faith itself is, for him, a passion. Yet, passions are also said to be things of the world. One has to be involved in the world, in order to hate. Unless we are indifferent to something, then it remains with us. Everyone knows this. So, how should we understand the gospels to tell us to aim for the other world, by means of being firmly attached to this one? This is a contradiction which has no easy explanation, nor any explanation.
Properly, the way we should understand our relationship to the other world, and this one, is the relation of indifference to this world, and love for the next. And this is achieved by the silent prayer. And it is also in this way that a man may be able to be a priest, but yet be indifferent to his role and his world, in the heart; and yet also belong, in the heart, to the next world, and to God. The silent prayer is the way in which we should understand Christ’s teaching and his incarnation and suffering and death.
But as far as I can gather, from reading his work in the important publications and more immediately in the Attack, he intellectually understood the Gospels very well, as demanding individualism, seriousness, isolation of faith, and commitment, and also a high form of selfishness. But these things are intellectually understood. The key to how to put them in to practice eluded him, and he had no option but to think that a mad passion, and unworldly passion, must be that key. It is not the case, as we can see from these final mad public announcements and curses. Rather, the silent prayer and unity with God in the prayer, are the key.
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