Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith

Merold Westphal

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467442299
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In this book renowned philosopher Merold Westphal unpacks the writings of nineteenth-century thinker Søren Kierkegaard on biblical, Christian faith and its relation to reason.Across five books — Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Sickness Unto Death, and Practice in Christianity — and three pseudonyms, Kierkegaard sought to articulate a biblical concept of faith by approaching it from a variety of perspectives in relation to one another. Westphal offers a careful textual reading of these major discussions to present an overarching analysis of Kierkegaard's conception of the true meaning of biblical faith.Though Kierkegaard presents a complex picture of faith through his pseudonyms, Westphal argues that his perspective is a faithful and illuminating one, making claims that are important for philosophy of religion, for theology, and most of all for Christian life as it might be lived by faithful people.

Part One

Johannes de Silentio

Chapter 1

Faith as the Task of a Lifetime

Although Fear and Trembling retells the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac as told in Genesis 22 and Hebrews 11, it is not about sacrifice. And although it contains the (in)famous account of the teleological suspension of the ethical, it is not about ethics. It is about faith and Abraham as the knight of faith. Abraham is, of course, no Christian, but no fewer than four books in the New Testament (Romans, Galatians, Hebrews, and James) portray Abraham as a hero of faith. So while his story has no specifically Christian content, it has the form of biblical faith sufficiently for Kierkegaard to assume that it is relevant for his overwhelmingly “Christian” readership. Not that any of his readers was overwhelmingly Christian, a matter of great importance for understanding the treatise, but rather, numerically speaking, his audience overwhelmingly identified itself as Christian. A subsequent pseudonym, Climacus, will satirize this assumption overtly. Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, will probe and question this self-­assurance. He repeatedly tells us that he lacks the humility and courage to make the movements of Abraham’s faith. “I wonder if anyone in my generation is able to make the movements of faith? . . . I honestly confess that in my experience I have not found a single authentic example” (FT, 34, 38).

Silentio’s disclaimer makes him an outsider looking at the life of faith. This means that Fear and Trembling is not a work of Christian theology, in which a teaching scholar in the church offers an interpretation of the Christian faith to inspire and to instruct and especially to inform preaching. So what kind of writing is it? Kierkegaard calls it a dialectical lyric, which isn’t exactly a familiar philosophical genre. But we can fit it without too much difficulty into several genres with which we are familiar.

Fear and Trembling can be read as a treatise in phenomenology à la Husserl. It is the quest for an eidetic intuition, the apprehension and articulation of the form of a particular mode of intentional experience. And, since Silentio does not affirm the validity or veridicality of this experience, however much he is in awe of it, we can think of his account as under the phenomenological reduction, the epoche.1

We can also read our text as an example of hermeneutical phenomenology à la Ricoeur. The difference is that instead of seeking to follow Husserl’s program, “back to the things themselves,” by approaching them directly, one does so indirectly through earlier cultural deposits, interpreting them in the light of prior interpretations. The path leads along “the detour through the contingency of cultures, through an incurably equivocal language, and through the conflict of interpretations.”2 It requires “the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works” and of “the detour of understanding the cultural signs in which the self documents and forms itself . . . [so that] reflection is nothing without the mediation of signs and works.”3 The authors of Genesis (including redactors), of Hebrews, and of James offer the interpretations by which Silentio’s interpretation is mediated.4

A third genre that helps illumine our text is ideology critique à la Marx. Silentio’s account will portray reason as anything but pure, universal, disinterested, and objective. He will take more seriously than Hegel the latter’s claim, “Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts.”5 And he will have his own version of the Marx/Engels thesis that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”6 It is no accident that Fear and Trembling begins, in its very first sentence, with a critical reference to “our age” or that his question (above) is whether “anyone in my generation” really has faith. That what passes as “reason” turns out to be the doubly contingent self-­interested, self-­congratulatory self-­interpretation of (1) the present age as seen by (2) its dominant elite means quite simply that “reason” is ideology in a rather Marxist sense.

Silentio’s “Marxism” will have a more Nietzschean flavor. Instead of protesting against alienation and exploitation, he will suggest that, compared to Abraham, the present age is nothing more than “wretched contentment.”7 In any case, the “attack upon Christendom” associated with Kierkegaard’s final polemical pamphlets begins not later than Fear and Trembling, and the theory and practice of any Abrahamic monotheism will be countercultural just to the degree that they remain faithful to their Abrahamic roots. The fact that Abrahamic monotheism is the basis for this form of social critique indicates that neither Marxian nor Nietzschean atheism has a monopoly on it. Its origins, in fact, go back to such Hebrew prophets as Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, and Jeremiah.8

Still another genre that almost fits is that of existential psychoanalysis.9 Since Silentio does not commit himself to the ontology presupposed by Abraham’s faith, he does not practice existential psychoanalysis in the sense in which Anti-­Climacus does in Sickness unto Death; he cannot be said to have psychic or spiritual health as his direct goal. But by calling faith a passion and, indeed, the highest passion, he poses the question of trans-­physical health most sharply. Abrahamic faith is either a pathology of the passions or the true foundation of the soul’s health. Silentio is the Socrates whose narrative poses this question insistently.

* * *

The bulk of Fear and Trembling is sandwiched between a brief Preface and a brief Epilogue. The Preface begins with a complaint that in “our age” everything in the world of ideas can be had at such a bargain price that perhaps no one will find it worthwhile to buy (FT, 5). The Epilogue begins with a reference to Dutch merchants who sank a few cargoes in order to raise the price and then asks, “Do we need something similar in the world of the spirit?” (FT, 121). Silentio is posing the question whether in “our age” faith hasn’t been so cheapened as to be all but worthless. It seems as if he wishes to supplement Bonhoeffer’s account of cheap grace with his own account of cheap faith.10

This cheapening takes place through the Hegelian notion that faith is easily achieved by the many and that the higher task of the intellectual elite is to “go further” than faith to the speculative system that attains the status of science. It is here that we find the first of what I shall present as Silentio’s five theses about faith: Faith is the task of a lifetime.

Silentio resists the notion that faith is to be surpassed with two analogies. In the Preface he satirizes the notion of going beyond doubt, as the Danish Hegelian Martensen had purported to do. But the ancient Greeks understood that doubt was “a task for a whole lifetime” and was “not acquired in days and weeks” since it involved denying “the certainty of the senses and the certainty of thoughts.” For Pyrrho, the goal of doubt was to free oneself from commitment to any belief at all. No easy task!

The closest analogy to this kind of doubt is not Descartes’ artificial, temporary doubt as a method rather than an actual experience; it is rather the Buddhist no-­self doctrine that calls on disciples to rid themselves of the belief that anything has a lasting identity. One does not first achieve this extremely difficult goal and then go on to study Buddhist metaphysics. Rather, Buddhist metaphysics and the accompanying narratives are the “expedient” or “skillful” means for achieving this radical, fundamental change of conscious experience. Silentio’s implicit suggestion is that metaphysics is not a higher stage than the spirituality of faith, which needs to “go further,” to surpass itself in that direction; rather, it is properly understood and evaluated as the “expedient” or “skillful” means in the service of the spirituality of faith. Insofar as theology is metaphysics in the service of spirituality, it is, so far as faith is concerned, the highest form of knowledge but not, qua knowledge, the highest human achievement. The contrast with Hegel could not be sharper when Hegel writes that “philosophy must beware of the wish to be edifying.”11

In the Epilogue the analogy is with love that is portrayed as the task of a lifetime. We never learn to love so completely that we can “go further” to higher tasks. Just as the tyro who says “I learned how to play golf (or chess or poker) yesterday” is ridiculous, so anyone who says “I learned how to love my parents (or my siblings, or my spouse, or my children) yesterday” is ridiculous.

Similarly, the Hegelians who want to “go further” than faith are ridiculous and the legitimate ...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Sigla
• Introduction
• Part One: Johannes de Silentio
• 1. Faith as the Task of a Lifetime
• 2. Faith as Trust in Divine Promises
• 3. Faith as Obedience to Divine Commands
• 4. Interlude — Three Questions In Medias Res
• 5. Faith as the Teleological Suspension of Reason
• 6. Faith as the Highest Passion
• Part Two: Johannes Climacus
• 7. Faith as the Reception of Revelation
• 8. Faith as the Happy Passion That Overcomes Offense
• 9. Faith as the Passionate Appropriationof an Objective Uncertainty
• 10. Faith as a Leap and a Striving
• 11. Faith as a Striving Pathos That Goes Against Reason
• Part Three: Anti-Climacus
• 12. Faith as Willing to Be Oneself — Before God
• 13. Faith as Contemporaneitywith Christ — Without Offense
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture References