Provocative Paradoxes

Here is one of Kierkegaard’s most arresting images: a man sews a garment, he works with care and persistence but he refuses to knot the thread he sews with and so it pulls through the cloth as he proceeds; the man sees this but keeps on sewing, firm in his commitment to the task.

Kierkegaard used this image in various books including The Sickness unto Death, because it illustrates the futility of speculative philosophy: the philosophers have worked long and hard—they’ve worked for centuries, in fact—but they have achieved less than they imagine that is credible or lasting because they refuse to admit paradoxes: they will not knot the thread so that their work can profitably begin. As a consequence, speculative thought has become a procession of theories which have their short time of prominence before unravelling to be replaced by the next theory, which also soon unravels. Kierkegaard exclaims:

For alas! the secret of speculative understanding is precisely to sew without fastening the end and without knotting the thread, which is why it can keep on sewing and sewing, that is pulling the thread through. Christianity, on the other hand, fastens the thread with the help of the paradox.

Speculative philosophy refuses to admit paradoxes because paradoxes make assertions that seem contradictory; they confound human understanding and defy convention. Paradoxes are an offence to human understanding, which insists on its own limited understanding as the ultimate standard of validity. Christianity, Kierkegaard insisted, is based on paradoxes: it is thick with ideas that confound human comprehension. Christianity is therefore going to be an offence to every person who makes their own understanding the measure of validity rather than acknowledging that they are a creature “before God”—a favourite phrase of Kierkegaard’s because it describes man’s essential characteristic and privileged position.

In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard identifies five key areas where Christianity will cause—and has caused!—offence: its exposition of man’s defiant state before God; and of man’s need of revelation before he can understand his own defiant state; its insistence on the responsibility of each individual human being; its extravagant affirmation of the exaltation God offers man; and the radical proposal that the eternal God entered into space and time in the person of a first-century Jewish carpenter. This last offence Kierkegaard makes the subject of another book, Philosophical Fragments, but he briefly highlights the offending and paradoxical nature of the incarnation in The Sickness unto Death.

Kierkegaard highlighted the offending doctrines of Christianity because they were distinctive guarantees of differentiation from all pagan philosophy. The offending paradoxes were not to be hidden as awkward nuisances; they were to be championed because they knotted the thread and thus secured the start so that reason could begin its work. Kierkegaard says, “And it is of the utmost importance that this is demonstrated in every specification of the Christian, since offence is the Christian protection against all speculative philosophy.” For example, Christianity teaches that man requires revelation before he can understand his state of defiance before God, that is, his state of sin. Given this need for revelation, Kierkegaard concludes, “What a dangerous objection it would be against Christianity if paganism had a definition of sin which Christianity had to acknowledge was correct.” In other words, if pagan philosophers could arrive independently at this doctrine then one of Christianity’s essential truths—the need for revelation before man can understand his condition—is contradicted and there is nothing divine or unique about the assertion.

Man is offended to be told that he is unable to know his own condition, yet Kierkegaard says this is exactly the case. Kierkegaard affirms the position of Christian orthodoxy which tells man that he is ignorant of the fact that he exists in a state of sin which does not consist, as is popularly believed, of immoral acts, but of defiance before God. Immoral acts are the result of this defiance and exacerbate the defiance, but they are not the initial dynamic principle. Sin is therefore, properly speaking, defiance before God: seeking one’s self without acknowledging that the dependent self is derived from God: “In the deepest sense, the being in a state of sin is the sin, the particular sins are not the continuation of sin, they are expressions of its continuation.” But man’s defiance before God—his state of sin—leads man to reject this diagnosis of his condition: it offends him. Such a diagnosis seems too extreme: it says that man can’t know himself by himself; it stresses that defiance persists no matter how otherwise law-abiding and upright a person may be; it makes man in defiance unequivocally guilty of active or passive rebellion against God; and it leaves man incapable of pleasing God except by ending his defiance, that is, by accepting the Christian diagnosis of his condition—the very thing that offends. Kierkegaard sums up the attitude of the common person to this idea: “Just a little less and he is willing to go along with it—but ‘too much is too much’.”

From this diagnosis it follows that the opposite of sin—of defiance before God—is not virtue, but faith: trust in God is the true opposite of defiance before God. Kierkegaard maintains that opposing sin with virtue is a pagan conception which judges things by a purely human standard:

No, the opposite of sin is faith, [his italics] which is why in Romans 14:23 it says, “whatsoever is not of faith, is sin”. And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity: that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.

According to Kierkegaard’s formulation, the opposite of adultery is not fidelity; the opposite of greed is not generosity. The opposite of these immoral acts born of defiance before God is faith—undefiance before God.

The Christian conception of man in defiance before God is sufficiently offensive to draw scorn, but Christianity goes further and states that man’s defiance blinds him to his own condition to the extent that man must be told about his own defiant condition; hence the need for revelation:

Here again is the mark of offence. The possibility of offence lies in there having to be a revelation from God for man to learn what sin is and how deep it goes.

This need for revelation before man can understand his own nature and condition strikes at the heart of man’s claim to epistemological competence. Speculative philosophers presuppose that man’s intellectual abilities are unimpaired and are a sufficient basis to understand life—even if they conclude that there is no understanding of life. But Kierkegaard points out that man’s defiance before God dramatically affects his ability to understand his own being and condition because these can only be understood in connection to God. Speculative philosophy affirms man’s normality and self-sufficiency; Christianity affirms man’s abnormality and insufficiency. Kierkegaard develops this theme in The Sickness unto Death and in Philosophical Fragments. It is a view shared by G.K. Chesterton. He records that he was relieved to learn that he and the world were not as they should be. This is from Orthodoxy:

The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had learned that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.

After affirming man’s defiance before God, Kierkegaard observes that Christianity further compounds the offence by insisting that man’s defiance is not abstract but individual:

In what do we find the possibility of offence here? In the fact that a person should have the reality of his being, as a particular human being, directly before God, and accordingly, again, and by the same token, that man’s sin should be of concern to God. This notion of a single human being before God never occurs to speculative thought; it only universalizes particular human beings phantastically into the human race.

Human reason avoids extremes; it prefers to base its work on the golden mean, the average, and the experience of the majority. It is predicated on an abhorrence of undifferentiated particulars, so it is offended by Christianity’s emphasis on the individual human being; it prefers to consider humanity as an undifferentiated mass. To consider each and every individual human being ruins everything; it seems unbalanced. So, in an attempt to be more balanced, pagan philosophy tries to lop a little off each side of Christian doctrines. It is willing to admit that sin is bad but it is certainly not defiance before God, and it can concede that God may be concerned with the human race but surely not with every single individual. Again, it is a case of “too much is too much”. But Kierkegaard observes that even offence is individual. There must be someone to take offence:

But offence is the most crucial possible specification of subjectivity, the particular human being. Clearly, thinking of offence without thinking of someone who is offended is as much an impossibility as flute-playing without a flautist.

Kierkegaard was a champion of human individuality and free will, so offence by an individual to Christianity is not a necessary response; there is the possibility of acceptance of Christian truths, of submission before God, of faith, and of recovery of man’s original theologically-related magnificence. Here again, scorners can find reason for offence in the forgiveness and restoration that God extends to each individual who ends their defiance: “The natural man’s narrow-mindedness cannot bring itself to accept the extraordinary that God has intended for him, and so the natural man is offended.” The doctrine of complete atonement also offends because it seems to contrast paradoxically with the Christian insistence that the defiant man is guilty of defiance before God.

But here too Christianity … is as paradoxical as possible; it is as though it were working against its own ends by setting up sin so firmly as an affirmative position that now it seems perfectly impossible to remove it—and then this very Christianity wants with the atonement to remove it so completely that it is as though drowned in the ocean.

To be near to God as Christianity teaches that man can come to him, and dares to come to him, and in Christ is to come to him, has never occurred to any human being … only a God who has taken leave of his senses could have hit upon such a doctrine—that is how a human being still in command of his wits must judge it.

But his judgment would be wrong. Kierkegaard states that man’s measure is determined by what he stands before: if he stands before nature (as atheistic evolution bids him), then his measure is purely biological; if he stands before society and the state, his measure is purely anthropological; but if stands “before God”, then his measure is divine. “And what an infinite reality this self acquires by being conscious of being before God, by being a human self that has God as its standard!” This is man’s true measure: he stands before his Creator; his self is thus theological. It is an exalted and privileged position; yet one that man rebels against. It is here that man’s many contradictions—his glory and his wretchedness—are born; they have their explanation in this paradox: man stands before God, yet man defiantly seeks fulfilment not in God but in various aspects of God’s creation: family, love, business, fame, money. It is a futile project, as Pascal notes in his Pensees: 

Man does not know the place he should occupy. He has obviously gone astray; he has fallen from his true place and cannot find it again. He searches everywhere, anxiously but in vain, in the midst of impenetrable darkness.

We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness. We have been left with this desire as much as a punishment as to make us feel how far we have fallen.

Through his defiance before God, man is fallen, but he is capable of being restored to his exalted theologically-related self. Christianity teaches that this is precisely what God has done for us. If a sceptic objects that this makes “too much” of man, Pascal wryly observes that he inadvertently affirms the Christian truth of man’s greatness: “If we claim that man is too slight to deserve communion with God, we must indeed be great to be able to judge.”

Kierkegaard knows that it requires courage to believe the tremendous restoration that God intends for each individual person. He notes, “Every person who does not have the humble courage to dare to believe it is offended.” It is a momentous change to move from defiance to faith, and this change affects every aspect of one’s life. Habits and patterns of a lifetime are questioned:

If one were to imagine a house consisting of basement, ground floor and first floor, tenanted or planned in such a way that there is, or is meant to be, a difference of social class between the occupants of each floor—and if now one were to compare being a human being with such a house, then the sad and ludicrous fact with most people is, alas, that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement … Moreover, he not only prefers living in the basement—no, he loves it so much that he is indignant if anyone suggests he occupy the fine suite lying vacant for him; after all, he is living in his own house!

Pascal, using a similar metaphor, likewise encourages the hesitant to investigate the extravagant promises of Christianity: “An heir finds the deeds to his house. Will he say, perhaps, that they are false, and not bother to examine them?”

Perhaps the most troublesome of the Christian paradoxes is the doctrine of the incarnation: that the God of eternity is found in the person of Jesus, a short-lived Jewish carpenter from ancient Galilee. Kierkegaard notes that the common vision of Jesus falls into one of two positions: it makes him, docetically, a mythic figure and not a particular human being, or it makes him, rationalistically, only a particular human being and not God’s son. In other words, each position seeks to avoid the Christian paradox that Jesus was both a particular human being and the promised Messiah, the son of God. Kierkegaard doesn’t make a defence of the incarnation in any traditional way; he insists that it shall be believed—by commandment of God—and that a refusal to believe is a further and most serious act of defiance before God.

It is here that critics of Kierkegaard have charged him with fideism. He wants individuals to accept paradoxical Christian truths, yet he doesn’t concede that some measure of evidence, apart from the emptiness of speculative philosophy as an alternative, is required or even helpful. Kierkegaard sees the believer in God as a lover whose passion doesn’t need reasons; in fact, reasons are a denigration of the believer’s love. What affectionate husband or wife needs three reasons, for example, to make love to their treasured spouse? In addition, the qualitative distance between God and man means that, for Kierkegaard, any attempt by finite man to comprehend the infinite God is ridiculous: “Comprehension is man’s circumference in relation to the human; but to believe is man’s relation to the divine.” That is why Kierkegaard could say, “He who is not offended worships in faith.”

In part, at least, Kierkegaard’s indifference to apologetics is related to his over-riding purpose: he wanted to smuggle Christianity back into Danish Christendom. Kierkegaard’s books were addressed to safe, prosperous and peaceful early-nineteenth-century Danish people. They were educated in and expected to conform to state-sanctioned Christianity, yet this very familiarity and easy conformity robbed Christianity of its surprising radicalism. In Kierkegaard’s words, the strong whisky of the gospel had been exchanged for lemonade. He sought to correct this situation. The problem he addressed was not that of scepticism but of spiritless conformity to a domesticated and therefore a debased Christianity.

Kierkegaard’s attitude to the offensive teachings of Christianity is to proclaim them boldly and to make no concessions to man’s narrow-mindedness:

The best advised course would be simply to tell them that the real reason why people are offended by Christianity is that it is too elevated, that its standard of measurement is not the human standard, that it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought of it.

Moreover, to try to remove the offensive teachings is to contradict Jesus, who frequently warned people not be offended by him, so the possibility of offence was integral to his teaching. He said, “Blessed is he who is not offended by me” (Luke 7:23).

By including a blessing, this essay reveals its homiletic character. That, too, is an accurate reflection of The Sickness unto Death because in the preface Kierkegaard states, “In a Christian context everything, yes everything, should serve to edify. The kind of scholarship that does not try to edify is for that very reason un-Christian.” Kierkegaard regarded any disinterested study of humanity as inhuman curiosity that fails to accord man the respect and dignity that he deserves. What Kierkegaard sought to engender is the focused passion of a lover, the elevating heroism of belief:

Christian heroism, and indeed one perhaps sees little enough of that, is to risk unreservedly being oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being alone before God, alone in this enormous exertion and this enormous accountability.