WEEK SEVEN OCTOBER 2/4, 2006

IS KIERKEGAARD A FIDEIST?

A great deal has been written since the death of Kierkegaard in 1855 on the question of the historical Jesus. The relation between Christianity and history interested Kierkegaard – and his pseudonym Johannes Climacus – because Hegel held that something called Philosophical History could establish the truth of Christianity. The life of Christ took place in time, the miracles he performed, his resurrection. Aren’t these, accordingly, historical events and can’t they therefore be adequately handled by the historical method? They certainly are the objects of the Christian’s faith – that Christ was born in Bethlehem, that he taught and healed and worked miracles, that he suffered, died and was buried, and that on the third day he rose again....not all of these figure as items in the Creed but they are what believers believe. Could their truth be established by an application of the historical method? If so, isn’t Hegel stating something fairly obvious?

A first distinction Climacus makes is between the eyewitness and the follower. What he is getting at is that all sorts of people heard Jesus, saw what he did, but not all of them believed. Believer and non-believer might agree on what they had seen, but the believer professes that Jesus is the Messiah and the non-believer does not. Has the believer seen something the mere eye-witness has not? Both would seem to have the great advantage over us that there are contemporary with these events.

It is easy for the contemporary learner to acquire detailed historical information. But let us not forget that in regard to the birth of the god he will be in the very same situation as the follower at second hand, and if we insist upon absolutely exact historical knowledge, only one human being would be completely informed, namely, the woman by whom he let himself be born. Consequently, it is easy for the contemporary learner to become a historical eyewitness, but the trouble is that knowing a historical fact – indeed, knowing all the historical facts with the trustworthiness of an eyewitness – by no means makes the eyewitness a follower....

What Climacus’s discussion seems to require is a distinction between two senses of history. As the above passage makes clear, there is nothing to prevent or object to in the quest for the most accurate historical knowledge of what actually happened in the first century of our era. This inquiry would make use of and profit by the various techniques of historical research that have been developed. But what would its most successful possible outcome amount to? Presumably the most accurate and exhaustive account of Our Lord’s life.

But this account, given the way it is arrived at – and presuming the objectivity and reliability of those methods – would be one on which believers and non-believers could agree. That is indeed what happened. Climacus’ point is that the historical account could not just as such produce faith, that is, cause one to be a believer, anymore than being an eyewitness of Christ’s acts and words automatically make one a follower or believer. Some accepted him as the Son of God, others did not.

There is a second sense of history that is involved in the believer’s professing that for us men and for our salvation the son of God became man. That happened. It happened at Christmas. It happened in Bethlehem. It happened as Luke tells us about it in his Gospel. The believer believes these as historical events.

Now history in this second sense includes and goes beyond history in the first sense. It is not a matter of further historical research in the first sense that establishes that the baby born in Bethlehem is the Messiah. Faith goes beyond merely being an eyewitness, it requires eyes to see and ears to hear, but these are not just the natural senses everyone has. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. It is accepting as true what is not seen or understood in the usual senses of those terms.

A notable asymmetry

There is a tendency in Climacus to suggest that just as historical knowledge in the ordinary sense does not entail faith, so faith does not entail historical knowledge in the ordinary sense. This tendency is expressed by his suggestion that faith requires next to no historical details in order to come into play. If one were told simply that God appeared as man and little else, that would be enough. Surely this is wrong. Historical knowledge of the usual sort is part and parcel of what the believer believes. It is not the whole thing, but without it, faith would have nothing on which to bear.

Pius X in his condemnation of Modernism specifically mentioned as anathema the suggestion that Christian faith was not grounded in the historical. Already of course the suggestion was that the serious employment of the historical method would undercut and disprove the historical facts which undoubtedly are included in what believers believe. In reacting to this threat, many believers said things not unlike what Climacus comes close to saying. Namely, that religious faith is independent of historical claims – in the ordinary sense of historical – and thus the disproving of those historical claims would not affect religious belief.

The most egregious form of this dissociation is still heard among “defenders of the faith” whose defense is its destruction. If the tomb of Christ were found and his bones were found there this would not, it is said, affect our faith in the resurrection. Christ’s rising from the dead is thus taken to be compatible with the historical truth that he did not rise from the dead. Resurrection then receives a completely ethereal meaning and the robust realism of Christian belief is eroded.

If, per impossible , the bones of Christ were found in a grave in Jerusalem .that would disprove and falsify our faith in the resurrection. Either he rose from the dead or he did not. If he did not, our faith, as St. Paul said, is in vain and we are the most miserable of men.

What the believer has to contend with are unfounded claims that purport to undermine Christian faith. Of course the believer does not think that anything that could be discovered could undermine his faith. Further, he is confident that the application of the historical method can only support and establish the historical (in the usual sense) component of his faith.

But to return to the target of Climacus. Any suggestion that history -- even Philosophical History -- can establish the central truths of Christianity is wrongheaded. Hegel’s suggestion is that Philosophical History will make our acceptance of Christianity a matter of knowledge in the usual sense, its truth having been established in the usual sense. Faith in the usual sense would thus, as Climacus saw, be rendered pointless.

Faith and Paradox

One of the reasons that Climacus gives short shrift to philosophical efforts to make the claims of Christianity into ordinary knowledge claims that can be established or disestablished in the ordinary way, is his definition of faith. At the center of Christian belief is the God-Man. Climacus’ suggestion is that such a phrase embodies a paradox. The Incarnation entails that the eternal has become temporal, the divine has become human. But the eternal and temporal are contraries – a thing is either eternal or temporal. The human and the divine are such that either a person is human or divine. For the believer to hold that Christ is human and divine, that the eternal word has become temporal, is thus a paradox. The question is: what is a paradox?

The suggestion is that it is a contradiction, such that to assert it would be to utter an absurdity. What is believed is an absurdity. One of the great problems of interpreting Kierkegaard, and his pseudonyms, is to understand how literally he means this.

In his Journals Kierkegaard wrote that he was a corrective and not a norm. His effort is not to lay out the contents of Christianity for readers who had no idea what it was. Au contraire . He presupposes that his readers have all the information they need about Christianity. The problem is that they say and do things which are incompatible with what they hold. He has decided against a direct refutation, a flat out historical discussion, for example. Rather, he will present the confusion in such a way, in such an exaggerated way, that his reader will get the point more easily. The demands of rhetoric, or at least its practice, permit excesses that are taken to be justified insofar as they provide the needed shock treatment.

That is the benign interpretation of Kiekregaard’s tendency to speak of the content of Christianity as consisting of contradictory claims. Far from considering that alleged fact to be a hindrance, it is welcomed as calling attention to what an extraordinary thing Christian faith is. Credo quia absurdum .

As that quote from Tertullian suggests, even his is susceptible of a benign interpretation. After all, it was St. Paul would said that Christianity was a scandal to the Jews and folly for the Greeks. Folly. Foolishness. Christianity is judged by non-believers as foolishness. By the world’s standards it is nonsense, by heaven’s it is the highest wisdom.

So Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms are not without their authoritative counterparts.

Fideism

Nonetheless, the word that seems to fit the viewpoint adopted by Johannes Climacus is fideism, and fideism is a heterodox understanding of faith. For the fideist, believing is not a reasonable act; what is believed is neither established by what is known nor could it be disestablished by what is known. Faith is simply a different realm from reason and there is no overlap between them. That is a position the Catholic must reject.

Alas, it is not easy to pin down Climcus and even more difficult to pin down Kierkegaard himself on the matter. In the Journals he seems to be making the Pauline point. To the unbeliever, the content of faith may seem nonsense, but “from the other side”, that is, for the believer, it is not. If fideism is at least a tendency in Kierkegaard, it is possible to find such passages which make the unequivocal attribution of fideism to him problematic.

One paradox of the Kierkegaardian authorship is that, his apparent obscurantism, goes hand in hand with an enormous learning. And we must be careful in getting the point of the denials he makes.

Item. The longevity of Christianity does not establish its truth.

Item. Biblical studies cannot establish the truth of the Bible.

These denials may seem to dismiss as undesirable Church history and biblical studies, but of course that is not their purport. But Kierkegaard was alive as were few others to the intellectual pride which can grip the scholar and lead him to think that he is establishing the truth of Christianity, that finally the whole thing will be put on a secure and scientific footing.

Of course what we have become familiar with is the debunking attitude of those who engage in such studies. Here, Kierkegaardian irony and derision are quite in order.

CHANGING ONE’S LIFE

I mentioned earlier that despite his distinction between the ethical and religious as life stages, Kierkegaard comes to talk with ease about what he calls ethico-religious knowledge. This can be explained either because early stages are subsumed into later ones – as the passions of the soul are baptized by coming under the sway of reason – or because of Kierkegaard’s acceptance of the way in which the moral provides a kind of analogue to the religious. It is the second possibility I wish to explore now.

Knowledge and Virtue

One of the oldest questions in moral philosophy asks whether knowledge is virtue, that is, is knowing what one ought to do tantamount to doing it? What is the relation between knowledge and practice, knowing and doing? In his Protagoras, Plato has Socrates defend the notion that virtuous action is simply a function of knowledge. He uses the analogy of the art of perspective. In judging the relative size of physical objects we can be misled because of the greater or lesser distance from the observer of what is seen. The art of perspective corrects for distance by reminding us that distant things seem smaller and close things larger than they are. Moral judgment requires an analogous art of perspective, this one bearing not on distance but on time. Assuming that moral judgments are appraisals of the relative force of pains and pleasures, the suggestion is that one can go wrong because a present pleasure is wrongly judged to trump a future pain it will bring about, or a present pain is misjudged relative to the future ease and pleasure it can insure. That is, the one drink too many is incorrectly compared to the massive pain of the next morning’s hangover, and the discomfort in the dental chair is given undue weight relative to the sparkling incisors it insures.

The heart of the position here attributed to Socrates is that one cannot not act contrary to the correct judgment of moral perspective.

The reason for that is that reason is what is distinctive in us, it is what is dominant in us, and it is simply unacceptable that reason could be dragged around by lower powers, such as the desire for pleasure or repugnance to pain.

The trouble with the position is that we all, alas, have had experience of acting contrary to our own best lights. It is human all too human to do the evil we would not, and not do the good that we would. But if knowledge or reason is not the sufficient cause of good action, and if reason is what makes us to be human agents, there would indeed seem to be a fissure in our very being.

Ethico-religious knowledge

It can be seen that this moral question as to how knowledge of what we ought to do relates to our doing or not doing it is analogous to the question of the way in which accepting Christianity at one level leaves unanswered the doing or enacting of its message. We are urged to be not simply hearers of the word, but doers also. This parallel between morality and religion is a commonplace of reflections on religion. It is hardly surprising then that it becomes a leitmotif of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments.

When we turn to that work we find a celebration of what is called the subjective thinker and the assertion of the primacy of the subjective. And we find the famous definition of truth which may seem to have the effect of relativizing all truth claims, making them simply a function of our desires. I propose to come at this claim somewhat obliquely.

In speaking of subjective thinking, said to be especially relevant to the moral and religious, Climacus invokes Aristotle’s distinction in On the Soul III, 10 between theoretical and practical knowledge. When we use our mind theoretically the aim is the perfection of thinking as such, namely, acquiring the truth of the matter. When we use our mind practically, the truths we acquire are ordered to an activity beyond and other than thinking, such as choosing. Practical thinking does not reach its completion in thinking, therefore, but in the activity it guides and directs.

This is why Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that one does not become good by philosophizing. That is, taking a course in ethics, perhaps receiving a high grade, does not as such make one a good man. A good student, perhaps, but the discussion of action in the way in which this is done in class or seminar is an instance of thinking not knowing, certainly not an instance of the moral doing that is under discussion. It is when moral knowledge is thought of as like this, that is, like that we find in Aristotle’s Ethics , that it seems preposterous to suggest that possession of it is one and the same with acting in accord with it.

Now if one thought that there is such knowledge and then there is something else called action that follows from it, it could become quite mysterious to know what happens between the knowing and the action. Aristotle’s solution is that practical knowledge in its full sense is what animates the particular actions performed. Practical knowledge in the full sense is embedded in singular actions. That is, there are degrees of practical knowledge, and that found in the Ethics is less practical than that present in this action or that. And Aristotle said, in partial defense of the Socrates of the Protagoras, that it would indeed seem impossible to have here and know the correct judgment of what I should do and not do it. The reason is that such here and know knowledge is embodied in the action already taking place. Correct judgments in the singular are a function of our moral character, that is, the bent of our appetite. If A is what I really want and a is clearly here and now the rest way to achieve A , I do a forthwith. The moral task is to get our appetite glued to what truly is our good and fulfillment, then virtuous action should come with ease.

Subjectivity is the truth

Let us turn now to Climacus discussion of truth. Truth resides in a relation between thought and being – some define truth as thought’s conformity with being, while others reverse this to being’s conformity with thought – but, Climacus says, everything obviously depends on what we mean by being. He proposes to take being to mean human being, and then the question of truth becomes one of the relation of our thinking to what we are. So we are back in familiar territory. Climacus then says that all essential knowledge relates to existence.

That essential knowledge is essentially related to existence does not mean the above-mentioned identity which abstract thought postulates between thought and being; nor does it signify, objectively, that knowledge corresponds to some existent as its object. But it means that knowledge has a relationship to the knower, who is essentially an existing individual, and that for this reason all essential knowledge is essentially related to existence. Only ethical and ethico-religious knowledge has an essential relationship to the existence of the knower.

This is the basis for the famous definition of truth as subjectivity.

Here is such a definition of truth: An objective uncertainy held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual.

Many have taken this to be a way to justify any claim as true if only one feels strongly enough about it. The definition offered by Climacus is taken to be a wild innovation without precedent in previous thought. This is clearly false.

Is Climacus a Thomist?

It is false first on the level of the ethical. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas after him speak of practical as opposed to theoretical truth. The latter is had when the mind’s judgment is in conformity with the thing judged. Practical truth, on the other hand, is had when the mind’s judgment as to what to do is in conformity with correct or rectified appetite, that is, with an appetite informed by virtue, disposing us to our true good. That disposition, inclination, prevents the appetite for an apparent good from deflecting the judgment. This judgment is made in the course of performing the action. That, again, is why Aristotle allows, in partial defense of the Socrates of the Protagoras , that it does indeed seem possible that one could act otherwise than in harmony with his (general) knowledge.

Thomas Aquinas goes on to liken the act of faith to this practical judgment, the judgment of practical wisdom or prudence. The role of the will in belief is inescapable. Nemo credit nisi volens , St. Augustine wrote: only those believe who will to. Of course the will is moved by grace, and the good that draws us is the promise of happiness. That is the motive for accepting as true what we cannot in this life comprehend or understand to be true. This dark knowledge of faith will be rewarded in heaven, where we will see even as we are seen.

Faith is an intellectual virtue, a habit of mind which disposes to the acceptance of the truths God has revealed. Since in this life the mind cannot be fixed on these truths on its own terms, by understanding them, the role of the will moved by grace is essential to the assent of faith. Faith is thus a gift, not an acquisition, as if one just chose to have it.

Any appraisal of Kierkegaard – or his pseudonyms – on the question of faith and its object must take into account the nature of the literature, the role of a particular pseudonymous work, and Kierkegaard’s over all purpose as the author of the authors.

To those who wished to reduce Christianity to a knowledge claim like all others, the truth of which can be decided by application of standard philosophical or historical criteria, Kierkegaard is there to thwart the effort. He will do this by indirectly reminding his reader that he does not really regard Christ as a teacher on the same level as Socrates or any other merely human teacher.

He is there to make the unsettling reminder that all the natural sciences in the world, all the history imaginable, all the scriptural scholarship you might wish for, cannot establish the truth of the essential Christian claims. In this life we cannot know , in the sense of prove , the trinity of persons in God, the union of human and divine natures in Christ, and so on. These must be believed because they cannot be known – in this life.

Moreover, he will suggest that the object of faith is a contradiction, involving the claim that opposites are identical, that the eternal is temporal, the human divine. It is here that Kierkregaard seems most opposed to Catholic orthodoxy. And yet, as I have suggested, even here he has Pauline precedents.

Kierkegaard is a corrective, not a norm. His indirect method would be useless in giving instructions on Christianity to those with no knowledge of it. He himself stresses this. His is a rhetorical effort which makes use of extreme statements to recall the nominal Christian to the realization of what it means to be a Christian. When books and passages in the literature are simply extracted and separated from that overall purpose the intent of Kierkegaard is distorted.