Before looking at Kierkegaard’s view of faith I feel it is necessary to point out that the question of what view exactly should be attributed to Kierkegaard becomes complicated when one considers his use of pseudonyms. I cannot proceed to delve deep into this discussion but throughout I will honour Kierkegaard’s wish that when writing about his works people should refer to the pseudonym they were attributed to. Thus it may be said that the following is a discussion of a view of faith which can be found in Kierkegaard’s writings, with there being a strong enough trajectory in a certain direction for it to be permissible to speak of a unified view of faith. The view most commonly attributed to Kierkegaard is that of the necessity of a “leap of faith”. However, it is in fact the case that these words never appear in the original Danish transcripts. It would be better to characterise his view as that of a leap into faith. A venture was necessary to move from the ethical realm to the religious realm, just as it is necessary in the move from the aesthetic sphere to that of the ethical. Kierkegaard was convinced that Reason could not lead one to faith, and in fact it at times appears that he felt it was an active impediment to becoming a Christian. He spoke as if it were necessary to protect Christianity from any proofs of the existence of God or the divinity of Christ. Such ‘proofs’, he felt, were an absurdity.
In Practice in Christianity Anti-Climacus speaks of an “infinite qualitative difference” between God and man. Due to this, the very idea of Jesus Christ, the God-man can only provoke offence. To man’s finite reason the very idea is nothing but an absurdity and the only way to get around the offence is to believe. Anti-Climacus thus rails against all so-called proofs for Christianity such as those from history, as if the past 1800 years (at the time of writing) had somehow made more plausible the claims of Christianity. Thus in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript Climacus takes seriously Lessing’s assertion that contingent historical truths can never become a demonstration of eternal truths of reason, an assertion Christian apologists are usually engaged in attempting to refute.
For Kierkegaard these arguments against reasoned proposals for the faith were an element in his artillery against the state of affairs in ‘Christendom’ where it was assumed that everyone was a Christian. The notion of becoming contemporaneous with Christ appears in this context. What this means is that it was no easier for the apostles to believe than it is for us now. History as such does not really play a part in the fruition of faith; we must become contemporaneous with Christ as the apostles were in order to respond to Christ’s call with infinite passion whether that is faith or offence. The possibility of offence is one which Kierkegaard time and time brings attention to, being a Christian (that is, to have faith) is not a matter of simply being a good citizen who goes to Church on Sundays. On the contrary, as Anti-Climacus puts it, “to be a Christian is to mean…to human eyes, to be the abased one, that is to mean suffering every possible evil”.
Kierkegaard expresses the notion of faith requiring “objective uncertainty” in the following evocative passage by Johannes Climacus: “If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy fathoms of water, still preserving my faith.” In this sense Kierkegaard’s writings are certainly of a fideistic nature but this was not an unsophisticated fideism which simply held that one believe whatever one wants to, rather it relied on the priority of a passionate personal commitment over a detached and supposedly objective inquiry into the truth. Hence Johannes Climacus’ dictum that “Truth is subjectivity”. This should not be misinterpreted to mean that truth is simply whatever one wishes it to be and that the objective truth of Christianity is unimportant, but that to assent to the doctrines of Christianity because one feels that they have been adequately demonstrated by rational methods is to lose the passionate element in faith which is a necessity in making it a living faith.
However, how far exactly this view pertains to Kierkegaard’s own is difficult to ascertain for Johannes Climacus states that he is not a Christian and so his views may not equate entirely with those Kierkegaard held. However, the conviction that faith is a passion and that objective certainty is in some ways a hindrance to the possibility of faith is one that appears frequently in Kierkegaard’s work and there is no doubt that he held it himself in some way, even if in not quite so radical a fashion as Johannes Climacus. It remains to be said that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on paradox and how Christianity must appear absurd to a human perspective has a noble ancestry. St. Paul essentially expresses the same idea when he speaks of preaching the crucified Christ for salvation as “folly” and a “stumbling block.”
Since I’ve written a bit about Newman’s views of the relations between faith and reason I thought I’d elaborate a little on their convergences (in that both were thinkers passionately concerned with the subjective appropriation of the Christian faith) and also their differences.
Newman was unhappy with the torpid state of the Church and felt that a mere moralism was stifling a vibrant and living faith. Likewise Kierkegaard too, had to contend with forces which he felt were opposed to genuine Christian faith, in his case the philosophy of Hegel and the deleterious effects it had on a doctrine of the individual Christian believer standing before God, instead subsuming said individual within an all-encompassing system. The attack Kierkegaard directed at “the present age” which “relaxes temporarily in complete indolence” bares similarities with Newman’s struggles against an officially Christian society which had practically speaking ceased to be so. The two thinkers shared similar historical circumstances in that they were members of a society with an established Church where being a Christian was a matter of course. Both Kierkegaard and Newman were ‘subjective’ thinkers, concerned that individuals should be aware of what the demands of Christianity entail and thus they fought against the debilitating effects of a nominal Christianity. This meant in their eyes, something quite different from being merely a good citizen, a gentlemen.
They can also be said to be somewhat similar in their critique of rationalism in theology and any claims of reason to be the sole arbiter of truth. Here, however, it is clear that Newman did not develop a polemic against reason as vehement as that of Kierkegaard. Newman’s desire was to demonstrate that faith and reason do not conflict and that reason ought not to be conceived in a narrow sense as philosophers such as Locke and Hume had done. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, seems as times to be arguing for the complete impotence of reason and an anti-intellectualist stance. This view of Kierkegaard is perhaps too superficial although it is entirely understandable why someone should arrive at it. I believe, however, that Kierkegaard’s primary concern was to maintain the element of passion in faith, it was not an attack on reason per se. It is not irrational if reason assents to its limits and there is no question of an arbitrary imposition of limits on reason. If this is the case then Kierkegaard can simply be seen to be accepting man’s finite nature which includes the use of reason. It nevertheless remains true that Newman appears to have had a higher regard for the capabilities of reason in the religious sphere than did Kierkegaard. Neither thinker, however, would have been out of place in today’s philosophical milieu. It might be questioned, however, whether Kierkegaard’s particular polemic against reason is a consequence of remaining captive to a Kantian conception of it. That reason is finite no one would wish to dispute but that it cannot raise itself to knowledge of God’s existence is another matter entirely and as I have argued elsewhere on the site, coming to know God’s existence is not an instance of ‘onto-theology’ and reason’s idolatrous grasping at the divine.
One area in which they differ is over the notion of the necessity of a “leap” in coming to know religious truths. Kierkegaard’s temperament was often shaped by a stark either/or and so there is a greater stress on the element of decision in the religious as well as ethical life (e.g. “Now the issue is: will you be offended or will you believe.”). Newman, on the other hand, was more disposed to favour an element of gradation in the coming to fruition of faith. It does not happen ‘all at once’, as the result of a decisive leap from the individual, but is the coming together of various different factors which contribute to the appearance of faith, as we have seen in the discussion of the illative sense. Nicholas Lash aptly sums up this view with his remark that “Newman never ‘leapt’ anywhere in his life”.
There are also differences in the two thinkers views on what sort of difference Christian faith has to someone’s life. Whilst both maintained that it would involve a radical transformation of the person, Kierkegaard stressed that becoming a Christian entails a wholly qualitative change, whereas Newman felt that it required a dramatic building upon the natural religious sensibility of the human person. Again the notion of a leap comes into play here; Kierkegaard affirms its necessity whereas Newman considers that “it has been the plan of Divine Providence to ground what is good and true in religion and morals, on the basis of our good natural feelings.” Newman would thus have no qualms over the Thomist axiom that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” Kierkegaard, on the other hand, wishes to emphasise the more dramatic aspects of Christianity’s breaking into the world, disrupting the categories of human reasoning and overturning all our expectations. And these two different emphases, I suppose, must forever remain in tension within theology.
