Fortunate Fallibility: Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin

Fortunate Fallibility

REFLECTION AND THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION SERIES SERIES EDITOR Theodore Vial, Iliff School of Theology A Publication Series of The American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press WORKING EMPTINESS Toward a Third Reading of Emptiness in Buddhism and Postmodern Thought Newman Robert Glass WITTGENSTEIN AND THE MYSTICAL Philosophy as an Ascetic Practice Frederick Sontag

LESSING’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION AND THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT Toshimasa Yasukata AMERICAN PRAGMATISM A Religious Genealogy M. Gail Hamner

AN ESSAY ON THEOLOGICAL METHOD Third Edition Gordon D. Kaufman

OPTING FOR THE MARGINS Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology Edited by Joerg Rieger

BETTER THAN WINE Love, Poetry, and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig Yudit Kornberg Greenberg

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THE METAPHYSICS OF DANTE’S COMEDY Christian Moevs PILGRIMAGE OF LOVE Moltmann on the Trinity and Christian Life Joy Ann McDougall MORAL CREATIVITY Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Moral Life John Wall MELANCHOLIC FREEDOM Agency and the Spirit of Politics David Kyuman Kim FEMINIST THEOLOGY AND THE CHALLENGE OF DIFFERENCE Margaret D. Kamitsuka PLATO’S GHOST Spiritualism in the American Renaissance Cathy Gutierrez TOWARD A GENEROUS ORTHODOXY Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology Jason A. Springs CAVELL, COMPANIONSHIP, AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY Peter Dula COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY AND THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS RIVALRY Hugh Nicholson FORTUNATE FALLIBILITY Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin Jason A. Mahn

Fortunate Fallibility Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin

jason a. mahn

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3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

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Christianity makes men whose strength is in their weakness . . . —Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

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Contents

Preface, ix Acknowledgments, xi Abbreviations, xiii Introduction: Fault and Fallibility, 1 1. Figuring a Fortunate Fall, 25 2. Felix Fragilitas in The Concept of Anxiety, 53 3. Felix Fallibilitas in The Sickness unto Death, 87 4. Felix Offensatio in Practice in Christianity, 133 5. Felicitas: Between Cross and Resurrection, 173 Postscript: Christian Para/Orthodoxy: Toward a Postmodern Hamartiology, 205 Notes, 213 Bibliography, 241 Index, 259

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Preface

It has been about ten years since I first began jotting “FC” (my shorthand for felix culpa) and “BI” (beyond innocence) in the margins of my theology and philosophy books. The scratches marked moments when authors played with the idea that life East of Eden, with all its drifting and doubt, not to mention despair and death, might be preferred to what looks like ready-made obedience and pre-canned paradise. I was then a graduate student, groping my way through a dissertation proposal, compelled by this frequent theo-poetic outlook and a little unsure of what to do with it. Looking back, I realize that I was attracted to the sentiment that we should embrace the loss of innocence for the same reason that I was first attracted to Kierkegaard— both promised ways of being (or at least looking) fashionably enigmatic with our otherwise all too simple faith. When I first read Kierkegaard in seminary, I was mainly attracted to his edginess and obscurity. With Kierkegaard and a bed-head hair style, I too could be in the church but not of it—a Christian with ironic reserve. When I eventually came to see Kierkegaard as flirting with the idea of a fortunate Fall, my interests in each doubled. I have spent a good deal of the last decade unlearning what I thought I knew about sin and salvation and revising my earliest impressions of Kierkegaard as fashionably unencumbered by things too churchy. The result of that unlearning and a good deal of relearning is the present book, where I argue that beneath romantic fascinations with transgression and philosophical justifications of moral evil—both of which pass under the name fortunate Fall—resides wondrous Christian testimony about God’s unsettling grace by ironically praising that which is furthest from

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redemption: “O happy fault, which merited such and so great a Redeemer!” The first mention of felix culpa belongs not to those at the margins of faith but to the Church’s central proclamation of life redeemed. The curiously positive things that Kierkegaard writes about anxiety, fallibility, and the possibility of offense are no less centered, if also obscurely, in the heart of the Christian tradition. I have the pleasure of thanking individuals and institutions that have supported my learning (and unlearning) throughout these years. Early mentors in theology, Paul Sponheim from Luther Seminary; Walter Lowe and Wendy Farley from Emory University; and Mark Jordan, now at Harvard University, model lives of scholarship, faith, and justice. Later mentors, Amy Laura Hall, Joe Harris, and Stan Hauerwas from Duke University, and Gordon Marino from St. Olaf College, further cultivated my tastes for Kierkegaard and for “becoming a Christian in Christendom” (as Kierkegaard puts it and Hauerwas gets it). Many friends and colleagues have helped this book in direct and indirect ways: Saul Tobias, Melissa Johnston-Barrett, David Mellott, and Chris Boesel (all once graduate students at Emory); Rebecca Walsh, Matt Brim, and Isaac Villegas (friends and colleagues from Duke); and my current, supportive colleagues, too many to list, at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. Duke University sponsored my research through the Mellon Research Grant (06, 07). Augustana President Steve Bahls and former Dean Jeff Abernathy have done so through two generous Presidential Scholarships (08, 09) and a New Faculty Research Grant (09–10); they and the members of the faculty welfare committee also extended a pre-sabbatical leave from teaching, in the winter of 2009, in order to finish the bulk of my revisions. Members of Augustana’s Faculty Research Forum, formerly directed by Adam Kaul and Molly Todd, have read my work critically and generously. For three long stretches, Gordon Marino and Cynthia Lund have enabled me to partake of the vast resources and vibrant intellectual life of the Hong Søren Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, through their summer research fellowships. Two anonymous readers from Oxford University Press, and the AAR Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion Series editor, Ted Vial, have offered crucial feedback on earlier drafts. Senior Editor at Oxford, Theo Calderara, and OUP’s editorial staff have shepherded it and me as well. Finally, two unusually insightful and careful Augustana students, Christine Hedlin and Kimberly Hedlin, have labored to understand almost every sentence of this book and edit them so others can understand more easily. I thank each of these individuals and institutions for making the present study better than it would have been without them. Finally, my wife, Rev. Laura Evans Mahn, and our two young boys, Asa and Gabriel, read my own life lovingly and searchingly on a daily basis—reminding me of my happy fallibility and folding me more deeply into good things. I am thankful for our rich and messy lives together. —Holy Saturday, 2011

Acknowledgments

Some of the chapters that follow draw on and excerpt material that has been published earlier. I thank the following publishers and their editors for allowing me to do so. Chapters 1 and 3 include ideas and some material appearing in “Kierkegaard after Hauerwas,” Theology Today, Vol. 64, No. 2 (July 2007): 172–85. Chapter 2 is an adapted version of “Felix Fallibilitas: The Benefit of Sin’s Possibility in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety,” Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 3 (July 2006): 254–78. Chapters 1, 3, and 5 incorporate ideas and material appearing in “Kierkegaard’s Three Devotional Discourses and the Felix Culpa Theme,” International Kierkegaard Commentary 18: Without Authority, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2006): 85–110.

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Abbreviations

References to Kierkegaard’s writings in parenthetical notation and endnotes use the abbreviations given below, followed by page number. All such references correspond to the new Princeton University Press translations, Kierkegaard’s Writings, 1978—(full titles and citation information are given in the bibliography). When I cite other translations or provide my own, I indicate so in the endnotes. All passages quoted in Danish can be found in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (1997–2010ff.). Reference to journal entries in the Danish (Søren Kierkegaards Papirer) is by Pap., followed by volume and entry number. BA CA CD CI COR CUP I CUP II EO 1 EO 2 EUD FSE FT

The Book on Adler The Concept of Anxiety Christian Discourses The Concept of Irony The Corsair Affair Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, volume 1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, volume 2 Either/Or: Part I Either/Or: Part II Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses For Self-Examination Fear and Trembling

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JC JFY JP OMWA Pap. PC PF PV REP SLW SUD TA TM UDVS WA WL

Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est (published with PF) Judge For Yourself ! (published with FSE) Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers “On My Work as an Author” (published with PV) Søren Kierkegaards Papier Practice in Christianity Philosophical Fragments The Point of View Repetition (published with FT) Stages on Life’s Way The Sickness unto Death Two Ages The Moment and Late Writings Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits Without Authority Works of Love

Fortunate Fallibility

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Introduction: Fault and Fallibility

At the end of what we now call his first or early authorship, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) insisted that “the religious continually uses the negative as the essential form” (CUP I 524). Toward the end of his short life he repeated the sentiment, claiming that “everything essentially Christian is a redoubling, or every qualification of the essentially Christian is first of all its opposite” (JFY 98). Kierkegaard seems to have taken these claims to heart. Applying them to his own work, he characterizes his entire authorship as “helping negatively” (PV 56), as “wounding from behind” (CD 161), as repelling and repulsing his readers so that, oddly, they might be attracted to Christianity. Even more graphically, he repeatedly interprets his work through metaphors of homeopathy and of forcing food out of our throats so that we might eat spiritually again (CUP I 275). It would seem that images of Kierkegaard as a melancholic Dane, father of existentialism, and favorite philosopher of the ill at ease, while they may not be wholly accurate, do not come from nowhere either. Readers of Kierkegaard rarely find descriptions of faith, hope, or love that are not encircled by reminders about ongoing anxiety and strife or demands for vigilance over sin and offense. Indeed, his more than twenty volumes of writings brim over with descriptions of what Keats called “negative capabilities”—vital humanity in the form of uncertainty, passivity, and doubt, as well as Christian joy over redemption and the life of Christian faith by constant recourse to temptation, sin, suffering, and repentance. Unsurprisingly, Kierkegaard specifies the capacity for sin to

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provide the negative capability most determinative for cultivating passions that are decidedly Christian. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he calls sin “the crucial point of departure for the religious existence” (CUP I 268). By reintroducing possibilities or capacities for sin, Kierkegaard provides an existential via negativa through which he labors to revive the possibility of faith. In this book I claim that such negative descriptions and the cultivation of negative capacities do not serve as windows into tormented souls (either Kierkegaard’s or our own) but rather provide a specific approach to theological reflection that ultimately bears stronger and truer witness to Christian salvation than would direct and superlative testimony. In short, that which is furthest from redemption provides a crucial tool for naming and engendering Christian faith. Kierkegaard is not alone in this approach. In fact, in the Church’s most central liturgy, the Easter Eve Mass, which dates back as early as the fifth century, Christian worshippers witness to Redeemer and redemption only through recourse to the original sin of humanity. Famously, worshippers there praise the Fall of Adam itself, calling it necessary and fortunate insofar as it proleptically witnesses to Easter grace. For reasons that I will explore at the start of this book, Kierkegaard primarily highlights the enduring and fragile fractures or gaps within created humanity that allow for sin’s possibility (what I call “fallibility”) when he illustrates how the religious uses the negative as its essential form. By contrast, the “fortunate Fall” tradition of the Christian church has named sin itself, or Adam’s Fall, as that which negatively testifies to the bliss of redemption. Although fallibility and Fall are very different notions, I argue that Kierkegaard repeats the rhetorical patterns and deep theological logic of fortunate Fall when he persistently perceives grace through the fractures of human fallibility. His negative way is less a precursor to modern existentialism than a way of returning to early Christian praise. This book thus reconstructs the underlying logic and rhetoric of the fortunate Fall (felix culpa) theme of Western thought through a fresh reading of Kierkegaard’s later religious writings. Connecting Kierkegaard with that old, odd theme is no easy task. The difficulty is due not only to the complexities of Kierkegaard’s authorship, but also to the fact that felix culpa, the claim that Adam’s Fall might be considered “fortunate” or “happy” in light of grace, has become one of Christianity’s most paradoxical, controversial, and unwieldy ideas. Its variants are many and conflicting. For example, the fifth-century Easter vigilantes, and later John Milton, praised sin as a backhanded witness to the ineffability of redemption and Redeemer. By contrast, for many today the phrase felix culpa connotes the explanations of philosophical theodicy or the exclamations of Romantic poets. In the modern era, Hegel foreshadowed contemporary theodicists in understanding all evil as comprehensible, historically productive, and therefore fortunate. For their part, German

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and English Romantics celebrated transgression as an expression of individual creativity and spiritedness. In Fortunate Fallibility, I trace Kierkegaard’s blunt critique of idealists’ justification of evil, and his playful deconstruction of romanticists’ celebration of sin—these derivative conceptions of fortunate Fall. At the same time, I argue that Kierkegaard joins their resistance to the moralization of evil by considering temptation and sin as determinative dimensions and negative signs of authentic religious existence. At least in comparison to the so-called “innocent” believers of cultured Christendom, Kierkegaard positions the self-conscious sinner as the better religious witness. The first part of my project disambiguates the ways in which sin and temptation are considered “good” in Western theology and culture. Each of the main exegetical chapters then analyzes the rhetoric of sin and human vulnerability in one of Kierkegaard’s religious works vis-à-vis the works of Hegel, the early German and English Romantics (especially Byron), and the fifth-century Easter Eve worshippers. I also suggest ways in which Kierkegaard’s nineteenth-century setting resembles our own. Contemporary Christian theology can follow Kierkegaard in resisting the moralization of sin without rationalizing or celebrating it. One way of doing so is to reconsider the gift of human fallibility. To repeat an earlier distinction: While the felix culpa tradition proposes the Fall itself as paradoxically fortunate, Kierkegaard typically replaces actual sin with possible sin—with human fragility, fallibility, and the possibility of spiritual offense. It is this “fortunate fallibility” that reconfigures authentic religious faith in a way that is arguably as rhetorically compelling and theologically operative as more traditional talk of a “fortunate Fall.” In fact, given the implications of cheap grace that felix culpa accrues in its modern idealist and romantic forms, I claim that Kierkegaard more accurately returns to the Church’s original proclamation by portraying human fallibility, not the Fall as such, as necessary and happy. Together, Kierkegaard’s playful maneuvers and my thematizations carve rhetorical space for Christian theologians to speak of human brokenness in ways that are more particular and peculiar than the typical discourses of Church and culture. Reading fallibility and fault in light of redemption entails neither simple orthodoxy nor paradox alone, but a kind of para/orthodoxy. Kierkegaard joins the “Exsultet” (the processional chant of the Easter Eve Mass) in praising Christ by praising that which is furthest from him: O truly necessary sin of Adam, which is cancelled by Christ’s death! O happy fault [felix culpa] which merited such and so great a redeemer!1 How might theologians and other Christians today relearn to speak “para/ orthodoxically”—to speak of sin in light of Christ and Christ in light of sin? How might Kierkegaard help?

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Against the Moralization of Sin I will suggest throughout this study that Kierkegaard “repeats,” in a nonidentical sense, the first and primary meaning of felix culpa (fortunate Fall) through his curiously positive descriptions of anxiety, the possibility of sin, and the particular possibility of sinning by taking offense at Christ. Instead of naming the act of sin as happy or fortunate, Kierkegaard (and I) continuously name the possibility of sin as such. Before we can justify this circuitous route, we must first establish the connection between the Fall and fallibility. Is the felix culpa tradition in the present study anything more than a heuristic device for introducing a very different subject matter? In the words of an early reader of this work, moving from the issue of Fall to issues of fallibility seems to move not only from apples to oranges but from an Apple to oranges—in other words, from a singular onset of sin that remains inexplicable apart from its de facto occurrence within the biblical narrative to a more general description of human possibilities, including the possibility of sin. To bridge this apparent gap, I will try to show the benefit of elucidating sin from within a theological anthropology and will argue that such an “anthropology” need not be less specifically Christian than narratives of the Fall. However, before turning to these matters, we first need to inquire into the first and primary meaning of felix culpa. Only then can we ask how Kierkegaard’s seemingly different proposition—that the possibility of sin is good—actually recovers and repeats the Exsultet’s proclamation. But the quest for the original meaning of felix culpa is no easy matter, as I have already suggested. The first reason for the difficulty is that the fortunate Fall tradition or theme has come to include so many variations, including those of speculative philosophers, modern theodicists, and the Romantic poets. With all these historical echoes and parroting voices, hearing the “original” proclamation requires careful rhetorical disambiguation. I will work to disentangle the intersecting meanings and opposing functions of felix culpa beginning in chapter 1. For now, I can only suggest that the famous lines of the Easter Eve Mass say little about the ironic nature of sin and even less about the benefit of human initiative or the acceptance of a tragic human nature. Rather, the Exsultet’s words about Adam’s Fall point away from themselves. Despite the fact that their ostensible referent is sin, the words become hostile witnesses to the unexpected gift of Christ and the salvation his life and death bring. The indirection of felix culpa’s referent introduces a second reason why its meaning is difficult to secure. The fifth-century Mass intentionally disrupts established meanings in the effort to say the otherwise unsayable. In other words, the paradoxical claim that the Fall is good because it merits or necessitates Christ works against itself for a purpose: to communicate something about Christ’s

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incomprehensibility. It witnesses to the unutterable incommensurability of Christ by breaking apart the language that otherwise threatens to capture and contain him. This is not reversion to hyperbole or mere rhetorical flourish on the worshippers’ part. After all, how else could one speak of a qualitatively different “Other” who irrupts on the human scene and reverses expectations except through the disruption and reversal of conventional meaning? Liturgical theologian Dirk Lange claims that this indirection is necessitated by the language of worship itself: “Liturgical language—and, more specifically perhaps, sacramental language— disrupts even the categories of language.”2 Lange calls liturgy as such “failed speech” yet recognizes it as speech “that ‘speaks’ precisely in its failing.”3 Others agree that the Church can say what it means only by juxtaposing utterances and actions that would otherwise work in opposition to one another.4 Perhaps nowhere are these juxtapositions and profitable failures of language more dramatic than in praise of sin as witness to Redeemer and redemption. Taking seriously how the Exsultet’s paradoxical form informs its content, we will notice the way that Kierkegaard’s alternative conception about fortunate fallibility might repeat both the rhetorical shape of fortunate Fall and much of its substance as well. Of course, I realize that to prove that “fortunate fallibility” reiterates more than just the linguistic register of paradoxical opposition, I must first establish that the liturgical language carries particular referential meaning. (To claim that the “how” of language always already implicates the “what” of its reference is not to claim that the second is reducible to the first.5) In regard to the present study, we must say that the utterance “O happy fault” is not without a certain range of referential meaning if we are also to claim that fortunate fallibility more closely replicates it than, say, married bachelors or square circles or any number of other paradoxes. At the same time, we have already glimpsed that felix culpa should not be boiled down to a representational idiom of fixed meaning. Its more fluid, self-involving meaning is closely linked to what it does not say, or better, to the “not” that it tries to say.6 At bottom, the liturgical trope indicates that redemption is not the same as moral innocence. This “not,” this difference between redemption and innocence, is a primary component of what the liturgy means. In other words, Christ and Christian redemption provide an excess of meaning that moral and conceptual frameworks cannot account for. Praising that which intervenes between innocence and redemption—the Fall into sin—becomes a primary vehicle for marking this difference, or slippage, between prelapsarian innocence and the gift of redemption. One should note how central and odd this incongruity between innocence and redemption is, even without recourse to the paradoxical language that inscribes it. On the one hand, the integrity of God’s creation both underscores the intrusiveness of the Fall and sets the stage for reunification and restoration. On the other hand,

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the superfluity of Redeemer and redemption necessitates a dismantling of the very stage language upon which the entire drama is set. The two movements appear antinomous: we must read forward from creation through Fall to redemption in order to situate and make sense of the Christian culmination; at the same time, the climax of the narrative destabilizes its framework and necessitates an ongoing, retrospective redetermination of the narrative itself—to the point where “narrative” seems too linear of a word and the despair of sin appears more expressive of redemption than the first stage of creation. Returning to the indivisibility of form and content, it seems that this sundering of created innocence goes hand in hand with the troubling of conventional meanings. I have tried to establish how the liturgical version of felix culpa says something substantial about redemption—or at least what redemption is not. But does it also mean something about what sin is or is not? Strangely, what seems like the primary referent of “happy sin” remains secondary; in the Exsultet, the phrase speaks of sin only in light of Redeemer, a point that opens up the possibility of alternative conceptions. The meaning of sin is derivative, but significant: if redemption is not (just) moral innocence, then, for Christians, sin is not (just) moral failure. Sin never simply indicates the bad action of a human being that results from a contextless, arbitrary will. Sin cannot be something that I always do but that never “does” me; we are not and have never been in complete control. Our relationship with sin, in other words, exceeds (without entirely overthrowing) the measures of moral accountability. Traditionally, Christian theology has consigned this suprapersonal, extramoral dimension of actual sin to the effects brought about by the first sin, which is often called “hereditary” or “original” sin in the Latin Church and “ancestral” sin in Eastern Orthodoxy. With the distinction between original and actual sin, sin as inherited versus sin as chosen, sin as sickness versus sin as crime, the theological tradition (largely here influenced by Augustine) developed a language to talk about the supramoral condition of sin and humanity’s responsibility for choosing it. It is clearly essential to recognize both the act and state of sin. Still, some argue that interpretations of sin as responsible act ineluctably overshadow interpretations of sin as enduring condition. Feminist theologian Kathleen Sands even argues that “original sin” today primarily serves to underscore the nonessentialness of evil rather than its tragic nature. By situating the origin of evil within a neat tripartite framework (paradise given, lost, and redeemed), the standard Christian narrative passes over claims about evil’s inevitability and endurance in favor of highlighting its accidental origination and eventual elimination. Sands writes: “Within the Christian theological tradition, original sin and fallenness are the vestiges of nonculpable fault. But their tragic character is sanitized and resolved by placing fallenness between an original paradise and a perfect ending, when the guilty conditions of human existence will be no more.”7 I find this critique of the way the Christian

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metanarrative situates and sanitizes evil within its neat narrative framework to be compelling and important. Certainly the default mode and dominant discourse of contemporary Western culture and conventional Christian thinking is thoroughly moral, and perhaps moralistic. By this, I mean that it presupposes that people maintain the capacity to perform morally praiseworthy or culpable acts and thus it minimizes the real and active power of sin that infects us, as it were, before and beside our conscious moral choices. My undergraduate students confirm this cultural assumption again and again. I can have them read entire books, such as Alistair McFadyen’s Bound to Sin, that compellingly retrieve sin as radical (it names our condition as such), communicable (it distorts us before we “choose”), and universal (no one is excepted),8 and my students will write papers that quickly list off such attributes before arguing that what is really important is personal responsibility for one’s own bad decisions. To speak otherwise of sin rubs against the deep assumptions of our individualist, responsible, post-Enlightenment society.9 Whereas Sands retrieves the less explicitly Christian category of “tragic evil” to resist the penchant for moralizing sin, Kierkegaard stays more theologically orthodox—and closer to the Easter Eve liturgy—in his own resistance to the situating and moralizing of sin. In The Sickness unto Death, his pseudonymous author, Anti-Climacus, titles one of his sections, “Sin is not a negation but a position” (SUD 96). Anti-Climacus defies all attempts to define sin in terms of a lack or deficiency in innocence, for which redemption will later recompense; instead, he calls sin a “position,” something irreducible to the conceptual/ethical framework that houses it. Sin is a position—something “positive” (100) or even “affirmative.”10 While it would stretch the translation to render this positive sin “happy” or “fortunate,” AntiClimacus nevertheless does what the Exsultet does—he shows how the Christian conception of sin must exceed its moral counterpart, precisely because it comprises not only a departure from innocence, but a potent power that must also be read back from the excessive and destabilizing event of redemption (SUD 100).11 Even when he links sin to an act of the will, Kierkegaard emphasizes that it is not something we occasionally do and for which our redoubled efforts or a little of God’s grace efficiently remunerate. Such moral accounting presupposes that a person is in control and it thus signals, for Kierkegaard, that he or she is “spiritless.” In this light, Kierkegaard playfully raises the question of whether the reckless rebellion portrayed in the Hebrew Bible or Shakespeare is better—if only because more fully human—than the passionless present age (EO 1:27–28). More theologically, he asks whether such spirited demonic rebellion might not be closer to Christian redemption than an insular, economized, moralistic life that is “too spiritless to be called sin” (SUD 101). In this study, I will explicate such passages in detail, attending to their contexts and the pseudonymous points of view from which they are penned.

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For now, I want to suggest that Kierkegaard plays with the possibility of happy sin (and the happiness of possible sin) in the framing and configuration of entire books. Perhaps none is better known among English readers than Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard’s invented author, Johannes de Silentio (John of Silence), notoriously writes of a teleological suspension of the ethical—a phrase that already resists the moralization of sin. I will here preview the exegetical work of subsequent chapters by reading Fear and Trembling in light of the odd language of sin’s necessity and blessedness. The short analysis that follows helps introduce several intriguing parallels between Kierkegaard’s work and the characteristics of fortunate Fall that we have already encountered. It also gives us the language of a “double-movement” of faith, to which we will return throughout this book.

Abraham’s Faith and Demonic Sin Fear and Trembling is Johannes de Silentio’s “lyrical-dialectical meditation” on Genesis 22, the account of Abraham’s faithful willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. The work is about faith, not sin. And yet, buried three-quarters into de Silentio’s book, in the middle of retelling the romantic tale of Agnes and the merman, he writes the following footnote: “Up until now I have assiduously avoided any reference to the question of sin and its reality. The whole work is centered on Abraham, and I can still encompass him in immediate categories—that is, insofar as I can understand him” (FT 98n.). Kierkegaard gives some of his most remarkable insights in footnotes, many of which undercut our confidence in having understood the text. This one is no exception. Recrafting the tradition of Agnes and the merman, de Silentio offers the demonic merman, a self-enclosed sinner, as an analog to Abraham, the knight of mysterious faith. As Abraham’s analog, the merman joins the ranks of Agamemnon, Brutus, a ballet dancer, a bourgeois Philistine, a breastfeeding mother, and others. De Silentio can understand many of Abraham’s near equivalents, but he readily admits, “I cannot think myself into Abraham” (FT 33). It seems that none of the counterparts exactly mimes Abraham’s incomprehensible double-movement of faith—his willingness to give up Isaac and then, “next, at the same moment” to receive him back, with even more joy (FT 115). Prior to the legend of the merman, the sacrifice of the tragic hero has come the closest. The tragic hero, an epitome of ethical stringency, shares with the knight of faith (Abraham) the first of two movements. Exemplified by the Greek warrior Agamemnon, the tragic hero renounces his worldly love in an “infinite movement of resignation” (47–48). Agamemnon is willing to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia just as Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son Isaac. The difference between them is that, assured of having fulfilled a higher ethical ideal (duty to nation trumps duty

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to daughter), Agamemnon should not and cannot receive his sacrifice back again. Abraham’s act, by contrast, remains unjustified by every immediate perspective; he completes his heroic resignation only by simultaneously believing that Isaac will be returned to him, “by virtue of the absurd.” Throughout the first two sections of Fear and Trembling, the tragic hero seems to represent Abraham’s faith as completely as it can be represented. Beyond the movement of resignation lies what paraphrasers of Kierkegaard have deemed the “leap of faith,” but what de Silentio portrays as an almost indescribable readiness to receive the resigned back again, with even more joy (FT 35). Then, in the last section de Silentio offers the merman, the demonic sinner, as another and more curious analog to heroic faith. Like Abraham, the merman has been set apart from universal ethics and moral frameworks into the topsy-turvy world of spiritual trial. His predicament is essentially this: having won Agnes’s love by deceiving her, the merman cannot find joy in his love but also cannot disclose that he is demonic without driving away the girl. Damned if he speaks, damned if he doesn’t, he entangles himself in an ordeal that proves more tragic than that of the tragic hero. Like Abraham’s ordeal, the merman’s dilemma is absolutely peculiar and incommunicable. He is bound by his silence; no words exist to disclose and heal his inner struggle. The merman thereby mimes the faith of Abraham, who is equally isolated, silenced, and tempted by universal ethics. Of course, these figures are inverted: the merman falls below the universal through his own sin and Abraham is raised above it by the commandment of God to sacrifice his son. Still, both ordeals require a paradoxical double-movement to allow the hero to re-receive his beloved with joy. The merman cannot belong to Agnes anymore than Abraham can regain Isaac “without, after having made the infinite movement of repentance, making one movement more: the movement by virtue of the absurd” (FT 99). The analogies between Abraham and the merman suggest that Fear and Trembling is more than a story about exceptional faith. De Silentio may be also narrating the everyday Christian’s more mundane, but no less spectacular, religious ordeal: the paradox of bondage to sin, the courage of repentance, and the marvel of God’s absurd forgiveness.12 At best, readers will not simply understand these ordeals but will enter into them—perhaps becoming so fully enthralled with their sin that they approach spiritual destruction in order that “next, at every moment” they also trust that God makes all things possible, even forgiveness and joy. Three implications of this selective summary help relate Fear and Trembling to the fortunate Fall figuration. First, the demonic sinner and the hero of faith share a double-movement, which makes the ethical hero look like the odd man out. In this imbalance, de Silentio paints the demoniac as “closer” to faith than those who, although ethically justifiable, spiritlessly lack the sinner’s pathos. Faith may be better replicated by demonic sin than by the ethical resolve of the tragic hero. De

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Silentio maintains that “in a certain sense there is ever so much more good in a demoniac than in superficial people” (FT 96). Whether this notion calls the moral resoluteness of the tragic hero into doubt is unclear. Certainly it calls into question the presumption of innocence and moral ledger of the so-called “mass man.” In suggesting that self-conscious sin is closer to the joy of redemption than are moral justifications and shallow presumptions of innocence, de Silentio raises truths that begin to resonate with the Easter Eve worshippers (although there are also strong parallels here with Romanticism’s version of felix culpa, as we will see). Second, Fear and Trembling directly connects with the Exsultet’s strange language through its notion of excess. At first glance, the dual movements by Abraham and the merman appear to return each to the position from which he started: Abraham keeps the Isaac he was willing to give up and the merman might keep his beloved if he repents of his sin. Upon closer inspection, the exile and return in each story culminates in an unchartable excess, not simply a regaining of what was thought to be lost. Abraham keeps Isaac with even more joy, just as the merman’s reconciliation to his beloved would outshine the power of his seduction. De Silentio accentuates the absurdity of this excess and recognizes that it might affront those who make neither movement—those who do not surrender Isaac in the first place, who honestly earn their lovers’ love, who remain obedient and watch the prodigal brother return. We recognize here an underlying paradoxical grammar of fortunate Fall: paradise regained is not the same paradise lost, but different and better—by virtue of the absurd. Equally recognizable is how deeply biblical that grammar is. It mirrors Paul’s use of Adam and trespass to configure Christ and grace (with his repeated witness to the “so much more” of the latter pair—Rom. 5:15–20), but it also surfaces in every story of lost sons, sheep, coins, and treasures whose recovery brings not a sigh of relief, but shouts of celebration. Third, there is a parallel between the unjustifiable “ethical suspension” in Fear and Trembling and the ethical and religious contradictions that underlie felix culpa. De Silentio writes of a “teleological suspension of the ethical” that characterizes Abraham’s unmediated, unjustifiable obedience to God. Some readers conclude that ethics give way to religion here—that obedience to God trumps moral obligations to others when the divine command is clearly heard. While de Silentio sometimes implies that Abraham is religiously justified, he insists that this justification is entirely different from ethical justification. In fact, insofar as justification depends on making the act comprehensible to others by setting it in a broader context, Abraham’s faith is decidedly unjustified. There is no language, religious or otherwise, by which Abraham can disclose his ordeal. De Silentio insists that religious faith does not and cannot do the same validating work as ethics, only in a different key. For the knight of faith, ethics is never supplanted or superseded, only sus-

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pended. Abraham’s excessive joy over Isaac’s return occurs not because he has resolved the ordeal by adopting religion as a new framework—but on account of the ongoing tension between ethical frameworks and the excesses of religion: “The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is” (FT 30). The mutual irreducibility and ongoing friction between ethics and Christianity founds and fuels Abraham’s faith. In a similar way, only cursory interpretations of felix culpa understand sin as now good rather than bad and thus miss the meaningful tension of the paradox. The first mention of fortunate Fall does not reinterpret sin univocally from a secure standpoint of redemption, but rather testifies to the equivocalness of sin—as devastating yet productive yet devastating, ad infinitum. That necessary hedging is born from the collision of narratives and the accompanying sundering of any one stable context or frame. This shifting of speech and splitting of standpoint testifies also to a loss of control by the agent of sin through the eruption of grace. If this were not so, would not the sinner be able to make grace abound by continuing in sin (Rom. 6:1)? On the contrary, as Paul writes, the sinner as agent is dead and can be resurrected only through the life of another. Kierkegaard agrees. Despite the popular stage theory that allows students of Kierkegaard to progress neatly from the aesthetic to the ethical to the religious, de Silentio never replaces ethical principles with new religious ones; he suspends ethical foundations and frameworks, holding them in abeyance and calling them into question. Whatever sin might mean, its meaning will come in and through the tension between the ethical and religious. I am accentuating this last point about the enduring variance between universal ethics and Christian particularity because much of the subsequent tradition of fortunate Fall has taken the trope to be a positive saying rather than an unsaying, a “not”—as a new place to stand rather than as the shifting subjectivities of sinners coram Christi. This is especially true with contemporary theodicists who, indirectly following Hegel, assume that conceptual expressions of Christian redemption wholly justify the tragedies of history. But it is true as well for Romantic poets who find that the consistent transgression of ethical boundaries provides an enduring ethos, as ironic as that conception is. I am also emphasizing the fracturing of language, perspective, and agency that is referred to and performed by “O felix culpa!” as a way of setting up Kierkegaard’s attention to felix fallibilitas. In the next section I will return to my claim that his talk of happy fallibility provides a way of holding the fortunate Fall tradition open, of keeping it from becoming yet another unbroken framework for explaining or embracing sin.

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From Fault to Fallibility By naming fallibility, not the Fall, as fortunate, my interpretation of Kierkegaard may seem to offer a proposition that is true but rather uninteresting. Doesn’t any teenage catechumen or cursory reader of Genesis recognize that the freedom God gave humanity was “very good,” at least before it was used to disobey God’s command (Gen. 1:31)? After all, adherents of felix culpa look at sin in a way that is unexpected, ironic, and intriguing. To treat fallibility—the mere possibility of falling—in the same light may seem banal and simplistic by comparison. Felix fallibilitas can sound like felix culpa drained of all paradox. However, I would like to suggest that such notions are rooted in contemporary assumptions about the nature of human freedom and the possibility of sin that Kierkegaard did not share. For starters, most contemporary theologians discuss human nature and freedom under the auspices of a doctrine of creation and its focus on prelapsarian innocence. By freedom, these theologians mean that none of humanity’s actions are decided in advance, given the multiplicity of real options and the indeterminateness of human nature. From my perspective, freedom and fallibility should mean something more specific than the nonactuality of good or evil in light of human indeterminacy. My conception of fallibility more closely resembles that of Paul Ricoeur, who, in his early study, Fallible Man, links the word to the essential noncoincidence of a person with him- or herself. Far from establishing the self-same identity of an agent (from idem, meaning “the same”), human consciousness always contains certain fissures, or gaps between self as object and self as subject.13 Partly this gap is due to the radical temporal character of personhood, and so it also makes sense to speak of a “delay” in one’s essential self. That necessary delay, fissure, or geological fault-line within the self makes sin possible— not only in the formal sense of not being impossible, but as a possibility that constantly arises from and bears on us. One could say that because we are never exactly who we are, the possibility to go against our nature is constitutive of our nature. Some, such as Sartre, tend to see this noncoincidence—or the fact that “I am what I am not, and am not what I am”—as inescapably causing existential nausea and spiritual malaise.14 Others, such as Ricoeur, Judith Butler, or Emmanuel Levinas, will find in this essential otherness of the self to itself not only an occasion for sin, but the possibility for creativity, openness to others, and responsibility beyond the quid pro quo of ethical systems. To explore the specifically Christian benefits accompanying our essential fallibility would go far in plumbing the fortune of fallibility. But here additional theological problems ensue. As soon as we associate sin’s possibility with structures of human consciousness, the gulf between creation and Fall seems to close. That distinction is theologically invaluable, not least because it

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guards against Gnostic devaluations of the physical world in favor of a purely spiritual afterlife. When Kierkegaard attends to humanity’s susceptibility to sin on the basis of its fragile composition, he also seems to minimize the distance between innocent creation and sinful trespass, making the “leap” into sin (as portrayed in The Concept of Anxiety) look like a predictable transition and thereby positioning the Fall as wholly explainable and exculpable. In light of this complexity, we must question: is it possible to attend to an anthropology of human fallibility without concluding that sin necessarily follows from the tragic composition of humanity? David Kelsey alludes to this difficulty when he tracks the contemporary “migration” of the doctrine of sin into other theological loci.15 Traditional theology, argues Kelsey, housed sin within the doctrine of creation and so stressed the sharp divide between created finitude and culpable fault.16 This distinction grows fainter as the doctrine of sin moves into the context of theological anthropology, the first of three migrations that Kelsey recounts. A major strand of contemporary theology reinscribes the drama of creation and Fall into theological anthropology in such a way that fallenness becomes a component of the human condition as such. Whereas creation and Fall formerly designated two distinct periods in a temporal sequence, for many contemporary theologians they express, in mythological form, a single aspect of human consciousness: the awareness that we are not (and never were) what we should be.17 Expressing concern about the implications of this trend, Kelsey writes, “ ‘Finitude’ and ‘sin’ are so closely tied together that they may seem to be two descriptions of the same reality looked at in two different respects . . . . The ‘goodness’ of finite reality, so central to the traditional doctrine of sin, seems to be in question.”18 While Kelsey does not explicitly name Kierkegaard as one who writes fallenness immediately into the human condition, many of the theological anthropologies he does mention—those of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Edward Farley, and Karl Rahner—are indebted to Kierkegaard, especially to his The Concept of Anxiety. Wolfhart Pannenberg criticizes Kierkegaard explicitly on this front. By portraying human nature as so fragile, anxious, and predisposed to posit itself as its own ground (and thus to depose God), Kierkegaard makes sin appear inevitable if not altogether necessary. As soon as one unlocks the doors to human fallibility, it would seem that the innocence of created humanity gets pilfered.19 In chapters 1–2 I will explain how these concerns over fault and finitude connect to theodicy, the philosophical justification of God in light of evil. Even when theodicy is a nonissue, such as with Kelsey, one notices that securing the distinction between finitude and fault primarily serves to erect a firewall between human loss and God’s accountability. But when we turn from questions about the whence of evil (theodicy) to the question of its overcoming (the doctrines of Christ’s work and person), the issue of accountability may in fact become less important. Recall that, when viewed Christologically within the Exsultet, sin also appear necessary—

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but as the antipode of Christ and the joy of salvation rather than as part of humanity’s tragic condition. It is also worth noting that, whereas Kelsey appears most cautious about sin’s relocation in anthropology, he commends a different migration of sin, namely, the move to read sin in light of Christ, a theological development he traces to Karl Barth. As the shadow of Christ, sin for Barth and his followers becomes a ruinous and deeply deluded reality, but also one that has been decisively overcome in the resurrection of Jesus. For Barth and company (including Kelsey), the proper human response to sin is not (only) grave penitence but also “sheer joy, a cheerful hilaritas as one goes about life in the every day.”20 Notice, then, that Kelsey attributes to the theological anthropologists a tragic view of human nature—sin becomes “necessary” because persons who are always already estranged from themselves cannot help but to enact it. At the same time, his descriptions of Barth and Christological hamartiologies closely parallel the perspective of the Easter Eve vigilantes, who see sin as both disastrous and destroyed, as begging for repentance while beseeching surprise and joy. These diverging migrations make sin necessary in disparate ways: either because it is dictated by an essentially estranged human nature or because it is happily “cancelled by Christ’s death.” I want to suggest here that theologians who read Kierkegaard as having a tragic anthropology mistake the second form of necessity for the first. They extract what looks like a general account of human nature (largely depicted in The Concept of Anxiety and the first half of The Sickness unto Death) from the Christology that shapes it (in the second half of Sickness and in Practice in Christianity). When Kierkegaard inscribes his doctrine of sin within an account of human nature, he also enfolds that anthropology within his portrayal of Christ’s particularity and the peculiarity of Christian redemption. Of course, it is still possible to read his account of human nature apart from its Christological context; Kierkegaard’s influence on Tillich, Farley, and Niebuhr, often mediated through Heidegger, provides proof enough of this fact.21 However, by connecting the necessity of sin with its second, Christological meaning, Kierkegaard’s treatment of sin’s necessity appears less like begrudging concessions to our tragic nature and more like the awestruck witness to that nature as upended and rewritten from without. It also more closely corresponds to Kierkegaard’s authorship at full stretch. Kierkegaard certainly plays a pivotal role in the modern tendency to understand sin in relation to the fissures of human freedom and self-consciousness, or what he typically calls “subjectivity.” His writings say little about the “objective” event of sin; by naming it a “leap,” they forestall speculation about the act of sin, redirecting the reader’s attention to the anthropological conditions that occasion and result from it. In short, he is more interested in how individuals relate themselves to sin, and how sin transmits to them, than in what sin might mean apart from human lives. In fact, personal appropriation or the “redoubling” of the doctrine of sin within an individual’s life is a necessary

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condition for understanding it. All these dimensions of his religious reflections point to Kierkegaard as inaugurator of the theological migration that Kelsey criticizes. At the same time, it should be equally clear that the certain fading (or teleological suspending?) of the clear-cut distinction between finitude and fault need not be the consequence of a tragic anthropology. That distinction also fades when one reads both, more happily, in light of Redeemer and redemption. Chapter 5 will even suggest that Kierkegaard, this so-called melancholy Dane and favorite philosopher of the restless and lonely, joins Barth in giving primary place to “cheerful hilaritas.”

Fallibility Redeemed I have been concerned with showing that Kierkegaard’s turn from fortunate Fall to fortunate fallibility, from the act of sin to the self ’s capabilities, constitutes a turn within a particular theological construct and not wholly away from the tradition of felix culpa. I have also tried to show that Christocentric hamartiologies (understandings of sin as centered in Christ)—no less than tragic anthropologies—tend to blur the otherwise clear differences between fallibility and fault. This fact helps draw the language of fortunate Fall and fortunate fallibility closer together and so helps get the current project off the ground. I now want to suggest that the strategy of reading sin in light of fragile selfhood and fragile selfhood in light of Christ is not peculiar to what we might call (with apologies for the wordiness) Kierkegaard’s Christocentric hamartiological anthropology. A good deal of the Western, Latinspeaking church recognized that the doctrinal counterpart to Christian redemption is not only acts of sin but the precarious human condition that makes those acts possible. I have already suggested that the Church dealt primarily with humanity’s extra-moral, pre-personal condition through its understanding of original or hereditary sin. With this concept in place, Christians could claim that Christ saves us both from our state and from our deeds, the first through baptism and the second through penitence. Western Christians typically followed Augustine in stressing the sinfulness of this condition in need of redemption, meaning that it originated from the first (“originating”) sin and should not be confused with a created innocence. But a deep counternarrative, often within the same sources, portrayed Christ and the Church as also responding to nonguilty dimensions of the human condition. In short, created, nonculpable fallibility itself requires redemption.22 I will here consider examples of these counternarratives in Augustine, Genesis 3, and the penitential practices of the premodern church. Surprisingly, St. Augustine, for all his discriminations between innocent fallibility and culpable Fall, takes the first to warrant salvation no less than the second. In Book II of his Confessions, as he confesses his inexplicable theft of unneeded

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pears, Augustine writes that God’s grace and mercy not only “melted away my sins like ice,” but also kept him from committing all the evil acts that he has not done. He explains: I confess that everything has been forgiven, both the evil things I did of my own accord, and those which I did not do because of your guidance. No one who considers his frailty would dare to attribute to his own strength his chastity and innocence, so that he has less cause to love you—as if he has less need of your mercy by which you forgive the sins of those converted to you. If man is called by you, follows your voice, and has avoided doing those acts which I am recalling and avowing in my own life, he should not mock the healing of a sick man by the Physician, whose help has kept him from falling sick, or at least enabled him to be less gravely ill. He should love you no less, indeed even more; for he sees that the one who delivered me from the great sickness of my sins is also he through whom he may see that he himself has not been a victim of the same great sickness.23 Augustine suggests here that the sick and the well, sin and innocence, are equally entrusted to the care of the Physician. (Augustine’s medicinal language—sickness, health, the divine Physician—underscores the idea that the counterpart to redemption is more like a condition than a crime.24) We can read this passage as an ironic twist to Luke’s parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). When the lost son returns to the father, Augustine implies, the obedient son should celebrate both for his brother and for himself, understanding that he too returns to the father, only not from sin but from sin’s possibility—from the evil things that he did not do because of his father’s care. The hero of faith in Fear and Trembling undergoes a similar double-movement of faith, as we have seen. He faces sin’s possibility and then “next, at the same moment” is saved from that temptation. Whereas Luke’s parable emphasizes the excessive joy of returning from exile (O felix culpa!), Augustine insists that the adoration of the one who is less dramatically saved from one’s own frailty should be no less, “indeed even more” (O felix fallibilitas!). The redeemable human condition is composed both of a created and subsequent brokenness, of fallibility and fault, of the possibility and actuality of sin. Each is mended and made fortunate by the Physician. Genesis 3, ostensibly the foundation for Christian understandings of sin as an act of willful disobedience (and source of Augustine’s hamartiology), also witnesses to the always already brokenness that situates and anticipates the Fall. Adam’s sin is anticipated and induced by Eve’s; hers is occasioned by the talking serpent; the serpent’s manifestation is explained only by the fact that he was created crafty; the God who creates crafty serpents also places humanity’s limit, not

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at the outskirts of Eden, but in the center of the garden, where the man and woman cannot help but face it.25 The need to narrate the decisive point of evil’s origin ineluctably gets ahead of itself; the fault is recursively anticipated in the reverberations of fallibility. In fact, it would be hard to imagine narrative qua narrative doing otherwise insofar as it sets even the most radical of ruptures within a plot that has (always?) already begun. All stories of beginnings begin opaquely.26 Ricoeur sees in this slippage, this slide from fallibility to fault within the Adamic myth, a “reaffirmation of the tragic.”27 Finally, we should notice the ways that the penitential practices of the premodern church also implicitly understand innocent weakness and the possibility of sin to join sinful acts in comprising that which the practices seek to reform. The characterization of sin as sickness that we see in Augustine is central to these early practices, even when they seem legalistic to modern eyes.28 In his study of spiritual discipline in Christianity and Islam, Talal Asad shows that the effort to coordinate ascetic practices to discrete acts of sin is inherently inconclusive, since the custom ultimately aims at ever receding spiritual health rather than moral remuneration. Early ascetics presupposed, writes Asad, that “there can never be a full cure in this world, merely a continuous process of curing symptoms. This need for an unending struggle against the permanent potentiality for transgression defines the basic character of Christian asceticism.”29 This “permanent potentiality for transgression”—or what I am calling fallibility—surfaces also in the early Church’s distinction between sins of deed and sins of thought. According to Asad, this is not a difference between a bodily deed and a mental one, but “between an event (whether physical or mental) and a potentiality (whether temporal or endless).” According to the early penitential practices of the Church, “an event that constitutes a transgression calls for something to counteract its damaging effects; [but] a potentiality for transgression requires that the self ’s power to act be classified and subdivided in order that it be recognized as dangerous.”30 Clearly, the penitential practices of the early Church sought to reform selves, with their capacities to sin, above and beyond sinful behavior. Asad’s distinction between event and potentiality connects to Luther’s later claim that concupiscence, the self ’s power to sin, is itself sinful, and to his consequent unsealing of the late medieval Church’s hermetic system of penance in the effort to radicalize repentance.31 Kierkegaard, too, reconstitutes the bond between our capacities for sin and sinful acts, especially when he, Luther-like, reminds us that before God we are always in the wrong (EO 2:339–54). This brief attention to Augustine, Genesis 3, and the penitential practices of the Church should be enough to question whether the “migration” of hamartiology into theological anthropology necessarily leads to the distortions that Kelsey suggests. The doctrinal exodus might just constitute a return—nonidentical for sure— to earlier orthodox Christian sensibilities. At the very least we can see that

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Kierkegaard is “not not” writing of sin when he writes of sin’s possibility. In fact, in contrast to contemporary thinkers such as Ricoeur, who connect fallibility exclusively to essential (or “prelapsarian”) innocence, Kierkegaard allows the possibility of sin to typify both created fragility and the entire arch of a sinner’s life. One looks for it, so to speak, within the sinner’s actual life and not only by bracketing sin and turning to the pure case scenarios of the Adamic myth or “essential humanity.” The correspondence between our sinful state and the possibility of sin is so strong that Kierkegaard will use one as gloss on the other: “hereditary sin” is “the ideal possibility of sin” (CA 23). For him, dealing with the condition originated from Adam necessarily deals with possibilities for sin that impinge on us. The power of sin is the possibility to sin, and vice versa. Talk of fortunate fallibility, or happy possibilities to sin, cannot be categorically divorced from talk of fortunate Fall, happy sin itself. In calling original sin the ideal possibility of sin, Kierkegaard prohibits us not only from relegating sin to isolated acts of a disencumbered will but also from imagining the state of original sin in terms of a static and reified abstraction that modifies who we are in general terms but stays disconnected to our everyday needs, fears, and loves. By contrast, I think that for most of us original sin, if it means anything at all, connotes a blanket pronouncement over anything and everything and so changes very little—like a dark night in which all cats become gray. In writing of inherited sin as the ideal possibility of sin, Kierkegaard suggests that the state of sin does not primarily constitute our abstract status as forensically judged but connotes a power that, once unleashed, preys on our particular capabilities, dispositions, and passions in order to lead us further into sin. Later in this study I will explicitly connect the “possibility” of sin with sin’s power and a person’s potentiality. For now, we should note that the “power of sin” referred to in the subtitle of this book refers to the “possibility of sin” that we have been addressing throughout this first chapter, with reminders that Kierkegaard and I treat this possibility not as a modal category opposite actual sin, but as an actual force residing within the apertures of human subjectivity. If the analyses I have given are correct, then the power/possibility of sin characterizes both the fragile noncoincidence of created humanity and the existential pull of its fallen condition. My central chapters will need to show how this possibility changes in scope and shape when moving from created existence to fallen existence to existence before Christ. Still, the fact that these stations are marked by different determinations of sin’s possibility and not more categorically distinguished might suggest to some that Kierkegaard, on my reading, has all but abandoned the traditional Christian metanarrative. It is more accurate to suggest that he radicalizes the language of creation, Fall, and redemption and saves it from simplicity by taking it to narrate not discrete external periods of salvation or world

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history—like cities that one stops in when traveling32—but the concurrent components of our rich and messy lives. Sacred history, if it be true, must be fabula, quae de me narrator—a story that narrates me (Pap. V B 53:13; CA 186).

The Aim and Scope of this Book As an endeavor in constructive Christian theology, this book uses Kierkegaard’s paradoxical, poetic remarks about sin, self, and Savior to claim that fallibility— meaning, the capacity to sin and including the possibility of taking offense at Christ—provides an abiding and ever-increasing component of authentic Christian faith. The possibility of sin, according to Kierkegaard, offers a kind of “determinate negative” against which Christian virtue is formed. If this were not counterintuitive enough, he also suggests that the radical healing offered by Christ in the forgiveness of sin necessarily and perpetually makes possible the most devastating sin of rebuking Christ and his “pathetic” love. This book does not so much think about Kierkegaard as with him in order to work through the role of sin and temptation in the life of Christian faith. Christian theologians may challenge my aim to reconstruct the paradoxical and seemingly heterodox “doctrine” of a fortunate Fall. Others might undergo a kind of ethicalreligious vertigo that ensues when one enters Kierkegaard’s plurivocal authorship, especially where he questions deeply held assumptions about good and evil, or offers alternative frameworks only to deconstruct his own constructions. People of other faiths or no faith tradition may be intrigued by a project that takes human fragility, fallibility, and fault seriously, perhaps believing that too many Christians equate salvation with easy protection from sin and temptation. These readers may be disappointed to discover that, according to Kierkegaard, it is none other than Christ, and him crucified, that makes a person fallible in the supreme sense. In short, while some readers will be concerned with orthodoxy and resistant to paradoxical language of fortunate fallibility or fortunate Fall, others will be compelled by such transvaluation of values and reticent of anything too churchy. But, again, what if utterances about sin entailed neither straight talk (orthodoxy), nor a countering voice (para-dox) alone, but rather a kind of para/orthodoxy—a way of speaking that is truly odd, odd but true? The Easter vigil lines point to the unfathomable love of God as glimpsed in Christ—a love so unbounded and magnificent that no human analogy does it justice, while even the oddest of utterances, for instance that Adam’s fall into sin is necessary and fortunate, might be made to testify to it. Exploring Kierkegaard in light of such language (and a little of the reverse) will challenge all who wish to keep Christian values and human transgression as mutually exclusive—whether they be Christians wanting to distance themselves from the sins of “the world,” or free-thinkers wanting to shatter the false

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innocence of believers. Kierkegaard’s writings, in his day and in ours, serve to unmask the self-security of Christendom and the insipidness of transgression, as well as the way these dual dangers mirror one another, either because false prophets mimic that which they would oppose or because the establishment absorbs and repackages its harshest critics. This shared circumstance makes the retrieval of Kierkegaard’s writings relevant, as well as urgent. The course of this book is circuitous by necessity; it leads through Kierkegaard’s ongoing, dialectical questioning, under different pseudonyms and in a number of moods, concerning the role of fallibility, temptation, and sin in the life of Christian faith—especially before the crucified Christ. Kierkegaard dares to ask: Is not the spiritedness of an individual who is willing to risk sin and even offense at Christ preferable to the spiritless “innocence” of the masses of so-called Christians? Even as Kierkegaard seems to answer “yes,” he already also asks: Are not presumptions of innocence and spirited sin equally removed from the Christian ideal of a spirited life before Jesus? The dialectic between these two questions shapes a complex relationship between the possibilities of heroic faith and demonic sin. Beyond both moralism and iconoclasm, the ethical and the aesthetic, the Christian is called to be both spirited and good, as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves (Matt. 10:16), even when these ideals appear at odds. Christians today need to receive faith by risking ethical and spiritual failure, and they might learn why and how from Kierkegaard. In this introduction I have already mentioned various rhetorical functions of felix culpa: proclaiming the joy of salvation, justifying past sin, celebrating human initiative, among others. Chapter 1 will dive deeper into these linguistic uses, locating Kierkegaard’s writings within the manifold historical circumstances, rhetorical contexts, and cultural subtexts that bespeak the happiness of sin. It will also locate some of these traditions and the question of a fortunate Fall within Kierkegaard’s writings, and will indicate how his authorship as a whole can be understood to pivot around that question. Chapters 2–4 trace Kierkegaard’s poetic creation of felix fragilitas, which he forms over and against Hegel’s felix culpa; felix fallibilitas, which he forges through and against Romanticism’s felix culpa; and felix offensatio, by which he repeats, in modern key, the song of the Easter Exsultet. Although interpreters of Kierkegaard’s texts, including Kierkegaard himself, argue over whether and how one might find unity in his plurivocal authorship, I will suggest that a movement away from speculative justifications of sin, through romantic celebrations of sin, and then back to worship of God in light of sin, reflects the overarching purpose of his corpus as well as any. Chapter 2 traces how Kierkegaard comes to terms with the goodness of human fragility over and against Hegel’s speculative felix culpa. It examines The Concept of Anxiety, whose pseudonymous author Vigilius Haufniensis (literally, a “watchman

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over the harbor”) criticizes Hegel’s understanding of moral evil through logical categories. Sin is absurd—unthinkable and unproductive. Yet for Haufniensis the possibility of sin, subjectively registered by a person’s anxiety, might help make faith possible. Especially at the close of his book, Haufniensis suggests that anxietyproducing possibilities for sin might save us from false resolutions and help bend us toward the help of another. Nevertheless, Haufniensis, perhaps too self-reliant, often seems to exhibit the very anxiety he attempts to “watch over.” In bending us toward grace, he also points us toward a more devoted authorial persona—AntiClimacus. Chapter 3 follows the “hyper-Christian” Anti-Climacus into a labyrinthine text and dismal subject matter—The Sickness unto Death. It traces the goodness of human fallibility, the more active power of sin, through and against Romanticism’s celebration of human trespass. Writing as a physician beside the spiritual sickbed, AntiClimacus understands the risk of sin and the promise of healing to be infinitely greater—and more intertwined—than does Haufniensis from his objective standpoint. To Anti-Climacus, sickness and cure seem so entangled that it looks like one might sin the more to make grace abound, or at least resign oneself to perpetual despair as a means toward self-actualization. Anti-Climacus himself flirts with the idea that humans might dispose themselves to sin in the effort to win self-security— a notion clearly related to those Romantic poets who see creative growth in suffering and transgression. But in the end, the progression of the sin of despair described in Sickness amounts to a pool of quicksand or a Chinese finger cuff: try to work your way out of sin and you’ll only immerse yourself deeper. To know the fortune of their fallibility without taking self-destructive pride in it, Christians must learn to look to an Other to know themselves—One who is both stronger and weaker than they could otherwise imagine. In chapter 4, I join Kierkegaard in analyzing the ways in which the Christ revelation is prone to appear “much too much” in light of the sinner’s self-diagnosis, and so tempts her to take offense. Upon glimpsing the inherent goodness of human fragility (chapter 2), and after becoming increasingly capable of spirited sin (chapter 3), Kierkegaard’s readers are finally offered the Christian cure to the sin-sick soul in Practice in Christianity. Anti-Climacus there depicts Christ as the Chief Physician who comes with outstretched arms beckoning, “Come here, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). But here’s the rub: Soon after Anti-Climacus begins to eulogize the Christian balm, he interrupts himself with “The Halt” (PC 23–66). It turns out that the unbounded love of God through Christ introduces a new and more devastating possibility of sin—the possibility of taking offense. The predicament is multiplex: First, we meet Christ in his suffering and abasement and are repulsed by such ungodliness. We become doubly repulsed to learn

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that we are responsible for Christ’s suffering (as well as our own), and that passage into Christianity is through painful penitence. Next, we realize the “help” offered in Christianity amounts to becoming present to a Helper who offers nothing other than his own suffering presence. Finally and most intricately, we see that God cannot go back on God’s own decision to become lowly, which means that God, ostensibly all-powerful, cannot make offense impossible. Simultaneously too much (because uncircumscribable) and too little (because seemingly powerless), the gift of Christ perpetually resists the desire to enclose him in a system of salvation in order to put him to work. My analysis of Practice in Christianity will show how Christ comprises good news to sinners only by incarnating the very possibility of offense. The intensification of sin’s possibility traced in chapters 2–4 may seem to lead further from happiness, insofar as happiness implies transparent self-presence, spontaneity, and purity of heart. Chapter 5 shows how the existential via negativa mapped throughout this book does not drive one away from Christian joy but pulls one into its vital center. I make a case for the felicity of fallibility by turning from Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works to the devotional writings that he published under his own name. Like the liturgy of the Easter vigil, Kierkegaard’s “veronymous” or “truly named”33 writings, especially when read with and against the pseudonymous works, position the reader between the cross and resurrection, between the temptation to sin and the joy of discipleship. Moreover, both the Easter Eve liturgy and Kierkegaard make each side constitutive of the other: no possibility of resurrection without cross, no joy without fracture, no intimacy with Christ without becoming strange to oneself. Finally, and most significantly, they envision and express—in language that is both fissured and fertile—a kind of Christian joy that is less about equilibrium and self-presence than the ecstatic surprise of being displaced by and before the Savior.

A “Methodological” Note This book focuses on possibilities. I presuppose that possibilities carry power and assume a host of forms. Some hover above like an unnoticed cloud; others bear down, cornering and assaulting; still others set in like a fever breaking or like the smell of a childhood home. As I have said, to suggest that the possibility of sin is good does more than to conceptually demarcate it as not-yet-actual-sin and therefore not-guilty. The suggestion requires a wider register of language, a thicker portrayal of mermen and breaking fevers than conceptual thinking tends to supply. It moves instead toward a more subtle and contextual theology that can be described, for lack of a better word, as rhetorical. The pure conceptual thought that one sometimes finds in analytic philosophy seeks to extract truth-claims from narratives and

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poetry, seeing such wordiness as mere embellishments on otherwise purified concepts. It understands the critical reader as one who figures out the text, and does so by taking all the figures out of the text.34 In contrast, the rhetorical reader remains at the surface of the text, finding in symbol, story, and metaphor rich oversignifications that perpetually postpone the extracting of underlying ideas. It entails submitting to the power of figures and examples, allowing them to disrupt and reconstitute one’s own dispositions. Finally, it entails situating the theological or philosophical meaning of a text in the particular historical traditions or narratives within which it is written and read. Such strategies provide a vehicle both for coming to terms with Kierkegaard’s writings and for thinking (and writing) theologically today. Despite the promise of rhetorical theology, Kierkegaardians remain divided over whether their namesake should be considered primarily a philosopher/theologian whose ideas have stable extralinguistic referents or a poet whose irony, tropes, and polyphony of narrations constantly throw the possibility of meaning back on the reader. Literary/deconstructionist readers, such as Roger Poole, trace the plethora of “blunt readings” (those with an impoverished awareness of Kierkegaard as a rhetorician) to the fact that Kierkegaard was first received and translated in the English-speaking world by theologians and philosophers of religion.35 Realist/apologetic readers, such as C. Stephen Evans, understand themselves to be writing against the earliest reception of Kierkegaard as an existentialist and irrationalist, and they liken deconstruction to a continuance of that reception. For them, Kierkegaard’s literary play comprises an ironic method that he adopted as a theological strategy but eventually abandoned.36 This interpretive division can be split by an understanding that Kierkegaard’s literary gestures are part and parcel of his theological import. One should join Joel Rasmussen in querying “why Kierkegaard should be considered primarily a theologian rather than a poet, or vice versa.”37 My own project uses some of the deconstructive strategies that authors such as Poole find most appropriate for reading Kierkegaard. Yet it should be noted that this is not a postmodern reading of Kierkegaard but a Kierkegaardian reading of self and sin. With the exception of some substantial use of Levinas in chapter 4 and a short discussion of postmodern sensibilities in the Postscript, I mention Derrida and other deconstructionists only in passing. Still, many will see the marks (some will say wounds) of postmodern influences in my nervousness about metanarratives and my explorations into the deferrals of language and of lived subjectivities. Rather than make a case for a rhetorical reading of Kierkegaard in general, I defer to the nature of our particular subject matter. That is, insofar as Kierkegaard’s construal of fortunate fallibility reiterates a good deal of the tone, much of the substance, and the principle function of the Exsultet’s paradoxical utterance, this

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project necessarily deals with poetic ways of speaking that always mean more and less than their conceptual surrogates. Attending closely to the way theological language works is thus less my adopted approach and more a matter of necessity. The subject itself dictates that we deal rhetorically with shifting, paradoxical language and remain wary of stabilizing and conceptualizing it. For now, only a wager: This project’s initial turn from the “paradox of a fortunate Fall” to Kierkegaard’s ironic portrayal of felix fallibilitas might return us, ironically enough, to the first and most compelling evocations of felix culpa. At best, rhetoric of fortunate fallibility joins proclamations of a fortunate Fall in comprising—to borrow from Nietzsche—“figuration through and through.” The first chapter begins to “figure” the role of fallibility and Fall in the life of Christian faith.

1 Figuring a Fortunate Fall

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone. —H. L. Mencken, American Mercury The strength of Christianity is its refusal to turn away from the central and unpalatable facts of human destructiveness. . . . [I]t is there, in the bitterest places of alienation, that the depth and scope of Christ’s victory can be tasted. —Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge God does not save people who are only pretend sinners. —Martin Luther, letter to Melanchthon

Is Sin Good? Imagine a professor standing at the chalkboard. The school is a liberal arts college with a nominal religious affiliation, but one where students are still required to take a course in Christianity alongside three semesters of modern languages and two semesters of physical education. Beginning at the left side of the board and moving to the right, the professor scribbles Augustine’s four stages of Christian sacred history. “Heilsgeschichte is the word,” she mentions, “for those of you who know German.”

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The first stage denotes God’s good creation before the Fall. In this state, humanity is innocent but free—able to sin and able not to sin (posse peccare, posse non peccare, in Augustine’s terms). The second stage describes the “postlapsarian” or fallen state of humanity. In this stage, human beings are still free in the sense that they are controlled only by their own broken desires, but they now have no choice but to sin (non posse non peccare). They ineluctably and incorrigibly choose to love the “stuff ” of creation instead of the Creator and so become Godforsaken, reaping their own unhappiness. God initiates the third stage by giving the Son as both a redeemer and moral example. God’s action liberates humans from their self-incurred bondage and restores their ability not to sin (posse non peccare). In this stage they are able to love God and one another as God intends and so can make progress in leading holy lives. The fourth stage describes the final state of consummation, where God’s grace holds sway over the celestial city of God and the lives of the saints. Reconciled humanity so loves God that humans are not able to sin (non posse peccare).1 Paradoxical to modern ears, perfect obedience to God expresses the supreme sense of human freedom. The professor steps away from the board, surveying the categories with her students and remarking on the conceptual tightness—even the beauty—of these stages of Christian history. Pointing to the last category, she draws attention to the peculiarity of Augustine’s premodern, thoroughly theological, understanding of freedom. Full-blown libertas, or becoming so rapt with the love of God that one becomes unable to sin, is better by far than liberum arbitrium, the freedom to sin or not sin, with which humanity was initially created. She expects to spend the rest of the period discussing with her students this unconventional notion of Christian freedom. Instead, a student in the back of the class raises his hand and stammers out an all-too-insightful question: “If the final stages of renewal and redemption are so much better than the first stage of innocence, does that mean that the second stage of sin is a necessary transition? I mean, if Adam and Eve had never sinned, then we wouldn’t ever get salvation or true freedom, right? Even in the diagram, sin is closer to salvation than is innocence. So, doesn’t that mean sin is good?” Is sin good? Perhaps the student means his question to be a playful challenge to the professor, who he has pegged as Christian, and he now expects her to softly censure his unorthodox question (while noting his intellectual acuity). Or perhaps he intuits the certain purchase that celebrations of sin carry in contemporary culture and particularly among his classmates. To suggest that human sin is closer to salvation than is God’s creation, that the bold sinner is better off than the innocent one, might place him within a long list of those avant-garde artists who gain notoriety by debunking the status quo, mass culture, popular morality, or anything considered overly orthodox. Or, perhaps the student has intuited

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and now intimates the persistent correlation in American culture between sin and sex. In suggesting that sin may be good, he might be less interested in the reaction of his professor or the class as a whole than in that of the girl in the front row who just might turn and roll her eyes at him and know that he is uninhibited. What the student probably does not realize is that his question echoes the apostle Paul, who, having linked the trespass of Adam with the obedience of Jesus, must ask whether one should exploit the correlation, sinning the more so that grace might abound (Rom. 6:1). The student has never heard of St. Ambrose, who wrote that the Fall “has brought more benefit to us than harm” and that “sin is more fruitful than innocence.”2 The student probably does not realize that the most famous articulation of his question comes not as the playful critique of an outsider but literally from inside the Church, in the processional of the Church’s most central Mass that celebrates the redemptive gift of the Savior and initiates the newly baptized. Sung by the deacon during the Exsultet of the Easter vigil as early as the fifth century, the liturgy not only ponders the necessity of Adam’s Fall, but even proclaims it as blessed insofar as it occasions the Redeemer: O truly necessary sin of Adam, which is cancelled by Christ’s death! O happy fault [felix culpa] which merited such and so great a redeemer!3 These lines give name to the idea of a “fortunate Fall” or felix culpa, an amalgamation of diverse notions that Adam’s sin might be a blessing in disguise. Despite how expansive and controversial the idea of happy fault would become, the paradoxical words are grounded in the center of the liturgy and so persist as supremely orthodox, as words that give God “proper praise.” The student doesn’t know that others in the Augustinian tradition have also understood the bondage to sin and the blessing of liberation as so symmetrical and mutually constitutive—as so “close”—that they discuss them in analogous terms. Martin Luther, for example, contends that a person is ridden like a horse by God or by the devil; the person is bound to sin or bound to Christ. Both sin and God want the exclusive claim on a person’s “freedom,” and only the insurgency of one can oust the lordship of the other.4 (Bob Dylan encapsulates Luther’s hamartiology: “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”) Because sin and God are locked in battle and each wishes to have the entire person, they are equally removed from the kind of moralistic thinking that imagines good and evil as ends of a continuum and places a relatively innocent humanity somewhere in between. Indeed, Luther envisages God’s justification of humanity as so distinct from moral innocence that he uses the freedom to sin as an expression of Christian faith. He famously advises Melanchthon to “sin boldly,” but also, “believe

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and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world.”5 Luther insists that God does not save “pretend sinners.” Only actual, bold sinners—who know themselves as such—will do. Nor is the student aware of the literary works that have explored his playful question. In George Herbert’s poem, “Easter Wings,” human sin and subsequent suffering, when grafted onto the wing of Christ, promise to “further the flight in me.”6 In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam wonders whether he “should repent me now of sin,” when seen in light of the coming redemption, “or rejoice/Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring .”7 The student doesn’t realize that contemporary philosophical theodicists, like Milton centuries before, seek to “justify the ways of God to men,”8 in light of evil and suffering, by exploring the meaning of sin. They demythologize Genesis 3 and Milton’s epic and reappropriate liturgical language of a fortunate Fall in order to demonstrate the compatibility of radical evil with God’s omnibenevolence and omnipotence. John Hick, in his Evil and the God of Love, writes that the ostensible malevolence of evil and suffering will be seen “in the retrospect of God’s completed work” as stages on the way to God’s triumphant fulfillment. Hick uses felix culpa as shorthand for this insight.9 The Romantic poets also intone felix culpa, though in a noticeably different key. They strengthen the association between creation and the happy ignorance of a child, suggesting that the “unhappy self-consciousness” of the experienced sinner is preferable to the happy ignorance of the undeveloped and uncourageous masses. Blake, in his Gnostic remythologizing, commends the lonely prophet-poet’s infinite rebellion against God’s arbitrary and homogenizing rules. Blake’s creator god Urizen is so “obscure, shadowy, void, solitary,” and “unprolific,” that his creation is already a kind of Fall, while human transgression against the Creator becomes its only saving grace.10 And the student might know, at least subconsciously, the ways in which implicit or explicit allusions to “happy sin” have permeated twenty-first century Western culture. Some more reflective references retain the rich ambiguity of Genesis 3, reminding us that the forbidden fruit grew on a tree of knowledge—and knowledge of good and evil at that. Recognizing the ambiguity of the Genesis story calls into question our preference for moralistic (and often patriarchal, heterosexist, and imperialistic) obedience to dogma over the painful knowledge that comes with transgression. The titles of provocative projects such as Kathleen Sands’s Escape from Paradise, Jefferey Kripal’s The Serpent’s Gift, and John Caputo’s Against Ethics, authored in part through the pseudonym Felix Sineculpa,11 suggest possibilities that are available only when we leave theological sanctuaries. More popular allusions bear traces of the romantic associations of innocence with ignorance and of exile from Eden with the painful but necessary process of

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growing up. These contemporary allusions pose the same hard questions as the Romantics about which is preferable: idle, ignorant innocence or passionate, clear-eyed despair. Think, for example, of Yeats’ lines from his poem “The Second Coming,” which might characterize our age as accurately as his: “The best lack all convictions, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Or take the pivotal scene from the cyberpunk blockbuster The Matrix, where Neo chooses to swallow the red pill rather than the blue, rejecting the blind, happy existence of human society for bleak knowledge of the world as it is. Or recall the final scene from The Truman Show, where the Adamic protagonist “Truman” boldly escapes Seahaven, the self-enclosed reality television set into which he has been born and within which he is both safe and unwittingly obedient to the show’s “creator.” While such films posit an “undecidable” choice between blissful ignorance and painful knowledge, their protagonists nonetheless win over American moviegoers by courageously choosing the latter. Our culture’s most pithy and marketable allusions to good sin exploit our enthrallment with individuality, artistic expressiveness, and sex. They sell any and every transgression of bourgeois morality in sin packaging, usually with a good bit of irony and often through the female body. Many bumper stickers come to mind here: “I didn’t invent sin, I’m just trying to perfect it,” “Come sin with me,” and “Sinner on board.” Or take the black T-shirts or miniskirts with “evildoer” or “sinner” printed in Gothic lettering—usually in glitter. For more evidence of this insipid version of happy (read: sexy) sin, simply Google “sin” or “Eve” without the safesearch function on, or attend a twenty-something Halloween party and count the number of devils in fishnet stockings. Perhaps it seems there are too many historical circumstances, rhetorical contexts, and cultural subtexts taking shade under the one conceptual umbrella of felix culpa. After all, the Exsultet of the Easter Eve Mass mentions a fortunate Fall only insofar as it reflects the light of Christ and further illuminates the Redeemer. This Christocentric focus survives in Milton, where Adam only questions whether to repent or rejoice of sin after glimpsing sin’s future eradication by Christ. Furthermore, because Paradise Lost is an epic poem, a narrative whose noncausal unfolding recounts God’s free actions in history, Adam is prevented from coming to a systematic solution to his felix culpa ponderings. By contrast, for Hegel, the modern philosopher whose entire work has been called a grand theodicy, speculative philosophy alone grasps the benefit of sin. When the “picture-thinking” of the narratives of the Bible (or of the Mass or of Milton) are sublimated in Pure Conception, sin’s goodness is no longer simply reflected and glimpsed—it is comprehended. Contemporary theodicists such as Hick seldom reference Hegel. But they too speculate about a final state that might render sin and suffering fully comprehensible and which the philosopher, through conceptual distinctions and immediate insight, has special access.

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The Romantics reworked the theme again. As dissidents from the Enlightenment belief in rationality as the highest revelation, early German Romantics and their English contemporaries preferred to compose imagistic, fragmented poetry rather than build a rational system of ideas. This is not to say that they more closely emulate Milton’s epic or the sacred liturgy. Unlike those suprapersonal narratives of Christian salvation, the Romantic fortunate Fall characterizes the cultivation of an individual’s human spirit. Transgression develops passion, individuality, and self-consciousness. Sin and suffering are painful, but so is growing up. All these historical and rhetorical shifts occurred even before the idea of a fortunate Fall took root in American soil, where it was tended by those cultural prophets wanting to distance themselves from the values of churchgoers, even as the high priests of Christian dogmatics seek to uproot it, especially when it implies that God ordains evil.12 How then is the professor of our imagined scenario to respond to the student? Posed with the simple question, “Is sin good?” when she is aware of the host of sometimes intersecting, sometimes conflicting felix culpa traditions in and out of church, which focus alternatively on Christ, reason, and the human spirit, the professor might very well keep quiet, unsure of what to say. Perhaps the best response would be: “Yes and no.” Or maybe: “It depends on what you mean.”

Our Gadfly Guide This book is an attempt to respond to the question of our imagined student. Actually, it wants to keep asking the felix culpa question and prevent any one response from becoming decisive. In this chapter I will swim through some of the rhetorical waters that suggest that human sin is good, waters that span from premodern, self-consciously Christian utterances to alternative uses in modern idealist philosophy, Romantic poetry, and contemporary postmodern reconstructions. Immersed in such murky seas, I do not primarily want to make conceptual clarifications, returning the reader to a clear and distinct idea, but rather to navigate the rich ambiguities and ongoing tensions associated with talk of happy sin. As a Christian theologian, I am most interested in the ways that such paradoxical language might be made orthodox, literally, properly praising of God, which might also entail orthodoxy becoming somewhat more paradoxical. I say more paradoxical because the central Christian narrative of creation, Fall, and redemption is already disproportionate and thoroughly ironic. For all the symmetry and balance of the stages of redemptive history (Anselm describes them as having a “certain indescribable beauty ”13), sacred history climaxes in the unexpected gift of Christ—a gift so excessive and incongruous that the very insufficiency of any “order of salvation” can

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be made to witness to it. Paradise regained is infinitely better than paradise lost. Emmanuel—God with us in Christ—far outshines the good of human innocence. In fact, Karl Barth (who is rarely accused of being unorthodox) recognizes in his Church Dogmatics that God’s triumph over human rebellion reveals a power that is “other and greater than mere creation.” Barth describes this power as “so much greater that the dangerous saying is forced to our lips: felix culpa, quae talem et tantum meruit redemptorem” [Happy fault, which merited such and so great a redeemer].14 Barth follows some unexpected forerunners when he here recognizes that praising God’s ability to transmute sin into redemption might mean praising sin itself insofar as the Fall into sin “merits” this transformation. For Barth, taking this step is dangerous. The language is risky because it reflects the modern, Romantic predilection for celebrating humanity’s limitless freedom—even its freedom to sin against God. More dangerous still, the claim suggests theodicy, the conceptual alignment of God with evil that, according to Barth, risks transforming the absurdity of sin into a rational or logical necessity.15 Still, Barth recognizes how the famous liturgy from Easter Eve primarily expresses the exceeding joy of redemption compared to created innocence. Its praise of Adam’s sin entails a poetic and paradoxical expression of the excess of salvation, not a celebration of human initiative or rational justification of moral evil. By marveling over redemption without justifying sin or romanticizing human loss, Barth may be closer to those who first sang of a felix culpa than are many theologians and philosophers who now use the phrase.16 Although Barth charts the typical theological hazards that flank utterances of a fortunate Fall, it is Søren Kierkegaard who guides us into, through, and out of them. Kierkegaard thought of himself as a modern Socrates, a Christian “gadfly of Copenhagen”17 who would ask irksome questions to Christians who thought they had all the answers. In this book I show that one of his most difficult, valuable, and irritating questions—which he never asks directly yet asks almost everywhere, once we learn how to hear it—is whether there are orthodox ways to declare paradoxically that sin’s possibility is good. With a polyphony of literary voices, Kierkegaard explores the manifold dangers of talk of happy sin, tries them on, plays with them, and then ultimately deconstructs them to discover Christian treasures beneath their murky surface. Often romantic and theodical characterizations of sin resonate more fully with us than the first utterance that they echo. To hear the original utterance again, we need to be attuned to the slightest modulations of speech and style. Kierkegaard can guide us well. He, like Barth, knows the theological terrain. But he also listens carefully to the way Christianity sounds within broader culture, especially a culture that presumes to be authentically Christian. As a religious writer in tune with the intersecting ecclesial, political, and social ethos of Christendom—indeed, as one

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who listened so well to the voices around him that he could assume them as his own pseudonymous authors, echoing back a full range of echoes—Kierkegaard helps us to hear our own talk of sin for what it is: sometimes worshipful and penitent, often self-righteous and self-justifying, always in danger of becoming duplicitous and despairing. The dual dangers of theodicy and Romanticism (of justifying sin and of celebrating it) remain for us as pervasive attitudes as well as theological positions. Kierkegaard recognizes them in the spirit of his day and writes them into his books in an indirect effort to hear them for what they are. Understanding how modernity mimics Christian proclamation is important for coming to terms with talk of good sin—whether in Kierkegaard’s day or ours. Kierkegaard confronts the first modern theological danger—the rational justification of evil through the philosophical enterprise of theodicy—not only in the grand theodicy of Hegel, which Kierkegaard scathingly attacks in The Concept of Anxiety and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, but also in the parlors of Copenhagen, where being a Christian had become synonymous with being educated, getting married, going to church, and otherwise being a good person. The hands of such good people (virtually everyone in Christendom) are clean; any moral blunders marking their earlier years give way to—and are justified by—the happy marriages and moral resoluteness that they now enjoy, just as the superstitions of the Dark Ages eventually gave birth to modern and enlightened Christianity. Kierkegaard chips away at the social-political-religious foundation from which Christendom’s Christians come to justify themselves (anthropodicy) under the auspices of justifying God (theodicy).18 In so doing, he also undermines Christendom’s relegation of sin as something from which they have already been saved. In a similar way, Kierkegaard encounters the second theological danger—using felix culpa to connote Romantic transgression, the cultivation of creativity and individuality by smashing the moral strictures of organized religion—not only in the early German Romantics whom he explicitly references,19 or in the elite literary coteries of Danish poet and critic J. L. Heiberg, but also in the refectory of the university, around bohemian cafés, and in the lobby of Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre. Kierkegaard’s age was marked by a spirit of ironic detachment, where standing apart from bourgeois values ensured that one was a modern man. But beneath its dandy dress and artistic flair, Denmark’s artistic avant-garde was comprised of sad souls, represented by the unhappy poet who “conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music” (EO 1:19). Romantic transgression of everyday morality may be “fortunate” insofar as it produces such sad, beautiful longings. But Kierkegaard sees these romantic circles as proffering bad substitutes for the passion of true discipleship—even though he was part of such circles, and they were part of him. His

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distance from the theodicists allowed him to scorn speculative philosophy and the Christian establishment, but he would need to out-poeticize the Romantic poet. I am highlighting cultural penchants for justifying and romanticizing sin because they capture a good deal of Kierkegaard’s own aversions and attractions, and also because they mirror one another and continue to underwrite North America’s ostensibly Christian culture. If there is one thing that goaded this gadfly of Copenhagen from his early aesthetic works to his final attack on the established Church, it is what he calls the spiritlessness of Christendom. Nineteenth-century “Christendom” technically denotes the Danish state church, an ecclesial-culturalpolitical conglomerate whose membership was composed of native-born Danes.20 Yet the target of Kierkegaard’s critiques has less to do with institutional arrangements than with deep cultural presumptions regarding the “isomorphism” between enlightened thinking, mainstream society, and Christian belief.21 Christendom is the place in which “spiritless” persons (or better: spiritless “persons”) are mistaken for faithful disciples. Kierkegaard’s criticism of Christendom thereby also condemns those of us who still use the alleged success of the Christian religion to make Christianity into a refuge and justify our unwillingness to risk failure. Whereas “Christendom” refers to a sort of infantilism of the normative church, Kierkegaard includes in “aestheticism” the attempt to grow up by transcending organized religion altogether. According to him, aestheticism, or what we might broadly call romantic religion, mirrors the perils of Christendom as it tries to transcend them. Those individuals (often called “spiritual, but not religious”) who would transcend determinate religion and transgress every prohibition as an end in itself appear, to Kierkegaard’s critical eye, no less banal or desperate or insecure than those idols they seek to smash. Kierkegaard’s writings thereby call into question both the uncourageous self-deceptions of organized religion and the pseudo-courageous pathos of its romantic critics. Today’s churches also often serve as crutches for the uninitiated. Our cultural prophets too have become just as prosaic—and just as marketable—as the bourgeois lifestyle that they would renounce. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish incisive critics of mainline and middle-class values from false prophets whose various forms of iconoclasm momentarily enthrall the public. Madonna parodies the virgin Mother and herself becomes an icon. Mick Jagger entitles an album, “Sympathy for the Devil,” and sings, “You’ll never make a saint out of me”—but eventually he gets knighted by the Establishment. Again, this book follows Kierkegaard around speculative justifications of evil and through romantic celebrations of sin (restating his reverberations of their resonances!) in order to “repeat” (in Kierkegaard’s nonidentical sense22) an earlier, more paradoxical and liturgical pronouncement of felix culpa. It winds through Kierkegaard’s deconstructions of speculative philosophy and cultured Romanticism and his reconstructions of what I will term fortunate fragility, fortunate fallibility,

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and fortunate possibilities for offense. Along this circuitous path I hope to show how Kierkegaard marvels over the splendor of humanity’s faithful and “spirited” nature compared to humanity’s first created innocence, and so also raises the question of happy sin. To some extent, he raises the question every time he marvels over the incommensurability between Christ and any closed system of ethics or salvation. But recall from my Introduction that he primarily raises the question indirectly by considering the powerful possibility of sin. The Sickness unto Death is a book that lies at the center of the present study. Previewing that work will enable us to understand further how the question of a fortunate Fall and Kierkegaard’s construal of fortunate fallibility go hand in hand. We will also position those configurations within a few contemporary theological options.

Kierkegaard’s Figuration of Fortunate Fall(ibility) The Sickness unto Death is written under the name Anti-Climacus, whom Kierkegaard describes as an idealized Christian “on an extraordinarily high level” (JP 6:6433), but also as “recklessly ironical and humorous” (JP 6:6142). (I will address whether and how the persona can be both in chapter 3; for now, suffice it to say that a manner of writing that is both ironical/humorous and extraordinarily orthodox might constitute the “para/orthodoxy” that I called for in the introduction to this work.) Anti-Climacus links despair and sin and characterizes the resulting spiritual sickness as an “appalling danger” (SUD 9) that leads to an “impotent self-consuming” (28). Yet Anti-Climacus also writes of a “despair that is a thoroughfare to faith” (67) and claims, “It is the worst misfortune never to have had that sickness: it is truly a godsend to get it, even if it is the most dangerous of illnesses, if one does not want to be cured of it” (26). Whatever deterioration of well-being the sickness of sin might unleash, there is some sort of “effective” or “radical” despair without which the spirit cannot “break through from the ground upward” (59). Spiritless people who are unaware of their despair comprise the foil to which those in “radical” despair appear “dialectically closer” (26) to spiritual health. The regression into intensified sin, Anti-Climacus suggests, may be more valuable than the cloistered life that never meets the possibility of sin—the life that is “too spiritless to be called sin” (101). Throughout the text, faith appears both more valuable and less stable than moral innocence. Clearly, The Sickness unto Death entertains the felicity of failure. But it is also in this text that Anti-Climacus categorically distinguishes between the possibility and the actuality of sin. This conceptual distinction resists the gnosticizing tendencies pronounced in the romantic remythologizing of Genesis 3.23 Kierkegaard insists that it is only possible sin that is good. That declaration seems to defend God’s good

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creation and expunge all queries about sin’s goodness. On closer inspection, however, we see how Kierkegaard’s distinction between possible and actual sin neither functions theodically nor eliminates the need to raise questions about happy sin but rather keeps those exact questions alive. We turn to some of the most pregnant passages of the text. Near the book’s beginning, Anti-Climacus offers a passage entitled “The Possibility and the Actuality of Despair,” which is, at face value, refreshingly straightforward. Having asked whether “despair [is] an excellence or a defect,” AntiClimacus answers that “purely dialectically, it is both.” He explains: If only the abstract idea of despair is considered, without any thought of someone in despair, it must be regarded as a surpassing excellence. The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal. . . . Consequently, to be able to despair is an infinite advantage, and yet to be in despair is not only the worst misfortune and misery—no it is ruination. (SUD 15) Since despair is how Anti-Climacus talks about sin, the passage can be read as an inchoate version of the free-will defense—that response to “the problem of evil” that traces evil no further than humanity’s misuse of its God-given freedom and thus denies God’s direct responsibility for profligate suffering.24 Like free-will theodicists, Anti-Climacus seems to suggest that the freedom to sin is conceptually synonymous with libertarian freedom, meaning freedom from external coercion and with genuine alternatives available. Following this assumption, the human freedom to sin or not to sin is a good gift from God. Only the misuse of that freedom brings about suffering. With human freedom as a necessary middle term, God cannot be held responsible, at least directly, for the reality of evil. But even if Anti-Climacus’s distinction between possible and actual despair parallels the theodical distinction between libertarian freedom and actual evil, the two distinctions differ markedly in their discursive contexts. Having claimed that the ability to despair is humanity’s “infinite advantage” while admitting that being in despair comprises ruination, Anti-Climacus goes on to note that “generally this is not the case with the relation between possibility and actuality” (SUD 15). Generally, if the possibility of something is good, then the actuality of the thing is even better. But in the case of despair, “not to be in despair is the ascending scale” (15). Having noted this qualitatively different kind of possibility, Anti-Climacus gestures toward an enduring equivocation accompanying the meaning of “not being in despair”: Not to be in despair is not the same as not being lame, blind, etc. If not being in despair signifies neither more nor less than not being in despair,

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fortunate fallibility then it means precisely to be in despair. Not to be in despair must signify the destroyed possibility of being able to be in despair; if a person is truly not to be in despair, he must at every moment destroy the possibility. (SUD 15)

Free-will defenders would find this passage troubling. They claim that the possibility of evil (or of Anti-Climacus’s despair) implies libertarian freedom and that libertarian freedom means noncoercion. For them, the possibility of sin qua possibility resembles every other possibility. They mean by it “nothing more and nothing less” than the non-necessity of evil or despair and the indeterminacy of human freedom. It is exactly such univocity that Anti-Climacus calls into question. For him, “not to be in despair” might mean that one has avoided the possibility of despair through distraction and immersion in “the crowd.” (Much of The Sickness unto Death bemoans Christendom’s lack of despair in this sense.) Alternatively, “not to be in despair” might mean having become concretely capable of—or even tempted by—the possibility of despair only to “destroy” that enticing possibility by turning to faith. In either case, “not to be in despair” means that the possibility of sin is more and less than the indeterminate, nonactuality of evil. It follows that this particular possibility cannot be fully accounted for with univocal conceptual distinctions. By describing the possibility of sin in words that are irreducible to stable concepts, Anti-Climacus portrays the possibility as a power, a determinate something (albeit a “nonactual” something) that can be encountered, surrendered to, resisted, or destroyed. I am again here trying to show that “fortunate fallibility” might be as perplexing as talk of a “fortunate Fall” and thus as deserving of our careful rhetorical scrutiny.25 The subsequent chapters of this book develop this point as they move from fortunate fragility to fortunate fallibility to the fortunate possibility of being offended by Christ. From this initial analysis of The Sickness unto Death, we should note a couple of points. First, “the possibility of sin” connotes something more determinate and stranger than the formal human freedom to choose evil. AntiClimacus suggests that such human capacity to choose is fractured from the start. This cleft or noncoincidence within human agency witnesses not only to an “original” heteronymous power within oneself, but also to the fact that the self is never self-sufficient but always already outside of itself. Thus, one’s “own” fractured freedom also points to others—and to an Other—as its essential ground. One here catches sight of how Anti-Climacus’s description of sin’s possibility goes hand in hand with his theocentric, and even Christocentric, anthropology. Second, we notice that, for all his associations of sin’s possibility with an internal alien power, Anti-Climacus also associates it with a person’s potential: to be fully

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human is to be capable of sin; to be increasingly human is to cultivate this capability. Insofar as “not sinning” is something that one does—heroically, even—then it must entail, to borrow from Fear and Trembling, a double-movement: first confrontation with the real possibility of sin, then “destruction” of that possibility. Anti-Climacus ostensibly joins Johannes de Silentio in underscoring the double-movement in order to distinguish heroes of faith from spiritual dilettantes. (Yet this distinction too will be troubled as we read Anti-Climacus beside Romantic sensibilities.) Anti-Climacus’s association of human excellence with the cultivation of particular capabilities also sets him broadly, if not oddly, within the Christian virtue tradition. That tradition, which aims to cultivate particular dispositions that make moral excellence possible, surpasses in nuance and rhetoric the free-will defenders’ analysis of sin. So far in this section I have considered one of Kierkegaard’s most pivotal configurations of fortunate fall(ibility) vis-à-vis the conceptual distinction between the freedom to fall and the act of falling. I now want to reexamine the two important features that we gleaned from this analysis—the characterization of freedom as internally faulted and the cultivation of fallibility—beside two trends in contemporary theology and philosophy of religion, exhibited here by Paul Ricoeur and Stanley Hauerwas. Doing so will further delineate the set of assumptions from which I am reading Kierkegaard. I will take each of the previously noted features in turn and then introduce a third.

Is Everyone Fallible? We have seen how Anti-Climacus understands freedom and the possibility of sin as carrying a determinate structure. Especially as distinguished from philosophical theodicy, his analysis closely aligns with Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological investigation in Fallible Man. Recall from the Introduction that Ricoeur traces the way human freedom is always already fractured. To be free is to be noncoincident with oneself, to bear the marks of a “fault-line”26 in one’s selfhood as such. Given this internal duality of the self, to speak of the human as fallible recognizes that the sinful sundering of this structural fissure into self-alienation is a real possibility (read: a pressing, enticing one), not simply a formal possibility in the sense of not being logically impossible. Likewise, to speak here of fortunate fallibility will affirm that the tenuous structures of freedom are good in and of themselves, and not only in the sense that they are not-yet-guilty. Ricoeur comes to these descriptions of human fallibility by bracketing religious assumptions about the nature of evil in order to record the way consciousness presents itself to itself as a phenomenon of investigation. For him, fallibility thus characterizes the human as such; to be human is to be fallible and vice versa. Are

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Kierkegaard’s analyses of fallibility also neutral and universal? Does he treat fallibility phenomenologically or as a technical term within a particular religious narrative? In calling the possibility of sin an excellence and lambasting those who do not develop it, Anti-Climacus suggests, rather strangely, that the possibility of sin belongs particularly to Christians. Of course, whether sin and its possibility characterize only Christians depends on which pseudonym one consults. As a kind of phenomenologist (like Ricoeur) who largely brackets revealed Christian claims, Haufniensis remains uninterested in the possibility of sin as it comes to be determined from within the Christian narrative. By contrast, Anti-Climacus, a Christian psychologist, will assert in the second, explicitly theological part of Sickness that it takes a revelation from God to understand the true nature of sin (SUD 96). Anti-Climacus makes a similar claim in Practice in Christianity, his second and more Christocentric book. There the mystery of Christianity and the limits of human understanding pivot around the idea that Christ himself introduces the possibility of Christian sin insofar as he becomes “the sign of offense in order [also] to be the object of faith” (PC 99). In light of Christ, the possibility of sin becomes specified as the possibility of offense, or the possibility of rejecting God’s forgiveness and love. Anti-Climacus even regards this sin (usually specified as the sin against the Holy Spirit) as the only sin in a strictly Christian sense. It follows that offense becomes a real possibility only for those for whom the humble acceptance of God’s self-revelation also becomes a possibility. The ramifications of such a Christocentric understanding of sin are unique: “sinner” and “fallible” become titles reserved exclusively for those who recognize themselves as standing before the crucified Christ. They alone are capable of being offended or clinging to Christ. According to Kierkegaard, the majority of Christendom’s “Christians” work to bypass the possibility of offense in their efforts to make Christianity more respectable and accommodating to the status quo. A life composed of various evasions and self-justifications remains doubly removed from the possibility of faith. It comprises a spiritless life—but not (yet) a sinful one. In his later Christian writings, then, Kierkegaard traces how the possibility of sin as already determined by the structures of human freedom and within a person’s life narrative is given further specification by the revelation of Christ and so becomes determinative in the choice for Christian faith. He thereby gives “Christian definition” to human concepts and capacities.27 This specification of the later pseudonymous works does not displace his earlier and more general investigations, of course. Rather, the complex interplay between possibilities as phenomenologically perceptible (The Concept of Anxiety and the first half of The Sickness unto Death) and possibilities as revealed and determined within the specific grammar of the Christian narrative (the second half of Sickness and all of Practice in Christianity)

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both correlates human capacity with divine gift and radically recontextualizes a person’s capacities in light of revelation. It also makes Kierkegaard’s analysis of fallibility and fault more dialectical and recursive, less linear and univocal, than most analyses since Kierkegaard. Even Ricoeur’s early work in Fallible Man and in The Symbolism of Evil can be counted among these less nuanced understandings of sin. Ending his earlier phenomenological investigation of fallibility and anticipating his investigation of actual evil through a hermeneutics of religious symbolism, Ricoeur writes of three increasingly complex ways in which human fallibility anticipates fault: as the “place” of weakness, as the “origin” of failure, and as the “capacity” to sin.28 In each sense, we come to know evil as arising from fallibility, as if the capacity to fail always already anticipates the “leap” into sin. But in the last two senses, fallibility as origin and as capacity, Ricoeur insists that we come to know the movement of fallibility only by looking back on it after the onset of sin. In fact, Ricoeur insists that we come to grasp this predisposition to sin only by confessing responsibility for sin itself. In other words, with the confession of responsibility for the radical rupture comes a paradoxical awareness of one’s gradual, seemingly natural, “slide” into sin.29 Ricoeur’s analysis of the relationship between sin’s possibility and its actuality is less reified and more compelling than those of the free-will theodicists, whom Ricoeur elsewhere criticizes for their captivity to the framework of onto-theology.30 Still, for all the methodological diversity between Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur offers a stable and overarching narrative that makes sense of the transition from fallibility to fault. Fallible Man is concerned with unveiling humanity’s possibilities (including the possibility of sin) through a phenomenological epoché that brackets religious narratives of evil’s origination. The Symbolism of Evil then interprets the actual onset of evil, a transcendental “occurrence” that necessarily eludes phenomenological investigations but can be recovered by a hermeneutics of religious testimony, symbol, and myth. Compared to those of Kierkegaard, Ricoeur’s phenomenological and hermeneutical investigations are too neatly divided according to the possibility and actuality of sin. At the same time, they are not divided clearly enough to account for the distinction between human reason and divine revelation, at least for theological appropriation. Despite his qualifications that some characteristics of sin’s possibility present themselves only after the sinner’s confession, Ricoeur generally associates possibilities with humanly observable phenomena and the unobservable leap into sin with the need to interpret the imagery of religious texts. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, the transition from The Concept of Anxiety and the first half of The Sickness unto Death to the second half of Sickness and Practice in Christianity involves turning not from possibility to actuality but from possibilities as universally accessible to possibilities as (re)configured within the Christian’s particular worldview.

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What is more, when Ricoeur turns from universal phenomena to particular religious texts, his methodological hiatus is not radical enough. The turn to a hermeneutics of religious symbolism amounts to a long, perhaps indefinite, detour from philosophical anthropology that helps disclose the full range of human experience by excavating insights buried within religious myth. The circumlocution allows for progress in describing the universal human experience; the possibilities encountered within religious language are our “ownmost” possibilities, even if they initially strike us as strange. In this sense, one’s encounter with the textual world of revealed religion helps one better encounter oneself—“oneself as another,” certainly, but recognizably oneself nonetheless.31 Kierkegaard, by contrast, will tend to maximize the qualitative difference between my self-perceptions and my selfhood as revealed by Christ. Through the use of pseudonyms and his own shifting relations to them, Kierkegaard clearly understands that the meaning of “fallibility” and “sin” depend on who is speaking and why. From one perspective, everyone is fallible by virtue of being human; from another, Christians alone are called to the particular task of becoming capable of sin.

Cultivating the Capacity to Sin Kierkegaard’s configurations of fallibility and the possibility of sin also set him broadly within the virtue tradition, an approach to ethics that stresses the formation of particular dispositions or capacities within particular religious traditions or “narratives.” We have heard Anti-Climacus write of human freedoms and possibilities as having determinate qualities and structures, the “determinations” of which do not thereby determine a particular course of action. In other words, AntiClimacus imagines events as becoming increasingly possible, without thereby becoming increasingly probable. Through his own phenomenological investigations, Haufniensis describes the way the possibility of sin presents itself differently to Adam than it does to postlapsarian individuals. Whereas Adam experiences limitless possibility, becoming dizzy by the utter indeterminacy of the “possibility of possibility” (CA 42), every person after Adam (Haufniensis describes them as “derived”) becomes anxious over a particular possibility—the possibility of sin. Postlapsarian individuals perceive sin in the world and have a presentiment that they too will become sinners, which in turn makes them anxious and more susceptible to succumbing. Although their presentiments and ensuing anxiety do not cause moral failure, they do make sin increasingly possible or even “easier” (CA 60). Haufniensis accordingly writes of the “nothingness” of possibility gradually becoming “more and more a something,” without ceasing to be nothing (CA 61). In recognizing the differences between possibility as abstracted from sinful historical-cultural contexts and the possibility of sin as experience from within

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them, Haufniensis (with Anti-Climacus) contributes to the Christian virtue tradition. According to this tradition, people form particular habits that cultivate arête (excellence, virtue) or, though weakness of will, sink into opposite habits that diminish moral and imaginative capabilities (vice). In either case, the possibilities available to an individual change in range and intensity depending on the person’s or the community’s previous choices. From within the virtue tradition, it makes sense to speak of possibilities becoming more possible without necessarily becoming more probable—a distinction that is eclipsed when one works in modal categories alone. Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus thus join virtue ethicists in understanding possibilities and actualities to be reciprocally constitutive. Both past sin and Christ’s scandalous offer of forgiveness make new sin increasingly possible and more real— more relevant and enticing. But if Kierkegaard gives the cultivation of sin’s possibility a privileged role in his quest to develop Christian dispositions, he nevertheless describes the process of becoming Christian rather oddly. Kierkegaard suggests that Christians develop virtuous dispositions first by facing—or even cultivating—negative capabilities, capacities to sin. Like the virtue tradition, Kierkegaard seeks to cultivate distinctive dispositions or passions in his readers by introducing them to particular possibilities. Unlike that tradition—indeed, as an inversion of much of it—the possibilities that Kierkegaard commends are primarily negative, and he introduces them so they can be “destroyed” rather than cultivated in the life of the reader. As I mentioned at the start of this study, Kierkegaard specifies the possibility of sin to be the sine qua non of our capacity to become Christian. In the Postscript Climacus calls sin “the crucial point of departure for the religious existence”(CUP I 268). Repeatedly, he characterizes his authorship as “helping negatively” (PV 56), or “wounding from behind” (CD 161). He also interprets entire works through metaphors of homeopathy and images of forcing food out of the Christian’s throat so that he or she might eat again (CUP I 275). Kierkegaard’s works thereby offer a peculiar kind of Bildungsroman.32 They, like romantic novels of the nineteenth century, lead the reader from naiveté and spiritless slumbers to experience and spirited selfhood. Yet the figures in Kierkegaard’s “novel of images” (a literal translation of Bildungsroman) are primarily negative: Faust, demonic rage, the spurious resignation of the merman, the stupidity of a man who builds a castle but chooses to live in the basement, perpetual sickness that cannot consume the spirit it inflicts. What sense can be made of Kierkegaard’s negative way? Most scholars will argue that Kierkegaard’s predominantly negative images and cultivation of negative capabilities comprise a pragmatic detour necessary in order to rid Christendom of its misguided assumptions before describing authentic Christianity. They claim that so-called Christians need to unlearn what they objectively know about Christianity in order to learn how to live Christianly. At some

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retrospective moments in his authorship, Kierkegaard himself justifies the indirection in this way (PV 13–20). However, it is an open question whether that interpretation should be valued over other interpretations by Kierkegaard and his readers.33 While the cultivation of negative capabilities does entail his primary strategy for reintroducing Christianity into Christendom, Kierkegaard’s recursion into negative capabilities is never merely a strategy—never a tactic that might be bypassed under better conditions. As Edward Mooney, Sylvia Walsh, and David Gouwens remind us, Kierkegaard’s indirect communication is not just an alternative method for communicating a thing, but comprises a different “thing” being communicated—namely, capabilities, dispositions, or possibilities.34 Kierkegaard showcases melancholy, anxiety, despair, and even spiritual rage because he thinks the capacity for such passions distinguishes true Christians from their counterfeit doubles. In this light, the capacity for sin comprises an enduring negative sign of authentic Christianity. Some contemporary virtue ethicists agree that Christian virtue should be stranger than and less commensurable with the virtues of competing traditions, including those of the dominant culture. Stanley Hauerwas argues that Christian virtues such as peaceableness and radical hospitality subvert the Aristotelian framework upon which they are built.35 As a postliberal unwilling to ground the Christian narrative in universal human experience, Hauerwas, like Kierkegaard, asserts that it takes a revelation from God to know human sin.36 Hauerwas, also like Kierkegaard, emphasizes the possibility of offense that such a Christocentric anthropology occasions.37 But for Hauerwas, the fact that the full revelation of sin only accompanies Christ’s revelation and Christian redemption provides a kind of epistemological security against the despair of sin. He writes, “Precisely because God has invited us to be part of His kingdom, the truth of our sin can be known and confessed without that knowledge destroying us.”38 Sin becomes that from which Christians are already saved, so the possibility of sin becomes an impossible possibility, to use Barth’s phrase. As we have seen, Kierkegaard also sometimes imagines sin as a particularly Christian problem; in this sense he anticipates the postliberal critique. But for Kierkegaard sin remains a permanent and pressing problem. Even when Christ saves the would-be Christian from sin, he simultaneously makes sin increasingly possible. Kierkegaard’s distinctive Christology lends new meaning to the unique way Christians are “put in jeopardy.”39

Poetry of the Religious I have suggested how Kierkegaard’s notion of fallibility shifts with the who and what of the situation and how he diverges from the virtue tradition by linking the possibility of faith with the cultivation of negative capabilities. Crisscrossing these

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characterizations of fallibility is a third quality of his writings and related contemporary trend. Throughout their descriptions of the possibility of sin, Kierkegaard and his pseudonymous authors configure theology rhetorically. The possibility of sin for Kierkegaard comes to be known and made active primarily through the linguistic tropes that are inherent in our language games, such as metaphors, similes, synecdoche, story, metonymy, and poetry. Some have argued that the very unity of Kierkegaard’s diverse corpus is metaphorical rather than methodological or topical. His endless reworking of tales, images, and metaphors spin the threads that stitch together his work as a whole—nowhere seamless, but integrated nonetheless.40 Through his poetic crafting, Kierkegaard creates a unity of possibility that asks not to be grasped or conceptualized but embodied.41 He understands his role as a “poet of the religious” (PV 285) who casts naive religious immediacy into “reflection” or “possibility”—including the possibility of sin. He challenges his readers to go beyond their immediate passions so that they might receive them back as the second immediacy of faith.42 In doing so, he both connects faith to the natural, innocent, and “immediate” passions that govern our lives and suggests that the second immediacy outshines in oddity and intensity our unredeemed urges and desires. In fact, we might read almost every rhetorical figure in Kierkegaard’s corpus as pulling the reader out from the refuge of our most familiar, “innocent,” yet undeveloped passions. Especially important are figures such as children, birds, and lilies, which model immediate spontaneity and trust, as well as descriptions of horses that remain still only through rigorous training or individuals who continuously wrestle with eternal ideals but still take walks in Deer Park. Each typifies the renewed spontaneity and second immediacy of religious faith.43 With these images, Kierkegaard moves his reader—in Louis Mackey’s words—toward an “elusive reintegratio in statum pristinum, a new immediacy, a contemporaneity with self possible only by virtue of the absurd.”44 The connection between Kierkegaard’s rhetorical style and the “theme” of fortunate failure suggests that the desire to extract the theological theme from Kierkegaard’s discourse might be fundamentally misguided. Theologians such as Arnold Come and philosophers such as John Davenport risk extracting the theme of a fortunate Fall from Kierkegaard’s rhetorical gestures in this way, and so might lose some of Kierkegaard’s meaning in the process.45 Others, such as Mackey, playfully rouse Kierkegaard’s religious sensibilities in, with, and under his poetry, and so continuously redirect quests for the meaning of Kierkegaard’s felix culpa back to the tropes that house it. Recall from my introduction that the inextricability of content and form also remains a salient feature of what I have called the “liturgical” felix culpa. Given that inextricability, if Kierkegaard repeats its style, as I argue, he will repeat much of its content as well. In fact, the conception we have been

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presently examining, namely, that “only” the possibility of sin is good, initially seems substantively dissimilar to felix culpa but in fact so closely resembles the liturgy’s para/orthodoxy that it repeats form and content better than do the philosophical and literary versions that duplicate the words but in a different voice and for conflicting rhetorical purposes. The next two chapters analyze the fortunate Falls of Hegel and the Romantics, which provide “subtexts” around and out of which Kierkegaard develops the blessing of human fallibility. To end this chapter, I give my own analysis of the subtext to which Kierkegaard returns after working back from modern justifications and celebrations of sin—namely, the Exsultet of the early Christian Mass. While analyzing this liturgy, I will also connect the Easter Eve service to broader trends in Christian worship by sampling the work of selective contemporary liturgical theologians.

Subtext I: Liturgical Fortunate Fall So far as we know, the phrase felix culpa first appears in the early Roman Missal for Easter Eve.46 During the vigil, the deacon chants the “Proclamation of the Easter Message,” commonly known as the Exsultet, a title taken from the first word of the deacon’s song: Exsultet jam Angleica turba cælorum . . . (“Rejoice now the angelic choirs of heaven”). Having processed bearing the Paschal Candle, from which the celebrant, clergy, and laity light their own, the deacon incenses the candle and begins the Exsultet, expounding the symbolism of the candle and “celebrating divine mysteries with joy.” Midway into the proclamation, he sings, “O truly necessary sin of Adam, which is cancelled by Christ’s death!” and then continues: “O fortunate fault which has merited such and so great a redeemer!” This tribute to the necessity and fortune of sin is made immediately after exalting God’s mercy and immediately before praising Easter Eve itself, “which alone deserved to know the time and hour in which Christ arose again from the grave.” The meaning and function of the felix culpa clause remains inseparable from its liturgical setting. Only after and in light of the exultation of God’s forgiveness (“O wonderful condescension of Your mercy . . . ”) and the adoration of God’s compassion (“O inestimable affection of charity . . . ”) does the deacon praise the necessity and blessedness of Adam’s sin (“O truly needful sin of Adam . . . ”; “O happy fault . . . ”). The grammatical construction of the felix culpa clauses suggests that sin itself is necessary for salvation by “meriting” so great a redeemer. But when considered within the broader liturgy, it is the adoration of God’s mercy and charity that is necessary for the recognition of sin. Only when refracted through the prism of redemption does the necessity of sin begin to glitter. Only when sounded through the resonance chamber of God’s mercy can the goodness of sin be heard.47

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Thus, when worshippers recognize God’s mercy and charity, they also glimpse the goodness of sin in retrospect. Yet the time in which this retrospective glance occurs also alters dramatically. The variance raises the question of whether even “retrospection” implies a temporal position that is disrupted within the liturgy. Immediately after the felix culpa clause, for example, the deacon praises the night “in which Christ rose from the grave!” The past tense of “rose” (resurrexit) implies that the first Easter Eve (or Holy Saturday) is remembered here, but the deacon proclaimed earlier that this same night “purged away the darkness of sinners by the light of the pillar,” which refers to the Exodus. The deacon also personifies the night as that which “at this time [the time of the singing] throughout the world restores to grace and unites in sanctity those that believe in Christ.” And immediately following the reference to the first Easter Eve, we learn that this same night, in the eschatological consummation, “shall be enlightened as the day.” The efficacy of God’s salvation via Easter Eve has happened, is happening, and will happen at the end of time. The “temporal location”48 of the liturgy shifts in relation to the distinct events being referenced, each of which is remembered, anticipated, or presently performed in the adoration of this holy night. When we look upon sin as fortunate and necessary from the moment of salvation, we should therefore note that this moment finds no single “place” in time. Singing the Exsultet on Holy Saturday— perhaps the most liminal and pregnant of all liturgical time—de-centers the worshippers and prevents their song from being taken straightforwardly. In their ecstatic adoration, they do not point to the meaning of felix culpa from without but rather find themselves lost within it. The worshippers proclaim the goodness of sin, but not with all-knowing hindsight. Rather, the Easter vigil, the original Christian liturgy, the source of all vigils, recapitulates all of salvation history in a single night—the night of recollection and eschatological expectation. Liturgical time reminds us that our linear time is impoverished in its linearity. It gives us a foretaste of divine “time,” tota simul, everything at once. Felix culpa can be taken as both remembrance and expectation, consummated glorification together with ongoing yearning. If, in fact, the Easter Eve liturgy provides the source and norm for Christian liturgy as such, then we should not be surprised to find its shifting temporal locations and telescoping of time characterizing broader patterns in Christian worship as well. In my introduction, I mentioned how Dirk Lange finds liturgical speech to comprise a kind of “failed speech” that communicates through its failing, disrupting settled meanings of language in the process. As is suggested by the title of his book Trauma Recalled: Liturgy, Disruption, and Theology, Lange likens Christian liturgy in general and the Lord’s Supper in particular to the uncontrollable repetition of a traumatic event.49 We do not actually re-present something already securely passed/past and so now make it wholly available when we invoke God’s

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presence in the Eucharist. Rather, what gets repeated is exactly that which is always already missed—an absence or trace (a traumatic “event”) that outstrips our work to contain it and so unsettles traditional narratives of meaning. In other words, instead of recollecting and dispensing a fully apprehensible Christ, the liturgy and sacraments, like traumatic reencounters, reveal something essentially uncontrollable, something excessive and necessarily missed, repeating only the impossibility of repeating the originating event.50 On this reading, the “Christ event” cannot be located at one point in an unbroken space-time continuum. It rather breaks apart the stability of that continuum along with the language meant to recall it. In light of Lange’s characterization of Christian liturgy as such, the Exsultet’s seemingly offhanded description of Easter Eve as praiseworthy for alone “know[ing] the time and hour in which Christ arose again from the grave” signals more than rhetorical flourish. It gestures instead to the essential indeterminability of the “foundational” Easter event. That event is no historical occurrence from which we progressively get farther away, but rather the very unsettling of history as clock time and place as spatial extension. Nothing happens on Holy Saturday—or at least nothing that can be directly observed and recorded.51 The fact that the holy vigil alternates between past, present, and future likewise portrays the resurrection as rupturing its own context. Unlike trauma, however, this permeability of frameworks and our inability to re-present the event is not necessarily a cause for distress. In the case of Easter Eve, it provides the very occasion for the worshippers’ wonder. Returning to the Exsultet, we also notice that certain incongruities within the felix culpa clause itself result from and add to the intensification or telescoping of time during Holy Saturday. The first clause (“O truly necessary sin of Adam, which is cancelled by Christ’s death!”) contains a disparity when pushed to its logical limits. Necessarium (necessity) implies an indispensable requisite for Christ, but the second half of the clause tells us that this indispensable condition is dispensed with by Christ’s death.52 Christ thus depends on a necessary condition that he nonetheless abolishes. Is it then that Christ relies on the necessary Fall or that the Fall’s necessity depends on seeing the Fall through Christ? The Exsultet seems to proclaim both without contradiction if we clearly distinguish sacred history (sin as “needing”53 Christ) from what could be called sacred epistemology (knowing this need through Christ). The incommensurability between the two faithfully expresses the worshippers’ liminal location and the liturgical momentum that carries them from adoring God to rejoicing in Adam’s Fall. If the first clause of felix culpa is seemingly incongruous, the second (“O happy fault which merited such and so great a redeemer!”) is thoroughly ironic. Meruit (merited) means to have deserved, obtained, or served as pay for something. It originated within the field of jurisprudence and can be used positively or negatively,

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with rewards or punishments. Oddly enough, in the Exsultet, “merit” connects a culpa (crime, fault, failure) with a great reward. If there is a crime, we expect it to “earn” punishment (“the wages of sin are death”—Rom. 6:23), which may or may not be forgiven subsequently. If the crime earns the reward of the Redeemer, we expect it is not a culpa but a fortuna. In this way, both the meaning and expression of felix culpa are ironic. Linguistically, the liturgy employs ironic tropes whose literal meaning works against them. Substantively, the fortune of the Fall is ironic in that sin “earns” a reward despite Adam’s opposing intentions and against all expectations. Liturgical theologian Gordon Lanthrop claims that such ironic reversals and linguistic countermotions provide the common pattern or ordo of Christian liturgy as such.54 Rooted in biblical patterns, the liturgy creates meaning by juxtaposing praise beside lament, the now beside the not-yet, human beside divine, expectancy for God’s coming beside remembrance of the crucified one, and so forth. Lanthrop goes so far as to claim that these paradoxical appositions that structure the liturgy and issue in reversal and surprise are the clearest way that Christianity can speak its truth.55 In other words, Christian meaning is inseparable from the “countermotions” that draw us into that meaning. In breaking old words and rituals against new experiences of grace, the language of worship intends to use the wrong word; indeed, the “wrongness of the word needs to be heightened, not tamed” in order for liturgical speech to work.56 We could say that the liturgy, like a good poem, means what it is and does—namely, as performed text where “one part [works] against another across a silence.”57 If Lanthrop is right in his characterization of the ordo of Christian liturgy, then there is reason to believe that the Exsultet in general and felix culpa in particular provide the paradigmatic example of Christian worship. Nowhere is the seam or “silence” between the two contrasting parts starker or more deafening than during Holy Saturday, the day that divides and pulls together the manifestation of sin (crucifixion) and God’s unexpected reply (resurrection). Likewise, nowhere is the tension-filled apposition between sin and death, on one hand, and righteousness and new life, on the other, more dramatic, poetic, or indispensable than when Easter Eve worshippers praise sin in order to praise Christ, thereby registering and enacting liturgical reversal and surprise. Returning again to the Exsultet, we notice how even the famous words felix and culpa are themselves counterpoised. It might even seem as though together they end in conceptual deadlock—as might be suggested by frequent references to the “paradox” of a fortunate Fall.58 However, to the degree that “paradox” implies that the rich poetic meaning of felix culpa is thereby settled (or abandoned), felix culpa is not simply paradoxical. In fact, both felix and culpa connote the accidental, fortunate character of humanity’s sin and are equally distinguished from the intentionality connoted by “merit.” Besides happy, the Latin felix means

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lucky, fortunate, or fertile, suggesting that the happiness is bestowed upon its referent in fortuitous and surprising ways. Culpa here is used to refer to Adam’s error instead of peccatum, delictum, or scelus. These alternatives each imply clear-eyed willfulness,59 whereas culpa implies a going-amiss, an erring more gradual and less intentional than wickedness or trespass. This exegesis suggests that there is something fortuitous and unexpected in both Adam’s sin and God’s response. Christians spontaneously respond with “O felix culpa” to the surprising transformation of sin by redemption in Christ. Any subsequent conjecture that the Fall was predetermined by God60 misses the novel fortune that arouses the original proclamation. So long as it is set within the Exsultet, felix culpa rejoices in God’s novel transformation of sin into blessing while continuously marking the irony and incongruity of that transformation in and through the countermotions of its own proclamation. In short, “O felix culpa!” expresses surprise and joy along with its inability to express them straightforwardly; it does not discern an underlying logic of salvation or a reified conceptual paradox. The joy of surprise requires that any logical or ontological connection between Adam’s sin and Christ’s atonement remain “behind the backs” of the worshippers. In fact, the worshippers’ inability to know—the very fracturing of clear and distinct ideas—provides the ground of possibility for celebrating divine mysteries. The shifts among time and place that complicate predication in the liturgy, as well as the refractions and reverberations that are required in order for one to see and hear sin’s goodness, together point to an event that fissures humanity’s normal sense of causality, morality, and time. We might even claim that it fissures the worshippers’ “subjectivity” insofar as being a subject connotes transparency and self-possession or implies a zero-sum game of acting or being acted upon. In this regard, we must also examine the repeated vocative “O!” that rhetorically knits much of the Exsultet together. In After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, Catherine Pickstock argues that the strange repetitions and recommencements of the medieval Roman Rite (which she considers the true Christian liturgy) enact a “doxological dispossession” that forms a “liturgical subject” distinct from the self-encasement of Descartes’ cogito.61 For Pickstock, praise itself is a “dispossessing act,” but the apostrophic or vocative voice in particular—and most compactly, the voice of the pure “O!” of undifferentiated voicing—supremely de-centers the worshipper.62 The urgent cry of “O!” de-centers us because it tries both to invoke that which seems absent and to gain some perspective from that which seems all too close; it trusts its power to call forth God and yet relies on God’s presence for its ability to do so. These ambiguities explored by Pickstock complicate what count as subjects and objects within liturgical praise. Are we invoking or being invoked? Is the One who is summoned

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absent or more present than we are? We notice a similar ambiguation and dispossession in the Exsultet’s invocation of Adam’s necessary sin and the happy fault. On the one hand, the worshippers recall or call forth sin in light of the fully present reality of redemption; on the other hand, by invoking the Fall, they gain some distance from what is overwhelmingly present, making space, so to speak, for the new reality that follows from and upends it. It follows that O felix culpa! does not entail a secure proposition (a “said”) that is fully grasped by the one who has spoken it. Rather, it works only in the performance (in the “saying”) and so reconstitutes the one who sings it, and in a fashion resembling the appositions that it expresses. The worshipper’s subjectivity, as both subject and object of the invocation, perhaps also resembles Luther’s Christian self as simultaneously sinner and saint (my analogy, not Pickstock’s). From my analysis of the Exsultet and the broader claim of these liturgical theologians, it should be clear that the Easter Eve Mass is meaningful not despite but because it ironizes straightforward meanings, self-possessed subjects, and spatialized temporalities. Other poetic and rhetorical accounts could be included in this liturgical type. To take the most obvious example, Milton’s own reference to happy fault certainly preserves much of these meaningful incongruities. After the Archangel Michael reveals to the fallen Adam a vision of his suffering and subsequent redemption, Adam is “replete with joy and wonder.” He replies: O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent me now of sin By me done or occasioned, or rejoice Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring, To God more glory, more good will to Men From God, and over wrath grace shall abound.63 We should note that Milton, despite how often he is cited as an exponent of the fortunate Fall, here merely considers its possibility. Milton’s Adam is “full of doubt” as to whether he should repent or rejoice. Such doubt does not express the cognition of two mutually exclusive propositions, but rather conveys the awareness of two counterpoised dispositions working in concert: contrition that arouses adoration and adoration that goads contrition. When Michael first foretells the Incarnation, he sees “Adam with such joy/Surcharg’d, as had like grief bin dewed in tears,/Without the vent of words . . . ” (XII. 372–74). That Adam’s jubilant tears resemble tears of grief reveals more than rhetorical flourish. It expresses the lack of

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any one point of view from which the Fall can be contemplated or univocal discourse in which its meaning can be stated. Furthermore, all of Book XII of Paradise Lost occurs after the archangel Michael has given Adam a vision of the history of salvation, thereby displacing Adam from his normal “temporal location” and way of seeing. Like the Easter Eve Mass, the ambiguity and overdeterminacy of place and time are essential. Adam can praise the fortune of the Fall in ecstasy, but he cannot grasp its conceptual truth. Milton is clear that the desire to know more fully and securely would only rekindle sinful concupiscence. Thus, before Adam rejoins Eve to exit Eden “with wandering steps and slow” (XII. 648), he vows to be satisfied with limited knowledge: “Greatly instructed I shall hence depart./Greatly in peace and thought, and have my fill/Of knowledge, what this Vessel can containe;/ Beyond which was my folly to aspire” (XII. 557–60). To this, the angel replies: “This having learnt, thou hast attained the summe/Of wisdom; hope no higher” (XII. 575–76). Such limited knowledge founds and fuels the mystery of felix culpa. On this, Milton and the Easter vigilantes agree. Of course, whether one should “hope no higher” will become vigorously disputed by idealist philosophers and Romantics writings in Milton’s wake. Those who accept such limited knowledge as circumscribed by revelation in turn will need to clarify that it does not amount to fideism, to belief in belief, which is but another crafty form of self-confidence. Rather, the way of knowing here parallels what Wendell Berry calls the way of ignorance64 and what Kierkegaard describes as human understanding willing its own downfall (PF 47–48). In the final analysis, the Exsultet’s exultations over a fortunate Fall perpetually mean what look like conflicting things: that Adam’s sin truly is necessary and fortunate in light of that which upends it, and that the worshippers can never comprehend the truthfulness of that remark. Both by telling the truth and by recognizing that one cannot know how it is true, the liturgical felix culpa provides an instance of analogical theological speech. The announcement of the Fall’s fortune would thereby mean something about God’s ironic interruption of human history—but it would mean this always with irony, and therefore without having grasped how the claim could be true. Traditional analogical rhetoric is distinct both from the theodicist’s univocity, with its assurance of having comprehended what it says, as well as from unbounded equivocation, which serves primarily to take comprehension away.65 The exultation means something that the worshippers take to be true. But its shifting voice and paradoxical language also mark what Barth calls the necessary brokenness of theological speech.66 The proclamation means much more—about Christ and our own interrupted condition—than the worshippers or we can conceptually grasp.

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In order to return to the first utterance of felix culpa, Kierkegaard learns to speak analogically in a time when univocal and equivocal speech seems to exhaust the options. The next chapters will follow the poetic creation of Kierkegaard’s fortunate fallibility out of the theodical version of the fortunate Fall, through that of Romanticism, and back to the liturgical proclamation in order to come to terms with the originality and radicalism of Kierkegaard’s hamartiology. Chapter 2 examines differences between Hegel’s univocal voice and the poetic prevarications of Kierkegaard so as to begin to characterize the blessing of human fragility.

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2 Felix Fragilitas in The Concept of Anxiety

Sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it. —Genesis 4:7 Innocence is not a perfection that one should wish to regain, for as soon as one wishes for it, it is lost, and then it is a new guilt to waste one’s time on wishes. Innocence is not an imperfection in which one cannot remain, for it is always sufficient unto itself, and he who has lost it, that is, not in a manner in which it might have pleased him to have lost it but in the only way in which it can be lost, that is, by guilt—to him it could never occur to boast of his perfection at the expense of innocence. —Vigilius Haufniensis, The Concept of Anxiety The [confessional] text can never stop apologizing for the suppression of guilt that it performs. —Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading This chapter traces the manner in which Kierkegaard deconstructs modern theodicy’s understandings of fortunate Fall in order to begin his return to earlier and more paradoxical expressions for Christian faith and beatitude. It shows how the effectiveness of Hegel’s theodicy depends on the univocity of his philosophical language. If Kierkegaard is to speak of fortunate fallibility and fault in ways that do not

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conceptually explain or ethically condone sin, then he will need to speak from more than one perspective and with more than one rhetorical voice. I argue that The Concept of Anxiety has just this sort of plurivocity inscribed within it. The text insists that human fragility, anxiety, and the possibility of sin—not sin itself—are fortunate in pointing us to the graces of God. More important, the text exhibits and performs that necessary fragility through the unstable relation between its multiple viewpoints. By examining the conflicting voices of this text, I suggest that theological examinations of the possibility and actuality of sin may become truer as they get less unified. Only by speaking out of both sides of our mouths can we come to terms with our necessary and happy fragility.

Speaking of Sin In The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong, William Placher traces a subtle shift in God-talk that occurs in the seventeenth century. Before this watershed moment, Christian theologians such as Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin spoke of God’s transcendence and God’s grace in analogical terms. Unlike equivocal language, analogical language, as defined by Aquinas, is not arbitrary; when Christians say that God is “good” or “wise,” the meaning of the words somehow corresponds to our everyday uses of wisdom and goodness— say, in terms of a wise grandmother or a good friend. From the other side, analogical language can also be distinguished from univocal language. God’s wisdom somehow corresponds to our other uses of “wise,” but the word does not mean the same thing in both cases. Thus, even to say that God is “wiser” than my grandmother would amount to what Wittgenstein calls an unintelligible remark because the two kinds of wisdom are incommensurable. Although we are aware that the meanings of our words about God somehow relate to our other uses of those words, the exact connection always goes on behind our backs. The terms of the analogy themselves must forever go unsaid. To speak analogously, then, is to speak confidently about God and grace with words from scripture and to trust that our words are meaningful. But it is also to resist any conjecture about how our everyday words apply to God and to avoid the assumption that we can fully mean or understand what we are saying.1 In the seventeenth century, philosophers and theologians continued to employ Aquinas’s method of analogy, at least at face value. In fact, many of them wrote and debated about analogy more than did their thirteenth-century counterparts. Their focus, however, was of an unusual sort. Working under the new assumption that proper analogy depends on our ability to specify how different uses of a word

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are related, figures such as Cardinal Cajetan systematized Aquinas’s approach into a theory of analogy—a theory that can be figured out—and so increasingly closed the gap between analogy and univocity.2 This drift toward univocity culminates in Descartes’s quest to place God within a rational system of “clear and distinct ideas” or within a metaphysical order whereby every “being” is like every other in that it is caused (if only self-caused, in God’s case).3 The drift toward univocity also entails what Placher calls the domestication of God’s transcendence. In modernity, “transcendence” becomes a definable property of God, meaning God’s remoteness or impassibility as counterbalanced by God’s immanence. It ceases to function as a linguistic marker for the radical incommensurability between God and creation—as a reminder that all human words must bend and break when applied to God. Besides the now hackneyed phrase “leap of faith” (which Kierkegaard never penned as such, even in Danish), the assertion that there is an “infinite qualitative difference” between Creator and creature remains Kierkegaard’s trademark idiom. The phrase was popularized by Karl Barth, who used it as theological leverage against liberal theology’s own penchant for comprehending and thus domesticating the otherness of God.4 Kierkegaard, too, used it to recover the transcendence of God, especially in light of Christendom’s smug self-assurance of being in God’s good graces. Only more recently are Kierkegaardians recognizing that the linguistic performance that enacts God’s transcendence—how we approach talking about God’s difference—also matters. If phrases such as God’s “infinite qualitative difference” were alone responsible for safeguarding God’s infinite qualitative difference, these words could at best forestall a trend toward “immanentizing” God but would not necessarily impede the drift toward univocity. (There is substantial irony here: the retrieval of God’s transcendence might itself domesticate God so long as it univocally asserts that transcendence.) Therefore, without an awareness of Kierkegaard as rhetorician, as one who always says more or less than he means, his readers would still be tempted, like Cajetan, to figure out and so reify the meaning of God’s difference. If we take Placher seriously, the domestication of God must be resisted in word and the word’s deed—by developing linguistic strategies that reinscribe the difference between what one claims and what one comprehends. The present chapter focuses on The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychological Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Original Sin, the sole work by Kierkegaard’s literary persona, Vigilius Haufniensis (the “Watchman over the Harbor”). The work was published in 1844, the year Nietzsche was born and early in Kierkegaard’s “first authorship,” the corpus up to and including Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Subtitle notwithstanding, and like the writings of Nietzsche, The Concept of Anxiety is anything but simple. Gordon

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Marino frankly confesses that it is a “maddeningly difficult book.” Edward Mooney calls it “nearly impenetrable.” Joakim Garff writes that it “comes rather close to being unreadable.”5 When readers do make sense of it, they commonly interpret it as a psycho-theological investigation into original and subsequent sin, with “original” referring both to Adam’s sin and to the first sin of each individual. (Haufniensis takes pains not to place Adam “fantastically” outside human history. ‘Adam—Hebrew for “the man”—is one of us, if also in idealized form.) The work offers an extended phenomenological or “psychological” account of human anxiety while gesturing toward the doctrinal issue of hereditary sin. But the author also refuses to theorize about how phenomenology and theology relate—how observing anxiety affects one’s understanding of sin. Ironically, the work entails an extended critique of “speculative” objectivity, yet it is written through an observational (“watching”) psychologist who, with ample objectivity, “sits and traces the contours and calculates the angles of possibility,” and who is “disturbed” no more than Archimedes (CA 23). The front piece of Anxiety announces: “The age of making distinctions is past. It has been vanquished by the system” (CA 3). I want to suggest that the entire work performs extensive training in the art of making distinctions—primarily, the Socratic (and “Placherian”) distinction between what one does and does not understand (CA 3).6 But recall the irony discussed above. So long as a person univocally distinguishes between what he or she does and does not understand, the person is, in fact, misspeaking and misunderstanding. It follows that, if Haufniensis is to help us into a wiser ignorance, his very language will need to mark graphically that which must go unthought. Those graphic markings that comprise the rhetoric of Haufniensis’s text tend to undercut the scholarly form that houses them. Haufniensis may be writing a well-structured and erudite treatise that explains the relationship between “concept” of anxiety and the “issue” of hereditary sin. And/or he might be writing a text that undoes such explanations, exposing the ideologies that drive them. Especially in the latter case, the project is theologically indispensable in its analysis of sin.7

The Marvel of Sin By the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard and his contemporaries were submerged within the modern philosophical quest to establish God’s existence clearly and distinctly. The possibility of speaking analogically in the way of Placher’s premodern figures perhaps had already been foreclosed. God’s qualitative otherness would have to be retrieved though contradictory language, opaque tropes, and other linguistic devices that wrest the reader from epistemic and linguistic self-assurance.

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Another and more obvious difference between the work of Haufniensis and Placher is this: whereas the premodern turn to analogy arose out of the difference between human cognition and the reality of God, Haufniensis’s language fractures under the difference between two other weighty subjects—human anxiety and human sin. To us, these subjects likely seem like thoroughly “domestic” (psychological, anthropological, and moral) issues that we would do well to domesticate further with unequivocal speech and action. Haufniensis himself seems to assert this idea. He avows that sin is freely chosen and so must be unambiguously condemned, especially in the face of a Hegelian dialectic that fails to distinguish Christian sin from “the negative,” a category of logic. However, could these be “transcendent” issues as well? Haufniensis also and with equal clarity points to anxiety as the tragic setting from which sin seems gradually to emerge. He seems univocally to condemn sin as a pure act of the will and univocally to depict anxiety as the predisposing condition. To do both seems to equivocate. Such vacillations, I will suggest, might be as essential to our speaking of sin as to our speaking of God. It is interesting to note that Placher similarly extends his investigation of our language for God into our language for human evil.8 In fact, nowhere is the “drift toward univocity” more apparent than in the philosophical enterprise of theodicy, an endeavor to reconcile three conceptually transparent, apparently incompatible propositions (God is all-good; God is all-powerful; evil exists). Placher suggests that it is not only or primarily the first two propositions that risk domesticating God’s transcendence. The last one as well—that “evil exists”—comprises the kind of statement whose meaning cannot be conceptually secured. Moreover, Placher insists on the impossibility of explaining not only evil—a term that often encompasses meaningless suffering—but also sin, the human evil that humans would seem to know all too well. He quotes Kathryn Tanner in this regard: “The origination of sin is properly a mystery, properly inexplicable in a scheme of thought where God is the ultimate principle of explanation. Human beings must be the ones responsible for their own moral failing since God by definition brings to be only the good; but the how of that human-originated-sin is, as Karl Barth says, an impossible possibility, the surd of a creature turning against its own being given by God.”9 Notice the implicit analogy between our necessary analogical language for God and the language we must use for our own human failures. In regard to God, one can proclaim that God is good, powerful, wise, etc. but never know how those words correspond to their referent. In regard to moral failure, we can know (Tanner writes that we must know) that humanity alone is responsible for rending the fabric of God’s good creation. Yet we can never know how that could happen. Sin appears absurd to the same infinitely qualitative degree that God is absolute. For Barth, the very possibility of sin cannot be thought apart

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from the fact that this “impossible possibility” has been actualized. The impossibility of turning against the source of one’s existence is possible only because we have done it.

Anxious Fragility Haufniensis’s book marks, in what it says and how it says it, both the actuality of our fall into sin and the im/possibility of this occurrence given human nature as created good but fragile, as innocent but always already anxious. With one of two voices, Haufniensis clearly asserts that sin occurs within lived existence, not by the necessity of logic, as Hegel proposed. It must be fully attributed to the free individual, who must take full responsibility for it. With a second voice, Haufniensis gestures toward the state of anxiety, of freedom looking down into its own possibility, as the context from which sin so steadily springs. Haufniensis goes beyond earlier portrayals by distinguishing Angst, the discontent over one’s freedom and the seemingly unlimited possibilities accompanying it, from fear, the more determinate and transitory response to a specific threat or danger. Unlike with fear, the contours of anxiety are difficult to trace. Anxiety is not subjective in the sense of being imaginary or idiosyncratic, but it is subjective insofar as the object causing the angst is oneself. Indeed, anxiety registers the very indeterminacy of one’s own freedom, an “object” that never presents itself to one’s own gaze. Anxiety therefore remains a necessary concomitant of what it means to be a self, yet forever withdraws from self-surveillance. According to Haufniensis, God composes the self in equilibrium but not in completion. The self is a synthesis of time and eternity, necessity and possibility, body and soul. Yet it also has the possibility—indeed the requirement—of reflecting on this synthesis by way of a third term, commonly called self-consciousness, but what various Kierkegaardian pseudonyms refer to as spirit or simply the self. Thus, geological fault-lines run across a person already in her original state. When she considers her essential nonidentity with herself, her noncoincidence, a dizzying ambiguity ensues: Am I essentially the stable duality on which I am currently looking? If so, and if that duality of body and soul is intact, how have I come apart from it? Am I rather this “I” that sees the twoness of me? If so, does not the original synthesis appear arbitrary and limiting, deserving to be overcome in my self-overcoming? Finally, if there are these various options for relating to myself, for being myself, then am I to believe that I really am not (yet) a self at all? That anything and everything is possible? It is enough to make one anxious. The self—at once essentially who it is and yet no-one-thing, nothing determinate, pure possibility, at once unified and boundless and yet crisscrossed with

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limens and limits—this self inevitably gets anxious. Haufniensis makes it clear that such anxiety belongs to the fragility of human nature and not to an error in judgment, much less to sin. In his Introduction he claims that “human nature is so constituted that it makes sin possible” (22). He repeats this configuration in the final chapter: “Because man is a synthesis, he can be in anxiety” (155).10 Sin enters only when such anxiety gets the best of us, causing us to swoon from dizziness or to try to arrest the anxiety by making an object of ourselves, what Sartre will later identify as bad faith. Fragile human nature is created in such a way that anxiety becomes inevitable and sin possible. It follows that the self ’s fragility and accompanying anxiety creates the possibility of sin, while sin itself is an actuality, an act of the will. If the relation between possibility and actuality is always one of mutual exclusivity and even antagonism, as other pseudonyms suggest,11 then we are not surprised to find anxiety and sin portrayed in very different ways—through the “two voices” that we will soon trace. These voices of Haufniensis seem incompatible. The first would have us condemn sin as unmotivated, without precedent, and inexcusable. The second would have us bracket such censures long enough to observe the “restless repose” of anxiety, a psychological liminal state out of which sin naturally seems to emerge. The first voice may comprise the “theological” voice, as Haufniensis sometimes suggests. Alternatively, the proper theological perspective might emerge in the correlation between innocent anxiety and guilty sin, as Haufniensis also sometimes suggests, as do a number of his commentators. A third option is usually overlooked: that it is through the very dissonance of the two voices that the theological perspective emerges, a perspective that is internally divided, fragile, and anxious, and so exhibits the very phenomenon it oversees. In what follows, I explore the possibility of this counterintuitive last option, with its more self-erasing understanding of sin. I thereby will show that the rhetoric of the text is more internally fractured and theologically elusive than is typically assumed. Before doing so, however, we need to understand the “text” to which Haufniensis is most directly responding, which is actually a host of assumptions and temperaments that Kierkegaard labels “the System” or “Hegel.” Because Kierkegaard often takes Hegel in caricatured form (and as mediated through Denmark’s Hegelian dogmaticians), I will try to take Hegel at his theologically best, attending especially to what look like dual perspectives in his early religious writings. One perspective promises to preserve the existential anguish of sin even as the other justifies it within an overarching philosophical framework. However, even from within this more generous reading, Hegel’s grand theodicy finally eliminates plurivocity and turns sin into a concept fully known and controlled by enlightened reason. Haufniensis is right to reject it.

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Subtext II: Hegel’s Fortunate Fall “The hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it.”12 This aphorism, repeated with different wording throughout Hegel’s corpus, sums up Idealism’s faith that the slaughter-bench of history will lead to and be justified by a final eschaton of Absolute Knowing.13 In Hegel’s theodicy, of course, this eschaton unfolds from within the dialectical progression, in contrast to traditional apocalyptic literature, where the end is unveiled from without. It follows that the role of sin—that which is overcome in the End—also shifts dramatically. For Hegel, sin names the division between the sheer individuality of existing beings and the conceptualized universality of Existence or Being itself. But in Hegel’s logic, unlike in traditional Christian eschatology, this “sinful” division between the part and the whole is an ironic constitution that bears within it the possibility of its own overcoming. Thus, the singular’s resistance to the universal actually generates more comprehensive processes of thought. The “cunning of Reason” emerges out of and is sustained by every apparent contradiction—including human “sin”—until finally, with speculative hindsight, one can see the purposefulness of “evil.” The scare quotes in the previous paragraph suggest that when Hegel philosophically comes to terms with Christian categories, he makes them almost unrecognizable, theologically speaking. I will later support this claim, taking my lead from Kierkegaard. In the meantime, I will limit my analysis of Hegel to his theological best by attending to the relationship between his speculative philosophy and the language he borrows from Christianity, and then to the place and function of “the Fall” in Hegel’s early theological writings. It is difficult to parse the relationship between Hegel’s theological thought, his dialectical logic, and his understanding of world-historical development. To use the terms of his early Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argues that the “picture-thinking” (Vorstellung) of religious discourse is aufgehoben (carried forward and surpassed) by the onset of conceptual thought.14 “The Revealed Religion,” that is, Christianity, knows the highest truth about the self-unfolding of Spirit; it knows that the particular image of God in Jesus must die so that the concept of God can live, a concept which is also an individual’s transparent self-consciousness. Revealed religion knows this, but it is not self-assured—it does not know that it knows. By expressing these thoughts in narrative and symbolic form (for example, speaking of creation, Fall, and atonement as if they happened at accidental points of history), the religious consciousness seems to know the truth in a nonnecessary way and therefore “untruly.” The irony of knowing the truth untruly occasions the final conversion of consciousness, completing the series of ironic reversals that comprise Phenomenology as a whole. At least at first glance, then, revealed religion, including

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its stories of the Fall, are confined to the penultimate stage of the Spirit’s journey through self-actualization to self-comprehension. And yet this initial impression may oversimplify. Limiting religion and its “pictures” of sin to one episode of Hegel’s Bildungsroman essentially ignores (1) the way Hegel believes that religion itself tells the whole story, and (2) the way Hegel continues to rely on religious imagery to express true understanding (Vernunft) through philosophical concepts (Begriffe). I have already alluded to the first complexity. Although revealed religion may fail to conceptualize thought, at least part of its message is the death of the spiritual symbol and the resurrection of the Spirit itself. Christian Vorstellung continually provides a surplus of meaning, much of which, according to Hegel, spills into and spawns higher orders of thinking. The second point is important as well. Supposedly having left picture-thinking behind, Hegel’s concluding section of Phenomenology on Absolute Knowing continues to use apocalyptic religious imagery to characterize the emergence of the absolute Notion. Hegel there describes history as a perpetual Calvary and philosophical comprehension as Erinnerung (recollection or inwardizing) of historical forms. The final sentence of Phenomenology loosely quotes a poem by Schiller: “Only/from the chalice of this realm of spirits/foams forth for Him [Spirit] his own infinitude.”15 Hegel thus emphasizes the irreducibility of both history (this realm of spirits) and its religious representation (the chalice). Only through these does Spirit emanate and return to itself. In this way, religion spills into conceptual thought and conceptual thought continually reaches back into the grab-bag of Vortstellung. Perhaps it is more accurate, then, to say that Christianity for Hegel comprises an essential metonym for Spirit’s self-consciousness rather than a penultimate stage that is superseded by it. On this assumption, Christianity would comprise not part of the truth, but the truth itself, the whole truth—even though it is not yet nothing but the truth.16 In the same way, “the Fall” itself can be seen as a metonym for Christian doctrine as a whole. Hegel sees Christianity as rehearsing the necessary unfolding of Universal Spirit, which undergoes self-diremption into particulars and then re-members itself into the Concrete Universal. Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion (1824, 1827, and 1831) depict this process first through the self-othering love of the Immanent Trinity, then through the creation and theosis of the world, and finally through the Fall into sin and atonement of humankind. Although these early writings on sin are certainly complex and nuanced, they also depict the Fall into sin as knowable, necessary, and defensible and thereby reopen the gap between Christianity as a story and philosophical comprehension. In the lecture manuscript, Hegel structures his philosophy of religion around three triads, one within the other.17 The outer triad consists of (1) the metaphysical concept of God, (2) the concrete representation of God, and (3) the participation in

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God by the life of the community. The middle triad subdivides the second stage of general religious representation. Here (1) the immanent Trinity, or “the idea of God in-and-for-itself, ” (2) expresses itself in creation through “diremption” or selffragmentation, and (3) comes to recognize itself through the “Appearance of the Idea in Finite Spirit,” otherwise known as human consciousness. It is in this third part of the middle triad—the idea of God in human consciousness—that Hegel inserts the innermost triad: creation, Fall, and redemption as narrated by the Christian story.18 The middle triad thus comprises the second movement of the outer triad and the inner comprises the third movement of the middle. (In light of these technicalities, it may be reassuring to note that Hegel insists numbers do not matter; in fact, they impede truly conceptual thought!) What is important is that Hegel demythologizes Genesis 3 and reconstructs his version of the Fall within the third, reunifying movement of the middle triad. The negative, second movement of the innermost triad—the Fall from created innocence into guilt and sin—simultaneously comprises part of the positive, third movement of the middle triad—the development of human consciousness whereby the Trinity returns to self-contemplation. Hegel thereby describes the progression of human consciousness with its Fall into sin in such a way that it is impossible to decide whether moral failure is good or evil. It is both—fortunate from one perspective and a failure from the other; happy and yet faulty and yet happy and so on. Later I will identify the association between the rise of consciousness and the loss of innocence as a predominant theme in romantic versions of felix culpa, but already here we notice that a similar correspondence between moral failure and the development of consciousness is built into the very structure of Hegel’s lectures. Recognizing the tension between the two prevents the easy caricature of Hegel as assuaging the radicality of evil by inclosing it within an airtight “aesthetic theodicy.” In other words, as he works out his speculative philosophy, he seems to retain, albeit in structural form, the same existential anguish of the Romantics. One of Hegel’s most nuanced interpreters, William Desmond, hears these two voices in Hegel—one existential and the other logical—and notes that they often do not harmonize.19 Putting this in the terms of the religion lectures, Hegel speaks existentially of the “infinite anguish, the suffering of the world” that accompanies the Fall, as well as ontologically about original innocence as an “immediacy” that must necessarily be annulled by human sin.20 When Hegel considers Genesis 3, he notes the ambiguity of knowledge, writing: “It is supposedly forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; yet this knowledge is what constitutes the nature of spirit—otherwise man is a beast.”21 Knowledge fissures us from an immediate experience of the world and this cleavage (Entzweiung) issues in painful fragmentation (Entfremdung). But the cleavage between knower and known—this Fall into cognition—also turns one toward Absolute Knowing.22 Thus the fall into self-consciousness is the “source

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of all wrong” and also the “source of reconciliation.” What produces the disease is also the source of health. The hand that hurts is the hand that heals.23 In a way, then, Hegel preserves the contradiction between the existential pain of fragmentation and its ontological necessity. When interpreters such as Charles Taylor sum up Hegel’s understanding of sin with three short words, O Felix Culpa, they might thereby indicate an enduring ambiguity or irony in Hegel’s work.24 However, they also and more intentionally indicate that this dialectic between existential anguish and logical necessity is itself aufgehoben. Even Desmond, who listens most carefully for Hegel’s two voices, admits that the “world-historical strain” of Hegel’s thought, or his metaphysic, harmonizes the otherwise negative dialectic between existential pain and logical necessity.25 We can see how plurivocity gives way to univocity in Hegel’s Lectures by recalling that the interlocking triads of God’s self-diremption and return and humanity’s self-assertion and atonement are themselves circumscribed within the outermost triad of the Spirit’s abstract concept, concrete representation, and communitarian embodiment. However “undecided” one wishes to remain as to whether the Fall is the negative moment of humanity’s self-estrangement or the positive process of God’s self-recollection, both options comprise the means by which Spirit becomes concrete in world history. From the final stage of Absolute Knowing, even existential anguish is given teleological purpose. It is here that the cunning of Hegelian logic serves to justify the agony of everyday existence. There are two important dimensions of this circumscription. First, given the interlocking triads of his religion lectures, Hegel only relatively distinguishes humanity’s Fall into sin from the Christian God’s “fall” into the created world and from the philosophical God’s “fall” into religious representation. Existential estrangement and alienation (Entfremdung) are only forms of differentiation or cleavage in general (Entzweiung).26 This view suggests a temporal simultaneity between creation and Fall. It also means that Hegel only formally distinguishes fallibility, the benign self-differentiation that makes moral evil possible, from moral failure, self-alienation, and guilt. The possibility of evil inevitably and necessarily passes over into evil itself. Second, returning to the language of Hegel’s Phenomenology, we can see just how positive evil becomes when speculation understands it as a “determinative negative.”27 I asserted earlier that Hegel’s “Fall” becomes a metonym for his religious thought and that his religious thought becomes a metonym for the entire System. That insight kept us from caricaturizing Hegel as superseding religion altogether. But when we now also consider the isomorphism of Hegel’s existential, ontological, and world-historical thought, it appears that the anguish of moral evil, which might otherwise resist conceptual clarification, actually determines the shape of the system’s unfolding. Sin within Hegel’s system entails any concreteness or

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singularity that initially resists the conceptualized universality of Being. It is through this “determinate negative” or “determinate nothingness” that Spirit recalls its determinate shape. In this ingenious account, Hegel finally finds sin to be productive, and necessarily so. In fact, there is, in the end, no such thing as spurious evil. With the 20/20 hindsight of one who stands at the end of history, Hegel sings of the Fall’s felicity with full bravado. The philosopher’s voice, while appearing divided at first, finally offers univocal reassurance to those who cannot yet discern the fortune of their failures, either because they are too close to them existentially or because they try to do so through the picture-language of revealed religion. In fact, the philosophical voice of Hegel—how he speaks of the fortune of falling—is the most important distinguishing factor between his univocal explanation of sin and the liturgy’s more oblique exultation of God through felix culpa. In what follows, I argue that Haufniensis becomes more closely attuned to the original exultation by maintaining dual voices and so hushing every final explanation for sin.

The Voices of Haufniensis Haufniensis’s concern for making distinctions culminates in his critique of Hegelian theodicy and the role that “the negative” plays within it. He begins The Concept of Anxiety by ridiculing Hegel’s inclusion of “Actuality” within his Logic (9). He then mocks Hegel’s treatment of religious faith as an immediacy superseded by Knowledge (10). Finally, he considers the role of Hegel’s “indefatigable” and “illusory” “negative” (12–13). If in Hegel’s logic, the “impelling power” of the negative “brings movement into all things” (12), Haufniensis argues, this ethereal and comical movement turns serious when it rolls into Hegel’s ethics. “Here one is astonished to discover that the negative is evil,”28 Haufniensis writes (13). And so here “confusion is in full swing” (13). Haufniensis critiques Hegel for confusing the immanent movement of logic, where every state is a transition and therefore merely quantitatively distinguished from every other state, with lived existence, where change requires a “transcendent” interruption and true becoming takes the form of a qualitative leap.29 His critique of Hegel centers on the latter’s understanding of the Fall as a logically accessible, mediating transition between ignorant immanence and Absolute Knowing. Haufniensis assumes that logically explaining the onset of sin amounts to justifying sin ethically, thereby assuaging guilt and bypassing the need for redemption (CA 13, 49). In short, Haufniensis critiques Hegel’s interpretation of the Fall not because it is bad theodicy but because it is theodicy. As soon as sin becomes understandable, it also becomes excusable and so ceases to be sin.

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In order to restore proper ignorance about evil, Haufniensis considers the relationship between human understanding and what he refers to as the “leap” into sin (29–35). Logic cannot make sense of the choice to sin without reducing its qualitative uniqueness to quantitative determinations. He mocks the way speculative theodicies align historical becoming with an immanent movement of logic. Regarding evil as “the negative,” as does Hegel in his Philosophy of Right, transforms moral evil, which is otherwise “sudden” and “enigmatic,” into a logical transition that is deducible from what has gone before. Mocking this error, Haufniensis compares Hegel’s ability to bring a qualitative state—sinfulness—out of quantitative determinations to a child chanting “one-nis-ball, two-nis-balls, three-nis-balls” and expecting that the rhyme will eventually bring about tennis balls (32).30 Having distinguished enigmatic sin from dialectical mediation, Haufniensis then distinguishes innocence from logical immediacy. Again, he targets Hegel’s metaphysical synthesis of existence and logic. He begins by denouncing Hegel’s understanding of innocence: If one wants to maintain a dogmatic definition in our day, one must begin by forgetting what Hegel has discovered in order to help dogmatics. One gets a queer feeling when at this point one finds in works on dogmatics, which otherwise propose to be somewhat orthodox, a reference to Hegel’s favored remark that the nature of the immediate is to be annulled, as though immediacy and innocence were exactly identical. . . . [The] concept of immediacy belongs in logic; the concept of innocence, on the other hand, belongs in ethics. (CA 35) Whereas Hegel claims that innocence is a transitional stage, Haufniensis insists that it “is a quality [or] a state that may very well endure.” In short, innocence is something (37). When reduced to a logical concept in Hegel’s sense, innocence as immediacy always already has mediation within it; it cannot but give way to negation and eventual reconstitution. For Haufniensis, the quality of innocence can only truly be cancelled by another qualitative, transcendent state. Only a guilty act can take innocence away. Haufniensis thereby distinguishes between the leap into sin and the state of innocence that may very well endure, emphasizing the qualitative difference between the two. He emphasizes each over and against Hegel’s desire to treat them as quantitative mediations within a logical system. Contrary to any comprehension/justification of sin, Hegelian or otherwise, Haufniensis will also distinguish what he can logically understand (say, the falling of a thrown ball), and what he can point to but never comprehend (the moral falling of an innocent individual).

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But how does Haufniensis reinsert this Socratic distinction between what he does and does not comprehend? Thus far we have only considered the origin and tenor of Haufniensis’s “theological” voice. Its tone is one of unequivocal moral censure. Bad, bad Hegel and his confusion of categories. What is to prevent the ironic reversal that we noted above, the possibility that a transcendent, qualitative leap might be rendered knowable, perhaps even quantifiable, not despite but because one unequivocally proclaims that the leap is absurd? The caricature of Kierkegaard in contemporary popular culture and some academic quarters falls victim to this very reversal. Pitting “leap” against all comprehension, paraphrasers of Kierkegaard merely contrast rationality with irrationality, objective knowing with subjective passion. At worst, this caricature of Kierkegaard reifies the “leap of the will” into something that resembles, in Iris Murdoch’s imagery, muscularlike volitional effort.

Enter Dissonance Although Haufniensis’s theological voice permeates nearly every page of the book, the text’s primary subject is the concept of anxiety. And it is anxiety that Haufniensis, in a second, “psychological” voice, introduces as the “intermediate term” necessary for understanding how the choice to sin interrupts the state of innocence (49). Although the leap into sin is sudden and unforeseeable, the fragility of the self and the anxiety that emerges provide a context out of which sin arises, seemingly assuaging the absoluteness of its eruption. Moreover, whereas the onset of sin is a qualitative change, anxiety can grow in quantitative terms. Anxiety increases as the “nothing” of sin’s possibility appears “more and more [as] a something” through inherited sinfulness (61). It should here be noted that “sinfulness” for Haufniensis indicates the increased possibility for new and greater sin, not a static state of actual sin. Moreover, the “possibility of sin” does not necessarily correspond to the probability of sinning but points instead to a volitional possibility that can be become more or less available according to the character of a moral agent.31 Through anxiety, then, the still innocent individual nonetheless “approaches” the leap into sin, and “innocence is [thereby] brought to its uttermost” (45). Haufniensis here seems to make sense of sin’s actuality through sin’s possibility by suggesting that one’s anxious self-relation commonly results in the choice to sin. It would seem that although Haufniensis’s theological voice condemns Hegel’s mediation and conceptuality, his psychological voice introduces a mediating concept between innocence and guilt—the concept of anxiety. Earlier I described Haufniensis’s view of the self in terms of a series of geological fault-lines or fragile points that make anxiety inevitable and sin possible. I am

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now suggesting that an additional rift fractures Haufniensis’s writing itself. (Or is it the same aperture—as if the very anxious ambivalence that Haufniensis means to watch over registers in the ways he writes of it?) On the theological side of this incongruity, Haufniensis repeatedly asserts that no quantitative determination prior to the leap into sin can lead up to or explain moral evil. Only confession of guilt can get at the nature of sin. On the psychological side, he nonetheless presents the phenomenon of anxiety as a way of situating or contextualizing this leap. The psychological analysis of anxiety seems to mitigate against the theological condemnation of the sinner by suggesting that “the fall into sin always takes place in weakness” and that the one “who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become” (61). On the one side of the fault-line is the sudden “leap”—on the other, a gradual “slide.”32 On the one side is the qualitative interruption of the will—on the other, human fragility, which quantitatively increases and finally succumbs. Throughout The Concept of Anxiety, Haufniensis seems to oscillate between stressing infinite individual guilt for one’s sin and recognizing anxiety as an assuaging explanation. The relationship between these perspectives is fundamentally and irreconcilably strained and contentious. Haufniensis’s text winds its course through mixed metaphors and shifting narrative voices rather than sticking to univocal discourse within strict methodological bounds. The narrator’s perspective is interdisciplinary, makeshift, and even disjointed.33 A certain degree of double talk by Haufniensis might even reveal his own anxiety, despite his attempt to be disturbed no more than Archimedes (23).34 Most interpreters overlook these dual and dueling perspectives, assuming that a methodological divide between psychology and dogmatics alleviates any tension between them. According to them, psychology only understands how sin is possible by examining the anxiety that ensues when freedom considers its limitless possibility. Dogmatics then proclaims that sin is actual and demands that each individual claim full responsibility for it. At some points, Haufniensis’s text seems to encourage such demarcations. The last paragraph of the work claims that “as soon as psychology has finished with anxiety, it is to be delivered to [at aflevere til] dogmatics” (162). This statement might suggest a happy complementarity between psychology and dogmatics. Yet the clause’s connotations are rather telling. The Danish at aflevere til can mean “to be delivered to,” as one would deliver a message, but it can also mean “to surrender” or “to be forced to hand over.” Such plurivocity makes the reader reconsider whether the relationship between psychology and dogmatics is not more strained and interesting than many assume. The final paragraphs of the Introduction describe how psychology “becomes deeply absorbed in the possibility of sin, [until] it is unwittingly in the service of another science [Christian dogmatics] that only waits for it to finish so that it can begin and assist psychology to

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the explanation” (23, my emphasis). Here it appears as though theology overtakes psychology, offering a kind of “assistance” that looks more like a hostile takeover.

Ambiguously Guilty It is in the first two chapters of The Concept of Anxiety that we best hear the mixed metaphors and dissonant voices of Haufniensis. There he gives his famous description of anxiety and the onset of sin through his analogy of a person standing over the chasm of his own self-consciousness, experiencing vertigo, and succumbing to dizziness. This re-narration of the Fall includes two sets of images that lie on either side of the psychological-theological fault-line: Anxiety may be compared to dizziness. He whose eye [Øie] happens to [kommer til at] look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit [vil sætte] the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold [griber] of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs [segner] in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment [Øieblikke] everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments is the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become. Anxiety is a feminine weakness in which freedom faints. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always takes place in weakness. But anxiety is of all things the most selfish. (61) Throughout this passage Haufniensis uses two contrasting figures—the eye and freedom—as metonyms for the falling individual. The “eye” portrays failure as an inability to withstand the anxious disequilibrium induced by the fathomless pit. Disequilibrium culminates in dizziness and fainting, neither of which suggests free choice of the will and both of which emphasize a quantitative increase in anxiety that gradually overtakes a person. Alternatively, “freedom” emphasizes the self ’s volition. Freedom “wants to posit the synthesis” and so “lays hold” of (gribe: to seize or clutch) the finite for security. Whereas the eye suggests the passivity and perhaps inevitability of failure, freedom suggests the responsibility of the one who sins. Though the narrative is coherent, the personifications within it are mixed and even competitive. Interestingly, the metonyms also exchange characteristics—without becoming unified. Haufniensis notes the eye’s responsibility for the vertigo (“it is

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just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down”), even though he first described the eye as accidentally having “happen[ed] to look down.” Freedom too both “leaps” into sin and faints in “feminine weakness.” It grasps after finitude but also “succumbs” to (segner: “drops,” “sinks into”) a dizziness that gets the best of it. Haufniensis here somewhat erratically conveys both the fragility and the fault of sinners; he both condemns the one who falls and assuages the sinner’s guilt. He depicts moral failure as a quantitative slide and a qualitative leap. Haufniensis even asserts that the purpose of such alternating depictions is to maximize ambiguity: “He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become” (61). Haufniensis captures this ambiguity in the “moment” in which the Fall occurs. Literally, “moment” (Øieblikke) means a “blink of the eye,” but in colloquial Danish it can also mean the eye’s sideway glance, a brief looking away. The first meaning suggests a failure no more intentional than blinking or needing to sneeze. The second connotes an intentional diversion, an unwillingness to be attentive.

Passing Over and Sticking to Guilt The dissonant voices within Haufniensis’s Fall narrative can be heard in other passages as well. For example, in sections 2 and 3 of Chapter 1 Haufniensis argues that the human choice to sin is without context or motivation, but then he twice denies that he is a Pelagian, meaning one who believes that individuals freely sin without influence from structures of society or history. In Section 2, Haufniensis speaks of sin presupposing itself, of “sin [coming] into the world by a sin” (32). When “the understanding” wants to explain this circular self-presupposition, it only gets further confused. Section 3 then shores up sin’s self-presupposition by refusing to understand innocence as having an inner teleology toward being annulled (once again, contra Hegel). Both sections emphasize that sin comes about through a freely chosen, qualitative leap that remains incommensurable with the preceding state. However, each section also concludes by appealing to a contrasting perspective. Haufniensis introduces these appeals as a defense against the “entirely misplaced” charge of Pelagianism (34, 37). Again, the pertinent aspect of Pelagianism is the idea that sinners are uninfluenced by society.35 Haufniensis’s first protestation against Pelagianism reads: It hardly needs to be said that this view is not guilty of Pelagianism, which permits every individual to play his little history in his own private theater unconcerned about the race. For the history of the race proceeds quietly on its course, and in this no individual begins at the same place as

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By admitting that the history of the race changes each generation’s starting point, Haufniensis affirms the relevance of historical and collective circumstances. But he does not clarify how the historical advance and membership in the human race qualifies an individual’s decision. In fact, immediately after admitting the influence of historical circumstances, he nonetheless asserts that “every individual begins anew.”36 Through contrastive rhetoric, he both acknowledges historical influence and asserts the power of the individual’s decision, but he refuses to show how these two claims connect. At best, Haufniensis’s theological assertions about the interruption of individual sin and psychological observations about the increasing possibility of sin because of history’s influence reciprocally delimit one another. They do not lead to reciprocal reformulations of the natures of sin and anxiety. In chapter 2, Haufniensis’s rhetorical voices are especially telling: the more an increase in anxiety seems to assuage the enigma of sin, the more vehemently Haufniensis insists that it cannot or should not do so. This portion of the text focuses on postlapsarian (Haufniensis says “derived”) individuals and contrasts their situation with Adam (or with the first sin of each individual). Haufniensis distinguishes postlapsarian individuals from Adam insofar as they become anxious not only because of limitless possibility, or the “possibility of possibility” (42), but also and frequently because of the possibility of sin. Postlapsarian individuals perceive sin in the world and have a presentiment that they too will become sinners. They reflect on this possibility and become anxious about it. Whereas their presentiment and ensuing anxiety do not cause moral failure, they do seem to make sin “easier” (60). Insofar as postlapsarian persons become anxious about falling, they de facto have already fallen.37 In light of this slide from fragility to fault, Haufniensis introduces what he twice calls the “maximum” scenario. In such a situation, sin perpetuates itself without the interruption of an individual’s volition. He describes a case scenario in which “a person seems to become guilty merely through anxiety about himself, something that could not have happened in the case of Adam” (53), or, again, where “an individual in anxiety about sin brings forth sin” (74–75). Such moral failure would seem like an easy transition: “The more reflective[ly] one dares to posit anxiety, the easier it may seem for anxiety to pass over [at slaae over] into guilt” (60). At maximum, sin itself would bring about more sin—without qualitative interruption. Haufniensis is fascinated with this worst-case scenario and returns to it under the figure of “the demonic.” However, at exactly those places where Haufniensis imagines sin to be a selfperpetuating state, he also most emphatically rejects this possibility. Indeed, he rejects it quite “dogmatically,” that is, without allowing the phenomenon of the slide into sin

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to influence his assertion. The voices of Haufniensis appear most dissonant here. Even as he presents the possibility of sin bringing about sin, he emphatically asserts on dogmatic grounds that this is simply impossible. For example, immediately after Haufniensis introduces the maximum case, he objects: “It is nevertheless true that every individual becomes guilty only through himself; yet what is quantitative in his relation to the race in this case reaches its maximum here and will have the power to confuse every view so long as one does not hold fast [fastholder] to the distinction specified earlier between the quantitative accumulation and the qualitative leap” (53–54). The reader must hold fast (fastholder) to the distinction between the quantitative and the qualitative precisely because the examination of the power of anxiety threatens to obscure the distinction. And now Haufniensis can only reassert this distinction despite how the power of anxiety threatens to undermine it. Reinforcing an individual’s responsibility for sin despite the race’s influence, Haufniensis asserts a second time: The more reflective[ly] one dares to posit anxiety, the easier it may seem for anxiety to pass over into guilt. But here it is important not to allow oneself to be deluded by determinants of approximation: a “more” cannot bring forth the leap, and no “easier” can in truth make the explanation easier. If this is not held fast [Holder man ikke fast pass dette], one runs the risk of suddenly meeting a phenomenon in which everything takes place so easily that the transition becomes a simple transition. . . . Therefore, although anxiety becomes more and more reflective, the guilt that breaks forth in anxiety by the qualitative leap retains the same accountability as that of Adam, and the anxiety the same ambiguity. (60) Notice again how Haufniensis implores the reader to hold fast (fastholder) to the distinction between qualitative sin and quantitative sinfulness, despite (or because of?) certain evidence that threatens to obscure it. Even as Haufniensis the psychologist describes “a phenomenon in which everything takes place so easily,” namely, where sinfulness seems to bring about sin, Haufniensis the dogmatist continuously interrupts his phenomenological observations by asserting that sinfulness cannot bring about sin, increased ease cannot assuage responsibility, no quantitative “more” can bring about qualitative difference. If, in the introductory chapter, Haufniensis presented psychology and dogmatics as somewhat mutually supportive, and if later this relationship appeared mutually delimiting, then here the relationship becomes antagonistic. The two no longer dialogue or even debate; they profess and vie for predominance. One Haufniensis is fascinated with the manner by which anxious reflections over sinfulness can issue in sin. The other Haufniensis adamantly “sticks to” (fastholde) the categorical distinction between fragility and fault.

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The Tenacity of Theodicy The previous section first examined how Haufniensis unambiguously critiques Hegel’s theodical felix culpa. It then traced a discrepancy within Haufniensis’s rhetorical voice that expressively stands out against the univocity with which Hegel finally comes to declare sin as good. I will soon say more about how Haufniensis’s vacillations remain essential for deconstructing theodical formulations of happy sin. But first we must address a difficult textual problem. Recall that Haufniensis used only one voice, his “theological” voice, to unequivocally denounce Hegel’s dialectical construal of innocence and sin. The splitting of Haufniensis’s voice first and foremost seems to call into question the clarity and force of his own original denunciation. Might we then say, in Hegelian fashion, that his original negation of theodicy is itself negated, returning us to a new and higher explanation of evil? Although no scholar would likely put it that way, the temptation to harmonize the author’s voices is nevertheless great. And that temptation, I think, follows from a nearly ubiquitous assumption about the purpose of this book and its principle subject, the “concept” of anxiety. Interpreters have largely assumed that the psychological voice’s exposé of anxiety helps explain the onset of sin. To explain sin, to set it in a wider salvation history that begins with human innocence and ends in God’s eschaton, mitigates against its monstrous absurdity. It is to participate nominally in the justification of God (“theodicy”), substantially in the justification of sin, and perhaps covertly in one’s selfjustification. The next section will explore the benefit of anxiety (in my language, the fortune of fragility),just as Haufniensis does in his final short chapter, “Anxiety as Saving through Faith.” First I will here examine two representative interpretations of The Concept of Anxiety in order to suggest the interrelation between the penchant for harmonizing polyphony and the tenacity of speculative theodicy. I focus on these particular explications because they are otherwise so convincing. Neither wants to mitigate against the surd of sin—indeed, both authors explicitly resist the reduction of moral sin to the progression of anxiety. If, however, I can show that they nonetheless “justify” sin by setting it in line with quantitative determinants, then we will be able to recognize just how tenacious is theodicy and how difficult it is to explicate The Concept of Anxiety without explaining sin (away).

Does Anxiety Explain Sin? Some years ago Gregory Beabout wrote an article entitled, “Does Anxiety Explain Hereditary Sin?”38 He was responding to Philip Quinn’s article, “Does Anxiety Explain Original Sin?” which was already considered a landmark in Kierkegaardian studies.39 Beabout draws upon Quinn’s analysis of the first chapter of The Concept

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of Anxiety, and particularly on his question of whether characterizing human freedom as anxious explains the original leap into sin. He extends that analysis by asking whether Haufniensis’s understanding of anxiety explains not only original sin but also the inheritance of sinful conditions. In the second chapter of The Concept of Anxiety, Haufniensis uses anxiety to characterize the “possibility of activity taking part in a distorted social structure that is already in place.”40 As we have seen, this possibility is “more developed” and “more concrete” than the possibilities available to Adam and so becomes the object of a more developed and reflexive anxiety. Beabout concludes that anxiety not only explains the leap from innocence to guilt but also explains each subsequent leap from anxiety-producing conditions, which make one predisposed to sin, to the sinful choices themselves, which are made only through an individual’s freedom. Beabout thus gives a positive answer to his question, “Does Anxiety Explain Hereditary Sin?” despite some initial reluctance. On the one hand, Beabout denies no less than Haufniensis that anxiety necessitates sin. He writes, “The sinfulness of previous generations can play a conditioning factor that influences the fall from innocence without compromising human freedom,” and, “Anxiety is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sin.”41 Beabout is particularly careful in distinguishing subsequent generations from Adam, noting that sin does not become more probable, but more possible, as in “more concrete” or “more developed.”42 He also commendably distinguishes between a “causal explanation” and a “transcendental explanation” for sin.43 Beabout thereby claims that the accumulated sinfulness of the race and the increasingly reflective capacities of individuals “explain” sin by providing the ground of sin’s possibility. On the other hand, Beabout’s language, at least when taken at face value, often coordinates quantitative determinants with qualitative freedom in ways that strict transcendental deduction would disallow. He suggests that socio-historical environments and an individual’s freedom together account for sin. He writes that “it is not the parents, the environment, or the social context alone that causes the innocent person to sin . . . . [Rather] the individual who is guilty is always, at least in part, responsible for his or her sinfulness.”44 Like Haufniensis, he begins this assertion by rejecting the idea that an increase in quantity can cause a qualitative leap. However, he ultimately suggests, here and throughout the article, that quantitative influences and qualitative freedom together account for sin, that together they add up to an adequate explanation for sin.45 Even his final sentence, which otherwise reiterates individual responsibility for sin, ends up dispersing responsibility for sin between the individual and his or her social context: “While quantitative changes may alter the setting and texture of the first sin of subsequent individuals, it is still the case that the qualitative change from innocence to guilt occurs in anxiety, and hence remains, at least in part, the responsibility of the individual.”46

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By treating quantitative determinations and qualitative freedom as sharing responsibility and causality, Beabout implies that they are commensurable. Thus his language here risks treating the difference between the quantitative and the qualitative in quantifiable terms. Each is allotted a “part” of sin’s explanation. Of course, were the qualitative leap to be fully coordinated with the quantitative in this way, it would lose its distinctive character. For Beabout, the individual is responsible “at least in part” because the environment cannot “wholly determine” the Fall into sin. If one follows Beabout’s interpretation of Haufniensis, the qualitative leap becomes a second factor that is added to socio-historical circumstances so that circumstances cannot be used to explain sin away. Philip Quinn equivocates when giving his own answer to the question of whether anxiety explains original sin, emphasizing that psychology offers only a “little help.”47 On the whole, a phenomenological account of anxiety cannot explain sin but only helps to distinguish the freedom to fall from utterly unmotivated liberum arbitrium. However, Quinn’s conception still indicates a direct and complementary relationship between psychological explanations and dogmatic assertions that I find precluded by the conflicting voices of Haufniensis. According to Quinn, Haufniensis’s presentation of anxiety as a “motivation” for sin seeks to explain how sin first arises. Quinn investigates how anxiety might explain sin without assuming that an adequate explanation must be cast in metaphysical terms. He claims that Haufniensis treads middle ground between understanding sin as a causal necessity (which Quinn attributes to Schleiermacher) and renouncing all motivational factors or ability to understand it (which Quinn attributes to Kant). According to this typology, Haufniensis joins Kant in resisting the idea that social and historical factors can explain the enigma of sin. He departs from Kant, however, by permitting psychological factors, including motivations and commitments, to influence a person’s Fall into sin. Like Schleiermacher, Haufniensis recognizes that the individual inherits conditions that are anterior to pure freedom and that occasion the leap into sin. Unlike Schleiermacher and back toward Kant, however, he claims that such influences can never impel one to sin. For Haufniensis the moral vulnerability preceding free choice provides a necessary but radically insufficient condition for explaining the onset of sin. Although Quinn concludes that “anxiety does not explain original sin,”48 he spends much time trying to locate the “little help” that psychology offers. He finds that psychological talk of anxiety prevents us from interpreting the leap into sin as beginning from a place of liberum arbitrium. In his words, “What anxiety is supposed to do for us is to preclude the possibility that the qualitative leap is made from a position of indifference, utterly unmotivated.”49 In a passage to which we will return, Haufniensis does reject the thought that sin could be chosen through freedom of indifference (CA 49–50). But Quinn and Haufniensis reject liberum arbitrium on different grounds. Quinn associates

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indifferent freedom with Kant’s description of an individual’s atemporal adoption of a morally evil maxim. In his earlier analysis of Kant and original sin, Quinn confesses his “intellectual discomfort” with such abstract freedom.50 Quinn nowhere explains this discomfort or indicates why it seems reasonable to have it. He only appeals to our presumed suspicion of Kant’s “unhistorical and individualistic” thought and our alleged uneasiness about uninfluenced, unmotivated freedom. Has not Quinn, when appealing to our discomfort at the thought of an unmotivated will, already decided that qualitative volition and quantitative determinations should finally correspond? He implies that to leave them utterly unrelated (or to understand them as qualitatively distinct) would offend human understanding. When Quinn uses feelings of discomfort as evidence against context-less volition, he allows reason in general or phenomenological psychology in particular to judge the validity of theological claims. Although he remains attentive to the ambiguous relationship between psychology and dogmatics and between quantitative determinants and the qualitative leap, Quinn—by insisting on the little service which psychology might offer theology—risks judging dogmatic propositions according to human experience and thus contextualizing the qualitative leap within quantitative progressions.

Explaining Nothing In the final analysis, Quinn and Beabout assume that psychological analyses of quantitative determinants overstep their bounds only when they fully explain the leap into sin. So long as they leave some room for human volition, they avoid “psychologizing” sin and mitigating individual responsibility. On my reading, Haufniensis’s assumption, as glimpsed within his conflicted rhetoric, differs significantly. For him, the divergence between psychology and theology is and must be inscribed in the language used to discuss it. Otherwise, the immeasurable gulf between innocence and sin looks more like a wide distance made progressively narrower when one attends to socio-historical factors. The bad irony traced by Placher returns: the transcendent leap is domesticated as soon as one speaks of it in unequivocal terms. Whereas Haufniensis’s mixed metaphors and two voices resist this domestication, it is difficult to imagine a commentary that would not speak with a voice that is more univocal and less conflicted than the rhetoric it considers.51 And yet Haufniensis is firm when he insists that anxiety “no more explains the qualitative leap than it can justify it ethically” (49). If psychology is allowed to help explain the leap into sin, it risks turning sin into something that it is not—ethically justifiable. Every time Haufniensis considers the help of psychology, he also insists on its necessary inadequacy: “The only science that can help a little is psychology, yet it admits that it explains nothing and also that it cannot and will not explain more” (51). For him, psychological explanations for sin risk the same ethical distortions

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as does Hegel’s speculative standpoint. However tenuous their conclusions, they are oriented toward the past and motivated by the desire to conceptually align the Fall into sin with the “normal” course of events. In short, they risk becoming theodicies. I am not claiming that Beabout and Quinn are involved in a covert philosophical enterprise despite their likely protests. Rather, I am claiming that the propensity to explain the onset of sin by setting it in context (that is, justifying it in the sense of alignment) finds its explicit and systematized form in the philosophical enterprise of theodicy, and that, among the various treatments of sin, many (if not most) function as theodicy. As Beabout’s and Quinn’s otherwise insightful work demonstrates, theodicy is tenacious. On the surface, both authors resist reducing sin to a qualitative transition and so critique any theodicy, such as that of Hegel, that explains sin away by making it the mediating transition par excellence. Still, each author also testifies to the difficulty of examining sin without minimizing its absurdity. And while I would not want to direct this charge to any one author, Haufniensis even suspects that scholarly explanations of sin conceal a hidden agenda. Some may stave off the need to confess sin by continuing to explain it. Justification as conceptual alignment often harbors moral self-defensiveness. None of this is to say that Haufniensis or any of Kierkegaard’s authorial personae make theological claims without appealing to socio-historical or psychological conditions. It is only to say that the delicate difference between fragile innocence and the rupture of sin can be pointed to and even asserted on theological grounds— but never understood. By harmonizing Haufniensis’s conflicted voices, interpreters have mistakenly assumed, first, that psychology can help dogmatic understandings of sin without threatening to undermine them, and second, that Christian theology should welcome such assistance without radical reappropriation. As an effect, Haufniensis’s interpretation of anxiety and sin appear as a watered-down version of Hegel’s theodicy. According to this view, sin is not necessary, but it is perhaps inevitable. Anxiety does not take us into sin, but it does lead us right up to it. Quantitative transitions cannot induce a qualitative leap, but they can help make sense of it. Haufniensis would be uncomfortable sitting so close to Hegel. He gives us reason to believe that anxiety and quantitative progression play a role that is clearly distinguished from leading to and so explaining sin. The final section of this chapter examines how The Concept of Anxiety proposes an alternative, but no less positive, function of our fragile and anxious condition.

The Fortune of Fragility (and vice versa) Haufniensis directly protests speculation about how innocence necessarily leads to sin and sin to redemptive knowledge. Through the progressive dissonance of his

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two voices, he also undercuts interpretive assumptions that back away from a speculative theodicy but still understand anxiety as approaching and therefore explaining sin. But although Haufniensis’s rhetorics foreclose the possibility of aligning fragility and fault, his cacophonous descriptions may still suggest a range of possible responses from the reader. If anxiety is not meant to explain sin, what is it meant to do? What good is it? To overcome our inclination to explain, we might begin with the end of Anxiety. Haufniensis entitles his final short chapter, “Anxiety as Saving through Faith” (155–62). In it, he personifies anxiety as the educator of humanity. To enter into anxiety without succumbing to it requires a double-movement of faith: to “sink absolutely” in anxiety and then “emerge from the depth of the abyss” and “receive everything back, as no one in actuality ever did” (156–58).52 The depths of freedom and possibility, which previously occasioned vertiginous anxiety, now promise to save all. When we read the book with the end in mind, we should notice those places where Haufniensis mentions the possibility that anxiety, “when rightly used . . . plays another role” (53). He periodically correlates anxiety with the possibility of religious faith, before naming anxiety as a condition of faith’s possibility in the final chapter. I will suggest here that the entire book might present anxiety-producing possibilities of sin as that through which (or against which) one builds religious faith. Recall that Quinn and Beabout suggest that qualitative leap and quantitative anxiety are commensurable, or quantitatively relatable, insofar as they together add up to sin’s explanation. The alternative is to imagine that qualitative freedom employs and controls quantitative anxiety according to its own purposes. Haufniensis sometimes suggests as much, noting that anxiety can be used by individuals to strengthen and shape their freedom. For example, having described the way the “nothing” that instigates anxiety becomes “more and more a something” (how indeterminate possibility becomes the possibility to sin), Haufniensis declares, “All of this is only for freedom, and it is only as the single individual himself posits sin by the qualitative leap” (61). The comment is cryptic, but Haufniensis implies that the purpose of anxiety becomes relevant only as one takes responsibility for positing sin. He thus also implies that the struggle between the observation of quantitative progression and the responsibility for the qualitative leap gets “resolved” only when the former submits to the latter. In other words, quantitative slide and qualitative leap continue to stand as qualitatively distinct. Haufniensis may be suggesting what Ricoeur will state no less cryptically in the next century—that “he who confesses that he is the author of evil discovers the reverse of that confession, namely, the nonposited in the positing of evil, the always already there of evil, the other of temptation .”53 I will return to Ricoeur shortly, but for now it is enough to note that the possibilities leading to sin become recognizable and relevant only by one’s taking full

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responsibility for sin. Anxiety becomes meaningful and purposeful only to the repentant sinner. Haufniensis explicitly suggests that the progression of anxiety is good insofar as it provides the resistance against which a person develops his or her freedom. The following passage (although nominally constituting another denial of Pelagianism) describes the slide into sin as that which is meant to be overcome: Christianity has never assented to giving each particular individual the privilege of starting from the beginning in an external sense. Each individual begins in an historical nexus, and the consequences of nature hold true. The difference, however, [between Christianity and paganism] consists in that Christianity teaches him to lift himself above this “more,” and it judges him who does not do so as being unwilling. (73) Occasions to sin are here beneficial insofar as they might be surmounted. We might infer that all the quantitative progressions that Haufniensis considers— the accumulation of sinfulness in the race, the “nothing” of possibility becoming more and more of a “something,” the advancing anxiety which seems to lead right up to sin—might provide that which Christians should actively resist. Notice that Haufniensis does not merely suggest that increasing anxiety cannot cause sin. He more boldly suggests that anxiety can help the earnest develop the virtue of faith. Fragility, anxiety, and the possibility of sin function for Haufniensis somewhat like the Fall functions for Hegel; they initiate a transformation from ignorant and untested “innocence” to spirited and intentional faith. Thus, in place of Hegel’s felix culpa, Haufniensis begins to develop a conception of felix fragilitas. The human fragility that denotes finite freedom and elicits subjective anxiety is “necessary” or even “happy”—at least insofar as the individual actively resists it. Although I find this interpretive possibility suggestive and will develop it more fully, we should also recall Haufniensis’s discomfort with sitting so close to Hegel. We should not obscure their vastly different theological temperaments and rhetorics by suggesting that fragility and Fall are functionally equivalent. If Haufniensis recognizes the positive function of anxiety, he does so without exhibiting a “false mood”—the self-justification risked by theodicy—to which Hegel and so many of our interpretations are prone.

Anxious Fragility or Spiritless Evasions For Haufniensis, the proper mood for dealing with sin is “courageous resistance,” not the wrong mood of “antipathetic curiosity” (15). Given this fact, we might

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wonder whether Haufniensis rejects liberum arbitrium not because he finds it offensive to reason (as Quinn does), but because he suspects that people who hypothesize about unmotivated volition do so to obfuscate their motivations and self-justifications. The passage in which Haufniensis critiques freedom of indifference suggests exactly this. Although he begins by calling such freedom a “nuisance for thought,” he ends by connecting it to the avoidance of earnest self-examination: If sin has come into the world by necessity (which is a contradiction), there can be no anxiety. Nor can there be any anxiety if sin came into the world by an act of an abstract liberum arbitrium (which no more existed in the world in the beginning than in a late period, because it is a nuisance for thought). To want to give a logical explanation of the coming of sin into the world is a stupidity that can occur only to people who are comically worried about finding an explanation. (49–50) By rejecting claims that sin entered the world through indifferent freedom, Haufniensis certainly refuses to reduce freedom to the muscular-like effort of pure volition.54 But he also traces belief in freedom of indifference to a worried attempt to find logical explanations for sin. In an earlier draft, Kierkegaard further characterized those individuals who anxiously justify themselves under the shroud of theodicy. They who are “comically worried about finding an explanation” for sin are “indifferent to the fact that the explanation is so inhuman that no person who has lived or who wishes to live can understand it, because it also proposes to explain him. If the explanation of Adam and his fall does not concern me as a fabula, quae de me narratur [a story that speaks to me], one might as well forget both Adam and the explanation” (Pap. V B 53:13; CA 186). Explanations of sin propagated from third-person, seemingly unconcerned points of view may not only fail to capture the reason for sin; they might also ensnare the explainer, exposing his or her motivation to avoid personal responsibility and confession. Only a story that first and foremost explains me can help me explain sin. It is therefore in his ridicule of speculative theodicy—and his accompanying suspicions as to the benefit of “indifferent” freedom—that Haufniensis commends anxious fragility in a way that differs more starkly from Hegel’s justification of moral evil. In fact, Haufniensis’s fortunate fragility actually turns Hegel’s fortunate Fall inside-out by casting into anxiety the security that accompanies speculative knowing. Haufniensis’s critique essentially reduces speculative theodicy to a sophisticated evasion of spiritual maturity. Lack of anxiety may in fact signal no more and no less than a lack of spirit. Note that such a critique comprises not only an instance of Haufniensis’s skepticism, as if his primary concern were whether Hegel’s

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systemizations were true to Christian moral theology. Rather, it more fully and complexly entails his suspicion55 that lack of anxiety conceals bad faith—namely, the bad faith of concealing one’s unwillingness to confront the possibilities of sin that accompany freedom and responsibility under the banner of salvation—just as explanations for sin function to mask self-seeking justifications. While Haufniensis probably won’t join the ranks of Nietzsche, Marx or Freud as a “master of suspicion” (although Anti-Climacus might, as we will later see), he does suspect, and rather scrupulously, that theodicy as broadly construed harbors as its operative value wider cultural evasions of the task of becoming spirit. Unsurprisingly, then, Haufniensis focuses his critique of theodicy not only on Hegel’s system but also on the general “spiritlessness” of the modern age at large. According to Haufniensis, all “spiritless” (Aandløshed) individuals—or rather, masses of people who resist becoming individuals—are “neither guilty nor not guilty” (94). As is written in The Sickness unto Death, their moods and motivations are “too spiritless” to be called sinful (SUD 101), so it is difficult to know whether they are better or worse off than the self-conscious sinner. Kierkegaard refers to them in different ways at different times. They are “the crowd,” “Christendom,” “Speculation,” “the present age,” “philistines,” or, most commonly, “the spiritless.”56 Haufniensis places in this category those who try to examine sin objectively in order to divert attention from their guilt and evade the task of resisting sin. Vanessa Rumble notes how his language about the spiritless becomes “singularly direct”57 as he mocks the profound comedy of spiritlessness—its mindless idolatry, senseless chatter, and superficial bliss. At first glance, the spiritless seem “innocent” because they will not commit to the task of becoming spirit and so skirt the categories of responsibility and guilt. However, on closer inspection, they are guilty of masquerading as innocent and fantasizing about a return to Eden. Through self-deception and the avoidance of anxiety, these Christian pagans of Christendom “never [arrive] at sin in the deepest sense” (93). Still, as Haufniensis is quick to add, “this is precisely sin” (93). The predominant characteristic of spiritlessness is its lack of manifest anxiety: “In spiritlessness there is no anxiety, because it is too happy, too content, and too spiritless for that” (95). Those who lack spirit also lack anxiety and the possibility to sin. In light of this particular diagnosis, Haufniensis’s prescribed treatment becomes clear: a heavy dose of anxiety to revive the comatose spirit. Rumble describes the treatment in telling terms: “Spiritlessness, having lost its sense of the task which is posed to human existence by freedom, must be reinitiated into anxiety, the first signal of the awakening of freedom and consciousness of possibility. The usefulness of Haufniensis’s portrayal of anxiety lies in its power not only to describe but also to produce anxiety. The implicit demand of The Concept of Anxiety to its readers is to become anxious.”58 Spiritless persons must become anxious, capable of sin for

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perhaps the first time. As with any good hermeneutic of suspicion, Haufniensis’s text itself might go beyond describing anxiety and actually induce it. The brief but pivotal attention that Haufniensis pays toward the spiritless helps manifest the benefit of anxiety. The spiritless are doubly removed from the Christian cure and so must (1) become capable of sinning before (2) learning to trust the Physician’s guidance. Like Hegel, then, Haufniensis urges a break with “innocence.” Contra Hegel, this innocence is not the innocence that precedes moral evil but the innocence that is presumed as a way of evading responsible commitment and deceiving oneself about the evasion. In fact, it is exactly the disengaged objectivity of speculation (Hegelian or otherwise), together with the collusion of religion and culture, that sustains the self-delusions of the spiritless. In attempting to fissure this “innocence”—to wound it from behind—Haufniensis turns Hegel’s felix culpa upon itself. Those self-secure individuals who have justified their sin and deceived themselves find their securitas called into question. Anxiety and the possibility of sin become good, fortunate, or even “happy”: O felix fragilitas.

Cacophonous Confessions I have suggested that, in place of the theodical “idea” of fortunate Fall, Haufniensis develops anxious vulnerability and calls it fortunate, at least in comparison with spiritlessness. I now want to emphasize that this “theme” of fortunate fragility remains inextricable from the dissonant voices that express it. Throughout this chapter we have deconstructed the stability that interpreters have imposed on Kierkegaard’s text. These interpreters assume that the first voice is alone theological and that any mitigating explanations must be commensurate with it. Our rhetorical reading, by contrast, has traced enduring polyphony, even to the point where the text ceases to mean any one thing about sin. The Concept of Anxiety calls into question our desire to figure out the text, provoking our anxiety where we would have things settled. This critical function of Haufniensis’s book carries theological importance in and of itself. We notice a similar dissonance in the rich narrative of Genesis 2–3, so long as we distinguish it from the reified doctrine of original sin. Sin remains that which radically fissures a harmonious creation, of course. But once we confess that point, we also come to recognize the fractures or fault-lines that are always already in place and which seem to bring about sin. Unlike the doctrine of original sin, the Genesis narrative preserves an antinomy that cannot be sorted out conceptually. As was mentioned in the Introduction, Adam’s sin is occasioned by Eve; hers is occasioned by the talking snake; the snake’s is occasioned by any number of factors, many of which are accounted for in subsequent theological texts that serve as Genesis’s “prequel.” (We can easily understand why writers such as Augustine,

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Milton, and Byron were compelled to go behind the story to continue the impossible pursuit of the receding origin of evil.) My point is that confession of sin inevitably involves showing how that sin came about; but the showing risks explaining and thus exonerating the sin, which leads to the renewed importance of confession, and so on ad infinitum. At its fullest narrative stretch, the Fall is both a tragedy and a choice, always and necessarily. Although the slide and the leap cannot be held together conceptually, as Haufniensis readily admits, they do come together in the performance of the confessional narrative, whether personal, biblical, or in Haufniensis’s retelling. Ricoeur makes a similar point when he writes of the “resurgence of the tragic” once the sinner takes full responsibility for sin. Paradoxically, confessing one’s responsibility for the radical rupture issues in the awareness of one’s easy slide into sin.59 Paul de Man takes the paradox one step further. In his deconstruction of Rousseau’s Confessions, he traces a subversive logic and textual predicament that infects the confessional narrative.60 The need to offer a coherent account of sin means that the aesthetics of the tale threaten to become more important than the truthfulness of the confession. In explaining one’s confession, the confessor necessarily risks explaining it away. The erasure that de Man recognizes as infecting Rousseau’s text—against Rousseau’s own intentions—affects Haufniensis’s book as well, although Haufniensis himself perhaps intends so. At any rate, the textual subversion does not necessarily undercut the rhetorical performance of Haufniensis’s text. In fact, it might—for us, if not for Haufniensis and/or for Kierkegaard— comprise the primary performance itself. If we play this line of thinking out, we cease to understand “the Fall” as a simple univocal concept or stable theological doctrine. Instead, it becomes shorthand for an irreducible tension—an original rhetorical fault between the confession of sin and the awareness of tragedy—that shows up at the level of story but is occluded by conceptual analysis. The fractured voice Haufniensis uses to speak of sin thus exhibits an enduring rift between ideal innocence and the sin in which we find ourselves. As sinners, we cannot and should not speak univocally of sin. Only a shifting voice tells the truth about ourselves. When we attend to the plurivocity of Haufniensis’s rhetoric, which echoes the aporias of Genesis 3—sin becomes less something to be comprehended and more an overly determinate trope that calls into question our presumed selfunderstanding. What we “mean” by confession changes as well. Confessional speech can be distinguished from the equivocal hedging that tries to pass for apology in the public square—admissions of guilt that too quickly become selfexonerations. (Those of Bill Clinton are frequently cited.) Confession can also be distinguished from the kind of fully controlled, univocal language that, when spoken with an adequate intensity of sincerity, guarantees the certainty of everything

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that follows. (That of Tiger Woods comes to mind, as well as some pronouncements of born-again conversions.) In light of these distinctions, confession itself provides a paramount example of analogical speech, irreducible to univocity and equivocalness. Confession tells the truth about sin. But part of the truth that it tells is its own inability to tell the truth. Like all analogous language, confession tells the truth without grasping how it is true; it repeatedly tells—in both what it says and how it says it—a fabula, quae de me narratur, a story that understands me more than I it.

Wishing for Innocence, Watching for Fallibility On the basis of its title, we might expect that Haufniensis’s concluding chapter, “Anxiety as Saving through Faith,” would culminate with the theological and existential fortune of fragility. In many ways it does. At the same time, however, it reverts back to less ironic and less interesting—and less Christian—ideas about human fragility and the powers needed to endure it. Although Haufniensis focuses directly on the fortune of fragility, he also reveals the fragility of this fortune, perhaps despite himself. Haufniensis, at the end of his book, returns to his famous analogy of vertigo. Surprisingly, here the dizziness of limitless possibility promises to rescue those who are falling rather than occasion their original Fall. He writes: In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. But he who sank in possibility—his eye became dizzy, his eye became confused, so he could not grasp the measuring stick that Tom, Dick, and Harry hold out as a saving straw to one sinking; his ear was closed so he could not hear what the market price of men was in his own day, did not hear that he was just as good as the majority. He sank absolutely, but then in turn he emerged from the depth of the abyss lighter than all the troublesome and terrible things in life. (158) Dizziness—along with possibility and anxiety—is now considered fortunate. Immediately after this passage, Haufniensis admits that those who sink in possibility risk “the danger of a fall, namely suicide” (158–9). Yet this aside remains only an aside; it barely diminishes the profit of being “educated” by anxiety (159). Although the journey into anxiety is dangerous, Haufniensis assures that its payoff is immeasurable: “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate” (155). Haufniensis here noticeably disconnects Adam’s original anxiety from the anxious possibility of sin experienced by everyone else. Recall that Haufniensis earlier traced the progression from Adam’s objectless anxiety to the more determinate anxiety over the possibility of sin that is experienced by “derived” individuals. We

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would expect the final chapter to focus on the latter form of anxiety, since it is this anxiety that is available to us as readers. Yet in the final chapter, the sole fact that “in possibility all things are equally possible” (156) awakens the spiritless from their narrow bliss. Imagery of absolutely sinking into an indeterminate abyss of formal possibility predominates. These images recall the pure possibilities available to Adam but not the anxious possibilities of subsequent persons, for whom possibility presents itself as the determinate possibility to partake in sin. By focusing on Adam’s condition, Haufniensis can only advise that we remain in anxiety, refuse to secure ourselves, and trust that we will emerge victorious. If he had turned his attention back to our actual condition, he would have continued his earlier admonition to fight through the possibility of sin by “overcoming” anxiety. In short, Haufniensis teaches us to wait upon possibilities when we might first need to turn and combat them. At the very least, we should notice that Haufniensis’s all-out celebration of anxiety at the book’s close noticeably differs in tone and breadth from his other, more circumspect and self-suspicious descriptions. Haufniensis even seems to fantasize about an innocent fragility that one might access apart from the confession of failure. To the extent that he does celebrate innocent anxiety, Haufniensis surrenders his suspicion and goes against the very words that were quoted in this chapter’s epigraph. Recall that he writes, “Innocence is not a perfection that one should wish to regain, for as soon as one wishes for it, it is lost, and then it is a new guilt to waste one’s time on wishes” (37). Although he goes on to claim that moral innocence is also not an imperfection that should be left behind (contra Hegel, as well as the Romantics), he begins with the claim that innocence is not a perfection that one should long to recover. Wishing for it too easily leads to the spiritless evasions and ideologies that Haufniensis otherwise critiques. The final chapter, by contrast, suggests that our only way forward to redemption would be to return to a fragility that is not already fallen. If that is the case, then Haufniensis would leave us quite hopeless. The final chapter of Anxiety does seem like wishful thinking. When he not only makes the point that anxious fragility is something that might have endured, but also suggests that it might save us (so long as we can endure it), Haufniensis risks confusing general possibilities that once were or always are with the particular possibilities that are now available to the sinner. This limitation might be the product of his detached standpoint. He is, after all, an observational psychologist who is interested in pure case scenarios rather than in the habituated dispositions of those already East of Eden. Fragility—the God-given possibility of sin—is certainly fortunate, both in and of itself and in comparison to the false innocence of the spiritless. But fragility will have to be reconfigured once psychology is “delivered to dogmatics” (CA 162).

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And so, if sin’s possibility is to be good in all its forms, we have to examine not just fragility, human weakness as originally created, but also fallibility—that weakness made strong by humanity’s sin. Everyone after Adam deals with more than the passive aptitude that makes sin possible; they also deal with an active capacity that makes sin so commanding. Part of that “dealing,” moreover, must entail a continuation—or even an intensification—of the self-suspecting hermeneutic that Haufniensis first establishes. The sinner cannot return to innocence—but she might press on toward redemption. This study proceeds to The Sickness unto Death in an effort to examine how.

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3 Felix Fallibilitas in The Sickness unto Death

The religious life is sick or has expired, because, alas, precisely what worldliness regards as health is, Christianly, sickness, just as, inversely, Christian health is regarded by worldliness as sickness. —Søren Kierkegaard, The Moment Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human. —Walker Percy, The Moviegoer Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits a sin is a slave to sin. —John 8:34 This chapter turns attention from Haufniensis’s examination of anxiety and the anthropological structures that occasion sin to the way pseudonymous author Anti-Climacus describes sin’s possibility as an imposing power and implores his reader to turn and fight it. It argues that, in The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus treats the power of sin’s possibility positively; only by facing and overcoming ongoing possibilities for sin can a person craft authentic faith. Writing as a spiritual physician, Anti-Climacus understands the risk of sin and the promise of healing to be more entangled than Haufniensis does from his detached perspective. In fact, sickness and cure seem so intertwined that Anti-Climacus seems

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to suggest that people should dispose themselves to sin in the effort to become fully human. In presenting fallibility as beneficial, Anti-Climacus thereby plays with a notion similar to the Romantic poets who see creative growth in suffering and transgression. However, by tracing subtle rhetorical shifts throughout The Sickness unto Death, I ultimately argue that what seems like Anti-Climacus’s flirtation with Romantic sensibilities actually dismantles a central Romantic conviction, namely, that we should resign ourselves to suffering in the effort to grow up. In tracing the goodness of human fallibility through and against Romanticism’s vision of authentic humanity, I claim that only with a more paradoxical doublemovement of faith—the capacity to resign our resignation—do we come to know the necessity of fallibility and begin to cultivate the dispositions of Christian virtue.

Anti-Climacus and the Sicko Self In Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation, Barbara Brown Taylor laments the degree to which Christians have forgotten how to speak about sin. Drawing on Karl Menninger’s Whatever Became of Sin? she compares Christianity’s distinctive rhetoric—and the particular passions that it produces—to the dominant cultural discourses flanking it on either side. On the one side, conservative Christians often adopt the legal language of a courtroom, conceiving sin in terms of prohibited acts and punishments proportionally meted out to individual transgressors. On the other, liberal Christians are more likely to speak of the human condition using the medical language of sickness and cure, of physicians who diagnosis and treat the diseases of their patients. However, according to Taylor neither of the dominant discourses adequately translates the ways that Christians traditionally spoke of sin. At full stretch, Christian hamartiology would paradoxically combine elements from both the legal and medical models while remaining reducible to neither.1 In the proper hamartiological light, sin is both a condition that afflicts us and an act that we are responsible for choosing. Our condition requires a divine physician who is also a judge and forgiveness that is therapeutic as well as forensic. This mishmash of Christianity’s legal and medical models dates back to Augustine’s paradoxical description of human failure. The biography is well known; Augustine first distances himself from his early, Manichean understanding of evil and suffering as a natural part of existence and emphasizes instead the original goodness of creation and humanity’s culpability for making it otherwise. Toward the end of his career, in light of Pelagians’ emphasis on human responsibility and our concomitant ability not to sin, Augustine speaks of sin as a condition into which we are born, a disease that infects us long before we choose it.2 Augustine articulates both

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positions at once when he says that each person is freely bound to sin—necessarily. A person is responsible for choosing the disease from which he or she suffers. To accept that we are simultaneously responsible for our sin and powerless to avoid it is no small venture, testified perhaps by the struggle of addicts and alcoholics who take full responsibility for a condition they cannot change. The previous chapter traced the lines that Haufniensis draws between human fragility and the resulting fault, lines that are perhaps both more pronounced and less perceptible to the Watchman’s myopic gaze than the author would have us believe. As we followed his effort to set sin straight, we repeatedly approached a shifting lacuna between his resolute indictment of Adam’s sin and his allowance that sin is born out of extenuating circumstances. It was enough to make us dizzy. However, when we place Haufniensis in the Augustinian tradition that Taylor recounts, we can take his equivocations to be necessary, and thus maybe better endure them. For if to sin is to be sin-sick—that is, to choose a condition that always already infects the chooser—then we must speak about sin out of both sides of our mouths, as prosecutors condemning human transgression and as advocates lobbying for treatment.

Enter Anti-Climacus Five years after Haufniensis authors The Concept of Anxiety, another ghost writer stands at Kierkegaard’s desk and produces two works, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening (1849) and Practice in Christianity (1850). The pseudonym is Anti-Climacus, a name that Kierkegaard adds fairly close to publication. Anti-Climacus is intended as a foil to the author Johannes Climacus (“John the Climber”), whose Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript unscientifically concluded Kierkegaard’s “first authorship.” One of Kierkegaard’s characterizations of the relationship between Climacus and Anti-Climacus is well-worn, together with the way he positions himself between them: Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus have several things in common, but the difference is that whereas Johannes Climacus places himself so low that he even says that he himself is not a Christian, one seems to be able to detect in Anti-Climacus that he considers himself to be a Christian on an extraordinarily high level . . . . I would place myself higher than Johannes Climacus, lower than Anti-Climacus. (JP 6:6433) In alleging that he lies between the two viewpoints, Kierkegaard suggests that he is less of a humorist and ironic outsider to Christianity than Johannes, yet not so resolutely religious that he can sign his own name to strenuous Christian ideals.

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Anti-Climacus, as an “extraordinarily high Christian” (JP 6:6431, 6433), seems able to speak directly about Christian ideals in all their purity, while Climacus can only satirize them and Kierkegaard can only confess his personal distance. Howard and Edna Hong solidified the typology when they introduced their 1980 English translation of Sickness. They assure Anti-Climacus’s reader that the prefix “Anti-” does not mean “against” but “denotes a relation of rank, as in ‘before me’ in the First Commandment.”3 There are no other pseudonyms before Anti-Climacus; he appears as perfect and as exacting as the God of Moses. Theologically, the book promises to be anything but anticlimactic. All of this might reflect Kierkegaard’s last and predominant interpretation of Anti-Climacus and might lead to coherent understandings of the second authorship that culminates in Kierkegaard’s attack against the established church of Denmark. However, this interpretation also covers certain ambiguities that characterize the emergence and writings of Anti-Climacus. Kierkegaard initially invented Anti-Climacus as a “recklessly ironical and humorous” persona (JP 6:6142), one who would outdo Johannes in the abandon of his wit. As such, he would be against Climacus, back toward the aesthetic. Did Kierkegaard need to rein the recklessness in, to control the irony, in order that Anti-Climacus could become theologian par excellence? Or does irony—the concealment of seriousness in jest and jest in seriousness (CI 248)—indelibly mark the venture of an author who authors a more trustworthy author in order to say all that would otherwise go unsaid? Rather than holding that Christian orthodoxy must always rise above paradoxes and ironic reversals, perhaps we might allow it to assume them—that is, to take them up into its own way of speaking. The present exploration of the “para/orthodoxical” language of fortunate fallibility makes this gamble.4 Clearly, rank alone should not exhaust our characterization of Kierkegaard’s new pseudonym. The hypostasized eminence of “Anti” does not comprise a transparent placeholder for any and every lofty ideal, sufficient in explaining itself. Because, Robert Perkins reminds us, any relation of rank presupposes difference,5 grading the two Climacus’s inherently suggests that they differ from and defer to one another, that the higher remains dependent on the lower for its status. To characterize Anti-Climacus accurately, we must trace the ways that he differs from and defers to other authorial personae, primarily but not exclusively to Johannes Climacus. We can start by giving the shared name “Climacus” more attention. John the Climber is said to think conceptually and deductively. He begins with a single thought and then “climb[s] step by step to a higher one, because to him coherent thinking [is] a scala paradisi [ladder of paradise]” (JC 118–119). In light of this characterization, would Anti-Climacus (John the Descender?) climb by going down, ironically imagining God’s perfection through the suffering of God’s son and those who follow him? Anti-Climacus’s

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“reckless irony” might very well reflect the imprudent kenosis of Christ and the existential unsettlement that is undergone by any true disciple. Marking such reversals, the chiastic χ would simultaneously mark the spot of Christian treasures and—like crossbones on a bottle of poison—warn the reader away from their power. This interpretive possibility gets the most play in Practice in Christianity. By contrast, The Sickness unto Death wins its irony largely by destabilizing what it means to be sick and what it means to be well. The present chapter will attend to such destabilizations and to the paradoxical idea of fortunate fallibility that emerges through them. The book’s irony is also visible in the way that the “Christian psychological exposition” of the hyper-Christian Anti-Climacus receives and overturns the more dispassionate psychology of Vigilius Haufniensis. In the previous chapter we examined how the Watchman speaks alternately as prosecutor and defense. Throughout all of these oscillations, however, he remains reliably oriented to dogmatics, which he always pairs with the guilty leap and never with anxious fallibility. (In this sense, Haufniensis is, at bottom, a moralist; as we have seen, he repeatedly subordinates his own psychological findings in order to “hold fast” to the moral condemnation of original sin—never the reverse.) When Haufniensis hands the issue of sin over to a proper theologian, does he expect him also to denounce sin, perhaps less ambiguously, or with less concession to the tragic slide? Surprisingly, Anti-Climacus receives the findings about sin entirely differently— not primarily as a moral issue demanding censure (although that too), but as a chronic sickness that will prove terminal if a physician does not intervene. AntiClimacus begins his preface with what is, if not judgment on Haufniensis himself, at least a critique of the objective standpoint he assumes: From the Christian point of view, everything, indeed everything, ought to serve for upbuilding. The kind of scholarliness and scienticity that ultimately does not build up is precisely thereby unchristian. Everything essentially Christian must have in its presentation a resemblance to the way a physician speaks at the sickbed; even if only medical experts understand it, it must never be forgotten that the situation is the bedside of a sick person. (SUD 5) Anti-Climacus goes on to connect the physician’s intimate familiarity with his patients’ ailments to “the ethical aspect of Christianity” (5). This correlation prevents us from interpreting the perspectival shift from Haufniensis the Legalist to Anti-Climacus the Physician as constituting a thematic shift from the act of sin to the condition of suffering. Rather, Anti-Climacus’s self-designation as a physician and his overarching medicinal metaphor portray sin as the sickness of despair and

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the sickness of despair as sin. This hyper-Christian will go at sin differently, not more easily—with scalpels rather than subpoenas.

Sin-Sick Selves We therefore need to examine the persona of Anti-Climacus as one who attends to the sick and to bear in mind his primary metaphor for human sin, the dis-ease of despair. It is through this authorial perspective and rhetoric that Kierkegaard begins to trouble everyday, all-too-modern understandings of sin and salvation. We begin by addressing some contemporary assumptions vis-à-vis those of Kierkegaard’s day. Anti-Climacus’s double-edged contention that sin is sickness and sickness is sin likely cuts into twenty-first–century readers more deeply than to those of Golden Age Denmark. Then and there, it was more conventional to think of sin within biological metaphors, given the preponderance of dogmatic Lutheranism to link Adam and the human race causally and deterministically through biological transmission.6 As we have seen, Haufniensis traces sin to an individual’s spirit rather than to soma, psyche, or to the disproportion between them, thereby rubbing up against what was considered orthodox.7 Perhaps Kierkegaard’s contemporaries would have received Anti-Climacus’s adoption of illness as a controlling metaphor for sin as a step back in the right direction. The taxing part would be how The Sickness unto Death continues to develop Haufniensis’s triadic anthropology, in many ways holding the sin-sick increasingly accountable for their ailments. Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus share an understanding of sinfulness not as an original disharmony that we biologically inherit, but as a tendency to secure ourselves against the vicissitudes of fragility, a temptation we might act upon in a number of ways.8 Finally, although Kierkegaard’s contemporaries may not have been astonished to see sin depicted as sickness, they would be surprised to see their own faces (not only the cultured elite, but also the bourgeoisie) in Anti-Climacus’s description of the sickness unto death—somewhat like Dante’s contemporaries found themselves written into the layers of hell and purgatory. For readers today, the author’s scalpel cuts more deeply. Despite attempts by theologians such as Barbara Brown Taylor to position the rhetoric of sin equidistant between the language of lawyers and physicians, a survey of recent hamartiologies shows we are most nervous about overlap with medical language. Psychiatrist Karl Menninger is an explicit example. He defines sin as either “transgression of the law of God; disobedience of the divine will; [or] moral failure,” seemingly equating the theological and moral definitions.9 Menninger claims that this moral/legal/ theistic understanding of sin is precisely what modern medicine threatens to eclipse. His analysis all but equates sin with individual transgressions of a moral law, to which science and medicine pose the primary cultural-linguistic threats.

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Mary Louise Bringle similarly questions whether despair should be treated as a sickness or a sin, especially in light of the rise of secular therapy and pharmacology.10 She concludes that both designations are appropriate, drawing deeply from Gregory, Aquinas, psychodynamic theory, and Kierkegaard. However, although her answer is complex and compelling, her original question is less so. When we compare Bringle’s question—whether despair is a sickness or a sin—to Taylor’s typology, it is clear that “sin” for Bringle takes on a moral/legal signification, with an emphasis on individual responsibility, against which she offsets the amoral, untheological rhetoric of “sickness.”11 Christian perceptions that the medical model poses a threat to human freedom and responsibility becomes particularly pronounced when one faces psychological and pathological explanations for evil. Many of us have become familiar with cover stories in both evangelical and mainline religious publications that pit Christian salvation against pharmacological intervention. These echo a widespread concern to avoid effacing the difference between psychological and spiritual disorders and to safeguard a place for the spirit against the expansive jurisdiction of the brain’s synapses and receptors.12 If these academic and journalistic trends are indicative of cultural ones, and I think they are, then the temperament of North America and Western Europe is almost exclusively Pelagian or semi-Pelagian. Although it sometimes pays lip service to the sinful “condition” of humanity—a condition that infects us, always already distorting the “freedom” with which we respond to it—the modern West prefers to think of sin as misguided action that is chosen with indeterminate freedom.13 Getting tough on sin becomes relatively straightforward, comparable to getting tough on crime or drugs or terrorists; a relatively innocent society roots out individual evil-doers and punishes them for their “sins.” Missing is the acknowledgement—the confession—of the systemic distortion of society that affects our perception of what is real and into which each of us is socialized. Also missing is the idea that salvation from sin, when understood at full stretch, entails radical healing, re-creation, deep therapy. To return to Anti-Climacus, we would be wrong to interpret him qua spiritual physician as soft on sin. Anti-Climacus’s analyses, like those of Augustine, contend that humanity is bound to sin by their own volition—even if that volition cannot be reduced to an individual’s “personal” choice. Furthermore, his course of treatment, like that of Augustine, is the consciousness of sin, a consciousness that is painful and that dangerously makes intensified sin increasingly possible. AntiClimacus’s tone is one of earnestness, often encompassing stringency and sometimes bordering on obduracy. In a number of ways he calls his readers sickos—that is, so morbidly deranged, unbalanced, or perverted that they do not see anything wrong with themselves. Of course, we are used to hearing (and wielding) such

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language as a means of diminishment and control—as a quick way not to deal with the inextricability of volition and compulsion, of morality and pathology, in the outcasted other. By contrast, Anti-Climacus depicts all of humanity as both sickly guilty and reproachfully ill. Not to excise the other but to cut each of us off from our privileged ways of comprehension and control—such is the result of the way this physician speaks at the sickbed.

Anti-Climacus’s Tangled Text If this account of Anti-Climacus’ diagnosis is accurate, then his metaphors of sickness and cure do not amount to an allegory in the normal sense of the term. As I hold throughout this chapter, Anti-Climacus’s medical references, as well as his allusions to human will power and Christian heroism that uneasily crisscross them, do not comprise tropes of closure that help secure the meaning of sin by way of an otherwise foreign term. Rather, they comprise tropes of nonclosure—opaque linguistic materials that frustrate the reader’s attempt to receive a single prepackaged meaning. Entailing something closer to irony than to allegory, “the sickness unto death” as language for sin takes from the reader at least as much as it gives.14 It confronts the reader with something that is conceptually unmanageable, and that on three levels: First, as we have begun to note, the text refuses to untangle sin as a diachronic and universal epidemic from sin as an instantaneous, personal act. Anti-Climacus compares the continuance of sin to the movement of a train; it makes just as much sense to say that the momentum of the train produces the next puff of the locomotive as to say that the puffs produce the movement of the train (SUD 106). The act of sin produces sinfulness, the state of sin, at the same time that the state produces the act. Both understandings are true and yet cannot be true together. (Were he writing today, Kierkegaard might take his example from Neil Bohr’s complementary principle, the idea that a subatomic entity can be taken to behave like a particle or a wave, but never both at once.) The antinomy is so tight that AntiClimacus appears to drive away comprehension. He writes, “the state of sin is the new sin, is the sin” (105) and then, “the state of sin is actually greater sin than the new sin” (106). The condition is the crime and the crime is the condition, necessarily and impossibly so. Second, the diptych-like structure of the book as a whole, whereby the two main parts are mirror inversions of one another, exhausts its meaning in selfreferentiality. After Anti-Climacus’s Introduction pairs sin with “the sickness unto death,” the first part declares that “The Sickness unto Death is Despair” (SUD 11). The second then announces that “Despair is Sin” (75). The circularity of the text forbids one from making apologetic use of it. What we know of despair cannot help

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explain Christian sin anymore than our knowledge of sin helps explain human despair; each means only in relation to the other from within Anti-Climacus’s text. As we shall see, this circularity characterizes the labyrinthine narrative of the book no less than the headings that structure it. Similar in form to the Athenaeum Fragments of the early German Romantics, which we will soon consider, The Sickness unto Death plays its own language game, complete in itself and repulsing outsiders, like a hedgehog. Or, to reintroduce the scalpel metaphor, we might say that the text consists of all blade, no handle; it wounds the reader wanting to grasp it from without. Anti-Climacus tells a story of the rising consciousness of sin, a consciousness that looks like the steep road out of despair but actually leads deeper into it. If the book provides a Christian apologetic, as many commentators insist, it is a backhanded or anticlimactic apologetic. Only from within its multiple recursions and textual dead ends might come the exhaustive hope for a different starting place.15 Third, and most encompassing, the meaning of sin remains ambiguous throughout the text. It ranges from the universal condition of humanity to a rare act of clear-eyed defiance. Which designation is appropriate depends largely on who or what is setting the criterion: the consensus of the crowd, the self in its Godgiven structure, God as the ground of the self ’s existence, or Christ, the most exacting prototype and judge facing each individual. The implications of this ambiguity are unsettling. For instance, the ignorance and presumptions of “the present age” can be depicted both as the most serious form of sin and, in a proper sense, as not-yet-sin at all. A most startling implication follows: the road away from the (sinful) false innocence of spiritlessness may be, in Walker Percy’s words, to manage to sin like a proper human being. Such polyvalence of sin joins the prior two characteristics of the text in preventing any translation of Anti-Climacus’s prose into stable concepts, definitions, or doctrines. What is more, the textual tensions repel not only readers’ comprehension of the book, but also their self-understandings or ways of being in the world. Ultimately, the one who must decide how sin is to be taken is not the reader as external interpreter but the reader who reads the story as his or her own—the reader whom the text illuminates as despairing, self-righteous, sinful, and/or penitent. In one sense, then, to be ignorant of sin means that a person is not really in sin, seeing as how the category does not apply to the only person for whom it should count. Does this ambiguity imply that ignorance is bliss, that we can save ourselves from sin by disregarding it? Do we always become sinners at a degree of removal, either through the humble confession of sin or the desperate attempt to master it? Those are the particular, historical problems of cultured Christianity, and in another sense, also the essential problems of sin itself.

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This repulsing self-referentiality, this antinomous language, these irresolvable equivocations that characterize The Sickness unto Death together serve to defamiliarize readers with the realities of sin and salvation. They also lead Anti-Climacus to ask, at the start of his work, a question that is both his most rhetorical and the most difficult to manage: “Is despair an excellence or a defect?” (SUD 14). I will soon join him in asking it and will repeat his incisive response, only to show how it returns, metastasized, to further tangle and trouble the text. Before analyzing Sickness more thoroughly, however, I will turn to a rhetorical tradition that AntiClimacus mischievously and strategically plays with but does not name—Romanticism’s distinctive version of happy sin. The tradition provides a productive subtext for reading Anti-Climacus on the fortune of fallibility.

Subtext III: Romanticism’s Fortunate Fall The early German (Jena) Romantics wrote in fragments. After Fichte’s serious Wissenshaftslehre and while Hegel was already building his System, this circle of avant-garde poets wrote self-referential pieces of art that were isolated from the surrounding world, complete in themselves, repulsing outsiders, like a hedgehog.16 Unlike the ancients, whose works sometimes became fragmented with time, the art of the Romantics was originally fragmented. Their works are leftovers right out of the oven, fallen to pieces in their first arising. As Friedrich Schlegel puts it, Viele Werke der alte sind Fragmente geworden. Viele werke der Neuern sind es gleich bei der Entstehung [Many of the works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written].17 This coincidence of artistic creation and a “fall” into fragmentation characterizes the literary form of the fragment poem. It also becomes a theme on which Romantic poetry repeatedly reflects. In it, we find two characteristics already indicative of a distinctively Romantic version of the fortunate Fall. First, the coincidence of creation and Fall, although primarily describing the fragmentation of consciousness that accompanies an individual’s original self-positing,18 comes also to characterize the Romantic view of God’s original creation. Second, if creation is always already fallen, then subsequent “falls” cannot be entirely evil. At worst, rebellion against a tyrannical God widens creation’s original fracture. Viewed more positively, it becomes merely the lesser of two evils and the means through which individuals become spirited and mature, despite their guilt and suffering. Geoffrey Hartman claims that, however notoriously difficult Romanticism is to define, much of its literary art, philosophical assumptions, and religious themes revolve around the possibility of a fortunate Fall.19 Paul Cantor in Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism supports a similar claim by tracing

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a thematic arch of English Romantics that begins and ends with the questions of Rousseau. Contra popular caricature, Rousseau could imagine no clear return to pristine nature from fallen civilization. Humanity’s condition entails a fundamental antinomy between the naive happiness characterizing original creation and the unhappy self-awareness characterizing civilization. Cantor quotes Rousseau’s depiction of the tragic situation: “Unfelt by the stupid men of earliest times, lost to the enlightened men of later times, the happy life of the golden age was always a state foreign to the human race, either because it went unrecognized when humans could have enjoyed it or because it had been lost when humans could have known it.”20 For Cantor, Romanticism follows by positing an “undecideable” choice between the innocence and ignorance of created existence and the guilty self-consciousness of human initiative, including rebellion. While both states are fallen, the latter alone requires courage and cultivates self-sufficiency. The Romantic poet-hero ventures to become spirited through the loss of innocence, even when he or she finds no rational justification for this venture. This goes for the poet as well as the protagonist of his or her work. In the words of Cantor, “The poet is best able to accept the fallenness of [humanity’s] condition, because the poet, needing suffering for growth, understands the profound connection between human creativity and the fall.”21 When compared with the Exsultet, this Romantic felix culpa does not express a drama of salvation but characterizes the internally divided nature of the human as such. Compared with Hegel, it expresses not a climactic dénouement but the initial battle cry of one who is willing to sin and suffer in the hope of cultivating creativity and spirit. Romantic heroes resolve themselves to the inevitability of suffering; they venture self-consciousness (with its self-conscientiousness and guilt) without a clear path to redemption. Thus the predominant figure of the literary movement becomes the Solitary Wanderer—someone like Cain, Ahasuerus, or the Ancient Mariner, who chooses the suffering of knowledge over the bliss of ignorance. Romantic poet-heroes are defined by pathos, meaning both “passion” and “suffering.” The hero, like the wedding guest infected by the Mariner’s ancient rhyme, perpetually becomes “a sadder and a wiser man.”22 In order to trace more carefully the distinctly romantic brand of felix culpa, I now want to turn from Germany to England and analyze Lord Byron’s Cain (1821).23 Though Cain’s murder of his brother in Act III provides the ostensible climax of Byron’s play, Cain’s sentiments, beginning in resentment and ending with despair, provide the true focus of Byron’s poetry and represent the sensibilities of many Romantics. After refusing to worship God, Cain is visited by Lucifer (I.i), who feeds his discontent by revealing the limitlessness and meaninglessness of infinity (II.i) and the horrors of Hades (II.ii). When Lucifer returns Cain to his family on earth, he is so overwhelmed by absurdity and death that the simple trust and

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worship of Abel sends him reeling.24 Overcome with emotion, Cain kills his brother. The play ends as Cain and his immediate family begin their second exile, now twice removed from the lost Paradise. When Adah declares, “Peace be with him!” over the spirit of Abel, Cain questions: “But with me!——” (III.i. 561). As the play unfolds, Byron makes clear that the only alternative to obedience and worship, which both Cain and Lucifer consider ignorant and puerile, is perpetual rebellion against both God and joy itself. This Romantic version of the fortunate Fall embraces the tragic necessity of rebellion, despite the suffering it fosters. Already in the opening scene, Byron dramatizes a head-on conflict between seemingly orthodox and romantic versions of felix culpa. He places the orthodox version in the mouths of Cain’s family member as they exult in God. Abel in particular is sure to praise the —Sole Lord of light! Of good, and glory, and eternity; Without whom all were evil, and with whom Nothing can err, except to some good end Of thine omnipotent benevolence— Inscrutable, but still to be fulfill’d— (III.i.231–36) The uniformity and piousness of the family’s adoration contrast with Cain’s internal conflict, making only the latter appear authentically human. When the family juxtaposes their praise of God with mention of sin and suffering, their unswerving piety appears contrived and constrained. Take, for example, the prayer of Zillah, the wife of Abel: “Oh God! who loving, making, blessing all/Yet didst permit the serpent to creep in,/And drive my father forth from Paradise,/Keep us from further evil:—Hail! All Hail!” (I.i. 18–21). Cain resents the inscrutability of God’s benevolence and his family’s unwillingness to question it, despite evidence to the contrary (for example, that God “didst permit the serpent to creep in”). Compared with the unwavering fidelity of Abel, Cain questions whether a faith that “seem[s] well-pleased with pain” might not be an instance of bad faith (III.i.116–17). He rejects any future vicarious atonement as well as any demand that he feel guilty for his ancestor’s sin. When Adah tries to comfort him with the hope of redemption, Cain protests: By sacrificing The harmless for the guilty? what atonement Were there? why, we are innocent: what have we Done, that we must be victims for a deed Before our birth, or need have victims to

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Atone for this mysterious, nameless sin— If it be such a sin to seek for knowledge? (III.i.85–92) The logic of atonement thereby appears wholly illogical to Cain—a “strange good, that must arise from out/Its deadly opposite” (II.ii. 288–89). Far superior and less improvident than God’s drama of sin and salvation would be to make humanity perfect from the beginning (II.ii. 289–305). The opening of Byron’s play thus directly questions the kind of fortunate Fall that I am calling liturgical, but it also offers an alternative version. Sin, Byron suggests, may be good before and aside from redemption. According to Cain, his parents merely sought knowledge and life when they ate of the forbidden tree: “The snake spoke the truth: it was the tree of knowledge;/It was the tree of life—knowledge is good,/And life is good; and how can both be evil?” (I.i.36–38). Throughout the play, Byron consistently pairs innocence with naiveté and guilt with the quest for knowledge, pitting the dyads against one another. Whether Cain be hero or antihero, he emerges as protagonist by shunning naive joy and worship to pursue unfettered knowledge even if it leads to despair. Although trespass remains far from blessed, it appears to be the only and necessary path for those unduped by pious fideism. Besides painting the worship of Cain’s family as mechanistic, Byron also interprets the joy of innocence as “narrow” through the character Lucifer (I.i.227). Like Cain, Lucifer describes the earth as a planet filled with “Things whose enjoyment was to be in blindness,” and he calls God’s creation “A Paradise of Ignorance” (II.ii.99–101). In Lucifer’s mind, even the angels lack the resolve to emancipate themselves from a blessedness that is really slavery (II.ii. 425–26). According to this view shared by Cain and Lucifer, Adam and Eve’s repentance for eating of the tree of knowledge comprises their only true sin. Cain deplores that his father “is tamed down” and that his mother “had forgot the mind/Which made her thirst for knowledge at the risk of an eternal curse” (I.i.179–82). Their true sin was not sinning fully enough. They ate of the tree of knowledge but not of the tree of life (I.i.294–95) and are thus stuck in guilt- and death-consciousness. Unable to restore their naive innocence or wholly abandon the thought of paradise, they are indefinitely possessed by an Unglücklickbewusstein, or unhappy consciousness. If only to protest his parents’ failure of nerve, Cain challenges himself to become one of the “Souls who dare use their immortality—/Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in/His everlasting face, and tell Him, that/His evil is not good!” (I.i.137–40). Can such rebellion restore joy as it brings knowledge? At points in the play, it seems as though the joy of innocence might be able to be united with selfconsciousness. The possibility of such a third stage between ignorant bliss and

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informed despair would clearly justify rebellion against servitude. Lucifer tells Cain that joy and knowledge are compatible, if only one would renounce unreflective obedience and cultivate unrelenting doubt. Knowledge is already yours, he tells Cain, and “The other [joy and life] may be still” if you use your mind (I.i. 208–16). Lucifer’s final words to Cain further encourage him to place his hope in reason: One good gift had the fatal apple given— Your reason:—let it not be over-sway’d By tyrannous threats to force you into faith ‘Gainst all external sense and inward feeling: Think and endure . . . . (II.ii.459–63) Lucifer thereby tries to convince Cain that the only way to become self-consciously happy is to turn from obedience to trespass. Despite Lucifer’s contention, however, Byron leads readers to doubt whether rebellion can return one to joy. Cain notices that Lucifer’s own quest for independent knowledge has not made him happy. When the spirit first appears, Cain describes him as “A shape like to the angels,/Yet of a sterner and a sadder aspect” (I.i.80–81). Lucifer’s spiritedness and power are so bound to his despair that “sorrow seems half his immortality” (I.i.95–96). When pressed, Lucifer admits to his sorrow, demurring only that despairing knowledge is better than blissful ignorance: cain And ye? lucifer Are everlasting. cain Are ye happy? lucifer We are mighty. cain Are ye happy? lucifer No: art thou? (I.i.120–22). With his final question, Lucifer both concedes that rebellion against God entails perpetual strife and asks whether this strife is not still preferable to a reticence that is less mighty and yet still includes the seeds of despair. Isn’t it better, he suggests, to be powerful and despair forthrightly than to be timidly obedient and despair more quietly? Byron further tightens the antinomy between ignorant joy and knowing despair by equating knowledge with the knowledge of meaninglessness and death. In Act II, Lucifer transports Cain to the abysses of space and time and then to Hades. To Cain, the world’s infinitude robs existence of importance while the underworld renders life futile. When he asks Lucifer why he led him here only to reveal this despair and absurdity, the spirit replies:

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lucifer Was not thy quest for knowledge? cain Yes: as being The road to happiness. lucifer If truth be so, Thou hast it. (II.ii.230–33) If truth be so. The implication is that knowledge of the truth not only is incompatible with joy, but actually brings increasing despair. Nevertheless, it should be embraced. The knowledge that Lucifer commends turns out to be knowledge of futility and death. Why then should one perpetually become “a sadder and a wiser man,” as Coleridge puts it? Again, Lucifer can only respond that despairing knowledge is the better of two evils: “But ignorance of evil doth not save/From evil; it must still roll on the same,/A part of things” (II.ii.235–37). It is better, he avows, to knowingly choose evil and suffering than be deceived by spiritual infantilism. For Cain, the decision is not so obvious. Lucifer as pure spirit can proclaim his preference for rebellious knowledge without equivocation; Cain as embodied and vulnerable cannot. However closely Cain resembles Lucifer in despair and resentment, he cannot accept that evil is “a part of things.” “Not of all things,” he replies, and proceeds to recount his unconditional love for Adah (II.ii.237–69). Lucifer insists that such love is deplorable: “I pity thee who lovest what must perish.” Cain counters: “And I thee who lov’st nothing” (II.ii.337–38). Cain’s own fortunate Fall then merely expresses the utter undecidability between ignorant joy and conscious despair. He has no assurance that, through sin, he will eventually become happy, and he feels no resignation to purchase knowledge at the cost of joy. He perpetually hovers (a favored term by the German Romantics) between the acceptance of fragility and repentance, which his family models, and the rejection of created existence in pursuit of pure spirit, as Lucifer personifies. He is unable to humble himself before God or transcend his created condition. Even his murder of Abel occurs in a fit of disorientation rather than through the robust self-possession that Lucifer idealizes. Having struck his brother in rage, he regains consciousness and does not know what he has done or who he is (III.i.321–33). After realizing what has transpired, Cain remains divided. He wants to take his own life but is protected by the angel’s seal. He vows to exchange his life for his brother’s but knows that murder cannot be undone. He longs to be forgiven and yet cannot forgive himself. He and Adah are finally exiled from their family to a land whose desolation matches their inward states. Beginning with resentment and ending in exile, Byron’s play dramatizes the tragic condition of humanity. The last line Cain utters after his wife blesses Abel (“But with me!——”) suggests that he remains unexplained and unredeemed throughout the dramatic action. To the end, Cain casts his protest in both directions;

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he disparages the ignorant contentment of his family but still questions whether Lucifer’s despair does anything but feed itself. Two broadly Romantic themes in Cain warrant highlighting. First, Byron proposes a worldview in which creation and Fall are closely intertwined, if not temporally or logically coincident. His very decision to choose Cain as his protagonist is telling. Cain finds himself suffering for sins that precede him. His birth initiates him into sin and suffering; he can resist them only by rejecting his created existence. (That creation falls into fragments in its original arising comprises a predominant theme and style of early German Romantic poetry, as we have seen.) Second and related, the story that Byron and each of the Romantics dramatizes is not a suprapersonal story of creation, Fall, and redemption, but the enduring plight of the human as such. Even in its most optimistic vein, the tone is one of concession to the ambiguous duality of human nature and the inevitability of sin and suffering arising from it. With their expression of felix culpa, the Romantics do not celebrate divine comedy but make dark concession to human tragedy. If their cries seem beautiful—and indeed it is hard not to be stirred by them—we are pleased by the agony and ostensible authenticity of the groans themselves and not by any sense of resolution they bring. Kierkegaard seems right when he writes that the Romantic poet/protagonist is essentially an “unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music” (EO 1:19). Before returning to Sickness, I should at least mention Friedrich Schleiermacher, the Romantic best known to contemporary theologians. Although Schleiermacher repeats elements of both the liturgical and theodical versions of felix culpa,25 like other Romantics he closely juxtaposes created finitude with fallen dividedness and writes of sin in terms of inevitable tragedy. In his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher reflects to the other members of the Jena romantic circle a shared weariness of religiosity that is divorced from passion and art.26 He distinguishes true religious piety from ethical mandates, lest the letter of the latter kill the spirit of the former. This stance in itself does not lead him to embrace the goodness of sin; he rather claims that vital piety will produce the fruit of good works as easily as a musical genius breaks into song.27 Nonetheless, Schleiermacher upholds sin as an inevitable and even healthy part of spiritual growth. In The Christian Faith, he connects the lifeless structure of humanity with “sensuous self-consciousness” or “the flesh,” and argues that the evolution of humanity’s spiritual nature, or its “God-consciousness,” depends on and subverts the primacy of this structural, sensuous element.28 The flesh, which can refer to either humanity’s fallen or its created existence, provides the possibility for both sin and righteousness in the same way that reified concepts can both express and kill the dynamic feeling below them. When we combine Schleiermacher’s

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aesthetic theory—centering on the way the letter simultaneously expresses and kills the spirit—with his evolutionary theology—with its focus on the way the body both occasions and resists the evolution of God-consciousness—it becomes clear that sin, like the fallen letter, both resists and supports the highest forms of spirituality. Sin is the resistance that the truly vital spirit gradually overcomes.29 It provides the lag that intensifies the pull toward spirituality through its resistance. In redemption, one experiences God-consciousness overcoming sensuous self-consciousness, or grace overcoming sin. Although sin is “misery” in itself, its role in creating the bliss of redemption is essential. Schleiermacher concludes that the experience of redemption through the second Adam is actually more vital and intense, a “more perfect human life,” than the innocence of the first Adam.30 Admittedly, he writes of sin positively only in connection with redemption and in this way approximates the Easter Eve liturgy. Connected with this experience of redemption, sin can be seen as the work of God, as Schleiermacher explains: “if we add the fact that the sin which persists outside direct connexion [sic] with redemption never ceases to generate more sin, and that redemption often begins to operate only after sin has attained to a certain degree, we have no misgiving in saying that God is also the Author of sin—of sin, however, only as related to redemption.”31 The fallen, fragmented nature of humanity provides helpful resistance over which the intuition of God—the unity of Being—is felt. The Fall is an essential ingredient in the emergence of spirit. However, for all these conceptual similarities with Milton and the Exsultet, Schleiermacher goes one step further to associate the positive role of sin’s resistance with the human experience of redemption. Whereas the Easter Eve worshippers proclaim felix culpa despite and because of their situation in the limen of Holy Saturday and so only glimpse a drama that surpasses them, Schleiermacher’s Romantic felix culpa poses sin-consciousness as a tragic yet necessary element of the human spirit itself.

Diagnosis: Is Despair an Excellence or a Defect? Having considered Romanticism’s diagnosis of the human condition, I will now return to that of Anti-Climacus. I have already indicated that Anti-Climacus’s strange rhetoric about the sickness of sin—equivocal, antinomous, and selfreferential as it is—leads him to the same key questions with which Cain struggles: “Is despair an excellence or a defect?” (SUD 14). This question, which titles an early section, states in short the question that drives The Sickness unto Death as a whole. Despair (Fortvivlelse), we learn, is the spiritual sickness named in the book’s title. In the first half of the text, Anti-Climacus catalogs the increasingly self-conscious forms of despair; in the second, he announces that “despair is sin” and continues to

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discuss it theologically as an illness “before God” (SUD 79). The opposite of despair is faith—the act of resting transparently in God so that despair is completely rooted out (14). The spiritual sickness goes unidentified by “thousands and thousands and millions” (23) who have it and is worse than anything else that can be experienced. It is perpetually unto death, and Anti-Climacus does not fail to describe it in the most apocalyptic terms: its “impotent self-consuming” (28), the way it “nails” or “binds” a person to him- or herself (21, 28), how it can rage in individuals with demonic hatred or quietly corrode entire populations. Given the dreadful nature of the malady, how can the question of whether despair is malevolent or benevolent even arise? If despair is sin, as Anti-Climacus categorically asserts, then its spiritual catastrophe seems all too obvious. By clearly associating sin with catastrophe and yet still entertaining the question of whether despair is an excellence or a defect, Anti-Climacus plays with a Romantic (or even “Byronic”) expression of felix culpa. Specifically, he joins the Romantics in questioning whether spirited individuals who despair with self-conscious pathos are closer to mature, authentic faith than people who are ignorant of their sin or despair less obviously. Throughout Sickness, Anti-Climacus, like Romantics before and after him, urges the reader to shed spiritual infantilism. Unlike most of them, he urges the reader to adopt in its place humble confession before God. Does this move constitute a return to the faith of Abel that Cain so despises in the opening of Byron’s play? As my analysis will show, Anti-Climacus initially adopts Byron’s question (which is better: happy ignorance or despairing self-knowledge?) but finally rejects the mutual exclusivity and exhaustiveness of his options. Moreover, fully coming to terms with Anti-Climacus’s question and response will depend more on how Anti-Climacus writes of fallibility and fault than on any final confessional position that he adopts. Anti-Climacus writes in ways that are both mischievous and acutely dismantling of preexisting positions—including the Romantic “position” of hovering between positions. I will now more closely analyze his text and rhetorical style.

An Essential Mistake We begin with an intriguing passage in which Anti-Climacus seems to entertain the idea of a fortunate Fall. At the culmination of Part One of The Sickness unto Death, he compares the most self-conscious or “spirited” form of despair—the demonic hatred of existence—to an error that slips into an author’s writing and then refuses to be corrected. Describing the error’s protest, Anti-Climacus adds this aside: Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author’s writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error—perhaps it

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actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production—and now this error wants to mutiny against the author. . . . (SUD 74, emphasis mine) In Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self, Arnold Come suggests that this passage indicates the necessity of at least some sin, or failure of the self, while the subsequent mutiny evidently stands outside of God’s “production.”32 Come’s reading, like that of John Hick and others in the wake of Schleiermacher, emphasizes humanity’s moral-developmental nature and positions the errors of humanity as an essential part of this development. At least some human failure must be part of God’s encompassing plan, so that in the end we will perceive the good fortune of our failures. Come thus divides inevitable failure from self-conscious rejection of God’s help, or what he understands to be sin proper.33 He claims that Sickness teaches the reader to accept inevitable human failure (or what Sickness calls despair) as “an essential element in [God’s] whole production” without committing the “final and ultimate failure of taking offense.”34 Come here suggests the possibility of a “fortunate failure” and returns to this theme throughout his analysis.35 While I find the proposal compelling, I will distinguish my own interpretations from those of Come shortly. The “essential mistake” passage is intriguing for being esoteric, but it is not the only place where Anti-Climacus entertains the possible value of the sin of despair. As I mentioned in chapter 1, he more directly writes of a “despair that is a thoroughfare to faith” (SUD 67) and suggests that “it is the worst misfortune never to have had that sickness: it is truly a godsend to get it, even if it is the most dangerous of illnesses, if one does not want to be cured of it” (26). He contends that there is some sort of “effective” or “radical” despair, without which the spirit cannot “break through from the ground upward” (59). Anti-Climacus also consistently associates the consciousness of despair with despair’s “intensification” or “qualitative deepening” (73, 63) and that deepening, in turn, with despair becoming “more spiritual” (73). These associations provide the largest clues as to how despair might entail an excellence—it forms spirit. For Anti-Climacus, as for the Romantics, the goal of a person’s life is to become self-conscious or spirited, or, in non-Romantic terms, to have vital faith. Spiritless people who are unconscious of their despair comprise the foil next to whom those who despair more radically appear “dialectically closer” (26) to spiritual health. The regression into intensified sin may be more valuable than the cloistered life that never knows the possibility of sin—the life that is “too spiritless to be called sin” (101). We have seen how that cloistered life—personified by Cain’s family—provides the structural counterweight to Lucifer’s bold rebellion and so helps frame the Romantic penchant for hovering between the two extremes. So long as Anti-Climacus

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also lionizes sin in light of spiritless “innocence,” he joins the ranks of these Romantic poets. The primary structure of Sickness, however, is divided between this immanent perspective (sin viewed positively before humanity) and a transcendent one (sin viewed negatively before God). Therefore, although Anti-Climacus suggests that despair contributes to the emergence of human spirit, he equally emphasizes that it constitutes a failure to become oneself before God, a sickness needing to be cured. When the quest for spiritedness indulges in this dangerous illness, its homeopathic effect is far from guaranteed. Thus, at the end of the Preface, Anti-Climacus is sure to point out that throughout the book, despair should be interpreted “as a sickness, not as a cure” (6). Anti-Climacus’s forewarning seems clear enough. However, even here the reader senses that the need to make this clarification is as revelatory as the clarification itself. We might compare it to the Apostle Paul’s insistence that one should not sin the more so that grace might abound (Rom. 6:1). In both cases, the rhetorical context that might very well cause slippage between sin and grace or between sickness and cure is just as significant as the elucidation meant to prevent it. Anti-Climacus’s clarification is almost as deconstructable as it is emphatic: “Just one more comment, no doubt unnecessary but nevertheless I will make it: once and for all may I point out that in the whole book, as the title declares, despair is interpreted as a sickness, not as a cure. Despair is indeed that dialectical. Thus, also in Christian terminology death is indeed the expression for the state of deepest spiritual wretchedness, and yet the cure is simply to die, to die to the world” (SUD 6). Does Anti-Climacus here imagine a Romantic reader who believes the potential benefit of despair overshadows its determinations as a painful and unwanted sickness?36 Or does he aim this reminder at himself, in order to place parameters around his exploration into the possible “excellence” of despair? Moreover, if despair should be interpreted as a sickness, not as a cure, why does Anti-Climacus emphasize its dialectical quality? Finally, does not the final sentence of the passage, by indicating the irony of being cured by dying, undercut the confidence with which Anti-Climacus interprets despair always as sickness, never as cure? A second, seemingly straightforward proclamation of despair’s desolation can be found in the apparently un-ironic aphorism that begins the dogmatic portion of the work: “Despair is sin” (75, 77). But this assertion too involves uncertainties. Which despair? What does Anti-Climacus mean by sin? The first question might be answered readily enough; any and every form of despair cataloged in Part One constitutes sin (although this clarification also reopens questions, as we shall see). The second question—what is sin?—is much more involved. It is not, of course, as though Anti-Climacus has left sin undefined up until this point. Rather, he has so overdetermined its meaning in the first part that it objectively comes to mean

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opposing things, while honing in on the reader’s subjectivity. Note, for example, the opening lines of Part Two: Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself. Thus sin is intensified weakness or intensified defiance: sin is the intensification of despair. The emphasis is on before God, or with a conception of God; it is the conception of God that makes sin dialectically, ethically, and religiously, what lawyers call “aggravated” despair. (SUD 77) Two rhetorical tensions of this passage are noteworthy. First, the passage immediately follows Anti-Climacus’s statement “Despair is Sin,” which titles Part Two. When Anti-Climacus here calls sin “the intensification of despair” and “aggravated despair,” the reader is left to question whether sin is despair, as the headings assert, or a particular kind of intensified despair, as the passage suggests. (In fact, the entire twofold structure of Sickness can be interpreted either as a work of identifying despair as sin or as tracing its development into sin. Others have noted this structural indeterminacy, often in the effort to solve its ambiguity.37) Second, AntiClimacus repeats a similar configuration when he writes that sin is “before God, or with the conception of God.” “Before God” seems to describe sin objectively; sin is the state of despairing before God, whether we are aware of God or not. “With the conception of God,” however, suggests that despair becomes sin when we thematize or otherwise recognize our creaturely status. The “or” here can function either disjunctively or conjunctively. On the one side, the despairing self may be a sinner regardless of whether she has a conception of God or even knows that she is in despair. On the other side, it may be the sinner’s own consciousness of despair and God that entitles her to be called a proper sinner. That ambiguity issues in a central, postmodern-like undecidability concerning the meaning of sin. Merold Westphal even suggests that Anti-Climacus’s overly defined definition of sin might mark the birth of postmodernism itself. 38

Sin as Common and Rare The ambiguity and undecidability of passages like these, I am arguing, keeps open the question of whether sin is a defect or an excellence. Larger structural tensions that run throughout the book function in similar ways. One of the most obvious is an incongruity between two textual segments that together form an inclusio around Part One. In the first section, “The Universality of This Sickness (Despair)” (I.B.), Anti-Climacus indicates that despair is commonplace, ordinary, or perhaps even universal (22–28). By playing on the word Almindelighed,

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often translated as “universal” but more precisely meaning “customary,”39 AntiClimacus intends to demonstrate the rarity of what people think is commonplace (spiritual health) and the commonplace of what people consider rare (spiritual sickness) (SUD 23; cf.TM 158). He does so to ensnare those who “ordinarily” consider themselves spiritually healthy in the net of despair. Anti-Climacus is making a serious and seemingly irrefutable accusation—namely, that sin is common precisely because the common view overlooks it.40 Popular opinions concerning the anomaly of sin indicate, for those with eyes to see it, that sin is all too common. The beginning of Part Two comprises the end of the inclusio. Having cataloged the manifold forms of despair in Part One, the first sections of Part Two continue to emphasize the extensiveness of despair, reinforcing that each form is wholly and equally sinful. Anti-Climacus then includes a section entitled, “The Socratic Definition of Sin,” in which he contrasts the Greek interpretation of sin as ignorance of the good with the Christian interpretation of sin as an act of the will. He acknowledges that “willed” sin may also be committed out of ignorance, but only as a “willed ignorance” (SUD 87–96, my emphasis). He then asserts, “Sin is not a negation but a position,” and distinguishes, in terms familiar to Haufniensis, the knowledge of sin as qualitative and transcendent from the speculative comprehension of sin as a more immediate “negative” (96–100). In each of these sections, Anti-Climacus emphasizes the particularity of Christianity’s understanding of sin, first in relation to Socratic dialectics and then in relation to idealist speculation. Having written of sin in increasingly particular terms, Anti-Climacus adds a final section: “But Then in a Certain Sense Does Not Sin Become a Great Rarity?” (100–104). He sounds almost surprised at the apparent contradiction between the commonality and rarity of sin when he writes: In Part One it was pointed out that the more intensive despair becomes, the rarer it is in the world. But if sin is now despair qualitatively intensified once again, presumably this despair must be extremely rare. What a strange problem! Christianity regards everything as under sin; we have tried to depict the Christian point of view as rigorously as possible—and then this strange outcome emerges, this strange conclusion that sin is not to be found at all in paganism but only in Judaism and Christendom, and there again very seldom. (SUD 100–101) Anti-Climacus continues to explain the “one sense only” in which this apparent contradiction is true. He claims that “seldom is there a person who is so mature, so transparent to himself, that [the definition of sin] can apply to him” (101). Sin is common because the definition includes everything that is not faith; it is rare because the definition strictly applies only to those exceptional individuals

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who transparently and self-consciously stand before God. To switch to one of Kierkegaard’s favorite metaphors, only those who recognize themselves as standing guiltily before God provide enough counter-resistance to enable the Christian jack, which otherwise would push them down, to build them up instead (101–2). Once the valence of sin is firmly established (how strange!), Anti-Climacus can write of the “advantage” of spirited, self-conscious sin while maintaining the limitations within which it should be understood. He values sin proper “aesthetically” for its rigor, but he is quick to point out that, “ethically,” spirited sin is simply more sinful (101). Given the alleged disdain with which Kierkegaard speaks of aesthetics,41 we might predict that Anti-Climacus too would emphasize how spirited sin can be preferred only in a highly limited way. Surprisingly, Anti-Climacus puts his emphasis elsewhere: Most men are characterized by a dialectic of indifference and live a life so far from the good (faith) that it is almost too spiritless to be called sin—indeed almost too spiritless to be called despair. It is certainly true that there is no merit in being a sinner in the strictest sense of the word. But, on the other hand, how in the world can an essential sinconsciousness be found in a life that is so immersed in triviality and silly aping of “the others” that it can hardly be called sin, a life that is too spiritless to be called sin and is worthy only, as Scripture says, of being “spewed out.” (101) In such passages, Anti-Climacus joins the Romantics in aesthetically validating individuals who emerge from the culture’s collective evasion of responsibility and guilt. (But note that Anti-Climacus also distinguishes between aesthetic, ethical, and religious perspectives, which problematically tend to be collapsed in Romantic religion.) Anti-Climacus continues to lambast the state of Christendom and its spiritless members until the end of the section, where he concludes, “This is precisely why Christendom . . . is so far from being what it calls itself that the lives of most men, Christianly understood, are far too spiritless to be called sin in the strictly Christian sense” (104). Clearly, the whole of Kierkegaard’s primary study of sin functions to call into question any univocal understanding of the topic. What is more, that critical function of the text serves to sustain the question about whether spirited, selfconscious sin—especially in light of the nominal “Christians” of Christendom— should be considered a liability or asset. Anti-Climacus’s hedging (which is not exactly Cain’s hovering) depends on the valence of sin. He insists that it is only with shrewdness that modern dogmatics came to believe that “sin is sin” (SUD 80) regardless of whether the sinner “soars high with the boldness of despair” or

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triumphs spiritlessly somewhere in the middle of the crowd (42).42 For AntiClimacus there is sin and there is “sin.” There is spiritless sin, which only an omnicritical physician can diagnose, and there is the spirited sin that sinners themselves know and feel. The question of which of these is sin in the stricter sense and which deserves the quotation marks, however, is disputable. Anti-Climacus himself vacillates. On the one hand, he seems to assume that the devil’s despair, which rages in impotent self-consuming, would bring spiritual death more quickly and thus comprise the paramount example of the “sickness unto death.” However, in an earlier draft of Sickness, after describing those whose lives “are far too spiritless to be called sin in the strictly Christian sense” (104), he adds, “Is this not the sickness unto death?”43 And if this conjecture were true, would it not destabilize any residual Romantic reflections about being able to sin one’s way toward immortal, painful self-knowledge? However we answer at this point, we see that, throughout the book, AntiClimacus closely juxtaposes suggestions about the possibility of despair’s advantages with assertions about its more obvious destructiveness. He finally and paradoxically concedes that the intensification of sin “in a certain sense . . . is very close to the truth; and just because it lies close to the truth, it is infinitely far away” (67). That incongruity—“very close and infinitely far away”— describes an otherwise nonchartable relationship between three dispositional states: the presumption of moral innocence, the self-conscious state of spirited sin, and the humble penitence of Christian faith. In this light, the most and least that can be said about the intensification of sin is that it is possibly good, or “dialectically closer . . . to being cured” (26). A possible return from “soar[ing] high with the boldness of despair” to humility before God depends not only on God’s offer of forgiveness and healing, but also on the individual’s “about-face,” or conversion of the will [Omvendelse]. Prior to conversion, the intensified state of despair requires constant dialectical qualifications: it is destructive but may be helpful; it is effective but possibly only in bringing about more despair; it is very close to faith but still infinitely far away. These qualifications would not sound odd in the mouth of Cain. He too equivocates, queries, drifts. At the same time, however, and to the degree that Romantics valorize Cain’s equivocations and insist that they must be chosen with hero-like will power, we must also recognize the ways that Anti-Climacus voices them quite differently. As I will begin to trace in the next section, Anti-Climacus begins by characterizing the fallible self as heroic, even entreating the reader to turn and fight the possibility of sin. Not until these tropes also collapse under the theological weight of Sickness can we glimpse something of Kierkegaard’s subtle deconstruction of Romantic religion.

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The Possibility/Power/Potion of Sin The preceding section traced several ways in which Anti-Climacus joins the Romantics in keeping alive the question of whether sin is a defect or an excellence. He does not offer a single answer to the question; settling the matter would amount to a kind of conceptual mastery of sin that would only threaten to delay or displace the possibility of personal mastery. This is not to say that Anti-Climacus offers no response to his central question. He categorically distinguishes possible sin, which is a “surpassing excellence,” from actual sin, which is spiritually destructive. Sin is subjunctively good but indicatively bad, advantageous in theory but ruinous in practice. The modal distinctions seem almost to settle the matter. But only almost. Anti-Climacus goes on to write that sin’s possibility is not an abstract notion to be engaged theoretically but an impinging power that summons every resource of imagination and will. The possibility of sin turns out to be sin’s real and only power, a power that Anti-Climacus will treat neither subjunctively nor indicatively but hortatively, imploring us to turn and fight it. The Romantic question would be resolved if Anti-Climacus were to tell us that sin is good when held merely as a mere possibility. However, Anti-Climacus does not present the possibility of sin as impotent (i.e., not-yet-actual) nor as a gloss for the capacities that we wholly own and control. Instead, he presents his reader with a possibility of sin that is determinative enough to distinguish embattled faith from spiritless self-assurance and potent enough to lead us unswervingly unto death. This section will show how distinguishing between the possibility and actuality of sin clarifies matters only by introducing how Anti-Climacus’s understanding of sin’s possibility—or what I am calling fallibility—is more peculiar, uncanny, and paradoxical than most others, including that of Haufniensis. When AntiClimacus calls the enduring power/possibility of sin “excellent,” he arrives at an understanding of human capability that is less familiar and safe than we might like.

The Powerful Possibility of Sin Reinhold Niebuhr is among those attributed with the adage, familiar in twentiethcentury theology, that sin is the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically demonstrated, for instance, by reading the daily newspaper. One can predict AntiClimacus’s disagreement on a number of fronts. Directly in the Introduction and again in Part Two, Anti-Climacus asserts that the “miserable condition” of sin is one that “man as such does not know” (SUD 8) and that it takes a revelation from God to learn what sin is (95). He also describes his final definition of sin—“before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to

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will to be oneself ” (77)—as pure algebra, deduced from his definition of faith. He explains that “for me to begin to describe particular sins in this little book would be out of place, and, furthermore, the attempt might fail” (82). Why is Anti-Climacus so cautious in describing the particulars of sin, preferring instead to create a definition which, like a transcendental net, catches every imaginable form? In this and other ways, Anti-Climacus can be taken as a mainline Protestant within the Pauline-Augustinian-Lutheran tradition. Despite the way he calls into question the assurance with which modern dogmatics (largely influenced by Kant) declare that sin is sin (regardless of whether it is judged by one’s conscience or by God), he equally and emphatically critiques the late medieval enumeration and classification of sins, for example, into seven deadly sins, mortal and venial sins, sins of omission and of commission, sins in thought and deed, and so on.44 The risk is that cataloging sins and pairing them with penalties might inadvertently commodify them, enabling a person to purchase the sin by paying the price, all with a clean conscience. Worse, it might make a fetish of them, exchanging underlying corruptions for isolated acts as the object of one’s concern. Beneath any series of sins that might be differentiated and cataloged resides the power of sin itself, a power that makes slaves of us—like the impulsion of passion itself. A second reason for Anti-Climacus’s abstractions is one I have already suggested. To the degree that it is customary to take sin as empirically demonstrable, Anti-Climacus suggests that this common view both covers over the ubiquity of sin and, in doing so, exposes sin as a kind of covering. When we point to newspaper headlines or other instances of sin, we not only miss the real, less apparent issue but incriminate ourselves, the pointers, in misrepresenting sin—which, in turn, is a sin. The fact that this assertion deconstructs itself—in other words, that the author’s identification of sin as hiding is equally prone to concealment—Kierkegaard might readily admit. His adoption of Anti-Climacus as an authoritarian author might safeguard against such endless regress, indirectly acknowledging that a more immanent diagnostic would have to be endlessly self-reflexive. A third explanation for the partiality that Anti-Climacus shows toward “Sin” as a singular, proper name and his relative disregard for individual sins is often overlooked, although it is behind the previous explanations and it links directly with the persona and central metaphor of Anti-Climacus. It is also fundamental to the present study. Anti-Climacus discounts specific acts of sin because the state of sin, upon close analysis, essentially refers to a future possibility, even when made potent by past acts of sin. This is not to say that actual sin does not exist, that our situation is essentially the same as Adam’s in his fragile, anxious innocence. On the contrary, Anti-Climacus assumes that we are guilty and thus must fight with sin. To insist that the state of sin is a possibility is to redirect the reader’s attention from those instantaneous crimes—which, as acts, are necessarily in

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the past, making headlines only the day after—to the future state that those sinful acts open up, the possibility of new and greater sin. This is where Anti-Climacus’s medical model breaks down, something he is happy to admit. He notes that after one catches a cold, perhaps out of carelessness, the sickness runs its course, becoming “an actuality whose origin recedes more and more into the past” (16). To declare that this sick person is continuously in the process of catching the cold would entail the “cruel and inhuman” desire of “wanting to dissolve the actuality of the sickness into its possibility” (16). The opposite is true with the sin of despair: “Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself ” (17). The sickness of sin is the only sickness that does get dissolved into its possibility. The despairing self “bears all the past as a present in possibility” (17). The power of sin does not lie in some actual occurrence, which we can leave in the past, letting bygones be bygones. Rather, sin’s power is sin’s real possibility, the way past sin makes new and stronger sin increasingly possible. The power of sin is the possibility of sin.45 To many, such an account will appear to treat sin even more insubstantially than Augustine’s notion of evil as privatio boni (privation of the good), which modern theologians have criticized for not taking sin seriously enough. The reverse is closer to the truth. When past actualities get dissolved into present possibilities they make the most powerful of potions. Anti-Climacus writes of possibility with unparalleled vividness: “possibility is the only salvation. When someone faints, we call for water, eau de Cologne, smelling salts; but when someone wants to despair, then the word is: Get possibility, get possibility, possibility is the only salvation. A possibility—then the person in despair breathes again, he revives again, for without possibility a person seems unable to breathe” (SUD 38–39). Possibility is powerful; its potency alone is able to revive the suffocating self.

The Virtue of Fallibility The passage just quoted is about the power of recuperative possibilities, of course. Is the possibility of sin as potent a potion? Anti-Climacus responds to his question, “Is despair an excellence or a defect?” with an explanation that suggests that sin’s possibility is supremely potent, for good or for ill. He begins by claiming that, “Purely dialectically, [despair] is both.” He explains that “If only the abstract idea of despair is considered, without any thought of someone in despair, it must be regarded as a surpassing excellence. . . . The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal” (SUD 14–15). But Anti-Climacus continues by noting that the particular possibility of sin is utterly unique when it comes to the field of possibilities:

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fortunate fallibility To be able to despair is an infinite advantage [Fortrin], and yet to be in despair is not only the worst misfortune and misery—no, it is ruination. Generally, this is not the case with the relation between possibility and actuality. If it is an excellence [Fortrin] to be able to be this or that, then it is an even greater excellence [Fortrin] to be that; in other words, to be is like an ascent when compared with being able to be. With respect to despair, however, to be is like a descent when compared with being able to be; the descent is infinitely low as the excellence [Fortrin] of possibility is high. Consequently, in relation to despair, not to be in despair is the ascending scale. (SUD 15)

In Kierkegaard’s commentary on this passage from his journals, he emphasizes that this inversion of the normal relation between possibility and actuality characterizes any examination of evil (JP 4:4030). He also suggests that the exceptionality of the inversion accounts for the incomprehensibility of sin. Yet the primarily rhetorical purpose seems to be less about comprehension and more about spiritual formation. Anti-Climacus repeatedly calls the ability to sin a Fortrin, the Danish word for “excellence.” Like the Greek arête or the Latin virtus, Fortrin names the goal of character formation and the power by which a person achieves fullness of life, or what Anti-Climacus calls spirit. At first glance, the possibility of despair or sin specifies a volitional possibility or disposition that must be cultivated in order that a person can become a self. The Sickness unto Death appears to belong to the genre of aretology or what Kierkegaard’s contemporaries would recognize as a Bildungsroman. However, if Anti-Climacus fits those traditions, he also dismantles them from within. Aristotle, for example, defines virtue (arête) as a “settled disposition of the mind determining the choice of actions and emotions.” 46 Thus to be virtuous or embody moral excellence, according to Aristotle, is to be wholly disposed to valued emotions and disinclined to contrary ones; the cultivation of a disposition is meant to issue in a corresponding action. In Anti-Climacus’s peculiar case, the goal of becoming preeminently capable of despair is “not to be in despair.” Retaining this classical Greek emphasis on the active cultivation of certain potent possibilities while insisting that the point of it is not to act on them is a tricky maneuver. (Yet it is not wholly unprecedented; consider, for example, monastic disciplines that use sinful cupiditas as the very “material for exercising virtue.”47) For his part, Anti-Climacus explains that there are two ways not to be in despair. A person can avoid the temptation to despair by immersing him- or herself in the established Church, cultured coteries, or other collective consciousnesses. Alternatively, he or she can recognize—or even cultivate—the possibility of despair and then actively refuse to give into it. This distinction makes the presence of sin’s real, live possibility of utmost importance. Anti-Climacus explains:

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But here again this category is equivocal. Not to be in despair is not the same as not being lame, blind, etc. If not being in despair signifies neither more nor less than not being in despair, then it means precisely to be in despair. Not to be in despair must signify the destroyed possibility [den tilintetgjorte Mulighed] of being able to be in despair; if a person is truly not to be in despair, he must at every moment destroy the possibility [tilintetgjøre Muligheden]. (SUD 15). In chapter 1 I argued that this passage serves to distinguish the rhetorical thrust of Anti-Climacus from that of theodicists. The latter look only to assign responsibility for the onset of suffering; distinguishing original or false innocence from postlapsarian redemption—the two kinds of not being in despair that AntiClimacus proposes—is not their concern. For Anti-Climacus, by contrast, the unperceived presence of sin’s possibility functions to demarcate two states that are indistinguishable phenomenologically. In this rhetorical context, language of sin’s possibility overruns modal categories. The primary rhetorical purpose of the passage is to make the power/possibility of sin imaginable and to plead with the reader to face and fight it. Anti-Climacus reminds his reader of the difference between not being in despair and truly not being in despair when he writes, “not to be in despair can in fact signify precisely to be in despair, and it can signify having been rescued from being in despair” (SUD 24). Both this and the previous passage I quoted (SUD 15) suggest that to be truly free of despair requires what looks like heroic action: either we are “rescued” from despair or we “destroy” its possibility.48 Not being in despair must be equivocal if it is to point to the possibility of despair as a destroyed or denied and thus hidden component of spiritual health. In a footnote toward the end of Sickness, Anti-Climacus claims that even offense at Christ, the highest form of sin, can be an element in faith “as an annulled possibility” (SUD 116). The possibility of sin in this case marks the hero of faith and yet remains imperceptible to everyone else—just as Abraham’s double-movement of faith distinguishes him from the bourgeois philistine yet remains essentially concealed from those who sing his praises (FT 82–120).49 In addition to distinguishing Sickness from philosophical theodicy and most strands of the virtue tradition, Anti-Climacus’s imperative to fight the power/possibility of sin also functions to depict sin’s origins in more ironic terms than Haufniensis uses. Haufniensis looks back to the concept of fragility to mark the origin of sin. At the end of the previous chapter I noted the limitations of this retrospective perspective; ultimately Haufniensis is left to celebrate fragility in wishful tones. Anti-Climacus, as a rigorous practitioner of Christian psychology, imagines the potentiated possibility of sin as something before his

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reader (never in the past, like the onset of a cold). Sin’s possibility comprises an obstruction or thoroughfare that each person must get through on the journey toward faith. Accordingly, the fragility that Haufniensis coolly defended—that anxietyladen weakness of freedom that makes sin possible—appears also, from a different perspective or within a different discursive practice, as fallibility—an activated capacity to fall whose ideal purpose is to be continuously destroyed in faith. Fragility characterizes the self in relation to the original possibility of its misrelations; it points to the noncoincidence of the self as that which occasions the first fall into sin. Fallibility involves the same noncoincidence but interprets it as a present power that unwittingly also bears the possibility of faith. It is the power of human weakness that is given to be overcome in “the virtue of faith.” In this sense, fallibility is the possibility of failure that is known only to those who courageously enter the fight. “The world,” Anti-Climacus writes, “considers it dangerous to venture in this way—and why? Because it is possible to lose” (SUD 34). Fallibility provides the definitive but always hidden conditio sine qua non of heroic faith. Later I will indicate how these idioms of warfare and heroism eventually fissure under the weight of Anti-Climacus’s ironic conception of the power of human weakness. In the meantime, however, we can read these opening sections of The Sickness unto Death as a booming call to arms for those brave enough to step away from the prudence of the crowd and enter headlong into the consciousness of sin, which is also sin’s possibility and power. We can imagine Anti-Climacus calling for the possibility of sin with the same urgency as he calls for the smelling salts of possibility in general: Get fallibility, get fallibility, fallibility is the only salvation! The potion is readily at hand—in fact always on hand—since it is produced by one’s dissolving past sin into present possibility. Sin’s possibility promises to awaken us, arousing sin-consciousness, in the hope that we turn from sin to faith.

Poisonous Possibilities and an Unstable Text I have been highlighting the urgency with which Anti-Climacus calls for the imaginative cultivation of fallibility in the opening of Sickness. One reason is in order to trace how the possibility of sin gets rhetorically reconfigured once phenomenology gets subsumed within Christian dogmatics.50 However, the other reason is because his call to arms gets silenced after the opening sections and so is frequently overlooked by interpreters. After introducing the live power and ideal uses of fallibility, Anti-Climacus continues with an autopsy of actual despair, showcasing its cadaverous faces within what looks like a stable typology.

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Throughout the rest of the book, he makes only few and brief references to what I see as the reader’s primary task—cultivating and then destroying his or her capacity to sin. Rather than exploring how fallibility can move us toward faith, the text instead traces the way that the consciousness of sin almost inevitably leads to more insurgent forms of sin. Perhaps Anti-Climacus cannot or does not control the irony of sin’s power to the degree interpreters of this “extraordinarily high Christian” have assumed. We have seen how the meaning of sin depends on something that the author cannot give, namely, what the reader thinks sin is. What the text most assuredly creates is the gaping gap between an objective definition of sin and the reader’s own subjective awareness of his or her sin. The difference between them comprises a new site of slippage or fault-line to be added to the apertures of the self and Haufniensis’s divided voice. What the narrator says and how the reader responds cannot be expected to coincide. Anti-Climacus has no doctrine of sin; he has only a practice of diagnosing sin that is necessarily completed or overturned by the patient/reader’s self-diagnosis. This necessary slippage between sin and “sin,” between authorial intention and reader reception, bears significantly on how we deal with the fortunate Fall language of the text. Recall that Arnold Come takes the “essential mistake” passage to mean that there is a transcendent perspective—assumedly available to AntiClimacus—from which the “sins” of humanity can be seen as foreordained by God. Felix culpa, in this vein, makes a concession to inevitable sin while celebrating its inclusion in the divine pedagogy. Tragic sin is used as a teaching moment, having been incorporated into the eternal lesson plan by the divine teacher. Anti-Climacus does not use this pedagogy analogy; in fact, he lambasts the idea that despair is something that one can outgrow, or the idea of despair as “something that appears only in the early years but is not found in the mature person who has reached the age of discretion” (SUD 58).51 But even more troublesome for Come’s interpretation is the gap that the author carves into his text between writer and reader. Come attempts to secure the meaning of a passage that is, at the most literal level, about the instability of written texts. This instability results from the necessary slippage between any privileged meaning of the text by way of a transcendental signifier (such as Come’s appeal to God’s perspective) and all that the text might mean and do for its reader. In the “essential mistake” passage and the broader textual tensions that we have traced, Anti-Climacus shows how even the highest authorial authority necessarily falls victim to the “mistakes” of his readers. If those mistakes turn out to be essential parts of the whole production, it is not because they have been foreordained by the author but because any and every text can and should function apart from the author’s intentions. By adopting the highest conceivable standpoint and then showing how even that is vulnerable, Anti-Climacus reminds us that all human

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language approximates writing and all writing is fallible. God alone is present to God’s authorship; the rest of us are always already mistaken.52 Anti-Climacus seemingly remains recklessly ironic, not despite, but rather through his self-characterization as the highest conceivable Christian. If that perspective cannot “figure out” the text, no perspective can. Such a reading has implications for the function of fallibility within it. Anti-Climacus initially suggests that fallibility in its ideal role should be both cultivated and destroyed. After doing so, however, Anti-Climacus leaves off conceiving and commending this ideal and begins tracing what typically happens when a person meets the power of sin. It is as if the possibility of sin comes to be more than the text or author can handle. The next section will suggest that this is precisely how it should be. Exactly because the physician concocts a potion strong enough to revive the unconscious sinner, the potion, like any stimulant worth its salt, is manifestly toxic. Like Plato’s pharmakon, sin’s possibility is poison as well as cure.53 Because sin’s possibility is not a substance and has no stable essence, it will always have the ungovernable potential to enact chiastic reversals, nauseating the well even as it promises to revive the sick. Sin’s possibility remains unstable and ambivalent regardless of Anti-Climacus’s initial prescription to control it. (Or is knowing the ambivalence of sin precisely what instigates Anti-Climacus’s initial efforts to control it?) Either way, I will here suggest that Anti-Climacus’s text is itself a kind of dangerous pharmakon, able to lead us to despair just as easily as it might cure us of it. Likewise, the authorial persona— for all his talk of supervising the sickbed— actually acts more like a heedless pharmacist. He dispenses potions that are so powerful they might become poisons, but he gives the patient/reader little instruction about how to take them. At this point we are ready to note that Anti-Climacus’ proclamation of the excellence of fallibility, when played out through the remainder of the text, cannot be functionally equivalent to the Romantics’ predilection to eulogize sin. AntiClimacus does not simply swap fallibility for sin as that which a well-equipped hero takes on. Rather, Anti-Climacus’s portrayal of the course that a self-conscious sinner takes deconstructs the Romantic hero’s self-initiated, self-reliant quest, especially as a remedy or foil to the inaction of the masses. On the one hand, in the narrative and structure of Sickness, Part One, Anti-Climacus urges the reader to choose spirited or even “demonic” despair over the spiritless malaise of the crowd, dividing no less than Byron the happy ignorance of the spiritless from self-conscious despair of the hero/poet. On the other hand, certain ironic reversals within that narrative disperse the assumed mutual exclusivity, exhaustiveness, and power of that choice, exposing Romantic resignation as yet another attempt to manage the unmanageable.

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Prognosis: The Course of Sin The most important word in Anti-Climacus’s title, Sygdommen til Døden , may be the smallest. The sickness of sin advances unto death—and only unto, since this spiritual sickness cannot do away with the spirit it inflicts, however much it would like to. This section will discuss how the various manifestations of despair in Part One become increasingly conscious/spirited, and thus more promising, but they also advance steadily toward spiritual death. Thus Part One as a whole both reinforces and undermines the ideal portrayal of fallibility and heroic will power that Anti-Climacus makes in his preface and introduction. The text thus begins to deconstruct the very romanticized capacity it otherwise extols. I will assume throughout this section that Part One of The Sickness unto Death comprises a narrative that develops alongside the progression of despair. Many interpreters would assume that reading Part One as a story goes against the grain of the text. I would argue that a narrative reading actually reads with the grain and against the joinery. Most commentators take “The Forms of This Sickness (Despair)” to exhibit a stable typology of what remains after despair has been vivisected: “infinitude’s despair is to lack finitude,” “finitude’s despair is to lack infinitude,” and so forth. What is missing in such accounts is the discernment of the narrative that runs through the typological categories, the story of the sickness of a single protagonist-consciousness that is left to run its course. Noticing the sections’ narrative progression means attending to the ironic reversals that lead from one form of despair to the next (and often back again), as well as to the recurring metaphors that—like similar fossils on distant continental shores—help mark the course of sin. Perceiving the narrative also allows the reader to be moved by it, a possibility that fulfills Kierkegaard’s hope that the book, despite its schematic structure, would stir souls and awaken consciences.54 While the Preface and Introduction clearly invite such a literary interpretation, the philosophy in the opening pages of Part One seems decidedly nonfigural. AntiClimacus, in his “purest Hegelianese,”55 describes three sets of relationships through which the self becomes itself: (1) the structural relations of the self (infinitude and finitude, possibility and necessity), (2) the relationship between these relations as merely “given” and the conscious adoption of them, and (3) the relationship between this relation that relates to itself and the power that establishes it, namely, God (SUD 13–14). “In total,” the human being is a synthetic self that is capable of relating to itself and, in doing so, also relating to God. In the language of this study, the human being is a fragile self that is capable of becoming fallible and, in doing so, also becoming faithful.

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The remainder of Part One examines the forms of despair made possible by this human structure. But I want to claim that they also form something of a means or method for becoming oneself in faith—however labyrinthine and dead-ended that path may be in practice. According to this rhetorical reading, the first extended section (under header “C.A.”) urges the reader to choose conscious, spirited despair over spiritless despair as a way of getting “dialectically closer” to faith. Surprisingly, in the next main section (C.B.), this suggestion that willful sin comprises the back door to faith slams tightly shut on itself. In other words, when read as a narrative, Part One both progresses from sin to faith (a course of treatment) and leads the reader from one form of despair to its mirroring opposite (the course of the sickness). Only when we develop an eye for the movement of despair and a feel for the rhetorical force of the book can we understand why we are rightfully pulled in these different directions.

Unto Spirited and Spiritless Death Although nominally about unconscious despair, the first section (C.A.) already privileges the self-conscious despair of infinitude and possibility (the transcending dimensions of selfhood) over the unconscious despair of finitude and necessity (the limiting dimensions), beckoning the reader to become conscious of despair.56 The individual who despairs of infinitude or possibility errors, and yet does so productively in trying to become a self. He or she imaginatively “represents himself to himself.” 57 This self-reflective capacity, which is rooted in the imagination but spreads throughout personhood, is the self, or the self ’s possibility (SUD 31). Imagination provides the possibility for reflection, and the intensity of this reflection proves directly proportionate to the intensity of the self (31). The dangers of this path to selfhood, Anti-Climacus reminds us, are very real. He explains: “This self fantastically reflected itself in possibility. Even in seeing oneself in a mirror it is necessary to recognize oneself. . . . The mirror of possibility is no ordinary mirror; it must be used with extreme caution. . . . That a self appears to be such and such in the possibility of itself is only a half truth, for in the possibility of itself the self is still far from or is only half itself ” (SUD 36–37). Possibility is like a hall of mirrors, maybe even a funhouse of mirrors. When used “with extreme caution,” the funhouse might reflect the self ’s true image; more often it produces a “phantasmagoria” of rapidly repeating reflection (36), deceiving the self into believing that everything is possible (37). Conceding the risk of losing oneself in this way, the reader must note that this despairing self nevertheless has embarked on self-consciousness and, as a result, has become at least “half itself ” (37). Thus a person who becomes infinitely disordered in the funhouse of possibility might still become self-consciousness. This person

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initiates the process of becoming by means of an “infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process” (30). She who fails infinitely within possibility is clearly on the wrong track, but she retains her capacity for self-consciousness and still might be helped by life through its punishment (34). In these ways, the disease that ensues with unchecked imagination, possibility, and passion remains appealing at some basic level. Just as the Romantics embraced distinctive forms of suffering such as tuberculosis, Anti-Climacus almost seems to honor how infinitude’s despair individuates the sufferer and expresses excessive passion. Although the course of this despair culminates in the self-consuming of demonic defiance, that consumption—like the “consumption” celebrated among the Romantic poets—nonetheless contains essential spontaneity and vitality.58 Anti-Climacus thus paints the despair of infinity and possibility in honorific terms; while such despair is on the wrong track, it might be on the “proper” wrong track—that is, able through its failure to be set aright. By contrast, Anti-Climacus nowhere romanticizes the despair of finitude and necessity. These kinds of despair, like the “despair that is ignorant of being despair” that they prefigure, are on the wrong wrong track—doubly removed by a “new negativity” (SUD 44) from selfconsciousness and faith. If infinitude’s despair is like the refining consumption of tuberculosis, the despair of finitude and necessity inflicts like a cancer. This despair makes the body into an object and the self into a mere number, a cipher of “the crowd.”59 Anti-Climacus describes this despair as the prudent lack of courage, or the absence of any venture toward self-relation. The quiet despairer “does not dare to be himself ” (33), or “does not dare to believe in himself ” (34). He “is too sensate to have the courage to venture out and endure being spirit” (43). It is here that Anti-Climacus writes with an urgency unparalleled in other sections: “Get possibility, get possibility, possibility is the only salvation” (38). This despairing patient not only lacks possibility, but also risks losing oneself and God (40–41). The philistine portrays the nadir of this despair. With his or her lack of possibility, everything becomes trivial. “Bereft of imagination” and self-assured as to the workings of the world, he or she drowns slowly in the “miasma of probability” (41). Absorbed in probability, devoid of every qualification of spirit, the philistine is a person for whom “there is no help to be found” (41). Using captivity imagery, which will become important in later sections, Anti-Climacus writes that this self has “imprisoned itself ” (42) and is bound to despair precisely because it “spiritlessly triumphs” (42) in the affairs of the world. The philistine is without spirit [Aandløshed]; he or she lacks both possibility and the possibility for possibility, both spirit and the condition for receiving it.60 Whereas Anti-Climacus nominally catalogs four types of despair in the preliminary section, I want to suggest that there are really only two movements within

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these categories, or more precisely, one struggle between two impinging possibilities. The first possibility originates in the imagination and, when unrestrained, uses the self ’s capacity for reflection to sustain spiritual rage, culminating in a hatred of existence. The other originates in prudential reason and, when undisturbed, uses the self ’s capacity for deliberation to endlessly defer self-knowledge, culminating in a spiritual atrophy in the guise of self-satisfaction. The first approaches a spiritual death not unlike the physical death by consumption—a maddening, solitary, fitful, and above all distinguished way to go. The second leads to a spiritual death that is suffered like a cancer, a death that traditionally symbolizes resignation and the triumph of utter meaninglessness. Anti-Climacus rhetorically privileges the first form, if only because those who despair boldly might become conscious of sin and be helped by God through suffering and punishment. Devoid of imagination and introspection, the spiritless person adds ignorance to error and self-complacency to despair. He or she so thoroughly “triumphs” in spiritlessness that almost no help can be found: The philistine-bourgeois mentality thinks that it controls possibility, that it has tricked this prodigious elasticity into the trap or madhouse of probability, thinks that it holds it prisoner; it leads possibility around imprisoned in the cage of probability, exhibits it, imagines itself to be the master, does not perceive that precisely thereby it has imprisoned itself in the thralldom of the spiritless and is the most wretched of all. The person who gets lost in possibility soars high with the boldness of despair; he for whom everything became necessary overstrains himself in life and is crushed by despair; but the philistine-bourgeois mentality spiritlessly triumphs. (SUD 41–42) It is precisely because the “boldness of despair” risks failure that it is more desirable than the assured triumph of spiritlessness. The imaginative, self-conscious despairer becomes fallible in the prior sense; he or she is supremely capable of both sin and faith. This bold sinner unleashes a power that promises to exhaust itself in the futility of its hatred and thus holds out the possibility for something else. In contrast, the everyman’s worries, whether material (How can I get a house?) or pseudospiritual (How can I get to heaven?), do not so promise to self-destruct. Always able to be renegotiated, they secure themselves against failing at failure to the point where they triumph in their own despair. This rhetoric echoes Luther, both in his offhand instruction to Melanchthon to “sin boldly” and his consistent preference for the afflicted and self-incriminating over the smugly self-righteous.61 At the same time, Anti-Climacus’s Lutheran piety has a decidedly Romantic bent. Just as Byron’s Cain emerges as protagonist only over-and-against the rote religiousness of his family, so too does the benefit of

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despair in The Sickness unto Death emerge only in relation to spiritless philistinism. Like Cain, Anti-Climacus’s despairing protagonist requires a happier, more ignorant crowd from which to take leave. The philistine gives Anti-Climacus the opportunity to rail against spiritlessness with renewed contempt, urging the mass-man to become an individual even if doing so means approaching demonic despair. As I have already implied, the sickness Anti-Climacus privileges in the opening sections also resembles the type romanticized by earlier poets. Anti-Climacus elevates spirited tuberculosis over spiritless cancer, the refining fires of consumption over the anonymous, everyday diseases of the masses. In close keeping with the tenets of Romanticism, to despair with spirit seems the obvious better of two evils.

Dismantling Romanticism It is at this point in the text, with all this rhetorical momentum behind it, that the narrative begins to undo itself. We would predict that the next section, “Despair as Defined by Consciousness” (C.B.), would continue to praise spirited defiance over the despair of the masses. Surprisingly, section C.B. actually calls into question any developing confidence in the benefit of spirited sin. While the first section privileges spirited, self-conscious despair over spiritless resignation, the second elides any meaningful difference between them. It deconstructs any weighted difference between “weak” and “strong” despair and also describes spiritless and spirited despair in analogous, mirroring ways. Thus, at the height of Anti-Climacus’s Romantic leanings, he begins to dismantle them from within. Although Anti-Climacus divides the section first according to ignorance and consciousness (B.a. and B.b), and then according to not willing and willing (b.a and b.b.), a “dialectical interplay between knowing and willing” (SUD 48) actually characterizes each section. Even the person who seems ignorant of being in despair is dimly aware of her or his state. Likewise, even the despairer who willfully, defiantly despairs depends to some degree on (willed) self-deception (42, 47). The section as a whole portrays two predilections or movements toward resolving despair, through either ignorance or defiance. On one end is despair in weakness, that is, despair “not to will to be oneself,” in which the individual remains unwilling to begin the journey to selfhood. On the other end is defiant despair, personified by a person who wills to be a self, but always over and against the power that created him or her. Despite these divisions, Anti-Climacus suggests that either strong or weak despair can serve as a synecdoche for the whole of despair. At first the reader is told that the spectrum of despair can be resolved by or “traced back to” willing to be oneself (defiance) (14). The reader is then told that all despair can be resolved in the form of willing not to be oneself (weakness) (20). Anti-Climacus goes on to explain

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that “the contradiction is the same” for both forms of despair (20). One weakly does not will to be one’s true self (the self coram Deo) when one defiantly wills to be oneself. One wills defiantly to be a false self when one, in weakness, is not willing to be oneself. The mirroring between weak and strong despair may be stated in other ways. Both forms mark the self-defeating attempt to heal despair by erasing or rejecting the fragile relation that occasioned it. They differ in respect to the type of fragility they reject. The weak despairer who does not want to be himself rejects the synthetic human nature that occasions and registers his despair. This self recognizes that, without the polarity between eternal and temporal, he would not be able to see the despair—indeed, he would be out of despair proper and back into that “kind of innocence” (42) accompanying spiritlessness. So the self, in bad faith, tries to shrink from its eternal dimension—tries futilely to choose not to choose, to become distracted and thus obscure the eternal in time. The defiant despairer’s strategy includes one further psychological reversal. Ironically, this strongly willed person also sees herself as essentially weak and de facto in despair. However, like the temper-tantrum child who realizes that she will not get what she wants, she becomes convinced that she does not want to be free of despair. In conscious self-flagellation, defiant despair masochistically tries to control the pain of despair by aggravating it and refusing to be helped. It chooses its (despairing) self-relation over and against other relations, including the one that might ease the pain, precisely because it might ease the pain. We have already noticed how the philistine has “imprisoned itself ” (SUD 42). Anti-Climacus uses parallel images of “inclosing reserve” or “shut-in-ness” (Indesluttethed) to describe the despairer who, already with the more defiant forms of weakness, secures herself, together with her pain, against every external relation (63–67). Unwilling to be helped, the defiant despairer prohibits all access to herself by jamming the lock of self-imprisonment (72). Thus the philistine and the demoniac are, in polar opposite yet mirroring ways, “secure in the power of despair” (44) with their worldly confinement and inward “jammed locks” (SUD 72). They both succeed in resolving the tension between what they know and what they will. Thus they are each also doubly-removed from the possibility of faith by a “new negativity” or “second severance” (44, 109–12). In Part One, therefore, Anti-Climacus not only rescinds the criteria with which the reader could prefer spirited sin but finally portrays the spiritless philistine and the spirited demoniac as parallels. In the end, cancerous lifelessness appears as self-consuming as spirited sin, while spiritual rage looks as sedative and unromantic as Aandløshed (spiritlessness). The prognosis of Part One entails a vicious circle, a Teufelskreis or devil’s circle, and yet includes the rhetorical call for spirit over spiritlessness within it. Can Anti-Climacus prefer spirited to spiritless sin but then describe the two in very similar, equally unfavorable ways?

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Marginal Convers(at)ions The order of the text is surely important. Anti-Climacus does not tell his reader to sin boldly and refrain from sinning in the same breath. Rather, he first leads the reader to question whether spirited sin might be “close” to salvation and then also calls into question any emerging confidence in that proximity. This is a unique Bildungsroman. The reader follows the protagonist out of spiritless despair and cultivates spirited self-consciousness in the process. However, when the protagonist ventures onward and thus moves toward a prison that is the mirroring opposite of the one he just abandoned, it is as if the reader were asked to take a course of his or her own. (In this sense, a mistaken reading perhaps keeps most closely with the author’s intentions.) Even though Anti-Climacus privileges spirited forms of despair, the ultimate goal of the book is faith, and this is figured only negatively by the text. As one interpreter puts it, the goal of Sickness Unto Death lies in the margins of the book.62 Perhaps unsurprisingly then, as Anti-Climacus traces the dialectic of despair, he only briefly mentions possibilities for exiting the progression by religious conversion. About the person who finally “understands that it is weakness to make the earthly so important” or “that it is weakness to despair,” Anti-Climacus traces the way he “now, instead of definitely turning away from despair to faith and humbling himself under his weakness . . . entrenches himself in despair and despairs over his weakness” (SUD 61). Only through such asides does the reader glimpse possibilities that remain unactualized by the despairing protagonist. A subsequent remark is similar but also suggests that immediate possibilities are so comprehensive and expected that the “turning away” mentioned above may come only from an “upheaval” initiated from without: If [despair] does not stop there and just mark time on the spot, and if on the other hand the person in despair does not experience an upheaval [Omvæltning] that puts him on the right road to faith, despair of this kind will either become more intensified in a higher form of despair and continue to be inclosing reserve, or it will break through and destroy the outward trappings . . . [or] become a restless spirit . . . [or] seek oblivion in sensuality. . . . (SUD 65–66) These conversations point away from the book (or perhaps to its margins) and toward a decision that cannot be described by its prose. Scattered within a textual journey that begins and ends with ways of succeeding at failure, the asides mention possibilities of failing at failure, of humbling oneself under one’s weakness (61). Although Anti-Climacus suggests that “one must go through every negativity” (44) in the “thoroughfare to faith” (67), there comes a point at which increased self-consciousness merely becomes self-conspicuousness and potentiated volition

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merely makes one volatile. When the two fuse, the result is childish, demonic rage. Based on this evidence, I would argue that that the real thoroughfare to faith is not a road from spiritlessness to defiance but a continuous journey away from both and into the margins of the text. The sinner should become singly guilty—already aware of her or his despair but not yet resigned to ease its pain by perversely willing it.

Treatment: Fortuning Fallibility sans Romanticizing Religion In an earlier section on the possibility/power/potion of sin, I claimed that AntiClimacus implores his reader to become capable of sin in order to then destroy that possibility in the conversion to faith. In the last section I then argued that this ideal use of fallibility appears less in the power of the author or his protagonist than Anti-Climacus originally suggests. Becoming conscious of sin provides the prerequisite for humbling oneself before God, but it also and more immediately occasions more intensive sin, either through the half-conscious desire to distract oneself from it or by the more spirited and creative—but equally futile—attempt to embrace and thus manage sin. To conclude this chapter, I will suggest (1) that it is within this central textual tension that The Sickness unto Death fully deconstructs the Romantic treatments of sin, and (2) that it does so in order to come to terms with a kind of negative human capability that is more vulnerable and open to interruption than its Romantic counterpart. I have already critiqued how Arnold Come seeks to interpret Anti-Climacus in the wake of Schleiermacher’s theological Romanticism, with its maturation model of human salvation. It is more productive to read Anti-Climacus as simultaneously adopting and overturning the felix culpa of Byron and the other Romantics. AntiClimacus and Byron depict their protagonists as emerging from similar social settings. Against a backdrop of unreflective, repetitive devotion, Cain refuses to praise God, questioning the assumed “pseudomorphism” between the religious and the social.63 Anti-Climacus too dares individuals to emerge from the safe ethicalreligious norms of cultured Christians. Especially at the beginning of Sickness, he labors to save us from despair’s resolution through false immediacy and safety in numbers. The protagonist first and foremost must battle the temptation to become a number among Christendom’s spiritless. Byron and Anti-Climacus also offer a similar, seemingly tragic means of breaking from this false security. Cain purchases his nonconformity through anguish; his break from the others entails a more tragic break within himself. The ensuing alienation between Cain’s infinite spirit and his finite existence rears resentment from the start of the play and leads to utter despair by the end. Thus Byron seems to suggest that if despair lets us break away from the false resolution of con-

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ventional religion, it also excludes the possibility of any resolution, retaining only a fundamental choice between happy and unreflective conformity and suffering self-consciousness. Anti-Climacus too paints a scenario in which manifest despair ostensibly provides his protagonist with the only road out of spiritlessness. The very structure of Sickness is based on a fundamental polarity between unreflective bliss and reflective anguish, as exemplified in the almost strict correlation between rising consciousness and intensifying despair. The “devil’s circle” that we have charted would seem to retrace Cain’s spurious movement from resentment to despondency. And yet in these same movements—in the false progress of despair and the mirroring of spiritlessness and demonic rage—Anti-Climacus also calls into question the predominant characteristics of Romanticism’s felix culpa. In comparison to the fortunate Fall personified by Lucifer (and by Cain in his more self-assured, rebellious moments), Anti-Climacus privileges intensive forms of despair and sin only to undercut any growing confidence in the fruit of such transgression. In other words, he first ennobles the decision to emerge from spiritlessness, only to make the choice between weak and strong sin undecidable. Anti-Climacus eventually condemns both the unwillingness to become a self (the sin of weakness) and any confidence in the payoff of one’s transgressions (the sin of strength), and does so equally and emphatically. This “undecidability” seems to resemble the more tragic and ambiguous version of felix culpa that Cain personifies in his less demonic, more human moments. But here again, Cain’s tragic hovering differs noticeably from Anti-Climacus’s undecidability. Byron nowhere depicts Cain’s deep melancholy as mirroring the shallow contentment of his family, nor does he portray Cain’s journey as returning him to the same prison-house he means to escape. If anything, the distinction between his family’s unreflective conformity and Lucifer’s spirited spite is sharp and stable. We might even claim that the absolute incommensurability between conformity and trespass is what drives the plot to its dénouement, immobilizing Cain and triggering his murderous fit. From Anti-Climacus’s perspective, in contrast, spiritual rage ends up looking just as captive, shallow, and fruitless as the immediacy it is meant to transcend. In Sickness, demonic despair becomes not only the polar opposite of listless indifference, but also its reflection. The extreme suffering of rebellion does not capture the author’s final interest as much as its spuriousness, or even its stupidity. In the present age, despair is “esteemed as a sign of a deep nature,” which Anti-Climacus reckons as “about the same as accepting naughtiness in a child as a sign of a deep nature” (SUD 114–5). Calling the pathos of demonic despair childish is perhaps the most stinging blow Anti-Climacus can land on Romanticism’s vision of authentic humanity. And yet—if we can allow for one additional “and yet”—the bulk of my analysis makes clear that such direct attacks against Romanticism are rare and contribute

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little to the rhetorical function of Sickness as a whole. The rich ambiguities and huge gaps of the text keep alive the romantic question of whether self-conscious sin is closer or further from faith than the spiritlessness of Christendom. If anything, Anti-Climacus directly criticizes the poets to the extent that they answer that question. In this light, we might say that two different notions of “undecidability” are at work in these texts.64 Cain’s central choice cannot be decided—he must perpetually hover—because no common, rational criterion can properly weigh idle satisfaction against raging discontent. In contrast, Anti-Climacus manifests undecidability because the choice between happy ignorance and self-conscious despair turns out to be a false one. Ignorant sin and spiteful sin remain equally childish and unproductive. To the degree that Cain is drawn toward and recapitulates Lucifer’s rebellion, Byron’s text celebrates humanity’s rationally unjustifiable choices for creativity and individuation based on the passion they produce. To the degree that Cain remains suspended between demonic rage and humble faith, the play commends what the early German Romantics called “hovering”65—the capacity not to choose, which is born from an awareness that choosing eliminates possibilities and leads to regret. This avoidance of decision and regret forms the flip side of the romantic resignation to humanity’s tragic plight. The ability to hover—cultivated by continuously choosing not to choose—is yet another commitment, which must continually trust in its own resolve. Therein lies the secret to Romantic management of despair. Under the guise of truthfully facing the tragic condition of humanity without the “props” of church and society, Romantics actually avoid the pain of suffering by claiming it as their “ownmost” capacity. Choosing despair becomes yet another way to avoid despair—albeit one that is highly reflective and ironic. The Sickness unto Death, as I read it, works to expose the essential duplicity of this vision by trying it on and deconstructing it from within. In one sense, Anti-Climacus depicts the human situation as even more tragic than do those Romantics who suggest that suffering is needed for growth, seeing as how Sickness closes every human exit from despair and reveals sin to be spurious in any of its forms. However, by depicting intensified despair as a “false start” after first suggesting that it is the way out of spiritlessness, Anti-Climacus negatively configures a more radical conversion that might lead to rest and transparency in God (SUD 14, 131). Admittedly, someone could point out that Byron’s Cain also seemingly points to its margins to indicate the true resolution of despair. Recall, for example, the moment when Cain tries to resist Lucifer’s lure by recounting his love for his wife. Lucifer says that he “pit[ies] thee who lovest what must perish,” and Cain responds, “And I thee who lov’st nothing” (II.ii.337–38). Certainly, there is opportunity here to glimpse the banality and impotence of despair’s “naughtiness,” as compared with the courage to love that which perishes. If Cain thereby joins

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Sickness in circling around and backhandedly witnessing to the otherwise unspeakable resolution of despair, so much the better. With regard to Sickness, we notice that the true telos and terminus of despair is left undefined and that to “choose” that resolution requires something akin to de Silentio’s double- movement of faith. Recall that Fear and Trembling distinguishes the knight of faith’s expectancy from the resignation of the ethical or tragic hero. The tragic hero can give up every earthly good with as much resignation as Abraham relinquishes Isaac. However, what he cannot do—and what surprises de Silentio much more than Abraham’s willingness to draw the knife—is to receive that which has been renounced again, as if for the first time, with even more joy. What Abraham finds the easiest and the most wonderful the tragic hero can only scorn (FT 35). No gift is more painful to receive than the one I have convinced myself I can do without. That reception, however much we speak of it as a capability, may not be rooted in the subject at all. It always implies another who gives. Thus, for all his language of the hero of faith, de Silentio also suggests that an Abraham-like “capacity” for finding joy again is not something we can discipline ourselves into. The reception is ultimately a marvel, “over and beyond human powers” (FT 48). Anti-Climacus implicitly describes faith as a double-movement as well. His work seems to create the possibility or capability of despair while “next, at every moment” also developing the capacity to turn from despair by “humbling oneself under one’s weakness” (SUD 61). Does that second movement entail human capability and effort? Certainly it presupposes it. Only someone who comes to know the really potent possibility of sin, and thus her fundamental fallibility, is ready for the act of humbling. But is that second movement hers? I can only note that the task of the religious hero is seemingly to become capable of sin without having confidence in that capacity, to resign oneself to suffering while remaining ready to relinquish that resignation if God should want to take it away. Although not as directly, AntiClimacus clearly joins de Silentio in finding this second movement the more miraculous and less understandable of the two, given that he only negatively inscribes it into the margins of his text. Why? Why does Anti-Climacus always “tell all the truth but tell it slant” (Emily Dickinson), why does he portray faith circuitously through fallibility and fault? Why not directly depict the ideal resolution of despair and the ideal outcome of becoming capable of sin? De Silentio again gives us clues. Whereas it is easy to recognize tragic heroes (for example, “their walk is light and bold”) externally, knights of faith “have a striking resemblance to bourgeois philistinism, which infinite resignation, like faith, deeply disdains” (FT 38). De Silentio imagines exclaiming, were he to meet such a knight, “Good Lord . . . he looks just like a tax collector!” (FT 39). Similarly, Anti-Climacus’s imagination of the power/possibility of sin rhetorically distinguishes two states that are externally indistinguishable: the philistine’s lack of

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despair and the true Christian’s faith. As soon as faith is depicted directly, without recursion to the possibility of sin, the distinctions between Christianity and Christendom and between religious faith and self-assurance collapse. Anti-Climacus depicts the possibility of faith as directly as he can—in, with, and under his portrayal of the possibility of sin. There are a number of distinctions that we must make between de Silentio and Anti-Climacus, of course. The former chalks up faith’s incomprehensibility and his own indirect method to his status as an outsider, whereas Anti-Climacus sees both as intrinsic to Christianity. De Silentio admits that heroes of faith are unrecognizable to outsiders or even to other heroes of faith (FT 71). Nevertheless, he upholds that they own a kind of interior space from which to discern their own status before God. For Anti-Climacus, the cleavage that makes sin and faith possible lies not between the single individual and others but within the individual herself. She becomes capable of faith only by becoming a problem to herself. Accordingly, Anti-Climacus’s depiction of the “work” of faith is equally difficult, but less straightforward, than de Silentio. Put differently, in Fear and Trembling the movement of infinite resignation seems to provide a solid stepping-stone for the second movement. In contrast, Sickness never stops turning back on itself. Becoming sin-conscious moves a person closer to confession only by making sin more possible. More intensive despair is closer to faith while also being infinitely farther away. Fallibility is fortunate only as an open-ended promise—as something forever on the way. It follows that, for all the language of warfare and heroism that Anti-Climacus uses to describe the cultivation and elimination of sin’s possibility, that language also undoes itself, witnessing to the irony involved in the quest to become strong in weakness. The connection between faith as a heroic task and faith as a wonder or miracle66 forever goes on behind our backs. Incidentally, Johannes Climacus—the pseudonymous author Anti-Climacus would outdo in the “abandon of his wit”—voices a similar irony in his description of how Christianity advances beyond merely human or Socratic modes of thought. Climacus claims that only God can give the condition for understanding Christian truth, but once God gives that condition, the Socratic is again valid (PF 63, 65). These powers of God and humanity seem fairly correlated until we realize that the truth that is recollected when Socratic knowledge returns consists in recognizing that one is outside the truth. By recalling a truth he did not know he had lost, “the learner is definitely excluded from the truth, even more than when he was ignorant of being untruth” (PF 14). Anti-Climacus runs with the same irony, queerly enabling readers to access the truth by confronting the depth of their resistance. Becoming fallible takes us beyond the ignorance of sin only by definitely excluding us from the truth. The possibility of sin brings us closer to faith only as we become infinitely further removed.

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Becoming fallible is necessary, superfluous work. The heroic task that Sickness demands is that we become who we are, but with more passion—that we make our condition more sufferable. This chapter thus ends where it started, with the precedence of Anti-Climacus’s medicinal metaphors over his volitional ones. Becoming fallible and capable of faith will look less like dual movements that the will directs and more like the utterly unromantic process of remaining fractured, abiding in our condition, and becoming (a) patient. Anti-Climacus schools his reader to become or remain the kind of patient a doctor could attend. In this sense, the true fortune of fallibility is something that can only be fortuned—expected with a hope beyond hope, like the terminally ill awaiting a miracle cure. We now turn to AntiClimacus’s second work, Practice in Christianity, to trace what happens when the sin-sick soul meets the divine physician face to face.

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4 Felix Offensatio in Practice in Christianity

But this in turn is the sharpened pathos—namely, continually to have a possibility that, if it is actualized, is a fall as much deeper as faith is higher than all the religiousness of immanence. —Johannes Climacus, Postscript There is too much in us that resists total truth, for us to come into that truth except via our resistance. —Sebastian Moore, The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger There is no such thing as a harmless remedy. —Jacque Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” The preceding chapter explored the words that Anti-Climacus hears at the sickbed: “Get possibility, get possibility, possibility is the only salvation” (SUD 39). I argued that the only possibility potent enough to revive the spiritless self is the possibility of sin. And yet, unlike those Romantics who resign themselves to despair, The Sickness unto Death cautions that sin’s possibility more readily exacerbates our condition than heals it. Fallibility becomes fortunate only insofar as we resign our resignation and open ourselves to an unknown cure in something like a double-movement of faith. This chapter will examine the dynamism of such radical healing by analyzing Anti-Climacus’s second book, Practice in Christianity. As readers might guess, the Christian balm does not straightforwardly or painlessly heal the sin-sick soul. In fact, I will argue that the first and

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enduring effect of Christian redemption, according to Anti-Climacus, is to sharpen and deepen possibilities for sin. Standing intimately before Christ, we are made to face not only our own intrinsic fallibility but the temptation to be offended by God’s own vulnerable love. I will show that the bulk of Practice faces the reader with possibilities for offense and paints Christian faith as an enduring struggle with negative capabilities. Calling fallibility and the possibility of offense fortunate neither abstracts from our enduring existential condition (Hegel) nor yields to the tragic conditions of humanity (Romanticism), but rather recapitulates the shifting identities and linguistic reversals of the original felix culpa.

Potentiating Possibility Notwithstanding the fact that Anti-Climacus assumes the status of the physician of souls, it has become clear that he is little more than a pharmacist: able to stir up possibilities for sin in the hopes of stirring souls but remaining—as one more author without authority—dependent on readers to appropriate the power of the book and the power of sin however they see fit. By contrast, Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus’s second work, announces that the Doctor himself will see the reader now. The power to heal belongs to Christ alone, that divine physician whom Anti-Climacus vividly describes throughout “The Invitation,” the book’s opening section. Christ comes forth with outstretched arms beckoning, “Come here, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (PC 11–22; Matt. 11:28). Readers exhausted by the dead ends and textual traps of The Sickness unto Death and who glimpse in its pages their own deadened, selfimprisoned lives cannot but be moved by the image of this Healer and the respite that he offers. For the opening section, readers anticipate resting in his arms, having been offered what looks like a soothing balm able to heal their fractured and faulted selves. And then, quite suddenly, an about-face, or what Anti-Climacus entitles “The Halt” (PC 23–36). Having wooed potential disciples toward the physician’s care, Anti-Climacus immediately describes Christ as having to become the “sign of offense” in order also to be the “object of faith” (PC 94, 98–99, 105). Because of this necessity, an “infinite fear of offense” must accompany “the infinite passion” of faith in Christ (111). Potential disciples shudder and recoil from the Inviter as if he had said, with Virgil’s Aeneid, procul o procul este profane (away, away, O unhallowed ones) instead of “Come to me and I will give you rest” (PC 23). Far from healing the fragility of human freedom and the fallibility of the self-conscious sinner, this strange physician reopens the wounds. The Christ revelation

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thereby introduces a new and most devastating possibility of sin—the possibility of taking offense. There has been less scholarly attention to Anti-Climacus’s radical cure, Practice in Christianity, than to his diagnoses and prognoses in Sickness. Perhaps this is for the same reason that people are more fascinated with Dante’s Inferno than with his Paradiso (or why the Joker is more fun to watch than Batman): purity of heart can appear boring beside the sin-sick soul, especially when the latter rages with demonic despair. But when the doctor is finally revealed to the reader, the “practice” that he commends is anything but conventional or banal. Indeed, it is so radical and counterintuitive that it can appear “infinitely worse than the sickness” (PC 110). “The help looks like a torment, the relief like a burden,” Anti-Climacus’s imagined interlocutor repeatedly cries (114). The narrator affirms this objection and does him one better. Even more halting than the burdensome practice is the Practitioner himself, whose importance remains irreducible to his saving work. Two carts seem before the horse. First, the Christian cure alone fully reveals and often exacerbates existential problems; second, the presence of Christ subsumes, exhausts, and often occludes the help that Christians want to find in him. Not surprisingly, then, Practice in Christianity has the possibility of offense everywhere within it. The explicit phrase appears verbatim on scores of pages,1 and the second of three sections is devoted exclusively to this theme. But offense lies between the lines as well—everywhere that Anti-Climacus describes the interpersonal encounter between an individual and Christ. This encounter, which Kierkegaard calls “contemporaneity,” simultaneously involves attraction and repulsion, two forces which seem to move the work as a whole. The three parts of Practice formally cohere by theme and genre, as each part is an extended explication of a Gospel verse. Number I explicates, “Come here, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28); Number II, “Blessed is he who is not offended by me” (Matt. 11:6); and Number III, the double entendre that is central to John’s gospel, “From on high he will draw all to himself ” (John 3:14; 12:32). Anti-Climacus interprets these verses with a particular sort of hermeneutical suspicion.2 How are we to ensure that the rest offered by Christ is not mistaken for idleness, or that Christian blessedness does not warp into self-serving eudemonism, or that Christian salvation does not merely fulfill human wishes? Recall that Anti-Climacus earlier conjured up the powerful possibility of sin, or what we called fallibility, the ability to fall, in order to distinguish the presumption of innocence from the consciousness of being rescued from sin. In many ways, Practice colors in that poetic invention with the specific temptation of being offended by Christ. For Anti-Climacus, the possibility of offense must be the negative mark of all things essentially Christian (rest, blessedness, salvation) in order to

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ensure that they are taken with earnestness and that the motivation for seeking them is the love of Christ alone. I will say more soon about how the “possibility of offense” functions critically in Anti-Climacus’s text. First I want to mark the uniqueness of his “practice in Christianity” by comparing Practice to Augustine’s developed theology. Recall, in chapter 1 of this book, our imagined scenario of a professor charting Augustine’s stages of salvation history. Humanity begins with the ability to sin or not to sin; it passes through the fallen state of losing its ability not to sin; finally, it culminates— at the end of history or in the lives of the saints—in perfect freedom, the inability to sin. The previous two chapters here might be taken to correspond to Augustine’s first two stages of faith. Haufniensis describes created freedom as having the power to sin or not to sin, adding that the one who reflects on this indeterminate freedom will likely get dizzy and fall. Anti-Climacus then examines how succumbing to sin potentiates sin’s power. Although The Sickness unto Death never claims that not sinning is impossible, it does make that possibility so marginal and guides the reader into the labyrinth of despair so deeply that sin becomes a power that we must deal with, even if we use it against itself in the conversion to faith. However, despite these broad similarities,3 there are noteworthy differences between Augustine’s theology and Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works. Augustine specifies the shifts between stages in terms of the categorical presence or absence of sin’s possibility. By contrast, Kierkegaard, especially through Anti-Climacus, specifies these shifts in terms of different determinations of sin’s possibility. This difference shows up in Anti-Climacus’s divergence from the Augustinian stage of regeneration. Augustine understands the encounter with Christ to heal the fragility of freedom. Eschatologically, if not also in time (for example, in the lives of the saints), Christians gain true libertas through the irresistibility of God’s grace. Negatively construed, this highest and only true freedom is the inability not to love God, the impossibility of sin. Anti-Climacus is silent on many issues concerning eschatology,4 but he is supremely decided on the relationship between the encounter with Christ and the possibility of sin. Meeting God’s love in Christ sharpens, rather than eradicates, the individual’s ability to sin. Rather than speaking of non posse peccare (the impossibility of sin), we might say Anti-Climacus characterizes Christian existence as posse peccare potentissme—the possibility of sin potentiated by Christ to the highest power. Christ’s love and offer of forgiveness thereby radically potentiate, reshape, and even “redeem” the individual’s ability to sin. We should distinguish this claim from the more obvious way that Kierkegaard diverges from the Augustinian tradition. In “Arminian Edification: Kierkegaard on Grace and Free Will,” Timothy Jackson distinguishes Kierkegaard’s belief in the preservation of human freedom from Augustine’s late understanding of the sinner’s bondage (non posse non peccare) and

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God’s irresistible grace (non posse peccare). According to Jackson’s interpretation of Kierkegaard, Christian freedom (libertas) has freedom of choice (liberum arbitrium) “within” or “beside” it.5 He links this free choice to God’s kenotic omnipotence, which allows God’s power to come through love and thereby uphold human freedom rather than obliterate it.6 Whereas Jackson speaks of human freedom as preserved by God’s self-emptying love, I will suggest how human freedom and the possibility of sin are determinatively shaped and intensified by the Incarnation. According to Jackson’s reading of Kierkegaard, Christ comes to us incognito, as an ostensibly weak being with intolerable love (or what Anti-Climacus names the “sign of offense”), in order to leave our freedom intact, to ensure that we come to him by choice. In my reading, Christ incarnates the possibility of offense not simply to preserve human freedom, but to recreate that freedom as the very power to not be offended. In this chapter I join Anti-Climacus in showing how Christian practice appears “much too much” in light of sinners’ self-diagnoses and so tempts them to take offense. Already in “the Halt,” Anti-Climacus suggests that would-be disciples are repulsed to learn they are responsible for Christ’s suffering as well as their own and thus must undergo painful penitence.7 The revelation repels potential disciples both from Christ and from themselves. Then, in the second section of Practice, Anti-Climacus traces the possibility of offense not only to humanity’s sinful condition but also, and perhaps primarily, to the nature of the Healer and his treatment. Christ, in order to become the object of faith, necessarily becomes and remains the very possibility of offense. Humanity is repulsed either by the “loftiness” of Jesus, as when this simple human being presumes to forgive sins (PC 94–101), or by his “lowliness,” as when humanity accepts that Christ is God but then meets him in his suffering and abasement (102–5). The third and final section of Practice in Christianity then connects our attraction and repulsion, claiming that Christ draws all to himself only by “thrusting them away” by virtue of his abasement, suffering, and death (153). Throughout the text, Anti-Climacus suggests that the “help” offered in Christianity amounts to becoming present to the Helper—a Helper who is the help, who offers nothing more than his own suffering self. When potential patients confront this fact, they become affronted. Finally and most intricately, Anti-Climacus shows that God cannot go back on God’s own resolve to become lowly and so cannot make impossible the possibility of offense. God’s power is perpetually revealed incognito, a revelation that itself repulses. The gift of Savior and salvation appear simultaneously too much (because uncircumscribable) and too little (because seemingly powerless). The Christian cure thus introduces, as if for the first time, the possibility of the most spirited sin. Why does Anti-Climacus take the possibility of offense in particular to be “Christianity’s crucial criterion” (SUD 83)? The simplest answer is that offense—

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from the Greek skandalon—is central to Jesus’ interactions with his historical contemporaries, as recorded in the Gospel narratives. That centrality is often occluded in translations of skandalon, many of which fail to connote the interpersonal defilement and provocation of Jesus’ words and deeds.8 So in many ways Anti-Climacus simply recovers the possibility of offense from the Bible. But whereas the possibility of offense is intrinsic to Christ, the possibility becomes problematic in Christendom. It follows that Kierkegaard also pays attention to offense in order to diagnosis diffi culties of becoming a Christian in Christendom. For Anti-Climacus, “the possibility of offense” promises to overcome three unfortunate assumptions of established Christianity: (1) that Christian faith essentially entails an innocuous set of beliefs, (2) that Christianity comprises a “harmless remedy” that should be embraced for the benefits it offers, and (3) that the importance of the Savior is exhausted by the salvation that he offers. I examine each assumption in turn.

Faith through Repulsion Anti-Climacus’s repeated claim that no one comes to faith except through the possibility of offense characterizes human faith and freedom in Christological as well as anthropological terms. Recall that, for Jackson, Kierkegaard retains freedom of choice as an element beside or within Christian libertas. In doing so, Jackson misses the intensification and specification of freedom given by Christ.9 His perspective negatively construes the relationship between Christ and human freedom— humanity is free because God’s grace through Christ cannot undo a person’s capacity to resist that grace. However, the rhetoric of Practice suggests that the Incarnation creates the possibility to resist grace by taking offense, while also creating the possibility that our resistance will itself be resisted in something like a double-movement of faith. The human capacity to resist is not an intrinsic capability; rather, Christ elicits it together with the possibility of its opposite. The possibility of offense therefore does not merely “accompany” the possibility of faith, but provides the repulsion out of which faith comes into existence (PC 121). On my reading, the possibility of offense actually impinges on human’s free choice, characterizing the very context out of which a person chooses. When possibilities impinge, they entangle and so characterize the very nature of freedom. Anti-Climacus characteristically expresses this odd configuration of faith and freedom through images rather than categories. For example, he characterizes religious choice through the analogy of a person standing at a crossroads: “just as the concept of ‘faith’ is an altogether distinctively Christian term, so in turn is ‘offense’ an altogether distinctively Christian term related to faith. The possibility of offense is the crossroad, or it is like standing at the crossroad. From the possibility of offense, one turns either to offense or to faith, but no one comes to faith except

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through the possibility of offense” (PC 81). What makes this situation “distinctively Christian” is not the choice between offense and faith, but the fact that this choice is made through the possibility of offense. In Anti-Climacus’s image, the possibility of offense not only lies down one of two roads, it also shapes the very crossroads upon which one stands. Anti-Climacus underscores the impinging quality of offense’s possibility when he elsewhere writes that one must “push through” (PC 115), “go through” (97–98, 99), “pass by” (101), “pass through” (101), and be “rescued” from (116) the possibility of offense. Anti-Climacus describes the possibility of offense as “the repulsion [Frastød] in which faith can come into existence—if one does not choose to be offended” (PC 121). Frastød means being viscerally repelled; it connotes an encounter with gruesomeness, as with a hideous face. The components of the word itself suggest the physicality and immediateness of the reaction—one is literally “put off ” (støde-fra) or thrust away from the scandal. The Greek skandalon, which Kierkegaard also uses, is best translated as “stumbling block” and also connotes immediate and physical danger. Similarly, Anti-Climacus uses the Danish noun Forargelse (offense, indignation, outrage, scandal) and its adjective form forarget to connote a charged, intersubjective setting that begets an immediate, even visceral, reaction. In some senses, this possibility of revulsion or repugnance parallels Johannes Climacus’s appeal to Lessing’s “broad ugly ditch”—the chasm between accidental truths of history and eternal truth, which makes language of God-becomeflesh inherently absurd (CUP I 98).10 Both Climacus and Anti-Climacus connect revulsion to the particularity of Christ. Yet the difference between the ugliness of Lessing’s ditch and the repulsiveness of Jesus’ presence is also apparent. What for Climacus was something which faith needs to get over (through a “leap”) becomes for Anti-Climacus something which faith must get through, perpetually and forcefully so. Anti-Climacus’s language conveys what the metaphor of standing at a crossroad only vaguely suggests—namely, that the possibility of offense is a jarring, stirring, and repulsing determinant of faith. The possibility of offense thus “guards” the entrance into faith as a “mortal weapon” (102) against all counterfeit doubles. It is “faith’s protection.”11 Through it every Christian passes, and without it, Anti-Climacus fears, embattled faith, and indifferent choosing become indistinguishable. Note that such indifference might characterize uncontextualized volition no less than prolonged deliberation. Anti-Climacus thus underscores the possibility of offense not only to distinguish faith from an informed, rational decision, but also to distinguished faith from a unilateral willful leap, despite the reification and popularity of that supposedly Kierkegaardian image. Contrary to both, faith is embattled and reactive—a product of relational encounter.

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Do Christians Love Christ for Naught? As we have begun to see, Anti-Climacus cannot overstress how the possibility of offense provides protection against “the established order,” with its spiritless Christians and their “Church indifferent.” In fact, throughout Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus presents himself as a master of suspicion, joining the ranks of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (and Haufniensis, too) in unmasking the self-serving benefits that cultured Christianity confers. We might even read Practice as posing the question of the Accuser in the Book of Job: Does Job love God for naught? In other words: Can a person offer God proper praise even without receiving social, material or spiritual benefits? Is disinterested religion possible?12 Anti-Climacus persistently underscores the possibility of offense to ensure that Christianity is not boiled down to its benefits and that Christ never becomes a “direct answer to a direct question” (PC 135) in such a way that the question situates and dictates the answer. As Anti-Climacus sees it, essential Christianity is self-critical by nature; Christ warned his disciples against being scandalized because that possibility was intrinsic to Christ’s life, particularly to his suffering and death. Following Christ’s example, Christian disciples should resist offense—but never by doing away with its possibility. In Kierkegaard’s day, speculative philosophical theology (of Hegel, but also of Danish dogmaticians such as Martensen) skirted the possibility of offense by understanding the Incarnation to represent the unity of God-in-general with humanity-in-general. Enlightenment moralism (of Kant, but also of churchmen such as Mynster, Bishop of Denmark) circumvented the possibility of offense by extracting Christ’s teachings from Christ’s identity.13 This domestication of Christ within speculative systems or moral precepts extended beyond the university or parish. In fact, Christendom itself, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, subtly and almost entirely circumvents the possibility of offense and with it the possibilities for becoming authentically Christian (PC 112–20). The possibility of offense in Anti-Climacus’s second work thus parallels the “possibility of despair” in his first—both possibilities ensure that Christ and the Christian life are not taken in vain. Anti-Climacus suggests that loving Christ—with full awareness that Christ is the very possibility of offense—alone assures that Christian love remains “disinterested.”

From Critique to Christ Still, while clearly the critical function of Practice remains central, Anti-Climacus takes interest in much more than disinterested love. Unlike other critics of religion, he exposes the benefits of cultured religion in order that one might become more authentically Christian. To claim that Christian love must be disinterested only

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negatively expresses and helps protect the more audacious idea that there is something outside one’s own horizon of expectation and need which might arouse desire. In this sense, the text brings readers to the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real, to borrow Iris Murdoch’s definition of love. The possibility of offense, whatever critical function it might serve, is only and always manifest by the actuality of Christ. This configuration between human possibility and the Christian revelation is odd. On the one hand, offense remains another version of human despair— intensified only by standing before Christ (SUD 113). In this sense, the possibility of offense designates human fallibility at its breaking point—not simply the origin or occasion for sin, but an internal capacity that must be confronted and resisted.14 On the other hand, Anti-Climacus links the power of sin not only to fragile and faulty human capabilities but to the One who might redeem them from without. Already in The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus makes clear that offense constitutes a response to something new and different—the forgiveness of sin (SUD 113–24). Practice in Christianity underscores this alterity by naming Christ himself as the possibility of offense. The claim that Christ is the possibility of offense entails not just a hyperbole meant to jar the reader from spiritual slumbers; it rather marks Kierkegaard’s desire to understand human fallibility and fault backwardly from what we know of the Christ encounter. Importantly, this retrospective determination does not cancel the earlier analyses of human fragility and fallibility by Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus. As with the felix culpa clause of the early liturgy, we must rather read in both directions. According to the liturgy, sin necessitates Christ and Christ makes sin unnecessary. For Anti-Climacus, the Redeemer blesses those who are not offended but cannot do so without incarnating the possibility of offense. Oddly enough, when he proclaims that Christ becomes the possibility of offense to become the object of faith, Anti-Climacus thus entails a way back to orthodoxy, a way toward proper praise of One who remains anterior to and reverses the horizon of human expectation—a transcendence, an Absolute.15 The proclamation that this possibility of offense is happy—O felix offensatio—thereby witnesses through its linguistic failure to that which slips away from its grasp. The whole second book by Anti-Climacus performs a similar para/orthodoxy. It would seem that the negative, critical function of the possibility of offense cannot be disentangled from its positive witness to Christ’s excessive identity, forgiveness, and love. This combination already helps make sense of Anti-Climacus’s repeated claim that Christ himself is the possibility of offense. Of course, critique and witness, suspicion and faith, make strange bedfellows and we perhaps justifiably question his project. Can Anti-Climacus pass judgment on the false securities of Christendom and the reification of the “choice” for faith in the name of Christ? Does not that name typically function as the transcendental signifier par excellence,

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securing the existence of the believer and her will power no less than the free play of signs? Alternatively, can Jesus be understood, not as the savior from human fallibility but as one who finally discloses and deepens it? What prevents the Christ event from becoming another prop that saves us from our fragile, feeble freedoms— the worst kind of bad faith? To respond to these challenges, we need to say more about the “about-face” that the possibility of offense enacts and about the face of Christ that occasions it. I will do so by putting Anti-Climacus in conversation with the unconventional postmodern theorist, Emmanuel Levinas, who is strangely “liturgical” in ways that help connect Kierkegaard to the para/orthodoxy introduced early on. In one alluring place, Levinas even uses the word “liturgy” to describe the passive activity of being interrupted by and responding to a transcendent Other.16 Kierkegaard calls that action passionate faith, or subjectivity itself. Others know it as, and through, worship.

About Face Already in The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus insists that entrance into Christian discipleship would require an “about-face” (Omvendelse) from sin to faith (SUD 61). That conversion entails humbling oneself under one’s weakness (SUD 61), and thus it remains so counterintuitive to the one enmeshed in sin that it will feel like an upheaval (Omvæltning) from without (SUD 65). Practice in Christianity then makes the sin-sick soul take a second about-face, one that is even more alarming. The healing offered to the now doubly downhearted appears more painful than the condition it promises to heal. Still, Practice rhetorically functions to get us to face the abased Christ and thereby confront the possibility of offense. Before the face of Jesus, and him crucified, one is faced with an entangled, embattled choice: Will you be offended or will you have faith? (PC 140–42; cf. UDVS 201–12; WA 21–35; JP 1:952). For all his emphasis on facing up to Christ in his lowliness and on the implied intersubjective space that occasions both sin and faith, Anti-Climacus uses Christ’s face only as a metonym for the entire Savior. The primacy of the face itself, and of the face-to-face encounter, best emerges when one reads Kierkegaard in light of Levinas. A number of recent studies explicitly pair the Danish Christian with the French Jew.17 While I will not repeat that important work here, readers who are familiar with Levinas will see his imprint in my explication of Practice. In this section I name four points of contact between the works of Levinas, especially Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being,18 and the works by Anti-Climacus. These connections help show how Anti-Climacus continues to anticipate the postmodern critique of presence even as they portray the immediacy of Christ’s face.19 It is in

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being encountered by that face and undergoing the repulsions and reversals it induces that the would-be disciple is placed in a similar passional context as the worshippers of Easter Eve. First, Levinas and Anti-Climacus equally clarify that the possibility of scandal depends on direct interpersonal encounter. The highest form of sin—which Levinas describes as murder and Anti-Climacus as offense—becomes possible only when one finds oneself directly before the gaze of the Other.20 Both authors contend that from that “position” (which is not a posture but a disturbance), only two options are possible: either faith and worship (Anti-Climacus) and an ethics of infinite obligation (Levinas) or rejection and effacement of the one before whom one stands. Second, both writers suggest that the responsibility that is ideally summoned by the face is not simply a matter of choice. Or better: it is not a matter of simple choice. Levinas emphasizes this point repeatedly. When I stand before the naked face of the other, I am not allowed to decide after prolonged deliberation or with an arbitrary will whether to respond to her or not, since—as facing me—the other is not the object of my deliberation but the one who founds and fuels my responsibility, my ability to respond. For Kierkegaard too, the face of Jesus presents itself as that which summons and subjects me. The “only” freedom I have (but this is a primary meaning of Christian freedom) is to undergo the subjection and respond to the summons, or to reject it out of hand. Both authors write of the transcendent face—whether of Jesus or another—as prior to my choices and commitments.21 Their attention to intersubjective spaces likewise problematizes any neat distribution of agency. It follows that faith, no less than offense, may be radically reactive and passive in nature. In this case the “hero of faith,” as de Silentio puts it, would be best characterized as he or she who sustains receptivity, openness, or what Kierkegaard elsewhere calls subjectivity.22 The last chapter concluded with such suggestions; I will return to them soon when I depict faith as an undergoing or a suffering. Third, Levinas writes consistently of the radical asymmetry of the face-to-face, distinguishing his characterizations from the reciprocity of Buber’s I-Thou relationship. The other, when I face her, is always already above me. In the language of Levinas’s first major work, the other’s “infinity” resists my attempts to limit my obligations by containing her in a “totality,” in a ready-made system of recognition and reciprocity. Levinas later writes of the “trauma of [this] transcendence”—how it throws my autonomy into question.23 He clarifies that the height of the other stems not from her majesty alone; it also and more primarily derives from her wantonness.24 The other is the stranger, the outcast, the hungry. She commands from on high precisely by appearing desolate. Before her face I cannot but become responsible or repulsed at her ungodliness. For the Jewish phenomenologist, of course, tout autre est tout autre, every other is wholly other—is the Other.25 For

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Kierkegaard, Christ’s own enigmatic combination of wantonness and majesty surpasses and sustains others; obligations to him become paradigmatic for all others. Despite this important difference, both authors trace the relationship’s asymmetry to the disturbing mixture of power and powerlessness that is revealed in the face of the other. Fourth, both the human face (Levinas) and Christ (Anti-Climacus) are “immediate” in many ways—they face a person without intermediaries—and yet they still resist being “present” to me in the way an intuition or immediate selfconsciousness might. In fact, by claiming that the other’s alterity and the ethical obligation she demands are prior to all self-consciousness, Levinas joins Derrida and other poststructuralists in resisting the relegation of difference into my horizon of understanding. Admittedly, Levinas is here the odd postmodernist out. Others critique pure presence by revealing the opacity of language; they insist that no human term can transparently yield to the referent it seeks to make present. By contrast Levinas attends to the superfluity of the face alongside the superfluity of language. Still the presence of that face—like writing itself—overflows the concept, endlessly deferring the meaning that one would like to extract from it. “The face speaks”;26 it functions as a signifier. In this way, the naked face for Levinas remains outside conceptual comprehension, functioning much like writing for Derrida. One might say that while the face is present, it is too present, too immediate for the one who is faced with it to look past it, appropriate it, or translate it into stable concepts. For Anti-Climacus, Jesus also functions like Derrida’s sign in resembling the face. He does not, cannot mean one thing, cannot denote an idea that one could comprehend and appropriate without remainder. Christ overflows the concept of Christ. Like the face itself, he takes one past the structure of representation altogether. The fact that Christ has to become the sign of offense in order also to be the object of faith provides a case in point. Christ becomes object only as sign. Indeed, for Anti-Climacus he is and remains a “sign of contradiction” (PC 124–27) that signifies infinitely more than we could comprehend. These four parallels between Anti-Climacus and Levinas open possibilities for speaking of Christ as Savior and of becoming contemporary with him without assuming that Christ solves the problem of fallibility by straightforwardly responding to human need.27 Even when we face Christ, the Christ we face is what AntiClimacus calls a “duplexity,” and a contradictory one at that—his strength hidden in weakness, the object of faith under the sign of offense. The very immediacy of Christ, his overdeterminacy, untranslatability, or “infinity” keeps one from appropriating him according to our own understanding, expectation, and need. Far from healing the fissure of fallibility, Christ reopens the wound. This gap or fissure between the face of Christ and our intentions and expectations bears the possibility of offense. For Levinas, the possibility of murder emerges together with the possibility

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of ethical responsibility, since both depend on an interpersonal encounter. So too for Anti-Climacus. The highest form of sin—the possibility of offense—is not possible on one’s own. It depends on facing the particular wantonness and majesty of Christ. In the words of the Postscript, the individual who encounters Christ is given a possibility which, if actualized, entails “a fall as much deeper as faith is higher than all the religiousness of immanence” (CUP I 585). As a way of connecting this claim with earlier chapters, we might say that the self coram Christi is still fragile and fallible, still capable of sin and called to convert this capacity into faith. But this self is now re-created by Christian revelation, whereby the Eternal becomes manifest as hidden under an opposite sign. The Incarnation, this “inordinate concession from God” (SUD 113), seeks to arouse humanity’s love, forgive sin, and heal spiritual sickness. Yet God’s love will not do this—Anti-Climacus even claims that love cannot do this—without also introducing the possibility of offense. Christ thereby sharpens the individual’s pathos.28 With the height of faith, God’s love through Christ brings possibilities for the deepest fall—as if for the first time.29 Although fraught with danger, the possibilities for sin that accompany faith in Christ are fortunate, blessed, and happy. The next chapter, on felicity, suggests that Christian joy is inseparable from the possibility of offense and that the possibility of offense is—as the passage into and sustainer of faith—the greatest Christian joy. Already here we can write of felix offensatio (the happy encounter30 with an obstacle), or even felix Offensator (the blessedness of Christ who, as the Obstacle, conditions both stumbling and faith). The liberation that Christ offers does not, according to Anti-Climacus, restore to the Christian a liberum arbitrium that, according to Haufniensis, humanity never had. Rather more paradoxically, the Christian is freed from sin-consciousness only by becoming entangled with new possibilities— possibilities for forgiveness and blessedness as well as offense and intensified despair. This overwrought position of standing before Christ and so within the possibility of offense recapitulates the dispositional position of the Easter Eve worshippers who find the nature and meaning of sin reversed. My earlier analyses suggested that breaking old words against new experiences of grace characterizes the language of liturgy itself.31 Moreover, proclamations of a fortunate Fall break open those old words—in this case, words about sin—in particularly astounding ways. They also rupture and disperse what we think to be the self ’s inherent capacities, including its capacity to sin. In one pregnant moment, Levinas uses leitourgia (liturgy) to name a similar disturbance of the subject. He cautiously salvages the word to characterize any “absolutely patient action” that is gratuitous in terms of the self ’s own projects and yet essential for welcoming the other as other.32 The reference is enigmatic. He notes that every religious signification must be removed from leitourgia, at least

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provisionally. Still, his description of the face-to-face encounter—where another interrupts every ready-made system of reciprocity and recognition and so founds one’s ability to respond to another, gratuitously and effectively—this encounter is not unlike what liturgical theologians such as Dirk Lange, Gordon Lanthrop, and Catherine Pickstock take to be at the heart of the Church’s sacramental action and liturgical speech. Recall that, for Lange, liturgy is more like a traumatic reencounter with something that never quite passes than the assured recalling of something safely gone. The words of institution, for example, recall not a presence already past/ passed but an absence that remains all too present, a trace or traumatic event that eludes the worshippers’ grasp. Such an event cannot be straightforwardly remembered, as if it were in human control to reproduce. Rather, it is the event that repeats itself, nonidentically, and only as a trace. Liturgy—as a human endeavor—fails. It works only through such failure. Lange adds that this essential failure leads to the permeability of the liturgical context as well as to the fracturing of the worshipper himself. The irrupting absence confronts the subject, “rendering human faculties passive and receptive.”33 For his part, Lanthrop emphasizes that the failed speech of the liturgy—this speech that speaks through its failing—still manages to make meaning by providing a less literal and nonunilateral way of keeping unsettled selves and meanings together through constant juxtaposition.34 Finally, according to Pickstock’s description of the mediaeval Roman Rite, the invocation of the wholly other through the “apostrophic voice” provides an alternative to the Cartesian dichotomy of subject and object. Through the invocation’s sheer undifferentiated “O!” the worshipper is disposed, led outside herself, made unreservedly receptive to that which lies outside, albeit in a way that reconstructs true subjectivity.35 Through its evocation of a God who is both unsecurable and all too present, the worshipper fashions deep humility “which fully admits its dependence upon that which is invoked for it to be subject at all.”36 When Levinas writes of a “deposition of the sovereign in self-consciousness,”37 he joins Lange, Lanthrop, and Pickstock in tracing how the liturgy disrupts our settled meanings and expectations and inverts our essential capabilities, all in response to the advent of the Other. Those disruptions and inversions also principally characterize what Kierkegaard finds in the Christ encounter, as repeated and performed throughout Practice.38 The trick for Kierkegaard, as for Levinas and the liturgy itself, becomes how to express the disruption of ourselves and our comprehension as witness to the other’s advent without recourse to newly encoded linguistic systems.39 This is a question about theological method, although Kierkegaard would dislike that term. If Christ halts those who come to him for healing, suspending their assumptions about sickness, sin, and salvation, then how does one continue to find or make meaning in these terms, and in the Savior himself, without reinserting one’s needs (or consciousness, or conceptions)

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as the yardstick for Christian beatitude? Alternatively, if one somehow speaks of the Savior apart from salvation and salvation apart from sin, what then marks the Savior’s relevance? In Anti-Climacus’s words, “what good is it” (PC 62)? Such methodological questions cannot be wholly divorced from existential ones: If Christ’s first and enduring act is to contest my quest for secure identity by prying open “my” fragility and fallibility, then what good is there in embracing faith? The next section turns to pointed passages in Practice that resist making Christ and Christianity into the kind of good news that sinners crave, while still creating the possibility for hearing the gospel anew. In working through these passages, I will grapple with broad theological issues concerning the relation between Christology, soteriology, and hamartiology—not to mention how these -ologies relate to the concrete encounter between Savior and sinners. As always, Kierkegaard’s theology lies in, with, and under his rhetorical art.

Help’s Helper “But then what good is it?” Anti-Climacus asks this question on behalf of those who have heard that Christianity is no gentle comfort (PC 62). If the revelation of Christ determines and accentuates a person’s capacity to sin, if a person “wins” faith only by continuously battling the impetus to scoff at Christ, if Christ’s reprieve for those who labor involves the arduous task of humbling oneself as a sinner, then—we can phrase it no better than Anti-Climacus—what good is it? His response might leave us wanting: “Answer: Be quiet, it is the absolute” (62). Throughout Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus silences the question in order to frustrate our attempt to make the work of Christ serve our needs for rest and healing. Or at least the treatment that Christ offers resists being appropriated without radical reconsideration of what counts as health and sickness. In this section I will more carefully sort through the relationship between human need for and characterization of salvation, on the one hand, and the Savior as irreducible to and perhaps incommensurable with that need, on the other. Exploring that relationship will entail returning to Anti-Climacus’s medical tropes, especially to his designation of Christ as a “Helper.” We inquire into the strange, inverted relationship between humanity’s diagnostics and the treatment it receives from Christ, as well as between the divine cure and the divine doctor—this “help” and the “Helper.” Thus there are two related issues here. First, we will inquire into the relationship between human diagnostics and divine treatment, between human expectations for help and the help that is offered by Christ. Sifting through this issue involves attending to how Kierkegaard’s metaphors entail a different kind of signification—how they make meaning while resisting comprehension. Second, we will trace the relationship between soteriology and Christology, or between the help

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that Christ gives and his identity as a helper. Both issues inform debates in contemporary theology. The first questions whether any ordo salutis or theory of atonement does adequate justice to the peculiarity of Christ’s work. The second deliberates on whether the person or work of Christ should be most determinative for Christian belief and practice. Together, these discussions enable one to trace rhetorical patterns within Practice, patterns that warn against overdependence on closed structures of understanding that would mitigate against Christ’s particularity and the reversals of Christian salvation. Built on such a counterstructural structure, Anti-Climacus’s Christology and soteriology comprise, at most, what David Kelsey calls nonsystematic systematic theology,40 and probably something closer to Louis Mackey’s understanding of unity by way of figural patterns rather than univocal systemizations.41 Better still, AntiClimacus’s theology replicates in its own post/modern form the Christian liturgy’s ordo by way of paradoxical apposition. In their breaking old words against otherwise unnamable experiences and witnessing to grace through broken ritual and speech, the paradoxes of the Exsultet’s felix culpa remain but a particularly striking example of Christian liturgy itself. We will recognize how Anti-Climacus, in juxtaposing Christian salvation with the needs of humanity, as well as the Savior with the reality of salvation, nonidentically repeats the earliest mention of felix culpa.

Sin and Salvation We turn first to the relation between the human problem as humanly understood and that problem as revealed from without. One can rephrase this issue in Kierkegaardian terms by inquiring into the relation between Religiousness A and Religiousness B.42 Scholars disagree as to whether Religiousness A, with its immanent God and its existential pathos, is completed or displaced by Religiousness B, with its revelation of the eternal in time (the Incarnation) and with the sharpened pathos that this object of faith brings.43 The discussion also contributes to broader methodological disputes in Christian theology. The contours of much of twentiethcentury theology have been drawn according to whether a philosophical or phenomenological analysis of “the human condition” contextualizes Christian understandings of salvation, or vice versa. Interestingly, Kierkegaard has been employed by both sides. Tillich and those who employ his method of correlation find Kierkegaard’s anthropology to accurately portray the individual’s sinful selfestrangement; they then characterize the restoration of “New Being” in Christ accordingly.44 Barth, with his neo-orthodox contemporaries and some later postliberal theologians, understands the “infinite qualitative distinction” between humanity and Christ to call into question human diagnostics, insisting that sin is revealed by Christ alone.45

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Two passages in particular help us trace the shifting relation between human diagnostics and divine treatment, and between “help” as a straightforward metaphor for Christ’s work and as ironic analog for something language cannot otherwise grasp. Each correlates human expectation and divine revelation even while testifying to the qualitative difference or even inversion between them. AntiClimacus pens the first in relation to his analysis of demonic defiance near the end of Sickness, Part One. He challenges the popular idea that anyone who suffers would accept help if it were offered: A sufferer usually has one or several ways in which he might want to be helped [at hjælpe]. If he is helped in these ways, then he is glad to be helped. But when having to be helped becomes a profoundly earnest matter, especially when it means being helped by a superior [en Høiere], or by the supreme one [den Høieste], there is the humiliation of being obliged to accept any kind of help unconditionally, of becoming a nothing in the hand of the “Helper” [Hjælperen], for whom all things are possible, or the humiliation of simply having to yield to another person, of giving up being himself as long as he is seeking help. (SUD 71) The passage uses “help” as both straightforward metaphor and ironic trope. AntiClimacus repeats the word hjælpe (aid, assistance) or its variations seven times but uses scare quotes when this term is applied to Christ. He does so to point out that when individuals find in Christ their help (aid, assistance), they risk making Christ—who is otherwise the highest (den Høieste)—into an “assistant” or “accomplice” (Hjælper). It would seem that humanity finds its need directly met by Christ only by demoting the Physician’s status to a medical intern. One of the first tasks of this Physician is therefore to call into question humanity’s diagnostics. But if Anti-Climacus designates Christ as “helper” with irony, he nonetheless finds in this word a meaningful description of Christ as Savior. An analogy between “normal” human help and the help of Christ can be seen in the way Anti-Climacus rhetorically employs en Høiere (a higher) beside den Høieste (the highest). No doubt that Christ is, for Anti-Climacus, different in kind, and that the individual’s trust in this Physician must therefore be absolute or unconditioned (ubetinget). But the qualitative difference between disciple and Christ remains analogous to the quantitative differences between sufferers and those who help them. The opening words of Practice in Christianity return to addressing Christ as Hjælperen. In the course of five short sentences, Anti-Climacus uses hjælpe or variants ten times to illuminate Christ’s nature and work (PC 11). Here it is not only humanity’s diagnostics but also its treatment that is questioned and transformed by Christian practice. Later, Anti-Climacus stretches the medical model to its breaking

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point. He writes as though the medication is worse than the disease and the doctor more important than his cure: Christianity does indeed proclaim itself to be comfort, cure, and healing—that being so, people turn to it as they turn to a friend in need, thank it as they thank a helper, because by the help of it or by its help they believe they will be able to bear the suffering under which they sigh. And then—then the very opposite happens. They go to the Word to seek help—and then come to suffer on account of the Word. And with this suffering it is not as when one takes a medication or undergoes a treatment in which healing can involve some pain, to which one submits and in which there is no contradiction. No, tribulation and persecution come upon one because one has turned to Christianity for help. When things become overcast in this way, the human understanding becomes darkened, so it is all at sea, does not know what is what. (PC 114) Anti-Climacus goes on to “explain” the disjointed relationship between human diagnostics and divine treatment by appealing to the identity of the Physician: When in sickness I go to a physician, he may find it necessary to prescribe a very painful treatment—there is no self-contradiction in my submitting to it. No, but if on the other hand I suddenly find myself in trouble, an object of persecution, because, because I have gone to that physician: well, then there is self-contradiction. The physician has perhaps announced that he can help me with regard to the illness from which I suffer, and perhaps he can really do that—but there is an aber [but] that I had not thought of at all. The fact that I get involved with this physician, attach myself to him—that is what makes me an object of persecution; here is the possibility of offense. (PC 115) These passages distinguish the suffering intrinsic to the Christian cure from all (other) forms of homeopathy. There is “no contradiction” in freely undergoing painful treatment in order to purge an illness. What distinguishes Christian treatment is its lack of an independent framework through which the painful treatment can be understood and endured. The lack of such framework pushes what one means by the meaning of salvation almost to its breaking point. The Christian treatment ostensibly entails what Levinas calls “signification without context,” or “meaning all by itself.”46 Anti-Climacus underlines the danger (and oddity) of sui generis signification. Without any point of reference, trying to understand the practices of Christianity is like staring into an abyss, where “it is all at sea” and where one “does not know what is what” (PC 114). (Haufniensis need not

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remind the reader what typically happens to those who lose all points of orientation. The “swooning” that Anti-Climacus describes will take a more aggressive, but still essentially reactive, form—taking offense at the Physician and his practices.) As the second portion of the passage helps indicate, Anti-Climacus not only distinguishes understandable human therapies from the inscrutable practices of Christ. He also distinguishes the treatments any doctor prescribes from the suffering that ensues from coming to this particular Physician. “Getting involved” with or “attaching oneself ” to Christ is abhorrent to those outside this faith commitment. Why? The first answer has to do with the incommensurability of Christ, and we will return to this issue soon. The other factor relates to the desperate and sinful attempt of humanity—especially in Christendom—to make everything commensurable. Anti-Climacus deliberates on the leveling of the crowd already at the beginning of this exposition on offense. Anticipating Levinas’s favored term, he writes that the “established order wants to be a totality” (91, my emphasis). The “calamity of Christendom” (35) includes its desire to make everything commensurable; “the lazy, secular mentality that wants to settle down and fancy that now there is total peace and security” (PC 88); the “reassuring security” (90) and the abolishment of “all fear and trembling” when “commensurability and congruity are accomplished and the established order is deified” (90); “the secularization of everything” (91); the deification of custom and ordinances (92); and the inwardness that was lost once “the outer and the inner had become entirely commensurable” (89). In this light, Christian therapy looks so peculiar because it involves the unconditional love of a particular Physician. Such excessive love challenges attempts by the crowd to mediate all differences, to secure itself by constant comparison with “the others,” to exchange any and all particularities. Given this situation, the unbounded compassion of God will be interpreted as “madness,” “too much,” “too lofty” (PC 58–59). Importantly, this leveling is not a product of human reasoning or finite existence per se.47 It results from the sinful attempt—through abstraction, commodification, and deification—to secure oneself against interruption. In other words, while there is an “infinite qualitative difference” between Christ and humanity, that difference becomes disturbing only when it meets what Levinas calls the self ’s nostalgia for totality or what Kierkegaard names the perils of established Christianity. It follows that, however incommensurable human diagnostics and God’s therapy remain, Christianity becomes incomprehensible only in relation to Christendom’s presumptions. To the degree that individuals have occluded their sinfulness, Christ appears deceptive and Christian therapy “terrifying and appalling” (PC 67). So long as individuals do not fully deceive themselves, there apparently remains the possibility of finding some sense to entering this madness, although the sensibility—this “signification without context”—will be reconfigured according to Anti-Climacus’s

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ironic tropes of the Helper and his help. I might add that Anti-Climacus, although warning would-be Christians against seeking “help” in Christianity, assumedly understands this warning, and Christianity in general, to be helpful. Anti-Climacus most directly discloses the odd sensibility of Christian therapy in “The Moral” attached to Number I, as if he were revealing a hermeneutical key that would retain an otherwise receding meaning of salvation. He asks rhetorically, “But if the essentially Christian is something so terrifying and appalling, how in the world can anyone think of accepting Christianity?” Anti-Climacus’s earlier answer—“Be quiet, it is the absolute”—remains relevant. But now he responds more fully: Very simply and, if you wish that also, very Lutheranly: only the consciousness of sin can force one, if I dare put it that way (from the other side grace is the force), into this horror. And at that very moment the essentially Christian transforms itself into and is sheer leniency, grace, love, mercy. Considered in any other way Christianity is and must be a kind of madness or the greatest horror. Admittance is only through the consciousness of sin; to want to enter by any other road is high treason against Christianity. (PC 67–68) The consciousness of sin makes the “horror” of Christianity less maddening. To the degree that individuals become sin-conscious, it would seem, they have the “capacity” to submit to the Physician’s practices. Is it, then, that the consciousness of sin contextualizes and secures the otherwise sui generis meaning and benefit of Christian salvation? In many ways it does, at least according to the summative, meta-analysis of “the Moral.” At the same time, however, one must recall what the consciousness of sin entails. My exegesis of Sickness suggests that the consciousness of sin provides entrance into Christianity only by making the road more difficult, because facing one’s sin first and foremost makes sin increasingly possible. The extended examination of Christendom in Practice then clarifies that sin has little to do with going against the norm or becoming the exception. Rather, sin (at least in Christendom) involves primarily the quest for totality, the self-securing and self-deceiving suppression of alterity. The consciousness of sin cannot thereby assimilate it in such a way that it fortifies self-consciousness and self-possessiveness. Salvation is a dispossession, a ruptured openness toward and by that which remains other. Sin-consciousness is the first fruits of and negative expression for that salvation. In this sense, Anti-Climacus’s assertion that the consciousness of sin provides the only entrance into Christianity need not suggest that sin-consciousness is something the sinner initiates and controls or that the meaning of salvation is stabilized by it. In fact, “the Moral” itself suggests as much. Anti-Climacus only

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“dares” to suggest that the consciousness of sin can force one into Christianity. He admits that “from the other side” grace is the force, implying that any discursive economy promising to spell out the correspondence between sin and salvation remains divided between the two sides. The consciousness of sin is but another way of speaking of grace or salvation itself. Sin-consciousness is made necessary by and testifies to the impossibility of otherwise signifying a signification without context. It becomes a way of marking salvation’s alterity to all systems of salvation, of stammering out Christianity’s untranslatability. Like the broken discourse at the heart of Christian liturgy, the consciousness of sin provides access to Christianity only insofar as it provides a countermotion that grace corresponds to by radically reversing. And so the work of that consciousness testifies, by its faltering, to a gift that it can neither anticipate nor approach on its own.

Salvation and Savior I have considered here the negative dialectic between humanity’s self-diagnosis and the unpredictable and strange (although not necessarily nonsensical) cure announced by Christ. I have also considered the analogical and paradoxical language that Anti-Climacus uses to expresses this dialectic. I now turn to the second, closely related, issue—the relationship between Christian help and Christ the Helper. Recall that the second portion of the long passage above (quoting PC 115) suggests that Anti-Climacus not only distinguishes human therapies from the practices of Christ, he also distinguishes treatments that any reliable doctor can prescribe from the suffering that ensues from coming to this particular Physician. Earlier I emphasized that “getting involved” with Christ appears offensive to the degree that sinners want to level all distinctions. Yet Christ is also offensive because the Savior appears to take precedence over the salvation he offers. Thus even those who are willing to undergo the strange homoeopathy of Christianity will be surprised to learn that the Savior may be more important than salvation. The relation between the identity of this Physician (the person of Christ) and his treatment (the work of Christ) has additional implications for whether Christianity is reasonable. In another place where Anti-Climacus inquires into the “why” of Christianity, he responds: “Well, there is no ‘why’; so it is indeed lunacy, says the understanding. There is no ‘why,’ because there is an infinite ‘why’” (PC 120). Appealing to an “infinite why” as a response to Christianity’s objectors is admittedly enigmatic. Murray Rae claims that to be infinite here means “to be both immeasurable and incapable of circumscription.” He then links this immeasurable, uncircumscribable “Why?” to the absolute love relation between sinner and Savior.48 In the words of Meister Eckhart, love itself is sunder warumbe—without a why or

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wherefore.49 By claiming there is no why but the “infinite why,” Anti-Climacus redirects the reader’s attention from possible justifications for becoming Christian. Such justifications—the primary aim of Christian apologetics—would fare no better than efforts to loquaciously catalog reasons for why one is in love. The “infinite why” points toward the identity of Christ as both resisting appropriation and inviting ongoing commitment and love. The identity of the Helper/Lover seems infinitely more important than the help or love that we get out of him. In fact, Anti-Climacus insists that the Helper is the help, just as for Climacus the Teacher is the teaching (PF 17–18). On the one hand, if there is no correspondence between the nature and work of Christ, it seems as though Anti-Climacus offers a Christology without soteriological import, a Savior without salvation. On the other hand, if Christ becomes only a “helper” (an assistant or aid) and if his identity is thereby exhausted,50 then one would have salvation without a Savior, a “functional Christology” whereby Christ’s identity is deduced from his effects. Guarding against the latter danger does seem the more immediate concern of AntiClimacus. He continually cautions against trying to prove Christ’s divinity by way of historical effect, in other words, by reasoning that, since there are millions of Christians in Christendom, Jesus must have been God (cf. CUP I 47n; BA 36–50). For Anti-Climacus, the issue is not merely a matter of faith’s relation to reason. It concerns his own gloss on the disinterested religion about which the Book of Job inquires: Can a Christian love Christ for naught—even without “historical effect”? That question also becomes pivotal for modern theologians. In a study on the history of Christology and soteriology, Walter Lowe traces the manner in which the priority given Christ over salvation by the early Church Fathers becomes reversed in modernity’s apologetic theology. With the birth of modernity, “Christology is virtually absorbed into soteriology,”51 a process that Lowe wants to help reverse. Drawing on Lowe, David Gouwens interprets Kierkegaard as resisting the precedence of modern apologetics by directly arguing that his “Christology precedes [his] soteriology.”52 Gouwens argues that, unlike modern interpretations of Christ according to human experience, Kierkegaard’s “orthodox Christology begins with Christ’s identity as Redeemer and Pattern: Christ is divine and therefore is able to save us.”53 Wanda Berry, by contrast, is concerned that the efficacy of Christ’s life not be overlooked, especially in relation to the soteriological needs of women, who characteristically experience sin in terms of weakness rather than defiance.54 She emphasizes the “correlation of Christology with soteriology,” and takes issue with the language of “preceding” that Gouwens employs.55 Moreover, Berry finds in Gouwens emphasis on Christology the desire to base Christ’s truth and uniqueness in doctrinal postulates concerning his two natures. She argues that it is more faithful to

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Practice in Christianity to emphasize that the truth of Christ is inseparable from the redoubling of that truth within the transformed lives of believers.56 While Anti-Climacus certainly underscores the need for personal appropriation, he also resists reducing the ontological reality of Christ to a dimension of the believer’s experience by refusing to base the importance of Christ on the benefits he offers. This is a predominant theme of “The Halt” of Practice, Number I. There Anti-Climacus argues that the results of Jesus’ life cannot prove that he was divine (28); the Incarnation is extraordinary whether or not there are any results (31–32); the believer is not permitted to take the invitation without the Inviter (40); and, while there is profound wisdom in Christ’s teaching, extracting it is troubled by the fact “that he is the person he is” (44). While it sometimes sounds as though Anti-Climacus denies that Christ brings about effects of any kind, and certainly not positive ones, these passages more accurately indicate his more nuanced claim—namely, that any quality of consciousness, profundity of wisdom, or relief of the self-conscious sinner that are gleaned from him cannot exhaust the reality or domesticate the particularity of Christ himself. We might also return to the first response that Anti-Climacus gives to his questions about the good of Christianity: “Be quiet, it is the absolute.” Like the “infinite why” that answers the why of Christianity, the silence demanded by Anti-Climacus quiets almost every explanation of Christian faith. Excepted is that of testifying to Christ by becoming his contemporary. Salvation is relationship with Christ; to justify belief wholly on other grounds discloses one’s hearts as essentially offended. Alternatively, to “justify” Christian faith by appealing (with holy silence) to the Christ-encounter would break open the meaning of justification and alter the nature of Christian apologetics. For example, we might claim that Abraham was “justified” in following God’s command to sacrifice Isaac after a teleological suspension of universal reason and its ethical principles. But that justification, de Silentio insists, is the paradox, is an absolute (read: unjustifiable) relation to the Absolute, is the excessive, incommensurable, and near madness of faith (FT 62). To “justify” Abraham’s faith in these terms does not set a particular God-relation in the context of universal understanding. Rather, it sets universal ethical reasoning apposite the singularity of revelation, enabling the “countermotion” (Lathrop), “disruption” (Lange) or the “anguished contradiction” (de Silentio) between the two to testify to the alterity of God’s command. The same is true of standing before the face of Christ, according to Anti-Climacus. Christianity is justified through the Christ encounter, but the encounter remains a dramatic event that makes sense only as an unexpected climax that reverses and reemploys the story leading up to it. The quiet demanded by Anti-Climacus, like the silence effused by de Silentio, recalls the way the liturgy, like a poem, performs its meaning only as “one part [is set]

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against another across a silence.”57 In this sense alone does the entreaty to silence by Anti-Climacus become its own ironic and oblique justification of faith. Berry is not wrong to insist that Christ remains unknown apart from the redoubling of his truth within the believer’s life. Apart from that subjective appropriation, appeals to doctrinal postulates concerning the “paradox” of Christ’s two natures easily sidestep the extant possibility of offense. I have emphasized the point of Lowe and Gouwens only because, without our first disentangling Christ from his benefits, it is difficult to see how he would not fade into the woodwork once the learner has “appropriated” his lesson, as any Socratic teacher should (cf. PF 14–18). With rhetorical urgency and a good deal of polemics, Anti-Climacus strives to save Christ’s infinity from any ready-made totality, systematic theology included.58

Such a Redeemer I want to make three additional remarks about the relationship between the context of salvation and the identity of the Savior. First, Anti-Climacus’s prioritization of Christ reinforces my earlier point about humanity’s freedom and the possibility of offense. Freedom becomes Christian freedom and thus includes the possibility of offense when the individual faces God’s stupefying love in the Incarnation. That event shapes the parameters of human freedom; one can do nothing excepttake offense or overcome this temptation through trust in Christ. In this interpersonal encounter, there is primacy on what Levinas calls the naked face, or on what Christian theologians name the objectivity of atonement. Only through God’s unconditional love is human freedom conditioned, grounded, given shape. So, whereas Judge William writes of entering the ethical-religious sphere by “choosing to choose” (EO 2:177–78), the choice to enter Christianity is initiated by another. A person is chosen—in order that he or she chooses. Election thus forces a choice, and Anti-Climacus accordingly describes Christ throughout Practice as the one who asks the question: Will you have faith or will you take offense? Second, as Lowe and Gouwens note, much of modern theology traces Christ’s divinity to an occurrence of human insight that takes place within the believer’s consciousness. There, the estrangement of knower and known is temporarily overcome; intuition of the divine ground entails transparent self-consciousness in and through its God-consciousness; one returns, at least momentarily, to an immediacy that is prior to and beneath finite, fragmented consciousness.59 Anti-Climacus will not conceptualize atonement in terms of a self-same return to at-one-ment. His repeated declaration that faith is a “second immediacy” reveals a starkly different piety and a distinctively Christocentric anthropology. Far from erasing the fissure in human freedom, Christ, as Anti-Climacus understands him, extends, deepens,

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and exacerbates it. The immediacy of innocence is irretrievable; the nostalgia for totality is itself a work of the Fall. The only hope left is to become a forgiven sinner, or what Luther calls simul justus et peccator (simultaneously sinner and saint). This new duality of the self overshadows and discloses the old. It reflects in its nonidentity the infinite qualitative difference between oneself coram hominibus and oneself coram Christi. Finally, one notices that, for all the ways that Practice resists conforming Christian salvation to the contours of the human condition as independently drawn, the surplus of meaning that destabilizes his soteriology and hamartiology comes not primarily from Christology but from Christ. Christ continually disrupts and disperses every context made to track his importance, whether soteriological, hamartiological, or Christological. In other words, Christ’s excessiveness becomes audible only by the bending and breaking of the language of savior, salvation, and sin. Already with the Apostle Paul, soteriology and hamartiology—and Christology too—are rent asunder by the surplus of Christ; all the other correspondences between trespass and gift only serve to highlight the “so much more” of the Incarnation (Rom. 5–6). Notice too that the Exsultet is equally Christocentric in its paradoxical speech. It is the Redeemer, and not simply redemption, that outstrips, reverses, and disperses the language which nonetheless points to him: “O happy fault which merited such and so great a Redeemer.” Without the superfluous, intemperate reality of Christ, it is difficult to see how salvation does not finally get reduced to our fulfillment. Christ is the extra that leads Christians extra nos, outside themselves, in Luther’s terms—or toward ecstatic desire, in those of Levinas. My interpretations of Christian help and its Helper have tried to read Kierkegaard’s rhetorical pleadings from within that Pauline-Lutheran tradition, which intersects also with the fifthcentury Latin Mass and, more oddly, with a French postmodern a/theistic Jew.

Peculiar Scandal At this point it might sound as though it is Christ’s incommensurability alone— his alterity to comprehension—that shapes the rhetoric of Anti-Climacus’s soteriology and Christology, not to mention anthropology and hamartiology. The profligacy and sui generis nature of God-become-flesh appears all that AntiClimacus needs to underscore the possibility of offense and to audit the profit of cultured Christianity. But we should recall that Christ’s alterity becomes menacing only when the established order resists otherness as such. In this light, AntiClimacus’s methodological privileging of Savior over self and sinner is thoroughly rhetorical—it works only as a countermotion. Take away the analyses of spiritless sin, and the newness of the Incarnation becomes but an aesthetic novelty. The

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Postscript already makes this point by insisting that the possibilities of faith and offense are contingent upon humanity’s prior (fallen) expectations. Climacus writes, “Precisely because [Christianity’s] newness is not direct but first of all must cancel an illusion, offense is possible” (CUP 539 n.). Anti-Climacus joins Climacus in assuming that prior passions must be in place for them to be reversed; both their cultivation and reversal create the possibility of offense. Once again, this explains why spiritless indifference is so devastating in precluding the possibility of offense, which in turn precludes the possibility of faith. We might therefore conclude that the possibility of offense belongs neither to Christ’s eternal nature alone nor to human circumstance alone but rather to the charged interactions between the two. Underscoring the encounter, Anti-Climacus characterizes offense as a Misforhold (misrelationship) between an individual and Christ (PC 78). The individual will not let herself or himself be helped through forgiveness and Christ will not—Christ omnipotently cannot—renounce the offer of help. In this way, both are “responsible” for the misrelation.60 I now want to reread the meaning of Christ and sinner with and against one another in the effort to better portray the dynamics of their mis/relationship. I will follow a somewhat hidden narrative strand of Practice that depicts the sin of offense and the life of faith as relational, passional exchanges between Savior and sinner. Sparks fly between these individuals that either ignite passionate faith or kindle the sinner’s contempt. The provocation stems not only from the “most chasmic qualitative abyss” that opens up when a sinner is made to face the forgiveness of sin (SUD 121–22). It also derives from the fact that the capabilities or subjectivity that a person must cultivate is dramatically called into question by a “questionable” configuration of Christ’s own power or subjectivity. To preview where we will end: Christ by his eternal decision becomes “bound” to express his omnipotent power only and always through suffering love, which often unnerves the person’s sense of self and strength. Each becomes “beside himself ”—Christ though his eternal resolve and the individual through the possibility of offense. We begin by noting that Kierkegaardians typically trace the origin of offense to Christ as the “scandal of particularity.” In many ways, what Anti-Climacus means by the possibility of offense does in fact parallel Johannes Climacus’s characterization of Christ as the scandal of particularity. Climacus’s scandal of particularity underscores Chalcedon’s description of Jesus as fully human and fully divine. AntiClimacus is faithful to this orthodox tradition. He also joins Climacus and others in insisting that it is no general conception about the union of “God” and “humanity” that engenders offense. Anti-Climacus asks, “What contradiction, if any, could there be at all in the speculative unity of God and man?” (PC 125). The scandal rather arises from the fact that a particular Palestinian Jew born at an otherwise insignificant time becomes the vehicle for God’s self-revelation. In other words, it is not that

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“God” and “humanity” join that elicits offense, but that God is in this particular historical individual fully and without reserve. In fact, a preliminary reading of Practice, Number II suggests that AntiClimacus’s direct examination of offense does little more than retrace Climacus’s account of the scandal of particularity. Anti-Climacus claims forthright that “essentially offense is related to the composite of God and man, or to the God-man” (PC 81). His two explicit expositions of “essential offense” follow suit by examining the God-man from opposing directions. The first, corresponding to a Christology from below, examines “the possibility of essential offense in relation to loftiness, that an individual human being speaks or acts as if he were God, declares himself to be God, therefore in relation to the qualification ‘God’ in the composition of the Godman” (PC 94). The second, a Christology from above, examines “the possibility of essential offense in relation to lowliness, that the one who passes himself off as God proves to be the lowly, poor, suffering, and finally powerless human being” (PC 102). Whether one is offended by Jesus’ claim to be God or by God’s self-revelation in Jesus, the possibility of essential offense ostensibly stems from this paradoxical union. In short, the “possibility of offense” seems to do little more than translate the “scandal of particularity.” Yet there is a bit more going on here. When we focus on the Christ–sinner relationship, we notice how Anti-Climacus pushes potential Christians beyond the alterity of Christ and the scandal of his particularity toward the peculiarity of his life and of the Christian life he engenders. He also thus pushes beyond the epistemological and methodological concerns that consume Johannes Climacus, which have also dominated Kierkegaardian interpretations.61 Anti-Climacus attends to a diachronic pattern of Jesus’ life and death as beside human expectations, and not only to a paradoxical proposition about the hypostatic union in and of itself.62 He is therefore more attuned to the Gospel narratives at full stretch, narratives that link the skandalon to Jesus’ long anguished journey toward Jerusalem (cf. Mark 8:31–33) as well as to the Christian imperative to suffer with Christ (Mark 8:34–35; Rom. 8:17; 2 Cor. 12:1–10). Finally, Anti-Climacus pushes beyond what I emphasized earlier, namely, that the advent of Christ transcends and suspends the expectations of humanity. Christ also reverses them, in such a way that the theologian must presuppose humanity’s prior dispositional outlook. Anti-Climacus thus reinscribes Christ within “the human context,” albeit a context that witnesses to Christ by fracturing beneath him. On closer inspection, then, the scandal of particularity does not account for all that Anti-Climacus means by offense. Recall that the two human “options” coram Christi are repulsion by the apparent ungodliness of Jesus or overcoming this repulsion through “practice in Christianity.” Clearly, offense cannot amount to the dismissal on reasoned grounds of a nonsensical paradox (even the paradox of God’s

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unity with a particular individual) anymore than faith can amount to the cognitive assent to a propositional truth claim. One could disbelieve in and be confounded by other paradoxes (a married bachelor, for example), but it is hard to imagine why one would be offended by them. The same is true of the singularity and paradox of the “God-Man.” Can particularity alone account for the way Anti-Climacus writes of the skandalon in terms of something that one runs up against in passional collision and from which one likely recoils? As I have repeatedly suggested, Practice in Christianity portrays both faith and offense as more interpersonal and dispositional responses than are “belief ” or “disbelief.” While one could correctly say that the offended sinner disbelieves in Christ and his forgiveness, for Anti-Climacus that “disbelief ” would resemble the disbelief of a person whose only love has abandoned her. Or—to take a more fitting example—it would resemble the disbelief that ensues when a person finally realizes that the eccentric behavior of her friend is due to the simple, incredible fact that he is in love with her.63 At full stretch, faith and offense suggest relational dispositions that react not only to the unique revelation of God in Jesus, but also to the determinative shape of God’s love there.

The Scandal of Peculiarity in Practice A more rhetorically attuned inspection of Practice, Number II suggests that more is going on than categorical contradictions. Recall from their titles that the two analyses of essential offense focus on how Jesus self-importantly “speaks or acts as if he were God” or self-debasingly “proves to be the lowly, poor, suffering, and finally powerless human being.” These are temporally extended acts befitting of a narrative (which Anti-Climacus precedes to recount)—not propositions about the nature of the second person of the Trinity. As such, they presuppose interactions with other characters, as well as a prior sense of how lowly humans or godlike heroes ought to behave. (Incidentally, Anti-Climacus’s focus on narrated interactions also makes sense of why he focuses more closely on the second form of essential offense—offense at lowliness. Christ’s earthly life as the Gospels recount it moves primarily from promised king to suffering servant, a pattern that is born from Jewish eschatology and recapitulated compactly in the Passion Week narrative.) In the actual expositions, Anti-Climacus attends to particular episodes in Jesus’ life rather than to doctrinal propositions. It is their narrative unfolding, not minimally the “God-Man” as such, that creates the possibility of offense. Applying a bit more pressure to the text, we also note that Anti-Climacus defers his exposition of the two forms of essential offense with a section about “inessential offense” that is longer than either (PC 85–94). There he writes of offense that is not exclusively related to Christ’s nature. It rather arises when any single individual runs up against the leveling and self-deification of the established order. What is

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more, he repeatedly interrupts his examinations of essential offense with addenda that reinvestigate inessential offense. The first supplement compares the situation of contemporaneity, where offense’s possibility is intrinsic to faith, to the ways that Christendom’s Christians bypass that possibility through speculation (101–2). It is as if Anti-Climacus were pulling readers back from the ideal situation of essential offense to their own concrete situations. Then, a long addendum attached to the second analysis (and five times its length) primarily examines the possibility of offense occasioned by the suffering of Christians as they imitate Christ (106–20). That possibility “derivatively corresponds” (113) to offense at the lowliness of Christ and yet remains inessential insofar as it relates to Christ’s nature only by a person’s voluntary and avoidable decision to suffer as Christ suffered (109). Thus, for all his ostensible focus on offense as intrinsic to Christ’s composition, that focus is prefaced and supplemented—even rhetorically supplanted—by passages concerned with the fuller historical pattern of Jesus’ human life and how it might be reduplicated in the lives of Christians.64 The possibility of offense certainly stems from the fact that Christ is singularly unique. But it includes, quite prominently, the ways that the pattern of his life calls to be reduplicated in the lives of everyday Christians. Through these rhetorical emphases, Anti-Climacus suggest that the real scandal worth reckoning with occurs when the otherness of Christ and Christians stands out against modern society’s need to level and moderate commitments. In this situation, one finds Christ’s excessive love and the excessive discipleship of Christians distinctive in their eccentricity. If pressed, Anti-Climacus might characterize Climacus’s scandal of particularity in terms of a scandal of peculiarity. That alternative phrase (mine, not Kierkegaard’s) helps mark the ways in which AntiClimacus surpasses the lesser Climacus in the recklessness of his irony. God’s self-revelation not only outstrips rationality with the singularity of its advent, it also goes against the passional dispositions of unconverted people, their habituated and largely unspoken preconceptions about how God should act and what discipleship should entail. Given this concrete situation, the lives of Christ and his followers appear unconventional, disproportionate, and off-putting. Only by reinserting the God-Man among the sinful expectations of Christendom’s Christians does Anti-Climacus fully come to terms with the extensiveness of offense.

The Sinner’s Reversal and the Savior’s Kenosis I have been arguing that the scandal of peculiarity stems not from Savior or sinner alone, but from the way their passionate dispositions collide against one another. Anti-Climacus marks this confrontation by tracking certain existential reversals that follow from it. When Savior meets sinner, both parties undergo an “about-face”—to

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return to our earlier language. First, when Christ responds to human expectations, he inverts our expectations along with the dynamics of our sin. Second, the one who inverts our expectations is himself an inversion of what we would want God to be. In other words, the potentially offensive reversal between the help we want and the “help” we get is enacted by the kenotic reversal of Christ’s incarnation and passion. I will now more closely examine these reversals, first human and then divine. The scandal of peculiarity stems from the way Christ inverts the sinner’s status. Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript already make this point.65 Especially in the Postscript, Climacus emphasizes a kind of ironic, complementary role that an individual’s prior self-knowledge plays in occasioning the possibility of offense. Becoming religious or spirited through inward suffering (Religiousness A) contributes to the possibility of being offended at Christ, even if that contribution is revised and reversed by God’s revelation. In a passage we have already considered, Climacus explains that if the Christian revelation was completely new, it would comprise only “newness upon newness” indistinguishable from aesthetics. Such novelty could surprise and even titillate, but it could not occasion offense. Offense becomes possible only “when someone wants to make new for him what he essentially believes he already has” (CUP I 539 n.). The newness (and oddity) of Christ thus depends on undoing errant passions already in place. Recall too that the Exsultet invokes sin as backhanded witness to Christ in an analogous way. Without recourse to the prior momentum of sin (as meriting death), the proclamation of the Gospel (sin “merits” a great Redeemer) ceases to arouse wonder. It risks becoming an instance of cheap grace easily expended, a novelty easily digested. In The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus reworks the sinner’s reversal in his own terms: “But Christianly, everything is changed, for you shall believe in the forgiveness of sins” (SUD 117). Anti-Climacus flags the change that Christ brings about by writing of a reversal between the sins of weakness and defiance, as humanity understands them and as Christ reveals them. He writes: Now a self comes directly before Christ, a self that in despair still does not will to be itself or in despair wills to be itself . . . . But here weakness and defiance are the opposite of what they usually are (since here the point is not just about being oneself but about being oneself in the category of being a sinner, thus in the category of one’s imperfection). Ordinarily weakness is: in despair not to will to be oneself. Here this is defiance, for here it is indeed the defiance of not willing to be oneself, what one is—a sinner—and for that reason wanting to dispense with the forgiveness of sins. Ordinarily defiance is: in despair to will to be oneself. Here this is weakness, in despair to will to be oneself—a sinner—in such a way that there is no forgiveness. (SUD 113)

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Earlier, Anti-Climacus distinguished weak and defiant despair according to one’s willingness to be oneself while having “the eternal” as one’s criterion. Before Christ, weakness and defiance are defined according to one’s willingness to be a sinner, “in the category of one’s imperfection.” This reversal originates the moment God offers reconciliation and so establishes a new goal and criterion—the ability to become a forgiven sinner (114). In the paragraphs following this quotation, Anti-Climacus continues to describe how Christ’s offer of forgiveness inverts or reverses the status of sin. In order to continue to fight at close combat against God, a person must run far away; yet fleeing from God is the highest effrontery—“so wondrously is the life of the spirit acoustically constructed” (SUD 114). The peculiar acoustics of the Christ–human encounter echo a point of Philosophical Fragments: When individuals muster all their strength to denounce “the Paradox” as absurd—or reject out of hand Jesus’ journey toward Golgotha—such hostility amounts to the flaccid inability to achieve the new ideal of becoming forgiven sinners and humble disciples. The Postscript and Sickness thereby each testify to how the human situation is revised and reversed by the advent of Christ. In Practice, the second reversal characterizing the scandal of peculiarity fully emerges. Christ reverses human expectations and so occasions offense by himself reversing all that (we think) it means to be God. Humanity is fully turned about by a God who has turned around—who appears, in the words of Paul’s Christ hymn, to have emptied himself of divine power (Phil. 2:6–11). In fact, I follow Merold Westphal in taking the Christ Hymn of Philippians to provide the primary subtext to Practice in Christianity.66 I do not want to argue that Anti-Climacus has a kenotic Christology in any technical sense of that term. A number of scholars helpfully unpack various doctrinal disputes concerning Christ’s forfeiture or concealment of divine attributes and position Kierkegaard among them.67 While Anti-Climacus witnesses to a radical reversal that begins in Bethlehem and culminates at Golgotha, he appears unconcerned about accounting for a metaphysical change in God’s attributes. In fact, both Climacus and Anti-Climacus suggest that Christ’s self-binding does not shelve or dismantle divine power but requires and manifests it. The famous “god poem” in Philosophical Fragments, whose title intimates the “Christ hymn,” makes this point clear. It culminates by declaring that what looks to humanity to be a sign of impotence, namely, that God cannot go back on God’s decision to become a lowly servant, actually manifests divine omnipotence. Only God can commit to another so powerfully that God becomes truly bound, irreversibly enslaved (PF 55). It is thus none other than God’s power that is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). Of course, to describe how Christ, captive to his own resolution, is “obliged” to continue whether he wants to or not is, for Climacus, only “to go on talking loosely” (PF 55). Yet, I take that qualification not to mean that Christ is not truly bound but

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that our language is habituated to speak of such bondage in pejorative terms. If Christ seems conflicted, that is so because we cannot recognize what full (or divine) commitment looks like.68 Anti-Climacus wholly concurs with these conceptions (PC 25, 128–31; SUD 126). But he also pays particular (and peculiar) attention to the actual pathetic grief of love that Christ expresses when he comes so openly and vulnerably toward us. Whereas the “god-poem” chalks up the appearance of Christ’s inner turmoil to the habits of human expression and the limits of human comprehension, Anti-Climacus underscores Christ’s conflict of love and forwards it to his reader with fervent rhetoric. He sees in Christ’s pathos a model for our own fallible faith.

Pathetic Love This final section examines a last, surprising reversal that ensues when one examines faith and offense within this relational context. I have been moving closer to it throughout the last two chapters. The “quest” to become fallible and the spirited “act” of withstanding the possibility of offense—like Kierkegaardian subjectivity itself—come to express not a heroic undertaking by the individual’s will but a delicate disposition inculcated through dependence and over time. The cultivation of fallibility, however much Anti-Climacus needs to distinguish it from the quotidian complacency of spiritless Christians, really does entail a kind of inactivity, a letting be, a patient entrusting of oneself to the care of another. From this point of view, Kierkegaardian subjectivity itself, at least for Anti-Climacus, means one’s “capacity” to become responsive to, affected by, summoned by—in short, subject to—powers that come from without.

Conflicts of Love We return to the Christ Hymn that Paul quotes in his letter to the Philippians. The casual exegete may miss a pregnant ambiguity in that famous passage. While most assume that it is to God the Father that Christ becomes “obedient,” even unto death on a cross, neither the original Greek nor the English translation specifies the recipient of Christ’s submission. Given the wider context of Philippians, it makes sense to suggest that Christ becomes obedient to humanity—becomes humanity’s slave. The interpretive decision matters, not only because it indicates alternative beneficiaries of Christ’s obedience, but also because it characterizes that obedience in considerably different ways. According to the typical understanding, Christ valiantly upholds God’s eternal plan with what looks like self-subsisting, heroic will power. The fact that Christ sustains his resolve even unto suffering and death serves

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primarily to confirm the will’s tenacity. Maintaining his determination unto death, Christ earns an eternal reward—his name is raised above every other name, and beneath it every knee now bends (Phil. 2:9–11). According to this interpretation, Christ surpasses others in the resoluteness of his will; he possesses magnanimous dispositions that military heroes might approximate: bravery, self-determination, fearlessness, a sense of duty. By contrast, if one interprets humanity as Christ’s master, several things change. First, the dispositions underlying such obedience invert those normally associated with a hero’s fortitude. By selflessly and recklessly binding himself to others, Christ models dispositions of radical vulnerability. He becomes ec-centric—always already beside himself, unreservedly for others in such a way that he arouses scorn and exposes himself to caprice. In place of the encased resolution of a champion chooser, we have dispositions of receptivity—capacities to lay himself bare, to become vulnerable, to remain fundamentally accessible to others. Second, the culmination of this obedience—death on a cross—would now indicate more than the extent to which Christ maintains his resolve. Widespread offense and then violent rejection rather follow quite naturally (which is not to say justifiably) from the pathos of one so irresponsibly exposed. (Incidentally, here one glimpses a profound correlation between what Levinas means by murder and what Anti-Climacus means by offense.69) Finally, this less common interpretation more graphically marks the unexpected reversal between Jesus’ pathos-filled life and the triumph of the resurrection. The common interpretation suggests that Christ’s unsurpassable will power gets rewarded with highest honors. Cross and glory then differ by degree alone; the resurrection serves as fitting reward for one who obeys so resolutely. By contrast, if Christ’s power is one of inexorable vulnerability, God’s resurrection of Jesus radically reconfigures all that power, virtue, and personhood entail. Although the Christ hymn remains only a subtext of Practice, there is reason to believe that Anti-Climacus would follow the less common, more paradoxical, and I think more accurate interpretation above. According to Practice, at the heart of Christ’s suffering—more decisive than the difficulty of obeying God’s will and facing death resolutely—is Christ’s susceptibility to being scorned, his omnipotent vulnerability to the potentially violent responses of others. This suffering is “the suffering of inwardness, suffering of soul, or what might be called the secret of the sufferings that were inseparable from his life in unrecognizability from the time he appeared until the very last” (PC 136–37). In other words, Christ, like the fallible individual before whom he is exposed, suffers his own self-contradiction— albeit of a unique sort. As we have seen, Anti-Climacus underscores primarily Christ’s own nonidentity or noncoincidence—the fact that Christ becomes the object of faith only as the possibility of offense—in order to ensure that potential followers not take him in vain. What I am emphasizing now is that Christ’s own

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virtue, or his particular passions (one might say, his faith), depends on and comes to express this vulnerable nonidentity, this conflict in love. Christ himself feels the self-imposed bondage of his omnipotent commitment. It grieves him. AntiClimacus writes of it with a pathos befitting of his subject: “Blessed is he who is not offended at me!” Ah, if only you could hear him say that himself, hear from the fervor that here, too, he is suffering for you, that is, hear the contradiction that, despite his love, he out of love cannot make impossible whether or not you will be offended at him, that he who came from far, far away, from heaven’s glory, that he who descended so low until he became the lowly human being and now stands there in order to save you also, that he who all powerfully can do all things and yet in love sacrifices everything—powerlessly, which he himself suffers under because he is more concerned for your welfare than you are yourself—must leave it up to you yourself whether you will be offended or not, whether, saved by him, you will inherit eternal happiness or bring about your eternal unhappiness and make him as distressed as love can become! (PC 76) Turning briefly to an earlier issue, we can here understand why scholars such as Timothy Jackson argue that God’s kenotic love upholds human freedom, construed as indeterminacy.70 That interpretation seems a direct gloss on the claim that Christ “out of love cannot make impossible whether or not you will be offended at him” (PC 76). According to this reading, while offense’s possibility is not overturned by the Incarnation, it certainly does not originate there. However, Anti-Climacus’s conception is more ironic. It is not simply that Christ “cannot make impossible” the possibility of offense, but more paradoxically that this impossibility arises “out of [his] love,” “despite his love.” Anti-Climacus repeats the same chiastic configuration in terms of Christ’s power. Christ “must leave it up to you yourself whether you will be offended or not” precisely because he “all powerfully” has chosen to become powerless. Christ for Anti-Climacus reveals that divine love and power contradict the finite and sinful expectations of humanity, appearing self-contradictory. They thereby shape human response as the possibility of offense. Note too that these self-contradictions in Christ’s love, marked graphically by Anti-Climacus’s chiastic configurations, do not simply point to the limitations of human language, although they do that too. Rather, they portray the very character of Christ as essentially vulnerable. Christ’s power lies in a kind of incapacity, in a susceptibility to suffering or fragile openness. Climacus will no doubt remind us that Christ’s commitment is without reserve; whatever grief he experiences does not stem from residual double-mindedness. Still, Anti-Climacus insists that Christ really suffers from his ec-centric dependency on humanity’s response, that Christ

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really wants the gift of his love requited and suffers when it is scorned. He also indicates that such passive, vulnerable capacities are what Christians should emulate when they take the Redeemer as Prototype. Through a sort of residual feedback loop, the fact that Christ cannot make impossible the possibility of offense increases his anguish, making him appear even more pitiable, and thus further occasions offense, and so on. The situation appears almost tragic, as Anti-Climacus suggests when he writes that Christ “is suffering here also; he wants to save all, but in order to be saved they must go through the possibility of offense—ah, it is as if he, the Savior who wants to save all, came to stand almost alone because everyone is offended at him! The mystery of suffering, as no human being can comprehend it or them: to be oneself the sign of offense in order to be the object of faith” (PC 99).71 Such passages shore up my broader contention that it is not simply the logical or categorical contradiction of the “Godman” that leads to offense, but rather the interpersonal contradiction of his all-powerful submission to others. Clearly too, God’s omnipotent suffering does not simply permit the possibility that an individual might be offended. The peculiarity of God’s power rather provokes Christian freedom, figuring it as compassionate or contemptuous pity. In either case, Christ himself models a kind of fallibility—an ideal duality free from all duplicity—that others must strive to reduplicate. To what degree do these Christocentric, cruciform dispositions of radical receptivity bear on Kierkegaard’s wider insistence on cultivating “subjectivity”? Answering that question may glide too easily past the differences between pseudonyms. At the same time, by entertaining the question, we can notice our tendency to read Kierkegaard’s endorsed subjectivity as a sequestered space “in which” I have direct knowledge of a privatized, well-buffered self.72 Kierkegaard’s readers are perhaps too fully in the grip of Cartesian assumptions when they associate subjectivity with an accomplishment that is solely one’s own. As Edward Mooney reminds us, subjectivity for Kierkegaard is almost the reverse: One has more or less subjectivity as one has (or takes) more or less responsibility for one’s life, or is more or less affectively and morally responsive to others and one’s ideals, or is more or less subject to passions and the heart. Subjectivity for Kierkegaard is an openness to be affected by (subject to, responsive to) deeply moral, religious, and aesthetic pulls, initiatives, invitations, pleas, calls, demands.73 This description seems especially faithful to Practice in Christianity. Subjectivity— what Anti-Climacus calls faith or discipleship—entails openness and responsiveness to the call of others. True subjects are subject to others: available, porous, responsive, and vulnerable. One’s “own” freedom and “heroic,” passionate

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subjectivity necessarily redouble as vulnerable openness to others. That is a sentiment that Kierkegaard may have taken from Luther: “A Christian is perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. [And yet,] a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”74 Then again, both can be seen as moving toward the reversals that characterize the Christ Hymn—as well as the Exsultet. Recall once more that the inversions characterizing the prose of felix culpa also come to characterize the worshipping subjects themselves. It is not sin as some objective and past event that gets dismantled and reconfigured by the apocalypse of Savior and salvation. Rather the liturgy existentially reconfigures the very identities of the worshippers. The announcement that the Fall becomes necessary and happy, like the “absolutely patient action” of leitourgia itself (Levinas), decouples who we are from the projects and identities we intend and seek to control. We become other to ourselves, and therefore capable of the receptive dispositions of patience and expectancy. Anti-Climacus understands Christ’s love as pathetic—as involving suffering and appearing pitiful, thereby eliciting compassion or contempt. He will remind us that Christ’s love is pathetic in a third sense as well. That love hopes to move or arouse our own. If and when a person falls for the vulnerable love of Christ, his or her faith also begins to look like passive succumbing, or even pathetically falling in love. This chapter concludes by showing how Anti-Climacus, for all his warfare imagery and warnings against bypassing the possibility of offense, also describes the struggle of faith in terms of falling in love. Such love must be taught, and even commanded (WL 17–43). But when the individual submits to the training, he or she can begin to experience faith less as a choice or battle and more like becoming enthralled. When the practice in Christianity is rigorous, we might even come to experience fallibility, not to mention the possibility of offense, as necessary and even blessed.

“Practice” in Christianity “Imagine a child,” Anti-Climacus instructs the reader in the third part of Practice (PC 174). “Imagine now a youth,” he directs the reader in the next chapter (PC 186). In the first scenario (174–78) he imagines the child being shown beautiful pictures of victorious heroes and then also a picture of Jesus hanging from the cross. The child is eventually told that this crucified man was the most loving person in the world and that it is he who will draw all to himself. This picture, Anti-Climacus imagines, will captivate the child; the child will forget everything else and, as he enters adolescence and adulthood, will condemn the world that crucified Jesus and vow to imitate his sufferings (177–78). In the second scenario (186–92) AntiClimacus narrates how the youth perceives an image of perfection. Becoming infatuated with it, he sees nothing else until, not watching his step, he falls into suffering.

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But he has fallen in love with the picture of perfection and cannot persuade himself to abandon the image—no matter how much suffering results. These stories narrate the process of overcoming the possibility of offense. The child first meets Jesus in his lowly suffering and then gradually comes to know him as the Redeemer. He becomes so enchanted by the abased Jesus that he cannot but continue to love him even when he learns that Jesus presumes to be God. Recalling earlier categories, the child meets and overcomes the temptation to be offended at loftiness (PC 94–101). The youth, by contrast, is first captivated by an image of perfection—the Christ who from on high draws all to himself—and then gradually comes to understand that he will suffer so long as he clings to him. He thereby meets and overcomes the temptation to be offended at lowliness (PC 102–5). Both stories describe the process of progressively strengthening one’s vulnerable empathy and passion for Christ from childhood into adulthood. They provide ways of gradually “winning” faith by avoiding offense. Anti-Climacus, for all his rigorousness, admits that a “human being must be handled gently, and that is why a person is given his task little by little; he is little by little pressed more and more firmly into the greater and greater effort of the test and examination” (PC 186). Perhaps one does not so much choose Christianity as one chooses to practice it—or better, subjects oneself to its training. Anti-Climacus ensures that the training will be difficult, but he also handles the would-be Christian gently and makes it “not more difficult than it is” (CUP I 557). And what is the result of this training? Not being offended, it would seem. If my analysis throughout this chapter is correct, then Anti-Climacus would no doubt phrase it negatively in this way. Even when he considers the one who is passing the test, he refuses to speak of Christian life in superlatives. The religious “continually uses the negative as the essential form” (CUP I 54), just as the “decision” for faith amounts to an ongoing ordeal that continually presupposes the possibility of failure. Yet, surprisingly, Anti-Climacus also uses these stories to characterize faith as the inability to abandon Christ. He writes that the disciplined youth cannot persuade himself to abandon the image of perfection (PC 190, 191, 193); he or she can only repeat Luther’s well-known exclamation, “I cannot do otherwise, God help me” (191, 195).75 To those who follow the pattern of the child, Anti-Climacus likewise writes, “You are not being compelled against your will, but blessed are you if your will compels you in such a way that you must say: I cannot do otherwise, for this sight [of Jesus’ crucifixion] moves me” (171). Do such expressions indicate that the mature, authentic Christian finally surpasses possibilities for failure and offense, resting as it were in the security of faith? Does grace become irresistible and does the highest Christian freedom become the inability not to love God? What would then become of Christian existence as posse peccare potentissme—the possibility of sin potentiated as the possibility of offense?

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These questions, like others that we have encountered in this book, must be answered differently from different perspectives. From a critical perspective, even the exclamation “I cannot do otherwise” must indicate an active refusal of the possibility of offense, not an abstract absence of that possibility. “I cannot” is a way of expressing “I will not”—with vehemence. But it is also possible to imagine that a person’s freedom could become so thoroughly shaped, so rigorously schooled in avoiding offense, that for the committed, smitten, vulnerable person the difference between being unable and being unwilling to be offended recedes toward its vanishing point. Anti-Climacus has no fear of calling into question the easy assumptions of cultured Christianity by continuously accentuating the possibility of offense. But, as Mooney again reminds us, Kierkegaard was no less afraid of suspending critique as well; he has “a spot for the sort of poetry and love and madness that sustains us beyond interrogation.”76 Anti-Climacus ends his second work with that second, more poetic voice, narrating how a person through rigorous practice becomes quite beautifully capable of being incapable of offense. This Christian has become strong in weakness—unable to do otherwise, hopelessly in love. These double negatives (“I cannot not be faithful”) and paradoxes (being “strong in weakness”) continue to distinguish virtuous dispositions that are cultivated within the authentic Christian from the presumed innocence of the spiritless. More important here, they also resemble the kenotic love that Kierkegaard finds in Christ. Of course, there will be differences between Christ’s pathetic love and its redoubling in the Christian’s life. Christ omnipotently chooses to become vulnerable, and that through an eternal decision, as Climacus insists (PF 24–25). When his self-emptying love becomes in time the Christian’s prototype, the latter can approximate its resolve only through continuous training. Thus when the Christian finally reaches the place where he or she also “cannot do otherwise,” one suspects that the human disposition only approximates the original. There will be times when the Christian will need to recall and revitalize the possibility of offense, if only to prevent his or her love from resembling a first immediacy. But to fall so deeply for the image of Christ that the possibility of doing otherwise is in no way hidden or repressed and yet feels as though it has been “destroyed”— this is Christian beatitude. Any faith worth its name will have to struggle through repulsing possibilities. And yet from another perspective and in a more poetic voice, Anti-Climacus describes how the battle against offense can feel like falling in love, even to the point where the beloved returns Christ’s vow: “I cannot do otherwise, God help me.” Admittedly, this splitting of Anti-Climacus’s voice toward the end of Practice happens subtly and without Kierkegaard’s commentary. It is much more obvious and important when we consider the largest stylistic fracture in the Kierkegaardian corpus—the one dividing his pseudonymous writings from the series of devotional

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texts that Kierkegaard signed with his own name. The final chapter here will return more directly to the relationship between fallibility and felicity, between the possibility of sin and the actuality of joy, by broadly examining the polyphony of Kierkegaard’s corpus as such. Even as Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus continually push readers to the possibility of sin, ensuring that faith takes hard work, the devotional discourses pull readers from trial to trust, portraying faith as an unforeseen gift. Chapter 5 examines these discourses and Kierkegaard’s multivalent authorship as a whole in order to more fully consider how fallibility and the possibility of offense—while arduous—can lead to Christian bliss.

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5 Felicitas: Between Cross and Resurrection

There is many a man who has been immer lustig [always merry] and yet stands so low that even esthetics regards him as comic. The question is to whether one has not become joyful in the wrong place; and where is the right place? It is—in danger. To be joyful out on 70,000 fathoms of water, many, many miles from all human help— yes, that is something great! To swim in the shallows in the company of waders is not the religious. —Frater Taciturnus, “Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?” It is odd, but I think true, that most of us are almost as ill-prepared to receive joy as we are suffering. —Stanley Hauerwas, God, Medicine, and Suffering In this book I have read Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors as crafting an existential via negativa through which the reader approaches faith by confronting possibilities for failure. Chapter 2 followed Haufniensis around theodical justifications of sin in the effort to express, with dual voices, the fortune of human fragility. Chapter 3 examined how Anti-Climacus in The Sickness unto Death deconstructs the Romantic embrace of despair even as he lifts up sin’s potent possibility as an essential component of Christian faith. Chapter 4 then traced how the fissures of human fragility and fallibility all but rupture when the divine Physician takes his scalpel to them. A particular and peculiar Christ means to bring healing and rest but does not and cannot do so without making offense exceedingly possible.

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In the terms of one modern deconstructionist, this strand of the pseudonymous authorship works to restore life “to its original difficulty.”1 Kierkegaard’s emphatic stringency—his demand for continual suspension above 70,000 fathoms of water, his vigilant censure of becoming joyful in any wrong place—this stringency might cause readers to forget that there is a right place for joy and that the greatness of being out on dangerous water is to be there joyfully (SLW 476–77). As we have seen, there is much in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works that rouses Christendom from its collective amnesia and induces a crisis of spirit in its spiritless members. Especially when following Kierkegaard’s inverted dialectic, whereby fragility, fallibility, and the possibility of offense provide passage into and continuously characterize Christian faith, one easily fixates on these “negative marks” (PC 143), perhaps forgetting what they inversely signify. Witness the fact that “being out on 70,000 fathoms of water” has become an emblem of Kierkegaardian faith, whereas the joy that must accompany it is less readily recalled. But for all their talk about stringent discipleship, suffering, and the possibility of sin, Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus, together with de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, and Kierkegaard himself, never lose sight of Christianity’s primary determinant— Salighed (beatitude, happiness)—however indirectly it must be expressed. In this final exegetical chapter I want to make the case that Kierkegaard does get back to Christian joy, even encircles it continuously. In fact, I will suggest that the purpose of his stringent pseudonymous authorship, especially when read beside his signed, devotional writings, is to make true felicity possible through its paradoxical countermotion. In broadly reading Kierkegaard’s entire authorship as using what is furthest from felicity to evoke and express it, I will here show how he most clearly repeats the Easter Eve’s own paradoxical proclamation of joy. More specifically, this chapter connects the polysemy of Kierkegaard’s broader authorship with the Easter Mass’s para/orthodoxy in the effort to describe how the felicity recognized by Kierkegaard, like that of the worshippers, comprises neither the final elimination of pain nor the acceptance of tragedy but something “in between” them and more difficult to express. The felicity of the Fall, for the Easter worshippers, and of fallibility, for Kierkegaard, entails what Lee Barrett has dubbed “the joy in the cross.”2 That joy remains inextricable from deep pain and ongoing possibilities for sin and yet entails a kind of expectancy, a readiness for surprise, or an opening of the self to that which interrupts it from without. Taciturnus insists that the right place for joy is in danger (SLW 476–77). This chapter’s consideration of Kierkegaard’s wider authorship will specify that dangerous place as being between confessional and communion table, or as the time of Holy Saturday, the day between cross and resurrection.3 It is during this “day between the days”4 that the vigilantes use Adam’s Fall as backhanded witness to Christ. That in-between time is crucial for speaking para/orthodoxically about sin, as I have argued in chapter 1. It

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also names the time to which Kierkegaard figuratively returns, having turned from theodical and Romantic conceptions.

Handling Happiness Kierkegaard deals with happiness quite differently than do the theodicists and Romantics. As I argued in chapter 2, Hegel’s philosophical Idealism effectively functions to explain and justify sin. Theodicy in general assuages the monstrosity of evil by showing how it brings about an outstanding good—in Hegel’s case, the good of inerrant philosophical insight. I have also suggested that the justification of sin depends on a mode of discourse that can be purged, at least in theory, from metaphorical and mythological language. Hegel’s explanations strive to be univocal in order to render evil fully rational. Finally, recall that his explanations are entirely retrospective. It is only with 20/20 hindsight, looking back on the slaughter bench of history from a secured place of Absolute Knowing, that Hegel grasps the divine comedy as one would “get” a cosmic joke. The happiness of this vision thus amounts to the security of having figured out self and history—a final speculative insight which “happy sin” compactly names. In chapter 3 I suggested that Romantic poets utter felix culpa for opposing purposes. If for theodicists the phrase explains sin, for the poets it exclaims one’s resistance to these very explanations. The cries of Cain protest what Romantics consider the easy resolutions of obedient faith (personified by Cain’s family) or of selfconfident rebellion (personified by Lucifer). As such, they protest against conceptualizations, even the concept of a fortunate Fall. Still, Romantic poetry expresses its own version of happy sin. In choosing self-conscious despair over easy resolutions, the poets underscore and accept the inevitability of misfortune. Felix culpa becomes not insight into the real meaning of sin but the battle cry of one willing to face the tragedies of lived existence. If Hegel speculates back on Good Friday from a final Easter Morning, the Romantics begin and end with the day of suffering. In Kierkegaard’s eyes, they err on the side of bearing their crosses too proudly, unwilling to give them up. The same words that Hegel uses to explain evil, and that Byron uses to utter tragedy, the Easter watchers use to marvel over God’s ironic transfiguration of human sin. The rhetoric of the Exsultet thereby remains irreducible to the theodical and Romantic types. Neither divine comedy as comprehended, nor tragic spectacle as embraced, the Easter proclamation uses the tragedy of sin to express the magnitude of good news, and uses good news to reveal the depth of sin. Neither a retrospective knowing, as from a final Easter morning, nor a cry of desperation, as if from the cross, the church’s song emerges from Holy Saturday, the time between

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suffering and redemption, or better, the time of simultaneity, when the other days of the triduum overlap and bear witness to one another. Entailing neither immunity from misery nor a poetry of suffering, the Exsultet points away from the human condition toward the one who interrupts, wounds, and heals it from without. Those who hear the words Lenten season after Lenten season develop neither the disposition of magnanimous invulnerability nor the fervor of human protest but rather the capacity to be surprised. My main exegeses have traced how Kierkegaard directly critiques theodical rationalizations (chapter 2) and playfully deconstructs Romantic resignation (chapter 3) in order to portray the self ’s capacities and tasks in more paradoxical, intersubjective, and “liturgical” ways (chapter 4). I am aware that the summary I am giving here might suggest that this liturgical configuration of sin and self constitutes a happy medium between the other two. Between comedy and tragedy lies a kind of tragic-comedy (cf. SLW 145–46, 366–67). Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday remains the time of Holy Saturday. Between prophylaxis and protest is praise. I think it is truer to suggest that the exultations of Holy Saturday remain different in kind from the options that border it on either side. The exultations belong to those who are keeping watch—those who have glimpsed or overheard, but have not comprehended, God’s apocalypse of grace. Likewise, their “tragiccomic” joyfulness entails not a halfway house between Hegel’s contentedness and Cain’s despair but a unique interplay of passionate dispositions that I will describe as ecstatic and eccentric.

First Fruits of Blessedness The Danish word Salighed is usually translated as “eternal happiness” in the Climacus writings, as “blessedness” in Practice in Christianity (for example, in “Blessed is he who is not offended at me”), and as “blessedness” or “eternal blessedness” in Kierkegaard’s devotional literature, with its repeated consideration of Mathew 5–6.5 The word indicates a spiritual happiness that is eschatological in nature but is also related to temporal happiness through an individual’s passionate concern.6 Kierkegaard also uses the word Glæde (joy) to indicate the experience of mundane happiness that accompanies one’s striving for eternal bliss.7 He writes “The Joy of It” (Det Glædelige i) with mantra-like repetition in his Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847) and his Christian Discourses (1848). He couples the phrase with descriptions of the suffering, poverty, and adversity that are normally regarded as far from joyous, considering, for example, “The Joy of It that in relation to God a person always suffers as guilty,” “The Joy of It that it is not the road that is hard but that hardship is the road,” “The Joy of It that adversity is prosperity,” and so on.8 In each devotion, Kierkegaard reflects on the gospel’s beatitudes and

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reconfigures their reversals through his own prose. It would seem that, even as the aptitude to fail becomes the capacity to sin, and as the capacity to sin becomes the temptation to take offense, Kierkegaard sees in this progression a possible means toward eternal bliss. But “means” is perhaps the wrong word. Kierkegaard and his pseudonymous authors do speak of a person’s life as a time of testing and the afterlife as a time of beatitude, but they more often and profoundly imagine spiritual struggle to be interlaced with spiritual bliss, in this world from beginning to end. For example, when Frater Taciturnus, pseudonymous contributor to Stages on Life’s Way, associates “the religious” with a consummated “third stage,” he also makes significant qualifications. The religious is “the sphere of fulfillment,” he writes, “but, please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills an alms box or a sack with gold, for repentance has specifically created a boundless space, and as a consequence the religious contradiction: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet to be joyful” (SLW 476–77, my emphasis). Other pseudonyms concur. Whatever the final stage or sphere of the religious entails, it is not the identical return to a first immediacy, the refilling of a sack that has been emptied for a time. Taciturnus emphasizes the simultaneity of striving and joy, just as de Silentio indicates the simultaneity of the two movements of faith, and as Anti-Climacus writes of faith as having despair continually within it as an annulled possibility. Faith involves a “religious contradiction” which entails neither tragic inevitable loss nor an interesting, humorous solution. Rather, to have faith is to live in a productive tension that bears the “first fruits of blessedness” (JP 2:2176).9 Predictably, it is Kierkegaard’s figurative language, as well as the multiplicity of his voices, that provides the bond between human striving and Christian beatitude. As should be clear, I find Kierkegaard’s unique portrayal of felicity to go hand in hand with his indirect communication in general and the multiplicity of his voices in particular. We have attended to that indirection and multivalence in our examinations of Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus. I here step back from explicating individual pseudonymous works that deal with sin in order to situate those writings within Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole. I will focus especially on his signed, “veronymous”10 discourses and on their important differences from the pseudonymous works. I do so in order to attend to the way that Kierkegaard is most obviously plurivocal, and also to suggest that the complex, inextricable relationship between spiritual trial and Christian beatitude itself remains inextricable from the complex relationship between the pseudonymous works and Kierkegaard himself. The shifting terrain of the latter relationship can be discerned by contrasting the works signed “Kierkegaard” with those he writes at second hand. But other approaches help as well. In the next section I will argue that trial and joy get

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configured already in the way that Kierkegaard interprets and responds to the pseudonymous works. I return in particular to Practice in Christianity, since scholars regard that work as both ending Kierkegaard’s “indirect method” and beginning his “direct attack” on established Christianity. I will then examine some of Kierkegaard’s signed writings to argue that they constitute univocal discourse only in the directness with which they declare the necessity of indirection. That necessity—like the necessary indirection of the liturgical witness—stems less from the deficiencies of the proclaimer than from the eccentricities of the proclaimed. Finally, this chapter will directly juxtapose the pseudonymous with the signed in the effort to show how they cloak joy in spiritual combat. As paired with works that admonish and awaken, Kierkegaard’s signed works, like those of the Exsultet, indicate wonder over the transformation of death into life, suffering into joy, and offense into adoration. I continue with a word about how Kierkegaard centrally “handles” happiness through the two sides of his corpus.

Kierkegaard’s Ambidexterity In his posthumously published report to history, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard simultaneously explains the coherence of his multifaceted authorship—a coherence that he intuits “with the help of providence”—and chastises his Copenhagen contemporaries for receiving his ironic pseudonymous works straightforwardly while virtually ignoring the upbuilding and devotional works that Kierkegaard signed with his own name. Using the first pseudonymous work (Either/Or) and first signed work (Two Upbuilding Discourses) as representatives for the whole, Kierkegaard likens the misreading to a lack of dexterity: “With my left hand I passed Either/Or out into the world, with my right hand Two Upbuilding Discourses; but they all or almost all took the left hand with their right” (PV 36). As the image suggests, Kierkegaard’s readers have erred first by receiving only one of his hands, and again by receiving that one inappropriately.11 At least in these retrospective accounts, Kierkegaard understands his two hands to be working in concert for a unified purpose. He regards himself as an author who, from the beginning of his authorship to its multiple endings, has “willed one thing”—that is, the religious, “but the religious completely cast into reflection, yet in such a way that it is completely taken back out of reflection into simplicity” (OMWA 6–7). The left hand questions the benefit of cultured Christianity. The right hand takes Christianity “back out of reflection” in order to make available the obedience and joy that characterize contemporaneity with Christ. Put in the terms of the present book, the later left-handed works by Anti-Climacus cultivate and commend the capacity to sin in general and to take offense in particular, the presence of which distinguishes Christian faith from the presumed innocence and

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childishness of “the crowd.” At the same time, the right-handed works by Kierkegaard describe how the life of faith, or what Sylvia Walsh calls the “simplicity of living Christianly,”12 nonetheless resembles the spontaneous obedience of children and the natural world. Put in more familiar terms, Kierkegaard’s perceived task is to lead the reader—with both hands—from an aesthetic first immediacy to the second immediacy of faith.13 Some will suspect that any effort to interpret Kierkegaard’s corpus in terms of the pseudonymous and signed overly privileges one interpretation—that of Kierkegaard, as siphoned from the journals and watermarked within The Point of View—and thus gives undue status to authorial intention. However, the decision to divide the corpus between signed and pseudonymous has certain advantages independent of Kierkegaard’s endorsement. Ironically, such a division even prevents the reader from attempting to discern Kierkegaard’s intentions within or behind every published work. Reading the pseudonymous works in light of the signed discourses, and vice versa, forces the reader to deal with synchronic differences in terms of Kierkegaard’s diverse literary repertoire and differing rhetorical purposes, rather than chalking them up to Kierkegaard’s personal maturation.14 Such comparative work is fruitfully done even when the privileged interpretation of The Point of View, which initially suggests such pairings, is thoroughly deconstructed.15 One might still object to the privilege that Kierkegaard ostensibly gives to his right hand and to the implied ease with which the reader might receive it. His analogy suggests that the right-handed works are more authentic and straightforward than those of the left. In Kierkegaard’s Danish, the højre Hånd (right hand) connotes the status of rank, as the adjective højere, for example, means higher or superior. Venstre (the left) connotes inferiority, as left-handed work (venstrehåndsarbejde) is inferior or shoddy. To be kejthåndet (left-handed) is often to be kejtet: awkward, clumsy, or maladroit. The instruction to receive Kierkegaard’s highest gift with one’s own right hand thus might suggest an uncomplicated reading of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding works that is rarely confirmed by those who study them. This objection can be responded to by one’s closely attending to Kierkegaard’s metaphor. When asking his readers to receive his right hand with their right hands, and his left with theirs, he is asking them to switch or cross their arms. The image is suggestive. It implies that the reader must read just as dexterously as Kierkegaard writes, even when reading the discourses. Michael Strawser is one of the more recent interpreters of Kierkegaard to insist upon this type of reading. He argues that the signed works—or the “veronymous” writings, as he calls them—are as indirect and ironic as the others and must be received as such.16 One might even deconstruct the signed works’ status. For if the right hand is privileged, it is privileged in relation to the left and thus depends on the left for its

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status. Such turns help level the hierarchical binaries that we (and maybe Kierkegaard) normally ascribe to conceptual divisions. In terms of the present chapter, it allows us to attend to the “plain, factual distinction” between the AntiClimacus writings and the signed discourses without having to ascribe a weight to each text in advance.17 As will become increasingly clear, I find that these texts differ from and defer to one another in theologically complex and rhetorically compelling ways. They also intimate the stereophonic proclamation of the Exsultet, especially in coming to know Christian joy from the day between cross and resurrection.

Rigor and Leniency, Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus We are presently concerned with the relationship between increasingly determinant possibilities to sin, which we have followed throughout this book, and eternal beatitude, the more typical object of Christian hope. One way that relationship gets negotiated is through the relationship between pseudonymous and signed works. But it also gets negotiated within the pseudonymous works, and especially in how Kierkegaard—as reader and sometimes editor of them—receives and appropriates them in a number of ways. This section returns to Practice in Christianity in order to trace both how Anti-Climacus depicts strenghed (rigor) in relation to mildhed (leniency) and how Kierkegaard depicts Anti-Climacus. Repeatedly in Practice, Anti-Climacus discusses Christianity’s rigorousness and how it relates to its leniency. He freely associates rigor with the Law and “Christ as the possibility of offense”; with leniency he associates the Gospel, grace, and “Christ as the object of faith.”18 Anti-Climacus thus discusses the relationship between possibilities to sin and Christian joy largely through his discussion of the relationship between mildhed and strenghed. But that relationship, and even the locus of that relationship, is no simple matter. In “The Voice of Rigor,” David Possen traces Kierkegaard’s shifting use of strenghed and its derivatives.19 Discerning the connection between rigor and leniency requires that we attend not only to the ways they are represented within Practice, but also to the way in which Anti-Climacus presents this relationship rigorously and/or leniently, and then to the way Kierkegaard, as “reader” (CUP I 626) and critic of Practice, understands his own perspective to be more or less rigorous than that of Anti-Climacus. The last of these issues entails difficulties of its own, since Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Practice changes over time. Because rigor and leniency get negotiated both inside and outside Practice, some biographical factors that surround the composition and reception of the work should be mentioned. After publishing Sickness and while brooding over the form

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and authorship of Practice, Kierkegaard records in his journals a flash of insight about Practice that allows him to “be more calm” and finally “understand [himself] completely.” The reassuring thought is that, while ethical rigorousness “must be heard,” it can stop with that step. Afterwards, “it must be left to everyone’s conscience to decide whether he is capable of building the tower so high” (JP 6:6451). Kierkegaard perhaps means that he cannot list himself as author without infringing on the reader’s freedom to uphold the highest Christian requirements, or to seek forgiveness for failing to meet them and indulgence from doing so in the future. Anti-Climacus need not scale back the requirement according to what the reader, or even the editor (Kierkegaard), seems capable of doing. Interestingly, Kierkegaard claims that he adopts Anti-Climacus’s rigorous voice as a way of making its message more lenient: If “Practice in Christianity” is published, what has been intimated in many places elsewhere will be carried out—namely to set forth the possibility of offense. This is also related essentially to my task, which is continually to jack up the price by bringing a dialectic to bear. But for that reason, too, a pseudonym had to be used. That which represents the dialectical element has always been by a pseudonym. To want to make it my own would be both untrue and an all too frightful and violent means of awakening. (JP 6:6464) A less dialectical work authored by Kierkegaard would be “too frightful” and “untrue”—frightful because this “zenith of Christianity,” if presented as other than an ideal possibility, could only induce despair; untrue because the author could not claim to embody the ideal he is proposing. Kierkegaard thereby stands with the reader under Christianity’s ideal requirement and judgment (JP 6:6442; JFY 2, 12, 133, 141). Somewhat ironically, “jack[ing] up the price” in this way makes the ideal requirement more manageable. By presenting the work rigorously but through a pseudonym, Kierkegaard holds open the possibility that the reader will resort to God’s grace through confession of sin. In particular, Kierkegaard hopes that Bishop Mynster, whom he finds increasingly responsible for Denmark’s spiritual slumbers, will confess that he has failed to live up to the Christian requirement as expressed by Anti-Climacus in its unalloyed stringency. The Editor’s Preface repeated at the beginning of each section (PC 7, 73, 149) states that the intended function of the ideal requirements is to encourage “personal admission and confession.” Kierkegaard as editor writes, “The requirement should be heard—and I understand what is said as spoken to me alone—so that I might learn not only to resort to grace but to resort to it in relation to the use of grace” (PC 7).20 This comprises the most explicit directive as to how the rigorousness of Christianity’s demands might be used leniently.

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Likewise, “The Moral” that concludes the first section couples demand for stringency with reliance on grace. Although the passage is attributed to the author (Anti-Climacus), its meta-analysis resembles that of the Preface, signed by Kierkegaard. In both passages, the author steps away from the main exposition to instruct readers as to how they should use it. “The Moral” recalls de Silentio’s descriptions of the joy that the knight of faith finds in daily life after passing through spiritual trial. In Fear and Trembling, heroic faith was linked to sin and grace only offhandedly, as the Introduction to this book noted. This connection is central in the Moral: “And what does all this mean?” It means that each individual in quiet inwardness before God is to humble himself under what it means in the strictest sense to be a Christian, is to confess honestly before God where he is so that he still might worthily accept the grace that is offered to every imperfect person—that is, to everyone. And then nothing further; then as for the rest, let him do his work and rejoice in it, love his wife and rejoice in her, joyfully bring up his children, love his fellow beings, rejoice in life. If anything more is required of him, God will surely let him understand and in that case will also help him further, for in the terrible language of the Law it indeed sounds so terrible, because it seems as though it were the individual himself who by his own power is to hold onto Christ, rather than, in the language of love, that it is Christ who holds onto him. (PC 67) Rejoice in work and one’s partner, bring up children with joy, and exult in life— nothing further. This worldly happiness is reserved for those who have “passed through” sin’s possibility and the confession of guilt. Especially at the end of Practice, Anti-Climacus repeats the language of returning, Abraham-like, to one’s daily vocation with renewed spontaneity. What makes the Moral and Preface unique is that there Anti-Climacus neither accuses nor consoles but rather instructs the reader on how best to use his words of accusation and consolation. The right “use of grace” entails returning to everyday tasks and interests and receiving them with renewed gratitude.21 We return to the historical details of Practice’s composition and reception. Upon publication, the book received little comment: one small review in the press and only a private reaction by Bishop Mynster, which was conveyed to Kierkegaard at second hand.22 Recalling the bishop’s reaction to Practice five years afterwards, at the time of the publication of its second edition, Kierkegaard declares that Mynster should have “either decisively declare himself for the book, venture to go along with it . . . or as decisively as possible throw himself against it, stamp it as a blasphemous and profane attempt, and declare the official Christianity to be the true Christianity”

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(TM 69–70) Kierkegaard notes that he did neither of the two, but “only wounded himself on the book” (TM 70). By the time he had written these words, Kierkegaard had given up the hope that the institutionalized church could be defended through confession of its guilt. In the same article, Kierkegaard writes that if Practice had been first published in 1855, it would be signed by Kierkegaard, not Anti-Climacus, and the repeated Preface and Moral would be dropped (TM 69). Each of these revocations would seem to make Practice even more rigorous. Without the permission granted in the Preface and Moral to use the book for confession and indulgence, readers would have no option but to reject the book or strive, perhaps despairingly, to fulfill its ideal demands. Without the pseudonym, Kierkegaard could not model the personal confession that he originally sought, at least not by distinguishing his own perspective from the ideal requirement. As Possen notes, typical interpretive assumptions that the hyper-Christian AntiClimacus is more rigorous than his editor are only partially true; in time, Kierkegaard proves the stricter of the two by revoking the rigorous pseudonym that actually made the work more lenient.23 But even the conclusion that Kierkegaard’s presentation of Christianity becomes increasingly rigorous between the first and the second publication of Practice deserves qualification. From a more nuanced perspective, it appears that Kierkegaard becomes not more or less rigorous but increasingly suspicious that the directives in the Moral and Preface have permitted readers to accept Christianity’s leniency while skirting its rigorous demands. By revoking the pseudonym, Preface, and Moral, Kierkegaard prevents the reader from beginning with his conclusion, from bypassing what we have been calling the first movement of faith and proceeding directly to the second. (De Silentio bars the shortcut as well: Abraham “had to draw the knife before [he] kept Isaac—FT 23.) Kierkegaard’s concern, therefore, is not that readers will find it too easy but that they will isolate its ease from its vigor. Indeed, any immediate appropriation of grace not only misses the strenuousness of Christianity’s rigor but also the joy of Christianity’s leniency. As he puts the matter in Practice, “Christianity is not at all closer to heavy-mindedness than to light-mindedness; they are both equally worldliness, equally far away, and both have just as much need of conversion” (PC 154). Perhaps the most remarkable indication that “worldliness,” by bypassing the rigorousness of Christianity, misses its joyousness as well, is found where AntiClimacus suggests that avoiding offense and winning salvation expresses the same thing in different ways. To the question that was explored in the previous chapter— Why would one undergo a treatment that appears infinitely worse than the sickness?—Christianity responds: “In order to avoid offense, or it says the same thing in another way: In order to enter into life” (PC 111). Anti-Climacus continues:

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fortunate fallibility That is to say, Christianity places an infinite emphasis upon entering into life, upon eternal happiness as the absolute good, and thus in turn the infinite emphasis upon avoiding offense. Therefore that which is really the occasion for offense is the infinite passion with which eternal happiness is comprehended, which corresponds to the infinite fear of offense. It is precisely this that is the occasion of offense to the natural man; the natural man does not have and does not want such a conception of eternal happiness, and therefore has no conception of the danger of offense either. (PC 111)

Here the “possibility of offense” itself expresses the magnitude of Christian beatitude when the would-be Christian faces its absoluteness. As has been mentioned, it is common among Kierkegaardians to regard Practice as representing the end of Kierkegaard’s indirect communication and the beginning of his attack on the Church, which appears to treat purity of the Gospel and the fallen modern church in dualistic terms. My interpretations suggest that, if there is a tendency toward dualism in Practice, it is not between an evil world and a holy otherworld, or even between a lax church and Kierkegaard’s prophetic condemnations. The duality is between the bifocal vision and bilingual speech needed to recognize and express the infinite terror and infinite beatitude of the essentially Christian, on the one hand, and the more myopic vision and univocal talkativeness of Christendom on the other. Christians’ eyes must continually shift, their voices must rise and fall, in order to know and express Christian faith.24 Anti-Climacus calls false all vision and discourse that do not bend in this way. On the one hand, “the discourse is indeed false that continually, and never in any other way than invitingly, enticingly, attractively, wants to speak about the visit to God’s house, because, seen from the other side, it is terrifying.” On the other hand, “that discourse is also false that finally ends by frightening people away from coming to the house of the Lord, because from the other side it is blessed; one day in God’s house is better than a thousand anywhere else” (PC 175). Passages such as this one suggest a more refined answer to the question concerning the relationship between striving and joy. It is not only that both ways of seeing and speaking point to the same reality. It is also that both perspectives and languages are required in order to represent that reality truthfully. To emphasize either rigor or leniency to the exclusion of the other does not just get “the essentially Christian” half right. It distorts Christianity thoroughly, rendering it completely false.25 Anti-Climacus thus speaks of the two sides (the “heavenly” and the “human”) from which faith must be seen and the two ways (law and gospel, rigor and leniency, the possibility of offense and Christian salvation) by which it must be presented.

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Perhaps more than any other pseudonym, he emphasizes the simultaneity between two movements of faith, given his renewed awareness of the temptation to take Christianity in vain. The next section will show how this way of seeing and speaking resonates with the liturgical felix culpa by examining how the texts signed “Kierkegaard” reiterate the Church’s peculiar and joyous proclamation.

The Signed Works and the Liturgy’s Song As we have seen, Kierkegaard worries that readers will begin with his conclusion, abstracting Christianity’s leniency from its rigorousness. This is not merely a methodological concern. He and Anti-Climacus understand that the greatest of Christianity’s blessings redouble as lowliness when enacted in the world. Christ’s twofold nature and kenotic self-giving found this redoubling and remain its paramount example. But beatitude in the Christian’s life also must be achieved circuitously, by becoming contemporary with the suffering Jesus. This section will trace how such redoublings express a marvel similar to the Exsultet’s wonder over the fortunate Fall. We attend in particular to the poetic language, Christocentrism, and references to Holy Saturday within the signed work, Christian Discourses, which Kierkegaard composed alongside Practice in Christianity.

Language Busting and Breaking In many ways, all of Kierkegaard’s devotional discourses qua devotional strive to make the reality to which they point immediately present to the reader. They thereby seem to fall under Derrida’s critique of logocentrism. While I cannot fully refute that charge here, I can suggest that the primary way that they connect the reality of God or self to the language used to describe it is not by taking one privileged concept as a direct, transparent window into an extralinguistic reality. Quite the opposite, signifiers connect with the signified only insofar as they create the reality they describe, in and through the description.26 In poetic language in general and performative discourse in particular, subject matter and communication remain inseparably intertwined. Practice in Christianity too does not just depict Christ as the sign of offense and the object of faith; it creates in and through this depiction an occasion for the reader to take offense or become faithful. Interrupting the initial invitation with “the Halt,” Anti-Climacus introduces Christ, the possibility of offense, with abrupt rhetorical shifts which themselves might offend the reader. In his signed discourses, Kierkegaard performs the realities he bespeaks even more continually. Witness the fact that almost every devotional discourse begins

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and ends with a prayer, usually addressed to “Father in heaven.” Framed by such prayer, the discourses do not so much exposit themes as assess the prayer’s power in order that it might resume with increased fervor.27 In Christian Discourses especially, Kierkegaard’s depictions of the essentially Christian make available its truth. Take, for example, Part Two, “States of Mind [Stemninger] in the Strife of Suffering,” or, according to an older translation, “Joyful Notes in the Strife of Suffering.” The epigraph is taken from Psalm 49:5: “I will incline my ear to a proverb; I will set my dark sayings to the music of the harp.” The reader will not find here talk about how suffering relates to joy. Indeed, at one point Kierkegaard merely asserts, “That this is joyful need not be developed” (CD 158). Rather, the work actually rejoices in adversity, setting dark sayings to the music of the harp by repeating its amazement over the Christian reversal of suffering and joy. The older translation of the title catches the play on “notes” (Stemminger). The reader finds here not developed arguments but tunes—ways of “delivering” suffering that make it sing.28 In the Exsultet and Milton, the reality of blessed fault likewise remains inseparable from the speech (or song) that blesses it. As we have seen, neither the vigilantes nor Milton’s Adam conceptualizes and analyzes the goodness of sin. They rather proclaim the happy fault and themselves “rejoice much more that much more good [from sin] shall spring.” Formally, then, both the liturgy and Kierkegaard’s discourses function to make present the reality they describe. But the two resemble one another in material ways as well. Both choose to express the magnitude of God’s grace inversely through sin and repentance. In the case of the Exsultet, the worshippers use that which is seemingly furthest from Christ’s mercy—the sin of Adam—to express their wonder over grace. The fact that even sin appears good in light of God’s mercy testifies to the magnitude of this unprecedented gift. For his part, Kierkegaard explicitly states the difficulty of expressing the graces of God before employing poetic inversions. He writes of a “language difference” between God and humanity (CD 268). When it comes to portraying God, human language is “second rate and half-true”—and so even when “we speak in the strongest expressions about God’s testing us, our speech is still meaningless unless the meaning is implicitly understood: that basically God is holding onto us” (CD 286). Wider considerations suggest that human language fails not primarily because of the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and humanity but because of the “even more infinite” difference between Christ as forgiving and the sinner as forgiven (PF 46–47; SUD 122). This “distance,” because infinite, can be portrayed as inexpressible closeness just as well as a chasmic abyss—which leads to the existential reversals we explored in the last chapter. Kierkegaard, like the Easter Eve worshippers, uses these beatitude-like reversals

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to indicate the mystery of the encounter. Explicating I John 3:20 (“even if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts”), he writes the following passage, thick with implications: [The apostle] does not say that God is greater than the most loving human being, but that he is greater than the heart that condemns itself. God and the human being resemble each other only inversely. You do not reach the possibility of comparison by the ladder of direct likeness: great, greater, greatest; it is possible only inversely. Neither does a human being come closer and closer to God by lifting up his head higher and higher, but inversely by casting himself down even more deeply in worship. . . . What a strange comparison! All human purity, all human mercy is not good enough for comparison; but a repenting heart that condemns itself—with this is compared God’s greatness in showing mercy, except that God’s greatness is even greater: as deep as this heart can lower itself, and yet never itself deep enough, so infinitely elevated or infinitely more elevated, is God’s mercy in showing mercy! See language seems to burst and break in order to describe God’s greatness in showing mercy. (CD 292) Louis Mackey calls this literary technique a via remotionis (borrowing from Aquinas), while Sylvia Walsh traces an “inverted dialectic” throughout the second authorship.29 According to both, the height of God’s love can correspond only to (while still surpassing) the lowliness of contrition. One might still ask: If language seems to burst and break in attempting to express God’s mercy, why must it burst into the particular image of human penitence? The concerns of Haufniensis to distinguish “the qualitative” from “the quantitative” suggest one response. To speak of God’s mercy via eminentia (through “the ladder of direct likeness”) would imply that the difference between humanity and God is bridged or at least “shortened” by the analogy. Comparing God’s height with the depth of human contrition, however, functions analogically (in the sense outlined in chapter 2) by comprehending God vis-à-vis human experience and simultaneously marking the limits of such comprehension. The analogy expresses amazement over God’s proximity in and through the difference or marks God’s otherness in and through the intimacy. There is deep resonance between this manner of writing and the language of the liturgy’s felix culpa. The Exsultet not only expresses Savior and salvation as hyperbolically as possible; by forcing Adam’s rebellion to bear ironic witness to grace, it makes Christ comprehensible while underscoring his inexplicability. When Kierkegaard writes, “as deep as this heart can lower itself, and yet never itself deep enough, so infinitely elevated or infinitely more elevated, is God’s mercy in showing mercy!” he likewise comes to terms with the mystery of grace in a way that unsettles

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frameworks for comprehension, magnifying Christ’s mysteriousness through and despite human knowing. The via remotionis, or what I have been calling liturgical speech, comes through most vividly in Kierkegaard’s meditations on the woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears (Luke 7:47 ff), a reoccurring image in the devotional discourses.30 This woman sorrows over her sins and also rejoices in Christ. More important, the sorrow itself expresses the joy, and Kierkegaard suggests that the two are identical: “She hated herself: she loved much” (WA 138, 139); or again: “Happy is the one in whom there is this true sorrow over his sin” (152). Sorrow over sin is one’s love for Christ; it is a sign, the outward manifestation of a hidden love relationship. The woman in turn becomes a “symbol” (141), “picture” (141, 143), “parable” (141), and “sacred story” (142) worthy of emulation. This is dangerous rhetoric, of course. Especially because Kierkegaard lifts up a grief-stricken female as the inverted sign for Christian beatitude, feminists rightfully ask whether this privileges sins of pride, ignoring sins of hiding,31 and thereby asks women and others who are traditionally deprived of full human agency to give up even more power. I cannot offer a full response here except to remind the reader that Anti-Climacus deconstructs the dichotomy between spirited and spiritless sin and portrays penitence not as a human work but as a vulnerable undergoing. In the words of Taciturnus, “to repent is not a positive movement outward or off to, but a negative movement inwards, not a doing but by oneself letting something happen to oneself ” (SLW 476). For his part, Anti-Climacus insists that repentance opens oneself to the qualitative otherness of Christ; it does not hand over power in a zero-sum game of domination and submission. Sorrowing over one’s sin thus remains equally removed from self-abnegation as from self-assertiveness insofar as either comprises a human accomplishment. Whatever “hating oneself ” means, it does not constitute a “positive movement” toward loving others much, but rather signals—albeit with risky words—the dissolution of all human efforts to precipitate Christian beatitude. Only as such does it become the inverted sign of Christian joy.

When Eternity Comforts A second defining characteristic of the liturgy’s felix culpa involves its focus on Christ, through which worshippers peripherally glimpse the goodness of sin. The vigilantes express that the sin of Adam becomes happy by meriting “such and so great a Redeemer.” The Exsultet, far from pondering the “fittingness” (Anselm) of Atonement given the magnitude of humanity’s debt, instead marvels at the excessiveness of the Redeemer, and at the way even sin appears good in his light. Kierkegaard likewise speaks of the joy of penitent sorrow only insofar as it inversely reflects Christ. The previous chapter’s analysis of Christian help and its Helper

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emphasizes that this concentration on Christ principally leads to the possibility of offense. A passage from Christian Discourses provides the supplement to Practice in pointing also to the “true joy” that Christian practice offers: You do find it entirely as it should be, do you not, and in a certain sense well advised, that the human grounds of comfort do not pretend to be able to make the sorrowing one happy but undertake only to comfort him somewhat, which they then do quite badly? On the other hand, when eternity comforts, it makes one joyful; its comfort truly is joy, is the true joy. It is with human grounds of comfort as it is when the sick person, who has already had many physicians, has a new one who thinks of something new that temporarily produces a little change, but soon it is the same old story again. No, when eternity is brought in to the sick person, it not only cures him completely but makes him healthier than the healthy. (CD 159) Attending specifically to the claim that, “when eternity comforts, it makes one joyful; its comfort truly is joy, is the true joy,” the initial claim suggests that eternity helps humanity achieve a joy it already seeks. The next clause qualifies this suggestion: eternity does not comfort in order to make one joyful; it makes one joyful in and through its comfort. The third clause further qualifies that “true” no longer refers to the degree to which comfort is joyous. It refers to the joy itself and suggests that all other joy is not only limited but also false. We can notice in these small rhetorical gestures the way Kierkegaard progressively concentrates on the peculiarity of Christ, in light of whom the otherwise painful treatment becomes joyous, just as all normal understandings of health and sickness, joy and sorrow, are called into question. Kierkegaard goes on to state that when eternity cures the sick, it does not just cure them completely, but makes them “healthier than the healthy.” He thus marvels over the Christian cure by comparing it to normal understandings of health and happiness, suggesting that the vitality of redemption exceeds all expectation. Clearly, both Kierkegaard and the vigilantes convey amazement over the extravagance and gratuity of the Redeemer. Only by attending to his splendor does the Christian glimpse the fortune of fallibility. And yet the parallels between Kierkegaard and the Exsultet go beyond the fact that their analogous descriptions of Fall and fallibility arise from and reflect the centrality of Christ. Beyond agreeing that Christ is central, they also characterize Christ’s life in startlingly similar ways. Recall from the previous chapter that AntiClimacus subtly fills in Chalcedon’s proposition about Christ’s two natures with narrative accounts of Christ’s humiliation and subsequent exaltation. Lee Barrett examines similar narrations within Kierkegaard’s devotional discourses.32 According

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to Barrett, Kierkegaard’s descriptions of Christ’s state of self-renunciation and subsequent state of exaltation, as sketched by the Christ Hymn, are motivated by pastoral concerns rather than doctrinal disputes about Lutheran Christology. The theme of Christ’s humiliation pastorally supports the Christian’s resolve in the face of suffering by acknowledging that, if Christ necessarily suffers, suffering must be a necessary component of Christ-like love. At the same time, the theme of Christ’s exaltation pastorally extends hope by insisting that joy is always hidden beneath suffering.33 Notice then that Kierkegaard, in giving hope to the suffering, respectively links Christ’s double-movement of kenosis and glorification to the necessity and blessedness of Christian struggle. One should be struck by the correspondence between these portrayals and the necessity and blessedness of sin as proclaimed by Exsultet’s famous couplet. Is it too much to suggest that the worshippers’ characterization of sin as necessary and happy points not only to the radical particularity of the Redeemer, but also to his peculiar life of humiliation and exultation? At the very least, we should recall that the worshippers sing felix culpa from the particular and peculiar time of Holy Saturday, the middle day of the triduum, which remembers Christ’s passion and anticipates his resurrection. The necessity and happiness of sin thereby witness not simply to the “advent” of a Redeemer (the words are not sung on Christmas morning), but to the particular shape of his humiliation and exultation. In the words of Alan Lewis, it is during this particular day that “we hold in tension what the cross says on its own, what the resurrection says on its own, and what each of them says when interpreted in light of the other.”34 In other words, Holy Saturday provides the time where otherwise incompatible narratives collide, suspending the potential supremacy of either. No resurrection without cross or cross without resurrection. The first utterance of fortunate Fall, like Kierkegaard’s kenotic Christological hamartiology, glimpses from this liminal time and through the collision of narratives the way defeat and victory are intimately juxtaposed.35 This time of Holy Saturday thus provides a third and final point of contact between Kierkegaard’s rhetoric and that of the worshippers, and I want to say a bit more about it.

Between Cross and Resurrection Holy Saturday lies between resurrection and cross much like Kierkegaard’s fortunate fallibility lies between Hegel’s consummate theodicy and the anguish of Romantic resignation. Unlike speculative theodicists, the Easter Eve worshippers do not bless the Fall with perfect retrospection. They do memorialize the Redeemer through their doxology, but they also await and expect a redemption that is yet to come. No reified meaning can be given to felix culpa precisely because it is announced from an overdeterminate point in time. Nonetheless, the worshippers are vigilantes,

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and confident ones at that. They know the one for whom they wait, and their waiting forms further dispositions of expectancy and hope. They are not selfassured as are philosophical theodicists. But neither are they enthralled by their own ruptured identities like some Romantic poets and their protagonists. They wait patiently and as patients—keeping watch for the one who would wound them back to health. The time of Holy Saturday ensures that one hopes through remembrance, and remembers through hope, continuously looking in two directions at once. In this sense, the day of Holy Saturday never merely passes; it is less a temporal duration or transition than the indefinite quality of abiding. One doesn’t get past it anymore than one gets past faith (FT 5–8, 23), just as for de Silentio Abraham’s three day journey up Mount Moriah is “infinitely longer” than the few thousand years between Abraham and us (53). The oddness of announcing the goodness of sin witnesses to the fact that normal time, causality, and subjectivity have been interrupted and are being held in abeyance. “Suspended,” de Silentio would say. For his part, Anti-Climacus already exhibits the dispositions of an Easter Eve worshipper or the persuasions of a Holy Saturday theologian. In Practice in Christianity, he continually places the reader between Christ’s suffering, which lies “behind,” and Christ’s glory, which lies “ahead.” Situating Christians at this juncture emphasizes the inseparability of Christian abasement and glory and suggests that we partake in Christ’s glory only by becoming contemporary with the abased Jesus.36 Anti-Climacus also consistently juxtaposes Christian redemption with a “loftiness” that lies “ahead” and Christian imitation with a “lowliness” that lies “behind” (PC 238–39). He links the paramount possibility of offense to the lowliness of Christ, claiming that “lowliness, abasement, is the stumbling stone, the possibility of offense, and you are situated between his abasement, which lies behind, and his loftiness—” (PC 153). Returning to our central focus on Christian beatitude, we might here question why imitation of Christ’s abasement is absolutely necessary for partaking in Christ’s redemption. Is it not possible to receive the gift of salvation with indebtedness and gratitude without having to emulate Christ’s suffering and abasement? What prevents Kierkegaard’s readers from hearing the descriptions of Christian beatitude as one more demand made upon them, as though it were not enough to enter into spiritual trial without also forcing a smile? Kierkegaard would likely respond by recalling the particular entrapments of Christendom. Because spiritless Christians demand ready-made redemption while remaining unwilling to journey down the road of contrition or through the possibility of offense, Anti-Climacus insists that the resurrection available in this life remains thoroughly cruciform. If even Jesus rises with wounds in his hands (John 20: 27; Luke 24:39), Christian discipleship certainly fares no better. Thus Anti-Climacus primarily situates Christianity between loftiness and lowliness in order to underscore the necessity of suffering and preserve

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the rigorousness of choosing Christianity. Without going the “roundabout way” (PC 238) through lowliness, the Christian would be drawn naturally to faith rather than through a freedom that is fallible and prone to take offense. A more direct path would obliterate the value of faith, according to Anti-Climacus. And because he assumes that “there is only one thing to which no one ever felt naturally drawn, and that is to suffering and abasement” (PC 167), Anti-Climacus emphasizes Christ’s suffering in order that no one be “enticed” to him (PC 153). This emphasis is shared by theologians who retrieve the tradition of Holy Saturday, especially those who retrieve it through Luther’s understanding of communicatio idiomatum, whereby God through Christ (and not only through the humanity of Jesus) suffers and dies.37 Lewis, for one, emphasizes that the promise of resurrection is cruciform much more than he emphasizes that the word of the cross is resurrected, although he insists on both.38 Only in sickness, death, and sin does Christian joy takes place; only in the context of despair and injustice can words of consolation prove authentic. Or most powerfully: the humiliation spanning cradle to cross “is the very shape of resurrection, and there is no other.”39 Lewis and Anti-Climacus, like Luther of the Heidelberg Disputation,40 are so concerned with certain “distortions of familiarity”41 that lead Christians to equate glory with cozy contentment that they continually stress the cross’s scandal. This emphasis on humiliation and self-giving corresponds to the “necessity” about which the Easter Eve worshippers first sing: “O truly necessary sin of Adam, which is cancelled by Christ’s death!” Sin, like Christian suffering, remains necessary if only by providing that which Christ takes away. However, we must again ask: do Kierkegaard and Holy Saturday theologians adequately witness to the joy of trial alongside its necessity? Can they continue their song: “O happy fault which merited such and so great a Redeemer”? For his part, Lewis repeatedly returns to the superfluity of grace as recorded in Romans 5. He notes that grace does not reduce or displace the power of sin but gives it “space and scope” before surpassing it in abundance and superfluity.42 If there is real joy in a redemption that is necessarily cruciform, it comes not because Easter undoes the crucifixion, but because it absorbs and outstrips it. Were Kierkegaard to concur, the necessity of living between cross and resurrection would ensure not only that Christians struggle, but also that their struggles provide the right place for joy. Kierkegaard does repeat the blessedness of fallibility along with its necessity, and we must turn back to the signed discourses to figure out how.

The Right Place for Joy In the right-handed works, Kierkegaard refers to the place between loftiness and lowliness as the proper place for praising God, thereby providing a counteremphasis

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to the left hand’s focus on sin’s possibility and thus reconnecting with the Exsultet’s joyous expectation. This is apparent in the seven “Discourses on Fridays” (Part Four of Christian Discourses), two of which were delivered as homilies by Kierkegaard in Frue Church, the Lutheran Cathedral in Copenhagen.43 Kierkegaard here refers to the time of confession and the place of the confessional, which lie “behind” the congregation, and to the liturgy of communion and the communion table, which lie “ahead” of it. The space/time between them provides the spot from which one can receive good news without the danger of self-assured triumphalism. Kierkegaard urges his listener/reader to come to the table by way of the confessional, to hope for rebirth by watching over the tomb. The discourses thus call the reader to reconciliation with God, circuitously (and quite tangibly) through the confession of sin. Despite the fact that Kierkegaard here continues to emphasize the necessity of indirection and the possibility of offense, he also insists that here is the right time and place to let fear and self-suspicion pass by. I quote a long passage that Kierkegaard delivered from the pulpit: But you who are gathered here to take part in this holy supper, you certainly have not denied him, or in any case you are indeed gathered here today to confess him, or by being gathered here today and with the purpose of being gathered you do indeed confess him. Therefore, even though it can be beneficial that the rigorous words are brought to recollection, are heard simultaneously, just as they inseparably belong together so that we at no time separate what God has joined together in Christ, neither add anything nor subtract anything, do not subtract the rigorousness from the leniency that is in them, do not subtract from the Gospel the Law that is in it, do not subtract from the salvation the perdition that is in it—yet the latter words are more suitable for meditating on today. We let the terrifying thoughts pass by, not as something that does not pertain to us—oh no, in that way no one is saved; as long as one lives it is still possible that one could be lost. As long as there is life there is hope—but as long as there is life there certainly is also the possibility of danger, consequently of fear, and consequently there will also be fear and trembling just as long. We let the terrifying thought pass by, but then we trust to God that we dare to let it pass by and to cross over as we take comfort in the Gospel’s gentle word. (CD 283) We have seen that occupying the temporal location of Holy Saturday—the time between cross and resurrection, the space between confessional and communion table—ensures that one comes to Christian bliss only through the possibility of sin, as Anti-Climacus repeatedly insists. However, Christian Discourses here insists that that same pregnant time also bears the right place for joy and confidence in

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approaching God. It is in this sense that Kierkegaard regarded the Lord’s Supper, together with the service of confession and absolution of sin that precedes it, to be the “true center in the Church.”44 While the pseudonymous writings evoke fear and trembling almost always and everywhere, Kierkegaard under his own name also sets aside a time to “let the terrifying thoughts pass by” and to “take comfort in the Gospel’s gentile word.” Anti-Climacus reminds us that there is no Christian freedom without the possibility of offense, no resurrection without cross or cosmic Christ without enduring scars. From the other side of his bilateral corpus, Kierkegaard reminds us that he who is not offended really is blessed, and that the arms outstretched on the cross are ready to embrace one. In the final analysis, the time of Holy Saturday is not simply depicted with different emphases by Anti-Climacus and by Kierkegaard. Rather, that same time between and beyond ordinary time, that time of abiding, might symbolically impart the boundary between the sides of Kierkegaard’s corpus as a whole. If that is true, then it is not just the pseudonyms or Kierkegaard or both who speak about the joys and fears of Holy Saturday. Rather, the very dissonance of his stereophonic writings would witness to what is otherwise inexpressible—to a dangerous joy and happy danger, the fortune of fallibility. While I can only be suggestive here, I propose that Kierkegaard’s right-handed and left-handed works, when read against and with one another, provide a final and clear echo of the paradoxical orthodoxy that is sung from Easter Eve.

Look at the Birds of the Air In the Introduction I suggested that the question of fortunate Fall is best addressed by asking about which is closer to Christian redemption: moral innocence or the consciousness of sin. Throughout this book we have seen how Kierkegaard’s left-handed works emphasize primarily the dissimilarity between innocence and redemption, between any natural “first immediacy” and the cultivated “second immediacy” of Christian faith. From this perspective, the self-conscious sinner really is “closer” to faith—or, at least “dialectically” closer, or closer “in possibility.” To take the most pivotal example, Anti-Climacus portrays Jesus as the possibility of offense in order to distinguish authentic, interpersonal faith from the heightened self-interest of so-called believers. Many of the right-handed works emphasize similar attributes. Yet one also perceives a counternarrative in them, one that comes to the surface especially in the discourses that Kierkegaard composed and published alongside the Anti-Climacus writings. These later discourses insist that the second immediacy of faith really is an immediacy (that is, spontaneous and habitual), however secondary (that is,

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dependent on rigorous training) it may be.45 Related, they focus on how an individual might develop dispositions of love toward Christ in such a way that sin—while eminently possible from Anti-Climacus’s standpoint—nonetheless becomes a kind of impossibility. Christ’s disciple or “contemporary” might undergo such extensive training in not being offended that he or she can declare, “I can do no other; God help me.” The previous chapter concluded by noting that AntiClimacus himself recognizes the possibility that Christians might become virtuous in this habitual, dispositional sense—even while insisting that Christians do so only by confronting the possibility of offense. Whereas this possibility of subduing sin through habitual training remains a supplement within Practice in Christianity, in Kierkegaard’s later discourses it takes front and center stage. A series of discourses entitled The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses best exemplifies the way embattled Christian faith might become second nature. These short devotional or “godly” (gudelige) discourses were published May 14, 1849, together with the second printing of Either/Or. Like his earlier signed discourses, they are “offered with the right hand” (WA 3) and serve to distinguish the right-handed from the left-handed works (JP 6:6407). As the name suggests, the discourses find in Matthew’s mention of the birds and the lily examples of spontaneous trust and obedience—first immediacies that provide prototypes for the silence, obedience, and joy of religious faith. As a whole the work describes how, through prayer and worship, a person “devoutly comes back to the beginning” through an “acquired originality” (WA 11, 38). The reader is commanded to be carefree and simple, like the bird and the lily, as well as innocent and happy, like the child, in order to enter the kingdom of God.46 In the effort to portray this counteremphasis on the simplicity and joy of Christian faith, I will describe three unique aspects of Three Devotional Discourses: (1) the way they explicitly close the gap between natural obedience and religious faith, (2) their distinctive portrayal of the power of sin, and (3) a noticeable shift from “battle” to “art” as the central metaphor for Christian faith. It should be noted that the various distinctions that I highlight do not neatly fall according to the pseudonymoussigned division. I will try to indicate this ambiguity in my analysis but will also suggest that “Anti-Climacus” and “Kierkegaard” nevertheless name distinctive rhetorical thrusts.

The Virtue of Necessity The first unique aspect of this text distinguishes Three Devotional Discourses not only from the Anti-Climacian writings, but also from previous discourses that also look to the bird and the lily as examples of Christian faith. Whereas earlier devotional discourses join the pseudonyms in emphasizing how the “acquired

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originality” or second immediacy of faith surpasses in value any natural obedience to God—how faith differs from innocence—Three Devotional Discourses functions to shorten this evaluative gap. In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, for example, Kierkegaard questions whether the fact that the bird has no worries about making a living can actually be considered a perfection. He questions whether it is really “a perfection to be careless in danger when one does not recognize it, does not know it exists; is it a perfection to take assured steps because one is walking blindly, to walk confidently because one is sleepwalking!” (UDVS 194). Kierkegaard there concludes that “only faith’s freedom from care is, divinely speaking, the soaring whose beautiful but imperfect symbol is the bird’s easy flight” (UDVS 194). The image of the bird provides an ultimately imperfect symbol for the art of Christian obedience.47 Likewise, Christian Discourses values the difficult sacrifice of humanity’s independent will to the will of God, as compared with the necessary obedience of nature (CD 84). Here Kierkegaard combines imagery of the bird and the lily with that of mother–child separation to express the exceeding value of returning to God from the possibility of fleeing (CD 62–63). Christian Discourses thus also minimizes the virtue of birds, lilies, and children in order to stress the exceeding value of one who has left the refuge of untested obedience in order to “return” to childlike trust in the second immediacy of faith.48 Each of these works resembles the pseudonymous writings in this sense, and by extension, the deep grammar of fortunate Fall and fortunate fallibility. If there is a relative difference between Three Devotional Discourses and these other works, it is in the degree to which the former emphasizes the similarities between the first immediacy of created nature and the second immediacy of Christian faith, as well as in the ardor with which its reader is urged to imitate nature’s teachers.49 In the later discourses Kierkegaard so personifies nature that the lilies and the birds themselves are seen to actively resist the temptation to sin. Their silence, obedience, and joy may not be simply “there”; they too might be won over and against temptations to despair. Accordingly, the idea that the lily is obedient to God despite having a precarious existence makes its obedience exceedingly praiseworthy (WA 27–28). Or again, the idea that the bird and the lily are unconditionally joyful despite being sorrowful under the yoke of perishability makes their joy exceedingly joyful (WA 41). Through these personifications, Kierkegaard reduces the difference between images of natural immediacy and symbols of intentional faith. He does so in order to call into question the would-be Christian’s pride in having the more difficult task. Kierkegaard proceeds to insist that his reader should not make qualifications concerning the ease with which the lilies and birds become silent or obedient, even if they are incapable of speaking or sinning. Such remonstrations only “frustrate

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the lesson in silence by, instead of being silent in earnest, foolishly and meaninglessly jumbling silence in with speaking” (WA 17). Again, while Kierkegaard elsewhere tempers the merit of nature’s spontaneity, insofar as that would make a virtue out of necessity, here he is quick to critique the false reverence that the poet bestows on his own embattled freedom: Therefore you are not to say, “The lily and the bird, it is easy for them to be obedient; after all, they cannot do anything else, or they cannot do otherwise. To become a model of obedience in that way is, after all, to make a virtue of necessity.” You are not to speak this way; you are to say nothing at all, you are to be silent and obey, so that, if it really is true that the lily and the bird make a virtue of necessity, you also might succeed in making a virtue of necessity. You, too, are indeed subject to necessity. God’s will is still done anyhow; so strive to make a virtue of necessity by unconditionally obediently doing God’s will. . . . [Submit to God’s will] so unconditionally obediently that you might in truth be able to say of yourself with regard to doing and submitting to God’s will, “I cannot do anything else, I cannot do otherwise.” (WA 29–30) In this way and throughout Three Devotional Discourses, Kierkegaard calls into question the self-satisfaction with which we might prize our fallible freedom over what we take to be the conformed will of nature. He continually directs our attention from our own involvedness and toward the “marvelous deftness” with which all of nature worships God. Eventually, when we learn to imitate nature, the lily and the bird will change from being our teachers to being “metaphors” for our religious faith (WA 32). But until that time, any attempt to belittle nature’s struggle because it is seemingly too easy, too silent, or too joyful only reveals the depth of our self-importance.

The (Dubious) Virtue of Fallibility There is a second way that Three Devotional Discourses counterbalances the emphasis on the possibility of sin that we have been exploring throughout this book. In what looks like an almost direct critique of Anti-Climacus’s rhetorical pleas, Kierkegaard here directly states that the “advantage” of sin’s possibility is “dubious” (WA 16). Again, it should be noted that we cannot neatly distinguish the different emphases according to pseudonymous-signed bifurcation. For example, in some places Kierkegaard joins Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus in appealing to the possibility of sin as that which distinguishes the human from the rest of nature. Even while contrasting the virtue of silence with the “idle chatter” that can make one forget God (11, 17), Kierkegaard writes: “Surely it is speech that distinguishes

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humanity above the animal and then, if you like, far above the lily” (10). He calls the ability to speak (or to chatter, and by extension, to sin) a Fortrin (advantage) that belongs to humanity alone (10). (Recall from chapter 3 that this is the same word that Anti-Climacus repeatedly uses to describe the “advantage” and “excellence” of despair’s possibility [SUD 15].) Yet in other places, and here he differs in emphasis from the pseudonyms, Kierkegaard asserts that this excellence is only a “dubious advantage” and an “enormous danger . . . which the lily and the bird in their unconditional obedience escape” (WA 16, 34). Again, the ability to talk, and with it to quibble and hedge, is purchased at a high price, and it is the lily’s “good fortune” (Lykke) not to have this capacity (15). Even if “the possibility of [sin] is man’s superiority over the animal,” as Anti-Climacus insists, Kierkegaard here underlines the dangers that ensue when a person perpetually gazes at his or her own fallibility instead of becoming silent, obedient, and joyful. The middle discourse on obedience even ends by tracing any doubleness or “ambiguity” (Tvetydigt) (WA 32) to human sin itself. Kierkegaard has his reader bear in mind “that it was human sin that—by being unwilling to serve one master . . . —disturbed the beauty of the whole world where previously everything was so very good, human sin that created a cleft in a world of unity” (WA 35). Thus even if he sometimes joins Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus in valuing fallibility, the nonidentity of human consciousness that makes possible sin, Kierkegaard also calls into question whether innocent fallibility can ever be known, and whether we might ever know it innocently, that is, without taking pride in our self-alienation. Especially compared with the other treatises, Three Devotional Discourses tries to prevent us from fixating on fallibility, and does so by imploring us to look again to nature.

The Art of Faith A third way that Kierkegaard counterbalances Anti-Climacus is by speaking of faith in terms of an art instead of a battle. Like Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard makes clear that people avail themselves of the advantage conferred with the possibility to sin only when they also refuse to actualize it. Unlike Anti-Climacus, he describes this refusal as a delicate art. Writing of the ability to speak as a metonym for the ability to sin, he writes: “But because the ability to speak is an advantage, it does not follow that the ability to be silent would not be an art (Kunst) or would be an inferior art (en ringe Kunst). On the contrary, because the human being is able to speak, the ability to be silent is an art, and a great art (en stor Kunst) precisely because this advantage of his so easily tempts him” (WA 10). In one sense, the “advantage” of being able to sin is really a temptation. It becomes an advantageous temptation only when the individual refuses to “take

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advantage” of it. In another sense, by refusing to employ this advantage, the individual does in fact perform an art—a great art—which both is learned from the lilies and birds and surpasses in value their less artful immediacy. Such passages thereby suggest that the very capacity that distinguishes adult humanity from plants, animals, and children becomes surpassingly excellent only when it is not utilized. Not dissembling or not sinning comprises the superior art. This conception by Kierkegaard closely resembles that of Anti-Climacus when he writes of the surpassing value of “not being in despair” (SUD 15). And yet the central metaphors differ noticeably. We have seen that Anti-Climacus writes of battling against sin’s possibility, of actively destroying it in one’s quest for faith, even if those literary metaphors eventually get dismantled within Sickness. Three Devotional Discourses configures faith as an art rather than a battle; it emphasizes straightforwardly what Anti-Climacus only gets at deconstructively, namely, that the “amazing feat” of faith will always be a “feat of meekness” (WA 42)—a kind of inactivity, of letting be, of trust and silence. Kierkegaard recognizes the oddity of this idea, asking, “But then in a certain sense is it nothing I shall do?” (10). To answer, Anti-Climacus would assumedly emphasize the difference between passively “not being in despair” and being out of despair in the consummate sense. Surprisingly, Kierkegaard only answers that, “Yes, quite true, in a certain sense it is nothing” (10). He admits that the value of doing nothing is only relatively true because “to be silent as nature is silent [i.e., without the possibility of doing otherwise] is no art.” Only the one who “devoutly comes backward to the beginning” by becoming silent after also becoming capable of sinful chatter truly accomplishes the nothingness that Kierkegaard prizes (11). But it is nonetheless a kind of inactivity that Kierkegaard commends, and here he speaks a different voice. If the sinner is trapped in his own self-contradiction, only the passive activity of meekness, surrender, and compliance can unravel him from his self-bondage (WA 42). Here, imperatives to look and learn dramatically overshadow the language of struggling and choosing.50 One should abandon oneself to the lilies and the birds. One should lose oneself in their image (WA 35). Kierkegaard understands the helplessness of falling before one’s teachers to comprise the Christian’s truly heroic act. In these ways, much of the devotional literature complements the later pseudonymous writings in and through its countermotion, like the inverse harmony of the bow and the lyre.

Kierkegaard’s Ambidexterity and the Joy of Worship I have suggested that Kierkegaard came to regard himself as an author who, from the beginning of his authorship to its multiple endings, has “willed one thing”— that is, the religious—“but the religious completely cast into reflection, yet in such

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a way that it is completely taken back out of reflection into simplicity” (OMWA 6–7). The left-handed (pseudonymous) works cast the everyday piety of Christendom into reflection, shattering its self-security and calling into question the benefit of cultured Christianity. The right-handed (signed or “veronymous”) works take Christianity “back out of reflection” in order that the obedience and joy that characterize contemporaneity with Christ might be made available to the reader. While Kierkegaard’s retrospective accounts speak of entering into and emerging out of “reflection,” the works themselves also speak of rousing a battle with sin and of practicing the “art” of not-sinning. Stated in these terms, Kierkegaard’s left-handed works continually point to the possibility of sin, the presence of which distinguishes Christian faith from the presumed innocence and childishness of the Christian establishment. At the same time, the right-handed works describe how the simple life of faith nonetheless resembles the spontaneous joy of children and the natural world. It is not uncommon for interpreters to describe these two aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship as successive stages (first aesthetic, then religious; first trial, then faith). Yet it is important to note that they comprise two synchronic sides of Kierkegaard’s authorship, and not its diachronic ends. Kierkegaard simultaneously extends the work of both hands; he inundates his readers with possibilities for failure and enables them to be helped by God, which in turn introduces possibilities for graver failure. It is through this simultaneity—this ambidexterity—that we can glimpse a final and profound way that Kierkegaard fully embodies the spirit of the first felix culpa. The Easter Eve liturgy neither justifies nor romanticizes the Fall. It neither provides an impervious standpoint from which sin can be interpreted nor looks away from Christ in human self-pity. Rather, the Exsultet paradoxically proclaims the transformation of sin into blessing alongside the normal wages of sin. Situated between cross and resurrection, the Holy Saturday worshippers witness to both the culmination of human offense and God’s unexpected reply. Felix culpa necessarily expresses both of these and expresses them together, precisely as a way of marveling over the way God gives sin its full due, surpassing it only after and as Christ succumbs to it. Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole, and especially the later works, likewise situates the reader between cross and resurrection, between confessional and communion table, between the possibility of offense and the blessedness of not being offended. If Kierkegaard rouses fallibility with one hand and ensures that we do not fixate on it with the other, it is by working with both of his hands that he proclaims God’s grace without taking it in vain and confronts the strength of human weakness without reveling in it. According to Kierkegaard, the human never emerges from the possibility of sin. But that constraint can be a gracious one—indeed, one

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that is fortunate or happy—when it expresses unconditional obedience to one who is both the possibility of offense and the prototype of not-sinning. The final pages of Three Devotional Discourses include some of the most evocative and dramatic in Kierkegaard’s corpus. Somewhere before this point Kierkegaard’s language has been transfigured. He no longer mimics the pastoral lyricism of the Romantic poet or rebukes his sad eloquence on ethical-religious grounds. Instead, he professes the spontaneity that accompanies life in God and marvels over the transfiguration of sorrow into joy. The Lord’s Prayer now prays the prayer, and it “prays itself joyfully and more joyfully and unconditionally joyfully” (WA 44). The contentedness of the bird, which up until this point has provided the prototype, now has been “far, far exceed[ed]” by the beatitude of the one in prayer (45). Earlier Kierkegaard suggested that once the reader truly learns obedience, he or she will “become the more perfect one, so that the lily and the bird change from being the teacher to being the metaphor” (32). It is this transformation that Kierkegaard simultaneously inscribes and performs at the close of his text. In a journal entry, he even links the text’s dramatic development to the unveiling of God’s own poetry, or what he calls the poetry of the eternal (JP 2:1942). The text began with the longing of the self-consumed poet and then developed the conflict between poetic wishes and Christian duty. But it then returns, through a circuitous path, to a second poetry—the poetry of the eternal. In Kierkegaard’s wider authorship, it is the pseudonymous works that primarily lead us away from the first immediacy and the veronymous works that bring us back to the second poetry. Three Devotional Discourses, as we have seen, primarily trusts its poetic images of birds, lilies, and children to paint what AntiClimacus’s more incisive, critical language consigns to the margins—the possibility of simple immediacy. By contrast, the Anti-Climacus writings call into question every depiction of immediacy, every naive trust of representation, suspicious that the power of the image will rob readers of their own interpretive decisions. Kierkegaard best arrives at the poetry of the eternal by leading his reader through the critical self-consciousness raised by Anti-Climacus. The second poetry emerges between these texts, out of the countermotion between the hermeneutics of suspicion and trust. In this light, Kierkegaard’s authorship in its entirety, as irreconcilably divided between the pseudonymous and the signed, itself functions as a particular kind of discourse that, like Luther’s theologian of the cross, finds Christian splendor revealed under its opposite sign, in human fallibility. Kierkegaard consistently uses images of lowliness (the cross, confession, the possibility of sin and offense) as the essential expression for God’s real presence (resurrection, communion, the actuality of mercy and joy). He uses what is furthest from God as the inverted sign of God’s mysterious advent. In this chapter we have seen how Kierkegaard often

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employs a particular image of human self-crisis to express Christian joy, as when he contemplates the woman who washes Jesus’ feet. We have also seen how he situates his readers in the tangible space between the confessional and the communion table, urging them to approach the table by way of confession, to hope for rebirth by watching over the tomb (CD 282–83). But most comprehensively, the two sides of Kierkegaard’s authorship themselves situate the reader between the weakness of human fallibility and the divine grace reflected in it. Their contrastive rhetorics together gesture—like Grunwald’s Baptist—toward Christ’s suffering glory and pathos-filled love, the object of faith under the sign of offense. The cacophony of voices that we call “Kierkegaard” constantly moves between abasement and glory, spiritual trial and the hope of rest. Doing so, he joins those who sing the Exsultet on Easter Eve. Note once again that this earliest mention of a fortunate Fall neither grasps a logic of salvation, justifying suffering and sin, nor sacrifices innocence for creativity, loathing those whose despair is more quiet. Instead, the liturgy witnesses to the extraordinary bliss of Christ himself, a bliss that is so unanticipated and uncircumscribable that it is best expressed through turns of phrase that both furnish and confound meaning: “O happy sin which merited such and so great a redeemer!” While the words might be different, Kierkegaard’s poetry of the eternal recites this liturgy in a post/modern key. His authorship places the reader between cross and resurrection, between the capacity to sin and the blessedness of not sinning, into the day of Holy Saturday. Unlike speculation, which “snips off a little from both sides” (SUD 100), the reciprocal rhetorical pleadings of Kierkegaard’s twofold authorship invigorate possibilities for sin and offense while simultaneously empowering the Christian to hold onto Christ. Under the tutelage of Kierkegaard’s writings comes the human at full register: capable of despairing with hopeless rage, capable also of silence and joy. What does such silent joy or joyous silence look and sound like? The last text that we have been considering offers some clues. The passional dispositions that Three Devotional Discourses develops are fashioned and exhibited in the Church’s prayer and worship. At the close of the work, the Lord’s Prayer, which provides a subtext throughout, “finally has nothing more to pray and ask for, but unconditionally joyful, ends in prayer and worship, in the prayer, ‘Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory’” (WA 44). If lilies and birds have begun to move readers’ gaze outward, away from their self-infatuation, that gaze finds its rest in the infinite beholding of God. Paradoxically, only by forgetting oneself in prayer has one become present to oneself in God. And it is in this worship—this remaining within God—that the reader finally “far, far exceed[s] the bird in joy” (WA 45). Admittedly, Kierkegaard lost faith in the institutional church in the last year or so of his life. He thought that the crossroads between confessional and table, where no one comes to Christ except through the possibility of sin and which once marked

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the center of the Church (JP 5:5089), became wholly replaced by the “forgery” of the institutional church (TM 74) as too straightforwardly accessed through infant baptism.51 If the analysis of this final chapter has been true to Kierkegaard, however, we can see how his authorship at full stretch points repeatedly and from different directions to Christian worship—especially as perched between confession and communion, between Friday and Easter—as the place/time from which Christians receive Christian beatitude. That particular and peculiar joy will seem too cruciform to some—stuck as it were in this body of death from which Christ ostensibly frees us. But longings for more immediate, self-sufficient, and spiritualized bliss only disclose assumptions with which Kierkegaard cannot concur, namely, that redemption can mean something other than being in relationship with a Redeemer whose suffering love both frees us from the power of sin and exposes us to the possibility of offense. Compassion for and with that Redeemer will continuously keep the self from closing back on itself. It will keep us open, nonidentical, inescapably beside ourselves. Yet that very ec-centricity by way of ec-static love also lets loose the kind of joy that Kierkegaard tracked from an early age: “not the laughter which is the playmate of pain . . . nor the wohlfeile, the syrup-sweet smile . . . but the smile which is the first fruit of blessedness” (JP 2:2176). If Hauerwas is right that most of us are as ill-prepared to receive joy as we are to receive suffering,52 this may be so because any blessedness worth its salt befalls on one as unpredictably and uncontrollably as does tragedy. On my reading, Kierkegaard’s writings place the reader at the right juncture to be surprised by joy.53 He cultivates a posture of waiting that is as attentive and hopeful as those looking East on Easter Eve. His writings also give language to the startling reversals already shifting underfoot: Christ lets sin have full scope and yet surpasses it in his mercy. The wages of sin are death, and yet it gives us such and so great a redeemer. The possibility of sin is unleashed by Christ so that we can receive the blessing of not being offended.

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Postscript Christian Para/Orthodoxy: Toward a Postmodern Hamartiology

In a recent essay that reads Kierkegaard deconstructively, Vanessa Rumble bemoans the fact that “the very religious concepts that are minimized in most postmodern readings of Kierkegaard are precisely those best suited to establishing the similarity of Kierkegaard’s and Derrida’s most pronounced philosophical leanings.”1 She places sin at the top of the list of these suppressed religious concepts. Rumble understands Kierkegaard’s hamartiology to anticipate Derrida’s dissemination of the transparent, transcendental human subject. If postmodernists can be faulted for overlooking this point of contact between their deconstructive practices and the religious writings of Kierkegaard, the oversight is not surprising.2 Bypassing his language of sin seems all too understandable, given that “sin” appears to provide a stable pivot around which the modern quest for self-presence, universality, methodological foundations, and purified discourse typically turn. Take, for example, the late medieval and early modern desire to ground historically relative truth claims in universal rationality (vis-à-vis the Enlightenment) or in universal prelinguistic experience (vis-à-vis modern liberal theology, a byproduct of Romanticism). In different ways, both projects use the consciousness of sin to shore up their methodological foundations. Cartesians justify their quest for philosophical foundations by contrasting them with parochial aims that result in religious violence. (Descartes wrote his Meditations on First Philosophy as a response to the decimation of the German population through the Thirty Years’ War. The quest for indubitable epistemic

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foundations seeks to mitigate against the moral evil of religious exclusion.) For its part, modern liberal theology makes religious language relevant by correlating it with universal human experience, typically including the experience of sin. Following the crisscrossing wakes of both traditions, contemporary Christian theology seems to find its sharpest apologetic tool in the consciousness of sin. If sin comprises, according to Reinhold Niebuhr, the only empirically verifiable doctrine, then theologians would seem obstinate not to ground the relevance of Christianity in this more general “experience.” Coming to terms with sin, so the logic goes, helps to anchor an otherwise free-floating Christian narrative. Kierkegaard seems to concur when he writes of the consciousness of sin as providing the point of entry into Christianity. To recall one of Anti-Climacus’s images, the language of sin ties a knot in the thread of dialectical deliberations, preventing one from speculating endlessly—that is, from sewing indefinitely by continuously pulling the thread through (SUD 93). Given this “foundational” place of sin in his corpus, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the most influential twentieth-century hamartiologists employ Kierkegaard in their own correlations between the human predicament and the Christian response.3 Yet it is interesting to note that many of these theologians bracket Kierkegaard’s references to Christ in their retrievals of his anthropology. While one can read Kierkegaard as correlating human problem with Christian response, one takes into consideration a fuller stretch of Kierkegaard’s corpus when one understands the “experience” of sin as narrative-dependent. The present study has suggested that sin appears (and even “feels”) differently depending on whether Vigilius Haufniensis observes it with his detached objectivity, or whether Anti-Climacus attends to it as a physician over the sickbed, or whether Kierkegaard discloses it in his own prayers and confessions. In light of such polyphony, “sin” becomes a relative poetic performance that applies only to those who under certain conditions can know it as such. Moreover, Anti-Climacus clarifies that the Christian seamstress ties a particular knot to keep human speculation from sewing and sewing—the knotty “paradox” of hereditary sin, a nonexperiential, nonrational notion that becomes “real” only within a particular narrative of salvation history. Far from providing an apologetic point of contact between universal experience and the Christian vision, sin for Kierkegaard principally contributes to Christianity’s discursive particularity and existential difficulty. Kierkegaard’s various authorial personae are best understood as mounting a protopostliberal critique of Christian apologetics.4 The ways they speak of sin become rather odd in the process. “Sin” also appears hopelessly modern in a second, deeper sense. Speaking of sin appears to reduce the otherwise irreducibility of evil to that which is freely chosen by responsible moral agents. The Enlightenment initiated the quest to

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enclose religion within the limits of reason alone. For Kant, this meant to circumscribe particular religious traditions within practical reason, meaning the rational discernment of a universal categorical imperative. In limiting the role of religion to supplemental motivations for ethical action, Kant also limits the recognition of evil to moral evil as freely chosen and something for which an autonomous individual is responsible. Even the “radical evil” in which individuals always already find themselves remains the result of human choice, albeit a transcendental choice that precedes historical consciousness.5 Although one could make the case that contemporary aversions to sin react to premodern claims about humanity’s bondage to sin, especially as biologically inherited, the more recent and sophisticated critiques come from the opposite direction. They fault sin language for suppressing the nonmoral and incomprehensible aspects of evil. To mix the language of Kant and Ricoeur, we might say that modernity tends to grasp evil within the limits of the Adamic myth alone. It either ignores the tragic aporias of the myth or transcribes them into moral categories. Contemporary feminist authors in particular have reclaimed “the tragic” as both the topic and method of a theology that resists the reduction of evil to the category of moral sin.6 The Introduction to this study mentioned Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology, where author Kathleen Sands defines tragedy as “the inevitability of our involvement in evil, an inevitability that comes fully into focus only in a world unclouded by spiritual infinitism.”7 Sands recognizes that twentieth-century theology sought to incorporate the tragic vision of life into its own stance concerning human responsibility for evil. She names Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Edward Farley as three who recognize the “severe constraints” to freedom and reason and who thus understand tragedy to be a component of life.8 According to Sands, however, while each of them recognizes our inevitable involvement with evil, even to the point of exaggeration, each also minimizes the tragic vision by appealing to Christian transcendence of tragedy in salvation and by asserting that sin, although inevitable, remains a matter of freedom and fault.9 Tillich and Farley join Niebuhr in admitting that sin is inevitable only to affirm its nonnecessity.10 Much of contemporary Christian theology seems to take with the left hand what it gives with the right. It acknowledges the radicalism of evil even while appealing to its contingent origination and final vindication. Feminists and other contemporary critics of modern theology thus resist sin language precisely for empowering humanity with false hope and undue mastery over nature and natural evil. At first glance, Kierkegaard appears implicated in their incisive critiques. Each of the authors critiqued by Sands draws explicitly from Haufniensis’s The Concept of Anxiety in acknowledging the inevitable (“tragic”) slide toward evil while still assigning humanity full blame for positing the (“Adamic”) leap into sin. Broader feminist critiques of the disproportionate attention to the sin

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of pride, at the exclusion of the sin of “hiding,” parallel the critique of the moralization of evil and the marginalization of the tragic.11 These too typically land on Niebuhr and Tillich, and through them, on Anti-Climacus’s examination of the “sin of strength” and the “sin of weakness,” which, somewhat embarrassingly, he respectively correlates with masculine and feminine despair (SUD 49–50n.). It is even possible to read the “double-movement of faith” and Kierkegaard’s entire bilateral corpus as taking with his right hand what he offers with his left. Do not the signed appeals to God’s unexpected forgiveness and Christian joy undo the pseudonyms’ testimony to the ubiquity of temptation and the inevitability of our involvement in evil? Our answer depends in part on how we read Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole. Do the pseudonymous (left-handed) works provide a circuitous route to Kierkegaard’s proper (right-handed) intentions in such a way that the end justifies and supersedes the means? Or do the sides of Kierkegaard’s corpus stand more permanently, dialectically, and recursively against one another, so that we do not move only from left to right, but between them, from tragedy and limit to hope and freedom and back again? The prior chapters of this book indicate that I find the second reading to be more faithful to Kierkegaard and more helpful for thinking through the tragedy of sin in the life of Christian faith. In light of what I said in chapter 2, it is clear that twentieth-century theologians misappropriated The Concept of Anxiety in the same way that others misread the relation between the pseudonymous works and those signed by Kierkegaard. They understand one “voice” of Haufniensis—the one assigning responsibility to humanity for the “leap” into moral evil—to answer and overtake the second voice that gestures toward the inevitable slide toward sin. By contrast, I have interpreted the cacophonous voices to be equally piercing, and persistently so. In chapter 3 I also highlighted the ways in which Anti-Climacus resists reducing evil to the “masculine” sin of too-much-self or to the “feminine” sin of too-little-self. Prioritizing either sins of strength or sins of weakness would set up a stable hierarchy through which sin can be comprehended and contained—an approach that Kierkegaard critiques in his outwitting of Romanticism. Finally, in chapters 4 and 5 I have tried to show that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous hermeneutic of suspicion and his veronymous hermeneutic of trust do not subsume one another anymore than an independent analysis of human need contextualizes and so subsumes the scandal of God’s unbounded love through Christ. On my reading, then, Kierkegaard’s individual works and his corpus as a whole actively work to resist reducing “the tragic vision” to the “Adamic myth,” natural to moral evil, and feminine despair to masculine despair (and vice versa, for each). Kierkegaard also thereby resists the moralization of evil in general and of Christian language of sin in particular, and in this way too he recapitulates the liturgy’s fortunate Fall. Far from restricting evil to ethical wrongdoing, which humanity can

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clearly perceive and for which it is clearly responsible, “sin” in its more particular Christian sense functions to mark an enigma that spurs and escapes our cognitive and ethical control. This difference between human ethical systems and Christian sin is striking in the Anti-Climacus works but begins already in Fear and Trembling, with which the present study began. Johannes de Silentio famously writes of the teleological suspension of the ethical that ensues when Abraham hears the commandment from God to kill Isaac. If for Kant obeying God’s command would entail sin, since to sin is to refuse to act on the universally available categorical imperative, for Kierkegaard it entails what Derrida calls an instance of undecidability and what de Silentio calls an ordeal. In the very contradiction between universal ethics and Christian duty Abraham finds his fear and trembling, his unutterable faith before God. Against all efforts to contextualize and moralize sin—to situate it within a closed economy of salvation—Kierkegaard has sin contextualize us. Unable to say what he or she means about sin, the reader is left only to confess it. And even if the confession that “I am a sinner” would then seem to comprise the most primary and transparent (Derrida would say logocentric) of theological speech, Kierkegaard makes clear that it too is thoroughly ironic, much like the utterance, “I am lying now.” Confession fissures confessor from confessed, sign from signified, perpetually frustrating the self-justifying desire to get beyond sin by naming it. As Amy Laura Hall insists, univocal confessions of sin too often strive to make our lives simpler, more comprehensible, thereby underestimating “the tenacity of our self-delusion and error.” By contrast, for Kierkegaard confession of sin (like Christ himself) serves to chasten and throw us off balance—saving us from the burden of our own control.12 Contemporary theology should join Kierkegaard in impeding the drift toward univocity and in refusing to equate the complex of sin with a simple immoral decision. Doing so might return us to a premodern understanding of prepersonal human bondage.13 But it also might join Foucault and other postmodern theorists in contesting the clear perception and alleged triumph of “my” autonomous freedom over the complex of forces that run through me.14 At its most basic linguistic level, felix culpa marks the incommensurability between Christian salvation and moral innocence, deconstructing the modern moralization of sin. Kierkegaard’s retrieval and my reconstructions of fortunate fallibility have attempted to do the same. There is a third and most basic sense in which talk of sin appears to manifest outmoded modern sensibilities. In many ways this sense provides the mirror opposite of the previous one. Talk of sin today appears above all to be conforming, normalizing, and restrictive. It appears hopelessly “moralistic”—not in the prior sense of appealing to human responsibility but in the more pervasive sense of didactically prescribing one way to live while reproaching every deviation.

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Postmodernity, by contrast, is nothing if not a host of strategies for giving otherness its due, for withstanding the pressure to homogenize. Derrida and other poststructuralists, for instance, attend to the binary oppositions driving Western thought. Especially in those metanarratives (Lyotard) that shape our perceptions of reality—but which we fail to see and scrutinize—“the other” is both disdained and rendered indispensable for sustaining the monological schema.15 He or (usually) she may be a deviant, a witch, a Jew, a native, a homosexual, or a welfare mom. Religiously speaking, the simplest and most comprehensive designation for the other is the sinner. Used in this way, the language of sin outcastes others (sinners are always those people) but also normalizes them and so uses them to stabilize the dominant identity (“We are Christians, not sinners”). Lyotard describes postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives,” and Derrida develops reading strategies to recognize the functional centrality of the peripheral other. It would seem that Christian language of sin and sinners would be the first among their critiques. The situation seems only to worsen when we extend our analysis from individual sins and sinners to the role of the Fall in “the Christian narrative.” The Christian story of creation, Fall, and redemption is perhaps the most comprehensive and customary (read: totalitizing and ideological) among metanarratives, and so, Lyotard would add, also the most incredulous. The three-act drama tells of an arche¯ or original unity; the division or fall into alienation and conflict; and the telos or goal toward which the second act points—restoration at a higher level. The narrative is powerful. Insofar as it associates sin with a fall from unity into division and conflict, difference itself and the fact there are “others” among us can be interpreted as a problem to be rectified. It assumes that in the beginning was sameness; difference is derivative and culpable. At the same time, and insofar as the consummated stage exceeds in intensity or value the original unity, the narrative also capitalizes on and justifies the conflict beget by sin, leading quickly to a speculative and theodical fortunate Fall.16 Like the simultaneous expulsion and exploitation of individual sinners, the Christian story appears both to interpret every “other” as an accidental product of sin and to render them necessary within an overarching framework. To save Christian language of sin from becoming (or remaining?) ideological, normative, and self-justifying in these ways was one of the goals of this book. The work is no doubt unfinished. Ongoing efforts to salvage “sin” will entail developing ways of speaking that do not contextualize sin within an overarching framework for comprehension and justification. Kierkegaard helps deconstruct the idea that sin and sinners are “negatives,” exceptions to a relatively innocent humanity that demand exclusion.17 Speaking instead of sin as a “position” or as “posited” (SUD 96–100), Kierkegaard rather has sin contextualize us, effectively questioning the

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presumed innocence of our capacity to know sin. Through such a hamartiological hermeneutic of suspicion, one could say that our knowing and speaking do not characterize sin so much as sin characterizes them. A postmodern hamartiology will also need to become increasingly particular and peculiar vis-à-vis dominant discourses about good and evil. It will do so primarily by reading sin backward from the special revelation of Christ rather than forward from the idea of a primal unity. Such a Christocentric hamartiology need not remove Christians from the enduring threat of sin, as was suggested by some Barthian/postliberal construals. Kierkegaard will have us come to know Christ as bearing in his lasting wounds the very possibility of rejecting him. Finally, to speak of sin without damning difference will entail the creative renarration of the Christian arche¯ and telos. More exactly, it will entail the deconstruction of modern renarrations, as well as the return to a less conceptual and more paradoxical portrayal of innocence and redemption. Over and against the standard metanarratives, Christians will assert that creation itself is nothing if not the positing of difference—and infinite qualitative difference at that.18 A fault-line or site of slippage thereby already distinguishes Creator from creature, creatures from one another, and each person from his- or herself. Redemption too—at least in Kierkegaard’s analysis—is not so much a reunification after alienation but the reemergence of otherness in the face of our efforts to homogenize, level, and control. Christ comes as an other, an Absolute Other who, Levinas would say, dispossesses me with a strange mixture of plentitude and wantonness.19 Even if the Fall occasions or partly contextualizes his advent, it actually constitutes the sinful erasure of difference, our inability to face the differences in ourselves, between one another, and—especially—before God. A postmodern hamartiology will continuously invert the modern narrative, exhibiting perennial undecidability between the Fall as alienation and the Fall as absorption of the other into the same. Turning the narrative inside out, theologians reinscribe plurality at both beginning and end. They come to see sin as the inability to withstand finitude, fragility, and difference. In doing so they join Christians in announcing, with a mood that is celebratory without being self-confident: O felix fallibilitas. Saving sin from absolutizing narratives and the bad faith of Christians will be difficult theological work. Many will suggest that it is not worth the effort, that sin-talk is irredeemably restrictive and oppressive. Indeed, this very sentiment is apparent in major strands of postmodern theology. Walter Lowe, for one, has discerned a tendency in prima facie postmodernism to associate modernity with the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment with the Newtonian closed universe.20 Wanting to break down the rigid walls of rationalism, such postmoderners alleviate modern claustrophobia by repeating an equally modern, Romantic disdain for determinacy. Endless possibility and the infinite human spirit replace the

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arid dogmatism of rationalism, unaware that unlimited freedom has its own limitations and can lead to an unhappy consciousness just as easily. In terms of the felix culpa motif, postmodernity’s “repetition of the Romantic gesture” (Lowe) transmutes modern theology’s theodical reductions into a more subtle form. Divine prohibition and command become understood as snags on the soaring spirit. Talk of sin becomes outdated, perhaps finally replacing sin itself as that which needs to be eradicated in the progression toward human flourishing. One of the reasons I find Kierkegaard promising as a resource for postmodern theology is the way in which he elicits passionate striving while deconstructing such Romantic resignation. Kierkegaard presents the highest human freedom as inwardly determined (but not necessitated) by God. For him, the purely negative and spiteful resistance to being saved personifies the culmination of freedom pursued as its own end. It is not the highest freedom for Kierkegaard, although the Christian should continuously risk it. Christian freedom is rather limited, determined, or otherwise given shape by real possibilities for failure. Perhaps paradoxical to modern ears, Kierkegaard suggests that the most heroic expression of freedom is to humble oneself under one’s fallibility, one’s capacity to reject God. If postmodern theology is not to mistake undecidability for indeterminacy, it will continue to speak of finitude and Fall—those different differences that mark the Christian before Christ. The present study has followed Kierkegaard out of univocal salvation systems and around Romantic critiques in the effort to find a more complex and Christian language for fallibility and fault. That language will be paradoxical as well as orthodox. Perhaps unapologetic and joyful too.

Notes

notes to introduction 1. In Latin: O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte delatum est!/O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem! See The Sacramentary, 474–78. The title “Exsultet” is taken from the first word of the long Easter Eve song: “Exsultet jam Angleica turba cælorum” (“Rejoice now the angelic choirs of heaven”). 2. Lange, Trauma Recalled, 167. 3. Ibid., 13. 4. Compare Lanthrop, Holy Things, 54–83. See also Placher’s retrieval of analogical speech in The Domestication of Transcendence, 27–31, 71–76; as well as his wider comments about Christian discourse about God in The Triune God, 1–42. 5. Even Derrida, who famously claims that there is nothing outside the text, refuses to abandon all ideas of meaning and truth. He seeks only to reinscribe those ideas in more complex and stratified linguistic contexts. See Derrida, Limited Inc., 146, and the discussion in Shakespeare, Derrida and Theology, 10. 6. See Lange, Trauma Recalled, 93–124. Compare Mark C. Taylor, Nots, 1–7. 7. Sands, Escape From Paradise, 16. I would prefer that Sands use the terms “supra-” or “extraculpable” rather than “nonculpable” fault—since assumptions about the latter assume the very epistemological innocence that she otherwise criticizes. 8. McFadyen, Bound to Sin, 14–25. 9. Ibid. McFadyen’s second chapter is titled: “Speaking morally? The case for original sin.”

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10. Hannay’s translation names the title, “That sin is not negative but affirmative.” Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Hannay, 129. 11. The only other book-length study attempting to read sin back from the Easter event that I know of is James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong, whose title is enough to suggest similarities between his deep sensibilities, which he takes from René Girard, and those that I am taking from Kierkegaard. Alison insists that “the doctrine of original sin is not prior to, but follows from and is utterly dependent on, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and thus cannot be understood at all except in light of that event” (3). Such a “very peculiar epistemological starting point” makes Christian theology “radically subversive of all forms of human knowledge” and yet configures sin as “joyous” insofar as it is “that which we are on our way out of ” (262–63). Alison’s book and an equally insightful one, The Crucified Jesus is No Stranger by Sebastian Moore, widely inform the present study although their discursive styles and theological genealogies are very different than my own. 12. Carroll Keeley claims that “it is clear Kierkegaard’s real accent has been intentionally displaced.” Keeley, “The Parables of Problema III,” 139. Others who have read Fear and Trembling as covertly concerned with sin and redemption include Whittaker, “The Suspension of the Ethical,” 101–13; Mackey, “The View from Pisgah,” in Points of View; and Green, Kierkegaard and Kant, 183–205. See also Green, “Enough Is Enough!” 191–209. 13. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 133–41; for idem-identity as distinct from the more diachronic selfhood of ipse, see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 2–3, 118–21.Compare Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 65–82. 14. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 617, as cited by Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 139. 15. Kelsey, “Whatever Happened,” 169–78. 16. Ibid., 171. 17. Compare Pannenberg’s description of the shift from Augustinian conceptions to the modern concentration, initiated by Kant, on a human being’s self-relation. Pannenberg, Anthropology, 94–96. 18. Kelsey, “Whatever Happened,” 173–74. 19. Pannenberg, Anthropology, 98–99. 20. Kelsey, “Whatever Happened,” 177. 21. Each draws especially from Haufniensis’s phenomenology of anxiety and his remythologizing of Genesis 3 in terms of human consciousness. Heidegger famously brackets Kierkegaard’s “ontic” Christian convictions in borrowing, without naming him, Kierkegaard’s ontological thinking. 22. Broadly speaking, Eastern orthodoxy more consistently portrays Christ as the capstone of creation, and not simply as “necessitated” by human sin. The counternarrative of the Latin-speaking church that I am tracing here—where Christ redeems human fragility and fallibility, and not only human sin—moves the Western church closer to the Eastern, albeit while maintaining its emphasis on Christ as redeemer. There is a related debate within the Western church between the more dominant “infralapsarian” position (from the Latin infra, after, and lapsus, fall), where God becomes human primarily as a response to human sin, and the “supralapsarian” position (before or above the Fall), where the Incarnation corresponds to the initial trajectory of creation or to the final consummation rather than to sin, and so, would have happened “anyway.” See van Driel,

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Incarnation Anyway, for a sophisticated study of three modern supralapsarian theologians: Schleiermacher, Isaac Dorner, and Barth. In light of van Driel’s work, my interpretations of the liturgy’s felix culpa help indicate the ambiguity between what otherwise look like the mutually exclusive positions of infra- and supralapsarianism. The claim that Adam’s sin necessitates Christ ostensibly makes the Incarnation contingent on sin. At the same time, it also calls into question what “contingency” could here mean and primarily functions as witness to the “Primacy of Christ” (a name often synonymous with supralapsarianism) above and beyond any reified ordo salutis. Ironically, what I take to be felix culpa’s primary referent—that redemption and Redeemer outshine the innocence lost by sin—corresponds to the first rationale that van Driel gives for a supralapsarian Christology (Incarnation Anyway, 151-52), and this despite his critique of the felix culpa argument, at least in the vein of Schleiermacher (see his chapter 2; I make note of Schleiermacher’s fortunate Fall in chapter 3). 23. Augustine, Confessions, 32–33, my emphasis. 24. See Taylor, Nots, 214–55. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anti-Climacus, in portraying sin as the “sickness unto death,” will join Augustine and other Church Fathers here. I will explore the significance of this in chapter 3. 25. On the observation that humanity’s limit is at the center of its existence, see Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 53–62. 26. Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 155. 27. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 310–26. 28. The practices of penance prior to the twelfth century, essentially under Benedictine Rule, appear most similar to a punitive court of law, where even absolution is withheld before penance is completed. Talal Asad explores the ironic fact that in this early situation penance “has a closer connection with the notion of ‘spiritual therapy’—that is, of creating the appropriate psychological conditions for rectifying dispositions.” See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 163. I thank David Mellott for pointing me to Asad’s study (personal correspondence). See also Mellott’s use of Asad, and his own analysis of the sin–sickness relationship, in I Was and I Am Dust, 94–101. 29. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 104. 30. Ibid., 103. 31. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession asserts that the tinder of sin (concupiscence) constitutes the essence of sin, in contrast to Catholic insistence (in the Council of Trent) that concupiscence only comes from and inclines one to sin. The context of the ecclesial debates is the relation between Christian baptism and sin, as well as how one understands the mode of grace in the Christian life. See Pannenberg, Anthropology, 119–20. For Luther’s radicalization of repentance, contra caricatures about easy grace, see his “Ninety-five Theses,” in Martin Luther’s Theological Writings, 40–46. 32. Compare the comments by pseudonym Johannes Climacus about his own stages of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious (CUP I 281). 33. The term is coined by Strawser, Both/And, 173–97. I discuss this designation in chapter 5. 34. I am here indicating the difference between rhetorical and conceptual receptions of Kierkegaard in broad terms. A more detailed account remains behind the present study:

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Derrida’s analysis of the “metaphysics of presence.” Derrida holds that Western thought almost in entirety quests after “the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship to language . . . [or] to a system of signifiers.” Derrida, Positions, 19. 35. Poole, “The Unknown Kierkegaard,” 58–66. 36. Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self, 29–46. Evans portrays the relation of Kierkegaard’s rhetoric to his ideas in terms of antirealism versus realism. I claim that the issue is not whether or not there is a mind-independent reality but whether human claims about reality must be discussed vis-à-vis figurative language. In other words, I understand the debate between literary and philosophical/theological readings to concern the relation between rhetorical figure and abstract concept and not the relation between the human cognition and reality extra nos. See my review of Evans’s book in Theology Today, 256–62. 37. Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, 3. Others arguing for or displaying a rhetorical-theological reading of Kierkegaard include Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God; Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker; Rumble, “The Oracle’s Ambiguity” and “Love and Difference”; Connell, “Why Kierkegaard Sill Matters,” 71–76; Mahn, “Becoming a Christian in Christendom,” 169–171; and Amy Laura Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love.

notes to chapter one 1. See Augustine, “Admonition and Grace,” chapter 12. See also Augustine, The Enchiridion, 136–38, and City of God, book 22, chapter 30. 2. De institutione virgins and De Jacob, as cited by Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, 287–88. 3. See Introduction, note 1. 4. Luther, “On the Bondage of the Will,” 140, 180. See also my “Beyond Synergism,” 239–58. 5. Luther’s Works, vol. 48, 282. Some understand Luther here to echo Augustine’s dilige, et quod vis fac [love, and do what you will]. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, 140–41. 6. Herbert, The Temple, Tanner 30. See also Herbert’s “The Pulley,” and “The Sacrifice” in the same collection. 7. Milton, Paradise Lost, book XII, lines 474–78. 8. Ibid., book I, line 26. 9. Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 243–45. Hick quotes the fifth-century Exsultet, claiming that “in their far-reaching implications these words are the heart of Christian theodicy” (364). 10. Blake, “The [First] Book of Urizen,” in The Complete Illuminated Books. 11. Sands, Escape from Paradise; Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion; Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. 12. See Sponheim, Speaking of God, 109–10, and Schuster, The Fall and Sin, 89–90. Both texts understand felix culpa as shorthand for what Paul Ricoeur calls the “tragic”

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response to sin and suffering, namely, that God is the author of moral evil. They join Ricoeur in rejecting such convictions in favor of the Adamic myth, in which responsibility is laid squarely on human choice. Ricoeur, however, in suggesting that “perhaps the tragic theology must be rejected as soon as it is thought,” and while still incorporating elements of the tragic into the Adamic, suggests that the tragic myth is useful as spectacle rather than speculation, as indelibly rhetorical. See Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 212. 13. Anselm, “Cur Deus Homo,” in Basic Writings, 197. 14. Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/1: 507. Compare van Driel’s first rationale for a supralapsarian Christology, as principally informed by Barth: “In Christ we gain more than we lost in Adam.” Van Driel, Incarnation Anyway, 151. See also Introduction, note 21, above. 15. Barth, Church Dogmatics, VI/1: 409–10. 16. I use similar comments about Barth to introduce Kierkegaard in the opening paragraphs of “Kierkegaard’s Three Devotional Discourses,” 85–86. 17. Among the many places in which Kierkegaard refers to himself as a modern Socrates is his last published work, The Moment: “The only analogy I have for what I am doing is Socrates. My task is the Socratic task of revising the definition of what it means to be a Christian” (341). See the discussion by Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 3–19. 18. For the claim that anthropodicy lurks behind theodicy, see Hauerwas, God, Medicine and Suffering, 59–64. Hauerwas draws from Becker, The Structure of Evil, 18. 19. Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony, attends to Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and K. W. F. Solger. 20. Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianity in an Existential Mode, 23. Walsh notes that the Danish People’s Church that followed Denmark’s new constitution in 1849 seemed to decouple political and ecclesial membership, but “de facto . . . the Danish People’s Church remained a state church.” 21. Ibid., 31. 22. See Kierkegaard’s Repetition, by Constantin Constantius, as well as Caputo’s analysis of nonidentical repetition in Radical Hermeneutics, 2–3, 11–35. 23. For broad discussions, see Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics; O’Regan, Gnostic Return in Modernity; and Cantor, Creature and Creator. 24. See Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil; Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil; and Davis, “Free Will and Evil,” in Davis, Encountering Evil, 73–107. 25. The connection between Anti-Climacus’s attention to possibility and the reader’s obligation to read him rhetorically go hand in hand. According to Kierkegaard, possibility comprises the greatest and most taxing gift that a reader can receive from a poet. In The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus notes that people normally consider possibility the lightest of categories (SUD 15, 7–42). But with regard to sin, he notes, possibility is actually higher and graver (SUD 15). Kierkegaard qua poet makes these possibilities “come alive” for his reader. Thus, even when Kierkegaard plays with the idea of an actual fortunate Fall, he does so in order to present sin as a poeticized possibility which the reader must confront. 26. Ricoeur’s French word is faille. The English “fault” accurately conveys both trespass and a geological rift. See Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 75 n. 32, 140 n6.

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27. In the subtitle of Practice, Number II (PC 71), Anti-Climacus describes his work as “biblical exposition and Christian Definition.” Christian definition (Christelig Begrebsbestemmels) means literally, “Christian determination of concepts.” 28. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 141–46; Symbolism of Evil, 310–26. 29. Ricoeur discusses this (epistemological) dependence on the confession of sin for glimpsing one’s (ontologically prior) fallibility by tracing how the “tragic myth” (which stresses the way one find’s oneself assaulted by evil prior to choosing it) gets incorporated into the “Adamic myth” (which stresses the origination of evil by humanity’s responsible free choice). See Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil¸ 310–26. 30. See Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge,” 254–58. 31. I here draw on the title of one of Ricoeur’s last book-length publications, Oneself as Another [Soi-méme come un autre]. 32. The Romantic Bildungsroman, which Kierkegaard shares with Rousseau, Goethe, Novalis, and Hölderlin, involves limited plot and setting and a focus on the formation of the protagonist “from the naiveté and illusion of youth to the sobriety of mature selfhood.” See Reed, Meditations on the Hero, 69. Compare Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, 77–78, and Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 95–96. 33. See Garff, “The Eyes of Argus,” 29–54. 34. Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 203; Walsh, Kierkegaard, 32–35; Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, 75–83. 35. Hauerwas, “The Difference of Virtue,” 251–60; see also Hauerwas, “Peacemaking: The Virtue of the Church,” 89–97. 36. Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, 30: “Sin is so fundamental that [one] must be taught to recognize it.” See also Hauerwas, “Salvation Even in Sin,” 61–76. The historical intermediary between Hauerwas and Kierkegaard is Barth, especially his understanding that one can never know sin except in the light of Christian faith. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1: 413 ff. 37. Hauerwas, “Christianity: It’s Not a Religion” in The Hauerwas Reader, 532. Hauerwas claims that Christian pacifism necessarily leads to conflict with peace as “the world” knows it. The formation of Christian virtue therefore draws attention to competing virtues and so creates what Kierkegaard calls the possibility of offense. 38. Hauerwas and Pinches, Christians among the Virtues, 128. 39. For expanded comparisons between Hauerwas and Kierkegaard, see my “Kierkegaard after Hauerwas,” 172–85. 40. Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, 259. 41. Kierkegaard interprets his method of indirect communication in the same terms: “If actuality is to be understood by a third party, it must be understood as possibility, and a communicator who is conscious of this will therefore see to it, precisely in order to be oriented to existence, that his existence-communication is in the form of possibility” (CUP I 358). 42. For Kierkegaard’s descriptions of faith as a second immediacy, or as an immediacy after reflection, see: SLW 162, 399; CUP I 263, 290, 347n.; FT 69, 82; and JP 2:1123. 43. JP 2804; CUP I 486–93, 593 ff.; FT 38–41. For “the child” as a common trope in Romanticism, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 413–15 and 379–83; for a description of nature as guide for morality, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 355–67.

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44. Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, 3. 45. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian, 139–40; Davenport, “‘Entangled Freedom,” 131–51. I will explicate Come’s interpretations in chapter 3. 46. The Sacramentary, 474–78. The following description and quotations are from this edition unless otherwise noted. For a comparative analysis of the Exsultet in relation to scripture, Church Fathers, and other Roman liturgies, see Lukken, Original Sin in the Roman Liturgy, 353–94. Lukken closes by stating that “the Exsultet expresses in a pronounced fashion a theological view of sin which can be termed representative of the liturgy as a whole” (394). For a brief history of the missal’s ban and eventual acceptance, see Lovejoy, History of Ideas, 287. 47. Compare Lukken, Original Sin, 390. 48. Paul Sponheim notes that “the temporal location does matter” for those who sing the felix culpa clause on Easter Eve. Sponheim, “Fifth Locus: Sin and Evil,” 379. 49. Lange, Trauma Recalled, 93–124. 50. Ibid., 95. 51. Compare von Balthasar’s portrayal of Christ’s passivity—his utter solidarity with the dead—during the day of Holy Saturday. Von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, 148–49. 52. See Lukken, Original Sin, 392–93, where the author notes that in Late Latin necessarium can mean “useful” or “profitable” as well as “necessary.” 53. The English missal translates necessarium Adæ peccatum as the “needful” sin of Adam. 54. Lanthrop, Holy Things, 33–83. 55. Ibid., 52–53, 79–83. 56. Ibid., 67, 80, 142, 57. Ibid., 82, quoting Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? 995. 58. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas, 277–95; compare Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 364; Weisenger, Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall; and Ficek, “The Paradox of the Fortunate Fall,” 1–7. 59. Peccatum is most frequently used for the transgression against natural law, delictum for transgression against positive law. Scelus conveys intentional injury to others and thus is most clearly distinguishable from the “error in judgment” meant by culpa. 60. Lovejoy asserts that this speculation introduces “more clearly some of the moral difficulties and metaphysical pitfalls which Augustine himself cannot be said to have wholly escaped.” Lovejoy, History of Ideas, 290. 61. Pickstock, After Writing, 170–85. 62. Ibid., 192–98. 63. Milton, Paradise Lost, book XII, lines 469–78. Subsequent references made parenthetically. 64. Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance, 53–68, 127–40. 65. I am here broadly drawing on Placher, The Triune God, 14–17, 21–26; and Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence, 27–31. I employ his work more systematically in chapter 2. 66. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/3: 293.

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notes to chapter two 1. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence, 27–31. 2. Ibid., 71–76. 3. Ibid, 85. Placher draws on the work of Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 120. John Caputo makes a similar claim by following Jean-Luc Marion’s critique of Cartesian univocity, with its assumption that God must exist in the same (measurable) manner as everything else that exists. See his Philosophy and Theology, 23–26. 4. In the second edition to The Epistle to the Romans, Barth writes, “If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: ‘God is in heaven, and thou art on earth’” (10). 5. Marino, “Anxiety,” 308; Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 107; Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, 541. 6. Haufniensis also distinguishes psychological observations from dogmatic propositions, metaphysical speculation from lived experience (CA 15–16), and philosophical ethics from Christian obligation (16–19). 7. See Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, 86. Poole elsewhere claims that The Concept of Anxiety is “probably the most ironic and certainly the most parodic of all the aesthetic works” (“The Unknown Kierkegaard,” 60). See the discussion and critique of Poole’s assessment in Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography, 217, 224–27. 8. Placher, Domestication of Transcendence, 201–215. 9. Tanner, “Human Freedom,” 112; as cited in Placher, Domestication of Transcendence, 210. 10. Haufniensis also uses the figure of the beast as that which, lacking the possibility of spirit, also lacks anxiety and the possibility of sin (CA 42; cf. JP 2:3557). 11. The “Interlude” of Climacus’s Philosophical Fragments contrasts the smooth and eternal movement of necessity with the change that occurs in existence every time a “possibility is annihilated by actuality” (PF 74). I will attend closer to this language of annihilating possibility, also found in The Sickness unto Death, in chapter 3. 12. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, 57. 13. Hegel, Reason in History, 27: “But in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?” 14. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 453–93. 15. Ibid., 493. 16. I am here borrowing language from Dudley, “Telling the Truth,” 127–41. 17. Hegel, Lectures, 61–162. 18. The subtitle of the “Appearance of the Idea in Finite Spirit” is “Estrangement, Redemption and Reconciliation,” but the actual headings are only two in number: (a) estrangement, and (b) redemption and reconciliation. Reconciliation is not treated substantially until the third of Hegel’s major triads—the communal spiritual life. Furthermore, in “Estrangement” Hegel considers both the human nature as originally created and the Fall into sin. So substantively, creation, Fall, and redemption better

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characterize the stages of this subsection, and this form gains clarity in the 1824 and 1827 delivery of the lectures. See Hodgson’s outline comparing the lecture manuscripts with their delivered form in Hegel, Lectures, 54–55. 19. Desmond, Beyond Hegel, 189–250. 20. Hegel, Lectures, 210, 202. 21. Ibid., 105. 22. Hegel makes much of the serpent’s promise that, by eating of knowledge, humanity “will be like God” (Gen. 3:5). Lectures, 104, 206–8. 23. Ibid., 206. 24. Charles Taylor, Hegel, 491. See also Desmond, Beyond Hegel, 210. 25. Desmond, Beyond Hegel, 206–26. 26. See Hodgson’s “Introduction,” in Hegel, Lectures, 29 and 92 n. 90. 27. Hegel, Phenomenology, 36, 51. For direct association of “the negative” with moral evil, see Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 92–93. 28. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, as cited by Thomte (CA 226 n. 28). 29. In many ways, the argument is between Aristotle’s metaphysic and Hegel’s ontology, and Kierkegaard’s criticisms gain prominence and incisiveness as he reads Trendelenburg’s Aristotelian critique of Hegelian mediation. See Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, 405. For Trendelenburg’s importance, see Come, Trendelenburg’s Influence. See also Come, Kierkegaard as Humanist, 142–45, 183–86. 30. Compare Climacus in the Postscript when he ridicules the hope that approaching “the leap” with a “running start” somehow reduces the infinite qualitative distance (CUP I 99). 31. See my Introduction and chapter 1 above. This language of an increasing possibility reflects the classical virtue tradition, as used by Davenport, “Entangled Freedom,” 131–51. Other considerations of Kierkegaard in light of virtue traditions include Roberts, “Existence, Emotion, and Virtue,” 177–84; Roberts, “The Grammar of Sin,” 135–60; and Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, 99–104, 138–49. 32. The latter term is from Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 145–46; See also Symbolism of Evil, 243–60, 310–26. 33. Compare Mackey’s remarks about how and why Climacus’s voice necessarily splits in Philosophical Fragments between the wonder-filled philosopher and the interlocutor that accuses him of plagiarism. Mackey, Points of View, 108. Compare also Mooney’s description of Johannes de Silentio’s “two-mindedness” throughout Fear and Trembling in On Søren Kierkegaard, 137–56. 34. Rumble claims that Haufniensis registers and personifies anxiety while claiming only to observe it. “The Oracle’s Ambiguity,” 612–13. 35. In denying Pelagianism, Haufniensis implicitly affirms Augustinianism, which here consists in the belief that humans are born into a sinful social situation that infects them, if not with sin, at least with “sinfulness,” the ripe possibility for further sin. He is not concerned that his view be Augustinian in the sense of understanding sin to be transferred from the first sin (originating original sin) through biological or other nonvoluntary inheritance (originated original sin). Nor is he concerned to be Augustinian in the sense that God’s grace be irresistible. See Jackson, “Arminian Edification,” 235–56; and Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety,’” 35–62. 36. In the second defense against Pelagianism (CA 37–38), Haufniensis again holds divergent conceptions together by way of contrastive rhetoric: sinfulness increases, but

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innocence is lost only by a leap; one may be more or less disposed to sin, but this more or less cannot constitute the concept of guilt. Even with his defense against Pelagianism, he does not appear to change his ideas on the fundamental nature of falling into sin or the way in which sin presupposes itself. Sin is explained by sin; this enigma remains indifferent if not impervious to supplemental, mediating explanations, just as the leap into sin remains undetermined by degrees of prior sinfulness. 37. My analysis is informed by Beabout, Freedom and Its Misuses, 59–66. Beabout’s interpretations, especially his clarification of the difference between Adam’s situation and that of “derived” (postlapsarian) individuals, widely inform my own—a fact that should not be overshadowed by my criticism of his earlier article, below. 38. Beabout, “Hereditary Sin?” 117–26. 39. Quinn, “Original Sin,” 227–44. 40. Beabout, “Hereditary Sin,” 123. 41. Ibid., 118. See also 125, where hereditary sinfulness “plays a conditioning role [in bringing about sin], but it is not a necessitating factor causing a qualitative change from innocence to guilt.” 42. Ibid., 122, 123. 43. Ibid., 119. 44. Ibid., 121–22, my emphasis. 45. Beabout claims, “There are two elements involved when an innocent person becomes guilty” (“Hereditary Sin,” 122) and asserts that socio-historical quantitative differences are “never enough to make an innocent person guilty without some act of personal responsibility on the part of the person who becomes guilty” (124). Again, after emphasizing the influence of the social context, Beabout asserts: “Still, the environment does not wholly determine how the individual will act” (125). In each of these passages, Beabout clearly reserves a place for individual responsibility, but his language may actually mitigate guilt by sharing responsibility with historical circumstances. All emphases are mine. 46. Ibid., 125 (my emphasis). In a response to these criticisms, which he included in a draft of his preface to the second edition of Freedom and Its Misuses, Beabout notes that his book better contextualizes the “explanatory” function of sin that he emphasizes with less context in the article. In fact, he insists that the book, like my own project, moves in the direction of tracing anxiety’s broader role in developing the virtue of Christian faith. An enduring difference, or at least a different emphasis in our assumptions, however, is the degree to which we accept at face value Haufniensis’s account of the methodological distinction between psychology and dogmatic theology. If I am reading him right, for Beabout that fairly settled distinction allows interpreters to understand free choice and anxiety to play partial roles in bringing about sin, whereas I see the voices as more contentious and so less easily combined. I thank Beabout for sharing his response to my critiques with me. 47. Quinn, “Original Sin,” 238, referencing CA 51. 48. Ibid., 243. 49. Ibid., 238. 50. Ibid., 231: “Even if one agrees with Kant that such [social and historical] factors cannot be causally sufficient for the existence of a propensity for which its possessor is to

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be held morally responsible, it seems reasonable to feel intellectual discomfort with the idea that they are precluded from having any causal influence in moral character. Worse still, it is hard to see how Kant could allow even psychological factors to influence the a-temporal choice that produces the evil propensity.” 51. We should note that Quinn elsewhere draws on Kierkegaard to value “polyglossia” over and against the inordinate emphasis on narrative coherence. See Quinn, “Unity and Disunity,” 327–37, especially 335. 52. This language echoes Johannes de Silentio’s description of Abraham: “[He] makes the infinite movement of resignation and gives up Isaac. . . . But next, at every moment, he makes the movement of faith” (FT 115). Ronald Hall examines this “double movement of faith” in “Kierkegaard and the Paradoxical Logic of Worldly Faith,” 40–53. 53. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 324. 54. M. Jamie Ferreira is most concerned that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on freedom and language of “leap” not be mistaken for utterly unmotivated freedom of indifference. See her Transforming Vision and “Faith and the Kierkegaardian Leap,” 207–34. 55. For a succinct distinction between evidential atheism or skepticism, on the one hand, and suspicion on the other, see Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, 11–14. A hermeneutics of suspicion, writes Westphal, “is the deliberate attempt to expose the self-deceptions involved in hiding our actual operative motives from ourselves, individually or collectively, in order not to notice how and how much our behavior and our beliefs are shaped by values we profess to disown” (13). Compare Westphal’s assessment of Climacus’s ideology critique in Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, 105–6, 115–25. 56. Aandløshed (or Åndløshed) commonly means dullness, fatuity, or insanity. Literally, it means “looseness of the spirit,” or in colloquial English, “not being all there.” In both tone and convention, the word indicates a diffusion or obfuscation of spirit, and the resulting dullness and lack of courage. 57. Rumble, “The Oracle’s Ambiguity,” 617. 58. Ibid. 59. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil¸ 310–26. 60. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, 278–301. See also Norris, “Fictions of Authority,” 87–107, which connects de Man’s deconstruction of Rousseau more broadly to Kierkegaard’s authorship. Compare Butler’s account of the necessary failure of narrative accounts of selfhood in Giving an Account of Oneself, 65–67.

notes to chapter three 1. Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin, 22–23, 37–41; Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin? 18–19. 2. Augustine thereby first incorporates moral/legal language in moving away from the medical model, and then later returns to hospital-talk as he separates himself from the moralists. For the distinctiveness of these rhetorics, compare Augustine’s early, On Free Choice of the Will with The Works of Saint Augustine: Answers to the Pelagians, IV.

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3. Hong, “Historical Introduction,” in SUD, xxii. Scholars such as Rae (Kierkegaard and Theology, 193–94 n.42) thereby typically distinguish the authority, but not the substance, of Anti-Climacus and Kierkegaard. 4. Compare Strawser, Both/And, 173–97. Strawser evokes Kierkegaard’s religious purposes to explain why his works must also be read as ironic, namely, so that the reader can appropriate the truths of Christianity in his or her life. As such, Strawser’s work is an instance of “controlled irony” (see CI 324–29) or even “controlled deconstruction,” as distinguished from Nietzsche’s bottomless skeptical doubt. For the distinction, see Norris, “Fictions of Authority,” 39–59. 5. Perkins, “Introduction,” 5. See also my “Reflections on Anti-Climacus,” 23. 6. The forms of biological transmission are various, ranging from traducianism to federalist theology. See Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety,’” 48–53. Barrett argues that Haufniensis resists the way Lutheran orthodoxy converts “the descriptive generality of ‘original sin’ (we all are sinners like Adam) into some kind of causal necessity (we are all sinners because of what Adam did)” (52). Compare Ricoeur, “Original Sin,” 269–86. 7. Hannay’s Kierkegaard: A Biography may overstate the case when it asserts that this constitutes “a totally novel conception of sin” (227). Similar remarks are in Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 434. 8. Compare Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 43–44. Medical doctors themselves often blended moral with medical advice in their prescriptions. Take, for example, this list of the likely causes of epilepsy, found in the 1852 publication of Haandbog i Therapien (Handbook for Therapy) by Olaf Lundt Bang, the Kierkegaard family physician: “being frightened, which can even be passed on to the fetus by the mother, indeed even in dreams . . . exposure to bad air, where many people are gathered; getting chilled; bathing; stimulating drink; tight-fitting clothing; mental stress; music; debauchery, especially masturbation.” Passage cited by Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 461. 9. Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin? 18–19. 10. Bringle, Despair: Sickness or Sin? 83–111. 11. For a more nuanced view, see Schultze, “Civil Sin: Evil and Purgation in the Media,” 234–36. 12. See “The Gospel According to Prozac” and Carter, “Taming the Beast.” Compare Marino, “Making the Darkness Visible” and my “Choking on Christian Authenticity.” 13. In Bound to Sin, McFadyen tests the interpretive value of Augustine’s original sin against several concrete pathologies in order to frustrate modern predilection to clearly divide victims from victimizers, individuals from their social locations, and human freedom from its pathological distortion. Hauerwas concurs: “I think the presumption we are made sick by sin is theologically right no matter how much it may offend our sensibilities.” Hauerwas, “Sinsick,” 11. From a non-theological perspective, Butler also counters the way U.S. culture—especially since 9/11—typically reduces the complex relations between conditions and acts to simple moralistic denunciations. Butler, Precarious Life, 1–18. 14. Compare Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, 156–58. 15. Here as elsewhere, Anti-Climacus’s form redoubles his material: the sickness of sin, like the book itself, consists of an “impotent self-consuming” (SUD 28). 16. Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” in Lucinde and the Fragments, §206.

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17. Ibid., §24. 18. See de Man “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, 172–73. For Friedrick Schlegel, the original act of consciousness, in positing or objectifying itself, becomes alienated from itself. However, only through this self-alienation can one becomes self-aware or self-conscious. Whereas the self-positing of the “I” represents for Fichte a moment of pure intuition during which the subject–object split is overcome, the Jena Romantics attend to the irony that accompanies an “I” that becomes itself only through fragmentation. The fact that poetic language is self-referential—closed in upon itself, forever producing a surplus of meaning—creates a maze of endless linguistic deferment and “parabasis” that suspends indefinitely any complete presentation of the self to itself. See especially Novalis’s “Monolog” (1798), in Philosophical Writings, 83–84. See also Calasso’s appreciation in Literature and the Gods, 178–83; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 39–58; and Horne, “Introductory Essay.” 19. Hartman, “Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,” in Beyond Formalism, 298–310. 20. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 158–59, as cited by Cantor, Creature and Creator, 1. 21. Cantor, Creature and Creator, 178. 22. Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 81. 23. Byron, Cain: A Mystery . Citations to act, scene, and verse henceforth made parenthetically. 24. Compare Cantor, Creature and Creator, 140–45. The motive for killing Abel is ambiguous and disputed by scholars. 25. Like the Easter vigilantes, Schleiermacher writes of the goodness of sin only in relation to redemption. Like Hegel, Schleiermacher, at least in his Glaubenslehr, conceptually subsumes all sin and evil under overarching divine purposes in a way that makes all evil seem to serve universal redemption. 26. Schleiermacher, On Religion. See especially “Second Speech,” 26–101. For the relations between Schlegel, Novalis, and Schleiermacher, see Forstman, A Romantic Triangle, esp. 65–79. 27. Schleiermacher, Speeches, 59. 28. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §66–68. See also Wyan, “Rethinking the Christian Doctrine of Sin,” 199–217. 29. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §67. 30. Ibid., §89. 31. Ibid., §80. 32. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian, 138–40. 33. Ibid., 138, 144. 34. Ibid., 139–40; 189–90; 142. 35. Ibid. Come calls despair an “essential failure” (243), or that which is “unavoidable and [thus] has to be dealt with as part of the maturing process” (191). The “self never achieves its potentiality except through the trauma of crucial mistakes (failures) that threaten the whole process” (155). He also directly returns to failure as a part of God’s higher purposes (189–91), and in a long footnote (156–57 n. 37) asserts that that purpose is

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clear—to achieve “a relationship of love between God and the human being and among all human beings.” 36. In Either/Or, published six years prior to Sickness, Judge William suggests that people must go through despair and actively choose it in order to master and eradicate it. See the note in Hannay’s translation of Sickness, 167 n. 3. Anti-Climacus’s rhetoric may suggest that interpreters of Either/Or had accused (or praised?) Judge William for writing about the benefit of despair. 37. See Grøn, “The Relation,” 43–45. I more closely follow Mackey, “Deconstructing the Self,” 160. 38. Westphal, Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue, 140. 39. The title reads, Denne Sygdoms (Fortvivlelsens) Almindelighed. Both Hong and Lowrie translate the heading, “The Universality of This Sickness (Despair)” (SUD 22 and Lowrie, Sickness, 155). Hannay translates it, “The Generality of this Sickness (Despair)” (Hannay, Sickness, 52). The former translation misleads so long as the reader gathers from “universal” a reference to the doctrine of hereditary sin. Anti-Climacus’s word choice would have had less theological baggage. The central hospital in Copenhagen, for instance, was called the Almindeligt (General) hospital, and it is plausible that the earliest readers of Sickness would have recognized the connection. Regardless, Anti-Climacus seems to use the word “generality” in its most nontechnical sense. 40. Den almindelige Betragtning af Fortvivlelse bliver derimod staaende ved Tilsyneladensen . . . Som en Følge heraf bliver Fortvivlelse et sjeldnere Phænomen, istedetfor at den er dt ganske Alminelige. (“However, the common view of despair does not go beyond appearances. . . . As a result, the phenomenon of despair is infrequent rather than quite [or, ‘absolutely’] common”) (SUD 22–23, my emphasis). I have altered Hong’s translation here to reflect Anti-Climacus’s word repetition. 41. Walsh, Living Poetically, 167–81; Swenson, Something About Kierkegaard, 159–77. 42. In the devotional material, Kierkegaard too writes of “the difference between sin and sin” (CD 180–81), or the difference “between the sin that the world regards as loathsome and the sin that the world regards as the good, or for which it has mitigating and euphemistic names” (CD 181). 43. Pap. VIII2 B 171:16 n. d., 1848 (my emphasis), as translated and cited in Hong, SUD, 157. 44. Tentler, Sin and Confession, 134–56. 45. In many ways this notion echoes Lutheran insistence that the “tinder of sin” (concupiscence) constitutes the “‘positive’ essence of sin” (Augsburg Confession). In contrast to the Lutheran-Catholic debates, however, Anti-Climacus aims not firstly to understand sin’s possibility in relation to grace (although that becomes more prominent in Practice in Christianity), but to mark its distinctiveness vis-à-vis more neutral possibilities that await a person’s selection. For the historical debates, see Pannenberg, Anthropology, 119–20. 46. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 95. For a more developed comparison between Aristotelian virtue and Kierkegaard’s hamartiology, see my “Kierkegaard after Hauerwas,” 172–85. 47. Beginning in the twelfth century, when monastic communities began recruiting adults from secular society, they invented ritual techniques that incorporated misdirected

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passions into the program of cultivating virtue. As incorporated, concupiscence and sensual desire (cupiditas) became what medieval theologians called materia exercendae virtutis, material for exercising virtue. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 145. Viewed from this perspective, Anti-Climacus’s use of the possibility of sin for virtue formation returns to a somewhat forgotten Church tradition. 48. The Danish for “the destroyed possibility” of sin is den tilintetgjorte Mulighed, meaning sin’s possibility as annihilated, wiped out, exterminated, or annulled. The fighting metaphor is significant in imagining this possibility to be determinate (capable of being encountered, if only in the imagination) as well as powerful (requiring a force to overcome it). 49. Ronald Hall also connects de Silentio’s description of the double-movement of faith and Anti-Climacus’s description of faith as including “the annulled possibility of sin.” See Hall, “Paradoxical Logic,” 40–53. 50. Haufniensis anticipates the alteration when he declares that “while psychology explores the real possibility of sin, dogmatics explains hereditary sin, that is, the ideal [ideel] possibility of sin” (CA 23). Fitting with the analysis I have offered here, the Danish ideel carries the same equivocalness as the English “ideal”; the possibility of sin becomes both a figure of the imagination and supremely advantageous. 51. Come himself responds to the question of whether “this universal human failure [is] merely a learning episode that all individuals pass through on their way to fulfillment and therefore needs not be taken too seriously” (Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian, 142). However, whereas Come’s subsequent appeal to ongoing possibilities for failure might preclude the idea that maturation is perfect, it does not cast despair/failure in terms other than divine pedagogy and human maturation. See here Sponheim, “Response to Arnold Come’s Kierkegaard as Theologian,” 9. 52. I am here applying a rough and ready distinction between appeals to authorial intention and a version of “anti-intentionalism.” Joseph Westfall makes more nuanced distinctions and traces Kierkegaard’s contribution to the many-sided debate in his “Kierkegaard and Intentionally Fictional Authors: Beyond Intentionalism and Anti-Intentionalism,” which Westfall has shared with me in draft form. 53. See Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, 61–71. Derrida deconstructs Plato’s dismissal of the curative dimension of writing in The Phaedrus by highlighting its danger as a counterfeit substance. As pharmakon, writing is for Derrida always both remedy and poison. 54. Kierkegaard wondered whether the formal categories of Sickness adequately sustained Anti-Climacus’s rhetorical aim (JP 5:6136). Compare Westphal’s wider comments about the relation between the dialectical and the rhetorical in “Kierkegaard’s Psychology and Unconscious Despair,” 40. 55. Mackey, “Deconstructing the Self,” 154. 56. Compare Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness, 216; and Stewart, “Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Despair,” 124–25. 57. Hannay, Sickness, 61; cf. Hong SUD, 31. Compare the section on possibility’s despair, where the reader is told that in order to become itself, the self “reflects itself in the medium of imagination, and thereby the infinite possibility becomes manifest” (35).

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58. For tuberculosis as a metaphor for Romantic creativity—along with the less illustrious connotations of “cancer” metaphors—I am indebted to Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 30–45. 59. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 30–45; compare Mark C. Taylor, Nots, 214–55. 60. Philistinism lacks enhver Aandens Bestemmelse,” “any spiritual characteristic” (Hannay’s translation) or “every qualification of spirit” (Hong’s translation). 61. Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, theses 5–12, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 52–54. Luther there plays with the categories of venial and mortal sin much as Kierkegaard plays with common opinion and the commonness of despair, suggesting that the sins feared to be mortal will be attributed as venial, while those assumed to be venial (“dead”) are really mortal (“deadly”). 62. Grøn, “The Relation,” 50. 63. Calasso, Literature and the Gods, 172–73. 64. I am here roughly following Derrida’s use of “undecideability” versus the complete free-play of signifiers that interpreters have wrongly associated with him, or what Walter Lowe calls indeterminacy. See Derrida, Limited Inc., 115–16, and Lowe, “The Bitterness of Cain,” 114–19. 65. When Novalis converted to Catholicism, his Jena peers criticized him for being unable to sustain the posture of hovering; that is, he committed himself to certain possibilities and so had fewer available to play with. See also Schlegel’s “Ideas” in Lucinde and the Fragments, esp. §134. 66. See FT 67 and PF 65. David Wisdo preserves the miraculous in Kierkegaardian faith against those who understand it as an act of volition. Wisdo, “Kierkegaard on Belief,” 95–114. See also Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, 246–58, and Barrett, “The Paradox of Faith,” 262.

notes to chapter four 1. Timothy Polk counts at least forty-one times that the term “offense” appears in Works of Love, adding: “Though I haven’t bothered with a word count, the terminology is doubtless even more frequent in Practice in Christianity.” Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard, 95–96 n. 6. An (electronic) word count reveals that the difference is about eightfold. In Kierkegaard’s Danish edition of Practice in Christianity, the word Foragelses (offense) or its variants appears 319 times. 2. Compare Polk, Biblical Kierkegaard, chapter 4. 3. Gregor Malantschuk also argues that Kierkegaard shapes his stages of spiritual development (aesthetic, ethical, religious) after Augustine’s creation-Fall-new creation pattern. See Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, 143–44. 4. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, 390. 5. Jackson, “Arminian Edification,” 252–53. 6. Ibid., 244, 246–53. 7. From the first pages of Practice, Anti-Climacus invites all who suffer to find rest in Christ. He makes clear that the invitation extends to all, including “the poor and wretched” (PC 13) and those who understand themselves to be innocent (18). Only after this universal

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invitation does Anti-Climacus assert that this Physician cures only sin (60–62). To come to Christ “on account of some other sickness, simply and solely because of it,” is like “breaking one’s leg and going to a physician who specializes in diseases of the eyes” (61–62). 8. McCracken, The Scandal of the Gospels, 7–8. McCracken’s book includes a chapter on Kierkegaard as well as substantial analyses of René Girard’s scapegoat theory and Mikhail Bahktin’s use of offense through his notion of the dialogical encounter. 9. My claim that freedom is reshaped by Christ’s offer of grace takes seriously Kantian influences on Kierkegaard’s moral thought. In Kant’s terms, freedom is thoroughly mediated by command; one first understands “I can” because one is addressed by the words “you must.” Of course, for Kant, that command essentially comes from oneself. For Anti-Climacus (like Levinas), it necessarily comes from another. 10. See Westphal, “Kenosis and Offense,” 36–37. Westphal traces the evolution of the possibility of offense from an epistemic problem in Fragments to an ethical problem in Kierkegaard’s second authorship. In so doing, he connects the language of scandal to Lessing’s “broad ugly ditch” and the scandal of particularity. 11. Compare CUP I 372, where Climacus asserts that despair and offense comprise “the Cerberus pair” that guard the gate into Christianity. 12. Gustavo Gutierrez helpfully interprets the Book of Job as revolving around this question. See his On Job, 5–7. 13. See PC 123 and Kirmmse, Golden Age Denmark, 387. 14. Compare Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 141–46. 15. Barth’s critiques of religion as the human quest for heightened egoism similarly provide negative witness to the incommensurability between God’s self-revelation in the Incarnation and all self-diagnoses of human need. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2: 507. That incommensurability goes far in explaining why Barth’s Christology is supralapsarian; compare van Driel, Incarnation Anyway, chapters 4–5. 16. Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” 350. 17. Simmons and Wood, eds., Kierkegaard and Levinas; Westphal, Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue; West, “Philosophy always comes too late: Levinas and Kierkegaard.” 18. Levinas scholars attend closely to the differences between the early and later Levinas, but I here follow Westphal (Levinas and Kierkegaard, 2) in treating Levinas’s two major works as complementary. 19. Typically, Kierkegaard’s Christocentric writings are bracketed by those retrieving Kierkegaard as an early critic of ontotheology. This exclusion rests on the assumption that Christ is primarily a mediating figure who serves to close the gap between God and humanity, or, in more existentialist appropriations, between the self and its selfconsciousness. Especially when Christ is portrayed as the savior, the commensurability and congruence between him and the needy sinner seems all too apparent. Kierkegaard’s depiction of Christ as a scandal of particularity and Anti-Climacus’s depiction of Christ as the possibility of offense should (re)open a space for thinking ontological difference Christologically. 20. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197–201. See also Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 86: “The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the

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face is what forbids us to kill.” Compare Butler’s discussion in Giving an Account of Oneself, 91–97. 21. Westphal, Levinas and Kierkegaard, 83. 22. I am following Mooney’s convincing description of Kierkegaardian (largely Climacian) “subjectivity” as moral, vulnerable responsiveness over and against the Cartesian associations that we tend to project on it. See Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 62–65. I return to Mooney’s characterization at the end of this chapter. 23. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, xlii. 24. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 180–83. 25. For connections to Kierkegaard, see Derrida, The Gift of Death, 53–81. See also a critique of Derrida’s interpretation in Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 103 n. 26. 26. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 66. 27. Admittedly, Levinas resists the idea of salvation per se in a way that Anti-Climacus does not. Still, Anti-Climacus joins him in resisting the reduction of religion to conventional understandings of reprieve. See Simmons, “Existential Appropriations,” 58–59. See also Kangas and Kavka, “Hearing, Patiently,”126, where the authors claim that both Levinas and Kierkegaard understand salvation as occurring through “patient demeanor in which patience is forced upon the ‘subject,’ deferring the fulfillment that is customarily associated with salvation.” 28. Gregor Malantschuk understands Judge William’s either/or to “sharpen” or become more “tense” in the Anti-Climacus writings, constituting “an intensification of the ethical toward the paradigmatic.” Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, 332. 29. The “as if ” qualification is indispensable if one is to resist not only the reduction of salvation to human need but also the reduction of sin to that from which the Christian is always already saved. Recall the discussion in chapter 1 of the ways Kierkegaard’s hamartiology differs from postliberals such as Hauerwas, who, following one reading of Barth, claim that the human sin can be known only in light of its fulfillment in Christ. 30. Compare Climacus’s description of the encounter between the understanding and the paradox, and of faith as a “happy passion” or their “happy encounter” (PF 49, 54) 31. See Introduction above, and Lanthrop, Holy Things, 67, 80. 32. Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” 350. Lange references Levinas’s use of leitourgia in Trauma Recalled, 199–200 n. 32. 33. Lange, Trauma Recalled, 39. 34. Lanthrop, Holy Things, 10–11; compare Lange, Trauma Recalled, 13. 35. Pickstock, After Writing, 192–98. 36. Ibid., 196. 37. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 52. 38. Levinas’s own reading of Kierkegaard misses this connection. J. Aaron Simmons has demonstrated that Levinas understood Kierkegaard primarily through the summaries of Jean Wahl, whose existentialist appropriations assumed that Kierkegaard retreated to religion because he could not fully confront the perils of existence. That is, Levinas from Wahl assumed that Christian salvation is inherently egoist, that the God-relation is but another term for one’s immediate self-relation, and that religion is essentially a matter of reprieve. Simmons, “Existentialist Appropriations,” 53–60. 39. Compare Lange, Trauma Recalled, 5.

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40. Kelsey, Imagining Redemption, 86–94. 41. Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, 259. 42. The terminology is from CUP I 555–86. 43. Merold Westphal is true to the Postscript’s ambiguity regarding the transition from A to B. See his Becoming a Self, 175–76, 180–88. Becoming religious (Religiousness A) involves a humorous contradiction in that a person must simultaneously become temporal and eternal. Becoming Christian (Religiousness B) is “doubly-dialectical” in that it adds to this human requirement the additional requirement of relating to an eternal God who comes into existence in time (the Incarnation). Religiousness B thus presupposes and sharpens—or even inverts—the pathos of Religiousness A. 44. Tillich, Systematic Theology, II: 31–44. Note also Edward Farley’s reliance on the method of correlation (correlating philosophical/anthropological observations with Christian terminology) as represented in the divide between Part One and Part Two of his Good and Evil, 115–18. 45. Barth expresses the qualitative difference between Christ and human expectation most graphically in his Epistle to the Romans, esp. 35–48. Among the three Kierkegaard books (translated into German) that Barth owned, Practice in Christianity seems the most influential. See McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 235 n. 92. Barth later understood Kierkegaard’s “new anthropological system” as a continuation of the liberal program of Schleiermacher. See Barth, “A Thank You and a Bow,” 3–7, as well as Walsh’s helpful summary in Kierkegaard, 201–2. 46. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 86. 47. For a similar point in the context of Climacus’s Philosophical Fragments, see Evans, Passionate Reason, 106–9. 48. Rae, “The Forgetfulness of Historical-Talkative Remembrance,” 87–92. 49. As referenced by Soelle, The Mystery of Death, 29. 50. Tolstrup, “Playing a Profane Game with Holy Things,” 268–74. 51. Lowe, “Christ and Salvation,” 222–48; quotation is from 241. 52. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, 145. 53. Ibid., 144–45, emphasis mine. 54. Wanda Berry, “Practicing Liberation,” 340. 55. Ibid., 311–13. 56. Ibid., 317. The emphases Berry places on existential appropriation and on the correlation between Christology and soteriology appear accurate to Practice in Christianity. Gouwens, however, places no less emphasis on them. He points out that the Nicene and Chalcedonian definitions of Christ (which he understands Kierkegaard to retrieve) provide shorthand for the Christian narrative of salvation. The identity Christians give to Christ issues from the significance they find in his saving work (Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, 142–43, 149). Gouwens and Lowe even note that Classic Patristic and orthodox Protestant theologies often also begin with the experience of salvation in figuring the significance of Christ. But where their liberal counterparts give both epistemological and ontological precedence to the experience of salvation, traditional Christologies emphasize that, even when the believer first comes to know Christ through the experience of salvation, the reality of salvation proceeds from and is shaped by Christ’s identity as God incarnate. 57. Lathrop, Holy Things, 82.

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58. Compare Allison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, 89: “What good is Jesus if he does not trouble our theological dreams?” 59. Schleiermacher is the supreme example of these functional Christologies, although Gouwens includes Bultmann, Tillich, and John Cobb as well. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, 144, 150. 60. The Danish word employed here is the same as the one used throughout Sickness to describe various possible misrelationships with oneself. One’s synthetic selfhood, as created by God, includes the possibility of misrelating to oneself. For example, Fortvivlelse er Misforhldet I en Syntheeses Forhold . . . I Synthesis ligger Muligheden af Misforholdet (Despair is the misrelationship in the relation of a synthesis. . . . In the synthesis lies the possibility of a misrelationship) (SUD 15). 61. See Evans’s remarks about Kierkegaard’s relative indifference to epistemology as narrowly construed in “Why Kierkegaard Still Matters—and Matters to Me,” 112–16; compare Piety’s examination of Kierkegaard’s epistemology as more broadly construed in Ways of Knowing, 1–19. 62. The pattern of suffering then vindication, tribulation then blessedness, death then life, repeats the basic sequence of Jewish eschatology. See Allison, The Historical Christ, 116–17. Although I am not addressing the issue here, my move to supplement the scandal of particularity, as rooted in Christ’s hypostatic union, with what I will call the scandal of peculiarity, as occasioned by the way Jesus’ life incarnates this eschatological pattern, may help overcome supersessionistic (anti-Jewish) strands of Christian theology. Jesus was scandalous as thoroughly, even paradigmatically, Jewish, even if those scandalized by him included fellow Jews (cf. 1 Cor. 1:23). For a very different but compelling use of Kierkegaard in overcoming Christian supersessionism, see Boesel, Risking Proclamation, 31–52. 63. I believe that this particular example is from Merold Westphal, although I am now unable to locate the reference. 64. Recall that chapter 3 argued that, in The Sickness unto Death, the dyad of weak and strong despair, or sin of strength and of weakness, was destabilized by the “sin” of indifference. I do not know of any scholar who has paired this triangle of despair with the two essential and one inessential forms of offense in Practice in Christianity. Doing so might prove valuable. In both cases, it seems that Anti-Climacus’s most pressing concern is with the boundary categories of indifference and inessential offense. 65. In Philosophical Fragments, Climacus includes an appendix to his discussion of the Absolute Paradox entitled, “Offense at the Paradox (An Acoustical Illusion).” In the reverberation generated when “the understanding” unhappily meets a transcendent Other, it is difficult to “hear” whether the understanding generates offense or whether offense is a true characteristic of the Paradox’s self-revelation, which the understanding only echoes. At first glance, Climacus seems to characterize human understanding as being actively offended by the Paradox of Eternity entering time. Upon further scrutiny, the reader better discerns that the understanding’s offense merely echoes or passively parrots what the Paradox reveals about itself. See Walsh, “Echoes of Absurdity,” 33–46. 66. Westphal, “Kenosis and Offense,” 22. 67. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, 183–89; Rose, Kierkegaard’s Christocentric Theology, 107–14; Walsh, Kierkegaard, 129–30; Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, 169–70; Sponheim, “Relational Transcendence in Divine Agency,” 2–54.

notes to pages 164–174

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68. I thank Paul Sponheim for helping me with this interpretation some years ago (personal correspondence). 69. René Girard’s examination of scapegoating and the “nonsacrificial death of Jesus” also help connect the two. See Girard, The Girard Reader, 177–88. Compare Heim, “Saved by What Shouldn’t Happen,” 211–24. 70. Jackson, “Arminian Edification,” 253. 71. Compare PC 105: “he has the power to remove the possibility of offense—but then he is not the object of faith, then he himself is deceived by human sympathy and deceives them. Ah, the abysmal suffering, unfathomable to human understanding—to have to be the sign of offense in order to be the object of faith.” The Sickness unto Death includes similar conceptions. Anti-Climacus there first suggests that human fallibility is so strong that even Christ cannot overturn it: “The greatest possible human misery, greater even than sin, is to be offended at Christ and to continue in the offense; and Christ cannot, ‘love’ cannot, make this impossible. This, you see, is why he says: ‘Blessed is he who is not offended at me.’ More he cannot do” (SUD 126). But then Anti-Climacus immediately traces both the strength of fallibility and the inability of Christ to overturn it back to the omnipotent suffering of Christ’s love: “Therefore [Christ] can—it is possible—he can by his love make a person as miserable as one otherwise never could be. What an unfathomable conflict in love!” (SUD 126). 72. The language is borrowed from Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 29–41. 73. Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 63. Compare Mooney, “Hidden Inwardness as Interpersonal,” 197–200, and Kangas and Kavka, “Hearing, Patiently,” 125–42. 74. Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 391. 75. Kierkegaard often quotes Luther’s legendary response to Charles V at the Diet of Worms: “I cannot do otherwise; God help me.” See WL 78; WA 30; SUD 126; PC 171, 191, 195. Interestingly, The Sickness unto Death uses the phrase to describe Christ’s grief in being unable to remove the possibility that humanity will take offense at him (SUD 126). It thus functions to secure freedom of choice, or the fact that one cannot be drawn to Christ without going through the repulsing possibility of sin. By contrast, here “I cannot do otherwise” expresses the kind of inner necessity that the Christian who submits to the will of God enjoys. One wins true freedom when one’s freedom of choice “rushes with infinite speed to bind itself unconditionally by the choice of attachment, the choice whose truth is that there can be no question of any choice” (JP 2:1261). 76. Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 84. Compare Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, 283–89.

notes to chapter five 1. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 1–7. I am persuaded as well by Amy Laura Hall’s moving accounts of “Kierkegaard’s call to discomfiture” in Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, 50. 2. Barrett, “The Joy in the Cross,” 257–85. 3. My language reflects that of Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 1–5, 33–42, 66–67, 77–78.

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4. Ibid., 28. 5. See UDVS Part Two, Section III: “What Blessed Happiness [Salighed] Is Promised in Being a Human Person,” and CD, especially Part One and Part Three, Section VI: “But It Is Blessed [Det er dog saligt]—to Suffer Mockery for a Good Cause.” 6. Khan, Salighed as Happiness? 60–88. See also Glenn, “A Highest Good,” 247–62. 7. Khan, Salighed, 86, 62. 8. UDVS, Part Three; CD, Part Two. For connections to de Silentio’s descriptions of the cheerful tax collector, see Hough, “Silence,” 152–57. 9. The longer passage reads as follows: “ . . . Not the laughter which is the playmate of pain—that I do not want, for that I have—nor the wohlfeile, the syrup-sweet smile—this I decline—but the smile which is the first fruit of blessedness” (JP 2:2176). 10. Strawser coins this term in Both/And, 173–97, to distinguish Kierkegaard’s signed writings from pseudonymous works, on the one hand, and from assumptions that those works signed by “Kierkegaard” directly correspond to Kierkegaard the historical writer, on the other. See also Westfall, The Kierkegaard Author, 1–11. 11. Kierkegaard borrows the hands analogy from the early Cynic Theodorus Atheos, through Tenneman’s Geschichte der Philosophie (JP 5:5639). He initially uses it simply as a request to greet warmly (as with a right-handed shake) those works that are meant to be upbuilding. The preface to the first series of upbuilding discourses (1843), for example, describes how “this little book” gropes its way with outstretched arms until it finds one who is “favorably enough disposed to allow himself to be found,” one whom Kierkegaard intimately calls “my reader” (EUD 5). The Two Upbuilding Discourses of 1844 likewise seeks a reader who “with the right hand accepts what is offered with the right hand” (EUD 179). Kierkegaard returns to the analogy in the years of 1848–49, while composing his AntiClimacian writings and while preoccupied with conceptualizing the unity of his authorship and concluding it with a signed work. 12. Walsh, Living Christianly, 2. 13. Ibid., 12; See also the essays by Schulz, Grøn, and Westphal in Immediacy and Reflection in Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. Cruysberghs. 14. Walter Lowrie, for instance, tends to use the evolutions and conversions in Kierkegaard’s own religious life as a hermeneutical key for understanding his various authorial personae. He thereby distinguishes Kierkegaard’s early pseudonymous works from the later Christian works according to the author’s own religious “progress” or “journey” but lumps the Anti-Climacus works together with Kierkegaard’s own mature religious understanding. See Lowrie, “Introduction: About the Year 1848,” xi–xviii. 15. Garff, “The Eyes of Argus,” 29–54. Compare Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 1–4, where Kierkegaard’s interpretations in Point of View are given authoritative status. 16. Strawser, Both/And, 173–92. 17. Ibid., 174–75. 18. To cite just one compact association: “The possibility of offense is frightful, and yet, just like the Law in relation to the Gospel, it is rigorousness that is part of the earnestness” (PC 140). Kierkegaard also connects these themes in his commentary on the work: “In book No. 2 (‘Blessed Is He Who Is Not Offended’) the qualitative rigorousness

notes to pages 180–185

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(strenghed) is the necessity with which offense is joined together with all that is essentially Christian” (JP 6:6528). 19. Possen, “The Voice of Rigor,” 161–85. Compare Burgess, “Kierkegaard’s Call for Honesty,” 38–41, 44–49. 20. Scholars have interpreted the final clause of this passage to mean different things. To “resort to [grace] in relation to the use of grace” (my emphasis) might suggest a third use of the law. Thus understood, grace would empower the Christian to strive again to fulfill the law’s requirement. Alternatively, one can stress the way the use of grace again must resort to grace, and thus understand grace as entailing not only forgiveness of past failure but also “indulgence from the actual imitation of Christ and the actual strenuousness of being a Christian.” These words are from Kierkegaard’s retrospective interpretation of the passage, written in 1855 when he wishes to revoke the recourse to grace that he offered in Practice (TM 69–70). See also Hong’s “Historical Introduction” to PC, xi–xix. 21. Kierkegaard scholars who most emphatically emphasize the this-worldly character of faith include Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation, and Ronald Hall, “Paradoxical Logic,” 50–53. Compare Hall, The Human Embrace, 7–40. 22. Hong’s “Historical Introduction” to PC, xv–xviii. 23. Possen, “The Voice of Rigor,” 177–83. 24. Compare how J. Louis Martyn describes Paul’s Christians as seeing “bifocally”— glimpsing “both the evil age and the new creation simultaneously.” Martyn, Galatians, 104. I thank Walter Lowe for pointing me here. 25. Kierkegaard elsewhere writes of the law as the “other side” of the Gospel. For example, while commenting on the seemingly contradictory statements expressed in II Timothy 2:12–13: “If we deny, he also will deny us; if we are faithless, he still remains faithful; he cannot deny himself,” Kierkegaard writes: “[T]here is no contradiction. The one clause is rigorous, the other lenient—in fact, here there is Law and Gospel, but both clauses are the truth. There is no duplexity in the verse, but it is one and the same word of truth, which separates people, just as the eternal truth, both in time and eternity, separates them, in good and in evil” (CD 283). In these ways, Kierkegaard counters the temptation of the established Church, and the Lutheran Church in particular, to supersede the law once it has driven the sinner to grace. Accordingly, one might contrast Kierkegaard’s dialectic of law and grace with the “second use of the law” emphasized by “first-form” Lutherans. For them, the law functions primarily to maintain civil obedience (first use) and incriminate sinners, driving them to faith (second use). See “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 585–629. The comparison is encouraged by Kierkegaard’s attention to Luther and criticism of the Lutheran establishment in what he writes after Practice, and especially in Judge for Yourself and For Self- Examination. See for example JFY 193, 213. Kierkegaard interprets Luther as one who understands faith as a constant striving, and his contemporary Lutherans as those who want to take the results of this striving without taking the means as well. 26. Ronald Hall still understands the “presence” made possible through performative speaking or reading to be incompatible with the privilege that deconstructionists give to writing and with postmodern theories about the self-referentiality of language. See his Word and Spirit, 164–206. By contrast, I suggest that the broad aims of each converge. While

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performative language does privilege live utterance insofar as it is here that reference and referent converge, that convergence occurs not by language being made transparent to a fully present reality, but rather by the “reality” being inscribed within the language that bears it. At their deepest levels, both performative theory and deconstruction attend to the ways that referents are inextricably bound to some utterances (Austin), if not all significations (Derrida). In this sense, performatives provide a unique example of the way all language works, even if the former attends especially to live speech. 27. To take just one example, consider the prayer and discourse comprising Part Three of UDVS. The prayer ends: “let your prototype stand very clearly before the eyes of the soul in order. . . . That by resembling you and by following you we might find the right way surely to judgment, since every human being ought to be brought before the judgment—oh, but may we also be brought by you to the eternal happiness with you in the life to come. Amen” (UDVS 217). The discourse itself, as announced in the Preface, does not exhaust the subject matter but “drinks deep enough [from “The Gospel of Sufferings”] to find the joy” (UDVS 215). That is, the discourse does what the prayer asks for; it proleptically answers the prayer, or at least rehearses the transformation of God’s judgment into eternal happiness. 28. See also JP 2:2201, as cited by Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, 183. 29. Mackey, A Kind of Poet, 257–58; Walsh, Living Christianly, 149–63. 30. Kierkegaard first portrays “The Woman Who Was a Sinner” in one of the “Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays,” which he published following Sickness. He returned to her in “An Upbuilding Discourse,” published immediately after Practice. In the former, Kierkegaard uses the line, “She hated herself: she loved much” (WA 138, 139, repeated four times) as a refrain for the discourse. 31. Dunfee, “The Sin of Hiding,” 316–27. For similar critiques, see Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” 100–112; and Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace, 62–73, 109–16. For discussions directly related to Kierkegaard, see Wanda Berry, “Practicing Liberation;” Walsh, “Prototypes of Piety,” 313–42; and Ferreira, “Rethinking Hatred of Self,” 122–24, 142–46. 32. Barrett, “Joy in the Cross,” 257–85. Barrett attends to “The Gospel of Sufferings,” the third set of discourses in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, but his analyses could be extended to many of the signed discourses, including Christian Discourses. 33. Ibid., 272–85, esp. 283. 34. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 33. I am here drawing heavily on Lewis’s characterization of Holy Saturday theology. Von Balthasar explores the meaning of Holy Saturday and of Christ’s descensus ad infernos (descent into hell) in more mystical and richly poetic ways. See his Mysterium Paschale, esp. chapter 4; and The von Balthasar Reader, 148. 35. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 77. 36. Anti-Climacus’s association of Christ’s twofold nature with the necessity of Christian suffering is exemplified here: “It is just as essentially a part of ‘the truth’ to suffer in this world as to be triumphant in another world, in the world of truth—and Jesus Christ is the same in his abasement as in his loftiness” (PC 154). Perhaps Anti-Climacus’s most productive imagery concerning the inseparability of Christ’s suffering and glory is his image, taken from John 12:32, of Christ’s being “lifted up from the earth”—through crucifixion. See esp. PC 259.

notes to pages 192–205

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37. Barrett, “The Joy in the Cross,” 260; Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 197–257. 38. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 12 n. 5, drawing on 1 Cor. 1. 39. Ibid., 67, 54 n. 16, 90, 362. 40. Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 57–58. 41. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 28–40. 42. Ibid., 96–97, 298, 320, 384. 43. See CD 249 and 450 n. 3. 44. JP 5:5089, as cited and discussed by Walsh, Kierkegaard, 192. See also Walsh, Kierkegaard, 133–35. 45. Westphal claims that to distinguish the second immediacy of faith from a first immediacy is to make an anti-Hegelian point, as well as an anti-Lutheran-establishment point (cf. JFY 194). Nevertheless, to call faith a second immediacy and thus to understand it as a kind of reconciliation between immediacy and reflection is to give Hegelian form to this anti-Hegelian point. See Westphal, “Kierkegaard and the Role of Reflection in Second Immediacy,” in Cruysberghs, Immediacy and Reflection, 174. 46. Compare CUP I 593–603. 47. Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, 164–66. Pattison draws heavily on Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits to highlight the value that Kierkegaard gives to human choice, consciousness, and anxiety, each of which distinguishes humanity from the natural innocence of nature. 48. The posthumously published Judge for Yourself! is similar. In it, Kierkegaard qualifies that the lily and the bird serve one master in a “metaphorical” sense only, and that the command for humans to imitate them is merely a “poetic expression” (JFY 187). 49. Ettore Rocca mentions this difference in passing, noting that Three Devotional discourses gives nature a “different status.” Rocca, “Kierkegaard’s Second Aesthetics,” 285–86. Compare Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, 330, where Three Devotional Discourses is said to be distinct from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits by “imply[ing] the consciousness of a new immediacy.” 50. Ferreira, Transforming Vision, 66–67, 85–88, 154–55; and Ferreira, “Faith and the Kierkegaardian Leap,” 207–34. While Ferreira focuses on the Climacus writings, one might extend her insights to the discourses, given the correlation between careful attention and not “doing” anything. Anti-Climacus’s emphasis on the will’s upheaval, on the other hand, prevents one from extending Ferreira’s insights across the authorship. 51. Compare Walsh, Kierkegaard, 191–92, 195–99. 52. Hauerwas, God, Medicine, and Suffering, xiv. 53. For provocative and quite moving accounts of Kierkegaard and joy, See Hugh Pyper, “The Joy of Kierkegaard,” 10–17.

notes to postscript 1. Rumble, “Love and Difference,” 162. 2. Westphal, “Kierkegaard’s Climacus: A Kind of Postmodernist,” 53–71, esp. 61. The reasons why the religious writings of Kierkegaard get bypassed by postmodern readings are

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too complex and historically contingent to examine here. Suffice it to say that most retrieve Kierkegaard as a (proto) postmodernist or deconstructionist through Heidegger’s somewhat veiled indebtedness to him, and so follow Heidegger in bracketing Kierkegaard’s “ontic” Christian convictions. Heidegger, for example, claims that Kierkegaard treats anxiety “ontically” and therefore in a limited way, precisely because he connects it to the Christian doctrine of sin. Heidegger, Being and Time, 492 n. iv. 3. Three noteworthy examples are Tillich, The Courage to Be, 125–31, 171–78; Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man I: 241–60; and Edward Farley, Good and Evil, 123–24. Each especially draws from Haufniensis’s phenomenology of anxiety and his remythologization of Genesis 3 in terms of the onset of human consciousness. For an appreciative critique of the way Farley’s work contextualizes the Christian narrative within a more general ontology of human vulnerability, see Lowe, “Issues of Good and Evil,” 51–64. 4. For the first case for “postliberalism,” see Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, esp.18–27. 5. Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 23-49. Compare Bernstein, Radical Evil, 11–45. 6. Wendy Farley targets the reductionism of “Augustinian theodicy” in her Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion and offers a response to suffering that would cultivate empathy rather than conceptual explanation. 7. Sands, Escape from Paradise, 9. Compare Bouchard, Tragic Method and Tragic Theology. 8. Sands, Escape from Paradise, 26. 9. Ibid., 27. 10. See Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, I: 251–60. 11. See n. 31, chapter 5, above. 12. Amy Laura Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, 49-50, 175. 13. McFadyen, Bound to Sin, 187–88. 14. Foucault indicates the ambiguity (literally: the doubleness) of the ostensibly unified subject in Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. For Foucault, “the Will,” “freedom,” and “I” can become indivisible, and thus reductionistic, terms that occlude the complexity of the phenomena involved therein. Nietzsche raises similar critiques in conjunction with Christian morality. See Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 215–17: “Willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unit only as a word.” And again, “‘Freedom of the will’—that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order—who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles.” The differences between Kierkegaard and this strand of postmodern genealogy are important; I am only suggesting that his understanding of sin joins (other) postmodern sensibilities in reducing the complex “tragedy of sin” to clear-eyed moral wrongdoing. 15. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, xxiv, xx, 34–37. 16. Compare Lowe, Theology and Difference, 23–27. See also Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, 3–20, 75–96.

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17. In this aspect, Kierkegaard’s work also anticipates the mimetic/scapegoat theory of René Girard. For connections, see Bellinger, Genealogy of Violence, 72–86. 18. See Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason, 1–30; compare van Driel’s description of God’s primary act of relating to that which is not God, Incarnation Anyway, 67–81. 19. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 180–83. 20. Lowe, “Second Thoughts about Transcendence,” 244. See also Lowe, “The Bitterness of Cain,” 109–21.

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Index

aestheticism 33, 109 (see also stages of aesthetic, ethical, and religious) Agamemnon 8–9 Alison, J. 214 n. 11 alterity 143, 211 of God’s command, 155 Ambrose, St. 27 analogy of 70, 000 fathoms of water, 173–4 and confession, 82–83 by inversion, 187, 201–2 of jack, 109 of Kierkegaard’s two hands, 178–80, 234 n. 11 of merman, 8–9 of sewing, 206 as theological method, 50–51, 54–57, 187 of woman who was a sinner, 188, 202, 236 n. 30 Anselm, St. 30 Anti-Climacus as pseudonym, 21, 34, 89–91, 112, 118, 134, 180–85 versus Climacus, 89–91, 161 versus de Silentio, 130–31 versus Haufniensis, 38, 91–92, 115–16 versus Judge William, 230 n. 28 versus Kierkegaard, 180–85, 195–200

anxiety 58–59, 230–31 n. 2 as context for sin, 66–71 as explaining sin, 72–76, 79 and faith, 77–78, 80–81, 84–85 apologetics 95, 154–55, 206 apostrophic voice See vocative voice Aristotle 114, 221 n. 29 Asad, T. 17, 215 n. 28 asceticism 17, 226–27 n. 47 atonement 98–99, 156, 190–92 Augsburg Confessions 215 n. 31, 226 n. 45 Augustine, St. 15–16, 25–26, 81, 88–89, 93, 113, 136, 223 n. 2 Augustinianism 221 n. 35 authorial intention 117–18, 179, 227 n. 52 Barrett, L. 174, 189–90 Barth, K. 14, 15, 31, 55, 57–58, 218 n. 36, 220 n. 4, 229 n. 15, 231 n. 45 Beabout, G. 72–74, 222 n. 37, 222 nn. 45–46 Berry, Wanda 154–55, 156, 231 n. 56 Berry, Wendell 50 bildungsroman 41, 125, 218 n. 32 Blake, W. 28 Bonhoeffer, D. 215 n. 25 Bringle, M. 93 Buber, M. 143

260

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Butler, J. 12, 223 n. 60, 224 n. 13, 229–30 n. 20 Byron, Lord 3, 82, 97–102, 126–28

deconstruction 23, 235–36 n. 26 of romanticism, 123–27, 212 of privileging of signed works, 179–80 demonic 8–9, 70, 120–21, 124 (see also sin, strong and weak) Derrida, J. 144, 185, 205, 209, 210, 213 n. 5, 215–16 n. 34, 227 n. 53, 228 n. 64 Descartes, R. 48, 55, 205–6 Desmond, W. 62–63 despair 35–36, 94–95 ambiguity of, 103–7 in Byron’s Cain, 99–101 as element in faith, 36–37, 115–16 as resolved, 128–29 as reversed, 162–63 typology of, 119–24

Cain 97–102, 126–28 Cajetan, T. 55 Cantor, P. 96 Caputo, J. 28, 220 n. 3 child Christian formation of, 168–69 as prototype for faith, 43, 195–96 in Romanticism, 218 n. 43 choice versus attending, 199, 237 n. 50 between offense and faith, 138–39 as forced, 143, 156, 233 n. 75 christ hymn 163–65 Christ See Jesus Christ Christendom 31–32, 33, 80, 109, 140, 151, 217 n. 20 Christian Discourses 185–87, 189, 196 christology from above, 159 from below, 159 functional, 154, 232 n. 59 infralapsarian, 214–15 n. 22 supralapsarian, 214–15 n. 2, 217 n. 14, 229 n. 15 Climacus as pseudonym, 89 versus Anti-Climacus, 89–90 cogito 48 Come, A. 43, 105, 117, 225–26 n. 35 communicatio idiomatum 192 communion sacrament of, 193–94, 202–3 Concept of Anxiety 20–21, 40, 55–59, 64–72, 76–85, 208 (see also Haufniensis) Concluding Unscientific Postscript 139, 158, 162 concupiscence 215 n. 31, 226 n. 45, 226–27 n. 47 confession analogical speech of, 82–83 as apposite communion, 193–94 of sin, 39, 81–83, 181, 209, 218 n. 28 conversion 110, 125, 128 crowd 121–24, 151

Easter vigil See Exsultet Eastern orthodoxy 214 n. 22 ec-centricity 165, 203 (see also kenosis) Either/Or 226 n. 36 election 156 (see also choice) equivocation 50–51, 54, 57 eschatology 136 established order See Christendom ethics in Levinas, 143 versus religion, 11, 109, 155, 207–9 as “sharpened,” 230 n. 28 teleological suspension of, 8, 10–11, 15, 209 Evans, C.S. 23, 216 n. 36 excess of faith, 155 of grace, 182 of Incarnation, 157 in liturgy, 46, 146 of salvation, 137 experience as theological starting point, 103, 205–6 Exsultet 27, 29, 44–50, 168, 188–190, 200, 202–203, 213 n.1, 219 n. 46 (see also Holy Saturday) as Christocentric, 157, 188–89 as performative, 186

Davenport, J. 43 de Man, P. 82 de Silentio as pseudonym, 8 versus Anti-Climacus, 130

face of Christ, 142–44 in Levinas, 143, 229–30 n. 20 faith as art, 198–99

index of Christ, 164–65 double movement of, 8–10, 16, 37, 77, 88, 115, 129–30, 133, 208, 223 n. 54 as heroic, 115–16, 129–30, 143, 198–99 leap of, 139, 221 n. 30 as passive, 143, 199 and possibility of offense, 134–35, 138–39 second immediacy of, 169–70, 194–96, 199 in Sickness, 125 as unjustifiable, 155 Fall See Genesis 3 fallibility as active capacity, 21, 113–116 danger of, 130–31, 195–98 and Fall, 2–4, 12–17, 63, 79–80, 81 and redemption, 15–19 versus fragility, 85, 115–16 as virtuous, 113–16, 197–98 Farley, E. 13, 14, 207, 231 n. 44, 238 n. 3 Fear and Trembling 8–11, 129, 209, 221 Felix culpa See Fortunate Fall feminism and sin of pride, 188, 207–8 and the tragic, 6–7, 207 For Self Examination 235 n. 25 forgiveness 162–63 fortunate Fall 2–6 as biblical, 10 in Cain, 101 in Fear and Trembling, 9–11 in Hegel, 29, 63–64, 175 as ironic trope, 4–5, 10–11, 31, 46–47, 200 in liturgy, 29, 44–50, 148 and popular culture, 29 of Romantics, 28, 30, 32–33, 96–97, 102, 175 in Schleiermacher, 102–3, 105 as theodicy, 29, 32–33, 175, 216 n. 9 various expressions of, 25–30 Foucault, M. 209, 238 n. 14 foundationalism 205–6 fragility as fortunate, 76–78, 81, 83–85 as rejected, 124 of self, 58–59 versus fallibility, 85, 115–16 versus fault, 67–71, 79–80 freedom as fallible, 12, 137, 166–67 and inner necessity, 170, 197, 23 n. 75

261

as libertas, 26, 136–37 as liberum arbitrium, 26, 74–75, 79, 136–37, 143 Garff, J. 56 Genesis 3 16–17, 28, 81–82 in Hegel, 62, 221 n. 22 as re-narrated by Haufniensis, 68–69, 183 Girard, R. 214 n. 11, 233 n. 69, 239 n. 17 god poem 163–64 gospel and law, 235 n. 25 Gouwens, D. 42, 154, 231 n. 56 grace 148–53, 181–82, 192, 235 n. 20 Hall, A.L. 209 Hartman, G. 96 Hauerwas, S. 42, 203, 218 nn. 36–37, 224 n. 13, 230 n. 29 Haufniensis conflicting voices of, 59, 66–71, 75–76, 81, 208 limited standpoint of, 84 as pseudonym, 20–21, 55–56 versus Anti-Climacus, 38, 91–92, 115–16 versus Hegel, 64–65 Hegel, G. 2–3, 59–63, 140, 175 versus Haufniensis, 64–65 Heidegger, M. 14, 230–31 n. 2 Herbert, G. 28 hermeneutics 39–40 of suspicion, 80–81, 85, 135–36, 140, 201, 208, 211, 223 n. 55 of trust, 141, 170, 201, 208 Hick, J. 28, 105, 216 n. 9 Holy Saturday 45, 47, 174–76, 190–94 and Kierkegaard’s authorship, 199–203 homeopathy 150 hovering 101, 105, 109, 127, 128, 228 n. 65 (see also undecideability) immediacy atonement as, 156 of devotional writings, 185 first and second, 43, 156, 169–70, 179, 194–96, 201, 237 n. 49 in Hegel, 65 inclosing reserve 121, 124 indirection as method, 1–2, 41–42, 174, 218 n. 41 and possibility of offense, 133–34, 137, 169 of salvation through confession, 191–92

262

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infinite qualitative difference between Christ and sinner, 186 between God and creation, 55, 148–49, 211, 220 n. 4 innocence as ignorance, 62–63, 97, 99, 221 n. 22 and immediacy, 65 versus salvation, 5–6, 27, 194, 209

and pseudonymity, 89–90, 180–85, 234 n. 10 as Socrates, 31, 217 n. 17 unified authorship of, 20, 22, 43 knowledge and despair, 97 in Hegel, 60–64 human versus Christian, 148–54, 206 as limited, 50 Kripal, J. 28

Jackson, T. 136–37 Jesus Christ and Christology, 157 conflicted love of, 164–67, 233 n. 71 as helper, 148–53 immediacy of, 142, 144 falling in love with, 168–71 life of, 159–60 as mediator, 229 n. 9 as Physician, 16, 131, 134–35, 147, 149–51, 228–29 n. 7 and salvation, 153–57 as sign/possibility of offense, 134–137, 141, 145 before sinners, 158–59, 161–62 suffering and glory of, 189–91, 232 n. 62, 236 n. 36 two natures of, 158–59, 236 n. 36 as vulnerable, 165–66 joy 173–74, 202–3, 237 n. 53 despite sin, 14–15 in devotional writings, 176–77 in everyday life, 182 in nature, 196–97 and possibility of offense, 145 after resignation, 8–9 and self-consciousness, 99–100 and suffering, 189–92 Judge for Yourself 235 n. 25, 237 n. 48

Lange, D. 5, 45, 146 Lanthrope, G. 47, 146 law uses of, 235 n. 20, 235, n. 25 leniency 180–85 Lessing, G. 139 leveling 151 Levinas, E. 12, 142–47, 150, 165, 210, 230 n. 27 on Kierkegaard, 230 n. 38 Lewis, A. 190, 192 liturgy language of, 5–6, 145–46 and Levinas, 145–46 and passive action, 142, 146 logocentrism 117–18, 141, 185, 209 Lord’s Supper See communion love Christ’s, 164–67, 233 n. 71 as disinterested, 140–41, 154 pathos of, 166–67 as self-emptying, 137 as unconditional, 151 as without reason, 153–54 Lowe, W. 154, 231 n. 56 Luther, M. 17, 27, 49, 122, 168, 192, 201, 215 n. 31, 228 n. 61, 233 n. 75, 235 n. 25 Lutheran church 202–3, 235 n. 25 Lyotard, J.-F. 210

Kant, I. 74–75, 140, 207, 209, 222–23 n. 50, 229 n. 9 Keats, J. 1 Kelsey, D. 13–15, 17, 148 kenosis 137, 162, 163–67 Kierkegaard, S. bilateral authorship of 178–180, 199–200, 208 as cacophonous, 202, 223 n. 51 interpreters of, 23 as poet, 42–44, 217 n. 25

Mackey, L. 43, 148, 187 Marino, G. 55–56 Marion, J.-L. 220 n. 3 Martenson, H. 140 McFadyen, A. 7, 224 n. 13 Menninger, K. 88, 92 metanarrative 210, see also stages of creation, Fall, and redemption Milton, J. 28, 29, 49–50, 82, 186 Mooney, E. 42, 56, 167, 170 Moore, S. 214 n. 11

index Murdoch, I. 141 Mynster, J. 140, 181–82 nature as prototype for faith, 43, 195–96, 199, 218 n. 43 negation in Hegel, 64–65 negative capabilities 1, 41–42, 126 negative way 1–2, 129–30, 133–34, 187 Niebuhr, R. 13, 14, 207 Nietzsche, F. 24, 55, 238 n. 14 Novalis 228 n. 65 obedience 196 offense 21–22, 228 n. 1 in Bible, 138 and Christ, 134–35, 141, 153–57, 164–67 essential, 159, 169 and faith, 134–35, 138–39, 168–71 inessential, 160–61, 232 n. 64 as interpersonal, 157–160, 167 and joy, 184, 203 as overcome, 168–71 in Philosophical Fragments, 232 n. 65 possibility of, 38, 135–41, 157–168, 184, 203 in Postscript, 162 otherness See alterity Pannenberg, W. 13, 214 n. 17 paradox of fortunate Fall, 47–48 and orthodoxy, 3, 19, 30, 90, Paul, St. 10, 27, 106, 163–65, 235 n. 24 Pelagianism 69–70, 78, 93, 221 n. 35 Percy, W. 95 performative language 235–36 n. 26 of discourses, 185–86, 201 of liturgy, 47 Perkins, R. 90 pharmakon 118, 227 n. 53 phenomenology of Haufniensis, 40 of Ricoeur 37, 39 versus dogmatics, 67–71, 238 n. 3 philistine See spiritlessness Philosophical Fragments 130, 163–64, 221 n. 33 Pickstock, C. 48–49, 146 Placher, W. 54–55, 75, 213 n. 4 poetry of the eternal 201

Point of View 178–79 Poole, R. 23 Possen, D. 180, 183 possibility 22 as destroyed, 115, 227 nn. 48–49 and indirect communication, 22–23, 217 n. 25, 218 n. 41 of sin, 41, 111–14 versus probability, 66, 121–22 postliberalism 42, 230 n. 29, 238 n. 4 postmodernity 23, 107, 205, 210 and hamartiology, 211 and Kierkegaard, 230–31 n. 2 and romanticism 211–12 Practice in Christianity 21–22, 133–42, 147–171, 191 composition of, 180–81 critical function of, 140–41, 180–85 reception of, 182–83 revocations within, 183 rhetoric of, 148, 160–61 and Sickness, 135 structure of, 135–36 prayer 186, 201, 236 n. 27, Lord’s, 202 prodigal son 16 psychology See phenomenology Quinn, P. 72, 74–75 Rahner, K. 13 Rasmussen, J. 23 realism 216 n. 36 reason See knowledge redemption See salvation religiousness A and B 148, 231 n. 43 repentance 188, 215 n. 31 resignation 8–9 resurrection 165 and cross 190–92, 200–2 rhetorical analysis of Exsultet, 44–50, 175–76 and Hegel, 60–61 of Kierkegaard, 43–44, 217 n. 25 of Practice, 148, 160–61 of Sickness, 94–95, 120, 122 rhetorical theology 22–24, 42–44, 215 n. 34 Ricoeur, P. 12, 17–18, 37–40, 77, 82 rigor 180–85

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romanticism Byron as example of, 102 cultural expressions of, 32–33 as deconstructed, 123–24, 212 and fortunate Fall, 28, 30, 32–33, 96–97 German (Jena), 96–97, 225 n. 18 and postmodern theology, 211–12 Rousseau, J.-J. 82, 97 Rumble, V. 80, 205 sacred history See stages of creation, Fall, and redemption salvation 147–156 as dispossession, 152 epistemology versus ontology of, 231 n. 56 indirection of, 191–92 as rejected by Cain, 98–99 and Savior, 153–57, 203 sui generis meaning of, 150, 152 as therapy, 150–52, 189 versus innocence, 5–6, 27, 194, 209 versus reprieve, 144, 230 n. 27, 230 n. 38 Sands, K. 6–7, 28 Sartre, J.-P. 12, 59 scandal 138, 139 of particularity, 158–61, 232 n. 62 of peculiarity, 160–62, 232 n. 62 Schlegel, F. 96, 225 n. 18 Schleiermacher, F. 74, 102–3, 105, 231 n. 45 Self (see also subjectivity) before Christ, 157–59, 161–62, 203 as complex, 238 n. 14 as deconstructed in liturgy, 48–49, 145–46, 168 non-coincidence of, 37, 58–59, 96, 116, 203, 225 n. 18 as synthesis, 58, 92, 119, 232 n. 60 postlapsarian, 70, 73, 83–84, 222 n. 37 as vulnerable, 167–68 Sickness unto Death 7, 21, 34–37, 103–131, 149, 162–63 as circular, 95–96, 124, 127 function of, 118–19 as narrative, 119–23 structure of, 94–95, 107, 127 simultaneity of creation and Fall, 63, 96, 102 of cross and resurrection, 175–76, 190–92 in liturgy, 45 of pseudonymous and signed works, 200

of rigor and leniency, 177, 183–84 of sinner and saint, 49, 157 sin as “close” to redemption, 26, 125, 130, 194 as act and state, 6, 111–13 ambiguity of, 68–69, 80, 95, 103–110, 206, 226 n. 42 bondage to, 88–89 consciousness of, 105–7, 123–24, 152, 205 as crime, 6, 88–94 and despair, 94–95, 106–7 in different theological loci, 13–15 and exclusion/scapegoating, 210 feminist critiques of, 188, 207–8 ignorance of, 95, 123 intensification of, 105–6, 120–24 leap into, 13, 14, 39, 64–71, 77 in light of Christ, 3, 7, 14–15, 38, 46, 135, 141, 188–89, 211, 218 n. 36 and maturation, 105, 117, 225–26 n. 35, 227 n. 51 and moral responsibility, 4, 7, 207–9 mortal and venial, 112, 228 n. 61 necessity of, 13–14, 44, 46, 192, 219 nn. 52–53, 224 n. 6 and neurobiology, 93 original/hereditary, 6, 15, 18, 56, 221 n. 35, 226 n. 39 as a position/positive, 7, 210 possible versus actual, 12–15, 34–36, 39, 59, 111, 114–16 power of, 18, 113, 115 as revealed, 111 as sickness, 6, 16, 88–94, 113, 121, 150, 224 n. 8 slide into, 39, 67–71, 77 Socratic accounts of, 108 strong and weak, 110, 120–24, 188, 208, 232 n. 64 universal and particular, 38–39, 107–9, 226 n. 36 Socratic definition of sin, 108 as human reason, 130, 156 Kierkegaard as, 31, 217 n. 17 spiritlessness 7, 34, 80–81, 105, 109–110, 121–22 and Danish Aandløshed, 223 n. 56 Stages on Life’s Way 177

index stages of aesthetic, ethical, and religious, 11, 200, 215 n. 32, 228 n. 3 of creation, Fall, and redemption, 6, 18–19, 25–26, 30, 61–62, 102, 136, 210 Strawser, M. 179, 224 n. 4, 234 n. 10 subjectivity 14, 145–46 (see also self ) of Christ, 158 versus Cartesian sovereignty, 146, 167–68, 230 n. 22 suffering of Christ, 164–67 and joy, 189–92 supersessionism 232 n. 62 Tanner, K. 57 Taylor, B. 8 Taylor, C. 63 theodicy 57, 175 cultural expressions of, 32–33 and free-will defense, 35–36, 115 and Hegel, 60 among Kierkegaard’s interpreters, 72, 75–76 and self-justifications, 32, 79–80, 217 n. 18 theology of the cross 201 (see also analogy, by inversion) Three Devotional Discourses 195–99, 201 Tillich, P. 13, 14, 207 time (see also simultaneity) in Fear and Trembling, 191 in liturgy, 4, 190–91, 219 n. 48 in Milton, 50 trace 146 (see also excess) tragic evil 6–7, 207

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and Adamic myth 17, 207–8, 216–17 n. 12, 218 n. 29 tragic hero 8–9, 129 tragic human nature 14, 97, 101–2 tragic-comedy 176 transcendental signifier See logocentrism trauma 45–46, 146 undecideability 97, 101, 107, 127–28, 209 (see also hovering) versus indeterminacy, 212, 228 n. 64 unhappy consciousness 99 univocity 50–51, 54–57, 209 in Hegel, 63–64, 175 Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits 196 vertigo 68–69, 83 via negativa See negative way virtue 37, 40–42, 218 n. 37, 221 n. 31 fallibility as, 113–16, 197–98 of necessity, 197 training in, 166–69 vocative voice 48–49, 146 von Balthasar, H. 219 n. 51, 236 n. 34 vulnerability of Christ, 165–66 of humans, 167–8 Wahl, J. 230 n. 38 Walsh, S. 42, 179, 187 Westphal, M. 107, 163, 223 n. 55 Without Authority See Three Devotional Discourses worship 202–3 (see also liturgy) Yeats, W.B. 29