Kierkegaard’s Pastoral Dialogues

By George Pattison and Helle Moller Jensen

Kierkegaard's Pastoral Dialogues takes a selection of Kierkegaard's most insightful spiritual writings and transforms them into a series of dialogues between two friends, a believer and a nonbeliever. In this way, some of Kierkegaard's complex religious thought is made accessible to a wider readership, so as to provide a resource for individual or group study in pastoral, counseling, or spiritual direction contexts. Each dialogue is accompanied by a commentary and questions to help discussion by groups or application by individuals. Finally, there are three responses from, respectively, a philosopher, a theologian, and a hospital chaplain, looking at how the dialogues may be relevant to these different fields of practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jun 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621893615

George Pattison

George Pattison is Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and has written extensively on Kierkegaard and modern religious thought. His most recent books are Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century and Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life.

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Foreword (1)

George Pattison

Why does one read Søren Kierkegaard? In my case, it began with reading an English translation of a selection from his journals. The parts that interested my seventeen-year old self most were those early notes where we see him walking along the cliff-tops at Gilleleje, wondering what to do with his life. And, of course, for a young person wrestling with the novelty and the difficulty of sexual relationships, there was the broken engagement to Regine—was love the most important thing in life? Or was there something more? Probably my Kierkegaardian interest in such questions led to the end of at least one relationship, as I learned many years later. And beyond questions of love and sex, Kierkegaard also spoke to my adolescent sense of needing to define the meaning of my life through some great act of freewill that would be both inexplicable to others and irrevocable. Reading Kierkegaard alongside Sartre, he seemed to be an essential exponent of both the tragedy and the inescapability of human freedom—perfectly adapted to the needs of late adolescence.

Then I left Kierkegaard behind for a while, spending several years absorbing myself in student politics, Buddhist philosophy, and similar 60s activities before returning to Christianity and starting to train for priesthood—and, unlike Kierkegaard, becoming a married man with children to think about. However, I soon realized that Kierkegaard had more to teach me than I’d yet realized. The more I read the more convinced I became that he was perhaps the first major Christian thinker to realize how different the situation of the church in modern society was from anything that had gone before. As few others, he seemed to sense how little one could presume upon modern men and women having any natural or automatic interest in religion, let alone Christianity. If people today were really to be exposed once more to truly radical Christian teaching, it was no good preaching at them from pulpits in empty churches, and no good just writing theological books to be read by other theologians. Both the churches and universities were, in fact, very problematic sites of Christian learning and endeavor, even though Christianity had identified itself strongly with both of them. At the same time he realized that while fundamentalism might be attractive to people destabilized by the complexity and rapid changes of the modern world, he also realized that the modern commitment to the freedom of individual conscience and to each individual thinking and deciding for themselves set a limit to any authoritarian approach to religion, whether it appealed to the Bible or to the life of the church.

Kierkegaard’s response to this situation can be seen in his strategy of indirect communication. Instead of setting out to instruct his contemporaries in the content of Christianity, he sought first to alert them to why the questions addressed by Christianity should matter to them. Because he himself was deeply attracted to the idea of being a writer of literary works—and superbly gifted in that regard—he therefore began by writing works such as Either/Or that read almost like novels and that touched on many of the questions radical young thinkers and artists of the time were asking. In other words, Kierkegaard made Christianity a question of one’s whole life-view. And, for him, writing at the end of the Danish Golden Age, he saw the issue of his time as a struggle between three principle life-views: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

My own interests in literature and art led me to focus on the first of these, the aesthetic, in my own doctoral work and to explore how Kierkegaard traced a path from the aesthetic to the religious. Of course, I was also aware that alongside the so-called indirect communication found in the pseudonyms responsible for Either/Or, Repetition, and other aesthetic works he produced a large body of religious writings under his own name, which seemed to contain a direct communication of the religious. And, like all other readers, I couldn’t help noticing that the vast majority of Kierkegaard’s readers didn’t pay very much attention to these—perhaps because they were religious and, as such, were regarded as being rather conventional, merely repeating (albeit in an idiosyncratic way) the same kinds of Christian teachings that could be found in any other theological work.

But reading these religious or upbuilding works for myself, I soon learned that they were in fact rather different from how they were usually portrayed. Far from being theological textbooks, they engaged the reader in a complex dialogical way, not teaching but raising questions, offering new and unexpected perspectives on familiar problems, subverting expectations. In the prefaces to them, Kierkegaard insists that he is not a teacher. He is without authority, as he says, and all he can do is, like his hero Socrates, help readers find their own way to the truth. That is why, like Socrates, he has a natural affinity for the dialogue form and why even though these upbuilding discourses look at first like classical sermons they are really very different. Most (though not all) preachers are, on the whole, monological. They have something to say, and they say it. Of course they also illustrate it with stories, images, and episodes from history, literature, and life. But the point is to get the message across. But for Kierkegaard the point is not to get a message across, it is to engage readers in a process of change and, like a therapist, help them become alert to the movements and needs of their own hearts. He is not the one with the answers. He is a fellow learner. And so, beneath the surface of the text, he presents us with a multitude of voices, each representing a different point of view, making objections, posing questions, giving assent. In one discourse, I counted over twenty! And, yes, the Bible is also one of these voices, but not imposing itself on us from outside and persuasive only to the extent that it really addresses what the others are saying.

Theoretically, this seemed to fit with the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the polyphonic novel (which he saw especially exemplified in Dostoevsky). According to Bakhtin, a polyphonic novel is one that contains a multitude of voices and points of view that crisscross each other in a constant, open, and unfinalizable movement. In such a work there is no final resolution, no grand finale, no concluding chord. Everything remains open; everything is still to be decided. The only possible resolution, he suggested, was a kind of love big enough to embrace such multiplicity and unselfish enough not to try to impose its own point of view on all the rest. Bakhtin was a reader of Kierkegaard (including his Works of Love) and this very possibly shaped his own theory—although Stalin’s Soviet Union was not a place where writers could openly discuss Kierkegaard, except as a decadent representative of bourgeois ideology! In any case, it seemed to me that Bakhtin’s thought appeared to be a good way of bringing Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses in from the cold and helping contemporary philosophers and students of literature and theology get interested in them.

It was at this point that I became aware of the work of Helle Møller Jensen. While I had been approaching the discourses from a theoretical and rather philosophical orientation, she had been using them to inform the practice of pastoral care, and where I had been analyzing the dialogical elements in a rather formal way, she had actually begun turning them—or perhaps turning them back into—dialogues! The present collection is the outcome of these converging interests. There is a lot more to be said about the process that has led us to the present work, and Helle will offer her own perspective on this, but there is one further thing to add.

In the last couple of years in particular I have become increasingly aware that the movement set in motion by the discourses is not only philosophically interesting and not only therapeutically helpful, it also has much to offer the growing interest in what we call spirituality. Kierkegaard is not just concerned to bring his readers back from one or other form of misery to normality. Rather, he opens horizons towards what is sometimes called the mystical. Of course, words like spirituality and mysticism are easily misused and I wouldn’t want Kierkegaard to sound too much like a New Age guru. But a careful reading of his discourses, including the ones offered in this collection, will, I think, help us to see that human flourishing is so far from being blocked by becoming open to God that openness to God—or to whatever we call that great presence we encounter in the silent depths of the heart—is an integral part of reclaiming the fullness of our individual and common humanity. My hope for this collection is that presenting these pastoral dialogues in this new way will help contemporary readers to make that movement, or at least, to take the first step, with God, to God, as Kierkegaard himself put it.

Foreword (2)

Helle Møller Jensen

Why does one read Kierkegaard? Kierkegaard is not a name one can avoid if one goes on into further education in Denmark. Already at High School Works of Love was on the reading lists, and Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death were integral to my theological studies. But Kierkegaard stayed with me as a source of inspiration when later on I became a parish priest. As a parish priest, one is expected to apply and to develop one’s education and one way of doing this is to get involved in study groups with laity interested in reading theological literature. It was through one such reading group (in Gilleleje, where Kierkegaard wrote some of his earliest journal entries) that I became familiar with Kierkegaard’s upbuilding writings. The group in Gilleleje included a policeman, nurses, teachers, craftsmen, and business people. They met once a month in the local library and asked me to help them understand Kierkegaard’s ideas. For me, it turned out to be quite an eye-opener as I discovered how people without any theological background were fired up by many of the ideas Kierkegaard developed in the upbuilding discourses.

Later, I found myself turning to Kierkegaard again, when my parish post was developed into a hospital chaplaincy. The first task was to help the staff know what I was about, so they could get used to the idea of working with a priest. There hadn’t been any institutional church work in the hospital previously and so my new colleagues were not at all clear as to how they could use a chaplain or what a chaplain’s work really involved. In trying to address this task I decided to re-write Kierkegaard’s discourse The One Who Prays In the Right Way as a dialogue. I chose this particular discourse because it develops a number of images of God, from the naïve ideas of a child through to the images that speak to an adult experiencing intense spiritual trial. The aim was to give the hospital staff an insight into the difference between a purely psychological and a theological view of the human person and to show the kind of issues that then come up. This idea—of re-writing the discourses as dialogues—was suggested by a lecture in Copenhagen by George Pattison, who had spoken about Kierkegaard’s Socratically-inspired maieutic approach and how Kierkegaard’s texts contain a variety of voices. (Maieutic relates to the Greek word for midwife, and Socrates’ teaching was, typically, to help his interlocutors bring their own ideas to birth—rather than impose his ideas on them.)

The first reaction of my health-worker colleagues to the dialogues was that they were too stylized and artificial and that the voice of the counselor was too dominant in relation to that of the client. So, I had to do more work on making the dialogues life-like and balanced. As I continued, I drew on more of the discourses and gradually became aware of an aspect of Kierkegaard’s communicative strategy that I hadn’t previously been aware of. I began to see the outline of a method of communication that involved more than the subjunctive and dialogical features of Socratic maieutics but that also emphasized how the positions and movements of the body portrayed in the text give an image of a person’s psychic situation. At its simplest, this meant that the outer is an image of the inner and—what was most exciting—that this was not only the case with regard to human problems but also in relation to how God is perceived.

This discovery was particularly relevant in the context of work in a hospital, where, in the nature of the case, there was a great interest in the body. Using bodily rather than psychological categories in order to talk about the mind and about God (in this case, instead of traditional dogmatic categories), enabled me to take the further step of introducing visualizations that corresponded to Kierkegaard’s descriptions of bodily states. I did this by purchasing a number of croquis model dolls in assorted sizes and positioning them in ways suggested by the text.

Forword1.jpg

This further development was partly prompted by Arne Grøn’s doctoral thesis, Subjectivity and Negativity: Kierkegaard, in which he demonstrated the double-perspective generated by the way in which Kierkegaard speaks about the body’s positions and movements in both metaphorical and literal ways. He explains how Kierkegaard’s text presents us with the individual as seen both from the inside and from the outside; that is, from the point of view of the observer and the one who is being observed. The object that the author qua observer relates to is the individual in motion. The movements are important in themselves, because they can be understood as anticipating a figurative stance.¹ In these terms, my use of the croquis model dolls was a way of giving a visual form to Grøn’s point that the movement an individual makes brings them to a particular point that, as figurative, is spiritually meaningful.

Since then I have used the croquis model dolls in various teaching situations. I have let others decide whether they should be used literally or metaphorically. Literally, they can be used to reproduce a visually objective picture of a real situation. This can help a person represent where she or he stands in various relationships. For example, in the hospital context it can, among other things, help clarify issues in patient-doctor communication. Using them metaphorically, on the other hand, can help represent a real situation as that is lived at the level