Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard

By Lee C. Barrett

A thought-provoking comparative take on two seminal thinkers in Christian history

In this book -- the first volume in the Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker series -- Lee Barrett offers a novel comparative interpretation of early church father Augustine and nineteenth-century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard.

Though these two intellectual giants have been paired by historians of Western culture, the exact nature of their similarities and differences has never before been probed in detail. Barrett demonstrates that on many essential theological levels Augustine and Kierkegaard were more convergent than divergent. Most significantly, their parallels point to a distinctive understanding of the Christian life as a passion for self-giving love.

Approaching Kierkegaard through the lens of Augustine, Barrett argues, enables the theme of desire for fulfillment in God to be seen as much more central to Kierkegaard's thought than previously imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781467440295

Lee C. Barrett

Lee C. Barrett is Stager Professor of Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Heidelberg Catechism (2007), Foundations of Modern Theology: Kierkegaard (2009), and co-editor of Kierkegaard and the Bible (2010).

Book preview

Index

Foreword

It is impossible to escape the long shadow that Augustine has cast over the Christian theological tradition. Theologians will invariably find themselves wrestling with Augustine’s direct or indirect influence whether it is exerted in terms of the framing of particular questions, the definition of categories, or the determinations of particular conclusions. Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century Danish Lutheran, was no exception. But how exactly did Kierkegaard engage, and find himself engaged by, Augustine’s legacy?

Boldly leaping into this discussion with both feet, Lee Barrett launches the Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker series by offering a wide-ranging and compelling account of what he calls the intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard. His investigation carefully and thoroughly examines various intersections that emerge within textual matters (e.g., Kierkegaard’s reading of Augustine’s texts), historical concerns (e.g., the manner in which Augustine’s texts and ideas were mediated through Kierkegaard’s teachers), stylistic or rhetorical choices (e.g., the connections between the modes of writing employed by both), and a wide range of theological perspectives and conclusions (e.g., considerable agreement concerning the telos of human existence). As a result, Barrett opens a trail through the manifold complexities of Augustine and Kierkegaard that forces us beyond any simple declamations; Barrett clears a path that leads us to the places where we can clearly see and feel the deep connections and occasional disagreements between these two giants in the Christian tradition.

Two further comments are helpful for orienting Barrett’s account. First, Barrett is first and foremost a Kierkegaard scholar and not an expert on Augustine, a conclusion that is amply supported by his manifold contributions to the International Kierkegaard Commentary, the Søren Kierkegaard Society, and the Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception, and Recourses project. Therefore, Barrett’s account begins and ends with a focus that is guided by Kierkegaard’s life and writings. This volume does appear in a series devoted to Kierkegaard’s thought after all. Recognizing this reality, however, is not to say that Barrett is unfair to Augustine—far from it. Rather, it is merely to suggest that a volume written by an Augustinian scholar may look very different from what you will find in the following pages . . . although that, too, is a needed volume.

Second, to suggest that Kierkegaard is Barrett’s first love would be to miss the larger picture. For Barrett, as this volume frequently illustrates, Kierkegaard and Augustine are worthy of attention because they assist us in the ongoing task of theology. Barrett is unashamedly a theologian, and for him theology is a work that necessarily serves the Christian life. For this reason, he begins and ends with the theme of an individual’s journey home to God, a theme that permeates the thought of both Augustine and Kierkegaard.

To draw these introductory comments to a close, please allow a personal anecdote from one of us. Nearly a decade ago at an academic conference, Paul heard Barrett offer a few remarks devoted to Kierkegaard’s relation to Augustine. What struck Paul, in ascending order of relevance, was (a) he had never heard a paper solely dedicated to relating these two figures before; (b) Barrett clearly grasped the depth of the material he was talking about; and (c) Barrett’s suggestions concerning the theological connections between Augustine and Kierkegaard seemed surprising and yet oddly sensible. Since that conference, Paul has been hoping that Barrett would find the time and energy to return to the intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard in a sustained way. That time has come. We are extremely grateful and excited that this volume is now appearing in the Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker series.

C. Stephen Evans

Paul Martens

Explanation of the References

The references to Augustine’s works are to the series The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997–). Rather than referring to page numbers, the notes refer to that series’ system of dividing the text into books, chapters, and sometimes paragraphs. For many of Augustine’s volumes, book divisions appeared in the early manuscripts, chapter divisions were added in the fifteenth-­century printed editions, and paragraphs were often numbered in the seventeenth century. The editors of the most recent English translation of Augustine’s complete works have chosen to use all three sets of divisions in those instances where all three have been in use. As a result, when there are both chapter numbers and paragraph numbers, the paragraph number will be in parentheses. For example, with regard to the Confessions, IV, 3 (9) means: book IV, chapter 3, paragraph 9. If the paragraph numbers are consecutive, not starting over with a new book, often a period will separate the chapter and paragraph numbers. This practice has usually been followed by other editions and translations of Augustine, which are legion. Thus the reader can, by using this citation system, find the reference in other editions and translations.

The references to Kierkegaard’s major books are to the series Kierkegaard’s Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978-1998), under the general editorship of Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. The references to Kierkegaard’s journals are to Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-78), also edited by Howard and Edna Hong. For this series, I have given the volume number and the entry number. For papers and notebook entries not found in the Hong series, I have cited Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007–). For this series, I have provided the volume number and page number because the system of enumerating the entries is too cumbersome. Because the citations of Kierkegaard’s texts are frequent and recurring, and because the sigla are simple, I have embedded them (in parentheses) within the text.

Sigla

AN See OMWA, PV, AN

BA The Book on Adler, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

CA The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Riedar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Andersen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

CD Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

CI The Concept of Irony, together with Notes on Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

CUP Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 2 vols., trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

EO 1; EO 2 Either/Or, 2 vols., trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

EUD Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

FSE, JFY For Self-­Examination and Judge for Yourself! trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

FT, R Fear and Trembling and Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

JC See Pf, JC

JFY See FSE, JFY

JP Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vols., ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967-78).

KJN Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000–).

OMWA, PV, AN On My Work as an Author, The Point of View for my Work as an Author, and Armed Neutrality, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

PC Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

PF, JC Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

PV See OMWA, PV, AN

SLW Stages on Life’s Way, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

SUD The Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

TA Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

TDIO Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

TM The Moment and Late Writings, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

UDVS Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

WA Without Authority, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

WL Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

WSA Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997–).

Introduction

Augustine and Kierkegaard: Rivals or Allies?

Intellectual historians of very different stripes have linked the names of Aurelius Augustinus and Søren Kierkegaard with surprising frequency, even though the careers of the two Christian thinkers were separated by almost a millennium and a half. It is indicative of this trend that the magisterial encyclopedia of Augustine studies, Augustine through the Ages, boasts a lengthy article comparing Kierkegaard and Augustine, while it contains no such essay comparing Augustine with Schleiermacher, Barth, Tillich, or even Rahner.¹ Sometimes the purpose of this widespread association of the two authors has been to contrast them as if they defined the opposite poles of the theological spectrum. According to some historians of Christian thought and Western philosophy, Augustine was the archetypal apologist of a totalitarian church, while Kierkegaard was the quintessential proponent of individualistic piety.² From this perspective Augustine was the promulgator of authoritarian and allegedly objective doctrines, while Kierkegaard was the advocate of passionate religious subjectivity.

But other interpreters have portrayed Augustine and Kierkegaard as close theological kindred, insisting that both of them practiced a similar and distinctive existential way of thinking about God and human life.³ Typically, these interpreters have hailed this unique way of doing theology as one of the most significant trajectories in Western religious and philosophical thought. In this view, Augustine and Kierkegaard shared the conviction that the desire to know and experience God was inextricably bound together with the individual’s quest for self-­transparency and self-­integration in a fractured and opaque world. With this connection established, Augustine’s and Kierkegaard’s self-­involving approach to religious reflection has then been juxtaposed to the more systematic academic styles that dominated theology in the late Middle Ages and the post-­Reformation periods.⁴ After surveying this abundance of rival assessments of Augustine and Kierkegaard, it could easily be concluded that two entirely different theologians have lived named Aurelius Augustinus, as well as two different Danish authors named Søren Kierkegaard.

The texts written by Augustine and Kierkegaard are sufficiently elusive and polyvalent to sustain both sets of interpretations. Viewed in one way, Augustine and Kierkegaard appear to be diametrical opposites; change the angle of vision slightly, and they appear to be remarkably similar. This ambiguity is to be expected, for both thinkers wrote in ways that resist facile appropriation and demand personal investment from their readers. Authors who hope to catalyze a profound transformation in their readers, as both Augustine and Kierkegaard attempted to do, usually produce books that are amenable to being appropriated in a variety of different ways. But despite the polysemous nature of their work, Augustine and Kierkegaard’s writings are not so indeterminate as to defy any comparison. Both authors provide enough directives and cues to the reader that some things can be asserted with a fair amount of confidence about the purposes of their texts. Because of the specificity of their rhetorical strategies and aims, many parallels and divergences can legitimately be explored. This volume will attempt to pay attention to the rhetorical strategies and pastoral purposes of the writings of these two Christian thinkers in order to give a more nuanced interpretation of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Augustine. I will argue that there is some truth in the approach that juxtaposes their works and also some truth in the approach that discovers a basic parallelism. I will conclude that, below the surface, it is the parallelism that is the stronger and more consistent dynamic, even though it is not the parallelism that has usually been discerned by scholars.

The comparison of the two the writers will serve several different purposes. The most obvious one is to better understand the ways Kierkegaard extended theological trajectories rooted in the thought of Augustine, even when the former was not aware that he was doing so. Because Augustine was so foundational for the theology and spirituality of the Western church, his writings served as a springboard for most subsequent theological developments, including the various ways of doing theology prevalent in early-nineteenth-­century northern Europe. Through the impact of the heritage of Augustine on post-­Trentine Catholics, Lutheran confessionalists, pietists of all kinds, heterodox mystics, and thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, Augustinian concepts and modes of thought were simply part of the air that Kierkegaard breathed. Even though Augustine’s influence on Kierkegaard was often not direct, Augustine was responsible for much of the framework in which Kierkegaard thought. Situating Kierkegaard in the context of Augustine’s legacy will shed light on the rhythms, dynamics, and tensions in Kierkegaard’s own work. This will enable us to see that Kierkegaard’s work in some ways represented a return to Augustinian themes that had been repressed or deemphasized by official Lutheranism. In certain respects, Kierkegaard was theologically closer to Augustine than he was to Luther. In order to accomplish this central goal of understanding Kierkegaard, we will look back at Augustine from the perspective of Kierkegaard, concentrating on the subjects in Augustine that are particularly relevant for grasping Kierkegaard’s theological world. We will examine Augustine’s writings insofar as they are the source of theological tendencies that blossomed in Kierkegaard’s writings, often bearing unexpected fruit.

Another goal is to gain a better understanding of certain aspects of Augustine’s thought. Looking for parallels and analogies between Kierkegaard and Augustine will highlight particular themes in Augustine’s work that otherwise might be overlooked or undervalued. The significance of motifs that were implicit or subterranean in Augustine’s writings may become clearer when their more explicit elaboration by Kierkegaard is taken into account. In particular, reading Augustine and Kierkegaard side by side will suggest that Augustine’s theology was more riddled with dialectical tensions than might otherwise be evident. Moreover, the similarities to Kierkegaard will show that the meanings of Augustine’s theological assertions were often dependent on highly specific rhetorical contexts and polemical and pastoral purposes. Reading Augustine through the lens of Kierkegaard is certainly not the only way to engage Augustine, but it is a possible way, and it may shed light on dynamics in Augustine’s texts that might not be adequately appreciated, such as the critical importance of divine kenosis.

Most importantly, this comparison of Augustine and Kierkegaard will help identify a way of being Christian that avoids some of the mutual negations of most forms of Catholicism and Protestantism. The parallelisms and intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard, I contend, allowed both of them to transcend many of the binary oppositions that have plagued Christian theology. We will find that both Augustine and Kierkegaard saw no absolute contradiction between affirming that human nature as created by God is oriented toward fulfillment in God and asserting that God’s self-­giving love comes to humanity as an unanticipated and gratuitous gift. Neither of them regarded human eros and divine agape as mutually exclusive. In fact, the two thinkers concurred that human beings have been created by God in such a way that they can develop an eros for self-­giving love and will only be ultimately happy if they do so.

Before we engage in a closer comparison of the two thinkers, it will helpful to consider the two rival genealogical accounts of their relationship in more detail in order to determine exactly what Augustine and Kierkegaard are alleged to have shared — and about what they are alleged to have disagreed. In so doing we will not examine every variety of interpretation of Augustine, or every type of interpretation of Kierkegaard, but only those that either directly compare the two or have an overt bearing on the comparison. We will begin with an examination of the interpretive tendency that dichotomizes the two, for in some ways this construal is the one that most readily suggests itself. Although it has recently fallen into some disfavor, it has enjoyed a venerable history and continues to attract adherents.

Augustine and Kierkegaard Conceived as Opposites

Some commentators locate the putative fundamental divergence between Augustine and Kierkegaard in their markedly different understandings of the respective roles of human and divine agency in the overcoming of the fractures and tensions in the soul (Augustine) or the self (Kierkegaard). Augustine, according to a very prevalent interpretation, ascribes an almost monergistic efficacy to God’s grace in the drama of human salvation. Even when the individual seems to be the voluntary and responsible author of her own faith, it is really God who has irresistibly moved the individual’s will. According to this interpretation of Augustine, the individual’s ostensible volitional powers are mere instruments that are being wielded by the sovereign divine will. Kierkegaard, however, often described the individual’s responsibility to be faithful in such an extravagant way that faith sounded like an act of radical human autonomy. Sometimes these expositors admit that Kierkegaard did suggest that some kind of divine aid is operative in the individual’s coming to faith, but then assert that the crucial factor in the process remains the individual’s will. Consequently, according to this construal, Kierkegaard’s view of human agency had some similarities to the position of Pelagius, Augustine’s great nemesis. According to Mark C. Taylor, [i]t is of central importance for Kierkegaard’s argument that man himself be responsible for his faith.⁵

Even more boldly, the older existentialists claimed to detect in Kierke­gaard’s work a foreshadowing of their own radically volitional view of significant human commitments, and thus a rejection of Augustine’s ascription of salvation to divine agency. Taking a more moderate view, Timothy Jackson has argued that Kierkegaard’s highlighting of the responsible appropriation of grace resembles the thought of Arminius, the Reformed theologian who proposed that the offer of God’s grace can be resisted by the human will.⁶ Such an opinion would have had some similarities to the tenets of the so-­called semi-­Pelagians, whom Augustine stalwartly opposed. But whether Kierkegaard is read as suggesting that the individual initiates the leap into faith or as implying that the individual freely cooperates with God’s activity, this interpretive trajectory implies that Kierkegaard undercut the emphasis of God’s sovereign grace that has been the hallmark of the Augustinian heritage.

Other interpreters have detected different disjunctions separating Kierkegaard from Augustine. For example, George Pattison has argued that Augustine’s epistemological speculations differ dramatically from those of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Johannes Climacus.⁷ Augustine formulated a Christian version of the Platonic theme that the truth is recollected, proposing that the light of truth inwardly illumines the mind and makes it receptive to the revelation of divine truth. Augustine’s view is very unlike Climacus’s ironic exposition of Christianity. Climacus identifies Christian faith with an unanticipated encounter with divinely revealed truth communicated by an authoritative teacher. According to Climacus’s presentation of Christianity, the receptivity to truth is not a component of human inwardness. (Pattison aptly points out that Climacus’s view should not be monolithically identified with that of Kierkegaard, who probably entertained a more nuanced understanding of coming to faith.) Augustine’s position would more closely approximate Climacus’s description of Socratic religiosity than it would Christian faith. This has generally been the opinion of interpreters who have emphasized the lingering importance of Neo-­Platonic epistemology even for the mature Augustine.⁸

Some commentators have portrayed Augustine’s work as the ultimate source of Western doctrinal theology — and as the impetus to the consolidation of a rigid orthodoxy.⁹ Augustine, it is claimed, strove to unify the church on the basis of corporately held and officially endorsed theological propositions. This, of course, conflicts with Kierkegaard’s disparaging remarks about the reduction of Christianity to a doctrine. According to this view, Kierkegaard’s insistence that Christianity is an existence communication did not mesh with Augustine’s concern for defining correct belief against various heresies. Kierkegaard’s subjective turn, it is alleged, stands in opposition to Augustine’s efforts to stipulate the objective meaning of concepts such as original sin, the Trinity, and the incarnation.

According to one strand of interpretation, Kierkegaard’s natural allies must have been the sectarian and heretical Donatists, who were willing to die for their belief that the Christian community (or at least its leadership) should be rigorously pure, rather than the Augustinians, who promoted a more comprehensive church that was sadly enervated by lax moral expectations.¹⁰ It is often noted that Augustine did come to endorse the imperial government’s closing of the churches of the Donatists, thereby implicitly sanctioning state intervention in ecclesiastical matters.¹¹ It has been recently argued that Augustine’s complicity in state coercion was greater than he himself intimates, for he was the leader of a minority party in the churches of northern Africa that triumphed over the majority Donatist party only by establishing an alliance with imperial force.¹² The Kierkegaard who strove to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom must have possessed a fundamentally different understanding of the Christian church from that entertained by the Bishop of Hippo, a high-­ranking ecclesiast who had helped invent Christendom. After all, Augustine believed that outside the institutional church there was no salvation, while Kierkegaard doubted whether the Danish church of his own day had any connection at all with New Testament Christianity. Peter Vardy has defined their opposition rather starkly: Augustine sees Christianity as essentially a communal affair, both in the Church on earth and with the saints in heaven. Kierkegaard emphasizes the individual journey of faith and the priority of the individual in relation to God.¹³ Put simply, from this perspective Augustine was a paradigmatic communitarian, while Kierkegaard was a strident anticommunitarian. Kierkegaard could envision the church, at most, only as a gathered community of committed and intentional believers, while Augustine saw the church as a mixed body of saints and sinners united by the sacraments.¹⁴ For Augustine, the individual was incorporated into the church through baptism, including the baptism of infants; for his part, Kierkegaard expressed grave reservations by the end of his life about the practice of baptizing babies. In short, Kierkegaard possessed the spirit of a sectarian, whereas Augustine trusted in the church as a sacramental institution.

Still other expositors portray Augustine and Kierkegaard very differently on the issue of the relationship of faith and human speculative capacities. It is often pointed out that Augustine’s motto was, I believe in order that I might understand. The understanding in question, it is alleged, was a speculative grasp of the logical relationships among Christian concepts and their metaphysical implications. The acceptance of revelation provided the basic data, and then the exercise of human reason on those data produced the deeper comprehension. In this view, Augustine used a Neo-­Platonic framework to generate a speculative metaphysical theology in a manner that anticipated the way Hegel would use German idealism to create a different kind of speculative system. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, disavowed all speculative metaphysical aspirations and restricted himself to clarifying and evoking the joys and tribulations of human experience in general and Christian experience in particular. From this perspective, Kierkegaard’s orientation was existential, while Augustine’s was speculative. Augustine’s legacy was the disastrous hankering for a Christian philosophy that would render the faith plausible, a prospect that made Kierkegaard shudder. Augustine felt a need to defend Christianity and make it intellectually respectable, while Kierkegaard sought to make Christianity shocking to his contemporaries. Perhaps Augustine had more in common with Hegel than he did with Kierkegaard.

Augustine and Kierkegaard Conceived as Fellow Travelers

In contrast to those interpreters who position Augustine and Kierkegaard as polar opposites, another set of intellectual historians narrate a saga of parallelism and indirect influence. At first blush this may seem odd, for Augustine is often remembered as the consummate theological insider, while Kierkegaard is characterized as the ultimate theological outsider. Nevertheless, existentially oriented thinkers such as Miguel de Unamuno, Nicholas Berdyaev, and Martin Buber have located Kierkegaard in a lineage that began with Augustine, continued through Luther and Pascal, and blossomed in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. For example, Karl Jaspers described Kierkegaard as Augustine’s descendant in that they both thought with their blood, reflecting on the nature and purpose of human life with self-­involving passion.¹⁵ Similarly, William Barrett claims that Kierkegaard walked through the door that Augustine had opened, that door being the existential strain in the Christian heritage.¹⁶ Barrett writes: "Where Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, What is man?, St Augustine (in The Confessions) asks, Who am I? — and the shift is decisive."¹⁷ Barrett adds that it is this shift that would lead to Kierkegaard. (Augustine himself, according to Barrett, did not entirely enter the existential room because he was held back by his residual Platonism.)

John Wild proposes that Kierkegaard’s most original conceptions come from classical and Christian, especially Augustinian sources, which inspired Kierkegaard to dismantle the essentialist view of the self.¹⁸ According to this account, the most significant thing about both writers is that they incorporated passionate inwardness and self-­reflection into the theological task as necessary conditions. Although Augustine did not use the modern term the self, he implicitly anticipated the concept by focusing on the individual’s introspective self-­awareness, self-­evaluation, and efforts at self-­integration and self-­direction (which do, in his estimation, inevitably fail apart from grace). The literary performances of both Augustine and Kierkegaard exemplify the conviction that authentic consciousness of the self requires awareness of God — and vice versa. Moreover, these interpreters point out that both Augustine and Kierkegaard used the spiritual journey of the individual pilgrim as the basic framework for thinking about Christianity. For both theological writers, life should be a via toward God, who is simultaneously the source, the support, the path itself, and the destination of the journey. It is noteworthy that, as further evidence for the parallel, both emphasize the fissure that separates the self from God, rendering the journey extraordinarily challenging. In these comparisons of Augustine and Kierkegaard, Augustine is usually identified as the primal font of this subjective turn in philosophical and theological writing (though sometimes Paul or Plotinus or even the Stoics are given that credit), and Kierkegaard is then hailed as Augustine’s most dramatic modern offspring.

The interpreters who concur that Augustine and Kierkegaard were twin exponents of inwardness, subjectivity, and the fractured nature of the self often disagree about what exactly this self-­involving kind of theology entails. Some laud this development, while others critique it. Their particular evaluative perspectives and ideological commitments color the ways each one tells the story. In recent decades Charles Taylor has been one of the most powerful exponents of the view that Augustine was the font of the subjective turn.¹⁹ Taylor established the basic trajectory for any future conversation concerning the relationship of Augustine and Kierkegaard by casting Augustine as the early protagonist of the saga of the evolution of the Western concept of the self, a concept that would receive one of its most influential modern expressions in Kierkegaard. Subsequent writers tracing the lineage of the subjective turn, or interiority, generally debate the merits or demerits of Taylor’s account of Augustine and his influence.²⁰ Because of the influential nature of Taylor’s work, I will consider it in some detail as a paradigmatic example of this interpretive tendency.

In Sources of the Self, Taylor enthusiastically says: It is hardly an exaggeration to say that it was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought. This step was a fateful one, because we have certainly made a big thing of the first-­person standpoint. By radical reflexivity Taylor means the consistent and intentional foregrounding of the self’s perspective on itself and its own actions and passions. Augustine, he alleges, turned away from outer objects in the public world to inner objects available only to the first-­person standpoint. According to Taylor, Augustine relocated knowledge of God in this domain of radical reflexivity and in the intimacy of self-­presence.²¹ Therefore, Augustine’s journey to authentic selfhood is simultaneously the journey to God: self-­discovery and sanctification are fused. Taylor underscores the enduring significance of Augustine’s novel approach. Augustine’s turn inward differs from the older Platonic introspection in which the divine ground could be recollected, discovered as always and already present in the depths of the soul. Such recollection has nothing to do with the unique challenges, decisions, and vicissitudes of an individual’s life. Platonic recollection does not involve the drama of the self’s struggle to relate to itself. In the Platonic scheme the divine ground itself is the true self; the true self is not the activity of relating to that ground. Augustine, however, departed from this picture by making the struggle of self-­relating constitutive of the self and of the self’s relationship with God.

Moreover, according to Taylor, Augustine further complicates the Platonic picture by insisting that the relationship of God and the self is rendered problematic by sin. God and the self are currently estranged from one another by the self’s own activity. Consequently, the reflexive turn does not by itself produce self-­certainty and self-­mastery or lead to the discovery of the self’s autonomous powers. Rather, the effort to relate the self to God initially uncovers the self’s incapacity and insufficiency. This floundering of the project of self-­knowledge on the reality of sin was part and parcel of Augustine’s more general shift of attention from knowing the good to personal assenting to the good. Augustine deprivileged the mind as the exclusive or primary organ for apprehending truth. He came to treat the will as a kind of independent variable determining what we can see and know. Unlike many of his philosophical forebears, for Augustine the will is not just determined by what the mind sees and understands. In conjunction with this highlighting of volition, Augustine locates the source of evil in the soul’s tendency to convert self-­reflexivity into self-­enclosure, in the drive of individuals to make themselves the center of their worlds. Taylor points out that, for Augustine, spiritual healing only comes when the self-­aggrandizing soul acknowledges its dependence on God in the very intimacy of its presence to itself. To express it differently, the soul must be enabled to love God; the soul must be swiveled around so that God is the focus of its attention and desire. In other words, Augustine introduced into Western thought the revolutionary theme that love precedes knowledge.²² Thus, according to Taylor, Augustine was not only responsible for the subjective turn but also for the decisive thematization of the conviction that volition is not determined by cognition, and for the foregrounding of a fatal flaw in volition.

Later in Sources of the Self, Taylor argues that all of these themes are echoed, with some modification, of course, by Kierkegaard.²³ According to Taylor, Kierkegaard filters these Augustinian motifs through the modern concept of the creative imagination. Rather than using Augustine’s language of divine illumination to explain the transformation in the individual’s self-­understanding, Kierkegaard uses the post-­Romantic view of the capacity of the self to adopt an imaginative stance toward life in general and oneself in particular — and thereby to constitute them. According to Taylor, the transformation of the self in Kierkegaard’s pages involves a shift in the way the self imagines its own self, which in turn involves a new construal of the self’s relationship to God. The individual chooses to see its life in a novel way, perhaps without actually changing anything about its empirical circumstances. In Taylor’s genealogy, the major link with Augustine is Kierkegaard’s insistence that this transformation comes from within (even if the motivation is inspired by God) and occurs in the individual’s interiority. The new and redeemed life is rooted in a new way of relating to one’s own self.

Many other interpreters basically agree with Taylor’s tendency to identify Augustine’s work as the birth of the modern introspective self that ultimately came to fruition in the writings of Kierkegaard. For many of them, the introspective turn is more or less detachable from its Christian underpinnings and is symptomatic of vast cultural changes that transcend the concerns of Christian communities. In this approach the admittedly different philosophical anthropologies of the two thinkers can be extracted from their Christian presuppositions and treated as independent variables. Martin Heidegger famously differentiated Augustine’s helpful analysis of the disclosure of historical being in the forms of angst, care, and self-­problematization from Augustine’s utterly unhelpful ahistorical ontotheology. It is not accidental that Heidegger did this during the very period in his life when he was absorbing Kierkegaard’s work, and his positive description of Augustine is saturated with Kierkegaardian terminology.²⁴ In a similar way, Wilhelm Anz credited Kierkegaard with being a primary witness to the ontologically sovereign I.²⁵ Krister Stendahl famously agreed that Augustine was the first modern man, and he ascribed to the Confessions the honor of being the first great document in the history of the introspective conscience.²⁶ Continuing this interpretive trajectory, Mark C. Taylor has proposed that the epoch of self was initiated by that staple of the Western canon, Augustine’s Confessions.²⁷ Although Augustine’s legacy was undermined by Hegel’s theory of the culturally constructed self, it was rehabilitated by Kierkegaard. Yet, in spite of their differences, both Hegel and Kierkegaard were indebted to Augustine’s seminal account of human life as a journey to selfhood.²⁸ According to Taylor, Augustine’s momentous interiorization of the biblical drama of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation could be cut loose from its scriptural roots. Similarly, Jean-­François Lyotard has proposed that Augustine’s I was the progenitor of the Cartesian cogito, and even the ancestor of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental ego.²⁹

Other interpreters who trace a positive Augustine-­Kierkegaard connection are not in complete agreement with Charles Taylor’s rendition. Some commentators locate the parallelism not in the analysis of human subjectivity but in the desire of both Augustine and Kierkegaard to illuminate the true meaning of traditional Christian doctrines and virtues. The alleged subjective turn is simply part of the effort to elucidate the necessary passional conditions for felicitous Christian communication. These expositors construe the two thinkers as orthodox Christians who were simply clarifying the existential dimensions of standard Christian teachings. For example, in the middle of the twentieth century, Denzil Patrick announced that Kierkegaard regarded Augustinianism as representing the true Christian position.³⁰ More recently, David Gouwens has argued that Kierke­gaard’s Augustinian narrative understanding of the self is not rooted in an autonomous psychological interpretation of human inwardness or self-­constitution. Rather, Kierkegaard’s treatment of selfhood and passion presupposes the pattern of creation/fall/redemption implicit in Christian doctrine in order to clarify the telos, failures, and challenges of Christian living.³¹ Arnold B. Come agrees with this view and has proposed that Kier­kegaard’s purpose, like Augustine’s, is to present the contents of Christian beliefs in a way that edifies the reader. In order to do this, the author must not only have a conceptual grasp of the doctrines, but also must be personally involved with the subject matter.³²

Other Christian theologians have narrated a similar saga — but with a more critical intent. They agree with Charles Taylor that Augustine and Kierkegaard did locate all knowledge of God in the self’s interiority, but they decry this theological move. For them, the methodological use of subjectivity is a capitulation to the anthropocentrism and even egocentrism of modern culture. The alleged inward turn is a betrayal of the proper focus of Christianity on the objective saving acts of God; it distorts the faith by interpreting it in the light of the evolution of human subjectivity. For example, Karl Barth lamented that the Augustinian inward turn was transmitted by the pietists to Kierkegaard, who in turn inspired the self-­obsession of the existentialists.³³ This subjectivizing strategy had deleterious consequences for Christian thought, because the foregrounding of subjectivity made the ordo salutis (the order, or the stages of the process of salvation) the organizing principle of theology. An antecedent analysis of human frustrations and aspirations became the lens through which the significance of all doctrinal affirmations was viewed. As a result, the gospel’s concentration on the unanticipated reconciliation accomplished in Christ was displaced by the drama of human spiritual aspiration. Tragically, the Christian message was forced unto a procrustean bed of theories about human nature, and preconceived notions of human flourishing woefully distorted the actual good news of Christianity. The momentum of the current flowing from Augustine to Kierkegaard helped theology metamorphose into anthropology.

More radical interpretations detect not the birth of the self but rather its demise in the inward turn of Augustine and Kierkegaard. Jean-­François Lyotard observes that Augustine and Kierkegaard not only write about the self but also construct it through the process of writing.³⁴ In their respective works the self is a performance, not a preexisting substantive entity. As such it is a fabrication, an imaginative fiction. Moreover, Lyotard proposes that Augustine does not recount an unproblematic story of the journey to true selfhood, but almost inadvertently narrates the repeated loss of self, even at the seemingly advanced stages of spiritual maturation. Following the interpretive trail blazed by Pierre Courcelle, J. J. O’Meara has argued, somewhat more cautiously than does Lyotard, that Augustine generously uses fictional elements in his autobiography in order to give his life a narrative unity that would edify his audience.³⁵ Joakim Garff has, in a similar way, contended that Kierkegaard’s self-­presentation in his writings is intentionally fabricated, but nonetheless remains riddled with fissures and unresolved tensions.³⁶ The self performed by Augustine and Kierkegaard is not integrated or coherent; rather, it remains disjointed, fragmented, and motley — in spite of their authorial intentions.

The Elusiveness of the Augustine-­Kierkegaard Connection

This overview of interpretive options shows a high degree of variation in the way Kierkegaard’s relationship to Augustine has been accessed. On the one hand, sometimes the discontinuities between the two thinkers have been highlighted, with much attention being given to the ostensible divergences concerning the role of free human agency and concerning the function of objective doctrinal assertions. On the other hand, sometimes the apparent continuity in the foregrounding of self-­relatedness has been emphasized in order to recount a more general story of the turn to the subject in epistemology, ethics, and cultural life. Sometimes a genealogy linking Augustine and Kierkegaard is traced in order to validate a purported parallelism in the use of Christian pathos in the doing of theology. But what is striking and significant about these accounts is the way Kierkegaard figures prominently as either hero or villain in a narrative of cultural history that has its roots in Augustine. Kierkegaard’s work is portrayed either as the premier fruit of the Augustinian spirit or as its subversion. Even when the differences between the two are emphasized, those differences are usually presented as Kierkegaard’s modification of or reaction against the Augustinian/Lutheran heritage that nurtured him. The one common thread in all of these various accounts is that some kind of important connection is presupposed. In general, this connection has something to do with the respective roles of inwardness, subjectivity, and doctrines in the two thinkers, and the related issue of the interplay between the self’s relationship with God and the self’s relationship to itself. For many, the connection, whether it is positive or negative, also has something to do with the critical roles assigned to divine and human agency in the two writers’ works.

Oddly, the exact nature of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Augustine on these foundational matters has not been extensively studied.³⁷ Usually a few parallels are duly noted, and then either celebrated or decried, depending on the interpreter’s ideological sensibilities. But a more nuanced comparison — attending to specific influences, convergences, and divergences — seldom occurs. Often the vaunted similarities and differences are described in very abstract and impressionistic terms, or they are discussed with respect to just one portion of the thinkers’ evolving and multifarious writings. Convergences and divergences on specific issues in specific contexts are often not considered; the differences in historical context are often not probed in depth. Another curiosity is the widespread failure to take into account Kierkegaard’s explicit statements about Augustine — and the nature of his exposure to Augustine’s thought. Even stranger, the internal tensions in the two writers’ respective writings are not compared. Given the importance often ascribed to the Augustine-­Kierkegaard connection, a closer investigation of the relationship between the two is sorely needed. This is the task that this volume will undertake.

The purpose of this project is not to collate verbal similarities and dissimilarities between Augustine’s and Kierkegaard’s doctrinal-­sounding assertions, as if their words could be detached from their rhetorical contexts and treated like passion-­neutral cognitive propositions. The theological articulations of Augustine and Kierkegaard cannot be compared in the way that the doctrinal formulae of a Reformed Scholastic theologian like Francis Turretin or a Lutheran Scholastic theologian like Johann Gerhard can be set side by side. Neither Augustine nor Kierkegaard was a systematic theologian in either the Scholastic or the modern sense. Both were rhetorical thinkers to the core, convinced that literary qualities and conceptual content could not be divorced. Both hoped to achieve certain affective and behavioral purposes through their writing; both sought to edify, console, unsettle, and provoke their readers. Their works were performances, often acts of adoration or confession. Moreover, both writers were highly contextual, responding to specific cultural crises and addressing particular audiences. Sensitive to the particularities of context, audience, and purpose, both Augustine and Kierkegaard produced works in several different genres, ranging from pieces that look like philosophical essays to sermons and prayers. Their selection of literary strategies was very self-­conscious, for both writers wanted to move readers to think and feel more deeply rather than merely provide readers with new information, clearer concepts, or more compelling arguments. For both thinkers, the theological import of their words cannot be abstracted from their efforts to nurture the adoration of God and to elicit gratitude for divine grace. Of course, paying attention to the performative force of their texts does not deny that Augustine and Kierkegaard were both advancing substantive theological claims. This reading strategy only presupposes that in the cases of these two intensely literary theologians, both of whom were intent on catalyzing a spiritual transformation of their readers, the theological substance cannot be divorced from the rhetorical purpose.

Conceptual instruction was not an end in itself for either one: both wanted readers to struggle with their texts in order to grow spiritually. Consequently, both Augustine and Kierkegaard often wrote in an odd, elliptical way so that the readers had to examine their own hearts in order to make sense of the text. Augustine remarks in the Confessions concerning his own book: What does it matter to me, if someone does not understand this? Let such a person rejoice even to ask the question, ‘What does this mean?’ Yes, let him rejoice in that, and choose to find by not finding rather than by finding fail to find you.³⁸ Augustine even exclaims: Of this I am certain and I am not afraid to declare it from my heart, that if I had to write something to which the highest authority would be attributed, I would rather write in such a way that my words would reinforce for each reader whatever truth he was able to grasp about these matters, than express a single idea so unambiguously as to exclude others. . . .³⁹ Margaret Miles has suggested that Augustine’s actual literary practice matched his espoused theory, claiming that he purposefully wrote in a way that invited multiple interpretations.⁴⁰ Augustine’s deliberate polysemy and contextual sensitivity make any effort to translate his elliptic prose into univocal doctrinal propositions and systematically arranged formulae a distortion of his writing.

Like Kierkegaard, Augustine was acutely sensitive to the limitations of direct communication between the writer and the reader in all matters of spiritual importance, and he was duly suspicious of the impact of the writer’s authority. He warns, Do not think that anyone learns anything from another person.⁴¹ External words are nothing but useless sounds unless they prompt the hearer to turn inward and listen for the Interior Master.⁴² For Augustine, indirection and ambiguity are often required for the kind of transformative communication that he treasured. His early Cassiciacum dialogues adopt the dialogic form of Cicero but, as Catherine Conybeare has argued, disrupt that genre with digressions, displacements, and irresolutions.⁴³ Multivocality pervades these dialogues, peppered as they are with interstices and jolting shifts in perspective. Multiple voices and unresolved disjunctions even appear in The Soliloquies (Soliloquia), his conversations with his own reason. In a different way, ambiguity also pervades Augustine’s sermons, for he often disguises their rhetorical structure, forcing the auditor to probe beneath the surface.⁴⁴ When it is necessary for his rhetorical purposes, Augustine, the bishop who was vested with ecclesiastical authority, could even announce that he was writing without authority, a phrase that would later be dear to Kierkegaard. In spite of his frequent condemnations of the aestheticism of the classical rhetorical heritage, Augustine does not hesitate to use his exquisite training in that classical heritage to prod and coax the reader to self-­reflection and a heartfelt encounter with the divine.

Augustine’s authorial strategies are reflections of his own very deliberate practices of reading Scripture.⁴⁵ Though he sometimes insists on fidelity to the more literal and plain sense of a scriptural passage, Augustine frequently celebrates the multivalent possibilities resident within those biblical texts. When commenting on Genesis, which Augustine assumes had been written by Moses, he proposes that Moses may have meant several things in a given passage, and that he may not even have realized all the things that his words could mean.⁴⁶ Evidently, for Augustine, meaning was not always tied to the intention of the author. (One must admit that Augustine was very inconsistent in this.) At times he could even claim that the ambiguity of certain Scripture passages is a spiritual boon because it stimulates different opinions and a dialogic search for truth.⁴⁷ Sometimes Augustine recommends a literal reading of a passage, and sometimes an allegorical reading, depending on which reading would help the Christian community grow in love. He was aware that different reading strategies could legitimately be applied to Scripture, and he realized that the meaning of his own texts would also be negotiated by the reader.

Kierkegaard’s use of sophisticated destabilizing literary strategies is even more dramatic and obvious than Augustine’s. Kierkegaard, of course, is notorious for his use of irony, indirect communication, books-­within-­books, and pseudonymous voices. His works are saturated with elusive metaphors, interrupted narratives, and strange juxtapositions that frustrate any univocal interpretation. His disorienting style and heteroglossia is designed to resist closure and render facile appropriation impossible. Kierkegaard accomplishes the goal of producing a demanding body of work that would force readers to struggle to make sense of it, and by so struggling, be provoked to make sense of their own lives. Kierkegaard succeeded so well in this that some interpreters have denied that his texts have a specific meaning or message at all, thus concluding that his works are simply provocations.⁴⁸ While this is surely an exaggeration (because Kierkegaard was trying to encourage certain particular transformations of pathos in his readers, as we shall see), it is nevertheless obvious that edification and literary indirection were correlative for him.⁴⁹ Much more than Augustine, he was suspicious that the coercive authority of any writer could subvert the self-­reflection that genuine faith requires. Like Augustine, he often deliberately writes in a way that might be amenable to multiple interpretations in order to foster the involvement of the reader in the construction of meaning. Like Augustine, he was convinced that learning to assume responsibility for one’s interpretations should be a pedagogy in the more sweeping assumption of responsibility for one’s own self (even though that assumption of responsibility is only a preparation for the turn to grace).

Kierkegaard’s elusive way of writing had an even deeper motivation. He was convinced that any bit of writing about matters of existential importance acquires meaning only when it is used to nurture the pathos and subjectivity — or inwardness — of the reader. Therefore, the shape of the communicative activity must reflect the concerns, feelings, passions, hopes, and fears that are part of its theological message. The pathos must be evident in the form, not just the content, of the communication, because passions cannot be transferred through simple didactic instruction, as if they were neutral data. The attempt to communicate an existential truth must be sensitive to the fact that the desired understanding and the passional process through which it is acquired are essentially linked. Kierkegaard says: "If this [an existential possibility] is communicated in a direct form, then the point is missed; then the reader is led into a misunderstanding — he gets something more to know, that to exist (at existere) also has its meaning, but he receives it as knowledge so that he keeps right on sitting in the status quo" (JP 1, 633). Authoritative, information-­conveying disquisitions inevitably fail to trigger the appropriate pathos. All communication of a capacity to feel and act in new ways must use indirect strategies that destabilize certainties, provoke disquietudes, and stimulate yearnings. Accordingly, as a religious writer, Kierkegaard persuades, cajoles, exhorts, promises, and commands. Concerning the difficulties of being a religious writer, Kierkegaard observes: The first and foremost task is to create pathos, with the superiority of intelligence, imagination, penetration, to guarantee pathos for the existential, which the ‘understanding’ has reduced to the ludicrous (JP 6, 6521). To engage his texts rightly, we must pay attention to his subtle communicative strategies, including his choice of genre, voice, identity of the addressee, and rhetorical force.

In their different ways, both Augustine and Kierkegaard were agreed that the form of a communication had to be appropriate to its content. Of course, there are profound differences between them that cannot be ignored. Augustine, the master classicist, often engages in more overt and sometimes heavy-­handed persuasion. When engaged in polemics against alleged heretics, he could even be coercively dogmatic. Kierkegaard, the child of Romantic culture, delights even more than Augustine did in thick irony. Disappointed in the established church, Kierkegaard could not and would not invoke institutional authority. But, in spite of these differences, both write in such a way that their rhetorical strategies are inseparable from the possible meanings of their texts. Consequently, any theological comparison of the two must take into account the passional purposes of any given passage in their works. Similar-­sounding doctrinal assertions may not be enough to establish real agreement in the faith, and seemingly divergent propositions may not necessarily be signals of different visions of the Christian life. Therefore, our project is more elusive than any straightforward doctrinal comparison. We can only compare their respective construals of Christian faith and life by paying attention to the metaphors, images, authorial voices, and a host of other literary devices that animate their texts. In any given context, we must take into account the specific pastoral goals that are being pursued by these strategies. Only by heeding the pastoral purposes and rhetorical properties of their writings can we attempt to identify convergences and divergences on specific theological motifs.

In so doing, we may discover that the convergences are more profound and unexpected than a less literary reading would suggest. Some hidden and occluded similarities of a very fundamental nature may become visible. We may also discover that both Augustine and Kierkegaard sought to hold in dialectical tension foundational themes from the Christian heritage that most other theologians have separated and regarded as incompatible, or have inadequately tried to integrate by allowing one to subsume the other. Both writers, we may find, were trying to make room in their depictions of Christianity for both human responsibility and for utter reliance on grace, for both works of love and for faith, for the emulation of Christ and trust in Christ’s divine compassion, and for life as a journey to God and for life as God’s embrace of humanity. Perhaps Augustine and Kierkegaard were both attempting as best they could to do justice to the complex, multidimensional, and seemingly paradoxical nature of the Christian life. We may even discover that a similar vision of the self-­emptying God was at the center of their respective theologies.

The Structure of This Book

In order to identify the points of intersection