“Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but
something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its
presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the
paradox of life and existence.”—Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling,
translated by Walter Lowrie (1843)
Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was born
on this date two centuries ago in Copenhagen, Denmark. He did not live the happiest of lives. You
wouldn’t, either, if your father, as a feudal laborer on church lands, cursed
God in his youth, could never shake his subsequent guilt, and transmitted that
depression like a virus to the family; if, for reasons unknown to others and
even perhaps to yourself, you broke off an engagement to a vibrant young woman; if you
became a laughingstock on the streets of your city for your physical oddities; and
if you rebelled against the Danish church of your time.
It took the 20th century, with all its
terrors and shocks to the human psyche, to rediscover the prolific works he
produced in only about a dozen years of feverish activity. Kierkegaard is now
regarded as the forefather of existentialism. “Kierkegaard’s great contribution
to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency,
that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe,”
wrote John Updike in a New Yorker article eight years ago.
In Fear and
Trembling, Kierkegaard reinterprets the story of Abraham and Isaac for a
rational modern age, introducing the notion of a “knight of faith” who can make
a “leap of faith.” With his influence on the likes of Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul
Sartre, Karl Barth and countless other theologians, philosophers, and even
novelists such as Updike, his thinking, born of torment, has been vindicated by posterity.
