Kierkegaard:
Exposition and critique
Daphne Hampson
OUP £25
(978-0-19-967323-0)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50 (Use
code CT449 )
Kierkegaard and
the Quest for Unambiguous Life
George Pattison
OUP £60
(978-0-19-969867-7)
Church Times Bookshop £54 (Use code
CT449 )
IN THIS bicentennial year of
his birth, here are two very different books on Søren
Kierkegaard.
One of the characteristics
of Kierkegaard studies is that commentators readily recruit him to
support their own agendas and find it relatively easy to do so.
Atheists, Catholics, pietists, and politicians of various
persuasions have enrolled him into their ranks. But it is odd that
the claims of Lutheranism as a key to interpreting his authorship
have not been tested to the same extent.
Daphne Hampson, of the
University of Oxford, has made a particular study of Lutheranism,
and is well placed to explore this theme. After all, Kierkegaard
was a cradle Lutheran much influenced by leading Danish bishops,
and he would almost certainly have remained at least a
semi-detached Lutheran had he lived longer than his 42 years.
Hampson begins by exploring
Kierkegaard's cultural and intellectual context, and concludes with
a pen-portrait of Kierkegaard the man, and an evaluation of his
authorship.
In between, she devotes a
chapter to each of seven books from Kierkegaard's voluminous
output. These are broadly representative of his authorship, and her
exposition and critique is generally judicious and fair. This
approach makes a change from more familiar autobiographical and
topic-centred introductions, and can be read with profit by
established Kierkegaard scholars and newcomers alike.
Hampson summarises
Kierkegaard's mission as "to make evident - in the midst of
modernity - what it is that Christianity claimed: no more and no
less." For example, Kierkegaard's key work Philosophical
Fragments wrestles with the relationship between the
Christological paradox at the heart of Christianity - God the
eternal enters time as a particular person - and the Enlightenment
emphasis on scientific reason as determinative of truth in the
modern world. Kierkegaard the Lutheran fights for faith against the
hegemony of reason, but Hampson makes it clear that she remains to
be convinced. As she says: "One may appreciate much about
Kierkegaard's stance without necessarily adhering to his
theology."
While we cannot uninvent the
Enlightenment, nor compromise the claims of reason in relation to
Christian coherence, we should not allow reason to eclipse faith as
itself a source of enlightenment. Of course, there is room to
differ about the relative epistemological significance of reason
and faith, but surely Kierkegaard was right to rehabilitate faith
in the face of rationalism's claim to capture Truth without
remainder.
Given the brilliance of
Kierkegaard's wit, and the profundity of his thought, it is
remarkable how so many commentators have produced books about him
that are dull and pedestrian. But with her very engaging style, and
commitment to honest and open dialogue with subject and reader
alike, Hampson is never dull.
Here, Kierkegaard's
Lutheranism is reflected through the prism of the Enlightenment.
Kierkegaard uses the Enlightenment to finesse his essentially
Lutheran perspective, and Hampson uses the Enlightenment to inform
her critique of Kierkegaard's essentially pre-Enlightenment
assumptions. She applauds Kierkegaard's readiness to accommodate
aspects of modernity when it comes to explaining Christianity to
his contemporaries, but she still finds him altogether too
pre-modern in his treatment of, for example, reason, gender, class,
and Christology. Whether this amounts to damning with faint praise
or praising with faint damns, readers, as Kierkegaard would say,
must judge for themselves.
Meanwhile, George Pattison
introduces his latest collection of Kierkegaard studies with a
comment that is alert to Hampson's ambivalence about the
relationship between modernity and pre-modern Christianity: "there
is insight in his writings . . . as to how it may be possible to be
faithful both to the religious inheritance and to the realities of
modern experience, including the realities of its intellectual
demands."
Pattison is Lady Margaret
Professor of Divinity at Oxford, and a leading light in
contemporary Kierkegaard studies. He has the happy knack of
reaching parts of the authorship other commen- tators seldom reach,
and is adept at seeking and seeing connections between Kierkegaard
and other stars in the intellectual firmament. In earlier books, he
has concen-trated on Kierkegaard the philosopher and theologian,
and here he applies himself to Kierke- gaard's cultural context and
influence.
In this sequence of elegant
and erudite essays, Pattison explores what Kierkegaard believed to
be the inevitably ambiguous lives lived other than coram
deo - before God. A right relationship with God, predicated on
an existential leap of faith, alone satisfies a quest for
unambiguous life. But, as so often with Kierkegaard, such a quest
is far from clear and straightforward.
The cultural complexities
with which Kierkegaard wrestled, and that Pattison here describes
and interprets, include the relationship between Romanticism and
Modernism, the city and the countryside, carnival and boredom,
liberalism and authoritarianism.
The chapter on Kierkegaard
and politics is especially stimulating, given the extent to which
ideologies of Left, Right, and Centre have sought to enlist him as
a fellow-traveller. Pattison prefers Kierkegaard's own account of
himself as a latter-day Socrates whose function as a citizen is to
be a socio-political irritant or gadfly.
The book mostly comprises
revised versions of pieces originally published in a range of
academic journals and symposia with seasoned Kierkegaard scholars
in mind - and seems to have been priced accordingly.
Dr Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.