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6. The Anatomy of Spiritual Trial
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120 kierkegaard and the self before god The Anatomy of Spiritual Trial the self before god: spiritual trial But this is rigorous upbringing—this going from inborn anxiety to faith. Anxiety [Angst] is the most terrible kind of spiritual trial [Anfægtelse]. —Kierkegaard’s Journals While also evoking the vertiginous anxiety that is characteristic of sublime experience, spiritual trial in Luther (Gn. Anfechtung) and Kierkegaard (Dn. Anfægtelse) is most clearly defined in relation to the self’s harrowing sense of paralysis or captivity before God. As Martin J. Heinecken describes it in The Moment Before God, spiritual trial is like the experience one has in a dream when one wants to run and yet with the utmost exertion is unable to move a muscle—this absolute frustration. The difference is that one is perfectly able to move about and one can do many things, and yet there is nothing one can do before God.1 By evoking the experience of spiritual trial by way of such tormenting imagery as a captive bird, a stranded fish, or an individual who is shipwrecked or adrift over 70,000 fathoms of water, Kierkegaard replicates the anxious tenor of Luther, who previously “compares the horrified conscience, which tries to flee and cannot escape, with a goose which pursued by the wolf, does not use its wings, as ordinarily, but its feet and is caught.”2 Spiritual trial in Luther’s anatomy of the self coram Deo came to denote “a form of temptation (tentatio), which takes place through an assault upon man (impugnatio),whichisintendedtoputhimtothetest.”3 Moreradicalthanmere carnal temptation (Versuchung), Luther’s use of spiritual trial (Anfechtung) six the anatomy of spiritual trial 121 denotes “tempting attacks”:4 “the trial of faith by various temptations.”5 These attacks, Tillich observes in The Protestant Era, engender a profound Angst, “a feeling of being enclosed in a narrow place from which there is no escape.”6 In Angst (deriving from the Lat. angustiae: “narrows”), the world constricts to such an extreme that in Luther’s words: “There is no flight, no comfort within or without but all things accuse.”7 Reading Kierkegaard’s works, it is likewise difficult to escape the sense in which the God-relationship appears as an inescapable “death struggle” (JP 4:4725 / Pap. XI2 A 67), described with such perplexing but evocative horror as “to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful” (SLW, 477). The vertiginous anxiety of the formless abyss of freedom is supplanted through the God-relationship by the narrowing angst of an inescapable conflict between humanity and divinity in which the salvation of the self may appear to be impossible. As Johannes Climacus articulates in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “captive in the absolute conception of God,” the individual is helpless as a bird imprisoned in a cage, or like a fish thrown on shore; “lying on the ground outside its element, so, too, the religious individual is captive, because absoluteness is not directly the element of a finite existence” (CUP, 483). Reading these harrowing descriptions of Johannes Climacus’s ironic, pre-Christian view of a radicalized Christianity, Daphne Hampson suggests that “it is clear that Kierkegaard was speaking of circumstances he well knew.”8 These illustrations of spiritual trial (Dn. Anfægtelse) in Kierkegaard evoke an experience Luther himself described as Anfechtung (Dn. fægte / Gn. fecht = “fight”). As Daphne Hampson explains: “Anfechtung (literally being fought against) is the word used within the Lutheran tradition for the sense that one is undermined/caught/pinned down when confronted by God.”9 In essence, the inescapable tension of spiritual trial is far more oppressive than the spiritual inertia described under the monastic rubric of acedia: while acedia expresses the aridity of the absence of God, spiritual trial is, recalling another of Kierkegaard’s descriptions, a devastating and intensified sunstroke from the unconditioned. Or as Johannes Climacus describes it: The religious person has lost the relativity of immediacy, its diversion, its whiling away of time—precisely its whiling away of time. The absolute conception of God consumes him like the fire of the summer sun when it refuses to set, like the fire of the summer sun when it refuses to cease. (CUP, 485) Kierkegaard himself conjures up the abyss to describe the perennial anxiety of the individual stranded tentatively between the inconclusive origins and ends of one’s salvation: “Just as the shipwrecked person who saved himself by means of a plank and now, tossed by the...