In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard by Christopher B. Barnett
  • David J. Gouwens (bio)
From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard. By Christopher B. Barnett. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. 215pp. $39.00.

As Christopher B. Barnett notes in this fine study, Harold Bloom’s definition of genius as “capacious consciousness” certainly describes Søren Kierkegaard, famed not only as a philosopher but also as a poet, theological writer, and social critic. Nonetheless, important features of Kierkegaard’s life and work still suffer neglect, and one of those is Kierkegaard’s spirituality. Barnett’s aim is ambitious: not only to appreciate Kierkegaard as a “spiritual writer” but “to treat Kierkegaard’s oeuvre as a place where one’s relationship with God can be illuminated and deepened” (xvii).

In what sense is Kierkegaard a “spiritual writer”? Building on his earlier book, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), Barnett in chapter one explores the Pietist and Moravian background of Kierkegaard’s upbringing and his fondness for Pietist writings, not only by Pietism’s father, the Lutheran Johann Arndt, but also, through Arndt, Kierkegaard’s “cautious” appropriation of medieval Catholic mystical writers such as Johannes Tauler and Thomas à Kempis. This Pietist background gave Kierkegaard a central concept that defined the purpose of his entire authorship: “upbuilding” (Danish opbyggelse), aimed at aiding his reader’s spiritual development and love for God.

Yet within the totality of Kierkegaard’s writings, one finds two narrower strands of Kierkegaard’s more directly spiritual literature, first, the “humanistic” spirituality of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses (1843–44) that Kierkegaard published under his own name to accompany his many pseudonymous writings, and second, his more explicitly Christian articulation of the nature of God, sin, and the imitation of Christ, following the 1846 publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Barnett argues, correctly in my view, for complementarity rather than rupture between the “humanistic” and “Christian” strands in Kierkegaard’s spiritual literature. Here Barnett notes similarities with two other classical spiritual writers, Bernard of Clairvaux and Meister Eckhart. With them, Kierkegaard envisions a twofold approach to spirituality: “an intrinsic human desire for that which brings fulfillment, as well as . . . the Christian claim that the triune God can best satisfy this desire” (19).

In chapter two, Barnett develops in more detail this basic claim of a progression from human longing to divine fulfillment by exploring Kierkegaard’s understanding of God, self, and the spiritual journey. Barnett identifies Kierkegaard with the classical exitus-reditus (exit-return) theme in Christian thinking (but without its Neoplatonic tendencies), and agrees with Lee C. Barrett’s recent argument that [End Page 131] Kierkegaard shares Augustine’s conviction that “journey” is a central metaphor for the Christian life, a journey marked paradoxically by both a passionate human striving yet also a sense of one’s absolute reliance upon God, as the “restless heart” desires rest (Danish Hvile or Ro) in God.

This image of spiritual journey means that Kierkegaard’s anthropology is at heart a theological anthropology. Barnett correctly disputes stereotypes of Kierkegaard as an advocate of autonomous “individualism,” appreciating rather Kierkegaard’s profoundly relational understanding of persons as “always already ensconced in relations with God and with the entire sphere of creation” (32). So too, as journey, this God-human relationship shows remarkable dynamism, which Kierkegaard describes through various “spiritual itineraries” from despair to faith: Kierkegaard’s famous “stages” of existence (aesthetic, ethical, religious), or the levels of religious deepening described in Postscript (relating to an absolute telos, suffering, and guilt as preparations for faith), or the “ladder of despair” of The Sickness Unto Death from which one may seek refuge in faith or trust as a spiritual quality, a resting in God in a peace that answers one’s despair. Again Barnett is quick to note resonances between Kierkegaard’s “spiritual itineraries” and other figures in the Christian spiritual tradition, such as John Climacus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent (the source of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus), the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, and the Deutsche Mystik of Eckhart and Tauler.

From this description in chapter two of the rich content of Kierkegaard’s conception of the self...

pdf

Share