The Lily’s Tongue: Figure and Authority in Kierkegaard’s Lily Discourses by Frances Maughan-Brown (review)

An incisive and creative exploration of several of Kierkegaard’s discourses on the Gospel of Matthew, Frances Maughan-Brown’s The Lily’s Tongue: Figure and Authority in Kierkegaard’s Lily Discourses is an innovative contribution to Kierkegaard scholarship. Combining both close readings of Kierkegaard’s texts, with an expansive list of philosophical interlocutors, which spans from Plato to Walter Benjamin and Derrida, this work strikes an illuminating balance between fidelity to the original text and using the thought of both later and earlier thinkers to mine Kierkegaard’s texts for their insights, without either being anachronistic or reductive. In striking this balance, Maughan-Brown gives us a work that offers a refreshing take on Kierkegaard’s occupation as an author.

Considered some of his least studied works, Kierkegaard wrote four separate sets of discourses, between 1846 and 1851, on Matthew 6: 24–34. In a smattering of essays, and an extended treatment in Kierkegaard scholar David Kangas’ recent book, Errant Affirmations: On the Philosophical Meaning of Kierkegaard’s Religious Discourses (2017), Kierkegaard’s discourses are generally read as espousing some “moral-theological” or even ontological lesson. In her reading, however, Maughan-Brown takes a completely different stance towards these discourses, which she terms the “Lily Discourses,” reading them as problematizing the questions of how a text has the authority it does, and in what that authority consists. The basic answer to these questions that Maughan-Brown supplies—an answer she considers Kierkegaard to endorse as well, particularly in the discourses on Matthew—is that we, as readers, grant a text the authority that it has. Through close readings of each of Kierkegaard’s discourses, or group of discourses, on Matthew 6: 24–34, Maughan-Brown traces Kierkegaard’s problematization of, and answer to, these questions in four separate chapters—“Glass Birds,” “Paper Flowers,” “The Child,” and “Golden Leaves”—with each chapter addressing in chronological order one of the discourses by Kierkegaard.

In the preface and general introduction, Maughan-Brown delineates the suppositions that underlie her exploration of Kierkegaard’s discourses in the succeeding chapters. A key supposition of Maughan-Brown’s reading—a supposition based on Kierkegaard’s own explicit view of the Gospel passage—is that the figures used in Matthew, namely, the lily and the bird, are not mere symbols, analogies, or metaphor, but instead are teachers, as understood by Kierkegaard according to the Gospel’s instruction to do so. Given this view, if the Gospel is a text with religious authority that communicates through the lily as a teacher, then, as Maughan-Brown concludes, a text (the Gospel) that is supposed to communicate directly, in fact, communicates in an indirect way (xvii). Consequently, as Maughan-Brown puts it, “for Kierkegaard, nothing guarantees authority in a text,” and this is precisely what Kierkegaard sees as problematized in the Gospel, a text that is “the most direct communication possible, the most authoritative text giving a lesson.” But that lesson is given through indirect communication, “through the flowers, by way of the birds, in footprints” (xvii). And thus, following this point, Maughan-Brown understands Kierkegaard as saying that texts—including the Gospel of Matthew—have the authority they do only insofar as the reader grants them such, a view of text and author that requires a reconceptualization of how that authority works (xxix).

Each chapter of Maughan-Brown’s work is voluminous and searching, covering a great deal of material, so consequently each chapter summation in this review picks out the points most pertinent to literary analysis. Chapter 1 (“Glass Birds”) addresses both how Kierkegaard allegorizes the figures of the lily and the bird, and how allegory brings about the comfort for a reader that Kierkegaard thinks we are to learn from the lily and the bird. Chapter 2 (“Paper Flowers”) takes up one of the many distinctions in Kierkegaard...