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3 Anti-Climacus: Theological Selfhood and the Dialectics of Despair When it comes to Kierkegaard’s mature existential vision, The Sickness unto Death is perhaps his clearest statement. It is also, interestingly enough, given Kierkegaard’s aversion to systems, his most systematic statement about the conditions of human existence. As I indicated in the last chapter, it is my belief that the epistemological reflections in Concluding Unscientific Postscript clarified for Kierkegaard just how existence could be thought. The sometimes dizzying reflections of Climacus give way to a more serious analytic earnestness of a religious psychologist with a well thought out message; it is, as Kierkegaard himself says, almost “too dialectical” for an edifying work (SUD xiv).Anti-Climacus seems to have more existential confidence than Climacus.And in this respect he is closer to Judge William’s efforts to state just how one can integrate the accidental with the universal and become a whole and coherent self. Indeed, a strong case can be made, as John Davenport (2001) suggests , that much of the Judge’s convictions carry through to Kierkegaard’s later writings such as Works of Love and The Sickness unto Death. The Judge’s convictions about human existence, about the ripening of spirit and the repression of spirit leading to depression, are parallel to AntiClimacus ’s claims that the self as spirit is the condition for the self as despair . They share a similar understanding of the structure and dynamics 04.ch3.78-118/Mehl 2/14/05 2:09 PM Page 78 of human existence and (to a lesser extent) of the perils of despair and the possibilities for existential identity.1 Still, Anti-Climacus extends Judge William’s divinely grounded reengagement with life, clearly finding our situation even more fraught with snares than the Judge.The Judge,I argue,with his choosing despair and then striving for continuity,stands at “the thoroughfare to faith.”In Anti-Climacus ’s words: “The despair that is the thoroughfare to faith comes also through the aid of the eternal; through the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself”(SUD 67).Has the Judge won himself? Has Climacus? As I have suggested, Judge William approaches the general religious faith that Climacus affirms as Religiousness A. He has despaired , has given up the finite self, but then his return is too easy (at least for Climacus); he too readily participates in social and cultural life; the spell of transcendence does not captivate or debilitate. But maybe that is as it should be.As for Climacus, he could see a way through the “contradictions of human existence,” but he was unable, or unwilling, to take the step, the final step of relinquishing the last tie to finitude—his own intelligence, his yearning to see life whole, to live in the truth, to achieve the transcendent perspective. Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus is firmly in the ethical-religious existence-sphere, and while he delineates the promises and pitfalls of this stance, he finally engages life on the terms of the higher passion identified by Climacus, the passion beyond Religiousness A, the passion of paradoxical Christianity.Anti-Climacus takes the step to live from the assured rest of a spiritual consciousness that knows that it is absolutely dependent on God and then trusts that God has provided the terms for us to accommodate our dire circumstances. Considered substantively, Kierkegaard believes , the terms of this faith are unintelligible, but they are existentially compelling. So Anti-Climacus takes the matter even further by going beyond the human religiousness that Climacus held to and expressing a specific sort of Christian faith, a faith that the God’s-eye view is revealed in the gift of transcendence of existence within existence, in Christ. One central point that distinguishes Anti-Climacus’s perspective is his discussion of the transcendent standard for the self: that the self must know itself as “before God.”This is an explicitly theological standard, and it is (Anti-Climacus tells us) really an “aggravated condition,” not a substantive change in the structure of human existence. Nevertheless, it is a very significant advance for the individual self insofar as the individual is now self-conscious about this divine criterion of selfhood. (This is the aggravation.) The self from the beginning is in fact a self that is created and demanded by God: a “theological self” as Anti-Climacus says. KierAnti -Climacus 79 04.ch3.78-118/Mehl 2...

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