Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition: Conflict and Dialogue

6 On Being Afraid of Hell: Kierkegaard and Catholicism on Imperfect Contrition

153 six On Being Afraid of Hell: Kierkegaard and Catholicism on Imperfect Contrition And you who feel so far removed from your God, what else is your seeking God in repentance but loving God. Kierkegaard What can be more grievous than hell? Yet nothing is more profitable than the fear of it; for the fear of hell will bring us the crown of the kingdom. St. John Chrysostom An act of contrition is usually spoken aloud when a penitent confesses in the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation, or penance. One particular act of contrition reads: O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell; but most of all because they offend you, my God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of your grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.1 154 · Sin, Justification, and Community Confessing one’s sins out of love for God above all things is called contrition , or “perfect contrition” in the Catholic tradition. Confessing out of the fear of the damnation or for other reasons than the pure love of God is called attrition, or “imperfect contrition.” The foregoing act clearly suggests that the former is better than the latter. Still, attrition is acceptable for the Catholic tradition, as a step in the right direction, and it is claimed to be purified in the “sphere” of the sacrament itself.2 Luther loudly protested this claim, writing, “This attrition they grant to the wicked and unbelieving, and thus abolish contrition altogether.”3 For Luther, as for Kierkegaard, there are only two ways, the way of faith and the way of unbelief.4 The former leads to salvation, and the latter to damnation. Attrition seems, to Luther, to be an inadequate form of contrition, and not to proceed from genuine faith. Thus, it belongs to the category of unbelief, and promotion of the idea that attrition is sufficient can only lead penitents astray. Kierkegaard appears to accept this view, at least with regard to what seems to be his “official” position.5 In his work “An Occasional Discourse,” which many readers may know as Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Kierkegaard argues that to will the good out of fear of punishment, even eternal punishment, is being double-minded. It might seem, therefore, to be part and parcel of the problem in which the prospective penitent finds herself, and certainly not an antidote to it. As a Catholic, I take issue with that claim, it being among the teachings of my faith that to be imperfectly contrite out of a fear of hell (together with the renunciation of the desire for sin and the hope for pardon) is not a symptom of sin but is rather “a gift of God and an impulse of the Holy Spirit."6 Furthermore, as a Kierkegaardian (of one sort or another) I want to take issue with this claim, since it seems to me that the larger Kierkegaardian religious dialectic forces us to admit that there must be more to Kierkegaard’s story. Now perfect contrition is motivated by a pure love of God and is often claimed to be sufficient, even apart from the sacrament of reconciliation , to forgive venial sins, or those sins that are not as serious or involve something less than full and deliberate consent. The former sort of contrition (i.e., imperfect), which primarily concerns us here, is only one that desires to change its ways on the basis of its fear of eternal punishment and God as punisher. On this, we might consider Karl Rahn­ er’s words: “In practice these two theoretically distinguishable kinds of On Being Afraid of Hell · 155 contrition coexist, though one or the other may emerge more strongly in our consciousness at a particular time.”7 Kierkegaard’s official position would seem to disallow this coexistence. I argue that Kierkegaard’s own argument in “An Occasional Discourse,” after being examined in the light of the Catholic tradition and his own larger religious dialectic, suggests a reexamination of his position, which will bring Kierkegaard and Catholicism closer than one might initially suspect. Kierkegaard’s Argument in “An Occasional Discourse” To begin this discourse, Kierkegaard is at pains to explain how repentance is...