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CHAPTER 1

KIERKEGAARD’S CREATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY

“Who thinks of hitching Pegasus and an old nag together to one carriage for a ride? And yet this is what it is to exist [existere]

for one compounded of finitude and infinitude.”1 What is it to be a human being? This question is as old as the human race itself, and

yet we continue to ask it, probing the depths of who we are as people, and exploring the

implications of our answers for how we live individually, socially, economically, and

theologically. Both Søren Kierkegaard and Walker Percy join the ranks of those who have

asked, yet they do so in a uniquely theological way. For instance, they presuppose creation;

they assume that human beings are made by God in a certain way. Both Kierkegaard and

Percy suggest that the things which comprise our make-up, our core constitution as human

beings, have come from the hand of the Triune God. We have been shaped, formed, given

abilities and proclivities as a result of God’s creational intent and action. By presupposing

these things, these two thinkers part ways with many who have posed the question of human

being from different premises.

In what follows both in Chapters One and Two of this study, some of Kierkegaard’s

and Percy’s own assumptions are carried into the discussion. For instance when we speak of

the essential composition of human beings, their fundamental make-up, we will use phrases

1 Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, eds. and trans., assisted by Gregor Malantschuk, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 55 [V B 198]. Note: these Journals and Papers are a seven volume set, and hereafter all citations from these volumes will be indicated as JP, followed by volume number and the Hongs’ journal entry number (not page number). For example, JP 1:55 (vol. 1, journal entry 55).

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like “creational selfhood” and “the creational ground of the self.” These phrases presume two

things: that divine agency is operative in creation and that the “ground” of human beings is

the Triune God of orthodox Christian faith. He is not only creational cause, but ontological

ground, and so all that being human means takes its flight or fall from this point of departure.

While we seek be true to Kierkegaard’s and Percy’s creational and ontological

presuppositions, there is a built-in danger of straying from them, especially in a discussion

over “creation.” Often these words are closely associated with thoughts of what the “original

sinless state” of humanity was like. What must it have been like to be Adam or Eve, enjoying

a state of innocence that none of us have ever known? This sort of speculation of what

humanity used to be (i.e. the “ideal possibility” of a perfect Edenic selfhood, which some

theologians apply to Adam and Eve) is simply not a concern for Kierkegaard or Percy.

Rather, they are focused, even when addressing “creation,” on humanity as it is. In other

words, both thinkers seem to engage in a kind of phenomenological, existentially personal

analysis of creation as it exists for the individual. Eden and the question of trees is an

existential reality rather than a primeval, historical one. In our approach here, we shall seek

to give sufficient nuance to these thinkers, both in their use of traditional theological

categories, and in their specialized, unique usages as well.

At this point, we turn now to investigate Kierkegaard’s view of the fundamental

ground of “creational selfhood,” which will be divided into the subcategories of

constitutional and referential ground. Here we will seek to demonstrate that for Kierkegaard,

creational selfhood consists in a relational synthesis that is both structural being and

teleological task, and is thus necessarily marked by the essential element and revelatory

agent of anxiety, while also standing in absolute referential relation to God in a way which

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properly orients essential relation to others. In addition, our hope is that a clear grasp of

Kierkegaard’s creational anthropology will also set the proper parameters for discussion of

Percy’s view of creational selfhood in Chapter Two, and place a comparative treatment of the

two thinkers (Ch. 3) and an analysis of Percy’s fiction (Ch. 4) within the proper interpretive

grid.

I. Constitutional Ground of the Self: A Relational Synthesis in Anxiety

The Self: A Relational Synthesis

The concept of a human being as a compound, composite, or synthesis of various

elements goes back at least as far as Plato, in his triadic explication of human beings as a

composite of three distinct elements: body, mind and soul.2 Of course since Plato, nearly

every philosopher has made some attempt at making sense of these (and other) various

elements that seem to make up a human being as an intermediate creature, positioned

somewhere between two poles of infinitude and finitude, freedom and necessity, physicality

and rationality, and many other combinations of “poles.” As the opening quotation suggests,

Kierkegaard is no exception. In his magisterial philosophical work, Concluding Unscientific

Postscript, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus puts it this way:

Existing (in the sense of being this individual human being) is surely an imperfection compared with the eternal life of the idea, but a perfection in relation to not being at all. Existing is a somewhat intermediate state like that, something that is suitable for an

2 Of course Plato’s anthropology is dualistic, in the sense that body and mind are completely distinct entities, driven by the controlling force of the soul. In addition to Plato’s dualism, there are various other philosophies of what makes a human being. These include subsets of monism (mind and matter are essentially the same), idealism (everything is mental), materialism (everything is physical), and of course many other variations. Our point here is simply to say that the ideas regarding man as some kind of combination between, or unity of mind, body, spirit, soul, etc… (others use terms like “beast” and “angel”), is an age-old philosophical formula.

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intermediate being such as a human being is.3

However, Kierkegaard communicates most clearly what he means by this “intermediate

being” in the opening comments of his mature philosophical anthropology, The Sickness unto

Death (SD).4 Here he clarifies his definition of “intermediate being,” but inserts a uniquely

Kierkegaardian qualification into the mix:

A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self.5

This quotation reveals two central points of interest. First, we can clearly see here—as

Kierkegaardian scholar Arne Grøn has pointed out—that “with this definition of synthesis

Kierkegaard places himself in a long tradition that regards man as an intermediate being

situated somewhere between the finite and the infinite.”6 Secondly, however, the last part of

the quotation indicates that given this synthesis as a mere “relation between two terms,” a

human being is “not yet a self.” This, then, is Kierkegaard’s unique qualification. The long-

standing description of a human being as an “intermediate being” situated somewhere

between various poles out of which s/he is constituted, appears to be, for Kierkegaard, an

3 Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 329 (emphasis mine). I am indebted to Arne Grøn for calling my attention to this quotation and for his articulation of Kierkegaard’s unique approach to the idea of human beings as “intermediate.” Cf. Arne Grøn, “The Human Synthesis” in Anthropology and Authority: Essays on Soren Kierkegaard, ed. Poul Houe, Gordon Marino and Sven Hakon Rossel, trans. Jon Stewart (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000). 4 “In Sygdommen til Doden (1849; Sickness unto Death), we find anthropology in its most conclusive version in Kierkegaard, i.e., anthropology in the negative form of an analysis of despair.” Grøn, 27. 5 SD, 43. Mark Taylor notes that Kierkegaard’s use of “freedom” for one pole of this synthesis is misleading. Later on in SD, in his analysis of the various poles, Kierkegaard himself proceeds by using the term “possibility” in the place of freedom. In addition, Kierkegaard goes on to equate the “self” with freedom, and says that like “self,” “freedom is the dialectical element” or third term in relation to the polarity of “possibility and necessity” (SD, 162). Mark C. Taylor, “Time’s Struggle with Space: Soren Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Temporality” in The Harvard Theological Review 66, no. 3 (July, 1973): 319, nt. 12. 6 Grøn, 31.

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incomplete definition of human selfhood.

For Kierkegaard, a synthesis of opposites such as those listed here, does not comprise

a fully human self, or human being. The existence of a fully human self requires a third

element that unites, sustains and constitutes the synthesis of opposites. Thus, in The Concept

of Anxiety (CA) he says that “Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical [soul and

body]; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is

spirit.”7 Later on Kierkegaard indicates that this “third” element called “spirit” not only

unites the psychical and physical poles, but also that “man is a synthesis of psyche and body

that is constituted and sustained by spirit.”8 Of course this begs the question: what exactly

does Kierkegaard mean by “spirit”? While he does clarify this in CA, he most clearly defines

“spirit” in SD where he explicitly equates it with the human “self” in what is perhaps his

most famous quotation: “The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self.

But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself…. The self is not the relation

but the relation’s relating to itself.”9

Here we come to that aspect of “intermediate being” that is so unique to Kierkegaard.

By situating the human “self” between itself as finite, bodily, temporal, etc… and between

itself as infinite, soul-possessing, and eternal, Kierkegaard alters the traditional conception of 7 CA, 43. In SD the word Kierkegaard uses for this “psychical” or “soul” element is Sjel. As Taylor notes, Sjel is an incredibly difficult word to translate into English. Though we may read religious connotations into the word “soul,” Sjel includes but is not limited to these. It can also refer to the psychic and mental aspects of a person, and thus could also be rendered “mind.” Louis Dupre adds more light here when he shows the contrast between Kierkegaard’s use of Sjel in this context and his use in his more explicitly “religious” works. Here, says Dupre, Sjel means “no more than the animating principle that has the potential to become spirit but has to pass through a process of reflection in order to do so. It is a category of immediacy.” In our view, Dupre’s is the best interpretation, and so we will treat Sjel throughout this work as a category of immediacy. Taylor, “Time’s Struggle with Space,” 318, nt. 11; Louis Dupre, “Of Time and Eternity,” in IKC (CA), 115. 8CA, 81 (emphasis mine). 9 SD, 43.

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the human person as a intermediate being by adding the category of relationality. The

human self is not merely the synthesis, since for Kierkegaard, “a synthesis is a relation

between two terms…[but] not yet a self.”10 Rather, the human self is that which relates itself

to these various poles of the synthesis, which are also the self.

The significance of this relational category simply cannot be overstated. With it,

Kierkegaard effectively defines human selfhood as not only a creational given, but also a

teleological task. The category of relation of self to itself means that the givenness of

creational human being also orients the self toward human becoming; there is a teleological

element built into the creational constitution of every human person. Kierkegaard brings this

odd couple together when he says, “Well, of course, every human being is something of a

subject. But now to become what one is as a matter of course—who would waste his time on

that?”11 For Kierkegaard, individuals must “waste time” on this precisely because in his

view, the ontological and the ethical are held together in the creational ground of the self.

Thus Kierkegaard attributes the possibility of falling into sin or “despair” to the fact that

“…God, who constituted man a relation, releases it from his hand, as it were—that is,

inasmuch as the relation relates itself to itself.”12 Here, being “released” from God’s hand

indicates, as C. Stephen Evans notes, that “The self is an ethical task, not a fixed entity, but

the task itself is part of the self’s ontological givenness. It is the form of being granted the

self by the creator. Its being essentially requires the self to become.”13

10 Ibid. 11 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 130 (emphasis mine). I am indebted to C. Stephen Evans for calling my attention to this quotation. C. Stephen Evans, “Who is the Other in Sickness unto Death?” in Kierkegaard Studies, Yearbook 1997 (offprint), ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 1. 12 SD, 16 (emphasis mine). 13 Evans, “Who is the Other,” 10.

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What is the self to become? The answer to this question is the subject of numerous

volumes of Kierkegaardian scholarship and a thorough treatment of this issue is beyond the

scope of our work here, since our aim is primarily to establish that Kierkegaard construes

selfhood as both being and task. However, it will suffice to say that the content of the task

has to do with the relation of the self to the poles of the synthesis: body/soul,

temporal/eternal, finite/infinite, and necessity/possibility (freedom). Throughout much of his

work, Kierkegaard describes how the self’s relation to these elements (i.e. relation to self)

can become “misrelated” or imbalanced. A person may take flight into abstractions or infinite

possibilities and ignore temporal limitations, finite relationships and responsibilities, such

that “the self is swallowed up in the abyss.”14 Thus in the initial creational ground of

selfhood, the self is given as a relational synthesis, but the harmonious balance of and self-

relation to the synthesis elements is a task to be achieved. Having summarized the content of

the task, we now turn to examine how the capacity for awareness of the task is built right into

the creational ground of the self.

The Creational Ground of Anxiety

The placement of “relation” into the traditional conception of human beings as

“intermediate” introduces, for Kierkegaard, both a dire problem and a blessed potential

within the self called “anxiety,” and he writes the entirety of CA in an effort to understand

how the existence of anxiety within a created individual makes the fall into sin possible,

14 In SD, for example, Kierkegaard writes about what happens to the self who embraces “possibility” at the expense of “necessity”: “Now if possibility outstrips necessity, the self runs away from itself in possibility so that it has no necessity to return to….Just when one thing seems possible some new possibility arises, and finally these phantasms succeed one another with such speed that it seems although everything were possible, and that is the very moment the individual himself has finally become nothing but an atmospheric illusion.” SD, 66.

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without being its cause. Throughout much of CA, Kierkegaard deals with anxiety as the

“presupposition” or “explanation” of sin “in terms of its origin.”15 He seeks to avoid

deterministic explanations of “hereditary sin” and tries show how the presence of “anxiety”

places every individual, in a

qualitative sense, in exactly the same position as Adam was in terms of the possibility of

falling into sin.16

Here, two points of clarification are in order. First, by bringing the category of

“anxiety” into the picture, Kierkegaard is trying to see how far psychology can bring us

toward an explanation (though not a cause) of the fall.17 Consequently, much of CA, as the

book’s subtitle suggests, is a “simple psychologically orienting deliberation” regarding

hereditary sin. This means that in most cases, the anxiety Kierkegaard deals with has to do

15 This is clearly indicated by the title of the first chapter in CA: “Anxiety as the Presupposition of Hereditary Sin and as Explaining Hereditary Sin Retrogressively in Terms of its Origin.” CA, 25. We must not assume however, that the attention Kierkegaard gives to “hereditary sin” means that he is out to simply explain how human beings passively inherit a sinful state. Rather, Kierkegaard deals precisely with the fall into sin as a personal act, showing how the constitutional presence of anxiety in human beings leads to the point of an unexplainable “leap” into sin on the part of each individual. 16 In terms of the possibility for each individual to fall, here Kierkegaard is careful to distinguish between qualitative alignment with Adam, but quantitative difference. Those of us who come after Adam are recipients—in a way that Adam was not—of a quantitative build-up of sinfulness in the world, including generational sin, sinful societal structures, and the like (CA, 32-33). Here, C. Stephen Evans’s summary statement is quite helpful, since we do not have the space or time to develop this area here: “In the Concept of Anxiety Vigilius Haufniensis maintains that every individual is ‘both himself and the race’ (CA 28). Original sin is not simply a physical, inherited malady. To the extent that I am a sinner, it is because I have chosen to be a sinner, just as Adam chose sin. Such a choice is scientifically inexplicable, but that simply shows that sin must be understood as the result of freedom (CA 32-33, 51, 92). Qualitatively, therefore, the sin of every individual is the same. This does not mean, however, that sin does not have real consequences for the individual and for the race. The individual who is born to a sinful race does not begin life with a blank slate, but as possessing sinful inclinations, which he or she did not choose him or herself and which qualitatively differ from the innocence of Adamic Eden.” C. Stephen Evans, “Kierkegaard’s View of the Unconscious” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. Martin J. Matustik and Merold Westphal (Indiana University Press, 1995), 93. 17 For our limitations regarding the field of psychology, see introduction, note 30.

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with what happens within a person prior to their own fall into sin.18 Thus, as is our aim, we

are dealing primarily with Kierkegaard’s view of the creational ground of human selfhood.

The second point springs logically from the first, as it helps to clarify what exactly

Kierkegaard means by placing anxiety in “Eden.” In CA, Kierkegaard does not define

essential anxiety as an affection, emotion or consequence of a fearsome object; it is not a

fretful response to a perceived or real threat. For Kierkegaard (at least in CA), anxiety is not

pathological or object-based, but is rather an ontological characteristic; it is a basic structural

element of human being that does not spring from any externality or circumstantial

vicissitude.19 In what follows we will attempt to explain the significance of this category for

Kierkegaard only in terms of its existence as part of the human self’s creational ground.

The soul-body dialectic we mentioned above is, for Kierkegaard, related to the

earliest stages of human life and personal consciousness. Consequently he speaks of this

polarity in terms of the consciousness of children.20 Thus these two poles (body/soul)

possess a quality of “immediacy,” an “immediate unity” wherein an individual rests in a state

of “ignorance,” “peace and repose,” an innocence like that of Adam and Eve prior to any

18 Though not developed here, the whole issue of sin as an “act” versus sin as a “state” is a hotly debated issue within Kierkegaard scholarship. There are times when Kierkegaard seems to affirm both, and in his journals he even appears to align with Augustine’s view of original sin as a state. For more on this complex issue, see Lee Barrett, “Kierkegaard’s ‘Anxiety’ and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin” in IKC (CA), 35-61. 19 It is important to note that for Kierkegaard, anxiety can become pathologically tied to sin. However in its essence or “fundamental” form, it is not pathological. For Kierkegaard, anxiety comes from God’s hand as a consequence of the relational way we have been created. Thus, as Evans puts it, “Anxiety…is not the cause of sin, and it does not explain why human beings sin. However, it does explain why it is possible for human beings to sin.” C. Stephen Evans, Søren Kierkegaard’s Christian Psychology: Insight for Counseling and Pastoral Care (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 61. 20 While we will not go into Kierkegaard’s analysis of the state of children in particular, we must note here that his attributing of the soul-body immediacy to children makes sense, in that here we are dealing with human selfhood at its least self-conscious and least self-reflective. Of course, in any investigation of Kierkegaard’s view of creational selfhood, this is the proper place to start, since on an existential-phenomenological level, this posture of “innocence” and “immediacy” is equivalent for Kierkegaard with the “Edenic” state of human beings.

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knowledge of good and evil. In this immediate state the third element of “spirit,” which

introduces the self as self-relation and task, lies suspended in a state of “dreaming.”

However, since “spirit” is precisely the “self” for Kierkegaard, it naturally “projects its own

actuality” and in doing so, directly disturbs the peaceful, ignorant immediacy of the soul-

body synthesis.21 Since this dreaming spirit constitutes the self, the self in ignorant

immediacy is drawn to it; it is drawn to itself, which it does not yet fully possess. This is why

Kierkegaard famously defines anxiety as “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic

sympathy and as a quality that is uniquely a mark of human beings as opposed to animals.22

It will also be helpful here to clarify further how Kierkegaard defines “anxiety”

[Angest] which cannot be rendered clearly in English. Kierkegaardian commentator Arnold

Come notes that in Danish, Angest has both a positive and a negative connotation at the same

time, whereas in English only negative aspects are heard.23 Come isolates a key quotation

from CA that captures these two aspects: “This anxiety belongs so essentially to the child that

he cannot do without it. Though it causes him anxiety, it captivates him by its pleasing

anxiousness [Baengstelse].”24 Come suggests that the closest the English language might

come to this “pleasing anxiousness” would be the thought of an “anxiousness to get going,”

in its positive, future-oriented sense.25

In summary, on the other side of this analysis what we essentially have in hand is

21 CA, 41, 43. 22 Ibid., 42 (emphasis original). 23 Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 166. 24 CA, 42. 25 Come, 166.

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Kierkegaard’s treatment of the psychological implications arising from what is for him, at

least in part, a “relational achievement theory” of the self.26 Because he holds the ontological

and the ethical together here, each self is placed in a situation of having to become itself in

relation to itself; it is this dynamic relation to self that makes anxiety not only possible, but a

fundamental aspect of human consciousness. All of this is of course very confusing, and here

two significant quotations help to bring all of these pieces together:

Innocence is ignorance. In innocence, man is not qualified as spirit but is psychically qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition. The spirit in man is dreaming…. In this state there is peace and repose, but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret to innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety. Dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is nothing, and innocence always sees this nothing outside itself….27 …So spirit is present, but as immediate, as dreaming. Inasmuch as it is now present, it is in a sense a hostile power, for it constantly disturbs the relation between soul and body, a relation that indeed has persistence and yet does not have endurance, inasmuch as it first receives the latter by spirit. On the other hand, spirit is a friendly power, since it is precisely that which constitutes the relation. What, then, is man’s relation to this ambiguous power? How does spirit relate itself to itself and to its conditionality? It relates itself as anxiety. Do away with itself, the spirit cannot; lay hold of itself, it cannot, as long as it has itself outside itself. Nor can man sink down into the vegetative, for he is qualified as spirit; flee away from anxiety, he cannot, for he loves it; really love it, he cannot, for he flees from it. Innocence has now reached its uttermost point. It is ignorance; however, it is not an animal brutality but an ignorance qualified by spirit, and as such innocence is precisely anxiety, because its ignorance is about nothing.28

While this text is central for Kierkegaard’s understanding of creational humanity, its

26 C. Stephen Evans notes that in the field of philosophical anthropology, “relational achievement theory” is one answer to the question: “What is a self?” In this theory a human being is seen to be a self in terms of “having a special status, a status that is linked to social relationships. On such a view, a human being may become a self, or might cease to be a self.” Evans argues, rightly in my view, that Kierkegaard leans toward an achievement theory, while also retaining something of a traditional metaphysical view of human beings as a “substance,” an ontological entity or “thing” with certain characteristics. Evans, “Who is the Other,” 1-3. 27 CA, 41. 28 Ibid., 43-44.

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latent opacity begs several clarifying remarks. First, the actuality of the self, here spoken of

as “spirit,” is both a friendly and a hostile power. It both attracts and repels and the fallout is

the “anxiety over nothing.” This situation comes about precisely because human beings are

more than a mere dyadic synthesis of body and soul, they are triadic beings who are

“qualified as spirit.” Again, we must recall that the spirit qualification is that element of

created selfhood that constitutes a task, it is something that the self is, but also that which it

must become.29

Second, when we make these connections, it becomes evident that anxiety is a

constituent part of creational human being; it is a necessary result of the relational character

of creational selfhood, which we described above. This is why Kierkegaard says, at the close

of CA, “If a human being were a beast or angel, he could not be in anxiety. Because he is a

synthesis, he can be in anxiety…”30 In light of this reality, Reidar Thomte can speak, in his

introduction to CA, of Kierkegaard’s “anxiety over nothing” as “that pregnant anxiety that

is…a pristine element in every human being.”31 And, in reference to the source of this

element, Arnold Come rightly concludes that for Kierkegaard, “…there is an infinite and

absolute goodness that never leaves the human spirit alone but implants an inescapable angst

at the core of human consciousness, an angst that beckons the spirit outward and onward.”32

Come’s comment here provides an appropriate janus. Having established anxiety as a core

element of creational being, we turn now to expand on its instrumentality.

29 Cf. Evans, “Who is the Other” (7), where he argues that “The self I must become is in some sense a substantial self.” 30 CA, 155. 31 Reidar Thomte, Historical Introduction to CA (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), xiii. 32 Come, 136.

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The Instrumentality of Anxiety

What we have explored above is only the first stage in a progressive concentration of

the state of innocence. In CA Kierkegaard moves his Edenic self through varying degrees of

self-consciousness in relation to awareness of itself as a task. What is important for us to note

here, is that anxiety is the agent within the self that propels each person toward a more

concrete realization of their own freedom. C. Stephen Evans puts it simply: “anxiety [is] the

companion of freedom.”33 Thus in a secondary stage of “innocence,” Kierkegaard notes how

a child moves into a vague awareness of “the possibility of being able,” and this essentially is

“a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety,” possessing the same

attraction-repellent effect noted above. It continues as a “higher form of ignorance” because

this immediate self, like Adam, is without the capacity to grasp what it is able to do, and so

the object of such anxiety is precisely “nothing.”

As the self becomes more reflective and anxiety more developed, Kierkegaard says

that the “nothing that is the object of angst becomes, as it were, more and more of a

something.”34 In other words, the self in innocence progressively moves into an increasing

realization of personal possibility—a growing clarification of what its freedom might

entail—and this is what makes “anxiety” into more and more of “a something;” the object of

anxiety solidifies. For example, on the outside edge of innocence, just prior to the fall,

anxiety’s object solidifies to the point at which the self clearly understands and desires its

own possibilities, it own freedom, and yet becomes terrified at the prospect of failing to

33 Evans, Christian Psychology, 60. 34 CA, 55.

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become the self it is called out to be.35 Arnold Come summarizes the whole process in this

way:

For Kierkegaard, the five-fold ‘concentration’ of the nothing of innocence described above is what sets the stage for the decisive event in which the child/youth will become conscious of being constructed as a unity of both the sensuous (finitude) and the psychic (infinitude), namely, when the child/youth is able to ‘pervade [the synthesis] differentially’, will then be aroused by the passionate determination to posit or actualize that synthesis, and hence, in this way, will seek to become her/his potential self....36

The point of this discussion is simply to show that for Kierkegaard, there is a telos of

the self for which anxiety serves as agent, due to the creational constitution of human beings.

In short, anxiety appears to be a progressively revelatory agent, ever sharpening the focus of

the self on its own freedom, in both its limitations and terrifying possibilities, ever disrupting

the comfortable stasis of immediacy. This is why we have argued that for Kierkegaard,

anxiety is non-pathological in its essence (though it can become so). Rather, it both is a

necessary aspect of human being that springs from our creational constitution, and possesses

a quality of instrumentality in relation to freedom. In the International Kierkegaard

Commentary (IKC) on CA, Dan Magurshak eloquently brings these threads together,

effectively calling us back to the original “immediate” synthesis of body/soul:

No matter how far one has developed, unless one has achieved complete self-realization, anxiety’s disclosure of possibility will always be disquieting. The possibility is that calls for decision will always be experienced as threatening the self-integration achieved thus far. Anxiety, then, in its essential moments, is the fundamental mode of affective self-awareness in which a person discovers the possibility of his free self-determination and its existential possibilities.”37

35 Come states this quite well: “as one in innocence is powerfully excited and allured by the freedom’s possibility, so now one is also terrified and repelled by the possibility of failure.” Come, 168. Evans, on the other hand, describes this as “the essentially ambiguous possibility that I may fail to be anything at all….Terrifyingly, this possibility both repulses and attracts me. I want to will my own independence and autonomy, even if it means my destruction.” Evans, Christian Psychology, 61-62. 36 Come, 170. 37 Daniel Magurshak, “The Keystone of the Kierkegaard-Heidegger Relationship,” in IKC (CA), 173. Here we must note our disagreement with Magurshak’s use of the phrase, “free self-determination.” Against this stands

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Thus far we have examined that, in his conception of the constitutional ground of

creational selfhood, Kierkegaard aligns himself with traditional conceptions of the self by

viewing the human person as an intermediate being, situated somewhere between the

dialectical poles of body and soul, finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility, and

temporality and eternality. Yet as we have noted, Kierkegaard introduces the new element of

the self as a relation to itself, and this introduces human selfhood as a task to be achieved.

For Kierkegaard, this shape of human being has been “constituted” by God, who himself

built the task orientation of selfhood right into its structural constitution. Consequently,

Kierkegaard holds that anxiety is a necessary, fundamental aspect of humanness, which acts

as a revelatory agent, illumining the self’s possibilities and freedom in a way that both

attracts and repels it.

II. Referential Ground of the Self: God and Others

We have established that for Kierkegaard, selfhood is both a creational given, and a

task to be achieved, and thus created with the possibility of anxiety. We have also established

that for Kierkegaard, “God, who constituted man a relation,” is the origin and ground of the

creational self. However, Kierkegaard’s definition of the self and its task as “a relation that

relates itself to itself” has caused considerable confusion for scholars. Is the task of selfhood

merely self-referential? Is Kierkegaard’s ideal self the archetypal acosmic individualist

whose sole purpose is existential self-authenticity? In Kierkegaard’s wake, many

existentialist thinkers—preeminently Jean Paul Sartre—have indeed taken their thinking in

all that Kierkegaard says about the self as an “established” relation that is called, precisely in the act of becoming itself, to “rest transparently in the power that established it” (SD, 44). Even amidst his emphasis on the ethical task of selfhood, Kierkegaard never loses sight of the self’s inability to bring this about autonomously.

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this direction by saying that the self’s task is to become fully authentic with reference

primarily to one’s own subjectivity.38 This is not Kierkegaard’s position. As we will

presently demonstrate, Kierkegaard holds that self-relation necessarily means relation to an

“other,” an assertion by which, we will argue, Kierkegaard sets up a divine referential

ground, or fundamental reference point of the created self and its task “before God.” Indeed

for Kierkegaard, the self receives its creational being and constitutional shape from God, but

an ineradicable aspect of this being is the vertical orientation of the self toward God, which

makes the task of selfhood possible only in absolute, referential relation to God.39

Referential Ground in The Concept of Anxiety

As we investigate Kierkegaard’s conception the self’s vertical ground, we must

reiterate what we have said elsewhere, that CA is both an early book in Kierkegaard’s corpus,

and widely considered one of “the most difficult of Kierkegaard’s works.”40 Consequently

CA will not be our definitive treatment of this referential aspect of selfhood. However, it does

make good start at moving us on into Kierkegaard’s more definitive and clear referential

38 Though of course there is a whole stream of existentialist thinking which sees relation to others as an essential, ontological element of human selfhood. Thinkers in this camp include Albert Camus, Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. 39 The phrase “vertical ground” may be an oxymoron, but it is an intentional one. It bespeaks of both the “vertical” relation of the self who is, for Kierkegaard, always standing infinitely “before God,” and this relation is precisely the “ground” of the self who cannot become him/herself without it. As we have noted above, the relationality of the self (here with reference to God) is, in part, the constitutional ground of the self. While we have said that the constitutional ground clearly includes relational elements, here we focus in exclusively and more comprehensively on that relational component in terms of its reference point in God; yet it is more than a reference point, since it is at once the “ground” of selfhood also. Thus: “vertical ground.” 40 Reidar Thomte, in the historical introduction to CA, xii. In light of these two issues, the anthropological study of CA must always keep the conclusive statements of SD within its purview, as our method will indicate by moving from this section into some key texts in SD. This method is appropriate for exclusive studies on Kierkegaard, but especially apropos when looking for connections with Walker Percy, since he repeatedly acknowledges the significant impact of SD on his anthropology and writings.

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statements in SD.

We have already noted that in CA, Kierkegaard describes the human being as a

synthesis of body and soul united by the “third term” of “spirit,” which he equates with the

“self” that each person is and must become. In CA however, Kierkegaard goes on to add

additional texture to his initial conception of human selfhood, and this brings a wholly new

and transformational category into play:

Man, then, is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal…. …The synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is not another synthesis but is the expression for the first synthesis, according to which man is a synthesis of psyche and body that is sustained by spirit.41

In this text Kierkegaard appears to imply that the “second” synthesis that is “the expression

for the first synthesis” is that of the temporal and the eternal, united and sustained by the

“third term” of “spirit” (self). However, shortly after drawing up this second synthesis,

Kierkegaard surprisingly equates the third term, spirit, with the eternal, the latter of which is

one of the two dialectical poles of the temporal-eternal synthesis:42 “The synthesis of the

psychical [soul] and the physical [body] is to be posited by spirit; but spirit is eternal, and the

synthesis is, therefore, only when spirit posits the first synthesis along with the second

synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.”43 Here is the crucial moment where Kierkegaard

equates “spirit” (self) with the “eternal,” and this second category is both a lynchpin, but also

maddeningly complex Kierkegaardian concept. Thus for our purposes here, we will merely

41 CA, 85; 88. 42 I owe this insight to Mark C. Taylor, who points out that “...there are four terms which Kierkegaard used do designate one aspect of the self system: spirit, eternal, freedom, and self.” Taylor goes on to analyze the implications of Kierkegaard’s equation of these terms. Taylor, “Time’s Struggle with Space,” 321. 43 CA, 90-91 (emphasis mine).

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draw up its broad contours.44

For Kierkegaard, the “eternal” speaks of both a subjective quality of human being that

has its ground in God, and the objective reference point, the “absolute” standard and telos of

human becoming.45 As the text above indicates, by equating the terms self, spirit and eternal,

Kierkegaard tightly binds the subjective constitution of the self as eternal, to an objective

reference point in God as eternal. Here it seems evident that the “eternal” category

introduces what Kierkegaard has taken for granted all along, that there is an objective,

transcendent orientation to being a self that is discernible within the constitutional

subjectivity of human being. As Louis Dupre states, “The eternal, as such, introduces a

transcendent dimension, absent from the previous categories, that wholly transforms the

existing synthesis.”46 Dupre further notes how thoroughly the category of the “eternal”

pervades and relativizes all other aspects of Kierkegaard’s view of the human self in a way

that precludes a self-determined view of human being:

[Kierkegaard] was fully aware of the consequences involved in simply identifying selfhood with self-determination and thereby tying it to an insurmountable temporality. He also took measures to avoid them. For him the ultimate category of selfhood is not infinite possibility, which is indefinite openness, but eternity. Moreover, the category of

44 For more on the “eternal,” see Dupre (IKC [CA]) and Taylor, as well as CA 85-93, where Kierkegaard works out the intricacies of the relation of the “eternal” to temporality, and the designations of “past, present and future.” Here Kierkegaard states that “the eternal is the present” or “the moment” in which “time and eternity touch each other” within time, and “only with the moment does history begin” (CA, 86-87; 89). These texts show that for Kierkegaard, the eternal is a fundamental category of the self because without it, there can be no temporal-developmental self-relation as an individual engages the task of human becoming. By recovering “the moment” for each human being, the eternal orients the self toward the future. And, when the self is designated and qualified as “eternal,” the future invades the present synthesis in the same way that possibility invades it and draws the self onward and outward toward authentic selfhood through the agent of anxiety. 45 Stephen Dunning notes that many interpreters see the eternal as external to the human subject. Against this, he argues that this concept involves the “internalization of the eternal,” and he applauds this move as “one of Kierkegaard’s most significant characterizations of the divine, namely, the concept of the eternal as an other that can only be known inwardly.” Stephen N. Dunning, “Kierkegaard’s Systematic Analysis of Anxiety,” in IKC (CA), 11. 46Louis Dupre, “Of Time and Eternity,” in IKC (CA), 116-117 (emphasis mine).

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eternity is not merely one element of a concluding synthesis….The relation to the eternal that concludes the constitution of selfhood has no dialectical counterpart. But since this relation also penetrates all other temporal aspects of the self, the eternal must, in addition, establish a bipolar synthesis with the temporal. Without this final synthesis the eternal would simply abolish the temporal and suppress the entire process of free self-realization. Hence, the eternal, though clearly transcending the temporal, must also relate to it. It could not enter the existing synthesis without inserting itself into it as one of the two elements of a new synthesis. But it is the eternal alone that determines the self as spirit.47

It is indeed “the eternal alone that determines the self as spirit,” because for Kierkegaard the

self cannot relate itself to its own temporality without also being related to the “eternal.” A

“vertical” orientation is a necessary element for a being which must relate itself to its own

temporality.

Kierkegaard explains this further by arguing that time itself is merely an “infinite

succession,” and only when the category of the “eternal” is introduced do the distinctions of

“past, present and future” gain any meaning at all.48 In other words, an individual cannot

relate to herself, that is, acquire a history in relation to herself, without also relating to the

eternal which places her precisely in “the moment” where such relation takes place.49 In this

way, any movement of the self toward becoming fully human is impossible without the

designation of eternity invading and defining time.50 Thus the “eternal” as such becomes the

47 Ibid., 123. One textual piece of evidence showing the preeminence of the “eternal” here, is that by equating spirit and eternal, Kierkegaard makes the “eternal” both a pole of the temporal-eternal synthesis and the “third” uniting element. This adds strength to Dupre’s assertion here that it penetrates all other temporal aspects of the self” and that “it is the eternal alone that determines the self as spirit.” 48 CA, 85ff. 49 “The moment” is a vastly complex concept of Kierkegaard’s, but in brief we can say that at bottom, it appears to be that which enables an individual to achieve a conscious relation to her own temporality: “The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time” (CA, 89). In addition, it is interesting to note that Kierkegaard sees the Incarnation as a key moment in history when “the moment” is fully realized. 50 Without delving too deeply into Kierkegaard’s complex view of time and selfhood, we must mention that Kierkegaard exerts a great deal of effort to show how the designations of past, present and future have no

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primary designation of the self as spirit, placing the ground and task of the creational self in

time, in an irreducible relation to it.

With his introduction of the “eternal” in CA, Kierkegaard has begun the process of

teasing out his view of the divine referential ground, the “verticality” that also belongs

inextricably to the constitution of creational selfhood. What remains is to shed the lingering

ambiguity involved in his concept of “the eternal,” whereby this vertical referentiality comes

into sharper focus. For this task we turn to SD.

Referential Ground in The Sickness unto Death

The referentially “vertical” ground and orientation of the self immediately rush to the

fore in the opening pages of SD: “Such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must

either have established itself or been established by another.” A few lines later, Kierkegaard

answers his own query: “The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation

that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another.”51 Here we

have an explicit statement indicating that the human self is “established” in such a way that

self-relation necessitates relation to “another.” About a page later, Kierkegaard defines

“another” more specifically when he describes the ideal state of the self: “in relating to itself

and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established

it.”52 Further, in the latter half of SD, the “power” is identified as God, and Kierkegaard

meaning apart from the “eternal” category, the latter also being that which gives “the moment” its content and meaning in relation to temporality. 51 Emphasis mine. Here we’ve chosen the Hong translation, which uses the term “another,” in contrast with Hannay’s phrase, “something else.” “Another” seems to be more consistent with the whole of SD, which later on, plainly identifies God as the one who has established the self. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13-14. 52 SD, 44. For this cit. and hereafter, the Hannay translation is used.

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argues that the teleological task of selfhood is only oriented toward and defined by God:

“The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude, which relates to itself, whose

task is to become itself, which can only be done in relation to God.”53

As Kierkegaard progressively develops this concept, he underscores the magnitude of

what it means for an individual as spirit, as eternal, to have this referentially vertical ground

and orientation of always existing “before God”: “what an infinite accent falls on the self by

having God as the criterion!”54 And, the phrase “before God” becomes a favorite of

Kierkegaard’s for stressing the reality of divine referentiality and its implications for the self,

whether consciously known or not:

Every human existence not conscious of itself as spirit, or not personally conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence which is not grounded transparently in God, but opaquely rests or merges in some abstract universal (state, nation, etc.), or in the dark about its self, simply takes its capacities to be natural powers, unconscious in a deeper sense of where it has them from, takes its self to be an unaccountable something....55

Here is a moment at which ontology and ethics come together. Ontologically, the human self

is qualified as spirit, as eternal, irrespective of consciousness and is in absolute relation to

and accountable “before God.” However ethically, it appears that transparency before God is

an option, a relational telos that the self may leave off in favor of any variety of self-

opacities. As in CA, the referential ground of creational selfhood appears to include both

what the self constitutionally is, and what it must become. This is even more clear where

Kierkegaard indicates that being a self who is “before God” also amounts to an “invitation”

for intimacy with God:

53 Ibid., 59 (emphasis mine). 54 Ibid., 79. 55 Ibid., 76.

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And now Christianity! Christianity teaches that this single human being, and so every single human being, whether husband, wife, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student, etc., this single human being is before God - this single human being, who might be proud to have spoken once in his life with the king, this human being who hasn't the least illusion of being on an intimate footing with this or that person, this human being is before God, can talk with God any time he wants, certain of being heard; in short this human being has an invitation to live on the most intimate footing with God!56

We have certainly established that for Kierkegaard, the self that is a “relation to

itself” is clearly not an autonomous, individualistic and self-referential being. If Kierkegaard

had stopped with a view of the self merely as “a relation that relates itself to itself,” then

Sartre would indeed have been justified in turning Kierkegaard’s existentialism into a

thoroughgoing anthropology of subjectivity. Rather, the self is not only qualified as

“eternal,” but is “established” in a way that both defines the transcendent orientation of

selfhood, and issues a call for the self to become its true self by resting “transparently in the

power that established it.”57

The importance of this transcendent category is clear not only in SD, but throughout

Kierkegaard’s corpus. However one task yet remains. Many scholars have noted that in SD in

particular, Kierkegaard glaringly omits any reference to horizontal relations, though some

scholars argue that the latter is presupposed, though undeveloped in SD.58 Does the vertical

56 Ibid., 117. 57 SD, 44. 58 Sylvia Walsh, in her article, “On ‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’ Forms of Despair” (IKC [SD]), calls the omission of the human other “rather puzzling” in light of Kierkegaard’s treatment of it elsewhere, especially in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, which we will turn to shortly. Arnold Come goes further: “Surely, this view is implicit in one of Kierkegaard’s basic contentions in Sickness: that God has built into the very fabric of the human creature the potentiality of being spirit/self so that no human can ever get rid of this ‘concession’ and ‘demand’ from the Eternal, because if spirit-love (Kjerlighed) to both God and Neighbor is the fulfillment of selfhood, then an essential relation to neighbor is a given relationship just as is the relation to self: in the very ‘fabric’ of existence. If Kierkegaard had made this insight explicit in Sickness, he would have defined the self as a relation that relates to itself and, in so doing, also relates simultaneously to both the Power that established it and to its neighbor.” Come, 210.

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ground of selfhood have implications for relation toward others? If human selfhood is indeed

an open relation to Another [“before God”], does Kierkegaard also consider relation to other

people as an essential element of creational selfhood?59 To these questions we now turn.

III. Horizontal Relationality Considered

The place of the human “other” in Kierkegaard’s writings is a hotly debated issue in

current Kierkegaard scholarship. In what follows we will not give an exhaustive account of

all the issues surrounding the debate. However, our aim in this section will be to demonstrate

first, that Kierkegaard does indeed include the essential need for relation to others in his view

of creational selfhood, and second, that that the self’s vertical relation to God provides the

proper priority and context for right relations with others.60

Mikael Plekon notes that for some interpreters, “Kierkegaard has become some kind of

superprotestant, a caricature of the tortured, lonely, alienated modern soul.”61 Pia Soloft

59 If SD is, as we have noted, Kierkegaard’s most “mature” and “definitive” anthropology, why is the essential relation to others completely absent from the work? A number of theories have been offered. Evans argues that the relational structure of the self does include horizontal relations in the first half of SD. He holds that the “other” that the self-relation interacts with does not exclusively refer to God. Cf. Evans, “Who is the Other,” 9. Also arguing intra-textually, Come notes that inclusion of “temporal” and “finite” in the temporal/eternal, and finite/infinite categories of the self in SD necessarily includes all aspects of human finitude and temporality, including family relations, friendship, social and political endeavors, and the like. Cf. Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995.), 102-103. Extra-textually, Come also notes that after completing Works of Love in 1847, Kierkegaard felt a sharper need to heighten his “attack” on the Christendom of Denmark, making it more decisive by contrasting the inwardness of the self “before God” to the easy cultural and communal Christianity around him (Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian, 212-213). Kierkegaard wanted SD to be included in the latter, explicitly polemical portion of his corpus, which he wrote under the conviction that “Christianity must be presented as the difficult thing that it is.” (JP, 6271, 493; IX A 390, 414). 60 The need for this aspect of the study will become clear as we move into Chapter Two, on Percy’s creational self. Percy’s thoroughly social view of the self is often either misinterpreted as Kierkegaardian individualism, or it is explained as an extreme contrast to Kierkegaard’s position. This section aims to show that there may be far more congruence between them on the essential place of the “other” than many scholars have allowed. 61 Michael Plekon, “Kierkegaard the Theologian: The Roots of his Theology in Works of Love,” in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (New Jersey; London: Humanities Press, 1992), 14.

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criticizes this view: “Kierkegaard has been regarded both as a solipsist, concerned only with

the internal moral life of the ‘Single One’, and as an acosmist, wholly concerned with the

private relation to the divine and wholly oblivious of the ethical relation to other human

beings.”62 Certainly these impressions of Kierkegaard are right about one thing: the existing

self (Endkelte), the particular individual (Individ) is, first to last, his fundamental category

throughout the entire corpus.63 While risking reductionism here, there seem to be two main

reasons for this emphasis, both of which derive from Kierkegaard’s desire to think and act

Christianly. First, Kierkegaard lived in “The Golden Age” of Denmark, a time in which a

general Christendom model prevailed, causing, in Kierkegaard’s view, widespread

nominalism and the loss of the fundamental uniqueness of the faith.64 Thus Kierkegaard’s

emphasis on the “individual before God” was in part related to his commitment to recover

individual “earnestness” and “inwardness.”65 A second part of his focus on the individual

self arises from his critique of Hegel’s philosophy, in which existing individuals were

effectively swallowed whole by Hegel’s “world-historical” schema. On this he says that

62 Pia Søloft, “Ethics as the connexion between subjectivity and intersubjectivity,” Enrahonar 29 (1998): 60. 63 Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian, 339ff. 64 Regarding the “Christendom” of Denmark, Kierkegaard writes in his journal: “'This is the enormous illusion which actually has abolished Christianity. One can get completely dizzy staring into the dreadful confusion of concepts which in this way has arisen with regard to what is Christian. In brief, the confusion is this, but it is continued from generation to generation by millions upon millions: they enter in to Christianity all wrong. Instead of entering as an individual, one comes along with the others. The others are Christians—ergo, I am, too, and am a Christian in the same sense as the others are.” (JP 1:390 [X2 A 453, n.d., 1850]). 65 The state church was headed by Bishop Jakob P. Mynster who, in Kierkegaard’s view, quietly upheld the status quo of cultural Christianity: “Right here lies Mynster's basic heresy. This business about going along with the established order of things, getting a secure position—all of which may be all right—if this is going to be life’s highest earnestness, then Christ, the apostles, all Christians in the strictest sense of the word—are impractical visionaries.” (JP 1:376 [IX A 60 n.d., 1848]). Many of Kierkegaard’s polemical works against the Christian establishment were thinly-veiled attempts at awakening Mynster to the nominal realities of Denmark’s Christendom. As far as we know, Kierkegaard did not succeed at this task.

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“One thing continually escapes Hegel—what it is to live.”66 For Kierkegaard, Hegel’s

philosophy of world history foundered precisely on the existence of the single individual.67

As a result of Kierkegaard’s vehement emphasis on the existing individual “before

God,” many scholars have charged him with neglect of external categories which could also

be essential to the individual in the development of holistic selfhood. One of the earliest and

most notable of these critiques comes from Martin Buber, who argues that in Kierkegaard’s

work, the individual’s relation to God is so absolute, that it effectively eliminates any

essential place for interpersonal, social, or political concerns.68 However, while Buber and

the many other critics offer a much needed corrective view, they neglect to see that although

biographical and philosophical factors frequently lead Kierkegaard to overstatement in his

passionate defense of the individual, he nonetheless clearly affirms horizontal relationality as

66 JP 2:1611 [VII1 A 153, n.d., 1846]. 67 “And, now, in the historical sciences! Too bad that Hegel lacked time; but if one is to dispose of all of world-history, how does one get time for the little experiment as to whether the absolute method, which explains everything, is also able to explain the life of a single human being. In ancient days one would have smiled at a method which can explain all of world-history absolutely but cannot explain a single person even mediocrely….” (JP 2:1606 [V A 73, n.d., 1844]). Kierkegaard continues: “No, the error lies mainly in this, that the universal, which Hegelianism considers the truth (and the single individual to be the truth by being swallowed up in it) is an abstraction—the state, etc. He does not come to God, the subjective in the absolute sense, or to the truth—that ultimately the single individual is really higher than the universal, namely, the single individual in his God-relationship. How frequently have I sworn that Hegel basically regards men, paganly, as an animal-race endowed with reason. In an animal-race ‘the single individual’ is always lower than ‘race.’ The human race always has the remarkable character that, just because every individual is created in the image of God, the ‘single individual’ is higher than the ‘race.’” (JP 2:1614 [X2 A 426 n.d., 1850]). 68 In his critique of Kierkegaard’s “Single One,” Buber offers scathing remarks over Kierkegaard’s aesthetic, ethical and religious stages which the solitary person must move through, referring to the whole schema as “wanton individualism”: “The Single One, the person ready and able for the ‘standing alone before God’, is the counterpart of what still, in no distant time, was called—in a term which is treason to the spirit of Goethe—personality, and man’s becoming a Single One is the counterpart of ‘personal development.’ All individualism, whether it is styled aesthetic or ethical or religious, has a cheap and ready pleasure in man provided he is ‘developing.’ In other words, ‘ethical’ and ‘religious’ individualism are only inflexions of the ‘aesthetic’ (which is as little genuine aesthesis as those are genuine ethos and genuine religio). Morality and piety, where they have in this way become an autonomous aim, must also be reckoned among those show-pieces and shows of a spirit that no longer knows about Being but only about its mirrorings.” Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), 51. The whole of Buber’s main critique here can be found in the smaller book within this larger collection, entitled The Question to the Single One (Die Frage an den Einzelnen, 1936).

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an essential aspect of creational selfhood, as grounded in what it means to be a whole self

before God. This element of Kierkegaard’s thinking is so often passed over, that here an

extended quotation from his Works of Love is in order:

How deeply the need for love is grounded in human nature! The first remark, if we dare to say so, that was made about humanity and that was made by the only one who could truly make it, by God, and about the first human being, says just this. We read in Holy Scripture, ‘God said, it is not good for the man to be alone.’ So the woman was taken from the man's side and given to him for companionship—because love and life together first take something away from a person before they give. Throughout all ages everyone who has deeply pondered human nature has acknowledged this innate need for companionship. How often it has been said and repeated and repeated again, how often someone has bemoaned the solitary or described the pain and misery of solitariness, how often someone, wearied in the corrupted, the noisy, the confusing life together, has let his thoughts wander out to a solitary place—only to learn again to long for companionship! This is how we are continually turned back to that thought of God’s, the first thought about the human being. In the busy, teeming crowd, which as companionship is both too much and too little, a person grows weary of society; but the cure is not to make the discovery that God’s thought was wrong—no, the cure is simply to learn all over again that first thought, to be conscious of longing for companionship. So deeply is this need rooted in human nature that since the creation of the first human being there has been no change, no new discovery has been made, but this selfsame first observation has only been confirmed in the most diverse ways, varied from generation to generation in the expression, in the presentation, in the turns of thought. So deeply is this need rooted in human nature, and so essentially does it belong to being human, that even he who was one with the Father and in the communion of love with the Father and the Spirit, he who loved the whole human race, our Lord Jesus Christ, even he humanly felt this need to love and be loved by an individual human being. He is indeed the God-man and thus eternally different from every human being, but still he also a true human being, tested in everything human. On the other hand, the fact that he experienced this is the very expression of its belonging essentially to a human being.69

This text is rich with possibilities for further development, but here we will take note

of what appear to be the most significant. First, Kierkegaard unambiguously grounds the

“need for love” in “human nature” by appealing to the Genesis account and God’s “first

thought” regarding human nature. Kierkegaard is saying that human beings are

fundamentally relational selves who need relation to each other to be whole and complete.

69 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 154-155.

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Second, Kierkegaard clearly affirms that the “cure” for one who has—as he himself had—

grown weary of corruption and the “teeming crowd,” noise and confusion of societal and

communal life, is not to retreat to a “solitary place” of autonomy and privatized spirituality.

Rather, he indicates that solitude itself is what turns us back to that “first thought” of God’s

again, that “it is not good for the man to be alone.” Finally, we cannot underestimate

Kierkegaard’s use of Jesus as the paradigmatic example of his assertions on human love.

Kierkegaard indicates that even he who shared the intimate communion of the inner triune

life of God experienced the need for human love; indeed as the God-man he demonstrated all

that it means to be fully human, and thus his experience reaffirms the “first thought” of God

and points us back to the garden. Thus we agree with Pia Søloft who states: “...it is not only

the transcendent determination of the Self, i.e. the relation to God, but also the intersubjective

assignment that constitutes the concreteness and the continuity of the Self...” because “the

identity of the self in Kierkegaard’s writings has an intersubjective dimension....”70 For

Kierkegaard, communion with other people is an essential element of human being

embedded in creational selfhood.71

Having established that Kierkegaard does indeed include relationality with other

selves as essential to human being, the horizontal orientation of self in its ethical task toward

others is clarified. Kierkegaard sees the ground and task of the individual in absolute relation

to God as the ever-present basis for the self and its task in relation to “others.” Kierkegaard

70 Søloft, 63. 71 This conclusion is of utmost importance in our comparative work between Kierkegaard and Percy. Far too many Percian scholars misinterpret Kierkegaard as fundamentally anti-social and individualistic, and then read that mistake into Percy. This is especially key when evaluating Percy’s view of the “search” undertaken by his solitary male characters. Is Percy approving of their autonomous tendencies, or does he see the solitary search as an exercise in futility? As we will argue in chapter two, Percy holds to a thoroughly social view of human being, largely owing to the incorporation of C.S. Peirce’s semiotic theories into his anthropology.

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understands that the object of human love and allegiance, be it a spouse, friend, political

party or human society as a whole, has the persistent proclivity to become an idol, a “self-

absolutizing finitude.”72 So for Kierkegaard, the vertical ground of relation “before God”

always provides the means and the telos of horizontal relations, in a way that prevents any

object of human love from usurping God’s place as the proper object and content of love.

Again Works of Love is our key text, where Kierkegaard pulls together an ontology of love

through a “triadic” conception of self in relation to others, with God as the “middle term”:73

Worldly wisdom is of the opinion that love is a relationship between persons; Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person—God—a person, that is, that God is the middle term. However beautiful a relationship of love has been between two people or among many, however complete all their desire and all their bliss have been for themselves in mutual sacrifice and devotion, even though everyone has praised the relationship—if God and the relationship with God has been omitted, then this, in the Christian sense, has not been love but a mutually enchanting defraudation of love. To love God is to love oneself truly; to help another person love God is to love another person; to be helped by another person to love God is to be loved.”74

Here Kierkegaard argues that any horizontal relation, if it be authentic love, must be

grounded in, authenticated by, and directed toward the love of God. At the very least, this

text indicates that the vertical relation does have priority, but certainly does not, as Buber and

others have claimed, carry the logical consequence of exclusivity, precluding essential

relations with others. In fact throughout the whole of Works of Love, Kierkegaard spins out

the vast implications that the God-relation has for relations to others.75 These implications are

unavoidable, because “The God-relationship is the mark whereby love towards men is

72 George Connell, introduction to Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community, xvii. 73 In chapter two we will examine Percy’s own “triadic” theory of human selfhood and its similarities, and fundamental differences from Kierkegaard’s rendition here. 74 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 107 (emphasis original). 75 For more on this topic, see the excellent piece of work by C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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recognized as genuine love.”76 Here we have only made a beginning, as Kierkegaard’s view

of sociality, political life, and community is vast.77 However, our intention has been merely

to show that the vertical relation of the self “before God” does not preclude, but rather forms

the essential basis for horizontal relations and the creationally “essential” need for the

intersubjective exchange of love and communion.

IV. Concluding Summary

Our goal for this chapter was to examine Kierkegaard’s view of creational selfhood,

in its constitutional and referential dimensions. In the process, we have established that

Kierkegaard’s creational self is an “intermediate being” and a synthesis, but also a relational

synthesis, thus possessing both structural being and teleological task. We have also argued

that the relational category grounds the creational self in “anxiety,” which serves as a

revelatory agent of the self’s possibilities and freedom. Further, we have contended that the

“relation” of the self involves transcendent orientation, a vertical ground that is an intrinsic

part of creational being and thus a necessary component of human becoming. Finally, we

hope to have made a start in demonstrating that Kierkegaard’s fundamental category of “the

individual before God” does not exclude, but rather sets the foundation for proper relation to

and love for other people, the “essential” need for which is “grounded in human nature.”78

And, having examined Kierkegaard’s creational self, our next task takes us into Percy’s view

of the same. Given his explicit debt to Kierkegaard’s anthropology, the hope is that this 76 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 120. 77 For further investigation of this aspect of Kierkegaard’s work, Cf. the following: Bruce H. Kirmmse, “Psychology and Society: The Social Falsification of the Self in The Sickness unto Death,” in Kierkegaard's Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, 167-92; Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, part 2; Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society; Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community (ed. George Connell et. al.). 78 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 154-155.

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chapter will properly contextualize Percy’s anthropology of creational selfhood, as well as

set a comparative analysis (ch. 3) and a reading of Percy’s The Second Coming (Ch. 4) on the

right trajectory. For now, we must delve into Percy’s creational anthropology, in which many

congruencies with Kierkegaard arise, but also notable differences.