The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard
Jacob H. Sawyer
Foreword by Murray Rae
The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard
Copyright © 2015 Jacob H. Sawyer. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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Dedicated to Miriam, who helps me in my struggle to author these words in my life.
Foreword
The published works of Søren Kierkegaard are endlessly fascinating, profound, witty, deeply moving, and enigmatic. While the individual works present numerous hermeneutical challenges for the reader, so too does the corpus as a whole. Kierkegaard published a good number of his works under the names of pseudonymous authors. Sometimes he named himself as “editor” of these works, while at other times he published under his own name. Although there are very clear thematic relationships across the whole corpus, and while the works sometimes refer to each other, Kierkegaard was adamant that nothing published under the name of a pseudonym should be attributed to him. And yet his Journals give evidence of his own agreement with many of the things penned by his pseudonyms, and reveal that on more than one occasion he decided only at the eleventh hour whether to publish particular works pseudonymously or under his own name. What is the reader to make of this complex mix of disclosure and concealment?
Scholarly practice and opinion on this matter has diverged widely. For over a century, virtually no heed was paid to the pseudonymity of Kierkegaard’s works. The views expressed in pseudonymous works were assumed to be Kierkegaard’s own. Then, in 1993, Roger Poole declared that this tradition of reading Kierkegaard had produced only “a useless corpus of secondary comment.”1 While that is far too harsh a judgement, and while not all have agreed with Poole’s insistence that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous literature be viewed as a forerunner of deconstructivism, few scholars now deny that the pseudonymity is a matter of considerable hermeneutical importance. There remains, nevertheless, much dispute over the nature and content of Kierkegaard’s works, and over the purpose that Kierkegaard’s “indirect communication” serves.
Informed, quite rightly in my view, by the conviction that Kierkegaard’s project is, above all, a theological one, Jacob H. Sawyer charts a course through the turbulent waters of Kierkegaard scholarship and offers a compelling account of what theological purpose is served by the pseudonymous concealment of Kierkegaard himself. The content of the authorship itself, Sawyer contends, directed as it is toward the edification of the reader through a personal encounter with God, requires of Kierkegaard that he “hide” himself as author. His intent as an author is not to win admirers for himself; nor is it to encourage attention to his own struggles; his intent rather is to provide opportunity for his readers to recognize that they exist before God and to respond to that reality with appropriate contrition, obedience, and joy. In service of that goal, Kierkegaard must hide away and leave his readers alone with God.
The evidence in support of Sawyer’s reading of Kierkegaard’s works is carefully assembled in this volume and is presented in a way that is consistent with the case made. Readers of this work too will be encouraged to consider anew their own existence before God, and to ponder again what may be required of them in response. Sawyer thus provides us with an astute and faithful reading of Kierkegaard’s works, a reading that serves well the great task to which Kierkegaard devoted himself, the task of making clear what it is to be a Christian.
Murray Rae
University of Otago
1. Poole, Indirect Communication, 7.
Preface
This book was originally written as a thesis to obtain a Masters degree in theology from Laidlaw College in Auckland, New Zealand. In between submitting it and seeing it published, my wife and I travelled to Canada so that I could have the privilege of working as a pastor for the children and youth of Spring Garden Church in North York, Toronto. This experience brought to light many difficulties that arise from attempting to embody the ideas I have outlined here from my reading of Kierkegaard. The propensity and temptation to abstraction is always real in any work on behalf of people, and my family at Spring Garden helped to work with me to ground theology in life. I am grateful for having been a part of this community.
But before this, many people in many different ways are responsible for creating the space for me to grow into a theologian and an author: my teachers Mark Strom, David Williams, Rod Thompson, and my supervisor Nicola Hoggard-Creegan; my peers of the More’s The Pity Society: Jimmy Harvey, Brendon Neilson, and Kyle Duncan, along with Christian Parker; various mentors and encouragers throughout the years, who have, I believe, shaped my life for the better: Malcolm Irwin, Gene Tempelmeyer, and various teachers, friends and family at The Salvation Army, Browns Bay. I am also thankful to Murray Rae for encouraging me to get this published and supporting me in this process.
And I am thankful to my mother, for her constant support and encouragement through editing and discussion, along with the rest of my family, who have been forced to journey with me through my endless outward processing. Lastly, of course, I am thankful to my wife, Miriam, with whom life is an ongoing adventure and joy, as we strive to know as we are known.
Jacob H. Sawyer
November, 2014
0.1 Introduction
Søren Kierkegaard in History
Isaiah Berlin famously commented on Leo Tolstoy’s authorship as being one of “a fox trying to be a hedgehog”—that is, one who saw the infinite value in being about “one thing,” but could not himself be like this because he was constantly attempting to chase many diverse ideas at the same time, attempting to write a complex pluriform of social commentary in a single work.1 On the surface (the outward appearance), Kierkegaard could be accused of the same thing. In fact, Kierkegaard’s pluriformity is so outwardly overwhelming that it seems that one would be hard-pressed to see any kind of big idea behind it. His construction of multiple layers of pseudonymity, genre, and subject matter is so diverse that it makes finding explicit links between them difficult. However, according to Kierkegaard himself, there is indeed unity, one big idea: becoming a Christian.2 This is a hidden unity, and this hiddenness will be the main theme of this paper. Firstly, a brief introduction to Kierkegaard is in order.
The Melancholy Dane
Søren Kierkegaard was brought up in the midst of a bleak home life. In particular his father Michael was the source of much anguish for young Søren, as in his strict pietism he enforced high demands on his children. The guilt that came from Michael cursing God as a poor shepherd boy followed him to his grave. He “continued to be haunted by the suspicion that a curse lay upon his family,”3 seeing evidence for this curse in the death