70. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony; This work also lies outside the above list since it was his university thesis, and not part of his “authorship proper.” See Kierkegaard, Point of View, 315 n. 9.
71. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers.
72. See 2.3 below.
0.2 Kierkegaard’s Task and How He Sought to Accomplish It
An Explication of the Thesis
Introduction
This chapter serves to outline the task that informed and directed Kierkegaard’s authorship. We consider here how the Christian belief of the incarnation can be seen to be fundamental to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the correlation between form and content.73 We can then see how Kierkegaard outworked this understanding through his authorship, an authorship characterized by hiddenness.
Søren Kierkegaard dedicated his literary talents to reacquaint his fellow Danes with Christianity. He believed that his society had seriously misunderstood what it meant to be a Christian to the point of distorting it, and so sought to do what he could as an author to “reintroduce Christianity into Christendom.” To begin with, Kierkegaard wrote in order to awaken his reader from being a mindless number in “the crowd” to being confronted by what he understood to be each and every person’s human duty and joy: to be a “single individual.”74 Kierkegaard believed that such a realization was a necessary first step for a person to know herself as a “single individual” under God—that is, a Christian.75 This was because he understood that the gospel of Christianity addressed people only as individuals, and required a personal decision from each and every human being.76 Therefore, a society’s presumption that all within it are Christians, under the illusion that it is a Christian society, is antithetical to Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity.77 Kierkegaard labeled such erroneous thinking as “Christendom.”
As he practiced throughout his authorship and reiterated most directly in his posthumous “The Point of View for My Work as an Author,” he claimed: “I am and was a religious author, that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion, Christendom, or the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts.”78
This was his task: to reintroduce Christianity as a demand on individual persons, into a society which believed Christianity to be a matter of an impersonal, objective status.79 But how was he to do this?
Kierkegaard understood that his task must be internally coherent: his form needed to complement his task. Such a conviction was not merely an artistic or stylistic one, but was rooted in the gospel, receiving theological support from the Christian claim that God’s Word became flesh. This complementarity between form and task is related to his understanding of the Christian belief in the incarnation, which lead Kierkegaard to adopt the form of hiddenness in his authorship.80
The King Who Loved a Humble Maiden
In this parable we are given an insight into Kierkegaard’s understanding of the gospel.81 Although Kierkegaard distances himself from this work by employing a pseudonym to articulate it,82 Kierkegaard’s veronymous writings as well as his own authorial practice are sympathetic to such an analogy. Through examining this analogy we will suggest how this can be understood to give rise to the form of Kierkegaard’s authorship.
As a way of portraying the love of “the god” for “the learner” in Christianity,83 Climacus employs an analogy in the form of a fairytale. Beyond mere unity of the parties concerned, love requires understanding. Climacus endeavors to suggest how the love of God for an individual becomes understood in Christianity.84 In this illustration, the King could not make his love for the maiden known to his subjects because they would force the maiden into meeting the King’s desires. Such love would become “unhappy” and distorted in this lack of equality. Likewise, the King elevating the maiden to an equal status with himself would also result in the misunderstanding of his love, as the maiden would be compelled—both internally and externally—to be in the debt of her lover. This would not elicit a genuine love that is concerned with the King for his own sake. The maiden would cease to be herself, and would instead become conscious of her debt to the King. Although the maiden would be satisfied in forgetting herself and in serving the King in all his glory, this would not satisfy the King “because he does not wish his own glorification, but the girl’s.”85
Climacus sees the solution as one where the King would come down to the level of the maiden, where the King would disguise himself as a lowly commoner and attempt to win her affection on an equal footing—free from the trappings of power-relations, thus steering away from demand or coercion by the King, and emphasizing the risky and vulnerable invitation in which all the power of the decision is given to the humble maiden. In this sense, the form of such an invitation becomes vital. It is here that Climacus uses the New Testament phrase “in the form of a servant” to establish in the mind of the reader a direct link to the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.86 It is here that we begin in our understanding of the key concept of “hiddenness.”
Although this “thought experiment” is undertaken in the name of a pseudonym, this account of the gospel can easily be seen to be consistent with Kierkegaard’s own belief as is illustrated in his explicit emphases on “the single individual” and “hidden inwardness.”87 More significantly, this concept of hiddenness is outworked in the form of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Because God did not primarily demand allegiance through appearing directly in all his glory, but instead sought to win the genuine love of each and every person through hiding himself and making himself our equal (or even less than this),88 Christianity is a humble and vulnerable invitation from God. The shift here is from Christianity being seen as a matter of status or intellectual ascent, to it being understood as God inviting each and every person into a subjective (i.e., personal) relationship with himself. In order for the individual to understand this in such an intimate way, the form of the gospel becomes the all-important emphasis for Kierkegaard.
This is the theological basis for Kierkegaard’s paying special attention to the form of communicating the gospel. This led him to realize that the form his evangelistic authorship must take was that of hiddenness.
The Hiddenness of the Gospel—God Hidden in Christ
For Kierkegaard, the idea that God became a human being was, paradoxically, a revelation of the hiddenness of God.89 This hidden revelation was not simply a subsidiary