“Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man. In the midst of all our exultation over the achievements of the age and the nineteenth century, there sounds a note of poorly conceived contempt for the individual man; in the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human. Everything must attach itself so as to be a part of some movement; men are determined to lose themselves in the totality of things in world history, fascinated and deceived by a magic witchery; no one wants to be an individual human being. Hence perhaps the many attempts to continue clinging to Hegel, even by men who have reached an insight into the questionable character of his philosophy. It is a fear that if they were to become particular existing human beings, they would vanish tracelessly, so that not even the daily press would be able to discover them, still less the critical journals, to say nothing at all of speculative philosophers immersed in world-history. As particular human beings they fear that they will be doomed to a more isolated and forgotten existence than that of a man in the country; for if a man lets go of Hegel he will not even be in a position to have a letter addressed to him.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 317-8; quoted in Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 358-9.

“And now, what of Christianity! Christianity teaches that this individual human being—and thus every single individual human being, no matter whether man, woman, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student, or whatever—this individual human being exists before God, this individual human being who perhaps would be proud of having spoken with the king once in his life, this human being who does not have the slightest illusion of being on intimate terms with this one or that one, this human being exists before God, may speak with God any time he wants to, assured of being heard by him—in short, this person is invited to live on the most intimate terms with God! Furthermore, for this person’s sake, also for this very person’s sake, God comes to the world, allows himself to be born, to suffer, to die, and this suffering God—he almost implores and beseeches this person to accept the help that is offered to him! Truly, if there is anything to lose one’s mind over, this is it! Everyone lacking the humble courage to dare to believe this is offended. But why is he offended? Because it is too high for him, because his mind cannot grasp it, because he cannot attain bold confidence in the face of it and therefore must get rid of it, pass it off as a bagatelle, nonsense, and folly, for it seems as if it would choke him.”

Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. XIX, Kierkegaard’s Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 85.

“[T]he first thing to keep in mind is that every human being is an individual human being and is to become conscious of being an individual human being. If men are first permitted to run together in what Aristotle calls the animal category—the crowd—then this abstraction, instead of being less than nothing, even less than the most insignificant individual human being, comes to be regarded as something—then it does not take long before this abstraction becomes God.”

Ibid., 117-8.

“Each age has its own characteristic depravity,” says Kierkegaard, the ironist, who was necessarily in conflict with whatever was the depravity of his age. In his age, he battled a general “contempt for the individual.” Is “contempt for the individual” the depravity of our own age?

It’s hard to say, since perhaps we cannot talk about our fragmented and pluralistic times as having any singular, unifying “depravity” at all. For sure, I think we can say that we’ve patched up some of the flaws of the Enlightenment. We don’t worship reason. If we are collectivists, we are at least no longer celebrating some Hegelian picture of world-history. We are moderns; Kierkegaard is our father; Hegel is a backwards child of the Enlightenment whom we have left behind us. We pride ourselves on our recognition of and respect for “the individual.” But we’ve missed the point, because we try to talk about the individual in ways that are not self-referential, that are more than ironic. I don’t think we understand “the individual” as anything other than one more abstraction, and I don’t think Kierkegaard would approve.

We might do better to discuss the “depravity” of particular aspects of contemporary life, not of the whole. Take contemporary evangelicalism, for instance: its roots, nominally, are in the Protestant challenge that faith need not be mediated by a priest. Thus neither metaphysics nor ethics is either received or defined in the context of the Church. This is a good challenge, from Kierkegaard’s point of view. If I allow a community to determine my standards of behavior, I’m prevented from living “on the most intimate terms with God”—just as surely as Abraham would have failed the test of faith if he had considered all the reasons against killing his son. The only command that matters for Abraham is God’s command to Abraham. Abraham cannot speak about his obedience, and Abraham cannot give reasons for his obedience, precisely because he is not operating according to any system of earthly, societal norms when he sacrifices Isaac. The established church of his day, notes Kierkegaard, similarly has nothing to say about Abraham.

In practice—and, for Reformed covenant theology and the like, also in theory—Protestantism doesn’t necessarily give the individual his full ethical independence. Instead, it burdens or walls up the individual’s relationship with God. But evangelicalism today looks to be moving away from received ethical norms; witness the current hand-wringing about things like obscene language or premarital sex, which just might be okay for Christians after all. Amid contemporary criticisms of evangelical ethical practice, I think we tend to miss the fact that it is generally evangelicals who are asking the questions and trying to live authentically in response to those questions. So I’m optimistic in that respect.

Elsewhere, Kierkegaard has argued against metaphysical certainty—arguing for faith and, perhaps, against reason. Socrates with his ignorance stood “on guard duty as a judge on the frontier between God and man.” Sickness Unto Death, 99. A rationalistic approach to metaphysics destroys the believer’s faith and his life with God, but Christianity, which “teaches that everything essentially Christian depends solely upon faith,” needs “precisely a Socratic, God-fearing ignorance, which by means of ignorance guards faith against speculation.” Ibid. This speculation is not individual but communal. Loosely following Aristotle: we cannot reason without speech, we cannot have speech without community; and this is why Abraham’s silence is so significant in Fear and Trembling. Abraham is truly a man without a city—desiring “a better, that is, a heavenly country” (Hebrews 11:16). But nobody wants to be left out of the communal speculation or the collective hunt for certainty, even if inclusion requires submitting to the rationalist nonsense of a philosopher like Hegel; even if it means dismissing a true relationship with God as “a bagatelle, nonsense, and folly.”

Admittedly, most of evangelicalism is not much better than Thomism in this respect. As the church militantly reacts to an ever more hostile world, the temptation grows stronger to conscript reason in defense of faith. Kierkegaard will have no truck with such apologetics, calling the first person to defend Christianity “de facto a Judas No. 2” who “makes Christianity out to be some poor, miserable thing that in the end has to be rescued by a champion.” Sickness Unto Death, 87. This seems inherent in at least the nominal nature of evangelicalism as “evangelical.”

Are there, then, any alternatives to evangelicalism which avoid this traitorous apologetic? For myself, I don’t think either Catholicism or Anglicanism has anything better to offer. True, each holds the sort of mystery and paradox—in spite of scholasticism and orthodoxy—which for Kierkegaard might protect faith from “speculative philosophy.” But the collectivism of a sacramental faith hampers my existing as an individual. The mysteries of the Catholic faith I find attractive or useful only if they protect the mysteries of individual faith. But Catholicism has nothing to protect.

So the search for my own community of faith continues. But I wonder: why do we use the phrase “community of faith?” Can faith even happen in community? Kierkegaard doesn’t seem to think so; at least, we can’t talk about faith. Abraham has nothing to say to his fellow men.

Why does “church” matter at all, then? Perhaps the reason a local congregation of believers can be both good and necessary is: I cannot give up the temporal to live in the eternal like the “knight of infinite resignation;” I need to place myself in this temporal life “on the strength of the absurd.” Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 78. As Kierkegaard writes, perhaps autobiographically, “I am able by my own strength to renounce everything, and then find peace and repose in the pain.… But by my own strength I cannot get the least little thing of what belongs to finitude; for I am continually using my energy to renounce everything.” Ibid. The pauper can give up the princess in his own strength; Abraham can give up Isaac in his own strength. But more has been promised: we are meant for more than resignation in the arms of the eternal. To receive it requires my reliance on a greater strength.

Similarly, in my own strength I can accept the speechless isolation of my existence as an individual. But such resignation will prevent me from connecting in temporal finitude with my fellow believers. If I go beyond resignation, if against all reason I refuse to give up, I can indeed make this connection—not through the ethical speech which is impossible; not by speaking, but by loving. “Consequently,” our author exhorts, “whatever your fate in erotic love and friendship, whatever your privation, whatever your loss, whatever the desolation of your life which you confide to the poet, the highest still stands: love your neighbor!” Works of Love, 76. And my very inability to obey this command to love my neighbor is precisely the reason why I must obey the command; despite its absurdity, I must love in God’s strength.

This is why I need a community, and this is why I need a church: I need a place where I can love. And the lack of such a place, I submit, is the depravity of my age, and perhaps of yours.

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