Great Dane

Reinhold Niebuhr has called him "the profoundest interpreter of the psychology of the religious life . . . since St. Augustine." The Roman Catholic weekly, Commonweal, has rated him "perhaps the greatest Protestant-Christian of the 19th Century, a man equal in spiritual stature to . . . Cardinal Newman." But to many a college-educated American the strangely beautiful name of Soeren Kierkegaard might as well be that of a new movie star or a kind of smorgasbord. Chief reasons: 1) only in the last decade have most of his works been translated from Danish into English/-; 2) his ironical, passionate, introverted philosophy of religion is off beam for positivist, social-minded Americans; 3) his thought is tough going.

Yet Kierkegaard's 100-year-old philosophy seems well fitted to these days. It is basic to the modern Protestant "crisis theology" of Karl Barth; its influence is strong on the great Spanish Catholic philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno; it is the groundwork for France's atheistic, postliberation fad of "existentialism." Protestants, Catholics and atheists who would like to sample the thought of the great Dane without reading all 20 translated volumes should welcome last week's publication of A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited by youthful (33) Kierkegaard- enthusiast Robert Bretall (Princeton University; $5).

Anthologist Bretall's judicious excerpting from 17 of Kierkegaard's major & minor works makes a 481-page compendium that is also almost a biography. For Soeren Kierkegaard lived most intensely and dramatically in his thoughts.

"Inwardness & Absurdity." On the surface Kierkegaard's life was both short and dull. Born in Copenhagen in 1813, he spent his college years in dilettantism, passed a course of theological studies cum laude, but was never ordained, fell in love but did not dare ger married, used up his inheritance in publishing his books, and died in 1855 at the age of 42--just when his money had run out. But that was Kierkegaard's life on the surface. His real life was a long, exciting, bitter, lonely struggle within himself. The fruit of that' struggle was his "existential" philosophy of subjectivity. To him the path to absolute truth was in "inwardness"--one of his favorite words.

This inwardness of all truth-giving experience, far from bridging the breach between man and God, widened that breach, for Kierkegaard: man, he felt, is so completely other than God that the Christian doctrine of God's incarnation in human form is nothing less than "absurd." To believe this magnificent absurdity God has provided man with the gift of faith, and only by faith--never by intellect or learning--can man believe.*

Christendom v. Christianity. All Kierkegaard's work, he confessed, revolved around the problem of "how to become a Christian." Wrote Kierkegaard:

"In an unpermissible and unlawful way people have become knowing about Christ, for the only permissible way is to be believing. People have mutually confirmed one another in the notion that by the aid of the upshot of Christ's life and the 1,800 years (the consequences) they have become acquainted with the answer to the problem. By degrees, as this came to be accounted wisdom, all pith and vigor was distilled out of Christianity, the tension of the paradox was relaxed, one became a Christian without noticing it. ... What one especially praises in Christ is precisely what one would be most embittered by if one were contemporary with it. ... Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it."

/- Mostly by Dr. Walter Lowrie and the University of Minnesota's late Professor David F. Swenson. * Modern "existentialists," like Sartre and Camus, have kidnapped Kierkegaard's "absurdity," stripped it of all religious significance, and beaten it into insensibility, using it merely as a dummy to dramatize what they consider the futility of any way of life.

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