love bears all things

by Newnameelizabeth

“Woman is weak,” it is said. “She cannot bear troubles and cares-the frail and weak must be dealt with in love.” Falsehood! Falsehood! Woman is just as strong as man, perhaps stronger. And do you really deal with her in love when you humiliate her in this way? Or who gave you permission to humiliate her, or how can your soul be so blind that you regard yourself as a creature superior to her? Just confide everything to her. If she is weak, if she cannot bear it-well, then she can lean on you; after all, you have strength enough. But you cannot tolerate that; you do not have the stamina for that. Therefore, it is you who are lacking in strength and not she.

Either/Or Part II, page 112, Sören Kierkegaard

social media did not create this phenomenon

by Newnameelizabeth

“an ‘esteemed public,’ which, to recall a line by Goethe, ‘is sufficiently shameless to believe that everything a person undertakes he does in order to provide material for conversation.”

Either/Or Part II, p. 101-102, Sören Kierkegaard

again, to be

by Newnameelizabeth

Kierkegaard Sören, rather than argue with you directly, I’ll take the round about. The route less taken and thus preserved pristine. The route one takes on one’s own in one’s kayak. (Either/Or Part II, page 84) I’ll not call you coward. I’ll call you hermit monk.

The first “why”

by Newnameelizabeth

I’m up to page 64 in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or Part II. He has just finished his argument against the first, most respectable, but not justifiable, reason given people marry: to build character. At first I had in my head an argument, ‘what about the idea of Marriage as Salvation, and the reason the Orthodox ceremony includes a martyr’s crown?’ He gives an example of a man who married an older, plainer person than himself, causing one to think “that the ‘why’ must be an eccentric one.” Playing into stereotypes much, Mr. Kierkegaard? That men are only naturally interested in pretty young women? But the man stated that one marries to build character, “to the slight edification of his [listening] wife.” I can see his point, though, that one’s preconceived notions about character building can make the spouse a guinea pig. They are there solely for the upbuilding of the other person. It reminds me of a certain Calvinist posture where others are dung that God miraculously and monergistically uses to his own, and vicariously, the Christian’s ends. There is a bad way to view martyrdom that removes oneself too much from the cause and effect.

what else can there be?

by Newnameelizabeth

If Kierkegaard’s answer for true love is to be thankful to God for the beloved, then why are there 300 more pages and 150 more in the supplement section of Either/Or? I will find out some day.

Is Kierkegaard a feminist?

by Newnameelizabeth

“It is more natural for the opposite sex to feel man’s predominance, to submit to it, and even though she feels glad and happy in being nothing, it nevertheless is on the road to becoming something false. Now when she thanks God for the beloved, her soul is safeguarded from suffering; by being able to thank God, she places enough distance between herself and her beloved so that she can, so to speak, breathe.” Either/Or pages 57, 58.

Or perhaps a proponent of female monasticism, which may be why he didn’t marry Regina?

question

by Newnameelizabeth

Kierkegaard can write pretty erotically in Either/Or Part 2 page 52-53 translated by Hong and Hong. It is ironic that he says afterward, “I have deliberately changed the ordinary phrases a bit, for, to be honest, the love described, no matter how passionate it is, with however much pathos it proclaims itself, is still much too reflective, much too familiar with the coquettishness of erotic love for one to dare to call it a first love.” So the first lover would not speak in such a way, only a subsequent lover? Then how can the first person person claim to be a first and only lover?

even the spiritual can become sensuous

by Newnameelizabeth

“Yes, indeed, the Christian God is spirit and Christianity is spirit, and there is discord between the flesh and the spirit, but the flesh is not the sensuous – it is the selfish. In this sense, even the spiritual can become sensuous – for example, if a person took his spiritual gifts in vain, he would then be carnal.” Sören Kierkegaard, Either Or, Book 2, p. 49.

 

Rich Mullins’ “Divine Obsession”

by Newnameelizabeth

speaking of Kierkegaard’s First Love in Either/Or, here’s an article comparing the ethical God to the aesthetic God. http://kidbrothers.net/release/sepoct95.html

I Still Love Kierkegaard

by Newnameelizabeth

This article passionately expounds on Kierkegaard’s themes, but I wonder if he went far enough in his own reasoning when he says this:

This was powerful stuff for a teenager such as me who was losing his religious belief. What Kierkegaard showed was that the only serious alternative to atheism or agnosticism was not what generally passes for religion but a much deeper commitment that left ordinary standards of proof and evidence completely behind. Perhaps that’s why so many of Kierkegaard’s present-day admirers are atheists. He was a Christian who nonetheless despised ‘Christendom’. To be a Christian was to stake one’s life on the absurdity of the risen Christ, to commit to an ethical standard no human can reach. This is a constant and in some ways hopeless effort at perpetually becoming what you can never fully be. Nothing could be more different from the conventional view of what being a Christian means: being born and baptised into a religion, dutifully going to Church and partaking in the sacraments. Institutionalised Christianity is an oxymoron, given that the Jesus of the Gospels spent so much time criticising the clerics of his day and never established any alternative structures. Kierkegaard showed that taking religion seriously is compatible with being against religion in almost all its actual forms, something that present-day atheists and believers should note.

Maybe Kierkegaard did reject organized religion in his time and place, but Orthodoxy gives the right context imo. I’ll borrow more from the article:

For me, Kierkegaard defined the problem more clearly than anyone else. Human beings are caught, he said, between two modes or ‘spheres’ of existence. The ‘aesthetic’ is the world of immediacy, of here and now. The ‘ethical’ is the transcendent, eternal world. We can’t live in both, but neither fulfils all our needs since ‘the self is composed of infinitude and finitude’, a perhaps hyperbolic way of saying that we exist across time, in the past and future, but we are also inescapably trapped in the present moment.

The limitations of the ‘ethical’ are perhaps most obvious to the modern mind. The life of eternity is just an illusion, for we are all-too mortal, flesh-and-blood creatures. To believe we belong there is to live in denial of our animality. So the world has increasingly embraced the ‘aesthetic’. But this fails to satisfy us, too. If the moment is all we have, then all we can do is pursue pleasurable moments, ones that dissolve as swiftly as they appear, leaving us always running on empty, grasping at fleeting experiences that pass. The materialistic world offers innumerable opportunities for instant gratification without enduring satisfaction and so life becomes a series of diversions. No wonder there is still so much vague spiritual yearning in the West: people long for the ethical but cannot see beyond the aesthetic.

The Church, meaning the individuals in her, is somewhat limited in the here and now, but there is also a now and not yet. When Orthodox advertise its”fullness”, I think people can get the wrong idea and expect too much from its temporal members. The ones more in touch with eternity, who have partaken of eternity through :”being born and baptised into a religion, dutifully going to Church and partaking in the sacraments” will be able to aspire to more fully be what he thinks is impossible. “To stake one’s life on the absurdity of the risen Christ, to commit to an ethical standard no human can reach. This is a constant and in some ways hopeless effort at perpetually becoming what you can never fully be.” To take the leap of faith not only with Christ, but also his Church.

Kierkegaard’s greatest illustration of this is his retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling (1843). Abraham is often held up as a paradigm of faith because he trusted God so much he was prepared to sacrifice his only son on his command. Kierkegaard makes us realise that Abraham acted on faith not because he obeyed a difficult order but because lifting the knife over his son defied all morality and reason. No reasonable man would have done what Abraham did. If this was a test, then surely the way to pass was to show God that you would not commit murder on command, even if that risked inviting divine wrath. If you heard God’s voice commanding you to kill, surely it would be more rational to conclude you were insane or tricked by demons than it would to follow the order. So when Abraham took his leap of faith, he took leave of reason and morality.

The atheist is not willing to do this. He may embrace Kierkegaard’s honesty about unreasonableness, but he’s not willing to join in the eternity of it. He has decided God was a demon instead, and that is what entering the Church can sometimes feel like. Like you’re selling your soul by kneeling before idols and committing cannibalism. It takes a leap of faith to see that instead the Church is the only place where the temporal meets the eternal. This is everywhere evident in the baptism of water and spirit, partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, the icons, incense, and hymnography. Hopefully there will be glimmers of it in the people too.