Absolutely relating to the relative

An analysis of identity politics, sociological pressure, and fads from a Kierkegaardian perspective

If you have paid attention to politics at any point in the last century, you will have noticed the presence of a range of “interest groups”. Some particularly famous groups include Black Lives Matter, the various waves of feminism, “men’s rights activists”, the wide range of organizations under the LGBT banner, and Maoist Third Wordlists. What unites these groups? They prioritise the quality of “sameness” at the behest of “otherness” (although, interestingly, Third Worldists, i.e., neo-Orientalists, appear to generally come from non-Third World countries and engage in an abstract dialectic of sameness—otherness), which allows for creations of in-groups and out-groups; regardless of the apparently inclusive or reparative goals of the movement or organisation, there is very much a hard binary that is forced onto the reality of society and proves a dualist bias to apply to any and all sociological and philosophical issues. Of course, this leads to problems—as Eller noted in regards to class reductionist Marxists:

Yet ever and always we have to give Marxism another try— because what else is there? If class distinctions are the “given,” the only entities we have with which to work; and if the inherent conflict between them is that which must be overcome—then what else besides class warfare can there ever be?¹

When the binary no longer provides explanatory power, the logic of the worldview breaks down. The choice to split all human struggle into a Manichean dualism of whiteness—non-whiteness, women—men, men—women, queer—non-queer, the imperialists—the imperialised, etc., transforms into a dogmatism and a metaphysics which turns the analytical tool into a reified component of reality itself. This process, presumably always carried out in earnest by those who are adhering to their particular analytical tools/metaphysics, can appear confusing—how do seemingly intelligent, committed individuals somehow make the same mistake over and over? For the Kierkegaardian, however, there is an approach which offers us an important insight: a critique of the absolute relation to the relative.²

The Marxian error

To explain this fully, we must initially proceed via negativa: only by understanding the failure of a methodology which is rooted in the absolute relation to the relative can we understand an alternative. To do this, we shall turn ourselves to a contemporary of S. K.’s—Karl Marx.

While there have been attempts to reconcile the thoughts of S. K. and Marx, this has generally turned out to be as faithful to both as attempting to reconcile the thoughts of Nietzsche and Marx or Christianity and party politics.

While Marx was correct in attempting to avoid the dangers of immaterial comradeship, he—as he so often did—launched into an overcorrective error. By identifying the proletariat as a concrete group within wider society (and, at a greater level, global socio-politics), Marx thinks that he has identified the “engine of social change”—but there is an error which often goes on undiagnosed and, as such, we don’t recognise the inherent identitarian character of Marxism.

The real group “the proletariat”, understood to be “the labourer… in the position to sell commodities in which his labour… [and] must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power, which exists only in his living self,”³ and the idealist concept “the revolutionary proletariat,” understood to be the engine of social change⁴, are not the same object: in the metaphysical conflation of being and thought, Marxian theory confuses the idea of the proletariat with the proletariat-in-itself. This is due to the “future-oriented” theory that Marx was attempting to construct: because this “system” (an odious intention for the Kierkegaardian) is constructed in such a way to be objective and scientific, the work acts as a kind of prediction or premonition—however, the calls to duty to establish political parties, engage in agitation, and attempt to grasp the new crown of economic power all serve as moral dicta. As such, Marx’s predictions cannot be understood solely as scientific in nature, but rather as morally imperative. This gap between the proletariat and “the proletariat” then rears its ugly head in reality, where we find the various Marxist micro-parties of the world attempting to develop a moral resistance (one ought to bring about the end of capitalism, end exploitation, etc.) under the guise of a scientific theory. While Marx correctly understood that reason and morality undergo a seemingly natural ebb-and-flow in the insecurity of time, he failed to recognise that his choice to develop a scientific theory of society is still a choice to do so—naturally subjective, naturally contingent; the thinker must commit themselves to the analysis of reality, but can only do so from within reality’s flow. The identified group, now stripped of its objective grounds in the theoretical, is merely another type of identity.

In the words of his co-theorist, “[t]hese gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.”⁵

The source of the error is quite difficult to diagnose at the first attempt: the Marxian “science” of history (a bold claim that such a thing is possible⁶, but one we will grant the Marxists for the sake of argument) rests on the presumption that the objective view of society is the correct view of society—by running away from the subjective existence of those who make up the contents of that society, we will somehow arrive at a solution to the apparent incomprehensibility of social movement. I use “running away” here to point out one of the problems that Marx failed to overcome: his intention to avoid the metaphysical speculation of both Hegel (the speculative idealist) and Feuerbach (the vulgar materialist) fails because he, like Luther’s drunken peasant who had fallen off his horse, had overcorrected and fallen off the other side—instead of viewing the isolated idealist subject and the abstracted materialist subject as leading to a more socially, necessarily unified subject-object understanding of the individual, Marx attempts to grasp the totality of society in a new kind of abstraction: as a social objectivity which describes all of human history. It is fairly straightforward to pick holes in this approach when one comes prepared with a wealth of historical knowledge—the infamous “Asiatic mode of production”⁷, a thorn in the side of any particularly hard reading of Marx qua historicist, was cleared away and amalgamated into the “feudal mode of production” when its particular characteristics could not be reconciled with Marx’s understanding of historical movement, for example. The abstractions fail to relate to society and offer us no real concrete methodology for understanding anything outside of Marx’s particular understanding of European capitalism—in its youth, of course. They still “hang over” society in a way which fails to be material or concrete in a proper sense; this becomes plainly apparent when, after having analysed Marxist perspectives on reality, all commentary returns to the same, pre-established conclusion. “This is due to bourgeois interest,” “this is due to empire,” “this is due to capitalist corruption blocking proper proletarian class consciousness.” That is not to say that at least some or even many of these assessments are correct—but for all of them? It stretches the realms of feasibility to the point of clearly exposing ideology within the ranks. It appears that Marx never really did depart from his Hegelian roots.

At this point, my reader, I don’t intend to “prove” that Marx is wrong⁸ or even that any particular aspect of his theory is incorrect—there are both better critiques of Marx available to you and also such a thing would require a library of dreary, fusty academic reflections. I aim to dislodge the Marxian claim that this is a “science” of history and, due to the conflation of being and thought, is simply another idealism—and an aesthetic one at that. As it is an idea amongst ideas, we are back to square one: our absolute relation to the idea is potentially incorrect, possibly a failure to establish the proper grounds for social thought and a pathway through the process of change. In a cruel twist of fate, Marx’s goal to push away from metaphysics in order to find something more concrete actually led him into a position where his idea floated free over reality; only the metaphysical could bring him back to ground.

The self in the world

The problem that Marx and the Marxists faced was that they were dealing in abstractions. By attempting to escape the problems of Hegelian metaphysics, they simply invented a new form of metaphysics—a “metaphysics of society”, or, sociology, as we prefer to call it these days. We sometimes collect scientific data to justify our society-encompassing claims (of which, the totality of their supposed applicability expose a deeply idealist and modernist failing), but the bones of philosophy are very much structural to our dear sociologists. As is abundantly clear to anyone who has studied the great “system-builders” like Hegel, Marx, Foucault, etc., the gap between philosophy and sociology is sometimes rather small. But, as is never more abundantly clear to anyone who has spent a considerable amount of time with Marxists or any other “radical” group of “revolutionaries”, it can be quite simple for this species of metaphysics to collapse into practical confusion and empty sabre-rattling—for all its rhetoric, we eventually find that it is nothing but rhetoric. The improper relation between the individual, the social, and their teleological object, understood by Dooley as “the ubiquity of sin”, leads to an excess of “the leveled age of passive reflection (metaphysics).”⁹ The reflective search for a scientific method turns into historicism, almost naturally—abstractions only teach us to continuously search for abstractions.

"Can a human being be justified in regarding a contemporary age as evil? Or is not a human being... so relative in relation to other human beings that at most there can be a question only of their weakness and mediocrity?"

To create a “concrete” sociology, says S. K., we must start with the most obviously concrete point: the individual as they encounter reality. This point of contact between the individual’s subjectivity and the “collisions” of reality gives us the grounds for actually understanding how the subject is formed and forms their place in the world—we construct a theory of the social matrix around us within the context of “the moment”. Here, my reader, I am sure that I will disappoint you: what we can say from this point with certainty or even the faintest glimmer of assuredness is rather slight; but is it better to create a bombastic system of thought which has about as much to do with reality as crude materialism, or is it better to identify what we can feel semi-comfortable with and then work from there? In short, we aim to avoid the problem caused by the apparent fact that “A logical system can be given... but a system of existence cannot be given.”¹⁰

Let us take the “I”, the infamous Cartesian cogito, as the basis of all thought (and, my reader, be assured that S. K. was not so reductive to step back into foundationalism—what kind of hack do we take him for? Camus?). The most immediate problem with taking this “I” is that the “I” would lack any kind of qualities—we can’t know something unless we relate it to a not-something, a thing other than itself. Therefore, we turn the “I” outwards and find that there is a “not-I” out there too¹¹. This all seems very high-brow and abstract at the moment, but we have established two points of certainty: the “I” and the “not-I”. However, we are in deep danger of becoming philosophically reactionary and turning back to Descartes—instead, we must realise that there is a “given actuality”¹² which unsettles how we engage with these two points of “certainty”. If nothing else, this “given actuality” is obviously unstable—we notice that the “not-I” is ever-changing, constantly undergoing the movement of “existence”, and therefore offers us a scattered image of both itself and also the “I”; we cannot find a firm image of the “not-I” to relate to and, therefore, our relational understanding of the “I” becomes confused¹³. And in this relational confusion, we find the unthinkable problem for the Cartesian foundationalist: the “I” is not consistent, even in the way it “resists” the “not-I”—we have no real certainty in either of these points of certainty¹⁴.

So far, we have proposed a firm ground for understanding and then demolished it. So much for an improvement on Marx. However, an early note in S. K.’s journals “shines a light” on how we navigate our way out:

“You always need one more light positively to identify another. Imagine it quite dark and then one point of light appears; you would be quite unable to place it, since no spatial relation can be made out in the dark. Only when one more light appears can you fix the place of the first, in relation to it.”¹⁵

The “light” we would need at this point would need to be an eternal, unchanging point by which we relate ourselves. As S. K. was a Christian writer, I won’t be giving out awards for those who have guessed what this “point” would have to be. Only by identifying the point of eternity can we begin the double assessment that undergirds a proper sociology: firstly, the individual’s relation to the eternal, thereby discovering itself; secondly, the individual’s discovery of the self turned outwards towards the “not-I” to understand it in relation.

It’s that simple! So, why do we still struggle to build a proper “system” of Christian sociology? Because, quite simply, this relation to the absolute, to the eternal, must itself be necessarily based in the particular subjectivity of the individual—we are no closer to an objective system of thought because the path towards an objective system of thought is to run away from one’s responsibility to recognise themselves in relation to the fixed point of eternity and then the flux of social change.¹⁶ We have escaped the Marxist presupposition—the expression of a subjective choice!—that we should have a “closed system” of reality, even if Marx’s analysis was a step along the right way away from the Hegelian closedness. We can postulate an “open system” of possibility¹⁷. And that possibility delivers us “an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual.”¹⁸

Doxology and Society

You and I, my reader, are not the first people to notice the rich social application of the apparently atomistic Christianity of Søren Kierkegaard; indeed, there is a not-quite-as-equally rich body of sociological thought relating to his understanding of Christianity and the self. These thinkers often draw on A Literary Review (especially Jacques Ellul, who had found the foundations of his thought within two paragraphs of that eccentric piece of social commentary), an attempt by the melancholic Dane to make his understanding of the individual explicitly clear in the context of the other and then this relation between the self and the other clear in relation to both society and God.

“[Those of the Present Age] shut themselves out from... the rebirth of passion by talkativeness. Suppose that such an age has invented the swiftest means of transportation and communication, has unlimited combined financial resources: how ironic that the velocity of the transportation system and the speed of communication stand in an inverse relationship to the dilatoriness of irresolution.”¹⁹

This, in short, is exactly the problem that proceeds from improper relations: a confusion of both actions and teleological goals due to a disorientarion in how we “worship”. For Tyson, the entire endeavour can be viewed as an attempt to consider “what if collective practices of worship are the most basic orientation points within any given sociological life-world?”²⁰ From this point, we must understand what happens in worship and how that can help us understand the error in identity politics that everyone from the anarchist-capitalists, the feminists, the Marxists, and everyone in between have brought us to.

I use the term “worship” cautiously here because the particular meaning that Tyson employs is slightly unusual. Instead of the perceived ritualism and personal relation to a deity (adapt as appropriate for the particular religious tradition you wish to draw upon), Tyson understands worship as the way we establish the “first object” of our lives. From this, “[t]o Kierkegaard, everything else [outside of worship] in life is a derivative function of the sickness or health of the relation of each individual to their first object of worship.”²¹ The absolute relation that underlies our particular worldview shapes the way we see the world as “[i]t does not depend, then, merely upon what one sees, but what one sees depends upon how one sees; all observation is not just a receiving, a discovering, but also a bringing forth, and insofar as it is that, how the observer himself is constituted is indeed decisive.”²² As we bring forth our first object of thought, the primordial lynchpin of our worldview, the way the world “collides” with us changes, we must maintain the objective uncertainty of the subjective individual within the “social matrix” of reality—because this is the point where a commitment is made. This, in short, illustrates in the broadest sense the determining factor between the separate loci in the existence-spheres—our worldview changes, we are ripped from one mode of thought and transplanted into another due to a fundamental change in the first object of our thought and how we relate to it.²³

But what is the error for the non-Christian here? Why is this apparently misdirected “worshipful” attitude of the faithless so problematic for S. K. and Tyson?

“...such identity-constructions cannot generate a source of non-contingent truth and intrinsic meaning within the soul’s own inwardness by herself. So every externally mediated object that is a mirror for self-worship fails to relate the soul to her genuine source of being, a source that is beyond the ego and that no external mediation can produce.”

Here, we’ve cut to the bone—the identification of the first object as contingent exposes the latent despair (understood as the categorical possibility for despair, where the individual is in the existential possibility of finding their worldview as collapsing into incongruity with reality as such) in the individual. In the process of existing, our lives express the most basic presuppositions of our subjectivity—the very “I”-ness of my own particular reality cannot be separated from the way that I live my life. Although you will find philosophers who are interested in pursuing the objective (this choice, somehow, is not a subjectively-rooted choice about how to approach the world²⁴—the objectivists remain quiet on this matter!), we find this particular orientation as callous as it is childish. It is an attempt to run away from responsibility into the quiet abstraction of objectivity, of non-subjectivity. We do not surrender the objective information we gain, but we refuse to surrender our subjectivity to that knowledge.

Marx, now stripped of his objectivity, falls into the collapsable category of “first ethics”—just like the feminists, men’s rights activists, the Third Worldists, the white supremacists, the black supremacists, Christian nationalists, etc. All closed systems of thought necessarily lead us back to the central knot: a subjective choice between choices based in and related to contingency, which naturally leads to the identification of in-groups based on an arbitrary metric within contingency. And we suggest, as the most basic problem, this is simply a reflection of the improper first object of thought. A fundamental misunderstanding of the world: first, in attempting a totalising theory of reality; second, in drawing lines that are apparently invisible to all those not within the in-group. We find gnosticism reinvented.

Identity politics and fads

The problem should be clear now: we have a bad habit of absolutely relating to the insecure relativism of history flowing past us. The problem is solved—we merely need to identify the non-relative to relate to. And then we remember that S. K. identified this problem in the 1840s, Jacques Ellul reiterated it in the 50s, and then Tyson did the same in 2008. Yet, here we are: absolutely relating to the relative! Something is amiss.

Remember: history carries with it the temporality of reason, a point that S. K. never departed too far from his Kantian presuppositions.²⁵ Capital-T “Truth” is aligned with being, but being can only relate to the being of the individual; as the individual is temporal, their being is subject to change—the Truth can only be true approximately to their being at a specific “moment”.²⁶ This means that, for the individual that is attempting to think “atemporally” at any point of time, the agent is caught in a temporal coherence that comes along with each wave of contingency. A part of this series of temporal waves, there are internally coherent philosophical frameworks that appear that are incomprehensible to other particular periods, e.g., the Socratic understanding of the immortal soul merely recollecting all knowledge seems bizarre in our modern age of scientific scepticism. As an extension of this, each period comes with its own fads—systems of thought that are very attractive because they are new and offer a great deal of explanatory power due to the process of reanalysis that comes with the newness, a common occurrence with “paradigm shifts”. While S. K. is famous for his critical view of Hegelian thought²⁷, Ellul was constantly concerned about the possibility of “sociological pressures” creeping into analysis, viewing the need for Christians to extricate themselves from sociological currents as key to building a proper Christian message²⁸—it didn’t matter that, e.g., theological Marxism or pragmatism were correct or offered faithful interpretations of scripture, but simply that they offered new and exciting analyses²⁹.

Ellul’s Jesus and Marx is one of the great attempts at anti-syncretic thought—an attempt to clear away the middle terms while well aware that it may fail and fail to escape its own particular faddism.

In this sense, as S. K. identified with the Danish Hegelians, Ellul with the “Christian” “Marxists”, and Hauerwas with the Niebuhrs³⁰, we find that identity politics of all forms are just a new reinvention on a theme: the theme being that we run away from the message of Christ and insist that He fit the philosophical trappings we have made for Him. In an even more embarrassing turn, the errors of the past were at least filtered through interesting paradigms of thought in Hegelianism, Marxism, and pragmatism; now, as a double insult, Christ is asked to play the part of a hyper-masculine³¹ head of the nuclear family who wants for nothing more than to set up a homestead and escape into the “subjective infinitude”³² of quietism without the appropriate disquietism of the call to faith—as if a celibate preacher who had lived His life travelling from one hotbed of sin to the next would have any interest in such a thing.³³ While we might disagree with Fernando Belo or the Niebuhrs, they were at least attempting to share something interesting with the world—now, this cannibalistic group only wants to sell you a course. An innovative approach to the Prosperity Gospel, no doubt.

Christian identity politics is a messy business. A particular passage from a 1916 obscure article lifts my spirit in times like these:

“The adolescent and pastoral Jesus of the Basilica is one thing, the weary, cadaverous Christ of the Gothic another; Angelo makes him muscular, Raphael fleshy; modern art makes his countenance appear more pleasant than convincing. As traditional Messiah, Jesus seems to be the over-fulfillment of prophecy; as moralist he appears too good for all ethical categories; as God, his head rises above the church; as social leader and philanthropist, his spiritual attributes are such as to discourage the enthusiast who tries to drive his Jesus into the dark corner of city life. Both religion and irreligion have held up their little cups which could hold just so much, but the abundant essence of Jesus has scorned their shallow brims and fallen to the earth.”³⁴

Every time we fit Christ into our preconceived philosophical frameworks, we have absolutely related to the relative: the idea of Christ, not Christ Himself. While certain clever philosophers might have insisted this is the best we could ever hope for, I am not quite as happy with this particular defeatism. We have made God into a system of thought, a thesis amongst theses, a quiet admission that all we can do is bang the drums and yoke ourselves to whatever has democratic consent—avoiding our responsibility to the life-long task of building a relationship with the absolute an sich.³⁵

An absolute relation to a lesser thought

Of course, this abstracted metaphysical thought does a lot for undermining the ideological foundations of competing “theories” (in quotes here as Christianity should not be understood as a theory amongst theories, but rather as something distinctly and decisively unique in its transcendence), but it lacks any real and obvious application in real life. At the absolute worst, the Marxists form a party—but what does the Christian anarchist do?

For that, we will analyze the work of both S. K. and Jacques Ellul in their respective works, A Literary Review and Anarchy and Christianity. When we can relatively relate to the relative and absolutely relate to the absolute, then we can attempt to build Christian political responses—in the knowledge that the freedom of Christ offers us a path around the dogmatisms of class analysis, money-based alienation, and the “favoured oppressed”³⁶. This seems an appropriate moment to pause for thought and reflection, so we will continue with “the absolute relation to the absolute” at another time and place. For now, I invite you to deliberate on your own condition, to become the “existing individual”.

1. Christian Anarchy: Jesus' Primacy over the Powers, p. 62, V. Eller

2. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 407, J. Climacus, tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie

3. Capital, vol. I, p. 119, K. Marx

4. “Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialistic and Idealistic Outlook”, K. Marx and F. Engels from The German Ideology, p. 8

5. On Authority, F. Engels

6. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, p. 90, F. Engels

7. “The British Rule in India”, K. Marx, link

8. Or, even worse, to “debunk” Marxism—the vomit-inducing idea is one of the easiest ways to identify philosophy that is not worth engaging with, as a rule of thumb.

9. Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard's Ethics of Responsibility, p. 105, M. Dooley

10. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 109, J. Climacus, tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie

11. My reader, if you stop here, you are a vulgar idealist.

12. Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard's Ethics of Responsibility, p. 94, M. Dooley

13. My reader, if you stop here, you are a Kantian, of sorts.

14. “Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy”, P. Mehl, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 27-28, edited by J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd

15. JP I A1

16. My reader, if you stop here, you have become a Kierkegaardian. Well done, you’ve cured yourself of the childish want for an objective understanding of the self (necessarily subjective) and society (necessarily a collection of subjectivity).

17. E.g., Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 77, S. Kierkegaard, ed. A. Hannay

18. “Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy”, P. Mehl, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 27-28, edited by J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd

19. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 56, S. Kierkegaard, ed. A. Hannay

20. Kierkegaard's Theological Sociology: Prophetic Fire for the Present Age, Kindle location 164, P. Tyson

21. Ibid., Kindle location 407

22. “Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins”, from Three Upbuilding Discourses, 1843 in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 59, S. Kierkegaard

23. “Ontology of Hell: Reflections on Theodor W. Adorno's Reception of Søren Kierkegaard”, M. Martinson, from Literature and Theology, March 2014, vol. 28, no. 1, p. 49—note, my reader, that Adorno phrased this in such a way as to criticise S. K.; I maintain that it is the strongest praise possible coming from the mouth of a man too afraid to abandon his Hegelian fetish for dialectical smoothness.

24. Comment on “Kierkegaard's Attack on Hegel”, M. Weston, from Thought and Faith in the Philosophy of Hegel, p. 145, ed. J. Walker

25. “Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy”, P. Mehl, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 29, ed. J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd

26. The Existentialists and God: Being and the Being of God in the Though of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Tillich, Etienne Gilson, and Karl Barth, p. 26-27, A. C. Cochrane

27. E.g., “It is true, here as everywhere, that if one wants a dogmatic definition today, one must begin by forgetting what Hegel has come up with to help dogmatics.”—The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, p. 34, [V. Haufniensis]

28. Anarchy and Christianity, p. 26 J. Ellul

29. Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, p. 55, J. Ellul

30. “Jesus and the Social Embodiment of the Peaceable Kingdom”, from The Hauerwas Reader, p. 117, S. Hauerwas, ed. J. Berkman and M. Cartwright

31. The irony being the ironic hyper-masculinity cover obscuring the actual hypo-masculinity-in-itself.

32. “To Gain One's Soul in Patience”, from Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1843 in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 165, S. Kierkegaard

33. Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 241, V. Eller

34. “The Pessimism of Christ”, C. G. Shaw, from International Journal of Ethics, Jul., 1916, Vol. 26, No. 4, p. 466

35. “States of Mind in the Strife of Suffering” in Christian Discourses, p. 101, S. Kierkegaard

36. Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, p. 30 J. Ellul