All Out Attack!
On S. K.'s "Attack" on Christendom
Between the years of 1854 and 1855, a single man—noted for his staunch commitment to that single individual, his endless disdain to the “chatter” of journalism, and his expansive, almost mystical commitment to Jesus Christ against the suffocating “mass object” of society—took his stand against the church of his fatherland in a searing tirade of theological fury. One of the central targets of this “attack”, Bishop Hans Lassen Martensen, was a noted career-clergyman, a Hegelian, and an altogether respected bourgeois theologian who had long acted as a foil for the work of our tragic hero’s quest to understand the answer to the question: “what does it mean to be a Christian in the bosom of Christendom?”1 From the perspective of the belligerent, it was quite clear that Martensen had no idea at all—and, indeed, wasn’t even aware that it was a question worth asking.
This man, if it is not already clear, was Søren Kierkegaard, an individual largely still misunderstood by the prevailing winds of academia that doesn’t explicitly bear the title “Kierkegaardian”. His efforts, the quietist product of two long years of intense writing hidden from the gawping maw of bourgeois Copenhagen’s demand for new literature, had followed an intense and creative period—evading categorisation, he danced between literature, philosophy, and theology in a way that possibly only his atheist counterpart to the South in Friedrich Nietzsche has otherwise managed, frequently publishing multiple books in the same year (and even, occasionally, on the same day!) that often acted as a living dialectical dance between two perspectives that we might find lacking. After this retreat, his attempt to make sense of Christ’s message in the face of the “liberated church” was met with furious outrage, scorn, limited approval, confusion, misunderstanding (both willful and otherwise), and a final testament to his oeuvre that would stand as both a confusing break from his carefully crafted artworks and a radicalised intensification of a man who was in the death throes of his time.
Deontological Anarchy
While the history of his Danish and wider European reception is an interesting one, it is not the central aim for this serial study of these works. His commitment to what he perceived to be guidance at the core of Christ’s message outlives the particular environment in which he launched himself into battle—it is a radical re-evaluation of the Christian faith as captured by the paganism of Christendom, emerging from a semi-Lutheran, semi-Anabaptist position and filled with all the piss and vinegar of mid-to-late 19th-century Pietism.
In this sense, I plan to work through S. K.’s final writings in order to identify the knots—or, more appropriately, the knots—that he pulled out from under the comforting, withering corpse of bourgeois Christendom and gave them the air they needed, the air which forced that single individual in the moment of the offence to choose: either we go as we are, caught in the malaise of faith poorly understood and even more poorly practiced or we surrender all claims to Christendom and merely take what we need as sojourners out into the world.
Attack!
As such, this serial investigation begins here: as a warning.
Often, S. K.’s bloody and violent rhetoric can be mistaken for a thesis far more “actively revolutionary” than his intended meaning, far less revolutionary in the sense he did mean, and often without the accompaniment of the broader corpus. This becomes especially pernicious when we find the helpful pointers that S. K. had left—seemingly intentionally—for us to discover in his journals. As always, the collections of relevant excerpts in the Hongs editions of his work are a treasure trove of nuance and rising complexity, but always allowing us to return to the simple line of investigation that haunts S. K.’s work as a whole: “what does it mean to be a Christian in the bosom of Christendom?”
“[I]f what one sees all over Europe is Christendom, then I propose to start here in Denmark to list the price for being Christian in such a way that the whole concept—state church, official appointments, livelihood—bursts open.”2
“Radical interpreters” of S. K., i.e., those who are prepared to grant his “attack” authority inasmuch as it coincides with their own goals, have often taken him to be an ardent enemy of Christianity in this violent flurry—however, this really isn’t the case. Despite my own unashamed anarchist leanings, S. K. was altogether a conservative-if-not-occasionally-reactionary thinker who looked at democracy, the free press, and growing liberalisation as indicators of a culture of nihilism sweeping—no, successfully having swept!—across Denmark and Europe at large. In the domain of politics, it did not matter what was said, only that everyone was saying it; in the domain of thought, it did not matter what was written, only that everyone was reading it; in the domain of ethics, it did not matter what people acted out, only that someone at some point in history had acted it out and, therefore, it was possible to align one’s self with that virtuous figure and claim idealistic protection.
With that in mind, we begin our journey into the attack—S. K.’s own journal, titled Øieblikket [The Instant]. This caustic, challenging, and powerful collection of essays that came from the hand of a dead man walking3 provides us not a framework for a Christian anarchism or a set of principles to absent-mindedly adopt as our own, but a staunch and serious critique of the Christianity of modernity against the Christianity of the New Testament4. And from this, we shall plan to become judged as Christians and as Christian anarchists—not by a high-minded and self-congratulatory thumb-biter sat in the front pew, but from a man who had earnestly given himself nowhere to turn but into the uncompromising commandment of the God-Man. An essay-by-essay assessment of S. K.’s final gift to the world and the negative contours of a Christian anarchism for those of us still here today.
“Thou plain man! The Christianity of the New Testament is infinitely high; but observe that it is not high in such a sense that it has to do with the difference between man and man with respect to intellectual capacity, etc. No, it is for all. Everyone, absolutely everyone, if he absolutely wills it, if he will absolutely hate himself, will absolutely put up with everything, suffer everything (and this every man can if he will)—then is this infinite height attainable to him.”5
Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 296 V. Eller
JP VI, 6444
S. K. would not live to see all of the essays written in his period of solitude make it to publishing, almost prophetically passing away just as his profile was returning to the fever pitch of infamy which the theorist of “the offense” presumably both enjoyed and detested at once.
Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 32 V. Eller; "My task" from The Instant, no. 10, from Attack upon "Christendom", p. 287, S. Kierkegaard
“My task” from The Instant, no. 10, from Attack upon "Christendom", p. 287, S. Kierkegaard