Antisemitism and Christocentrism

Saving "Kierkegaardianism" from Kierkegaard

Oct 06, 2024

Kierkegaard was an antisemite.

This much is unavoidable and we would do well to remember not to attempt to avoid it. Emerging from a particular period of time with a particular worldview does little to excuse our ethical failings when these directly contradict the central necessary core of the Christian faith which S. K. was so bold in upholding out of the quagmire of the contingent rationalisations of the worldly state church. The Hegelianism of his “present age”, which saw Christianity as the perfection of religious superstition into a form which philosophy could adopt in liberal theological purity, the supersession of Judaism in the culture of the time brought with it a renewed, intellectualised antisemitic attitude that mirrored the views of Martin Luther with a new sagacity and sophistication. Despite the apparent (and often exaggerated) anti-Hegelianism that was central to S. K.’s thought, this antisemitic undercurrent went from an initial appropriation of the myth of the Wandering Jew as the fate of humanity in liberal society to the gnashing of a violent hatred which is so shocking in our modern day. It seems that, while antisemitism was very much a flavour of the period, S. K. had also taken it up with the vigour so clearly present in his theo-philosophical musings.

Because of that, my reader, I intend to follow S. K. in one way and oppose him in another: do not expect to find apologetics here which absolve him of his antisemitic worldview. Least of all should we expect to find cowardly “product of his time” defences here, as if they could offer us any recourse when taken into our particular subjectivity or in the context of S. K.’s project of sloughing off the flabby excess of his contemporaneity in an effort to absolutely relate to the absolute. If there is a figure who we can forgive less for their explicit or latent antisemitic worldview, it is our dear Søren. For the sake of intellectual integrity, however, it is important to identify two particular “antisemitisms” within his work:

i) a dialectical opposition to a particular understanding of Jewish theology, especially within the latter half of his authorial career, and

ii) a pronounced hatred of the Jewish essence, which S. K. saw as irremovably present within all Jewish people

In regards to (i), my reader, I intend to explore the role that S. K.’s perception of Judaism as “worldly” played in his Christocentric theology and whether it is possible to unyoke what is for so many people an impressive and significant contribution to Christian ideas from the blasphemous stain of antisemitism. First, we will explore to what extent S. K. opposed Judaism on theological grounds and how these have been interpreted as antisemitic (including by those antisemites who were inspired by his words). Towards this end goal, we will explore how S. K.’s Christocentrism leads us into an awkward space where antisemitism (and, for what it is worth, Islamophobia) does seem to be a natural byproduct of his goal—the role of Christ in acting as an epistemological strength for the Christian teaching at the behest of Judaism and Islam.

Any attempt to diminish the presence of (ii) within his body of work would be inappropriate in an age where “[n]o statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children”, as Greenberg so cuttingly presented the case1. Indeed, an assessment of the overall between these two currents must admit that there are many “points of contact”, where his passionate antisemitic orientation gave rise to a seemingly innocent theological method. In that way, this is written in the awareness that this distinction will not offer any comfort to those who have experienced antisemitism under the banner of S. K.’s thought or any other circumstance—to some extent, Hirsch, Heidegger, and Schmitt were correct in their conclusions about parts of S. K.’s work. In part II, I will lay out S. K.’s theological opposition to Judaism and highlight the areas where his antisemitism either colours or is coloured by his reflections.

I also intend to compare these pulsating veins of antisemitic thought within S. K.’s work in part III of this series and show how they are widely inconsistent with his anti-essentialist anthropology via the use of Walsh Perkins’ feminist reading of The Sickness Unto Death2. In this sense, as the subtitle of this essay notes, we intend to save Kierkegaard’s thought from Kierkegaard’s thoughts—while, at the same time, avoiding the temptation of apologetics or hand-waving that is so tempting with admirable figures of history.

In part IV, after we have explored the extent of S. K.’s essentialist antisemitism, we will navigate a way forward through the sin of antisemitism into a genuine Christocentric theology that adheres to S. K.’s own anti-essentialism. You and I, my reader, will have to look at theology in the wake of the Holocaust, in that very presence of burning children, in order to find the thoughts which would unyoke the Christian message from the hatred of the Jewish people.

For a short taste of the antisemitism that sat in the back of S. K.’s presuppositional mind, see the below interview with Kierkegaard scholar Roe Fremstedal:

For a glassy-eyed, would-be “Left-facing” existing individual like myself, these words serve to bring me back to the ground. As he would have been all too ready to admit, S. K. was by no means a perfect individual and possibly no better than a drunken peddler3; indeed, it is always the message of Christ that sits beyond S. K.’s work, apophatically.

The division between Christian ideas and Jewish ideas paints a very grim image of S. K.’s approach to theology, especially within the context that similar divisions were made by Nazi theologians towards the end of releasing Christ and His message from the Jewish roots that grounded Him within His own culture. Although we might question the separate intentions of these two separate parties, the knot of agreement—that Judaism brings with it a particular understanding of scripture that is now known to be false or, at least, no longer relevant—makes for uncomfortable reading. In a sense, we can see the prying fingers of liberal theology giving way to both this collapse in S. K.’s thought and Nazi theology: because we live in an age of reason, we can do away with the unnecessary aspects of scripture. “Reason shall serve as the basis of our exegesis, dismissing all those meddling inconveniences handed to us by historical understandings As a cruel mirror image of the (presumably well-intentioned) liberatory readings of the Bible which hold the Sermon on the Mount as the be-all and end-all of scripture to navigate around the inconveniences of the Law, the Jewish roots of both Christ and Paul were dismissed as historical inconveniences.

As Barth, empowered by the aspects of S. K.’s theology that were not infected with the liberal theological tendency to rip the spirit out of the heart of the Word, would later emphasize “Jesus Christ [who] is the Son of God and the Son of David... [and] the radiance of God's majesty... was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”4, the Jewish roots of Christ are necessary for understanding Him in any way. There is no theology without recognition of Christ qua both the same and at once Jesus the Jewish man and Christ the God in His actual existence: Christ Jesus, the God-Man. Ironically, this desire for the actual image of Christ was so important for S. K.—to think we could divorce that from Judaism outright, superseded totally, seems inconsistent with his thought and a worrying but educating reminder that we are always blind to our biases, trapped within certain spheres that history hands us.

Towards that end, some of S. K.’s most antisemitic sentiments must be given light—the wound must be torn open, exposed to sunlight and seen in its cowardly indecency. We remember S. K.’s own devotional words: “God creates everything out of nothing—and everything God is to use he first turns to nothing.”5 Only by reducing him to nothing in the eyes of a world which knows the horrors that antisemitic hatred brought about, a world that S. K. did not predict, can we salvage him from the wreckage.

Piety on S. K.’s impiety

I quote M. G. Piety, a fantastic Kierkegaard scholar, at length:

I ran across a couple of articles on Søren Kierkegaaard from the beginning of the 1940s while doing research for a book about a Danish nurse in the German Red Cross during the Second World War. To stumble on article on Kierkegaard was in itself not surprising. What was surprising was that they were in National Socialisten [the National Socialist] and Jul i Norden [Jul in the North], two strongly anti-Semitic publications associated with the Nazi party in Scandinavia.
“Søren Kierkegaard is without question the greatest genius the Danish nation has produced” began one of the articles. Moreover, continues the author, “his writings contain the best instructions for the liberation of the Danish people from the spirit of Judaism which has come increasingly to dominate Denmark and which he saw himself as called by providence to fight. One could thus to this extent be justified in asserting that Søren Kierkegaard was the first Danish National Socialist.”6
The author would not have been able to support such a claim, even if he had done extensive research, given that Kierkegaard was vehemently opposed to every form of both nationalism and socialism. On the other hand, there is something to the claim that Kierkegaard wanted to free the Danish people–or preferably all of Christendom–from “the Jewish spirit” which he, like the Nazis, viewed as materialistic, and which he increasingly portrayed as essentially in opposition to Christianity.7

A minimal defence was offered here towards the end that S. K. could neither be viewed as either a nationalist or a socialist (although, of course, the extent that socialism could be viewed as a suitable term for what would emerge in Germany is laughable and only useful to propagandists and “the Crowd”). This, of course, didn’t stop fascist and fascist-adjacent figures from adopting S. K.’s work as representing the viewpoint of their politics.

However, something more interesting comes to the surface—the contradictory interpretations of S. K.’s work, something that I have noted before.

Illustrating the First Step

The deliberation between these points of the existential freedom in Christ and the essential sinfulness of Judaism should serve as an irreconcilable gap to vault—it is not clear that S. K.’s methodology would deliver us such a particular view of Judaism. S. K.’s hardest conclusions in this area are simply irreconcilable with his body of work as a whole. However, to establish some of the hateful antisemitic writings in the authorship, we might begin at the end in the Attack:

For it was blood-money Judas received for Christ's blood—and these thousands and millions were also blood-money, which was procured for Christ's blood and by betraying Christianity and transforming it into worldliness. Only that—is it not true, thou shopkeeper's soul clad in velvet?—only that the case of Judas is almost laughable, so that on internal grounds one is nearly tempted to doubt if it is historically true, that a Jew—and that is what Judas was after all— that a Jew had so little understanding of money that for thirty pieces of silver he was ready (if one would put it so) to dispose of such a prodigious money value as Jesus Christ represented, the greatest source of revenue ever encountered in the world, on which a million quadrillions have been realized, to dispose of it for thirty pieces of silver!8

Here, S. K. clearly frames the absurdity of the betrayal motif in the passion as absurd due to the Jewish essence being one which would understand the short-changedness of accepting only 30 pieces of silver for Christ Himself. Outside of the (at first appearances) more sophisticated deconstruction of Christianity and Judaism from a theological perspective elsewhere in the corpus, it appears that S. K. was not above simple stereotyping that ran through his contemporary Denmark and fought against by those who championed religious tolerance (something S. K. opposed for complex and sometimes Romantic reasons…9) such as Grundtvig. This is, by no means, the worst example we find—however, it serves to set the tone for further explorations in the future.

As a prolegomenon to a broader exploration of S. K.’s reflections on Judaism, it is important to note the actual knot of contention—to the extent that S. K. can be considered a virtue ethicist10 who attempted to yoke the abstract Aristotelian notion of eudaemonia with the concrete but necessarily contradictory object of Christ, we must say that the role of following in Christ’s footsteps, the imitatio Christi11, was key to understanding the oeuvre overall. Judaism, of course, lacks this particular figure and also any other analogous figure of such lofty standards and certainty of perfection. Although not necessarily antisemitic to point this out, it is easy to imagine—if not outright point to obvious and sometimes worryingly influential voices—that have offered this point—the difference between these two faiths in the infinitizing role of Christ for Christians.

But where does the position leave us? Christ’s example qua mediator (a theological point built upon by a variety of post-Kierkegaardian theologians to construct the basis of anti-liberal theology, including Barth, Brunner, and Bonhoeffer) is then central to a doctrine that stands against the world and everything within it—leaving Judaism as something “of the world”. From S. K.’s perspective, it appears that the ideals of the status quo, e.g., the state, the nation, the finite, will be taken up by Jews on the grounds that their faith is the highest stage of the ethical12. This has a bipartite implication:

i) Christianity and Christianity alone has the strength through Christ to rise out of “the ethical” of das Sittlichkeit, the Hegelian social order, and Jews would only ever be able to become members of a given society (although this is, of course, a staggeringly different kind of essentialism to the usual image of Jews as subverters and wreckers of non-Jewish societies that are or were prevalent amongst antisemites), and

ii) As Jews stand against those values embodied in the actual life of Christ (the infinite)13, then it becomes impossible for them to rise out of their despair around their secular condition and are “driven by revenge”14 to the extent that only the externality of scapegoating can soothe their awareness of their sin.

It is hopefully needless to say that this image of Judaism is, at once, eccentric in ways that antisemitism usually isn’t, but still carries with it antisemitic implications. In regards to (i), the tripartite gallery of Jewish heroes—Moses, Abraham, and Job—are presented as carrying with them a failure to capture the freedom and perfection of Christ15 due to their status as sinners before God—Moses qua a murderer (Exodus 2:11-12) and impertinent (Deuteronomy 3:23-28); Abraham qua presumptive (Genesis 16); Job qua “the ethical” who needed God to rip his life away from him before he could see the “ethical-religious”. This image, whilst holding valuable theological insight, does carry with it a brutishness that needs further clarification—particularly as to whether S. K.’s supersessionist perspective was i) a useful illustration of the changes in scripture and ii) an accurate understanding of Jewish faith. As Buber and Levinas would point out, most would say that it is incomplete at best16.

The height of Judaism is then only “the ethical”: it is possible to become like Abraham, Job, and Moses in that they were sinners but had faith that allowed for transcendence—much like a Christian believer, who can become anew in faith. But Christ is beyond the believer and acts as the infinite guilt17 and object that leads to an infinite debt18 on the part of the Christian, a release from responsibility into the liberty of faith—the impossible becomes possible through the example of Christ and the cycle of sin, repentance, and forgiveness - something Judaism lacks in the context of a Nicht-Gott19. In regards to the deeply “ethical” character of “Christendom”, S. K. saw Christianity’s reversion into parody as signalling a return to “the father’s faith”—it had acquired again the characteristics of Judaism20. Here, where the individual is most ready to lean upon the Old Testament in isolation from the Word to transform it into an ethical or legal doctrine, says S. K., we find the faithfulness of the Jew and the faithlessness of the Christian—they are opposed to one another, necessarily21.

To leave things here, my reader, would risk leaving us with an irreparably antisemitic understanding of Christocentric theology, especially that type that emerged following S. K.’s work. However, we shall—with one small closing remark.

But to pull back on the dialectic, it is important to share some sentiments from Lindsay’s Reading Auschwitz with Barth: the Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology—that, despite the fact that our differences in theology are plainly apparent and deeply divisive, Christians and Jews are still held in the hope that God’s promise shall come true. Like the good Kierkegaardian I am22, I, of course, insist that Karl Barth was far closer to S. K.’s thought than he ever realised—especially in his latter days when he thought he had disavowed himself of the existential musings of a man who wanted above all to be received as a Christian23. In that sense, this apology for the reconciliation of Christianity and Judaism that flows from Barth’s particular view of theology seems appropriate for a reflection on what the future might hold for these peoples both divided and united by a promise.

While S. K. has more than a little antisemitism in his work—however, his influence is still drawn upon by Jewish thinkers and towards liberatory Jewish ends.

I then ask you to do one thing for me: instead of the usual behaviour enforced by “the Crowd”, where a single sin is taken as the eternal righteousness to sentence a single figure to rejection, I ask you to hold onto S. K. here. While his antisemitism is abhorrent to our modern sensibilities, it is not enough to surrender the body of his work to the obscurity of discarded history. We have already attempted to show that an ardent monarchist could have something valuable to say to those who would hold the liberatory quality of Christianity in the highest—I suggest we attempt to do the same here.

Kierkegaardian Reflections

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