Life! Life! From the Father of Lights!

Against crowd-formation and self-involved pessimism

Schopenhauer, in his dreary hermitude, a fantasy of the infinite confined to the pitifully finite, is most infamous for inverting Leibniz into the first truth of pessimism: “this is the worst of all possible worlds”¹. Turned inside-out by a world that seems to, from at least one perspective, enjoy our suffering, the German had taken to felling the metaphysical lie that had haunted humanity for millennia—he refused to allow his cantankerous and disgruntled view of reality to be dismissed by metaphysical musings and theological imaginings. He, of course, went on to engage in his own highly speculative metaphysics, but he had succeeded in knocking down the breakwater which had held back the tide from the piddling, cloistered reflections of the now collapsing security of Christendom.

But what Schopenhauer failed to do was move past of his possibly unrecognised, brutal dismissal of a modern orthodox Kantianism: by noting Kant's failure to find “ground” for his theory of the human self, we find that his ethical view of self-recognition in discovery and reflection floats free over the “70,000 fathoms of the deep”²—the will influences our rationality and the will cannot be undermined. Kant is a metaphysician who has tricked himself into thinking he has found the comfort of reality once again; he flies over creation but fails to describe what he is, only ever grasping at what he thinks he is. The gap, while not necessarily wide, leaves us in philosophical insecurity.³

But this isn't the only way. Contemporaneously with the irate German, a Melancholic Dane had also realised that we hang high above creation if we let ourselves be carried off into the self-involved subjectivity of “imagination”⁴ or the altogether more dangerous objectivity of “materialism”⁵. Instead of starting with "the universe" or “human history”, our heroic malcontent dared to believe what that wise man from antiquity said:

“One must first learn to know oneself before knowing anything else. Only when the person has inwardly understood himself, and then sees the way forward on his path, does his life acquire repose and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, fateful traveling companion—that life’s irony which appears in the sphere of knowledge and bids true knowing begin with a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing.”⁶

The agent qua contingent and possible being, bound up in the necessity of his own life, finds himself not drowning in these 70,000 fathoms over the deep, but miraculously forced by his own free will to walk on the surface—through the help of his Messiah, he walks on water by first knowing himself, his surroundings, and his propensity for “imagination”. Alive in spirit, the miracle of free will and the abomination of the cross are realised in the agent’s actions: this, here, my reader, is the corrective for Western philosophy in toto! Not that God descended to the lowly status of a man, not that God empowers the one who turns to Him to listen, not that miracles are possible for those with eyes to see!—no! The corrective is that truth is found in a relationship; therefore, to start with the “view from nowhere”, the perspective-agnostic adoption of substance, is a serious error. I begin with the agent, the you, my reader, to uncover the offence of Christianity, the illumination of the Father of Lights.⁷

From the cross, we descend to the crossroads—Hercules stands at the Skilleveien and is compelled to act by the dizziness of freedom⁸ itself:

“I think of the occasions in my later life when I stood at the crossroads [Skilleveien], when my soul was matured in the hour of decision”.⁹

“As soon as one can get a man to stand at the crossroads [Skilleveien] in such a position that there is no recourse but to choose, he will choose the right”.¹⁰

Here, the temptation is to think too quickly: at the crossroads, we have the ability to choose—there are various roads, potentially infinite roads, that allow us to do both the greatest goods and the most horrendous evils, that allow us to set upon the task of becoming both who we are and who we will be¹¹. This is all very well-trodden ground, albeit dragged down into the mud by those who still hold to a self-abstracting understanding of a vulgar determinism. We won’t waste time engaging with this, my reader—because there is something altogether far more interesting that appears in this very scene, but is often missed by those too willing to choose.

What Hercules¹² fails to recognise in his choice and what the Christian must grasp with both hands on the road to sanctification is that there is a rupture in their reality that makes them aware that they, no—you, my reader, your reality has been ruptured at some point in the past. You recognise that there is a life where you were “as such”, a victim of mere causality and swept up into the movement of necessity as necessity moved to sweep you up, and a position, now, in this freeing moment, in this dizzying reality where Christ takes your to pull you out of the water creeping into your lungs, there is a recognition of choice and that choice is yours. This rupture in life, where life becomes possible by way of your new awareness of your reliance on something altogether Other, something altogether different from what had come before, is where we find the Father of Lights shining into our lives:

“Every good and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of variation. These words are so comprehensible, so simple, and yet how many were they who really understood them, really understood that they were a commemorative coin more magnificent than all the world's treasure, but also a small coin that is usable in the daily affairs of life.”¹³

There is no darkness in the “Father of lights”, but plenty within humans¹⁴—and only by recognising one’s darkness, one’s sin, one’s reliance on the very atonement that made sin not only possible but also blotted it out, can we direct ourselves towards the light with the help of this Wholly Other. When the individual qua individual, illuminated by the unchangeableness of the Father of Lights, sees himself as himself for the first time, they will see what Schopenhauer was too afraid to admit: at the moment of metanoia, when the threat of total collapse looms over the Christian, there is a realisation that the old self, this “old Adam” that needs to be cast out, was the worst of all possible I’s. My life, when identified in this way, is the worst that I ever was—and now begins the path to both being and becoming a self, through the recognition of sin.

“...the ‘migration’ undertaken [from seemingly theological reflections to seemingly anthropological reflections] by Kierkegaard entails a homecoming of hamartiology into Christology and soteriology; sin must be understood as that from which Christians are saved, even while the offer of such salvation, mysteriously enough, also opens up possibilities for new and more devastating sin.”¹⁵

Sin itself is the quality which allows us to recognise ourselves before God, but we could never even recognise sin without the help of God to see the unseen.¹⁶ Aware of our guilt, our always already present guilt that is only real in the moment of appropriation; aware of our indebtedness, our always already present indebtedness that is only in the moment of appropriation. This is when the possibility of choice, real choice, a choice where we are not merely pushed along by the waves of necessity, where we walk on water through the ability to hold out a hand in the quiet admission that we cannot do it alone—this, my reader, is freedom, and freedom requires the collapse into the arms of this Wholly Other first in order that we might be pulled out of the storming tempest we dangerously sink into.

“Just as the bird that became exhausted crossing the ocean sinks down with feeble wing strokes toward the sea and now can neither live nor die, so it is also with the self-tormentor who becomes exhausted on the way across the distance between today and the next day. To live is to exist today; when one is dead, there is no more today. But the self-tormentor lives, yet not today; he does not live until tomorrow, yet he goes on living day after day.”¹⁷

Here, you and I are ready to become Hercules, the heroic romantic figure that is a nothingness in comparison to the One Who Weeps. In the moment of choice, where the flow of necessity would have us do some particular thing that returns the disrhythmic beat of its various drums to a self-deceptive insistence of polyrhythm. Against the powerful, incisive, “temperature-raising” collision of another breaking into our lives, upsetting the rhythm that our self-recognition as sinful and duty-bound provides us, the actors of the “gift and task”¹⁸ of a God-given life, we stand at the crossroads and must choose for ourselves.

Christianity, in this way, is first and foremost a matter of breaking up “the Crowd”, of dismissing contingency in the name of necessity, of acting out the impossible in a world which restricts and “shuts up” the possible¹⁹. In this sense, the most radical political stance available, the one that first and foremost Christ called us to take upon ourselves, to bear as our own, is the stance that calls for the quiet conservativism of self-responsibility, as the one gifted a life and tasked to live it, and the radicalism of proceeding unimpressed by those who demand our obedience. Father! Illuminate the darkness in me so that I can see through the crowd and follow you faithfully!

Now that you have understood the ethical-religious, turn to the aesthetic:

1. The World as Will and Representation, supplement to the 4th book, “On the Vanity and Suffering of Life”, p. 2222, A. Schopenhauer

2. Works of Love, p. 363, S. Kierkegaard

3. The Passion of Possibility: Studies on Kierkegaard‘s Post-metaphysical Theology, p. 7, I. U. Dalferth

4. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 21, S. Kierkegaard

5. “Every Good Gift and Every Perfect Gift is from Above II”, from Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1843 in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 145-146 S. Kierkegaard

6. JP AA:12

7. “Every Good and Every Perfect Gift is From Above”, from Two Upbuilding Discourses in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 39, S. Kierkegaard; “The Changelessness of God”, from The Moment and Late Writings, p. 272, S. Kierkegaard

8. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, p. 61, [V. Haufniensis]

9. Either/Or, vol. II, p. 157, ed. [V. Eremita]

10. Ibid., p. 168

11. Søren Kierkegaard's Christian Psychology, Kindle location 647, C. S. Evans

12. JP AA:12

13. “Every Good and Every Perfect Gift is From Above”, from Two Upbuilding Discourses in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 39, S. Kierkegaard

14. “The Changelessness of God”, from The Moment and Late Writings, p. 272, S. Kierkegaard

15. “Sin: Leaping and Sliding and Mysteries Pointing to Mysteries”, J. A. Mahn, from Clark T & T Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, p. 265, ed. A. P. Edwards and D. J. Gouwens

16. As is so often the case, G. K. Chesterton’s insistence that sin is clearly seen by opening up a newspaper is the journalist showing his theological sloppiness. When the world opens a newspaper, they see nothing of the sort—possibly a horror, possibly a frivolous triviality to express a sentimental weakness over, possibly an empty nothingness that doesn’t even attract our attention. We are disengaged from sin unless we are engaged with our sin, I with my sin and you with your sin; there is no other way to understand how you and I have harmed creation but through recognising that sin entered the world again through you and I.

17. "The Cares of the Pagans" in Christian Discourses, p. 79, S. Kierkegaard

18. "Preface", from Four Upbuilding Discourses in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 107, S. Kierkegaard

19. SV1 XI 17, quoted in ““Out with It!”: the Modern Breakthrough, Kierkegaard, and Denmark”, B. H. Kirmmse, from The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p. 20