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Living in the Light of Religious Ideals1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2011

Clare Carlisle
Clare Carlisle
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Extract

As a ‘poet of the religious’, Søren Kierkegaard sets before his reader a constellation of spiritual ideals, exquisitely painted with words and images that evoke their luminous beauty. Among these poetic icons are ideals of purity of heart; love of the neighbour; radiant self-transparency; truthfulness to oneself, to another person, or to God. Such ideals are what the ‘restless heart’ desires, and in invoking them Kierkegaard refuses to compromise on their purity – while insisting also that they are impossible to attain. It is the human condition which makes them impossible, and he is willing to describe this in dogmatic terms as original sin – sin being the refusal and loss of God, and thus also the loss of a self that has its ontological ground in its relationship to God – but he is more concerned to explore it in psychological terms. The human condition is for Kierkegaard characterised not merely by ignorance, but by wilful self-deception.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 68: Philosophy and Religion , July 2011 , pp. 245 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2011

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References

2 Kierkegaard, Søren, The Sickness Unto Death, tr. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 100Google Scholar.

3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, tr. Hollingdale, R. J. and Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage, 1967), §585Google Scholar.

4 Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche, tr. Krell, David Farrell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979–87), vol. III, 206Google Scholar.

5 Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, tr. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 15; 51Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., 16.

7 Ibid., 42; 47.

8 Ibid., 52–3.

9 Kierkegaard, Søren, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, tr. Steere, Douglas V. (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), 31; 218Google Scholar.

10 See Rumble, Vanessa, ‘Love and Difference: The Christian Ideal in Kierkegaard's Works of Love’ in Elsebet Jegstrup (ed.) The New Kierkegaard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

11 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 22.

12 See ibid., 162.

13 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, 50–51.

14 Ibid., 39.

15 See the Foreword to Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols.

16 See Cupitt, Don, Above Us Only Sky (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 2008), 15Google Scholar.

17 See Luther, Martin, The Bondage of the Will, tr. Packer, J. I. and Johnston, O. R. (London: James Clarke, 1957), 158–62Google Scholar.

18 Rumble, ‘Love and Difference: The Christian Ideal in Kierkegaard's Works of Love’ in The New Kierkegaard, 164.

19 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, 53. He is commenting on James 4:8.

20 Kierkegaard, Søren, Works of Love, tr. V., Howard and Hong, Edna H. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 165Google Scholar.

21 Kierkegaard, Søren, The Concept of Anxiety, tr. Thomte, Reidar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 18Google Scholar.

22 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 104.

23 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 40.