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Kierkegaard, MacDonald, and Universalism

SK Universalism quote

I wrote earlier about how I had recently discovered a thinker, George MacDonald (1824-1905), whose views were very similar to Kierkegaard’s. What I don’t know is whether MacDonald was familiar with Kierkegaard’s work, and if so, to what extent. My post on Kierkegaard’s early reception in Germany provides evidence to support that MacDonald likely had at least some exposure to Kierkegaard’s works, both in German translation and via reviews and responses to those translations in German theological journals. 

I still haven’t had time to do any research on the extent of MacDonald’s exposure to Kierkegaard. That would require tracking down which books MacDonald personally owned, which books and periodicals would have been available to him in the libraries he used, and going through all his correspondence in search of any mention of Kierkegaard. I did, however, stumble across a reference in the second volume of MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons that I believe provides further support for the view that MacDonald may have been influenced by Kierkegaard. The sermon in question is entitled “The Word of Jesus on Prayer.” “Convince me,” protests MacDonald’s imaginary interlocutor, “that prayer is heard, and I shall know. Why should the question admit of doubt? Why should it require to be reasoned about? We know that the wind blows: why should we not know that God answers prayer?’ 

MacDonald replies, “What if God does not care to have you know it at second hand?”

Kierkegaard scholars will immediately recognize not merely the expression, “at second hand,” but also the precise sense in which MacDonald uses it here, as identical to Kierkegaard’s use of it in Philosophical Crumbs and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  

My first thought, actually, was that this philosophical-theological use of the expression “at second hand” might actually have a biblical origin. I did a word search on both the King James Version and the Revised Version (to which MacDonald makes frequent reference in his writings) of the Bible, but could not find it in either version. That doesn’t preclude, of course, that both Kierkegaard and MacDonald got the expression from some third source independently of each other, so if any reader knows of such a source, I would be very much in your debt if you would share it with me. 

The question of the relation between Kierkegaard and MacDonald raises another interesting issue. MacDonald was a universalist. Was Kierkegaard? I don’t mean to suggest that MacDonald would have gotten his universalism from Kierkegaard, because if Kierkegaard was a universalist, that is far from obvious. There are scholars who appear to think he was, and there are places in Kierkegaard’s works that suggest he may have had universalist leanings. Kierkegaard famously says, for example, in Crumbs that if a person did not receive the condition for understanding the truth from the god (i.e., Christ) in this life, “[i]f they met each other in another life, this teacher would again be able to give the condition” (Crumbs, p. 95). Since the “condition” in question is faith, the implication is that those who lack faith, for whatever reason, are not damned to hell for eternity, but will have multiple chances to attain it. Kierkegaard may even have believed that the faithless would continue to be presented with such chances until, finally, they did receive it.

The difficulty with this interpretation, apart from its apparent reliance on the doctrine of reincarnation, is that the passage in question continues “[b]ut one who had once received it [but lost it again] would be a stranger to him,” because “[t]he condition was something entrusted, for which the receiver would always be required to give an account” (Crumbs, p. 95). That doesn’t mean that someone who had not had faith in this life would be damned to hell, but it does have ominous implications for those who had faith in this life and then lost it. 

There are multiple references to hell in Kierkegaard’s writings (though, interestingly, exponentially more references to hell in the commentaries on Kierkegaard’s writings in the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter than in the writings themselves). Even that doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that Kierkegaard believed in eternal damnation because MacDonald also refers occasionally to hell, though as a place of corrective rather than retributive punishment. 

A casual search I did on the online edition of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter was not encouraging for those of us who would like to think of Kierkegaard as a universalist. 

I discovered a place in Kierkegaard’s journals where he says: “The NT [i.e., New Testament] is clearly based on the view that there is eternal damnation” (JN vol. 9, p. 262).

It’s possible, of course, to argue that Kierkegaard did not feel compelled to agree with everything in the New Testament.

“In an article in Nordisk Kirketidende,” Kierkegaard writes, “Fenger from Slotsbjergbye wrote affirming the eternity of punishment in hell and scoffing at the Christians who imagine themselves to be Christian without having heaven-hell. From a Christian point of view he is right” (JN vol. 11: Part 2, p. 345, emphasis added.)

The rest of the entry goes on to argue that there is insufficient concern among Christians for the situation of those who may be damned to hell for eternity and that Fenger was himself among those whose concern seemed insufficient. It is conceivable, of course, that Kierkegaard was simply pointing out that, if there were a hell to which God damned anyone eternally, as so many Christians believe, then Christians should be far more concerned with the spiritual situation of their fellow man then they tend to be.

I’m sympathetic to such attempts to preserve the possibility that Kierkegaard was a universalist. It’s not only more morally appealing than the view that some people would be damned to hell forever, it actually seems to cohere better with the basic tenets of Christianity. I’m inclined to agree with Keith DeRose, Allison Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Yale who writes 

Universalism is far from a mere doctrine of barren theology; many, like Paul, find great joy in the belief. Part of the joy some find is in the thought that not only they, but their fellow humans, will, eventually at least, experience everlasting life with Christ. But, like Paul, you may find the joy is focused rather on God, and on how wondrous and complete a victory will be won by the God “who desires everyone to be saved” (I Timothy 2:4). And, on the other side, the non-universalist picture may come to look strangely dim, not exclusively because of the awful fate that awaits some of your fellows on this picture, but because God is deprived of such a complete victory, and, in winning only a partial victory, his desire that everyone be saved will ultimately be frustrated.

(“Universalism and The Bible”).

That is, not only does the idea of eternal damnation fail, I would argue, to cohere with the idea that God is love, it also fails to cohere with the idea that God is omnipotent. God desires that everyone should be saved, but then everyone isn’t saved? So God doesn’t get what God wants? If God truly desires that everyone should be saved as I Timothy 2:4 (among other biblical passages) suggests, but everyone isn’t saved, then God is outright defeated, which suggests that he isn’t omnipotent. 

But if Kierkegaard was a universalist what is one to make of passages such as the two above, as well as the one in Works of Love where Kierkegaard asserts that Christianity “discovered” (opdagede) what the world found ludicrous — the idea of “eternal damnation” (evig Fortabelse)”? Is it possible that such passages were simply hyperbole? Kierkegaard was always concerned with the effect his writings would have on others. Is it possible that he thought the idea of universal salvation just wouldn’t be very helpful to people in that it would incline them to take Christianity less seriously if they felt everyone would eventually be saved? 

There is an intriguing passage in the Hongs’ translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers that suggests that may in fact have been the motivation for his references to eternal damnation (though the fact that some of these references are in his journals and papers poses problems for such a thesis). The passage in question makes a pretty unequivocal statement in favor of the idea of universal salvation. It reads: 

“[W]at the old bishop once said to me is not true — namely, that I spoke as if others were going to hell. No, if I can be said to speak at all of going to hell, then I am going along with them. But I do not believe that; on the contrary, I believe that we will all be saved, I too, and this awakens my deepest wonder” (JP vol. 6, p. 557).

The problem is, I could not find this passage in the new Journals and Notebooks (2007-2019). Nor could I find it in the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (1997-2013) I did find it, however, in Vol. 11, Tome 3, p. 57 of the purportedly superseded Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (1909-1948). Since that provided me with the actual wording of the original Danish I plugged the wording into the search function of the online edition of SKS.

Nothing! 

I will leave open the question of whether the omission of what appears to be an absolutely essential passage from Kierkegaard’s papers from both the new Danish and English editions of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers, editions that purport to be complete, is part of a conspiracy to conceal from the public that Kierkegaard subscribed to a doctrine that most denominations of Christianity (and the Danish Lutheran Church in particular) consider heretical.

One thing is clear, however, both the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter and the new Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks are deeply flawed, as one might guess by comparing how few years were put into their production relative to how many years were put into the production of the older Papirer The new Skrifter was produced in only 16 years and the  Journals and Notebooks, which was based on the Skrifter, was cranked out in only 12 years, as opposed to almost forty years that was put into the production of the Papirer. 

Serious Kierkegaard scholars will need to continue to use the earlier Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers and Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. Fortunately, it is still possible to get your hands on these invaluable works. I found a copy of the Journals and Papers on Ebay for $125.00 for the whole set, and another on abebooks.com for $495.00. I also found a set of the Papirer for 660 euros, and sets do occasionally appear for sale by Danish antiquarians. Both the Journals and Papers and the Papirer will become increasingly hard to find, though, so if you are serious about Kierkegaard scholarship and you do not already own these works, I urge you to buy them now!

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The Forgotten Prayers of Kierkegaard

md30488481705The day I posted “The Decline of Editing,” Kierkegaard scholar Katherine Schuessler of St. Andrews in the UK discovered another discrepancy between the online edition of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, or SKS, and the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, or KJN. Katherine wrote me such a detailed and information email about it that I asked her if she would mind if I turned that email into a guest post. What follows is Katherine’s post. Be sure to check all the links because a pdf of the prayers referred to in the title of this post can be found by clicking on one of the links!

A side project of mine is to document where every prayer Kierkegaard wrote is, including where the different English translations of those prayers are. In looking to trace down a prayer that Perry LeFevre’s collection includes (Pap VII 1 A 131), I found that the SKS’s online Danish version comes from H. P. Barfod’s edition of Kierkegaard’s journals, Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer (1869-81), .

Barfod has been widely criticized for his lack of editing skills. He edited the first three volumes of the Efterladte Papirer and It appears he included everything from Kierkegaard’s papers that appeared to have been written between 1833 an 1847. Not all of this material, made it into the later Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (1909-38). The KJN editors chose to translate Kierkegaard’s Journal JJ as it was in 2015 (or so), before what was judged to be missing material was restored, rather than stitch translations of those missing pages back in.

It’s important for English readers to note that the KJN is not an exact replica of the SKS, insofar as the SKS carries no scruples in cross-referencing to previous editions of Kierkegaard’s journals.

My question is, if the editors of SKS thought the evidence sufficient to establish that the pages in question had originally been part of Kierkegaard’s journals (i.e., confidently of Kierkegaard’s hand) why didn’t the editors of KJN think so too?

If you enjoyed this, stay tuned because Katherine is going to do another guest post!

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The Decline of Editing

The annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion took place last week. As usual, there were three Kierkegaard sessions. I missed the first session, which was on Kierkegaard and “public philosophy.” The other two sessions were excellent. The theme of both sessions, which were sponsored by the Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Group of the AAR, was “Kierkegaard, Contagion, Class, and Corporeal Vulnerability,” so the sessions were timely, with frequent references to the COVID-19 pandemic.

I was particularly interested in “Kierkegaard, Emotional Contagion, and Affective Sociability,” a paper by Wojciech Kaftanski, who is affiliated with The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, a program with which Jeffrey Hanson, another Kierkegaard scholar is also affiliated. (Ironically, The Human Flourishing Program is housed at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Kierkegaard must be spinning in his grave!).

There was one passage of Kaftanski’s paper in which I was particularly interested. The passage is below, followed by the original Danish text.

“Nowadays…efforts are made in the states to bring about this irrationality, the existence of a prodigious monstrosity with many heads or, more correctly and accurately, a thousand-, according to the circumstances, a hundred-thousand-legged monstrosity, the crowd, an irrational enormity, or an enormous irrationality, that nevertheless has physical force, the force of the shout and uproar, also an amazing virtuosity in making everything commensurable with the hands raised to vote or with the decision of fists lifted up for a brawl. This abstraction is an inhuman something whose power is certainly enormous, but whose enormous power cannot be defined humanly but can be more accurately defined as the power of a machine”

“…sørges nutildags i Staterne for, at dette Ufornuftige finder Sted, at der existerer et eventyrligt Monstrum ||—|| med mange Hoveder, eller (rigtigere og) sandere, et Tusind-, efter Omstændighederne , et Hundredetusind-Been: Mængden, et ufornuftigt Uhyre eller et uhyre Ufornuftigt, som dog sandseligt har Magten, Skrigets og Larmens, item en beundringsværdigt Virtuositet it at gjøre Alt commensurabelt for de til Ballotation oprakte Hænders eller de til Slagsmaal opløftede Nævers Afgjørelse. Dette Abstractum er et umenneskeligt Noget, hvis Kraft dog ikke kan bestemmes menneskeligt, men rigtigere som man bestemmer en Maskines, at den har saa og saa mange Hestes Kraft; Mængdens Kraft er altid Hestekraft.” Pap. Vol. IX B24, p. 324.

It took me awhile to find the text because the first reference Kaftanski sent me was incomplete. He very kindly supplied me with the complete reference, however, after I pointed out the problem. I wanted to use the Danish text in something I was writing, so rather than type it all out from the hard my hard copy of the Papirer, I just typed “Hundredetusind-Been: Mængden” into the search field of the online edition of SKS. The online edition of SKS boasts that it is the complete text of everything, both published and unpublished, that Kierkegaard ever wrote, so I was confident that I would find the text there.

I didn’t.

See the screen shot that serves as an illustration for this post. Notice the text in the “Søgeresultater” (i.e., search results) field and the “Ingen resultater funded” (i.e., no results found). That’s right, the text of the passage that is there for all the world to see in the hard copy of the Papirer does not come up when one searches on any of the various phrases from the passage that I tried in my repeated vain attempts to save myself the trouble of retyping all the text.

I had actually considered getting rid of my hard copy of the Papirer since I has assumed everything that I would ever need would be at my electronic fingertips. Good thing I didn’t, eh?

So let that be a lesson to those of you who had assumed, as I had, that you didn’t any longer need to have hard copies of Kierkegaard’s works in Danish.

But back to Kaftanski’s paper. I enjoyed the paper, though I’m at a loss now to summarize it. Wojciech indicated to me, however, that it was roughly the same as a section of his recently published Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity, so I decided to just go ahead and buy the whole book. I can’t weigh in on the book yet. I will do that at a later date. The purpose of this post is to vent about, as the title suggests, the decline in editing at academic presses. There are two problems quite early in Wojciech’s book that an editor should have caught. They are minor, and likely won’t cause any problems in understanding the text, but they’re annoying and should not have made it past an editor. They’re actually on the same page, page 6, according to my ebook version. The first is an anachronistic reference to a “cocktail party.” The sentence is:

“This phenomenon Kierkegaard sees chiefly in the young and privileged who spend their time strolling through the city, visiting department stores, frequenting theaters and amusement parks, but also meeting at cafes or cocktail parties to exchange gossip about the next series of novelties coming to town and discussing whether or not to engage with them.”

The problem is that while the first reference to a “cocktail” appears to have occurred around the end of the eighteenth century, the expression “cocktail party” is much later. The phenomenon of the cocktail party dates from the early part of the 20th century. What Kaftanski meant, I’m sure, was that “the young and privileged” met in cafes and in literary and social “salons” in private homes.

The second problem is a reference to “salaried labor,” when what Kaftanski clearly means is not salaried labor but wage labor. The sentence is:

“In factories, wool mills, and servitude, engaged in salaried labor, people were reduced to performing tedious manual and alienating work, which consisted mainly of producing multitudes of copies.”

The sentence is a little bit labored, beginning as it does with a relative clause. The problem, though, is that 19th-century workers of the sort Kaftanski describes would not generally be spoken of as “salaried.” They would have been paid “wages.” Salaried labor usually involves a contract that specifies the terms of employment. Wage labor typically does not. Salaried labor is generally of a higher status than wage labor. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but they shouldn’t be in a scholarly work of this sort.

These two minor stylistic problems should not affect the reader’s understanding of the text, but they are still annoying. They aren’t Kaftanski’s fault because English is not his mother tongue. It IS the mother tongue, I presume, however, of the editors over at Routledge. Did the editors even look at the manuscript before they sent it to press? Poor editing is one of my pet peeves. I guess it bothers me so much in part because I’ve had a lot of demanding teachers who have drilled points like those above home to me, and in part because I’ve been a victim of poor editing myself.

There’s increasing talk of reducing the time to both an undergraduate and a graduate degree. The idea, of course, is to save money. I’m sympathetic with the motivation, but concerned that we are losing our grip on scholarly standards as it is. I hate to think of what books will look like that have been produced by editors who are products of accelerated degree programs!