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Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on “Original Christianity”

This year is the bicentenary of the birth of George MacDonald. There were a number of conferences held to celebrate this auspicious event. I was fortunate to be able to attend two of them. I wrote earlier about the first conference that took place at Wheaton College last summer. This post is about a conference that took place at Yale University on the 13th and 14th of December. 

I discovered by accident that Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has the largest collection of MacDonal materials of any library in the world. That knowledge encouraged in me the hope that Yale might be willing to host a conference on MacDonald, so I “cold-called” several members of the faculty at Yale to see if there was any possibility that my hope might be realized. I didn’t have to wait long, David Mahan, of Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music responded almost immediately that the ISM could provide us with a venu. He couldn’t promise any financial support, however, so I turned to Drexel in the hope that they might be willing to provide the money we needed. They did! 

Drexel, or more specifically, David Brown, dean of Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences, and former Drexel President John Fry, very generously agreed to cover all the costs associated with the conference. That promise was absolutely crucial in making the conference the success that it was because quite a few of the speakers could not count on institutional support to cover their costs. I will forever be indebted to Drexel for their generosity in what are hard times for pretty much every institution of higher education.

The conference was absolutely wonderful. We were treated to a tour of some of the MacDonald materials in the library, and encouraged to apply for the numerous fellowships the library has to support scholars doing research on their collections. There was a truly impressive list of presenters, as well, including Malcolm Guite and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, president and co-chair respectively of the George MacDonald Society, Julie Canlis, Kerry Magrudder, Trevor Hart, and many more. A full list of speakers can be found on the program. 

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, there are lots of similarities between Kierkegaard’s and MacDonald’s thought. Mine was the only paper, however, comparing the two. There is talk of all the papers presented in celebration of MacDonald’s bicentenary being published, so I won’t give you the whole paper here. The paper, “Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on ‘Original Christianity,’” argues that “Kierkegaard and MacDonald share a reverence for the original Christian texts and a healthy skepticism for the official Christian tradition and its tendency to lapse into dogmatism and authoritarianism, that was unusual both for their own time and for ours and that this reverence and skepticism reveals a deep affinity in their thought concerning the true message of Christianity and the nature of Christian life.” Both Kierkegaard and MacDonald, I observe in the paper, had extensive knowledge of ancient Greek and used this knowledge to correct what they felt to be errors in the interpretation of the Christian message. Again, I’m not going to present my entire argument here. I will, however, give you a little taste of the nature of my argument. The paper begins…

“Ad fontes, or “to the sources,” was one of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation. It appears in Psalm 41 of the Latin Vulgate (Psalm 42 in most other versions), which reads “As the hart panteth after the water brooks,(desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum) so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” 

The sources, or fonts, as we say in English, of Christian faith are first and foremost the earliest Christian writings, and to access these requires considerable knowledge of ancient Greek. It is not merely the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament that were written in Greek, but also the works of the earliest of the Church Fathers.”

The paper gives a number of example where both Kierkegaard and MacDonald use their knowledge of ancient Greek to defend their own interpretations of the true message of Christianity. The paper, as a whole, is yet another argument in support of the view that Kierkegaard, like MacDonald, was a universalist, and while I didn’t have the space to develop the argument in the detail I would like, I think I made a fairly convincing case, drawing not merely on texts from the works of both thinkers but also on the impressive scholarship of Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan, whose co-authored book Terms for Eternity: Aiônios and Aïdios in Classical and Christian Texts makes a very compelling argument that there are few if any references to eternal damnation anywhere in the New Testament. This fact has been obscured by church history which, from the period of at least Augustine onward, has arguably systematically misinterpreted the meanings of these terms. Scholars well-versed in ancient Greek, however, as both Kierkegaard and MacDonald were, would certainly have been aware of the paucity of references to eternal damnation in the New Testament as well as of the fact that the church appears to have labored mightily to obscure this. This fact could actually be one of the reasons that both thinkers exhibit such a healthy skepticism for the authority of various thinkers throughout church history. Interesting, eh?

The Yale MacDonald conference was such a success, that we are hoping to be able to make it a regular event every two, or perhaps three years. So there is time for you Kierkegaard scholars to familiarize yourself with MacDonald’s thought before the next conference!

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Translation Recommendations

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I have just returned from a wonderful conference at Wheaton College on the thought of George MacDonald (photo at left, courtesy of Ben White). I’ve mentioned in earlier posts how close MacDonald’s thinking is in many respects to Kierkegaard’s. Despite this, however, his thought seems virtually unknown to Kierkegaard scholars, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that mine was not the only paper on MacDonald and Kierkegaard, Mark Lama presented a paper entitled “Hearing the Raven Croak: Lilith, Kierkegaard, & Selfhood.” I enjoyed the paper very much, though I’d have enjoyed it more, I’m sure, if I had read MacDonald’s novel, Lilith.

Lama’s paper led me to the discovery of yet another problem with the Hongs’ translation of The Sickness Unto Death. Lama quoted from Hannay’s translation of that work for Penguin. Hannay has: 

This then is the formula which describes the state of the self when despair is completely eradicated: in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it. (p. 48).

Where the Hongs have:

The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating to itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. (p. 14).

The Danish, however, is:

Dette er nemlig Formelen, som beskriver Selvets Tilstand, naar Fortvivlelsen ganske er udryddet: i at forholde sig til sig selv, og i at ville være sig selv grunder Selvet gjennemsigtigt i den Magt, som satte det (SKS 11, 130).

I actually preferred the Hong’s “rests” from a stylistic point of view. Unfortunately, I have to confess that Hannay’s “grounded” is better, given that the Danish in question is “grunder” and not “hviler.” My guess is that Kierkegaard chose the former because it fit better the somewhat scholarly tone of the book.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Hannay’s translation is, in this instance, superior to the Hongs’ Hannay’s translations (with the exception of his translation of the Postscript) are generally superior to the Hongs’ 

I was discussing this recently with Andrew Davison, until recently Professor of Theology and Natural Sciences, at the University of Cambridge (and sometime priest at S. Clement’s here in Philadelphia) and now Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford. Davison suggested that I should do a blog post where I identified which of the many English translations of Kierkegaard I thought were the best. I do sometimes get emails from people who want me to recommend translations for them, so it seems like a blog post that does that would be a good idea. Take these recommendations with a grain of salt, though, because I have not sat down and made studious comparisons of all the English translations of Kierkegaard. And remember, no translation can serve as a foundation for serious scholarship. 

In general, I would say that the best translations of Kierkegaard are the older ones done by David Swenson and Walter Lowrie. They are still widely available in used bookstores and on abebooks.com. Alastair Hannay’s translations for Penguin are also very good. Under no circumstances, however, should you the translation of the Postcript that Hannay did for Princeton. Something went horribly wrong with that translation as I detailed in earlier posts on this blog. There are assorted other translations, George Pattison has a couple, I believe, as does Bruce Kirmmse. But while Kirmmse has an excellent knowledge of Danish, neither Pattison nor Kirmmse is a writer of sufficient eloquence, I believe, to do Kierkegaard’s prose justice. 

I have a handful of translations by other people that I have not yet read. Among those are Stephen Crites’ translation Crisis in the Life of an Actress, and other essays on drama (Harper Torchbook, 1967), A.S. Aldworth and W.S. Ferrie’s translation Consider the Lilies (London: C.W. Daniel Company, Ltd, 1940), Alexander Dru’s The Journals of Kierkegaard (Harper Torchbook, 1958), and The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle (Harper Torchbook, 1962), and an intriguing The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Gerda M.Andersen, and edited by Peter P. Rohde.

I will check out these translations and let you know what I think of them in later posts.

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The Myth of Kierkegaard’s Misogyny

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Women fight over one of Kierkegaard’s shirts

There was a session in honor of the work of Sylvia Walsh at the years’s annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. The presenters, Sheridan Hough, Céline Léon, and myself, focused on Walsh’s most recent book, Kierkegaard on Woman, Gender, and Love. It was a wonderful opportunity for us to express our gratitude to Walsh not just for her excellent scholarship, but for everything she had done for each of us throughout our careers. Walsh, and her husband, Robert L. Perkins, went out of their way to help and promote the work of younger scholars and those of us who benefitted from that assistance will be forever in their debt.

I’m indebted to Walsh, yet again, for helping me to appreciate what a truly egalitarian thinker Kierkegaard is on gender issues. He was way ahead of his time in his understanding of how gender stereotypes warp the development not simply of women, but also of men. I discovered this in the process of preparing my paper for the session, “Between the Lines: Reading Kierkegaard on Women (and Men).”

“That the social environment into which a woman is born plays an important role in the formation of her character,” observes Walsh in “Issues that Divide: Interpreting Kierkegaard on Women and Gender,” one of the essays in Kierkegaard on Woman, Gender, and Love, “is a viewpoint clearly voiced by Kierkegaard himself in Two Ages, a literary review of a novel by that name penned anonymously by Thomasine Gyllembourg, an accomplished female writer of the time whose works were greatly admired by Kierkegaard” (p. 4)

 Unfortunately, Kierkegaard’s admiration for Fru Gyllembourg, as well as his admiration for several other prominent women of his day, has tended to be obscured by the multitude of negative references to women in his works. Some of the most notoriously sexists, even misogynistic, observations about women occur in the portion of Stages on Life’s Way, entitled “In Vino Veritas,” where various characters describe women as “incomplete form[s]” (p. 55), “display fruit[s]” (p. 77), and as lacking sufficient reflection to avoid contradicting themselves (p. 51). 

One could argue that it ought to be apparent to readers, and more importantly to scholars, that the negative views of women expressed in ”In Vino Veritas” do not represent Kierkegaard’s own views for the simple reason that the views of the various speakers, about what they purport is woman’s nature, do not even cohere. Fortunately, Kierkegaard tells us himself that those views are not his own. “The purpose of the five speakers in ‘in vino veritas,’ he explains, “is to provide an illumination of woman that is essential yet false” (KJN Vol. 11, part 2, p. 24, emphasis added, the title of this section of Stages is not capitalized in KJN).

There is evidence in the authorship taken as a whole that suggests that whatever differences there might be between men and women that are rooted in their respective biologies, Kierkegaard did not view these differences as having essential significance. 

So what is that evidence? The following observation, written around 1849 in one of Kierkegaard’s journals is key: “There really is something to the view that one ultimately finds a bit more self-sacrifice among women,” he observes. It’s tempting to interpret this to mean that Kierkegaard really does think that there are essential differences between men and women based on their biology. But then he goes on to say that this abundance of self-sacrifice one finds in women

is no doubt because they live quieter and more withdrawn lives and thus a little closer to ideality; they don’t as easily acquire the marketplace measures used by men, who get right to the business of life. What saves women is the distance from life that is granted them for so long …. This quieter life means that women are sometimes more loyal to themselves than men are, since men are demoralized from boyhood by the demand to be like others, and become completely demoralized as youths, not to mention as men, by being taught all about the way things are in practical life, in reality. It is this very competence that is ruinous. If girls are brought up in the same way, one can say goodnight to the whole hum. race. And women’s emancipation, which tends toward this very sort of education, is no doubt the invention of the devil. (KJN NB11:159 [1849)] emphasis added.)

To descry “women’s emancipation” would certainly appear sexist when taken out of context (as many of Kierkegaard’s remarks so often are). It’s clear from this journal entry, however, that Kierkegaard believes the problem is not with the idea of educating women, but with the specific type of education the ”emancipation” movement appeared to be advocating for women. That is, Kierkegaard believed this education had a corrupting influence on men, one from which women were at least marginally more protected. Such protection is a social phenomenon, though. It may be based, in the minds of some, on the view that women’s biology makes them less fit than men to survive without such protection. This would not appear, however, to be Kierkegaard’s view. The journal entry suggests Kierkegaard believed that if women were brought up in the same way as men, far from buckling under the weight of “the way things are,” they would become exactly like men.

But an acknowledgement that women are the equal of men in their potential to deal effectively with “the way things are in practical life,” does not necessarily translate into an acknowledgement that they are the intellectual equals of men. Did Kierkegaard believe women were essentially the intellectual equals of men? Is there any evidence to support such a view? The answer is an unequivocal yes. First there is Kierkegaard’s admiration for Fru Gyllembourg, that Walsh observed and that I have already cited. There there is Walsh’s observation that, 

Woman’s reflective capacity is … recognized in a … serious and positive manner by Kierkegaard in The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (1848), where he compares and praises the artistic genius of two actresses of his day (Madame Heiberg and Madame Nielsen) who are able, each in a different way, to bring dialectic or reflection to bear in their theatrical interpretations of the idea of femininity (C, pp. 85-90; cf. SLW, 131n.) (Walsh, p. 10).

And indeed, Kierkegaard refers to the view that women are intellectually inferior to men as a “masculine superstition” (mandelig Overtro) (KJN Vol. 5, p. 229).

Walsh observes that Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Sickness Unto Death, defines woman’s nature as devotedness. This may sound sexist to contemporary readers. Walsh points out, however, that while man’s nature is not defined as devotedness, according to Kierkegaard,

in relation to God … the self [is] defined as devotion for both man and woman, which suggests that ultimately, the self is defined in terms of the feminine for Anti-Climacus and that a distinction must be made between the penultimate selfhood or self-identity of man and woman in terms of their sexual identities, wherein they are different, and their ultimate selfhood as human beings in relation to God, wherein they are the same and equal (Walsh, 8.)

Women thus have an advantage relative to men, according to Kierkegaard, in that the cultural conception of feminine selfhood is far closer to the true self as before God than is the cultural conception of masculine selfhood. It’s important to remember, however, that this advantage is not an essential one, but a culturally constructed one. There is little, if any evidence that Kierkegaard believed this advantage was conferred on women by their biology. Quite the contrary. Kierkegaard’s emphasis is always on the essentially human.

Hence Kierkegaard observes in Works of Love that 

Each one of us is a human being and then in turn the distinctive individual [det Forskjellige] that he is in particular [han særeligen er]; but to be a human being is the fundamental qualification. No one [ingen] should become so enamored of his distinctiveness that he cravenly or presumptuously forgets that he is a human being. No one [intet Menneske] is an exception to being a human being because of his distinctiveness. He is rather a human being and then the particular person he is [det han særligen er]. (WOL, 141, emphasis added).

So much for Kierkegaard’s purported misogyny. Not only does he think that the cultural conception of feminine selfhood is closer to genuine selfhood than is the cultural conception of masculine selfhood, but he thinks women are essentially every bit as smart as men, an admirably progressive view for a man of Kierkegaard’s day. This revelation about Kierkegaard also goes a long way to explaining his popularity among female readers, as well as the fact that the women who knew him, and whose recollections are collected in Erindringer on Søren Kierkegaard (recollections of Søren Kierkegaard) (Reitzel, 1980) speak so positively of him. 

Kierkegaard’s overriding concern is, of course, with the truth of Christianity and how culture can obscure it by presenting a false and distorted picture of it. Our true selves, the true human self, the true selves of both men and women, as conceived by God, according to Kierkegaard, are devotion, devotion to God. That such devotion seems more natural to women is not, according to Kierkegaard, because they are essentially different from men, but because, as Kierkegaard observes in the journal entry from which I have already quoted, they are brought up differently from men. This means that not only are the various sexist comments made by the characters in “In Vino Veritas,” but indeed all Kierkegaard’s apparently sexist remarks, whether in published works or in his journal and papers, essentially satirical barbs directed by Kierkegaard at a culture, or at worldliness more generally, that can get creation so wrong.