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Conference News

Genius of GMD

I just returned from an extraordinarily productive annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. There were a total of five Kierkegaard sessions at the conference, and there were very good papers at each session. I will give a full report on the conference soon. 

My post today, though, is about a conference that will take place later this month at Yale University on the George MacDonald. The conference, which is co-sponsored by Drexel University, runs from the 13th to the 14th of this month, i.e., December 2024. It is in celebration of the bicentenary of MacDonald’s birth in 1824.

I’ve written before about the similarities in MacDonald’s and Kierkegaard’s views of Christianity. My own paper for the conference is entitled “Ad Fontes: Kierkegaard and MacDonald on ‘Original Christianity’ and concerns the use both thinkers made of their knowledge of ancient Greek to get back to what each considered to be the essence of Christianity. Ad fontes, or “back to the sources,” as many readers will be aware, was one of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation. The argument of this paper is 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 makes reveals a deep affinity in their thought concerning the true message of Christianity and the nature of Christian life. 

There are going to be lots of great papers, though, on a variety of subjects from a variety of scholars, including Justin Bailey, Chair of the Theology Department at Dort University, Julie Canlis, author and acclaimed Calvin scholar (her first book was awarded a Christianity Today Award in theology), Malcolm Guite, an internationally acclaimed poet and speaker and Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, Trevor Hart, Rector of St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Scotland, and former Professor of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews, and many more! And the subjects of the papers run from philosophy and theology, to MacDonald’s views on nature and science, and literature and creativity. A complete list of the speakers can be found on the conference website. Space is very limited, but there are a few places left, so hurry and register. Even if you have never heard of George MacDonald, you will be very glad you registered for this conference! 

Miller Hall, where the conference will take place, is right across the street from Yale Divinity School. Coffee and lunches will be provided, but dinner arrangements will be left to the conference attendees. Even if you don’t know anyone when you arrive, I guarantee you that you will not be eating alone. MacDonald scholars are some of the nicest people I have ever met. They make friends easily and have a real passion for sharing the thought of one of the greatest religious thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century. 

This event is going to be enormous fun! 

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Kierkegaard and Current Religious Discourse

MDPI has two open-access journals that are worth a look. John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans recently edited a special edition of the journal Religions entitled “Kierkegaard, Virtues and Vices,” and, Lee Barrett, formerly of Lancaster Theological Seminary and now of Moravian Seminary, and Dr. Andrzej Slowikowski, of Uniwersytet Warminsk-Mazurski w Olsztynie, Poland, have just come out with a special edition of Philosophies on “Kierkegaard’s Religious Thought in Relation to Current Religious Discourse.” 

My “Was Kierkegaard a Universalist” is the first one you’ll see when you go to the webpage for the special edition. There’s been a lot of discussion among theologian in the last few years about universal salvation. Universalism, as its known, is increasingly popular among these thinkers, hence it seemed relevant to address Kierkegaard’s thoughts on this issue. The paper examines evidence both for and against the view that Kierkegaard was a universalist and concludes that despite Kierkegaard’s occasional references to the importance of the idea of eternal damnation to Christianity, there is reason to believe that he may have been a universalist.

After my paper comes a paper by René Rosfort, of the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen. Rosfort argues in “The Humanity of Faith: Secularization of Christianity,” that “Kierkegaard’s famous existential approach to Christianity amounts to a secularization of Christianity and as such can be seen as a critical development of and not a rejection of the Enlightenment critique of religion.” 

After Rosfort there’s a paper by David J. Gouwens of Brite Divinity School, entitled “Kierkegaard’s Descriptive Philosophy of Religion: The Imagination Poised Between Possibility and Actuality.” Gouwens argues that Kierkegaard “imaginatively deploys conceptual and rhetorical strategies maieutically to both describe and elicit self-reflection aimed at transformation, thus expanding the imagination’s uses for his readers.” 

Next comes Joseph Westfall, of the University of Houston, with a paper entitled “Abraham’s Faith: Both the Aesthetic and the Ethical in Fear and Trembling.” Westfall examines Johannes de Silentio’s presentation of the faith of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, and argues that a new way of conceiving Kierkegaard’s “notion of faith as a paradoxical co-inhabiting of both the aesthetic and the ethical stages, rather than as a rejection, synthesis, or overcoming of them” can be derived from this presentation.

After Westfall’s paper there is a paper by the aforementioned Andrzej Slowikowski, entitled “Kierkegaard’s Theories of the Stages of Existence and Subjective Truth as a Model for Further Research into the Phenomenology of Religious Attitudes.” Slowikowski uses Kierkegaard’s theory of the stages of existence as a kind of template for sorting out ”the complex world of human religiousness” by reducing that world “to a few very basic existential attitudes.” 

Next comes Heiko Schulz, of Goethe-Universität, in Frankfurt a.M, with “Thankfulness: Kierkegaard’s First-Person Approach to the Problem of Evil.” Schulz argues that Kierkegaard offers promising resources for address the problem of evil. Schultz argues that “in order to make use of these resources at all, one must necessarily be willing to shift the battleground, so to speak: from a third- to a genuine first-person perspective, namely the perspective of what Climacus dubs Religiousness A. All (yet also only) those who seek deliberate self-annihilation before God—a God in relation to whom they perceive themselves always in the wrong—shall discover the ideal that an unwavering and in fact unconditional thankfulness (namely, for being forgiven) is to be considered the only appropriate attitude towards God and as such both necessary and sufficient for coming to terms with evil and suffering, at least in the life of someone making that discovery.” I’m inclined to think that Schulz is right here, though I confess I haven’t read the paper yet. 

The last piece in the special edition is by Curtis L. Thompson of Thiel College in Greenville, PA. That piece is entitled “Dancing in God in an Accelerating Secular World: Resonating with Kierkegaard’s Critical Philosophical Theology.” The intent of his paper, explains Thompson, “is to demonstrate how [Kierkegaard’s] religious thought, especially on God’s relation to the world and to the human being, can contribute to generating a cogent response to the challenges presented by our accelerating secular world.”

I haven’t read any of these papers yet, alas, because I am hard at work on a paper I’m scheduled to present at a conference in the UK in early September. The conference is entitled “The Existential Dimension of Doubt,” the launch conference of the ERC Advanced Grant Project “The Ethics of Doubt — Kierkegaard, Skepticism and Conspiracy Theory.” Once I’m back from this conference, however, I’ll check out each of these papers and let you know what I think of them.

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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.