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Lee Barrett on Kierkegaard and Universalism

I promised in my last post that I would give my readers a little smags prøve, or taste, of the excellent paper on universalism that Lee Barrett presented at the inaugural session of the Society for the Study of Christian Universalism at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Boston last November. Barrett’s paper actually looked at universalism in three thinkers, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. I’m going to present only the material on Kierkegaard, though, and not even all of that, because the paper really deserves to be published in full. 

What I love about Barrett’s paper is that, as I mentioned in my last post, Barrett makes a convincing case that Kierkegaard may have been a universalist without referring to the explicitly universalist passage from Kierkegaard’s journals. “That is, Barrett argues that universalism can actually be inferred from various passages in Works of Love.”

So here is a little smags prøve, of Barrett’s excellent paper!

“It probably seems strange to discuss Kierkegaard in the context of universalism. But his literature contains a recessive and often subterranean trajectory that gestures toward the universal salvation of individuals. … Works of Love, and other texts, contain remarks that implicitly suggest that no one will be excluded from God’s love, which is his definition of eternal blessedness. This becomes clear if we start with Kierkegaard’s account of the characteristics of human love, and then apply them to the divine font of love briefly sketched at the beginning of the Works of Love. My assumption is that what is most essentially true of the visible stream of human loving works must also be true of their invisible source.

Although Kierkegaard protests that this is not a book about God’s love, but about human works of love, the volume’s opening nevertheless spotlights divine love. In a mood of thankfulness Kierkegaard writes, “How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth…so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you…Savior and Redeemer who gave yourself in order to save all” (WOL, 3). Human love cannot be understood unless the reader realizes that it has its source and origin in the individual’s innermost being, where God’s love resides (WOL, 9). He writes, “Just as a quiet lake originates deep down in a hidden spring, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love” (WOL, 9). The hidden life of God’s love is made known and is recognizable by its fruits (WOL, 7-8). This entails that what is said about the human works can be transferred to God’s love, for the human works are generated by God’s love. What is true of the manifestation must be true of the source.

Let us consider the chapter “Love Believes All Things” (WOL, 225-245). Kierkegaard’s main point is that the reader should believe the best of others and refrain from judging them negatively. The basis for Kierkegaard’s advocacy of a hermeneutics of charity is his claim that the way we judge others manifests the spiritual and moral qualities that are in us. The decision to judge or not judge reveals whether there is self-protective mistrust or risk-taking and generous love in an individual. 

Genuine love does not remain intentionally ignorant of the unworthiness of its objects (WOL, 241). True love is cognizant of the ignoble nature of its objects, or their possible viciousness, but “hides” that unworthiness; love does not dwell upon it. A hope for an eschatologically postponed judgement, in which all the unloving scoundrels would receive their due condemnation, would be unloving; it would not be a hiding of unworthiness.

This “love believes all things” theme has profound consequences for the nature of God. If the loving thing for humans to do is to believe all good things about the other, and if God’s love is the font of human love, then this hermeneutics of charity must be the fruit of God’s love. God must overlook the unworthiness of the objects of God’s love, and those objects are all of us.

God takes no delight in exposing hidden sins, but hides them, puts them behind God’s back. Kierkegaard asserts that any type of love that is contingent upon a positive assessment of the other is false love. This does open the possibility that in eternity a hermeneutics of charity reigns universally.

The chapter, “Love Hopes All Things,” extends this trajectory (WOL, 246-263). Again the purpose of the chapter is to warn the reader to resist the worldly temptation to condemn others and, more emphatically, to never despair about the salvation of another person. Kierkegaard insists that hoping for the good of others, including the eternal blessedness of others, is a work of love, for it is an essential dimension of dealing lovingly with others (WOL, 253). One should never unlovingly give up on another person, never stop hoping for their salvation. Kierkegaard’s concern here is for the character of the lover.  If the individual were to give up on someone as hopelessly lost, she would demonstrate that her love was not an enduring disposition. He warns, “Woe to the one who has given up hope and possibility with regard to another person; woe to him, because he himself has thereby lost love” (WOL, 260). 

This hope includes the hope that God will be merciful to those who seem to be incorrigible reprobates (WOL, 262). One must not hope that divine vengeance will fall on the seemingly depraved other. Kierkegaard warns that the reader must never try to imagine God as a collaborator in vindictive hating. The cultivation of one’s own loving capacities requires that one preserves one’s hope for the divine forgiveness of everyone’s sins and for their becoming blessed.

But what about hope for the salvation of unloving people even after their demise? Kierkegaard raises this issue explicitly, asking if it is possible for someone to be eternally lost (WOL, 262). Changing the ending of the story of the prodigal son so that the prodigal does not repent and return home to his father, Kierkegaard asks if there is hope for the prodigal beyond the grave. Kierkegaard does not answer this directly; he does not speculate about the prodigal son’s post-mortem state. Rather, he shifts attention to the fact that the father continues to hope. Hoping for the blessedness of the departed, even those who seem to have been spiritual and moral failures, is a work of love (WOL, 248).  

The chapter “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” elaborates a cognate theme (WOL, 280-299). Love does not just overlook sin or ignore sin; it “removes” it. Kierkegaard even claims that it “believes away” what is seen. Kierkegaard then roots this more generally in God’s love. More particularly, the human imperative to not see evil is rooted in the fact that human evil is hidden behind God’s back (WOL, 295). Of course, God is not ignorant of the evil, but God refuses to see it; God forgets it. Kierkegaard dares to call God’s forgetting an act of decreation. Kierkegaard writes, “Forgetting, when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creation, since to create is to bring forth from nothing, but to forget is to take back into nothing” (WOL, 296).”

There is more to Barrett’s paper than this, but to include even the entirety of the section on Kierkegaard, would make it too long for this post. Plus, as I said, I really think the paper deserves to be published, so I don’t want to put so much of it up on this blog that it would diminish Barrett’s chances of publishing it elsewhere.

I should also put in a plug for Barrett’s book Kierkegaard’s Two Ages, A Literary Review. The book is part of the Cambridge Elements series on Kierkegaard, and though I have not read it yet, I’m familiar with Barrett’s work, so I know it will be good!

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Kierkegaard on Women

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View of Dublin

As I explained in my most recent post, I chaired a session at the last annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. The session was sponsored by the Søren Kierkegaard Society, so all the papers were on Kierkegaard and they were all excellent. My last post looked at two of the papers. This post will look at the third paper “Gender and the Practical Dimensions of Kierkegaard’s Existential Philosophy,” by the Irish scholar Siobhan Marie Doyle. Doyle’s was one of the best defenses of Kierkegaard against the charge of sexism that I have ever heard. It also raises a very important philosophical question concerning what it means to charge someone with an -ism. What is sexism? What is antisemitism? Are occasional sexist remarks enough to qualify one as “sexist”? The question is equally pressing, of course with respect to the issue of antisemitism. Kierkegaard, as has been well documented by the Danish scholar Peter Tudvad, made some truly horrific remarks about Judaism, but many scholars are reluctant to classify him as antisemitic because there appears to be no foundation in his thought for such a charge. Does a person need to have a world view in which the gender, race, or religion in question figures as deeply flawed, or can genuine prejudice exist alongside an essentially egalitarian world view as a kind of psychological anomaly? These are important questions that deserve more attention than they have been given.

I’m not going to look at those questions now, however. What I want to do now is to summarize for you Doyle’s excellent paper. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part looks at what Doyle keenly observes is Kierkegaard’s “apparent ambivalence toward the feminine throughout the course of his authorship.” Sometimes he praises them and other times he excoriates them. It is indeed hard to figure out what his general view on women is, if, indeed he has one. The second part of the paper looks at Kierkegaard’s “call for the equality of all people, as presented in his ethical work: Works of Love.” Doyle is clearly using “ethical” here in the sense of Kierkegaard’s Christian ethics, rather than the ethical as the state of existence that precedes the religious. Christianity does indeed have its own ethics according to Kierkegaard and Doyle is correct in that it is the ethics of neighbor-love as expressed in Works of Love.

Doyle draws heavily on deliberation II A, B, and C in Works of Love as providing “solid evidence of [Kierkegaard’s] personal belief in the equal status of women and men.”

For Kierkegaard, she writes, “our apparent dissimilarity is merely ‘a cloak’ that disguises our actually similarity.” She then quotes a passage from Works of Love to illustrate this

Take many sheets of paper, write something different on each one; then no one will be like another. But then again take each single sheet; do not let yourself be confused by the diverse inscriptions, hold it up to the light and you will see a common watermark on all of them. In the same way the neighbor is the common watermark, but you see it only by means of eternity’s light when it shines through the dissimilarity (WOL, 89.)

If we are to take this passage seriously, and Kierkegaard clearly meant us to do that, then it becomes very difficult to argue that Kierkegaard considered women as inherently inferior to men, or indeed that he considered people of other races, cultures, or religions, including Judaism, as inherently inferior to white Europeans Christians. Nowhere does Kierkegaard ever suggest that there could be anything about a person that would exclude him or her from the category of “neighbor.” He is a humanist, in the religious sense of that term, through and through because he believed that all human beings were created by God and hence were equally valuable as God’s creations.

So why, then, does he say the terrible things he sometimes says about women? And why does he say the terrible things he sometimes says about Jews? In the first instance, it appears that what Kierkegaard generally takes aim at in his negative remarks about women is more the socially-constructed category of the feminine rather than what one might call the essentially feminine. That doesn’t excuse what he says, of course, but social constructions of gender have been problematic throughout history so it is possible to have a certain sympathy with his occasional attacks on “the feminine” understood that way.

His attacks on Judaism, on the other hand, are harsher and hence more disturbing. They arguably go beyond what would have been considered socially acceptable in 19th-century Denmark. There are negative references to Judaism early in his authorship, but they are relatively mild. His view of Judaism early on appears to have been that, like aesthetic and ethical world views, it was incomplete. His views turn more negative, however, toward the end of his life. Scholars have tended to ignore the virulently antisemitic remarks Kierkegaard made late in life out of a sense, perhaps, that they were anomalous. They certainly do not fit with the beautiful passage Doyle quotes from Works of Love. So where do they come from?

My guess is that they are a product of the persecution Kierkegaard experienced at the hands of the satirical newspaper Corsaren. The attack was initiated by Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt, the editor of Corsaren and a Jewish intellectual for who Kierkegaard had a great deal of respect. The attack has long been thought to have been confined to 1846. Tudvad revealed, however, in his book Kierkegaards København (Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen) that, in fact, the attack extended from 1846 right up until Kierkegaard’s death in 1855! Few people would be able to maintain their psychological equilibrium under such conditions. It appears that that may have been a battle that Kierkegaard lost, finally, in the end.

I examine this issue in more detail in an essay entitled “Kierkegaard: The caricature or the man?” in the January 2020 issue of the Dublin Review of Books. I thought it would be appropriate to draw your attention to this essay in my post on Doyle’s excellent paper because Dublin is her home town!