Lord, give us weak eyes for things of little worth,

and eyes clear-sighted in all of your truth.

-- Prayer before The Sickness Unto Death

“The Archimedean point outside the world is an oratory where a man really prays with all sincerity--and he shall move the earth. And it is unbelievable what a man of prayer can achieve if he will close the doors behind him.”--from Kierkegaard’s Journals

I

Stanley Hauerwas and James McClendon have suggested that story and narrative play large parts in our ethical decision making.¹ They find normative truth claims often take place with a story-formed backdrop. Such a claim seems correct, in my estimation. As a senior in college, I was plagued with indecision--as I suspect many college seniors are even today

-- regarding career, education, and the like. I wrestled with possibilities for hours, eventually seeking out one of my mentors. After detailing my quandry to him, he asked me rather matter-of-factly, “Have you prayed about it?” I was immediately ashamed, for I had not. But why was I ashamed? My assumption is that many college seniors take jobs and graduate school opportunities with little or no thought given to God or any input He might have in the decision making process. But my story was different from those students. As a pietistic Baptist, my mentor and I both believed that God very much wanted input into my life decisions. By not praying, I had forsaken my story.

While one’s approach to a philosopher or theologian should not be driven specifically by biography, knowledge of such stories can be elucidating. Few philosophers or theologians have life stories as colorful as that of Søren Kierkegaard, and much has been written about the appropriateness of placing Kierkegaard’s story within the context of his work. I recognize this as a possible obstacle to overcome. Having said that, though, I am curious about the place of prayer within Kierkegaard’s life and writings. Kierkegaard’s father was from a pietistic background, and Kierkegaard himself seemed to have embraced that background, his attacks on Christendom notwithstanding.

Kierkegaard’s pietistic background, in my opinion, is an influence which does not leave Kierkegaard’s side, throughout his writings. Even in his last writings as he attacks Christendom, Kierkegaard continues to profess the truth of Christianity, and one of his last requests was to take communion.² Given this dogged refusal to give up on Christianity--in fact, a desire to present the case for authentic Christian belief within the Danish world--Kierkegaard demonstrates the place of faith within the life of the individual.

One of Kierkegaard’s later writings, The Sickness Unto Death, is an attempt to overcome despair with faith.³ This text, written under the pseudonymn Anti-Climacus, provides an interesting porthole through which one might observe Kierkegaard’s view of prayer. Kierkegaard spends much of the first section of the book explicating his notion of the “self,” coining the somewhat interesting definition of a self as “a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”⁴ Throughout the text, Kierkegaard argues that an individual must work through the process of becoming a self, ultimately deciding that one truly comprehends selfhood once an individual fathoms the relationship between God and self. In other words, the God-individual relationship serves as a catalyst to discovering selfhood.

In an earlier text, Philosophical Fragments, and its follow up, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard presents the Christian faith with relation to the self in a very different manner.⁵ Instead of taking a psychological approach, Kierkegaard uses a more classical, philosophical approach, almost syllogizing the Christian faith as a reasonable manner of life. These texts also pick up the questions of existence and self, and they address the God-individual relationship. Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of these texts, addresses prayer as well.

While Anti-Climacus and Johannes Climacus are different pseudonymns with very different character backgrounds (Kierkegaard notes that Johannes does not consider himself to be a Christian while Anti-Climacus considers himself to be a Christian on an “extraordinarily high level”⁶), some connections seem clear between the two. Both of the authors are intent upon bridging the gap between human existence and God, and both of them are concerned with discovering selfhood during this process. While recognizing that these pseudonymous authors have different perspectives and different arguments to make, I would like to suggest that some similarities can be delineated. I suggest that Kierkegaard’s pietistic roots are at work within these texts, and the concept of prayer is driving both authors to a similar understanding. What, then, is the role of prayer in becoming a self? I would like to read Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and The Sickness Unto Death hoping to answer this question. Taking my cue from some themes from Kierkegaard’s biography, I will look briefly at the themes of death, Christ, and confession as they are present in some of Kierkegaard’s writings in order to formulate a thesis.

II

Ironically, death is an appropriate place to start. Jonathan Edwards once resolved to think daily about his death because, he reasoned, only coming to grips with his death would motivate him to live a full and good life.⁷ One might accuse Kierkegaard of a similar line of thought. The Sickness Unto Death is not simply concerned with just any sickness, but it is indeed concerned with the sickness that leads unto death. The question might be posed to Kierkegaard, “BuT why is death the meaningful point? Why write about death as opposed to any other moment in human existence?” Perhaps it is, as Douglas V. Steere notes, “that Kierkegaard imagined the situation of death to be something like the exposure of a man on Søren Kierkegaard’s beloved Jutalnd Heath in which the sparsity of all vegetation left no place where a person could possibly run or dodge or crouch or lie prone and not still be exposed.”⁸ Anti-Climacus notes on the opening page of the Preface in Sickness that the individual human being must stand alone before God.⁹ Death is the moment in which all periphery items are stripped away from the individual. The individual moves certainly and slowly towards death, and in death the individual stands singularly before God and must provide an honest account of himself or herself. So in this moment of accountability, the individual must come to grips with despair--the sickness that ends in death. I should note that Anti-Climacus’ view of death is not an end but rather a beginning. He notes that “Christianly understood, death itself is a passing into life.”¹⁰ But whether one is a Christian or not, whether death is viewed as an end or a beginning, death is a moment of accountability with which Kierkegaard was thoughtfully concerned.

It may be overstating my case to say that Kierkegaard was obsessed with death, but I think that it would be fair to say that Kierkegaard gave death extensive thought. The aesthetic personality from Either/Or comes immediately to mind. The unnamed aesthete, or ‘A’ as he is typically known, is a member of a society for the dead, and his “Diapsalmata” repeatedly draws attention to the happy occurrence of death. Of course one might argue that the aesthete is too selfish to seriously consider any sort of self-harm, but the aesthetic character considers death quite closely.¹¹ So while the aesthetic personality from Either/Or is perhaps further from Anti-Climacus than any other character in Kierkegaard’s corpus, the two authors hold one thing in common: they are consumed with death. Granted, A and Anti-Climacus approach death from two very different perspectives, but death is an inescapable fact of life for both of them. One might wonder if both A and Anti-Climacus muse extensively upon their deaths because their creator, Kierkegaard, thought closely about his own death as well.

Steere refers to a passage in Kierkegaard’s journals which gives credence to such a hypothesis:

In eternity, conscience is the only voice that is heard. It must be heard by the individual.

. . . It must be heard. There is no place to flee from it. For in the infinite there is no

place; the individual himself is the place. It must be heard. In vain the individual looks

about him for the crowd. Alas, it is as if there were a world between him and the nearest

individual. . . . In eternity you will look in vain for the crowd. . . . Eternity scatters the

crowd by giving each an infinite weight, by making him heavy--as an individual.¹²

When one considers this journal entry, the aesthetic “Diapsalmata,” and the Preface from The Sickness Unto Death, not to mention other scattered, yet pervasive, references to death, the theme of death steps to the forefront of Kierkegaard’s writings. But instead of asking why Kierkegaard was so concerned with death, as one might be tempted to do, one could ask how to overcome death. And so Kierkegaard attempts to demonstrate an overcoming of death through Anti-Climacus and Johannes Climacus. Their writings portray hope for those readers attempting to move beyond the threat of death. In other words, instead of reading Anti-Climacus and Johannes Climacus as authors solely reflecting Kierkegaard’s individual struggle to move beyond his own mortality, one might read Anti-Climacus and Johannes Climacus as writing to the broader community. So how are death and sin overcome?

The Sickness Unto Death argues that despair is only overcome by faith. Somewhat similarly, Philosophical Fragments suggests that sin can only be overcome by faith. So while Anti-Climacus and Johannes Climacus have different characters to play in the Kierkegaardian corpus, both suggest that the condition leading to death is sin; both suggest that sin can only be overcome by a correct relationship to God, i.e., faith. Several factors are at play here. Death must be confronted if one is to become a self. And, given the similarities between Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus, one could deduce that Kierkegaard is convinced that an honest assessment of death and the individual’s relationship to God is Kierkegaard’s motive for these works. So, if Kierkegaard is convinced that the individual must come to grips with death and sin, and if Kierkegaard is convinced that the best way to do this is faith, then one might ask, “What sorts of actions would a faith-filled person demonstrate?” One answer, I believe, is a prayer.

One of the more famous passages written by Johannes Climacus addresses the subject of prayer. In the Concluding Unscientific Postcript to Philosophical Fragments, Climacus notes:

If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea

of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if somone lives in

an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting

upon the image of an idol--where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in truth to

God although he is worshiping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is

therefore worshiping an idol.¹³

Climacus does not suggest in this passage that prayer moves the individual beyond death. In fact, death is mentioned no where near this passage. But given some other clues regarding Kierkegaard’s understanding of death, perhaps one can read death between the lines. The primary concern of this passage is the honesty of the praying participants. Johannes Climacus faults the individual praying as a Christian in this passage because the individual does so in a manner that is “untruth”ful. Simultaneously, Climacus allows the pagan to be a true pray-er because the pagan prays “with all the passion of infinity.” What is Climacus’ question in this passage? Climacus asks the reader, “Where, then, is there more truth?” Which of the pray-ers is more truthful regarding his or her existence? This is the question of Climacus--the question of honesty.

Prayer, it seems, is inseparably bound with honesty for Climacus. An individual cannot offer a prayer in dishonesty. If one does so, then one is not truly praying--at least not to the true God. In fact, a dishonest prayer in Climacus’ opinion may as well be offered before an idol. A dishonest prayer is the prayer of a real pagan. The character originally identified as a pagan in this example is granted his prayer before God, even with an idol before him, because the pagan character is honest in his prayer and is honestly appproaching God. Climacus is less concerned about a correct doctrine of God when it comes to praying, but he is very concerned with self-honesty.

Prayer, then, is not only about approaching God, but prayer is also about the individual human being honestly assessing himself or herself before God. This, I think, is at the heart of prayer for Kierkegaard’s characters Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus. Given Anti-Climacus’ preoccupation with the individual standing alone before God at death, one might deduce that prayer is the tool given by God to humanity to prepare individuals for death in Anti-Climacus’ opinion. As individuals honestly assess their dealings with sin and despair, they are forced to consider their relationship to God honestly. Instead of offering untruthful prayers as meaningless acts of piety, those individuals who are filled with faith offer honest prayers. The honest individual discerns his or her need alone before God. As one prays with increased regularity, one continually improves one’s honesty about oneself. The individual is able to honestly assess himself or herself and thus prepare for death, the ultimate moment when one is accountable to God. Prayer is the penultimate act preparing the individual for death.

Steere’s article refers to Psalm 139, “Thou hast searched me and known me . . . Whither shall I go from thy spirit or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”¹⁴ In death the individual is forced into honesty before God. Prayer provides an opportunity for the individual to enter into that honesty voluntarily during earthly existence.

III

Existence is fluid for Kierkegaard’s characters; the individual is constantly changing as he or she experiences and processes those happenings in life. “An existing individual is constantly in process of becoming; the actual existing subjective thinker constantly reproduces this existential situation in his thoughts and translates all his thinking into terms of process.”¹⁵ Climacus and Anti-Climacus both grapple with the notion that the individual must learn to live in this fluid life before and with God. Prayer is the tool that allows individuals a realistic opportunity to do so.

If Kierkegaard hopes individuals will honestly assess themselves before God through prayer, he must provide a model of one who has done so. Jesus Christ, then, becomes the model for one who lived honestly before God and himself. Johannes Climacus writes Philosophical Fragments in order to argue that Jesus Christ is indeed the example of one who lived before and with God through fluid human existence. Climacus notes that God came in the form of a servant to earth, and this coming was the demonstration of God’s love for humanity. While summarizing Climacus’ arguments could take more space than is warranted in this essay, one could suffice by saying that Climacus finds the only possible form God could have taken was that of a servant for this is the only form capable of demonstrating love to every single member of humanity. The Incarnation, then, is God’s yes to humanity. The Incarnation is evidence of God’s love. As Climacus notes, “But if he [God] moves himself and is not moved by need, what moves him then but love, for love does not have the satisfaction of need outside itself but within.”¹⁶ Two concerns come to the forefront. First, the Incarnation is an act of love to which humanity must respond. Second, the Incarnation is an act of love which humanity is to model.

Climacus suggests that humanity will suffer because of these two concerns. As humans choose to respond to God in love, they, too, will be persecuted and suffer--perhaps even unto death. And as humans model the love seen in the Incarnation, they will suffer because “it has to be this way, and it is love that gives rise to all this suffering.”¹⁷ The Incarnation, the form of a servant is very real, for it demonstrates that when veiled in flesh, God must come to terms with death. As Climacus says, “But the form of the servant was not something put on, and therefore he must expire in death and in turn leave the earth.”¹⁸ When God becomes human, God must come to terms with death, just as individuals must.

In Jesus Christ, humanity finds a model for dealing with death. One lives in love, as Jesus did. One must suffer in that love, as Jesus did. One must live relating correctly to God, as Jesus did. And as one is able to do these things through prayer. Prayer, as I have already stated, includes honestly assessing oneself before God. The disciple of Jesus watches Jesus’ assessment of himself. Jesus was fully human and related to God through the fluid existence of humanity. The disciple of Jesus is now challenged to assess oneself in the same manner. Through such an honest assessment, the individual becomes aware of God’s act of love--the praying individual comes to model Jesus and understand his suffering and love. The praying individual learns to love because the praying individual is able to honestly assess before God. Climacus notes that one cannot love another individual until one loves the self.¹⁹ And one cannot love oneself until one knows of God’s love for oneself. And prayer allows one to do this, honestly, before God. Climacus and Anti-Climacus are Christocentric, then, because they recognize that Jesus embodies what it means to be an individual standing honestly before God. Indeed, as the individual honestly assesses themself before God, desires are transformed. In one of his edifying discourses, Kierkegaard notes that as the individual prays, God provides means for the individual to be changed and receive new desires. “God conquers” through the prayers of the individual.²⁰ Quite similarly Kierkegaard writes in his journal:

The immediate person thinks and imagines when he prays, the important thing, the thing

he must concentrate upon, is that God should hear what he is praying for. And yet in the

true, eternal sense it is just the reverse: the true relation in prayer is not when God hears

what is prayed for, but when the person praying continues to pray until he is the one

who hears, who hears what God wills.²¹

It seems Kierkegaard saw prayer as a transformative act, changing the individual to be more in the likeness of God.

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus prayed, “Not my will, Father, but yours.”²² Climacus’ writings argue for a similar prayer from humanity. In a manner of speaking, the Incarnation stands as an example of prayer for all of humanity. As humans learn to live as Jesus did, honestly before God, they learn how to pray before God. And as humans learn to pray, they learn to face death as Jesus did. His life models how individuals should face death. As Louis Dupré notes, “Only in the imitation of Christ does contemporaneousness . . . receive its final, existential determination. . . . Contemporaneousness is not attainable by speculation, but by the presence of Christ in my own existence.”²³ Humanity living in fluid existence responding to Jesus will discover the path to facing and overcoming death.

IV

While Kierkegaard did attack Christendom until his death, he remained a confessing Christian. I use the term “confessing” meaning more than a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, but rather, referring to a strain of Christianity concerned with direct contact with God. Given his interest in death and Christ, one can hardly be surprised. Christians of a confessional nature have traditionally gathered around the themes of death and Christ, especially the Moravians.²⁴ Given this tendency, Kierkegaard’s confessional nature of thinking is hardly surprising. Merold Westphal has pointed out that Kierkegaard’s thought ties itself to the discipline known as “mystical theology.” Such theology is not concerned with exotic manifestations of God, but it is, rather, an exploration of the soul’s interaction with God.²⁵ In other words, Kierkegaard’s thoughts concerning God are less in the form of science (even the logically formatted Philosophical Fragments) but are instead a matter of tangible experience with God.

I would be wrongheaded to suggest that Kierkegaard’s experiences with death and his following of Jesus caused him to become a confessing Christian. My suspicion is that Kierkegaard would have been a confessing Christian in any regard. However, because the themes of death and Christ run so strongly through both his writings and his life, Kierkegaard’s confessional status was all the more strengthened. Kierkegaard’s understanding of God and humanity’s relationship to God became tied quite closely with worship and prayer. As Westphal notes, “Needless to say, a theology that is intended to culminate in prayer and worship must have its origin there as well. The relation between the formation of dogma and the disciplines of formation will have to be circular.”²⁶ Prayer, doctrine, and action are wound tightly in Kierkegaard’s thought. If an individual hopes to become a self, prayer will play a vital role.

Why, then, is it important to note that Kierkegaard was confessional in nature? Because a confessional thinker will not allow an artificial separation between theory and practice or, more specifically, between doctrine and praxis. Theologians who approached Christianity as a science (the Wissenschaft of some German theologians) attempted to approach doctrine as a set of regulations separate from practice. Kierkegaard almost certainly had this Wissenschaft methodology in his sights as he wrote, most probably the work of Hegel. By allowing for a more organic, holistic methodology, Kierkegaard wrote from a confessional stance in opposition to a scientific stance. This decision allowed Kierkegaard to place importance on the tranformation of the individual and to place prayer as an active, cogent agent able to bring about self-discovery.

V

Kierkegaard’s relationship with his father has been dissected, and his romance with Regina has been approached from every possible angle. Kierkegaard’s life seems to be a lesson in working through pain. In fact, some have suggested that Kierkegaard enjoyed living a pained existence. Whatever his motives, Kierkegaard believed that the individual should live freely loving God and loving other individuals because of the work God did in Jesus Christ. His biographical stories, then, were informed in at least some manner by the story of Jesus. The story of God appearing as a suffering human servant persuaded Kierkegaard that the path of true human existence would traverse the same ground as that of Jesus.

So in order to face death, in order to live like Christ, in order to be part of the community of confessing Christians, Kierkegaard embraced prayer for he found it to be at the heart of character transformation. Kierkegaard deduced that an individual moves beyond despair by embracing God, and that embrace is best manifested through the action of prayer. And so Kierkegaard found prayer to be a place of honest assessment for the individual. As he concluded, “The Archimedean point outside the world is an oratory where a man really prays with all sincerity--and he shall move the earth. And it is unbelievable what a man of prayer can achieve if he will close the doors behind him.”²⁷ Kierkegaard believes that prayer can change much. Perhaps prayer can even change an individual, especially the manner in which an individual responds to their stories.

Works Cited

Dupré, Louis. Kierkegaard as Theologian. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963.

Hauerwas, Stanley. “Vision, Stories, and Character,” The Hauerwas Reader. Edited by John

Berkman and Michael Cartwright. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Edited and

Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1992.

------ . Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Translated by David F.

Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944.

------ . Edifying Discourses, Volume IV. Translated by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin

Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1946.

------ . Either/Or, Part I. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

------ . The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard. Edited and translated by Alexander Dru. New York:

Oxford, 1951.

------ . Philosophical Fragments. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

------ . The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

McClendon, James. Biography as Theology. Nashville: Abingdon, 1974.

Steere, Douglas V. “Solitude and Prayer,” Worship (55:2): 130.

Westphal, Merold. “Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task,” Modern Theology 8:3

(July 1992): 243.