Soren Kierkegaard: Faith, Anxiety and the Leap

Søren Kierkegaard is one of the few Christian thinkers whose name is known to people who have never opened a book of theology. He is called the "father of existentialism," quoted on anxiety and despair, and credited with the phrase "leap of faith." He spent the last year of his life attacking the established church of Denmark, and on his deathbed he refused Communion from a pastor.

Orthodox Christians often find him both attractive and puzzling. He saw with rare clarity that a comfortable, nominal Christianity is not the faith of the apostles. Yet he looked for the cure in the single individual standing alone before God, rather than in the Church that Christ founded. This article sets out his life and main ideas as scholars describe them today, corrects some popular myths, and then gives an Orthodox reading: what he saw rightly, and what he lacked.

In brief

Søren Kierkegaard (1813 to 1855) was a Danish writer raised as a Lutheran, who wrote philosophy, psychology and Christian devotion, much of it under pseudonyms. Fear and Trembling (1843) meditates on Abraham's willingness to offer Isaac and on faith that receives back what it surrenders. The Concept of Anxiety (1844) and The Sickness Unto Death (1849) analyse anxiety and despair as conditions of a self that does not rest in God. The famous "leap of faith" is not his phrase: a computer search of his published works found it nowhere, though he did write about a "leap." In 1854 and 1855 he attacked the Danish state church as a betrayal of "New Testament Christianity," and before he died he refused Communion except from a layman. He deeply influenced existentialist philosophy and modern theology.

Thesis: Kierkegaard rightly exposed nominal Christianity and rightly taught that faith is a personal surrender to Christ, but his remedy, the individual alone before God without the Church and her Mysteries, is a serious error that the Orthodox faith answers with the Body of Christ.

A life in Copenhagen

Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813, the youngest of seven children of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a wealthy merchant. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he was "brought up as a Lutheran but was also shaped by a Moravian congregation in which his father played a prominent role."¹ He took a theology degree and a higher degree in philosophy, with a dissertation on irony in Socrates, and qualified for ordination in the Lutheran state church, but he was never ordained.

In 1840 he became engaged to Regine Olsen and in 1841 broke the engagement, a decision that haunted him and that he never fully explained. The years that followed were astonishingly productive: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling and Repetition (1843), Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). After a bruising quarrel with the satirical paper The Corsair in 1845 to 1846, he wrote openly Christian works, including Works of Love (1847), The Sickness Unto Death (1849) and Practice in Christianity (1850).² In the middle of his last public battle he collapsed in the street, and he died in Frederik's Hospital a few weeks later, on 11 November 1855, aged 42.

Many of his books appeared under invented authors, such as Johannes de silentio (Fear and Trembling) and Anti-Climacus (The Sickness Unto Death). These pseudonyms speak from different points of view, so a sentence in one of them is not automatically Kierkegaard's own view. Careful readers keep that in mind, and so does this article.

Fear and Trembling: Abraham and the knight of faith

The title echoes St Paul: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."³ The book circles one story, God's command to Abraham: "Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love," and offer him "as a burnt offering."⁴ Its narrator, Johannes de silentio, admits he cannot understand Abraham. He contrasts the "knight of infinite resignation," who gives up what he loves and finds a kind of peace, with the "knight of faith," who gives it up and yet trusts that he will receive it back. In an early English translation by Lee Hollander, Johannes writes that "the movement of faith must ever be made by virtue of the absurd, but, note well, in such wise that one does not lose the things of this world but wholly and entirely regains them," and that the knight of faith believes "by virtue of the act that to God nothing is impossible."⁵

The book's most debated section asks whether Abraham's act involves a "teleological suspension of the ethical": whether a direct command of God can stand above the universal moral law. Modern scholars warn against reading the whole book through that question alone. The SEP entry by John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans stresses that Abraham's faith is measured less by his readiness to sacrifice Isaac than by "his trust and hope that he will 'receive him back'," in this life.⁶

Here an Orthodox reader can agree with much. The Epistle to the Hebrews says Abraham offered Isaac "concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead."⁷ St Irenaeus of Lyons saw in Abraham a man who "with a ready mind delivered up, as a sacrifice to God, his only-begotten and beloved son, in order that God also might be pleased to offer up for all his seed His own beloved and only-begotten Son, as a sacrifice for our redemption."⁸ The Fathers read Genesis 22 as an icon of the Cross and the Resurrection. Kierkegaard reads it as a drama of the solitary believer's inner struggle. Both see faith as trust in the God who gives life to the dead. Where Kierkegaard dwells on the "absurd," the Fathers dwell on the God who is good: He stopped Abraham's hand, and He did not spare His own Son.

Anxiety, despair and the self before God

In The Concept of Anxiety, the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis studies hereditary sin. The SEP summarizes his view that anxiety is "an awareness of freedom" and quotes his famous line that "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." Sin is never simply necessary: "a morally free action always comes from a 'leap'."⁹ An Orthodox reader will notice that this resists any idea that human beings sin by mechanical necessity; each person sins freely, though all are born into a fallen and mortal world.

The Sickness Unto Death, by Anti-Climacus, describes despair as "the state in which the self fails to become a self in truth." The cure is not self-assertion. The self cannot rest by relating only to itself; it must rest in God, who created it. As Lippitt and Evans put it, "Despite Kierkegaard's reputation as an 'individualist', he does not see the process of becoming a self as one that is carried out by an autonomous, isolated self."¹⁰ In Practice in Christianity, also written as Anti-Climacus (Hollander titled it Preparation for a Christian Life), we read: "Only the consciousness of being a sinner can inspire one with absolute respect for Christianity."¹¹

The "leap of faith": a phrase he never wrote

Kierkegaard is often credited with the phrase "leap of faith," and with the idea that faith means jumping blindly against reason. {{very-strong: The phrase does not appear in his published works.}} In 1993 the Kierkegaard scholar Alastair McKinnon searched a machine-readable edition of the collected works and reported that "this phrase does not occur even once in his published writings." He showed that the one place where a standard English translation of the Postscript uses "the leap of faith" is "simply a mistranslation."¹² Mariele Nientied reached the same result and noted that the misattributed phrase "provoked scholars to vilify Kierkegaard as a fideist, irrationalist, decisionist, voluntarist, misologist."¹³

Kierkegaard did write about a "leap" (Spring), a qualitative change that cannot be reached by a smooth chain of reasoning, and his pseudonym Johannes Climacus called the Incarnation "the Absolute Paradox." {{debated: Whether he was a fideist who set faith against reason is still argued.}} The SEP entry judges that "it is far from obvious that Kierkegaard saw Christian faith this way," since for him "Faith and offense are opposite and rival passions, and neither can be fully justified by reason."¹⁴

The attack on Christendom

Bishop Mynster, primate of the Danish church, had been his father's friend and spiritual adviser. He died in January 1854. In a sermon preached the Sunday before the funeral, the theologian Hans Lassen Martensen, widely expected to succeed him, placed Mynster among "the holy chain of witnesses for the truth" stretching back to the apostles (Hollander's translation of the Danish sandhedsvidner).¹⁵ To Kierkegaard this was intolerable. A witness to the truth, he argued, suffers for Christ; Mynster had enjoyed honour and comfort. On 18 December 1854 his first article asking whether Mynster had really been a witness to the truth appeared in the newspaper Fædrelandet, and a fierce public battle followed.¹⁶

In 1855 he launched his own pamphlet, The Moment, and wrote ten issues. Its tone is sharp and satirical. In the first issue he explains that he writes because people live "in the illusion that they are Christians and that the clergy's toying with Christianity really is Christianity." In another he mocks a nation where "we are all Christians" by birth.¹⁷

The end was stark. When his friend Emil Boesen, himself a pastor, asked if he wished to receive the Eucharist, "Yes," answered Kierkegaard, "but from a layman, not a pastor." When Boesen protested that this would be difficult to arrange, he replied: "Then I will die without it." He explained that "pastors are civil servants of the Crown."¹⁸ According to the SEP, he also affirmed to Boesen that he was still a believer in Christ.¹⁹

Influence

Kierkegaard's influence grew mostly after his death; in 1923 his translator Lee Hollander could still say he was "virtually unknown to us."²⁰ The SEP lists Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel and Lévinas among those he influenced in philosophy, and notes that Wittgenstein called him a "saint." It also warns that the label "father of existentialism" "obscures at least as much as it reveals, especially to those who associate existentialism with atheistic figures such as Sartre."²¹ Kierkegaard was a Christian writer to the end. Atheist existentialists kept his language of choice and anxiety and threw away the God before whom, for him, every choice is made.

An Orthodox reading

What he saw rightly

• Nominal Christianity is not Christianity. A faith inherited like citizenship, never repented of and never lived, is what St Ignatius of Antioch warned against: "It is fitting, then, not only to be called Christians, but to be so in reality."²²
• Faith is a personal surrender, not a conclusion on paper. Kierkegaard was right that no historical argument can replace meeting Christ. The Orthodox Church agrees that faith is a living relationship with the risen Lord, which reason serves but cannot produce.
• Sin, repentance and the imitation of Christ. His insistence on the consciousness of sin, on following Christ rather than only admiring Him, and on love of neighbour in Works of Love is close to the ascetic teaching of the Church.
• The self is made for God. His account of despair as a self that will not rest in its Creator echoes St Augustine's prayer, "You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You," and fits the Orthodox teaching that the human person finds life only in communion with God.²³

What he lacked

Kierkegaard's great weakness is the one he made into a principle: the single individual. Lee Hollander, introducing his translations in 1923, summarized the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (written as Johannes Climacus) this way: "Nor can the existence of the Church through the ages furnish any guarantee for faith." Of the "Gospel of Sufferings" in the Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits (1847) he wrote that for Kierkegaard "the narrow way to salvation must be traveled alone."²⁴ Here the Orthodox Church must say plainly that he was wrong.

Christ did not save isolated individuals and leave them to find one another. He founded one Church, His Body. The first Christians "continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers." St Paul writes: "you are the body of Christ, and members individually," and "we, though many, are one bread and one body; for we all partake of that one bread."²⁵ Christ Himself said: "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you."²⁶

The early Church knew no Christianity apart from the bishop, the Eucharist and the community. St Ignatius of Antioch, martyred early in the second century, wrote: "wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church," and called the one Eucharistic bread "the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying." St Cyprian of Carthage wrote: "He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother."²⁷ Kierkegaard's refusal of Communion at the hour of death, however sincere his protest, cut him off from the very gift by which Christ unites Himself to His people.

His protest was aimed at a real abuse: a state church in which clergy were civil servants and membership was a matter of birth. The Orthodox world has had its own share of worldly bishops and nominal believers, and honesty requires saying so. But the answer to unworthy clergy is not to abandon the Church, the Mysteries and the apostolic ministry. It is repentance within the Body of Christ. The Church's holiness is Christ's, not that of every pastor.

Behind the individualism lies Kierkegaard's Lutheran inheritance. He inherited the Lutheran teaching of justification by faith alone, within a Church that was a national institution, and when that institution failed him he had nowhere left to go but inward. Orthodoxy teaches instead that salvation is theosis, union with God by grace, worked out in synergy, human freedom cooperating with God, who "works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure."²⁸ That cooperation happens in the Church, through baptism, chrismation, confession and the Eucharist. The leap Kierkegaard sought is real, but it is made into the font and toward the chalice. For the Orthodox teaching on salvation, see What Is Theosis? and Grace and Free Will; for the Lutheran tradition he came from, see The Lutheran Tradition Explained.

Objections and replies

"Kierkegaard proves that faith is irrational."

He did not use the phrase "leap of faith," and the scholarly reading of his "paradox" is far more careful than the slogan. Christian faith goes beyond what reason can prove, but it is not opposed to reason; the Fathers called it a reasonable trust in the God who revealed Himself in history. The site's article Faith Isn't Blind answers this objection directly.

"Kierkegaard was right to walk away from institutional religion."

He was right to condemn a church run as a department of state. He was wrong to conclude that the visible Church and her ordained ministry are expendable. The Church is not an institution that Christians may take or leave; it is the Body of Christ, the place where He gives Himself in the Mysteries. See Which Church Is the One True Church?

"Existentialism grew out of Kierkegaard, so his Christianity was only a stage."

His later followers do not define him. He wrote openly Christian works to the end, attacked the church in the name of the New Testament, and died confessing faith in Christ. Sartre's freedom without God is the opposite of Kierkegaard's self resting in God.

What we can say confidently

• Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813 and died there on 11 November 1855; he was raised a Lutheran, also shaped by the Moravians, and never ordained.
• The phrase "leap of faith" does not occur in his published works, though he wrote about a "leap."
• From December 1854 he publicly attacked the Danish state church, beginning with Martensen's praise of Mynster as a "witness for the truth," and continued in The Moment.
• {{strong: On his deathbed he refused Communion from a pastor, while affirming his faith in Christ.}}
• He influenced existentialist philosophers and modern theologians, but he was himself a Christian writer.
• From the Orthodox standpoint, his critique of nominal Christianity is largely sound; his individualism and his separation from the Eucharist are errors.

What remains disputed

• How far the pseudonymous works express Kierkegaard's own views.
• Whether he was a fideist or a careful critic of rationalism.
• Why he broke his engagement to Regine Olsen, and how far his writings contain messages to her.
• Whether the teleological suspension of the ethical in Fear and Trembling is the book's central claim or one stage in a larger argument.

Conclusion

Kierkegaard wanted to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom. In that he was a prophet of sorts, and Orthodox readers can learn from his honesty about sin, his contempt for comfortable religion, and his insistence that every person must stand before God. But a prophet without the Church can only point. He saw the sickness and named it well. He did not see that the medicine had been given, not to a crowd of lonely individuals, but to the one Body of Christ, in the Eucharist that St Ignatius called "the medicine of immortality."

The Orthodox Church does not ask anyone to choose between personal faith and the Church. She offers both together, as the apostles did: repentance, baptism, the Body and Blood of Christ, and life in communion with the Holy Trinity and with all the saints. That is the leap worth making.

Notes

1. John Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans, "Søren Kierkegaard," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2023), section 1, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/.
2. Lippitt and Evans, "Søren Kierkegaard," section 1 and chronology (see note 1).
3. Philippians 2:12 (NKJV).
4. Genesis 22:2 (NKJV).
5. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard, trans. Lee M. Hollander, University of Texas Bulletin 2326 (1923), Project Gutenberg eBook 60333, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60333.
6. Lippitt and Evans, section 3.3.1 (see note 1).
7. Hebrews 11:19 (NKJV).
8. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.5.4, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, ANF 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103405.htm.
9. Lippitt and Evans, section 2, citing The Concept of Anxiety (see note 1).
10. Lippitt and Evans, section 2 (see note 1).
11. Kierkegaard, Preparation for a Christian Life (Practice in Christianity), in Hollander, Selections (see note 5).
12. Alastair McKinnon, "Kierkegaard and 'The Leap of Faith'," Kierkegaardiana 16 (1993), https://tidsskrift.dk/kierkegaardiana/article/view/31284.
13. Mariele Nientied, "Kierkegaard without 'Leap of Faith'," Papers of the 26th International Wittgenstein Symposium (2003), abstract, https://wab.uib.no/ojs/index.php/agora-alws/article/view/2509.
14. Lippitt and Evans, section 3.3.1 (see note 1).
15. Hollander, introduction to Selections (see note 5); Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vol. K27 (2011), commentary, https://tekster.kb.dk/text/sks-p469-kom-shoot-p-4386.pdf.
16. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter K27 commentary (see note 15); Lippitt and Evans, chronology (see note 1).
17. Kierkegaard, The Present Moment nos. 1 and 2, in Hollander, Selections (see note 5).
18. Bruce H. Kirmmse, "'Out with it!': The modern breakthrough, Kierkegaard and Denmark," in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15-47, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-kierkegaard/out-with-it/F7D5D3F19B125CF4A80D9F3793D2DBCC.
19. Lippitt and Evans, section 1 (see note 1).
20. Hollander, introduction to Selections (see note 5).
21. Lippitt and Evans, introduction (see note 1).
22. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Magnesians 4, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, ANF 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0105.htm.
23. Augustine, Confessions 1.1, trans. J. G. Pilkington, NPNF1 1, revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110101.htm.
24. Hollander, introduction to Selections (see note 5).
25. Acts 2:42; 1 Corinthians 12:27; 1 Corinthians 10:17 (NKJV).
26. John 6:53 (NKJV).
27. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans 8 and To the Ephesians 20, trans. Roberts and Donaldson, ANF 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm and https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0104.htm; Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church 6, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, ANF 5, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050701.htm.
28. Philippians 2:13 (NKJV).

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Kierkegaard, Søren. Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard (Diapsalmata, Fear and Trembling, Preparation for a Christian Life, The Present Moment). Trans. Lee M. Hollander. Austin: University of Texas, 1923.
• Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vol. K27. Ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and others. Copenhagen: Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 2011.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Ante-Nicene Fathers, vols. 1 and 5: Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians, To the Magnesians and To the Smyrnaeans; Irenaeus, Against Heresies; Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885-1886.
• Augustine. Confessions. Trans. J. G. Pilkington. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 1. Buffalo, 1886.

Other scholarship

• Kirmmse, Bruce H. "'Out with it!': The modern breakthrough, Kierkegaard and Denmark." In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, 15-47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Lippitt, John, and C. Stephen Evans. "Søren Kierkegaard." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023.
• McKinnon, Alastair. "Kierkegaard and 'The Leap of Faith'." Kierkegaardiana 16 (1993).
• Nientied, Mariele. "Kierkegaard without 'Leap of Faith'." Papers of the 26th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 2003.