Abstract
George Pattison,
Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life: Between Romanticism and Modernism: Selected Essays
, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013; 272 pp.: 9780199698677, £60.00/$110.00 (hbk)
George Pattison,
The ever-busy world of ‘Kierkegaardemia’ continues to buzz with fresh rereadings and revisions of this complex but brilliant thinker. It seems one will never quite unravel all the riddles he left for us. The bizarre nature of Kierkegaard's authorship, its controversial reception and multiple translations since his belated ‘discovery’ in early twentieth-century Europe, has left a seemingly endless trail of interpretative litter. In these two books, Pattison addresses some of these enduring, contextual problems. A Kierkegaard in the wrong hands, it seems, is a dangerous thing indeed. Pattison attempts to bridge the divide between the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘religious’ appreciations of Kierkegaard whereby one might read the literary, philosophical and theological facets of the authorship simultaneously. It is probably best to view both books as collated ‘essays’ circling around their given theme rather than wholly systematic treatments. Although much material is revised from previously published articles, it is now difficult to find many of these works.
Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life, an eclectic medley, creatively engages Kierkegaard with various tropes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought, ranging from Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Barth, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Sartre, Shestov and others. We see Kierkegaard as both proponent and social critic of his culture, engaging emerging concepts of nineteenth-century bourgeois life such as ‘carnival’, ‘the city’, ‘the grotesque’ and even ‘boredom’. Pattison's term, ‘unambiguous life’ reflects Kierkegaard's lifelong yearning to overcome the various aspects of culture and Self which hinder true contentment: ‘a sense for “the whole”’ leading to an ‘inner unification of the self’ (p. 4). It is often thought that Kierkegaard demonstrated such ‘unambiguity’ in his later, polemical stances. Pattison argues, however, that there is more enduring ambiguity to be found in Kierkegaard than these latter radical convictions suggest. He argues, rightly, against interpreting Kierkegaard solely through the lens of ‘decisionism’ whereby the individual will to change one's political or social surroundings led – in the twentieth century – to disastrous consequences. Kierkegaard did not simply ‘arrive’ at the stark clarity of the attack-upon-Christendom literature; it was the product of the dialectical process from which he cannot be easily divorced. That said, Pattison seems to interpret Kierkegaard's ‘unambiguous’ polemicism as simply another ‘moment’ in the dialectic, rather than a conclusive stance. This, it seems, is problematic because it overrides Kierkegaard's theological convictions regarding the gospel which undergird his radicalism. It is one thing to ward off certain ‘fundamentalist’ readings of Kierkegaard's polemical tone but another thing to read him through the opposite lens of ambiguity, especially when Kierkegaard held sharp (but by no means ‘unnuanced’) critiques of ambiguity itself.
It would be criminal (and unethical!) not to mention a particular gem in this intriguing collection: a self-examining chapter on ethics, based upon a second-hand book shopping experience in Copenhagen, where Pattison himself ‘finds’ a rare literary treasure – scraps of hand-written paper wedged at the back of a dusty volume – which turns out to be a quasi-fictional ‘sequel’ to the life of one of Kierkegaard's characters, Judge William. Pattison offers his own translation of this anonymous work followed by some short, perceptive commentary on the mysterious apocryphal document in relation to interpreting Kierkegaard's authorship and ethics. He elsewhere applies Kierkegaard to social ethics, hinting at the necessity of the theological.
Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century is concerned more specifically with Kierkegaard's varied theological interactions. Kierkegaard was no ‘systematic’ theologian, but he did have ‘a coherent understanding of the nature of Christian doctrine’ (p. 2). Pattison highlights the importance of Kierkegaard's theological training at the University of Copenhagen, noting the value of reading his early student notes on the likes of Schleiermacher, Hegel[ianism] and Strauss. Pattison, having largely contributed to the recent Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks translations, knows these lesser-known sources extremely well. He not only illuminates interesting ‘points-of-contact’ and riposte between Kierkegaard and these thinkers but also includes details within Kierkegaard's own annotations that reveal early trajectories of his theology. As expected, Kierkegaard wrestled with the key themes of nineteenth-century theology, such as reason, faith, doubt, tradition, religious experience and the ‘historical Jesus’. Beyond these more descriptive chapters, Pattison also offers a constructive reading of Kierkegaard's own doctrinal loci, with accounts of sin, redemption, preaching, the Church and the all-too-critical debate over divine immanence and transcendence. He also reflects upon the possibilities (and problems) of secularist readings of Kierkegaard and his ‘value’ in a post-Christendom world.
As in the previous book, Pattison is evidently keen to ‘recover’ Kierkegaard from significant misreading relating to his polemical theology. Where Kierkegaard might be seen as ‘dualistic’ with his famously quoted ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and humanity, Pattison interprets Kierkegaard's position as more nuanced, arguing that his theology of redemption, for example, is inextricably linked to ‘recreation’ (p. 81). Given Kierkegaard's emphases upon the Christian life and his correctives to Luther, there are certainly grounds for such a claim (even if it is a slight overreach to claim Kierkegaard's ontology as closer to Rahner than to Luther or Barth (pp. 100–1)). However, developing a latent Kierkegaardian doctrine of creation within redemption – ‘interesting’ as it is – does run the risk of downplaying what Kierkegaard emphasized so directly regarding the debilitating effects of sin and the need for utterly ‘transcendent’ redemption in the gospel. Similarly, Pattison suggests that Kierkegaard's doctrine of ‘satisfaction’ in the Atonement is aimed more towards God's love for humanity than his wrath against sin, contra the Augustinian-Lutheran model (p. 160). Although this helpfully widens the scope of Kierkegaard's view, there is a danger that Pattison dilutes Kierkegaard's intended homiletical force. Also, unless we can say that God's love was somehow satisfied[!] at the cross, it is hard to see what other use the word ‘satisfaction’ can mean for Kierkegaard other than divine wrath against sin (which is inseparable from God's love for us). There is an occasional danger that Pattison, in correcting certain interpretations, downplays Kierkegaard's own voice, as dangerously ‘dualistic’ as that voice may, at times, sound. These matters of doctrinal nit-picking are, of course, a welcome break from having to argue for Kierkegaard's value as a ‘theologian’, which, after reading Pattison's otherwise excellent and engaging treatise, should be in no doubt.