VIRGINIA STEM OWENSVirginia Stem Owens teaches English at Texas A & M University, and is author of A Feast of Families (Macmillan) and Wind River Winter: How the World Dies (Zondervan).

This year a group of 20 Christian writers, known as the Chrysostom Society, is producing a series of essays for CHRISTIANITY TODAY on how classic writers have influenced their work. In this essay, Virginia Stem Owens writes of her repeated encounters with Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. In the near future, readers will be treated to other essays, including Philip Yancey’s reflection on John Donne. The essays will be collected and published in book form as The Reality and the Vision (Word Books).

Let me give you fair warning. If you are a confirmed optimist, a Pollyanna by persuasion, someone who insists on looking on the bright side, you can forget about reading Kierkegaard. Nowhere within the considerable number of his published pages will you find a single silver lining. There is only a brief gleam of gold here and there, or a point of crimson embedded in shadows, in the manner of a Rembrandt painting: a single speck of light set amid deep and brooding gloom.

It takes a certain temperament, I suppose, to appreciate the kind of writer or painter who sees the world that way. Still, on several occasions in my life I have been relieved to find someone who has articulated the truth about the dark side of life. Every generation needs a writer who insists on stripping away the veneer of false security we so carefully protect and who tells us certain bare and bony truths about ourselves.

My first brush with Kierkegaard came in the 1960s when I was a college student minoring in philosophy. What time or place could have been more propitious for our meeting? The civil rights movement was just beginning to heat up in Texas, and I was enrolled in the only integrated university in the state. President Kennedy was assassinated just 30 miles down the road. The world seemed to be turning upside-down. Søren Kierkegaard, who is summed up in one literary encyclopedia as “a rebel against secure bourgeois morality,” would have felt right at home.

Students, many of them the first in their families to go to college, haunted Voertman’s bookstore across from the campus, hungry for books such as Notes of a Native Son, The Plague, and Catch 22. We were seeking words that could change the world, writers whose encounter with the world seemed as desperate as one’s own. That’s what I found in Kierkegaard. Here was an iconoclast as passionate as James Baldwin, as stark as Camus, as ironic as Joseph Heller. But Kierkegaard also did something none of those other writers did. He ran, lance fixed, full tilt at the church.

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Few of the voices we heard in the sixties wasted their breath on the church; to them she was just a dead horse they didn’t stop to beat on their way to the barricades. But for someone like me, who had spent two decades of Sundays on oak pews, who had committed hymns indelibly to memory and rocked on the ebb and flow of a vast sermonic ocean, for someone who had learned most of her early aesthetics and all her rhetoric from the church, there was no avoiding that particular confrontation. For it was the church by whom I felt betrayed. This mother, who had given me to understand that Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam, who had taught me to feel simultaneously guilty and safe—this same mother now appeared to my idealistic student’s perspective as no better than Hosea’s harlot-wife, a mouther of truths she daily betrayed.

The church had taught me, for example, to sing about the little children, red and yellow, black and white, all precious in Jesus’ sight. But by design and explicit policy, there were no multicolored rows of faces in the Sunday school where I went as a college student. And furthermore, one was not allowed to call this glaring discrepancy to anyone else’s attention. I knew, because I had been personally requested by the deacons not to mention the matter. Once an adolescent sinks her sharp and implacable teeth into a betrayed ideal, nothing can assuage the hunger for vindication. By the time I got to college, both the time and I were ripe for rebellion. And Kierkegaard provided the manifesto for the revolution.

Kierkegaard had been brought up in an oppressively religious household. His father, whom he described as “the most melancholy man I have ever known,” required him to wear dowdy old-men’s clothes instead of dressing him like the other children. Though Kierkegaard and his father were exceptionally close, this youngest child recognized later in life that his father’s religious understanding was exceedingly morbid. Thus, when Kierkegaard went off to the university and found himself liberated from the gloom at home, he began to castigate in his journal “the strange, stuffy atmosphere which we encounter in Christianity” and “its narrowbreasted asthmatic conceptions.”

Still, neither Kierkegaard’s quarrel with Christianity nor mine sprung from the rationale of atheism, which I had already dismissed as even more asthmatic and narrowbreasted than religion. Rather, his rebellion was necessary in order to wrench what he had been taught into line with what he had experienced. In April of 1838, at the age of 25, he wrote in his journal, “If Christ is to come and take up his abode in me, it must happen according to the title of today’s Gospel in the Almanac: Christ came in through locked doors.” I understood in my bones that belligerent response to salvation.

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Today, when revolt is so easily dismissed as only a young person’s prerogative, a passing phase, it encourages me that Kierkegaard remained on the barricades to the end of his life. His sharp edges never got ground down; he never accommodated. Even now that I am a teacher instead of a student, I lean on this frail and sickly Dane when I need shoring up.

Like what happened one fall when I was approached about contributing to a Christmas ad to be run in the university newspaper. The ad copy proclaimed, “Jesus is the reason for the season,” which sentiment was to be followed by the names of “faculty friends” willing to talk to students about how “Jesus offers the solutions to life’s questions.” Harmless enough. Exactly. A catchy jingle, a promise of relief from mental confusion. But, as I tried to explain to the young solicitor on the phone, I cannot honestly tell students that Jesus will uncomplicate their lives. If anything, he will make them, depending on the person’s temperament, either knottier or more interesting. And are “solutions” what life needs anyway? How does one “solve” life?

That is the story of how and why I was originally attracted to Kierkegaard, the unlikely, ungainly rebel who thumbed his large nose at the ecclesiastical establishment. A second and deeper level of attachment came not because he was a rebel but because he was a spy.

As a writer, Kierkegaard was consumed with the problem of how to represent life as we live it adequately. Like many other writers, he knew the uneasy sense of forging a fabrication, of perpetrating a fraud, when one makes abstract generalizations about life. Abstractions are necessary to analysis, certainly. But to represent humanity as no more than “a rational animal” is to falsify our total reality. Not unless that other part, which Kierkegaard called passion, is taken into account, is one dealing with a true human being.

When I worked on my first book, I felt this same split between reason and passion slicing me in two. As soon as I started propounding abstractions, the life itself seemed to drain away from the words. A tinny note of falsity crept in. And somewhere in the back of my head, a thin, impatient voice kept repeating, “You’re only saying that because it sounds like it ought to be so. It makes sense. But is that the way life is? What does it feel like to be inside life?” I knew that as long as I wrote from a remote plateau of intellectual detachment, I would never get it right.

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Once again it was Kierkegaard who provided me with a manifesto, not for a revolution this time, but for writing. “I am like a spy in a higher service,” he said in a book published after his death:

I do not go to work straightforwardly but with indirect cunning; I am not a holy man; in short, I am a spy who in his spying, in learning to know all about questionable conduct and illusions and suspicious characters, all the while he is making inspection is himself under the closest inspection. Observe that this is the sort of people the police make use of. They will hardly select for their purposes the sort of people whose life was always highly honest; all that they take into account is that they are experienced, cunning, intriguing, shrewd people who can nose anything out, always follow a clue, and bring things to light.

Getting it right, then, meant watching, observing—spying. One must pay attention to otherwise unregarded details—how a person’s hair grows, the color of the skin between the eye and the bridge of the nose, the shape of the fingertips. The particulars that make a person himself or herself and no one else. Such attention often involves a certain amount of pretense, even deception. You go to parties, you listen to conversations, smile at jokes, serve on committees—all those activities that the ongoing human enterprise comprises. But all the while you are attending to them for your own hidden purposes. You are not what you appear to be. You are, in fact, a spy, seeking to discover what their life is like “from the inside.”

I still have a letter from a reader outraged at a piece I wrote on patients in a V.A. hospital. I had worked as a volunteer there once a week, mostly pushing wheelchairs. “Vile ministrations” was the way the letter writer described my activities. He felt I had only used the occasion of volunteer work to satisfy my writer’s morbid curiosity about the grosser physical details of the patients’ various conditions. Instead, he said, I should have been cultivating “a respect for persons.”

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Kierkegaard acknowledged the morally ambiguous position of the spy. He even imagined his own accusers saying, “Your whole activity as an author is a sort of misanthropic treachery, a crime against humanity.” But he also supplied me with my only defense against this reader’s charge of treason: “I have endeavored to express the thought that to employ the category ‘race’ to indicate what it is to be a man is a misunderstanding.… Every single individual within the race (not merely distinguished individuals but every individual) is more than the race.”

In admonishing me to cultivate “a respect for persons,” my own accuser, I felt, had reduced their reality to an abstraction like “human race.” Persons in the abstract are slippery and elusive. How is one to have “respect”—or any other feeling—for them unless one first pays close attention to their individual incarnations? It was the particularity of each individual that Kierkegaard insisted was important, not some mathematical set called humanity. To preserve the particularity of an individual, that work calls for a spy. And only Kierkegaard’s paradox—that each individual within the race is always more than the race itself—could justify such work.

My third engagement with Kierkegaard was occasioned by questions not about writing but about living. His answer—which is, strictly speaking, no answer at all—is the same as Paul’s and Jesus’ and Abraham’s: we live by faith.

But “faith” has been bowdlerized, tamed, and packaged by the culture of which the church is a part, and when one in need of spiritual relief reaches for the faith remedy, one often finds instead a cherry-flavored placebo.

No one, I’m convinced, should be allowed to claim faith who knows where the next meal is coming from or where he or she will sleep tonight. Faith is a word we should fear to have on our lips, lest it be defined for us in ways we cannot imagine. Kierkegaard would go further. You should not talk about faith, he would say, unless you are prepared to stand, like Abraham, with the knife raised over your child’s body.

It was only this last year that I discovered what he meant. Kierkegaard’s great book on faith, Fear and Trembling, reveals that for him Abraham was a pivotal figure. He recounts the events of the story from Genesis 22: the voice with the arbitrary, seemingly senseless instruction, the early morning march up Mount Moriah, building the pyre in preparation for the sacrifice, binding the child, raising the knife. Such a man, he points out, if we should encounter him as an actual person in the modern world, would either “be executed or sent to the lunatic asylum.”

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The effort to imagine honestly such a scene is immense. “I can think myself into the hero, but into Abraham I cannot think myself,” Kierkegaard said. Why is it so hard for us to understand Abraham? Simply because he had faith and we don’t—not the kind of faith that can sacrifice the dearest thing in the world to a God we had believed was good. We had rather hate God first.

I know this. Not that I was put in quite the position Abraham was with Isaac upon Mount Moriah. God, being gracious, condescends to our weakness. It was not my own hand that held the knife over my child last year, but another’s. Nor was it death that the knife threatened, which would perhaps have been easier to bear. A clean end to a child in her twenties, full of energy and beauty, even that can be borne. But if the knife were used instead to disfigure and mutilate that life, what would become of faith then? I was to find out last summer.

In short, our daughter faced a custody suit for her two children, which, owing to no-fault divorce laws and the legal precedent that the sex of a parent or child cannot be a determining factor in assigning custody, she was by no means certain of winning. Money, however, is allowed as a determining factor, and money was something she didn’t have much of. As the case developed over the course of the year, it turned, as these things tend to do, into a monstrous nightmare. Neither she nor her children could leave the state they were living in. Both her resources and ours were depleted. The knife, which would deliver such a blow as no mother could presume to survive, was poised to descend.

One prays, of course. There are, after all, those psalms about being delivered from one’s enemies, rescued from those wanting to cause you harm. There are even psalms calling on God to do terrible, bloody things to your enemies. But after one has vented anger, grief, and vengeance, after one has implored, beseeched, raged, bargained, and threatened, after wearing out all the available emotions, what is left?

Faith, you might say. Don’t kid yourself. The more accurate word, supplied by Kierkegaard, is resignation. At least, that was the best I could muster. And he made it clear that there is a world of difference between resignation and faith.

What most of us aspire to when faced with some great reversal, some tragedy in our lives, is not faith at all, but resignation. This in itself is a noble enough virtue; indeed, its nobility is beyond the reach of most of us. It requires a stoic acceptance of our fate at the hands of a God we do not and cannot understand, one who can call up this response to adversity that Kierkegaard calls “the knight of infinite resignation.” He certainly does not scorn such a person. In fact, he admires the tragic hero, sketching for the reader how he imagines he would act in such a guise, had he, like Abraham, “been summoned to undertake such a royal progress to Mount Moriah”:

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I would not have been cowardly enough to stay at home, neither would I have lain down or sauntered along the way, nor have forgotten the knife, so that there might be a little delay—I am pretty well convinced that I would have been there on the stroke of the clock and would have had everything in order, perhaps I would have arrived too early in order to get through with it sooner. But I also know what else I would have done. The very instant I mounted the horse I would have said to myself, “Now all is lost. God requires Isaac, I sacrifice him, and with him my joy—yet God is love and continues to be that for me; for in the temporal world God and I cannot talk together, we have no language in common.”

Kierkegaard knows that we may be tempted to find such a response even “more ideal and poetic than Abraham’s narrow-mindedness.” Because what was required of Abraham is not reasonable. It is not even ethical. It flies in the face of all we think we know about God and his nature. To command a father to murder his own child does not accord with what we know either of truth or goodness.

Herein lies the difference, Kierkegaard points out, between resignation and faith, between the tragic hero and Abraham. “Faith begins,” he says, “precisely where thinking leaves off.” Only a paradox, radically disrupting our logical analysis, is capable of making murder into a “holy act well-pleasing to God.” The tragic hero remains within the bounds of ethics and can only gaze uncomprehendingly, in resignation, upon such a grisly scene.

I recognized all too well this figure of the knight of infinite resignation. All summer long, despite my prayers, despite my pillaging of the psalms, the best I could come up with was resignation. And I had only arrived at that point out of exhaustion. It takes enormous sums of energy to sustain anger. And I am one who, like Kierkegaard’s hypothetical figure, arrives at a particularly painful emotional state ahead of time “in order to get through it sooner.” I was trying to prepare myself for disaster. Yet every time I tried to think about the possibilities, my mind skittered spastically away from them. I could not bear to think about what might happen to my daughter if her children were taken away from her. This was the place where, as Kierkegaard said, “thinking leaves off.” How does one think, maintain cool detachment, in such a situation? Yet faith did not begin there. Nothing began there. There was only the abyss, filled with waiting terror.

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I went to Houston to see a priest who had been my spiritual mentor for several years. He is a Dickensian character, with a red nose and a round paunch from too many cruise-ship buffets. He is in many ways very childlike, and children don’t make a virtue of resignation.

“Your problem is you’ve already decided on how this would turn out,” he told me.

“Yes,” I said. “The children won’t be safe. My daughter will go crazy.” “You’re not willing to accept any other answer.”

“No,” I said.

“Well then?”

“Actually, I guess I’ve worked myself up to where I could accept another answer. But I’m afraid.”

“I’m sure you are. But the Lord will protect those children.”

“Maybe so. But what about my child? Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted? I’m afraid that I’ll never be able to trust God again. I don’t blame him, you understand. I know this isn’t his fault. But I just don’t know that I can trust him with my child.”

He rubbed his chin. “You are in a pickle, then, aren’t you? Who will you trust?”

I didn’t know. But that’s when I found out what it felt like to be Kierkegaard’s knight of infinite resignation, getting on his horse, heading for Mount Moriah, thinking, “Now all is lost. God and I cannot talk together; we have no language in common.” Life was a desperate thing and called for desperate measures. And yet I now learned what Kierkegaard had known, that this “prodigious resignation” was only a “surrogate for faith.”

The problem with resignation, as opposed to faith, is that it kills joy. The story might have the same ending in both cases, whether Abraham resigned himself to his fate or remained faithful. Either way, God might, at the last minute, have stayed the hand that held the knife. But if Abraham—or I—had merely resigned ourselves to whatever came, the last-minute rescue could bring relief, but not joy. Resignation can only receive its children back again with pain. Only faith produces joy.

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Kierkegaard made clear to me this distinction between resignation and faith. I could see that more was called for here than stoical acceptance, which is, after all, of one’s own making. But how to come by Abraham’s faith? How to offer up on the pyre of trust one’s own child? Faith, like the world, must be created out of nothing, a feat beyond our powers.

The night before the trial date, I got grimly to my knees again and started to pray the same agonizing prayer I had prayed for months. I took a deep breath. But before I could even begin, it came. The lightness that Kierkegaard describes as the lightness of a dancer. The iron weight of resignation by which one subjects the unruly will suddenly lifted, fell away, evaporated.

Understand that the lightness was not of my own making. I was profoundly shocked, even a little embarrassed at first, to be feeling this way when disaster still loomed. I still had no sense of assurance about what exactly would happen the next day. I only knew that a hand was pulling me to my feet and offering to whirl me around like a feather. And though I had been weighed down for months, though my soul was as brittle and desiccated as a dry leaf, I still remembered what trust felt like. This was it.

“Most people,” Kierkegaard said, “live dejectedly in worldly sorrow and joy; they are the ones who sit along the wall and do not join the dance.” I felt as though I had gotten an invitation to dance. I got up, dusted off my knees, and began to whistle.

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