Anti-Climacus

KIERKEGAARD AND CHRISTIANITY: David Wayne e-mails me a quote from Harold Bloom on Kierkegaard and suggested the following topic of discussion:

"In any regard - this whole idea of "the immense difficulty of becoming a Christian in any ostensibly Christian society" intrigues me. I have long felt that the idea of America being a "Christian nation" is more problematic than helpful to the practice of true Christianity, so this quote has piqued my interest."

The first thing I'd say about Kierkegaard is that he'd consider the question of how to be a Christian in a Christian society to be a subset of the question of what it take to be a Christian as such, especially in light of our existential realities being what they are (that is to say, that we have to wake up every day and face up to the reality of the difficulties of life and our incommensurability to the various tasks before us). The part from Bloom he quotes sounds like it's from Practice in Christianity, which is one of his later works, and so a little more cynical in tone (The Sickness Unto Death is probably the best exposition of his views*).

The essential idea works something like this: when Christianity is just this thing out on its own, it tends to focus very strongly on remaining true to itself--you're really concerned about the quality of your soul when no one is around to watch it for you, and having to live idiosyncratically within society forces you to be a lot more clear on what you believe and why.

When you live in a Christian society, it's really easy to not be a Christian of the type Kierkegaard wants (that is, one whose inner life is not organized in accord with the principles of Christianity). The problem is that there are outward signs by which one can be assumed to be Christian without actually being so--regular church attendance, generous giving, and a morally upright life (as led in public, anyway). A society is necessarily going to overvalue the outward things (since it's easiest to judge those); if you're interested in being a part of that society, doing the outward things becomes a priority, and it's very easy to become sidetracked on those (as should be fairly obvious).

I think that's the crux of the argument he makes, but I'll peruse further and see if I come up with anything.

*insomuch as the psuedonym he writes under (Anti-Climacus) is the one he reserves for when he writes about what the ideal Christian should believe. There's some question in the scholarship whether or not to believe he's really representing himself when he writes as Anti-Climacus; I tend to think he is, though he enjoys the bit of intellectual distance from himself (it's essentially for the same reason that I write as Anti-Climacus and not Nick Troester, even though I tend to only write what I believe to be the case).