Kierkegaard

That Which We Measure May Be Forgotten

It’s the end of a year and a new one beckons, another way in which we humans try to control things by measuring them. I am as guilty of this sort of thing as any, and probably more than most — how much time have I wasted over the last few years meticulously noting down everything I eat into a food journal, for literally no actual purpose?

I also track the books I read, movies and TV I watch, and my opinions about them, etc., for only slightly greater purpose — unlike the food journal, the book lists might be revisited once or twice in the future. These lists also let me do things like this, an end of year summary that will certainly be of interest to no one but me. (Of course, the same can be said of all the other articles on this little WordPress outpost.)

For many unmeasurable reasons, this has been a very good year. Below are some of the things that can be weighed, tracked and listed.

Books

I finished 64 books this year, down a bit from prior years, but then this is also the year I dove eagerly down the Kierkegaard rabbit hole. It started with a Catherine Project reading group of Fear & Trembling, continued with another CP group tackling Sickness Unto Death, and then a courageous few of us decided to stick together for The Concept of Anxiety. We’ve also read a few of Kierky’s discourses, including the three contained in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air.

All of these books rank naturally as my best reads of the year, probably the best reads of my life; in January, our group begins Part 1 of Either/Or, and I begin thinking about how to actually turn Kierkegaard’s insights into personal action (or to use more precise words, inwardness and reflection).

I am still, of course, unfinished with Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World, which I am reading at perhaps the slowest pace of any book in my life. I’m glad to be doing so. God willing, I will continue notating my way through it here at the blog through 2024.

A few other books I read and loved this year:

Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell (2020) — Beautiful writing about a messy life (and is there any other kind?).

Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin (2009) — Quiet and wonderful. How did it ever become a movie?

Secret City, by James Kirchick (2022) — Long but fascinating.

Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates (1992) — Should have read this a long time ago, but I am a latecomer to JCO’s work.

Jessica Fayer, by John L’Heureux (1976) — I read two L’Heureux novels in 2023 as part of my ongoing meander through his work; this one shows its age, but is a provocative examination of how death creates meaning for even the most desultory life. (The other one, The Handmaid of Desire, a weak attempt at academic satire, was mediocre.)

Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons, by Rowan Williams (2018) — Small but dense, worth rereading again. Also convinced me that I really need to read Iain McGilchrist, if only his books weren’t so damn massive.

Works of Mercy, by Sally Thomas (2022) — A first novel from a Catholic poet; funny and heartbreaking.

Howards End, by E. M. Forster (1910) — A good friend convinced me to read this as part of a group, and I didn’t regret it.

Philosopher of the Heart, by Clare Carlisle (2019) — A very good biography of Kierkegaard, though there are others I plan to read as well.

How to Inhabit Time, by James K. A. Smith (2022), and For the Time Being, by W. H. Auden (1944) — I didn’t plan on ending the year reading these particular two books, or imagine that they would wind up being such a one-two punch.

Movies

Not a lot of movies this year, though we wound up actually going to the movies more than I would have expected, and mostly just for fun: Barbie (which was more serious than most people seem to think), the new Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible films (which were both more fun than most people seem to think), Theater Camp (which was hilarious). Also saw both Vertigo and Shadow of a Doubt on the big screen, which were terrific experiences.

Passages, which I wrote about here, was the best new film I saw all year; I still enjoy thinking about it.

Finally, we stumbled across Brian de Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise on the Criterion Channel, and what the actual fuck? Amazing weirdness; I can’t believe I’d never heard of it, let alone never seen it before.

Television

Not a lot of TV this year, and hopefully even less next year. But we finally got around to watching the third season of Atlanta, and it was such pure genius that we are putting off watching the fourth and final season until we feel a craving for something perfectly sublime.

Also, Somebody Somewhere on HBO (or whatever they call it now) is heart-wrenching and hilarious and beautifully acted; and the first season of Poker Face was just sheer fun; and All Creatures Great and Small starts every year on the perfect note. (New season next week!)

This Blog

This will be the 44th post since June 27. It feels weird to launch a blog in 2023, knowing that, unlike the glory days of 2005, it will be pretty much impossible for anyone to find it. But I’ve never really felt at home anywhere else, and whether anyone else ever reads any of these posts or not, I still feel a particular moment of apprehensive excitement when I press the “publish” button. Here’s hoping I am able to do so even more frequently in 2024.

Books In and Out of Season

I admire people like Joel Miller who are able to plan out their reading, which seems infinitely preferable to my habit of perusing my to-be-read shelves (now numerous, spanning multiple rooms) waiting for a certain inspired curiosity to fall on my head like, well, a book from a high shelf.

But I doubt I will ever be able to join the ranks of the planners. Instead, every time I must choose my next book, I’m seized with a bit of paralysis. What’s the book for me right now? is one of the questions with which I struggle. And, is it a book I want to have read, or one I want to read? — which are sometimes the same, sometimes not.

This is why my husband rolls his eyes at how many books I bring whenever we go anywhere, weighing down the luggage. Well, I don’t know what I will feel like reading when I finish the one I’m reading right now! I must have choices.

Unfortunately, once I defeat the paralysis and answer the questions, sometimes those answers are wrong.

I have a habit of accumulating books that make sense for a certain time and place in my life, but then never getting around to reading them — until, possibly, they are well past their season.

For example, John Fowles’ The Magus has existed in a corner of my shelves in various editions throughout multiple housing situations since I was in high school. I didn’t know much about it, but as a young man (boy) the idea of it, as encapsulated in whatever marketing copy was on the back of that original tattered paperback, thrilled me.

But I always put off reading it, imagining it would be an experience I could savor at any time. Last summer I found a very nice Modern Library edition at a bookstore in Maine, and then last week, when asking myself, What’s the book for me right now?, I decided to answer myself, Why, it must be The Magus, finally.

Oof. Wrong answer. 700 pages of, to be frank, absolute shit, which does not qualify as the most insightful book review ever written, I agree. But this book started off as the sort of faux intellectual potboiler I would ordinarily enjoy, and very quickly devolved into what can only be termed a “hate read.” I finished it only because I couldn’t believe it was as bad as it was. I sometimes wondered if Fowles was pulling my leg.

But, no. This was his first book, though he worked on it for years and published it as his third, and then later revised it again in 1977. (If this edition was an improvement, I shudder to think what the original was like.) Fowles was as serious as the seriously despicable-yet-dull narrator he had created.

I hated this book so much that I don’t even want to dwell on all the reasons why I hated it — the complete misunderstanding of women (or men), of sex, of religion, of simple adult human living and decision-making. I wasn’t bothered by how horrible all of the characters were, I was bothered by how boring they all were, despite the author’s desperate, interminable attempts to make them all seem so sinister and twisty and interesting.

Anyway. Even Fowles admitted in a foreword that he didn’t quite understand the book’s popularity, and that said popularity seemed to be centered among adolescents. If I’d read the book when it first caught my eye, instead of putting it off for 30 or so years, I might have found it just as transformative as some of the gaga Amazon reviewers. I was a pompous ass, after all — God is dead, so let’s drink coffee, and all that crap — and the book’s naive ramblings and endless circularities would probably have struck me as profound when I didn’t know what profundity was.

This isn’t the only time this has happened; I had a similar experience with John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. It was first published when I was in college, and reviews convinced me so thoroughly that I would love the book, that I always held off on reading it until there might be a time when I felt the need for a truly transformative reading experience. Such a time finally came, and I read the novel while in the waiting room every day for six weeks undergoing radiation treatments.

And oh my God, I hated that book, all of it, every word. Again, perhaps I would have loved it, if I experienced it earlier in life.

I know, some will say — life’s too short, stop reading if you don’t like it. And generally, I do; there are lots of books I’ve started and set aside, but I don’t hate those books, they just weren’t for me at that time. (Some of them I return to, and find it has become the right time.) The books I loathe, for some reason, I tend to finish. It may be that the books which engender such strong feelings have other compensatory traits that drive me forward.

So I’ve learned that the books I self-consciously put aside as a younger self to read later may not scratch any particular itch I develop in, shall we say, middle age. But I’m not sure this lesson is compelling enough to change my haphazard approach to selecting books, even though a schedule, or at least a goal, might be helpful. For example, I’ve been toying with the idea of declaring 2024 a “big book” year, and focus on finishing a few big novels I feel guilty about not having read.

But I’m hesitant to make a commitment. After all, any fiction I read is in addition to all of the Kierkegaard, Ellul and similar authors I am determined to continue absorbing. Can one actually read Either/Or and Moby-Dick in the same year?

Hmm. Come to think of it, perhaps one can and should.

Don’t forget, you’re alive.

A few years ago, a high-concept app called WeCroak gained a bit of buzz in circles both mainstream and religious. Installed on your phone, several times a day the app will send you a reminder that says, “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

What peace, many wrote, to be reminded that our existence is but a blink of time! The argument you are currently having with your spouse, the project due this morning that completely slipped your Wordle-playing mind, the cruel things you snarled at the customer service rep over the phone last night: Who cares? None of it matters! Soon, you’ll be dead.

In his book Low Anthropology, Christian author David Zahl writes that, in addition to reducing anxiety by focusing the user on something beyond the present, the app also reminds us that all people experience death, of themselves and others, which makes grief a bridge across difference. “[L]oss is a touchpoint with our fellow citizens,” he writes, “however differently we may interpret that loss. More than that … it motivates sympathetic outreach to others who are suffering, regardless of what else we may or may not have in common.”

Which may be true, although you might think otherwise if you’ve ever seen how toxic Twitter can get following the tragic death of anyone associated with either political party.

I thought of this app today because I’ve been reading Kierkegaard (of course), and though I’m not in a position to presume to fully understand his work, it occurred to me that the reminder I need several times a day is not that I’m going to die, but that I’m alive.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard wrote, “If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness … if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair?”

His point (despite his morose reputation) is that life is not despair, or not despair alone. Because we do, in fact, have eternal consciousness. (Later, in Sickness Unto Death, he wrote, “If there were nothing eternal in a man, he could not despair at all.”)

I know about death. I’ve seen loved ones die, and I was told, a few years ago, that I was going to die myself — and not in the usual, happens-to-all-of-us sort of way.

Tell me I’m mortal and I’m apt to roll my eyes at the obvious. I mean, I get the utility of it: Yes, someday I’ll be dead and none of this will matter, and with any luck it will happen before I have to go to that dentist appointment next Tuesday.

What I need is an app that will remind me several times a day that I’m alive, and eternal, and to ponder that, even if only for a moment.

Ellul: Do Not Confuse Christian Ethics with Morality

This entry is part 5 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Returning to Chapter 1 of Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World. (Remember, I’m taking these notes as I go, section by section, so I reserve the right to realize later that I’m making incorrect assumptions and assertions! In other words, maybe I’m getting it wrong; feel free to tell me so.)

In my last post, we discussed Ellul’s contention that only laypeople can present “theological truth” to the world, since unlike clergy, they have no separation from the world.

This means that we must live our daily lives as “salt of the earth, light of the world, sheep among wolves” — essentially, pointing the world to Christ — not by following any formula or set of rules, but by the way we act in any particular situation.

It would be easier to grasp Ellul’s point here if he offered concrete examples about what exactly it might mean to live as salt/light/sheep, but maybe he is avoiding examples on purpose. A concrete example would suggest that there is always a single behavior required for a particular situation, or a set of guidelines we can follow for living as Christians. But those guidelines would add up to “morality.”

And that, Ellul says, is the problem: we confuse “Christian ethics” with morality, or virtues. But moral systems are what we use to try and improve the human world, and that’s exactly what we cannot do. We’re so desperate to relieve the tension of living in a sinful world that we create moral systems to try and improve that world. But that world cannot be improved, and Christianity does not equate to morality. (EDIT: Maybe that would more accurately read “that world cannot be made less sinful.” There are things about the world that can be improved at a certain objective level, I think, but the sinfulness — and ultimate collapse — remains.)

If we want to understand this, we need to understand Ellul’s definition of Christian life, which he views as a state of constant struggle between judgment and grace.

At every moment, we are being judged, and we are being forgiven. It is the struggle between these two states that ensures our freedom because, at every moment, we are being “placed in a new situation.” That new situation sets us free from both “satanic fetters” and any pre-determined, legalistic program of morality.

Ellul’s Christian faith certainly reminds me of Kierkegaard and his “individual before God.” For Ellul, there can be no accounting of God’s ethical demands appropriate for every circumstance, because “all Christians are in fact responsible for their works and conscience.” Each individual’s faith is a “living attitude” and that faith is what will determine their individual actions in every circumstance, as opposed to a specific moral guideline.

But, and here’s the requisite complicated rub, just because there are no guidelines, doesn’t mean there isn’t any guidance. We are able to (and in fact, required to) “trace the outlines” of Christian ethics, so that we might better respond in “specific, variable situations.” But these ethics cannot replace the “combat of faith” within each individual Christian for determining their behavior.

So, as we struggle each day to deepen our individual faith in Christ, we decide on which actions to take based on that faith, along with the broad lessons (not hard-and-fast rules) we learn from Christian ethics. Those ethics themselves, Ellul says, should be “continually subject to question, review, and reformulation through the efforts of the whole church community.”

In this discussion of ethics and individual action, Ellul appears to embrace a Kierkegaardian existential faith, while also preserving a role for the church, of which Kierkegaard thought little.

Note: I’m going to try to figure out how to better track these Ellul posts, perhaps by creating a single page listing them in chronological order.

Ephemera, 8/15/23

I recently read Clare Carlisle’s biography of Kierkegaard; it was illuminating about Kierkegaard, but also a well-written and insightful work in its own right. She writes here about the way in which marriage impacted the life and work of both Kierkegaard and George Eliot. Of SK, she says:

“Kierkegaard once wrote that marriage requires complete openness between husband and wife, and that he could not open himself to another person in this way. Perhaps he was driven by his artistic and philosophical vocation to seek a solitary life. Or perhaps his decision to stay single (and celibate, as far as we know) was shaped by the belief, held as sacred by his Christian church, that certain forms of desire — homosexuality, for example — were sinful and shameful. Kierkegaard took these questions to the grave, boasting that no one would ever discover the secret that explained his inner life. All we know is that he felt unable to become a husband, and that he interpreted this incapacity as a spiritual situation.”

* * * *

I wrote earlier about the film Passages; the wonderful Garth Greenwell writes about it with much greater insight and greater style, and at greater length. His piece reminds me that there is so much more in the film than I could wrap my head around in my single viewing — including Tomas’ career as filmmaker. Of the Tomas character, Greenwell writes:

“He put me in mind of a line from the theologian Denys Turner, whom I’ve quoted before in this newsletter. Talking about the ascetical practices of certain mystics, Turner makes a quip about the ‘pre-ascetical self’ — the self before it’s submitted to any kind of discipline — being ‘a riot of desires,’ hardly a self at all. Art can come from that, of course — Tomas doesn’t hold a candle to the giants of artistic bad behavior; but Tomas’s emotional riots, his fervors, his temper tantrums, his utter disregard for others, are no guarantee of the quality of his art … The only thing they can guarantee — for everyone around him, for himself above all — is pain.

* * * *

So that people don’t think I only write snarky comments about Covenant blog posts, this one about Paul Simon, his career and his beautiful new album is quite enlightening and worth a read. I saw Simon perform during his “Rhythm of the Saints” tour a lifetime ago, and remember it as a great show. Most vividly I recall, before playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” he said something like, “There are two definitive versions of this song, one sung by Art Garfunkel and the other by Aretha Franklin. I only sing it to remind people that I wrote it.”

Kierkegaard as Poetry (Part 1)

Yes, It Is Nothing

But what does this
mean, what am I to do,
or what is the effort
that can be said to seek,
to aspire to God’s kingdom?

Shall I see about getting
a position commensurate
with my talents and abilities
in order to be effective in it?

No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom.

Shall I give all my possessions to the poor?

No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom.

Shall I then go out and proclaim this doctrine to the world?

No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom.

But then in a certain sense it is nothing I shall do?

Yes, quite true,
in a certain sense
it is nothing.

In the deepest sense
you shall make yourself
nothing,
become nothing
before God,
learn to be silent.

In this silence
is the beginning,
which is to seek first
God’s kingdom.

(From “Look at the Birds, Look at the Lily,” by Kierkegaard, included in Without Authority, translated by Howard & Edna Hong; italics in original.)

Ephemera, 07/03/23

Yesterday’s Old Testament reading turned out to be the Sacrifice of Isaac, and hearing it read aloud in church for the first time since my experience with Fear & Trembling earlier this year made me realize how much of an impact SK’s book had on me. Murderer, I thought.

* * * *

Six episodes, about fifteen minutes each — I’m not sure I could take much more than 90 minutes a year of Tim Robinson’s brilliantly unsettling I Think You Should Leave. (And I couldn’t possibly watch all 90 minutes at once.) He takes an unpredictable premise, populates it with “normal” people (read: unattractive on the screen, unremarkable in person), and then Just … Keeps … Pushing. The skits almost always last longer than you think they might, to an uncomfortable extent. It’s an existentialist exercise in sketch comedy. You can’t escape the absurdity; it just keeps unspooling.

* * * *

“The post-Christian world is characterized by supercharged morality within a vacuum of meaning.” (Richard Beck)

Sin & Scandal

This entry is part 2 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing my read-through of Chapter 1 of Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World. There’s a lot here.

Ellul (perhaps because he was a layperson) is most concerned with the plight of the laity in the modern world, because unlike the clergy, there is no separation between a layperson and the rest of society. “Claiming to be separate becomes more and more difficult, as each person is forced into a world that becomes more intrusive, crushing, and demanding than ever.”

Ellul argues that modern society differs from previous civilizations in the extent to which humans are immersed in the world. “Modern transportation systems, the interconnection of economic institutions, or the rise of democracy” — modern humans are submerged in larger systems from which they cannot easily extricate themselves. (Even moreso now than it was in Ellul’s time, obviously.) For this reason, he says, Christians “cannot consider themselves pure” in comparison to the rest of the world; they are not only individual sinners, but they share in the collective sin of society.

Having just finished reading Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death I’m pondering the difference between SK’s focus on the individual sinner and Ellul’s definition in this chapter. Ellul says that the reason that there is “none righteous” is not that every individual is wicked, “but because all things are confined under sin.” We are related to others in sin extending back across time and generations to the original sin. So the modern world makes clear (through our global inter-connection) what was always a Biblical truth: we share in the sin of all.

Original (hereditary) sin is a difficult concept to grasp (for me!), and I remember being somewhat confused by SK’s brief discussion of it in TSUD. Conceding my lack of familiarity with both authors, I think that there may be a similarity between these two takes on sin, that they might in fact be one, since they both describe sin as essentially a state of being, as opposed to actions or behaviors. This is definitely oppositional to (for lack of a better term) Americanized Christianity, with its emphasis on individual responsibility for specific actions or behaviors.

Laypeople feel this connection to societal sin most acutely, Ellul says. It makes them uncomfortable; it is scandal to be associated with the world’s sins. So they try to escape, in two ways:

  • Separate the material from the spiritual — eg, This is my personal life, and that is my spiritual life, and never the twain etc. They focus their effort on “spiritual problems” apart from everyday life, which is separate, their dayjob, so to speak. This sort of compartmentalization is hypocrisy. “God became incarnate; it is not our job to disincarnate him.”
  • Or, they try to “Christianize” everything. Let’s create a Christian state, Christian movies, Christian books, Christian psychology, etc. This is taking “the world” (of which we are, as noted earlier, specifically not a part), finding what we think is “good” in it, or glossing it with something we think is “good,” and calling it Christian. You can’t reform the world’s activities by “pronouncing a blessing on them.” On the social/cultural side, this is very reminiscent of the evangelical subculture in which I grew up; on the governmental side, more reminiscent of today’s dark illiberal impulses.

In both of these cases, Christians are attempting to “build a bridge” between themselves and the world. This bridge, Ellul says, is “morality” — and he is clearly not using the term in a favorable sense.

This type of bridge, he says, is the “most anti-Christian position possible.” But he also says that there is, in fact, “no possible solution” to the scandal that exists.