Picked-Up Pieces (20 page)

Now, is such advocacy not a hidden prosecution? It may be argued that harsh words were a needed corrective to an existing complacency and that the New Testament itself is sternly world-denying. But I notice that, just as liberal apologists are troubled to explain away the “hard” sayings of Jesus, Kierkegaard is embarrassed by the Gospels’ softer moments—the genial miracle at the wedding of Cana, the sufferance of little children, the promise to the thief on the cross. Kierkegaard says, “Men live their life in the strength of the assurance that of such as children is the kingdom of God, and in death they look for consolation to the image of the thief. That is the whole of their Christianity, and, characteristically enough, it is a mixture of childishness and crime.” Surely here he is attacking something essential to Biblical teaching—the forgivingness that balances majesty. He seems impatient with divine mercy, much as a true revolutionary despises the philanthropies whereby misery is abated and revolution delayed. The “Christendom” he attacks has strangely little substance, apart from the person of Bishop Mynster, his father’s pastor, who is criticized only for his urbanity and eloquence and his refusal to confess that “what he represented was not really Christianity but a milder form of it.” Indeed, the whole attack is an invitation to
the Church to commit suicide: “Yes, truly, suicide, and yet an action well-pleasing to God.” Any specific reform—a revival of monasteries, an abolition of “livings”—he explicitly disavows. The one concrete result he expects from his attack is his own imprisonment and death. Though the Church’s functionaries barely troubled to respond even in writing, he did die. He suffered his fatal stroke while returning from the bank with the last scrap of his fortune. He had nowhere further to go, and his death, whose causes eluded diagnosis, seems willed.

In the hospital, he told his only intimate friend, the pastor Emil Boesen, “The doctors do not understand my illness; it is psychic, and they want to treat it in the ordinary medical way.” His conversations with Boesen, a kind of continuation of the journals (printed as such by Dru), have a relaxed sweetness; his terrible “task” is done, and he is happy that so much in his life has “come out right” and is melancholy that he cannot share his happiness with everyone. He refuses to put flowers sent him into water: “it is the fate of flowers to blossom, smell, and die.” Of
The Instant
, whose tenth number lay unpublished on his desk, he said, “You must remember that I have seen everything from the inmost center of Christianity, it is all very poor and clumsy.… I only said it to be rid of evil, and so to reach an Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” This “Alleluia,” it may be, could be reached only through a scandal in which, alone like a shepherd boy on the Jutland heath, Kierkegaard execrated God. At any rate, with Kierkegaard, as with Proust, we feel writing as a demon—the one way to set a bent life straight.

Kierkegaard would hardly be pleased to know that more than any other thinker of the 19th century—not excluding Newman and Dostoevsky—he has made Christianity intellectually possible for the 20th. Not that the “millions of men falling away from Christianity” that he foresaw and desired has not occurred. But, by giving metaphysical dignity to “the subjective,” by showing faith to be not an intellectual development but a movement of the will, by holding out for existential duality against the tide of all the monisms, materialist or mystical or political, that would absorb the individual consciousness, Kierkegaard has given Christianity new life, a handhold, the “Archimedean point.” From Jaspers and Barth, Unamuno and Marcel, Heidegger and Sartre, his thought has filtered down through the seminaries to the laity. He has become, as he angrily predicted, the property of those men “more abominable and gruesome than the cannibals,” professors and clergymen,
and he is used, in the form of a few phrases or a bolder style, to prop up the feeble, always tottering faith of contemporary “Christians.” He has become an instrument in the conspiracy to “make a fool of God.” Those who read him eat the aesthetic coating and leave the religious pill, and “neo-Orthodox” Protestantism, his direct beneficiary, has accepted the antinomianism and ignored the savage austerity, the scornful authoritarianism. Yet Kierkegaard himself, this two-tined Fork with his trouser legs of unequal length, this man in love with duplicity and irony and all double-edged things, lived luxuriously to the last and is nowhere quite free of sophism and vanity. (His sermons, for example, so symphonic and ardent, somehow belong with the memorable sermons of fiction, like those of Father Mapple in
Moby Dick
and of Père Paneloux in
The Plague
.) In the journal of 1849 he reminded himself, “It must never be forgotten that Christ also succored temporal and worldly needs. One can also, untruly, make Christ so spiritual that he becomes sheer cruelty.” If this is what Kierkegaard seemed to do in the end, he also remembered that infinite majesty infinitely relents. Late in
The Last Years
we find this surprising entry: “For with such clarity as I have, I must say I am not a Christian. For the situation as I see it is that in spite of the abyss of nonsense in which we are caught, we shall all alike be saved.”

RELIGIOUS NOTES

O
N THE
B
OUNDARY
, by Paul Tillich. 104 pp. Scribners, 1966.

T
HE
F
UTURE OF
R
ELIGIONS
, by Paul Tillich. 94 pp. Harper & Row, 1966.

These two small posthumous volumes cast a sympathetic backward light upon a somewhat puzzling figure. Tillich, though possessed of a personal radiance that penetrated even the speckled fog of a television interview, seemed in his writing pervasively ambiguous and tortuously euphemistic. In
On the Boundary
, a terse autobiographical sketch, he declares that for all of his long life he considered his proper place to be on both sides of the fence. Theologian and philosopher, conservative and socialist, German and American, he felt himself a mediator in a world of fragmentation, and entertained atheism in the church parlor. It took an exceptional serenity to do this: “The man who stands on many boundaries experiences the unrest, insecurity, and inner limitation of existence in many forms.” His tolerance of uncertainty and of contradiction was perhaps specifically Lutheran, and Tillich may have been the first Lutheran voice in American intellectual history. Lutheranism (existing throughout the United States in geographical enclaves whose atmosphere, oppressive and stagnant and idyllic, can be felt in the novels of Conrad Richter) is itemized by Tillich as “a consciousness of the ‘corruption’ of existence, a repudiation of every kind of social Utopia (including the metaphysics of progressivism), an awareness of the irrational and demonic nature of existence, an appreciation of the mystical element in
religion, and a rejection of Puritanical legalism in private and corporal life.” In
The Future of Religions
, which contains, amid much eulogistic padding, four short addresses, he more specifically relates Utopianism and the concept of progress to the Calvinism that has informed American ideals. On the other hand, Lutheranism, with Greek Orthodoxy, is a church of “withdrawal from history.” One wonders, considering the exhaustion of the frontier, where Puritanism had point, whether the future of Christianity in America does not lie with some such withdrawal. History is proving to elude apotheosis, and Tillich’s remarkable rapport with young students appears prophetic of the mystical, latitudinarian, and rather Asiatic new wave of American religious expression.

M
Y
T
RAVEL
D
IARY
:
1936
, by Paul Tillich, edited and with an introduction by Jerald C. Brauer, translated from the German by Maria Pelikan. 192 pp. Harper & Row, 1970.

The late Professor Tillich, having fled Nazi Germany in 1933, returned to Europe three years later for a round of lectures and conferences, and he mailed his wife installments of the diary he kept from April to September. Now this affectionate record has been published, and while it is neither very amusing nor very enlightening, it is something of both. Tillich’s own generous and receptive nature shines through his notation of countless conversations, audiences, bottles of wine, beautiful vistas, nights of good or less good sleep. In Paris he visits night clubs featuring “very nude” girls; in Switzerland he climbs glaciers. In Scotland he is “seated at the Dean’s right, next to Patterson, an old systematic theologian”; in Holland he marvels at the Rembrandts. At all stops he counsels and consoles friends he may never see again—expatriated and polarized citizens of a Europe that was on the edge of the abyss and knew it, yet was still the immemorial Europe of good food, mountain views, well-mannered prostitutes, hikes, ideas, and rain showers that enliven rather than ruin an afternoon. Though Tillich visits Barth and gossips about Heidegger, he rarely reads a book or goes to church. In a way, this is everybody’s summer abroad, right down to the well-evoked days at sea, except that Hitler’s handwriting is now no longer a topic of analysis, and trips to Russia are not the latest thing among the intelligentsia. This charming memento of a vanished man and era has been indifferently
served by its publishers: typographical errors abound, and where contemporary photographs of the scenery would have helped, there are quite superfluous pen-and-ink scribbles (by Alfonso Ossorio) of nothing in particular.

D
ELIVERANCE TO THE
C
APTIVES
, by Karl Barth, translated from the German by Marguerite Wieser. 160 pp. Harper, 1961.

This collection of recent sermons displays the grave, generous, and—often—genial humanity of “anti-humanist” theology’s living Olympian. Seekers of novelty and subtlety in philosophical accommodation should seek elsewhere; it has been Barth’s work to turn the Christian field with a resharpened plow, rather than to look for new pastures or draw new boundaries. The force of these sermons lies in that—minus a few topical references and with a few adjustments of emphasis—they might have been preached any time in the last two millennia, and, but for their exceptional compactness and pertinence of expression, by a conservative clergyman anywhere. Perhaps because they were for the most part delivered to inmates of the prison in Basel, their dominant note—an unusual one in contemporary Christian literature—is of hope, of joy in the Lord, of an ardor that can assert, concerning faith, that “no human being has ever prayed for this in vain.”

How I C
HANGED
M
Y
M
IND
, by Karl Barth, with an introduction and epilogue by John D. Godsey. 96 pp. John Knox Press, 1966.

A bracing demi-autobiography, essentially composed of three self-descriptive articles Barth wrote for the
Christian Century
in 1938, 1948, and 1958 under the heading “How I Changed My Mind.” Actually, in the three decades considered, Barth changed his mind rather little, holding fast to his central vision of God’s otherness through all political and theological storms. The dominant impression these pages leave is of Barth’s heroic stubbornness, the reasoned yet pugnacious refusal to let others think for him: when political relativism was fashionable, he implacably opposed Hitler, and when political absolutism prevailed, he took a mediating attitude toward Communism. Though his theology, a
virtual reinvention of Christian orthodoxy, must be described as conservative, it has been viewed by himself as a “restless” activity, a “process” in which he has been concerned “not to forfeit my freedom.” What also emerges from these essays, amplified by the editor’s description of a visit to Barth in 1965 and the theologian’s concluding letter, is an account of the aging process as it has been experienced, with rare good grace, by a man of firm health, normal worldliness, and enviable sense of vocation.