Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 37: January 1999

George Pattison. Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith: An Introduction to his Thought. London: SPCK, 1997. 145 pages with index. Reviewed by Vincent McCarthy.

Vincent McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

George Pattison’s slender new volume is a kind of pen-and-ink sketch of Kierkegaard against the background of his intellectual and cultural context, worthy of a theological Dürer.

Chapter One (Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith) attempts to bridge the cultural gap between late 20th century Britain and early 19th century Denmark. Formally, Pattison addresses a British reading audience that has frequently had less Continental contact than its American intellectual cousins. In the process, he indirectly reminds American readers that, in both philosophy and theology, it has sometimes been easier to reach Calais (and points east of the Rhine) from New York than from Dover.

In situating his Kierkegaard introduction against a contemporary, post-modernist backdrop of Nietzschean nihilism, Pattison introduces into the discussion a far more radical figure than Kierkegaard and one who has had far more influence on post-modernity and its spokespersons. Indeed, against a backdrop of Nietzsche with his twin declaration of the end of Western metaphysics and the death of God, Kierkegaard’s agenda can seem to be a mere tinkering reformation of a foundationless modernity, even with the announced drama of a crisis of faith, with the recall to tradition or, more radically, a summons to an authentic new departure from Christian origins. But, understandably, Pattison does not develop this tempting Nietzsche comparison, which would have led his book in a very different

direction. Kierkegaard’s insights into the shadow side of modernity are in any case at least as rich, and frequently far more detailed, than Nietzsche’s more radical and strident analysis.

Chapter Two (Critique of Age) is an excellent analysis of SK’s take on the present age. Pattison’s outline is masterful in its brevity. In a few strokes of the pen he sketches the Romantic intellectual heritage, from Schiller to Danish Hegelians, and their connection to bourgeois religiosity: the piety of the easychair and the hubris of the philosophical armchair, the smug sight of which provoked Kierkegaard to take up his polemical pen.

In Chapters Three through Five (Critique of Society, Critique of Philosophy and Science, Critique of Art), Pattison very ably sketches Kierkegaard’s critique of 19th century culture, although mostly high culture. Throughout, Pattison is judicious and circumspect, always well-informed. There is virtually nothing to take issue with in these fluid essays. At the same time, it must be added that they indroduce no new perspective. But neither should they be accountable to such an expectation in an introductory work of this type, least of all a pressure to be novel for the sake of novelty, in place of being scholarly for the sake of scholarship.

Formally, Immanuel Kant had only three Critiques. Pattison assigns four to Kierkegaard. What his discursive spirit of critique misses, however, is a Critique of Kierkegaard. One may argue that this is gently inserted throughout the text, but the irenic, positive tone of the work obscures critique of Kierkegaard, or even the necessity of it. (One can argue that that is not the purpose of an introductory work. But if other authors are displayed with their shortcomings, when compared to SK, surely SK deserves the same at some point.)

What is also perhaps missing among Pattison’s sketch of Kierkegaardian critiques is a supplementary critique of Kierkegaard’s critique of religion. For Kierkegaard is narrowly (if self-consciously) in the line of Paul-Augustine-Luther and is tied to very traditional Christian categories in an age that was not only becoming secular in substance but, where religiously informed, much broader than Kierkegaard. In an appreciation of non-Christian religion, Kierkegaard is mostly silent but also mostly reactionary. Hegel and Schopenhauer knew and appreciated far more about Hinduism and Buddhism and other sources of spiritual riches. In addition, if one attributes the appropriation of the Abraham-Isaac story to Kierkegaard himself and not just to the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling (who as an esthetic author might be viewed as experimenting intellectually with literary types), one might think that Kierkegaard was simply mistaken in binding himself to a paradigm that is inadequate to explain his own psychology and experience. (Nonetheless, the effort is manifestly a great success as provocation to reflection about faith.)

Chapter Six (Becoming an Individual) surveys Kierkegaardian religious therapy, as outlined in Concept of Anxiety and Sickness unto Death. As with virtually all topics, Pattison is systematic and thorough. But here, at least, the irenic tone may misrepresent Kierkegaard (as Pattison would probably readily admit). For Kierkegaard, becoming an individual is a matter of the greatest urgency and passion. And so an irenic survey of the Kierkegaard corpus cannot do it justice. In addition, while Pattison mentions the role of will and of grace, they do not seem, at least in my judgment, to get their due here. For Either/Or is about a character who will not will, and subsequent works outline the religious problem of the character who does will: that willing is not enough, that restoration requires humbling of the will as well as of the intellect before divine grace. Surely as difficult a teaching in the 19th century as it was in the 5th (Augustine vs. Pelagius).

Chapter Seven (Doctor or Patient?) wisely places toward the end of the work the inevitable confrontation with Kierkegaard’s person and biography. As Pattison notes, Kierkegaard’s scholarship is full of biographical speculation and sometimes preoccupation, paradoxically both enabled and predetermined by an author who would be the first to protest that his thought rises above his person and his biography. On the whole, Pattison steers a careful course but at times the currents pull hard. Pattison seems personally taken by what he sees as an eros-thanatos conflict in Kierkegaard, perhaps influenced by the same 20th century psychoanalytic sources he cites in his speculative interpretations of Kierkegaard’s journals. His boldest suggestion, repeated in the concluding chapter, is that Kierkegaard understood faith as adoring surrender to God the cosmic tormentor, a very hard saying indeed.

Chapter Eight (Inconclusive Unscientific Postscript) is Pattison’s brief conclusion to this slender volume. It is a postscript only in so far as Pattison at last departs from the discursive script to speak, and argue, in his own voice for his underplayed but undisguised conclusion: Kierkegaard is a classic and hence of value to contemporaries. The emphasis is very properly on subjectivity, but Kierkegaard is less of a relativist than Pattison might lead his introductory audience to think. For Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjectivity is also a call to subjective appropriation to “old truths” contained in Christianity, waiting to be sensed in their contemporary power by contemporaries who make them real and felt in their own existence. If emphasis on Kierkegaard’s classic theological stance is not sufficient, to the ear of this reviewer, in Pattison, there is no cause to be overly worried. The reader directed by this fine introduction to the works of Kierkegaard will soon hear this powerful call for him/herself.