Kierkegaard's authorship can function for its readers as a variety of textually mediated spiritual discipline. In the past two decades this way of engaging his texts has recieved increased scholarly attention. This session will provide an overview of this approach to Kierkegaard's writings and will explore his relation to historic traditions of spiritual practices and classic spiritual virtues. The implications of his work for types of contemporary spiritualty will also be considered.
Rather than arguing for any one position, this paper aims to provide a field guide to recent scholarly works on the spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard. Given the explosion of literature on the topic, the need for such a guide is acute. I outline four different categories of research currently being explored: (1) historical; (2) translational; (3) philosophical; (4) liturgical, and I cover authors such as Lee Barrett, Christopher Barnett, David Kangas, and Tekoa Robinson. In conclusion, I argue for the importance of this avenue of research in comparison to previous approaches.
There is a fundamental tension in Kierkegaard’s account of prayer: prayer is described as both language in the most profound sense and a silent receptivity to God. Thus, this account appears inconsistent given these two descriptions. However, there is no inconsistency here insofar as prayer *as* language may foster the attention and listening constitutive of silence—and may *itself* be silent—in the relevant religious sense. This claim is developed by analyzing how Kierkegaard uses language in his own written prayers, focusing specifically on the rhetorical features of an understudied sequence of prayers from 1846. These rhetorical features suggest that *true* Kierkegaardian prayer may also be *spoken* prayer insofar as prayer *qua* language places the pray-er in a situation in which their self is continually echoed back by God’s communicative silence in a dynamic of mutual address that unifies the self *through* speech spoken out of faith and obedience.
I explore the tension between Kierkegaard’s commitment to the absolute difference between God and humans and the emphasis on equality found in the story of the king and the maiden in Philosophical Fragments. I present Kierkegaard’s argument for why our love for God would make us embrace humility, and I point out that the same logic would call for God to humble Godself, which is affirmed in the pseudonymous story. But this raises the question of whether the absolute God-human difference would not frustrate God’s project of love with us, and I propose a way to hold onto both strands. In this scheme, the two spiritual practices geared toward remembering our finitude and receiving divine self-abasement, respectively, become appropriate. I finish by arguing that, to maintain this paradox, it would be helpful to conceptualize God as someone who takes ultimate responsibility for all the evils in the world.
| Nigel Hatton | nhatton@ucmerced.edu | View |