Kierkegaard and Christian Faith

By Paul Martens and C. Stephen Evans

Kierkegaard and Christian Faith responds directly to the perennial and problematic concern of how to read Kierkegaard. Specifically, this volume presses the question of whether the existentialist philosopher, who so troubled the waters of nineteenth-century Danish Christendom, is a "Christian thinker for our time." The chapters crisscross the disciplines of philosophy, theology, literature, and ethics, and are as rich in argument as they are diverse in style. Collectively the chapters demonstrate a principled agreement that Kierkegaard continues to be relevant, even imperative. Kierkegaard and Christian Faith reveals just how Kierkegaard's work both defines and reconfigures what is meant by "Christian thinker."

Following an autobiographical prologue by Kathleen Norris, this volume gathers the chapters in pairs around crucial themes: the use of philosophy (Merold Westphal and C. Stephen Evans), revelation and authority (Richard Bauckham and Paul J. Griffiths), Christian character (Sylvia Walsh and Ralph C. Wood), the relationship between the church and the world (Jennifer A. Herdt and Paul Martens), and moral questions of forgiveness and love (Simon D. Podmore and Cyril O’Regan). The volume underscores the centrality of Christianity to Kierkegaard’s life and thought, and rightly positions Kierkegaard as a profound challenge to Christianity as it is understood and practiced today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781481304726

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Kierkegaard and Christian Faith

Paul Martens and C. Stephen Evans

Editors

Baylor University Press

© 2016 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Cover Design by Dean Bornstein

Cover image: Caricature of Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (engraving) (b/w photo), Marstrand, Wilhelm (1810–73) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Martens, Paul Henry, editor.

Title: Kierkegaard and Christian faith / Paul Martens and C. Stephen Evans,

editors.

Description: Waco : Baylor University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015043355 (print) | LCCN 2015045182 (ebook) | ISBN

9781481304702 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781481304726 (ePub) | ISBN

9781481305273 (ebook-Mobi/Kindle) | ISBN 9781481305280 ( ebook-web PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855.

Classification: LCC BX4827.K5 K5185 2016 (print) | LCC BX4827.K5 (ebook) |

DDC 230/.044092--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043355

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. An Introduction to False Pretenses, Søren Kierkegaard, and Trying on Faith for Size

Kathleen Norris

Part I

Philosophy, Revelation, and Authority

Chapter 2. Kierkegaard as Four-Dimensional Thinker

Merold Westphal

Chapter 3. Kierkegaard, Natural Theology, and the Existence of God

C. Stephen Evans

Chapter 4. Kierkegaard and the Epistle of James

Richard Bauckham

Chapter 5. Kierkegaard and Apostolic Authority

Paul J. Griffiths

Part II

Christian Character and Community

Chapter 6. On Becoming a Person of Character

Sylvia Walsh

Chapter 7. Søren Kierkegaard, Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, and Transparency before God

Ralph C. Wood

Chapter 8. The Apophatic Self and the Way of Forgetting

Simon D. Podmore

Chapter 9. The Rule of Chaos and the Perturbation of Love

Cyril O’Regan

Chapter 10. Secrecy, Corruption, and the Exchange of Reasons

Jennifer A. Herdt

Chapter 11. Kierkegaard and the Peaceable Kingdom

Paul Martens

Notes

Contributors

Index

Preface

Søren Kierkegaard was born on May 5, 1813, in what was then the relatively small city of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2013 the two hundredth anniversary of his birth was celebrated worldwide, from Cameroon to Iceland, from Hong Kong to Toronto, from Mexico City to Melbourne, and also in Copenhagen. In fact, interest in the nineteenth-century Dane is soaring higher than ever before. Today, he is of interest to philosophers; theologians; historians; ethicists; literary, cultural, and political theorists; and the list goes on.

The purpose of this volume is to illuminate the polyphonic nature of how Kierkegaard continues to speak to Christians today. In the nineteenth-century Danish world where the Evangelical Lutheran Church was the state church, Kierkegaard sought to articulate a version of Christianity that challenged the status quo, that sought to make becoming a Christian more and more difficult.¹ In the fall of 2013, the Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture provided the following prompt to instigate a wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversation in commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of Søren Kierkegaard’s birth:² "With great passion and vision Kierkegaard engaged the challenges of his age: he articulated his work and displayed in his brief life the journey of ‘becoming a Christian’ within the crucible of early nineteenth-century Danish Christendom. . . . But is he a Christian for our time—do his ideas resonate in our 21st-century context?" The eleven essays collected in this volume are but a small sampling of the rich discussion and debate that emerged over the course of the conference.

Given the conference’s central question—is Kierkegaard a Christian for our time?—it is hardly a surprise that each of the following essays provides an affirmative answer, even if the affirmation may be qualified. Each of the authors reveals a different perspective on what constitutes the defining features of (a) our time and (b) Kierkegaard’s thought, corpus, or existence. Therefore, there is no unified constructive voice in the following essays other than the conviction that Christians today are better off wrestling with Kierkegaard than simply ignoring him; despite this principled agreement, there is also considerable diversity and even profound disagreement here. Perhaps Kierkegaard would appreciate this situation, since he also believed that to a certain degree every generation and every individual must learn the task of becoming a Christian from the beginning.³

I.

Organizing engagements with Kierkegaard is nearly as difficult as organizing Kierkegaard’s expansive thought—inevitably, the categories one brings to the table are shown to be inadequate to the task at hand. Furthermore, all of the chapters in this volume are written as discreet arguments relative to their respective discourses, arguments that can be summarized here only in rather general terms. Those qualifications aside, we have sought to gather the following essays around select themes that illuminate organic links between the essays and various facets of Kierkegaard’s thought. The trajectory that the themes follow in this volume generally moves from epistemological questions regarding what and how one can know about Christianity to ethical questions about how one ought to live as a Christian. Whether Kierkegaard would agree with even this loose trajectory is, of course, up for debate.⁴

Kathleen Norris launches the volume with an autobiographical prologue that reveals her teenage infatuation with and affinity for Kierkegaard, her anxious clinging to Kierkegaard in an attempt to answer questions not yet understood. In drawing parallels between Emily Dickinson and Kierkegaard, Norris highlights how faith, as a dynamic and restless force, does not shy away from acts of idiosyncratic and dauntingly imaginative biblical interpretation, resists the complacency of Christendom, is a way of life and not a doctrine, and continues to make Christian existence difficult, whether one is a teenager or a seasoned poet.

We suspect that all of the contributors to this volume, like Norris, have found that they occasionally persisted with Kierkegaard because it was both absurd and necessary to do so. Yet, each of the contributors has persisted with Kierkegaard in an idiosyncratic direction. To Norris’ likely chagrin, some have even utilized Kierkegaard in making distinctions between disparate things. In fact, the first two essays boldly embrace this sort of task—namely, the task of distinguishing Kierkegaard’s unique place with reference to the discipline of philosophy. First, Merold Westphal summarizes four dimensions of Kierkegaard’s thought—existentialist, hermeneutical phenomenologist, postmodernist, and ideological critique—and spends the majority of his chapter outlining how Kierkegaard employs ideological critique in Fear and Trembling. According to Westphal, Kierkegaard employs a form of ideological critique that can be a fine resource for resisting a common form of idolatry, the idolatry that places the theories and practices of one’s political, social, or religious community (either established or sectarian) as the highest norms of life. For C. Stephen Evans, however, Kierkegaard also serves a more constructive role, a role that assumes that God’s reality is or should be obvious to every human person. In this way, Evans argues that Kierkegaard offers a kind of natural theology, not one based in rational proofs of God’s existence but one that assumes God is present to individuals, through conscience, as the source of moral obligations, as authority, and as judge. One of the consequences of this conviction, therefore, is that Kierkegaard rejects modern apologetics based on epistemic evidence. Drawing upon a wide range of Kierkegaard’s texts, Evans argues that epistemological concerns about evidence for faith sidestep the real issues in the modern world—namely, weak imagination and impoverished emotional lives. And, for this reason, Kierkegaard passionately argued that truth is subjectivity.

Self-consciously, both Westphal and Evans circumscribe their essays in a way that positions Kierkegaard’s use of philosophy as a kind of propaedeutic to Christian revelation. That is not to say that Kierkegaard’s philosophy and theology are not deeply intertwined; it is merely to say that philosophy alone, for Kierkegaard, is a poor thing (to use Evans’ phrase) in relation to the knowledge of God revealed in Christ. The second group of essays then takes up the theme of divine revelation and wrestles with the complexity of its authoritative claims.

Picking up where he left off in his commentary on the book of James,⁵ Richard Bauckham attempts to illuminate how one ought, as Kierkegaard strongly emphasized, to look at oneself in the mirror of God’s Word. After summarily describing Kierkegaard’s exegetical advice, Bauckham devotes the bulk of the chapter to illustrating how Kierkegaard practiced this subjective mode of reading Scripture as an individual before God (especially with reference to the relationships with his erstwhile fiancée Regine Olsen and father Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard). The scriptural text that focuses much of Bauckham’s argument is James 1:17 at least partly because it is Kierkegaard’s favorite verse. However, attending to this verse—because of and yet despite all of the autobiographical resonance—also allows Bauckham to demonstrate that Kierkegaard’s reading of Scripture extends beyond narcissistic, self-centered readings: the mirror of the Word is a good and perfect gift of God that contextualizes the reader not only as a recipient of God’s gifts but also as responsible for their right reception. In so doing, Bauckham’s account of Kierkegaard’s mode of reading Scripture uniquely evokes themes like subjectivity and moral authority already present in Evans’ essay.

Paul J. Griffiths continues this indirect conversation in his own way, yet he significantly raises the stakes involved in relating authority and subjectivity. Drawing primarily upon Kierkegaard’s extended engagement with one of his contemporaries (Adolph Peter Adler) Griffiths suggests that the logic of Kierkegaard’s thought ought to lead to a greater appreciation of the authority held by apostles, both historical and contemporary. Much like Evans, Griffiths rejects epistemic considerations as appropriate criteria for determining religious truth; unlike Evans and Bauckham, Griffiths suggests that Kierkegaard performs his own position inconsistently. What Griffiths means is that when Adler makes a claim to apostleship, Kierkegaard does not immediately ask, Will I obey, or will I not obey? Rather he attempts to debunk Adler as an apostle. To remain consistent with Kierkegaard’s position, Griffiths argues, entails submissive pondering; to illustrate, Griffiths appeals to the qualitatively different responses of Mary and Zechariah to the appearance of the angel Gabriel, and he then daringly concludes with the pregnant suggestion that a Marian-like posture is deeply and perpetually relevant to the claims of Catholic Christianity.

If Griffiths concludes with a gesture toward a possible rapprochement between Catholicism and Kierkegaard on the concept of authority, however, Sylvia Walsh emphatically pushes Kierkegaard back toward a form of Lutheranism in developing his account of Christian character. According to Walsh, Kierkegaard’s sharp criticism of the nineteenth century’s lack of character inversely corresponded to his constructive thematizing and depiction of fictional characters. Echoing a recurring theme in this volume, Kierkegaard’s Christianity is described as a character-task and a battle of character rather than a battle of thought with doubt. Then, in what is sure to be a contested move, Walsh sharply separates Kierkegaard’s conception of Christian character from the classical tradition of virtue ethics, especially as it is represented by Aristotle and medieval scholasticism. Specifically, she argues that Christian character is profoundly Lutheran in that it is formed in relation to God, consists in inwardness, is composed of spiritual qualities that are rightly understood as gifts of God (e.g., faith, hope, joy, and especially love, the essence of Christian character), rejects the language of virtue (including infused virtues that somehow complement one’s natural capacities), and is usually expressed negatively in relation to the world (e.g., suffering and self-denial).

Ralph C. Wood then follows by presenting a fascinating interpretation of Love in the Ruins, a novel written by a twentieth-century American Catholic, Walker Percy. According to Wood, Percy utilizes the central character of Dr. Tom More (a lapsed Catholic descendent of Sir Thomas More) to affirm the accuracy of Kierkegaard’s perceptive analysis concerning (a) the self as constituted by a proper synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites (e.g., temporal and eternal; finite and infinite) and (b) the despair that results when this synthesis is lacking. Furthermore, Percy’s Dr. More vividly displays Kierkegaard’s concept of the demonic, the refusal to exist in transparency before God. Yet, seemingly affirming Walsh’s analysis while also rejecting its theological sufficiency, Wood describes Dr. More’s return to the church in Thomistic rather than Kierkegaardian terms. In effect, therefore, Wood suggests that Kierkegaard’s critical diagnosis of the self must be supplemented in the constructive direction by resources that can be found only in the outward and visible, the sacramental and communal life of the Church.

It has been noted often that Kierkegaard believed love to be the primus motor in the Christian life.⁶ The next two chapters again return to this theme as it continues to shine through Kierkegaard’s postmodern legacy. Simon D. Podmore, stretching beyond Struggling with God,⁷ reveals how forgiveness is a work of love that originates in the secrecy of divine love and, in so doing, powerfully demonstrates that the individual/social dichotomy foisted upon Kierkegaard is neither as stable nor as final as frequently assumed. Forgiveness, as Podmore explains, is a way of forgetting, a will-to-forgetting that is also a form of self-emptying (especially an emptying of the will-to-vengeance) that (a) proceeds from the realization of being forgiven and (b) breaks wounded self-enclosure and makes interpersonal love possible. In this way, forgiveness further exemplifies how the contested relationship between grace and will, present in several of the chapters, may not be as mutually exclusive as it is often assumed. Podmore’s constructive vision entails a warning, however, that ought not be missed: human forgiving and forgetting is a wounded and wounding process that does not prescribe a normative ideology of forgiveness, which is a fine way of remembering that the dazzling darkness of divine love—which we can neither know nor control—is the sole source of truly transfiguring love. Cyril O’Regan carefully shatters nearly all of the usual categories for explaining Kierkegaard in arguing for reading his thought as a late modern or postmodern form of Augustianism that is, however, of a totally different character than that suggested by Jacques Derrida and John Caputo. Nonidentically affirming and broadening Podmore’s conclusion, O’Regan argues that Kierkegaard provides a description of an irreducibly temporal self whose temporality is perforated in and through a relation to God as totally Other in such a way that does not divide the self. Rather, the wounded self is united only in relation to the God who gives good gifts, including wounds that forestall immanent satisfaction. Further and perhaps logically prior, O’Regan goes on to illuminate how Kierkegaard echoes Augustine’s contention that time can be granted a unity only through a relation between temporality and the eternal that is established by the eternal. These conclusions, as significant as they may be, also address only one of the constellation of features in Kierkegaard’s work that, at least according to O’Regan, will continue to haunt reflection on Kierkegaard in the years to come.

The volume then concludes with two attempts to illuminate how Kierkegaard continues to challenge and enrich the discourse and practices of political theology. Speaking directly to the communal life of the church and its potential corruption, Jennifer A. Herdt critically engages Kierkegaard through a reconstructed debate between Jonathan Malesic and Jonathan Haidt, a debate that is then resolved by an appeal to John Howard Yoder. Malesic, appropriating Kierkegaard’s elevation of the particular over the universal, argues that Christians ought to operate in secrecy in such a way that refuses to get caught up in instrumentalizing Christianity for prosperity in the world. Haidt, Herdt’s counterpoint, moves in the opposite direction by demanding that Christians ought to be willing to exchange reasons for their faith, especially with those who do not share their identity or do not belong to their community, so that they are not corrupted by ideology and self-enclosed groupthink. To mediate this dialectic, Herdt presents Yoder as one who, like Kierkegaard, is an unrelenting critic of Christendom. Further, Herdt’s Yoder is a proponent of genuine Christianity as suffering and potential martyrdom all the while, unlike Kierkegaard, affirming a strong ecclesiology that openly serves as a model for the civil commonwealth, especially in its commitment to the practice of the exchange of reasons in all matters of discernment (whether within the church or with the wider world).

Paul Martens, on the other hand, worries about overreaching attempts to correct Kierkegaard’s ecclesiology and, in a sense, returns to some of the critical themes that initially appeared in Westphal’s argument. To illustrate the potential for overcorrection, Martens examines the relationship between Kierkegaard and contemporary American theologian Stanley Hauerwas. After briefly sketching Kierkegaard’s largely unrecognized influence on Hauerwas, Martens outlines how both understand their respective contexts idiosyncratically and therefore offer fundamentally different solutions in an attempt to help their contemporaries with the task of becoming Christian—Kierkegaard attempts to draw people away from Christendom’s crowd in order to become individuals before God; Hauerwas attempts to draw people into the community of the church in order to learn the true practices of Christianity. Recognizing that each of these emphases is incomplete on its own, Martens concludes—indirectly challenging Herdt’s final appeal to Yoder—that Hauerwas’ communal vision ought to be haunted by Kierkegaard lest it fall into a form of idolatry that Fear and Trembling sought to name and reject.

It must be noted that we do not imagine that these few introductory comments concerning the shape of this volume do justice to the complex richness of each of the chapters. Yet, we also hope that they are not entirely unjust. Rather, we intend these comments to help readers grasp several of the enduring themes that draw these disparate arguments much closer together than they may seem on the surface and to serve as an invitation to read and explore further the prescient role Kierkegaard may yet play as a Christian thinker for our time.

II.

As has been indicated above, each of the contributions to this volume interacts with others in surprising and often fruitful ways. Yet, each chapter is also intended to serve as a discrete argument. Therefore, out of respect for the demands and preferences of the differing arguments, we have not sought to key references to a single translation of Kierkegaard’s texts. However, we have attempted to standardize references to the selected translations in such a way that is consistent throughout while also recognizing (because each chapter also functions as a complete entity) that full bibliographic information ought to be provided the first time a given text appears in each article.

1

An Introduction to False Pretenses, Søren Kierkegaard, and Trying on Faith for Size

Kathleen Norris

I would like to begin with an offer of two caveats. First of all, I am not a trained theologian: the last formal class I took on the subject of religion was a required course at Punahou School in Honolulu, when I was in the eighth grade. I still have one paper I wrote for that class: a cheeky reflection on what I grandly termed the affair between David and Bathsheba.

And second, I am no philosopher. I’m much happier making connections between disparate things than making distinctions between them. I’m not sure I even believe in dialectical opposition; I like to think that all things meet, eventually, even if we can’t always perceive how or where. And stories tend to stay in my head much longer than ideas. Once, after I had spent several months with a group of scholars at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Minnesota, a professor of philosophy became exasperated with me during a conversation and said, All you do is tell stories! And I immediately responded, in all earnestness, What else is there? I learned that this is probably the worst thing you can say to a philosopher.

But I did once try to study it. As a young woman at Bennington College, one of the most secular environments in America, I sought out both literature and philosophy in an attempt to nurture my spiritual life. But philosophy was—and is—a struggle for me. For example, one class at Bennington had me reading an entire book by Immanuel Kant; but now, although I know that Kant had one very big idea that had a significant influence on Western culture, for the life of me I can’t recall what it was. (I could have Googled it, I suppose, for the purpose of this essay, but I didn’t.) I continued taking philosophy courses at Bennington until I wrote a paper on the philosophy of William Blake, who of course was a mystic poet who saw angels in the trees of Hyde Park. My professor kindly suggested that I turn my full attention to the study of literature. So, I was basically kicked out of the philosophy department at Bennington. In the world of philosophical scholarship, I suspect that this is about as low as it gets.

But perhaps already in what I’ve said so far, you might have some idea of what attracted me to Søren Kierkegaard. If some of his Socratic thought-twisting made my head spin—and still does—I found in him a poetic creativity and sense of humor that greatly appealed to me. I really did develop a teenage crush on him. (For the record, I liked Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles as well.) My Kierkegaard infatuation began when I was about fifteen: I was browsing in a bookstore and can still remember the pale-yellow paperback titled Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. I ask you, what teenaged girl could resist that? This one couldn’t. I found Kierkegaard addressing subjects I was desperate to know more about, even if I was too young to understand much about his world or his writing. It amuses me now to try to imagine what he would have made of the overly cerebral, precocious, and passionate girl I was then; most likely, he would have run for the hills, or maybe the wilds of Jutland.

When I was in high school, my family attended a very liberal United Church of Christ, whose adult classes were taught by the religion faculty of the University of Hawaii. It was there that I was introduced to the biblical interpretation of Rudolf Bultmann, and I didn’t much like all that de-mythologizing. On my own I discovered, and found refuge in, Evelyn Underhill’s masterful book Mysticism; and I also latched on to Kierkegaard and what I think of as his re-mythologizing of religion. The first thing I read by him was Fear and Trembling, and I was hooked, absolutely delighted at the way he could discuss Abraham and Isaac, suddenly introduce a merman and a young woman, and even admit that he could understand the merman whereas he could not understand Abraham. This was my kind of thing.

To do some re-mythologizing of my own, I’ll add that it is the archangel Raphael who makes sure that you find the people in your life you most need to find—and I believe the same is true for the writers we need. I needed Søren Kierkegaard when I was too young for him because I needed to hear what he had to say about boredom, despair, and trying to form a self and come to a mature religious faith.

As a fledgling writer, I was also attracted by his language, the magnificent power of his writing. Although I’d never say that I understand the full meaning of the teleological suspension of the ethical, I always did like the sound of it; it has what poets called a good mouth-feel. And I am grateful to Kierkegaard for introducing me to the word eschatology. In my book Amazing Grace, I write that I was [a] scholarship student in an expensive school, a fish out of water, with little grasp of the complex culture of Hawaii, where my family had recently moved: ‘shark bait’ was common slang for pale-skinned, bookish kids like me. I took up Kierkegaard in self-defense, finding a kindred spirit in the eccentric Dane. For similar reasons I also embraced Emily Dickinson, and the two nineteenth-century recluses, in becoming my friends, plunged me into the world of ‘eschatology.’

Later I discovered that the motto of the Norris family crest that my father found in England is Regard the End. It would seem that eschatology is in my blood. Or maybe my love for eschatology has to do with hope and my constitutional inability to do things right. The first time I was asked to preach to Presbyterians, I spoke about the communion of saints; the first time I addressed a gathering of Unitarians, I talked about sin. Often it is by doing things all wrong the first time that I make them come out right in the end. I have the feeling that Søren Kierkegaard would understand.

In a way, I had come to Kierkegaard all wrong—backward, as it were—plunging into his writing long before I had any way to understand it. The bite of Kierkegaard’s sarcasm was accessible to me and also attractive to a lonely teenager needing to feel superior to the high school jocks who called her a dog. I admired his scorn for Christians who had become too complacent in their faith, rendering it lifeless. I longed for a deep, all-encompassing faith. But above all, I loved the boldness of Kierkegaard’s claim to BOTH a poetic and a philosophical license, his calling Fear and Trembling a dialectical lyric, for example. I treasured the boldness of his proclamations—Doubt is thought’s despair; despair is personality’s doubt¹—even if I had difficulty following the lengthy expositions that followed.

I admired Kierkegaard’s ability to cut like a laser through the superficial. It thrilled me to read that to be unaware of being defined as spirit is precisely what despair is.² That I may have had fleshy football players and cheerleaders in mind as I read this matters far less than discovering Kierkegaard’s deep insight that deep, deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells also anxiety, which is despair.³ In a metaphor that helped me as an adolescent, and still instructs me when I am faced with the onset of a despondency whose causes are not easy to discern, Kierkegaard summons up a fairytale—or more accurately a troll tale—comparing despair to the troll . . . who disappears through a crevice no one can see. . . . So it is with despair, he writes, the more spiritual it is, the more urgent it is to dwell in an externality behind which no one would ordinarily think to look for it.⁴

But the question remains, why Kierkegaard, that sly and most exacting of thinkers, for a teenager with a spotty understanding of Christian tradition and a constitutional incapacity for philosophical rigor? Trying to cope with his dazzling array of categories, his atomized language, made my struggles with algebra seem easy. Well, to put it in Kierkegaardian terms, I gave up on algebra but persisted with the Dane because it was both absurd and necessary to do so. I felt a deep personal affinity with him that I could neither explain nor deny. If Søren Kierkegaard was an unlikely companion for a dreamy adolescent girl in 1960s Honolulu, he was also a kindred soul.

Like me, he harbored a hidden self that he felt would never be accepted or understood by his peers. He could conceal his melancholy by applying his wit and what he termed his gift of dialectical clarity, while I relied on the synthetic powers of metaphor and poetry. But the results were similar: a divided self, which could appear to be one person on the page and quite another in the world. From childhood on, I had frequently encountered what Kierkegaard describes as the sadness of having understood something true—and then to find oneself only misunderstood.⁵ Most adolescents feel lonely and misunderstood at one time or another, but when one’s otherness is repeatedly borne out in experience, it helps to have someone like Kierkegaard on your side. I would not have expressed this as starkly as did Kierkegaard, writing of the curse of never to be allowed to let anyone deeply and inwardly join themselves to me.⁶ But I was beginning to sense that my life would not unfold like that of my peers—that childbearing was out of the question, and marriage unlikely.

As a teenager I was no doubt misreading Kierkegaard much of the time. When I was asked to come up with a quotation to go under my senior photo in the school yearbook, I chose this: "When a man dares declare, ‘I am eternity’s free citizen,’ necessity cannot imprison him, except in voluntary