Christ the Moral Exemplar: Kierkegaard's Poetic Ideal

Introduction

Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th century chief critic of the state church of Denmark, wrote one of his most renowned books, Practice in Christianity, under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus in 1848, just one year after he had thought to end his work as a writer (Hong, xi). Of Practice, Kierkegaard noted: “‘Without a doubt it is the most perfect and truest thing I have written’” (Kierkegaard qtd. in Hong, xviii). Though Kierkegaard focused on a number of themes in Practice, such as the paradox of Christ as the “God-man” and the twofold “offense” of the God-man--that God could be an individual human being and that an individual human being could be God--he primarily intended, as it will be argued, to typify a Christian ideal in line with the “pedagogical model” of the ancients and the early church (Rasmussen, 153). Kierkegaard further set out to reveal “that one becomes oneself through imitating Christ” by following the model of “moral exemplarity” (Campaijen, 341). In other words, Kierkegaard’s work with Practice reflects his desire to reveal how the individual can achieve authentic existence as a human being by pursuing Christlikeness in one’s individual circumstances. This desire came out in the form of a critique of the 19th century Danish church, an institution that had, in various ways, lost touch with its pedagogy and moral exemplar, Christ.

Background

Kierkegaard’s main objective for writing Practice in Christianity was to reintroduce true Christianity into Christendom, to essentially reveal to the church that it no longer followed the true Christ but had instead put in his place an idol (36). As Kierkegaard notes:

…we [in Christendom] really do not care to find out in a deeper sense what it is [Christ] does; even less do we try with the help of God and according to our humble capacities to imitate him in doing the right, the noble, the sublime, the true…We are content to extol and…are ‘too scrupulous,’ perhaps also are too cowardly and flabby really to want to understand.  Christendom has abolished Christianity without really knowing itself (36).

Kierkegaard criticized the church in Denmark for making the act of becoming a Christian too simple, “as simple as putting on one’s socks” as he put it, and that the church had further placed too much reliance upon the evidence of “eighteen hundred years” of Christendom, as though the church’s existence somehow verified the truth of Christ (35). In so doing, the church had glossed over the paradox of Christ as the “God-man” and thus had watered down Christ’s teaching, making Christ’s teaching “a matter of course,” provable by reference to historical fact (Kierkegaard, 35). To become a Christian, one no longer had to confront the true Christ as in the manner of Christ’s contemporaries. One no longer had to confront the paradox that the infinite God was somehow a finite, individual human being. Even more, the recognition of Christ’s identity as moral exemplar, as one to model one’s life after, had faded into little more than a fickle admiration for his deeds. Christendom had, in effect, become a form “paganism” (Kierkegaard, 35).

Kierkegaard's Poetic of Mimetic Piety

According to Joel Rasmussen in his article “Poetry, Piety, and Paideia in Kierkegaard’s ‘Practice in Christianity,’” Practice “exemplifies a poetics that effectively retrieves the primary pedagogical model of both classical antiquity and early Christianity” (153). With the use of “paideia,” a form of teaching meant to “in-form” and “con-form” pupils to the values found within “the shaping narratives of the culture,” Kierkegaard wished to reintroduce the Christian paideia into Christendom (Rasmussen, 155). To succeed, Kierkegaard needed to denote first the relational difference between poetry and history, between the possible and the actual (Rasmussen, 159). Poetry in this sense does not refer to mere prose but rather to an understanding of the ideal that was meant to be imitated or pursued. For Kierkegaard, the poetic ideal that the individual should imitate in her personal life was the life of Christ (Rasmussen, 159). As Kierkegaard prays:

Lord Jesus Christ, you did not come to the world to be served and thus not to be admired either, or in that sense worshiped. You yourself were the Way and the Life--and you have imitators. If we have dozed off into this infatuation, wake us up, rescue us from this error of wanting to admire or adoringly admire you instead of wanting to follow you and be like you (qtd. in Rasmussen, 159).

Kierkegaard ultimately considered one of the chief failures of the Danish church to be its substitution of “a piety of ‘admiration’” for a “piety of ‘imitation’” (Rasmussen, 159). The church had shifted toward an emphasis on cognitive comprehension, speculation, and observation as the elements of “truth,” whereas the original Christian tradition of truth as “being,” as in the being of Christ, had fallen to the wayside (Rasmussen, 160). The notion that Christ literally embodies truth radically differs from the modern conception of truth as something results-based and objectively knowable (Rasmussen, 160). Moreover, to recognize that truth can only be known through embodiment and, further, that Christ is the embodiment of truth, means that one cannot come to know the truth embodied in Christ until one comes to embody Christ in one’s individual life (161). Kierkegaard, recognizing this truth, wished to reintroduce this way of understanding the truth of Christ and the Christian walk into the Christendom of his day as a corrective measure against the tide of modern conceptions of truth.

This correction, however, cannot come without “‘a frightful discovery…that the truth is persecuted’” (Kierkegaard qtd. in Rasmussen, 172-173). The poetic ideal set forth in Practice should inculcate the one who hears of it with “a great deal of trepidation and anxiety,” because the paideia of Christianity entails that the pursuit of the virtuous ideal comes with “the painful dialectic between typical human aspirations and the life of suffering” (Rasmussen, 172). Christ, who was the embodiment of truth, suffered for being the truth, and Kierkegaard thinks this fact should fill the one who wishes to mimic Christ with dread, for as one imitates Christ’s love, one will invariably imitate Christ’s suffering. Christendom had abolished this element of Christianity and in its place established a state religion with the pious ideal of admiration for Christ’s love and suffering rather than imitation.

Becoming Oneself by Imitating Christ

Rob Compaijen takes up the topic of imitation found in Kierkegaard’s writing in his article “Authenticity and Imitation: On the Role of Moral Exemplarity in Anti-Climacus’ Ethics.” Compaijen, using both Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity, shows that Kierkegaard argued that a person becomes oneself by imitating Christ (341). Kierkegaard thought that human beings come to understand their existence through praxis and that excellent praxis makes one self-identify as an excellent human being (Compaijen, 348). Of course, human beings can often associate various practices with their identity, such as their professions or positions of power, but according to Kierkegaard, profession and position “are very low ideals” in comparison to higher ideals such as citizenship (Compaijen, 348).

Recognition of the ideal further corresponds to a human being’s existence as “a self-conscious relation between reality and ideality” (Compaijen, 349). A human being acts rightly when he recognizes the factuality of his existence, and from this factuality, pursues the ideal, or an imagined possibility (Compaijen, 349). As a relation between the factual and the ideal, a human being can never truly grasp or achieve the ideal, because, as Compaijen notes, “only that ideal that can be strived for but cannot be realized does justice to human nature” as a self-conscious relation between reality and ideality (349).

Since, as already discussed, a human being achieves authentic existence and identity through the pursuit of the ideal from the context of her facticity, it is important to discern what the ideal is. According to Compaijen, when we enter into a practice, we immediately become aware of those who are exemplars of said practice (350). Thus, when one sets out to pursue the Christian ideal, one immediately becomes aware that Christ is the exemplar “who has shown what it means to exist, as a human being, over and against God” (Compaijen, 350). According to Kierkegaard: “‘in Christ is it true that God is man’s goal and criterion, or the criterion and goal’” (qtd. in Compaijen).

Christ exemplifies the ideal, first, in that an individual can at best approximate the life of Christ but never factually can achieve Christ’s ideal, which relates to the premise that to maintain one’s authenticity as a human being, the relation between the factual and the ideal as separate must be maintained (Compaijen, 351). Secondly, when one practices Christianity, which is the pursuit of Christlikeness, one immediately recognizes Christ as the exemplar of Christian practice (Compaijen, 351). As the ideal, Christ therefore reveals how to excel at being human, and, moreover, how one can, through the process of striving to imitate Christ, become oneself as a human being in the most authentic way possible (Compaijen, 353). Thus, as concludes Kierkegaard, by imitating Christ the individual becomes herself (Compaijen, 353).

Since to become oneself, one must become like Christ--or, at the very least, one must strive to be like Christ, to approximate Christlikeness in one’s actions--, one must now consider why the imitation of another makes an individual who they are as an individual. As Compaijen asks: “Isn’t one, through imitating someone else, neglecting one’s facticity as this particular individual, that which Anti-Climacus [Kierkegaard] describes as human reality” (355)? It seems that imitation may somehow contradict a human being’s relation to his facticity in the face of his attempts to imitate the ideal set by another. However, pointing to the words of Judge William, Compaijen iterates that the ideal self is “the self ‘which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself’” (qtd. in Compaijen, 355). In other words, there is a “‘not yet, but already’” element in the imitation of Christ that entails the pursuit of the ideal that is both outside of oneself and within oneself (Ferreira qtd. in Compaijen, 355-356). When one comes before an exemplar, one imagines what makes the exemplar the ideal human being, and, since the imagination further “relates the ideal to [one’s] own existence,” one inevitably recognizes: “I should be like the exemplary other” (Compaijen, 356). The result is that one does not contradict one’s facticity when setting out to imitate an exemplar. Rather, the imitator views her imitation as imperative in reference to the facticity of her own situation in relation to the ideal.

It should be noted that Kierkegaard did not intend that imitation should equate to the literal imitation of Christ’s actions, but rather to “existing in the way he existed” (Compaijen, 356). To want to literally mimic every act of Christ signifies that the individual wishing to do so does not want to be himself, which contradicts his identity as a relation between factuality and ideality (Compaijen, 356). To be authentic, one must not forsake one’s “concrete” and “particular” existence (Compaijen, 356). The goal of imitation, rather, is to “express Christ’s being human in [one’s] own existence” (Compaijen, 357).

Compaijen notes regarding Kierkegaard’s thought that “an authentic existence should…consist in an existence in which reality and ideality are fundamentally different but are, nevertheless, related in the strongest possible way” (360). In a sense, this conception of authentic existence leads to the conclusion, according to Compaijen, that the “God-man,” or what Kierkegaard also calls the “sign of contradiction,” represents the epitome of authentic being, since the God-man is both “the facticity of being” in his identity as an individual human and the ideal in his identity as God (360). Christ practiced in reality God’s ideality. In Christ’s factuality, he practiced in factual terms the “measureless neighbor-love” of God (Compaijen, 363). It is this immeasurable love that represents the ideal practice for a human being. Though this ideal can never truly be achieved, the possibility of pursuing this ideal, as exemplified in Christ, from one’s own factual circumstances, represents the sort of praxis that leads to becoming genuinely human in one’s existence.

The Failure to Preach Christian Paideia: Avoiding the "Stumbling Block"

The recognition of Christ as both poetic ideal and moral exemplar seems to have faded in Denmark at the time Kierkegaard wrote Practice in Christianity; hence, Kierkegaard’s strong desire to reintroduce real Christianity into Christendom. Where the church should have taught that Christ represents a poetic ideal to be imitated, parishioners heard a message of Christ’s historical facticity, as an object that could be measured in the “eighteen hundred years” of church history. People no longer had to encounter the paradox of Christ the “God-man,” the “sign of contradiction.” The church seemed to have forgotten that the path to faith in Christ must begin with the offensiveness to rationality, to objective, measurable, and provable knowledge, encapsulated by Christ, who is both God and an individual human being simultaneously. Though “from on high he will draw all to himself,” Christ draws all to his majesty through his abasement (Kierkegaard, 153). His abasement, which is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks, is the paradox that one must confront and, through faith, come to see that this paradox, which is that this abased individual human being is God, is the truth.

Through this recognition of the truth embodied in Christ, as thought Kierkegaard, the Christian must set out to further realize that the perfect love of God enacted by Christ as an individual human being, represents the paideia of Christianity. The God-man is the poetic ideal, exuding the virtues valued by God and his people, and as such the God-man represents the moral exemplar of the church. Christ is the one whom individual Christians should imitate within their own facticity as individual human beings. In so doing, Christians begin the process of becoming themselves, of becoming authentic human beings as they pursue the perfect practice of limitless neighbor-love from the facticity of their individual circumstances. It is this pedagogical, poetic, pious mimicry of Christ that Kierkegaard so desperately wanted to re-instill in Christendom; however, the question of whether he succeeded is another matter. If appeal to historical fact tells us anything, it is that the need for a return to the poetic ideal as the foundation of Christian truth remains a prescient need in modern Christianity.

Works Cited

Compaijen, Rob. “Authenticity and Imitation: On the Role of Moral Exemplarity in Anti Climacus’ Ethics.” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 48.1 (2011): 341-363. Print.

Hong, Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Introduction. Practice in Christianity. By Soren Kierkegaard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. xi-xix. Print.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Practice in Christianity. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Print.

Rasmussen, Joel D.S. “Poetry, Piety, and Paideia in Kierkegaard’s ‘Practice in Christianity.’” Kierkegaard Studies Yearkbook 45.3 (2010): 153-173. Print.