Notes
1 Ecclesiastes 3:1.
2 Kierkegaard often takes some liberty with his quotations paraphrasing what he takes them essentially to mean. “He hath made everything beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart from the beginning to the end.”
3 For example: 2 Thessalonians 1:3.
4 Matthew 23:23. See note 2. The precise text is: “These ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone.”
5 James 3:5.
6 Matthew 12:43, 45.
7 Compare Börne, Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 126: “All are not free who scoff at their chains.”
8 Compare Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic I. 16, 20.
9 Compare Romans 8:38, 39.
10 1 John 5:19.
11 Of Themistocles in Cicero’s de Oratore II. 74, 299.
12 Plato’s Republic IX. 572.
13 Genesis 2:18.
14 Ecclesiastes 4:10.
15 Compare Luke 17:10.
16 See translator’s introduction.
17 These words are attributed to Francis I as having been spoken after the battle of Pavia where he was taken prisoner.
18 Compare 2 Timothy 3:7.
19 Psalms 94:9.
20 Proverbs 4:23.
21 Ecclesiastes 7:2.
22 Compare Luke 9:59.
23 Compare Luke 17:10.
24 Compare Mark 8:36.
25 Matthew 27:41-44.
26 Shakespeare in Henry V, Act 2, Scene 4.
27 Socrates, Plato’s Republic VI. 492 B.
28 John the Baptist.
29 Compare Rosenkranz, Erinnerungen an Karl Daub, p. 24: “So as on sentry duty, at night on a lonely post, perhaps before a powder magazine a man has thoughts that under any other circumstances would be quite impossible.”
Kierkegaard refers to this same passage again in Fear and Trembling, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 100.
30 Genesis 12:1.
31 Jose Arndt’s, True Christianity.
32 Luke 15:7.
33 Compare Matthew 11:28.
34 Epicurus in Diogenes Laertius, 140.
35 Mark 9:36.
36 Ephesians 6:14, 17.
37 Acts 5:40-41.
38 The Danish word for “courage” is Mod and for “opposition” is Modstand. (Tr.)
39 The Danish word for “patience,” Taalmod, contains the Danish word for “courage,” Mod, and invites the discourse which follows. (Tr.)
40 Compare Acts 22:27-30, and 24:23.
41 Compare 1 Peter 1:16.
42 The Danish word for “actor,” Skuespiller, means literally show or display—player. (Tr.)
43 Socrates in Plato’s Republic VII. 518 A.
44 Psalms 2:4.
45 The Latin proverb “Tu si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.” See Boethius Consolatio philos. II. 17.
46 Proverbs 25:13.
47 Romans 5:3-4.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
WHEN LIFE’S weather is fair there are not many who read the Book of Job or Pascal’s Thoughts. Yet in times of outward or inward searching these books seem to many to be the one thing needful and men seek them out.
Søren Kierkegaard is being discovered by the English-speaking world after something over three-quarters of a century of complete neglect. The creative writing of this Danish Pascal was nearly all done in a phenomenally productive six-year period between 1842 and 1848. Kierkegaard died in 1855 at the age of forty-two. The neglect of one who has influenced German theological thought for forty years and who more recently has been openly acknowledged as a formative force upon the minds of such divergent figures as the German philosophers, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger; as Karl Barth; as the lay Catholic thinker, Theodore Haecker, the Jesuit Pryzwara; and as the Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno can scarcely be charged to the insularity of the English-speaking religious and philosophical world or to the mere barrier of language. This insularity has been penetrated by far less significant continental and Scandinavian figures, and admirable translations of Scandinavian literature have been available for several decades. A deeper reason must be sought for this Anglo-Saxon neglect and for the present quickening of interest.
The Liberal theologian of England and America is described with commendation by Dean Inge in the closing chapter of his Types of Christian Saintliness: “His ‘authority’ is the best available judgment of civilized humanity which is the Liberal’s Great Church. Theological Liberalism is thus a kind of consecration of all the best ethics and science and philosophy regarded as the manifestation or revelation of the will of God to man.” This broad, liberal creed supported by a set of idealistic categories that never questioned seriously the progressive revelation of the mind of God in the existing personal and social relationships of man has been too much at home in this prosperous world to need to call out a rebellious Danish religious prophet who challenged the very categories of its thought. But the World War and the condition of soul revealed by the subsequent social, political and economic unsettlements as well as the open contempt for Christianity shown by the new economic and nationalistic religions have forced liberal Christianity to search its very foundations in order to see what is unique in its Christian faith; to ask whether Christianity is simply a synthesis or amalgam of all the finest world thought; to ask where the spring of its dynamic, of its power, of its revolutionary character is to be found; to ask why Christianity is on the defensive, instead of on the offensive; to inquire what the Christian religion demands of a man. It is this mood that is opening the Anglo-Saxon mind of our time to such a radical Christian thinker at Søren Kierkegaard.
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing is the first of Kierkegaard’s Edifying Addresses to be translated into English. It was written in 1846 and was included in the volume of Edifying Addresses of Varied Tenor that appeared in Copenhagen on March 13, 1847.
In the two important volumes Either-Or and Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard from 1843 onwards had explored from within the æsthetic and the ethical ways of life, and had done it with an imaginative insight and a dramatic richness scarcely surpassed in the history of literature. Here the æsthetic way of life and the ethical way of life are personified in well-drawn characters and presented in meticulous detail down to their most subtle refinements. Both of these ways of life are shown to be ultimately unstable in one who is aware of their full implications, and to point beyond themselves to the religious way of life, different aspects of which are represented in Fear and Trembling, Repetition, the Concept of Dread, Philosophical Fragments, and the Final Unscientific Postscript.
All of these works were issued not under Kierkegaard’s own name but under pseudonyms. They are indirect. They prepare the way. They are intended to unsettle the reader by revealing to him the true character of the dwelling he has inhabited.
But simultaneously with these works, there appeared regularly from 1843 onwards, some twenty Edifying Addresses, always bearing Kierkegaard’s own name. These are direct. They plunge abruptly into the religious way of life itself and explore it from within.
The title of Edifying Addresses (Opbyggelige Taler) sounds quaint and uninviting to the ears of this century. An “address” sounds formal and reminiscent of the days of rhetoric and of ponderous oratory. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, like the rest of this series, is really not an address in the ordinary sense at all. It was never spoken aloud to an audience. Like all of Kierkegaard’s Edifying Addresses which are really unpreached sermons, it was written for men and women to speak aloud to themselves. It was aimed at an audience who read and who pondered what they read. Kierkegaard’s own life-long practice of reading sermons aloud to himself convinced him that there was no more effective way to engage with them. In creating these addresses he always spoke them aloud sentence by sentence before he set them down. This may account for the unusual degree of intimate intensity that characterizes them.
The addresses are written to “edify.” The Danish word “opbyggelig�
�� means literally “upbuilding,” and in spite of the modesty of his prefaces in which he protests that he is without authority and that he makes no pretense of being a teacher, Kierkegaard expressed in his title precisely what he intended for them to do. They were not written as the present-day mind would perhaps prefer them: to entertain, to instruct, or to provoke—but to “upbuild.” Yet for Kierkegaard the “upbuilding” of a life could not take place by building on another room like one of the regular additions to a New England farmhouse, or like an interior remodeling that altered a few partitions. No, it was rather an “upbuilding” that called for a costly abandonment of the security of the old under walls. Men must build on a new foundation. They must bottom themselves in a new center. “There are plenty to follow our Lord halfway,” declared Meister Eckhart, “but not the other half.” The story of the nun, Dame Morel, in the reform of Port Royal, who was ready to give up all of her luxuries but one—all but the key to her little private garden—is the story of men everywhere whom Kierkegaard sought to lay hold of in these Edifying Addresses. They wish to keep at least one key back. As Christian swimmers they long to keep one foot on the bottom. Kierkegaard sought to draw them out into water that is 70,000 fathoms deep where life depends not upon half-measures, but upon faith.
These Edifying Addresses call for self-examination. They “unconditionally demand the reader’s own decisive activity, and all depends on this.” They often explore a text and are never troubled if the same text has already been used in several previous addresses. They explore it slowly and deliberately. They look at each facet. Like a spider’s web they throw out their main supporting filaments and then from the center outwards they weave around them strand by strand until the web is complete. They would leave no way of escape for one who enters. They would track down evasion into its hidden ways, they would expose every attempt to simulate, they would bring the reader into the very inmost demands of existence within the religious mode. They require patience on the part of the reader, but if he follows them through to their conclusion he can scarcely escape their grip upon his life.
Kierkegaard had a true and realistic respect for the resistance which a man’s mind offers to an idea, especially if it is an idea that demands costly action on his part. As a writer he knew how difficult it was to get his own thoughts embodied in suitable words. He suggests that if this is hard, it is ten times as hard to get these words of his to redistil their meaning into the thoughts and into the will of another. He was always ready, therefore, to take infinite pains with what he wrote, and the Edifying Addresses were all written over at least three times before they were finally published.
Eduard Geismar, the Danish scholar whose Kierkegaard studies have extended through a life-time, has written of Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing: “It seems to me that nothing that he has written has sprung so directly out of his relationship with God as this address. Anyone who wishes to understand Kierkegaard properly will do well to begin with it.”1 The fact that this address was written as a spiritual preparation for the office of confession does not limit its interest to those who observe church occasions. This office can be celebrated at any moment in the heart of one who is made ready.
Central in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard is his master category the individual. All of his thought ultimately had to pass through the needle’s eye of whether or not it compelled men to face their sovereign responsibility as individuals. And this, too, was the pass of Thermopylæ at which Kierkegaard stationed himself to defend the individual against any philosophical, political, or religious teaching that tended to slack off this consciousness of the individual’s essential responsibility and integrity.
Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, like his other Edifying Addresses, is directed in the preface to hiin Enkelte, “that solitary individual.” Yet in this address Kierkegaard succeeds with an exceptional directness in laying bare what it means to become an individual. The “indirect” method of insinuation which characterizes his approach to this problem in so many of his works is laid aside here. In one whole section with a relentless persistence he makes almost a choral refrain of the question, “Do you live as an individual?”
Kierkegaard apparently intended to attach a much longer preface to Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing than the one which appeared there. In this original preface he explained the dedication to hiin Enkelte “that solitary individual” and emphasized the importance of this category of the individual to his thought. This important preface which he later expanded somewhat, was followed by a second one on the same theme, written in 1847 and 1849, and by a postscript added in 1855. All three of these have been preserved and were attached as a supplement to the posthumously published The Standpoint of My Activity as an Author which appeared in 1859. In these notes he wrote of the Edifying Addresses: “I marked my writings to which I attached my name with the category of the individual from the beginning; and it continued like a formula to be repeated in stereotyped fashion so that the individual is not a later invention of mine but has been there from the beginning.” 2
When Kierkegaard speaks of hiin Enkelte in his dedicatory preface, he means more than we do by our words “that individual.” The nearest English expression that approaches it is “that solitary individual.” He means the individual as separated from the rest, the individual as he would be if he were solitary and alone, face to face with his destiny, with his vocation, with the Eternal, with God Himself who had singled him out.
Perhaps Descartes was on the right road when he sought to isolate the individual I in man from all other experience and make it the starting point for his system. But he was wrong and even culpable in not pressing on in his exploration of the I beyond its capacity to think, for thought, Kierkegaard would insist, is not its most unique endowment. Here in the core of the I is a center from which choice springs, from which responsibility for one’s acts springs, from which the ultimate sense of uneasiness and weariness with anything that is short of the highest of all in reality ultimately issues, from which remorse and repentance arises.
Allow this center in a man to remain dulled by the crowd; allow it to continue dissipated by busyness; permit it to go on evading its function by a round of distractions, or to lull itself by a carefully chosen rotation of pleasures, abandon it to its attempt to drug, to narcotize suffering and remorse which might reveal to it its true condition; let it wither away the sense of its own validity by false theories of man’s nature, of his place in the social pattern, of his way of salvation; in short, allow any of these well-known forms of domestication of man’s responsible core as an individual, to continue unchallenged, and you as a thinker and a friend of men have committed the supreme treason!
“In one’s friend one shall have one’s best enemy,” wrote Nietzsche, and in Kierkegaard the reader finds that he is confronted with a merciless enemy to every form of gregarious domestication within himself. Kierkegaard does not risk smothering his reader with leniency. He is prepared to be hard, to wound in order to heal, to use the knife. Kierkegaard conceived it his function as a writer to strip men of their disguises, to compel them to see evasions for what they are, to label blind alleys, to cut off men’s retreats, to tear down the niggardly roofs they continue to build over their precious sun-dials, to isolate men from the crowd, to enforce self-examination, and to bring them solitary and alone before the Eternal. Here he left them. For here that in man which makes him a responsible individual must itself act or it must take flight. No other can make this decision. Only when man is alone can he face the Eternal. And the act that is called for at this point is not one of mere noetic recognition. When all is known that can be known, the responsible core of the will in the man has still to yield. He must act, he must choose, he must risk, he must make the leap. For in an existence where qualitative differences remain, there is no other entry into the deepest level of existential living as an individual. Only by this leap on faith could one know the release of guilt, the sense of commitment, the accept
ance of a vocation, of a calling in whose service is perfect freedom. For in any lesser service there is servility. Only the Omnipotent One dares exercise that restraint of true love that makes its associates free and heightens, not debases, the individual core of responsibility and integrity within them. “The consciousness of one’s eternal responsibility to be an individual is the one thing needful.”
Only in the light of this his central task can Kierkegaard’s attacks upon the philosophical speculation of Hegel or upon the social, political and ecclesiastical life of his day be understood. Hegel tended always to make the individual a mere passing-point, a moment, in the cosmic process, and to insist on the individual’s gaining his concrete ethical significance through being identified with the social, religious, and political institutions of his time. Man is to be saved by identification with a set of external arrangements. This for Kierkegaard is the ultimate blasphemy. For instead of heightening his core of responsibility and integrity man is invited to do what he is already enamored with doing, to join the crowd, the mass, to be dissolved into the organic whole. To become a set of relations within the whole is all too congenial to modern man, Kierkegaard believed. “It must be apparent to anyone with even a little dialectical skill, that one cannot attack the (Hegelian) system from within. Outside of it, however, there is only one free seminal point ‘the individual,’ ethically, religiously, and existentially accentuated.” 3 It was with this creative category of the individual that Kierkegaard attacked the Hegelian system.
Purity of Heart Page 19
