A Philosophical Study of Kierkegaard’s Concept of God
Hassan Jafari Azadshahr Islamic Azad University, Iran
Abstract:
The conviction that God is personal has always been plainly implied both in the biblical writings and in later Jewish and Christian devotional and theological literature. In the Old Testament God Speaks in personal terms (for example, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jocob) and the prophets and psalmists address God in personal terms. Person signifies the most perfect thing in nature. And since the dignity of the divine nature exceeds every other dignity, this name of person is applicable in a supreme degree to God. Person is one of the names strictly and properly applicable to God but, like the other attributes, it is applicable only by virtue of the principle of the analogia entis.
This paper as a rule deals with the Personal God and its historical approaches. It attempts to throw some light on Kierkegaard’s theory of person, subjectively and “existential truth is paradoxical”. In short, he rejects Hegelian universal and accepts a personal transcendental God and the dependent finit man, who as a lonely individual stands before God, like Abraham supported by his unconditional dedication to God. In the religious tradition of Kierkegaard, God revealed himself in the historic person of Christ, in whom eternity meets time. For him, God is not regarded as an objective reality existing independently of human conciousness, but is in some way constituted by subjectivity. God also does not exist even though this faithless and loveless human correctly believes in the eternal being of God, because to exist is to stand in a person- to person relation.
The first part of the paper considers the concept of Personal God generally. This will serve as background for understanding Kierkegaard’s theory of Personal God and subjectivity and truth as paradox. Finally Kierkegaard has introduced a mystical way for existing and understanding God.
A Philosophical Study of Kierkegaard’s Concept of God
Hassan Jafari Azadshahr Islamic Azad University, Iran
Introduction
Philosophy of religion systematically explores the intellectual questions that arise in considering religious views. It leads various thinkers to inquire into the meaning of the claims made by different religions. It also attempts to find a rational justification or explanation of the problems or to examine another area of human interest and experience. The concept of God as central standpoint in philosophy of religion is dealt with by philosophers of religion who make a remarkable effort to develop a theory, which is perfectly suitable for their general information as given in certain religious traditions, their scientific knowledge about how the world functions, or their rational understanding of the character of the various aspects or their experience. Theories about the concept of God range from different forms of the human imagination invented for various psychological, sociological, economic, and other reasons to explain the characteristics of the divine will, the divine intelligence, and the like.
This article will deal with two problems: first, the concept of God in general and the personal God with its historical approaches, second, Kierkegaard’s theory of God person, subjectivity, and existential truth paradoxical. He rejects Hegalian universal and accepts a personal transcendental God and the dependent finit man, who as a lonely individual stands before God, like Abraham supported by his unconditional dedication to God. In the religious tradition of Kierkegaard God revealed himself in the historic person of Christ, in whom eternity meets time. For him, God is not regarded as an objective reality existing independently of human conciousness, but is in some way constituted by subjectivity. God also does not exist even though this faithless and loveless human correctly believes in the eternal being of God, because to exist is to stand in a person –to person relation. Kierkegaard ultimately has introduced a mystical way for existing and understanding God.
In discussing these problems it will be necessary to regard the data determined precisely by both religion and philosophy. But absolutely religious data, in contrast with theological contemplations based on them, will be mentioned only when they are relevant to philosophical understanding.
1
Concept of God
It is very difficult – perhaps impossible- to give a definition of God that will cover all usages of the word and of equivalent words in other languages. Even to define God generally as “a superhuman or supernatural being that controls the world” is inadequate. “Superhuman” is contradicted by the worship of divinized Roman emperor, “supernatural” by Spinoza’s equation of God with Nature, and “control” by the Epicurean denial that the gods influence the lives of men. 1
According to the main tradition of Christian thought, God is also immanent. Augustine held that light of god’s presence in the human mind enables it to recognize eternal truth. Aquinas, while rejecting the Augustinian theory of illumination, affirmed God’s omnipresence unambiguously. “God is in all things, not, indeed, as part of their essence, or as a quality, but in the manner that an efficient cause is present to that on which it acts. Hence God is in all things, and intimately.” Similarly, the mystics affirm that the transcendent God is present (even when unrecognized) at the “ground” or “apex” of the soul. 2
The conception of God presented by Hegel contains, at least to my mind, many objectionable features. What seems to be inevitably involved is nothing less than a modification of the traditional conception of God as inherited from Aristotle and taken over, with profound modification, by St. Thomson, so as to include into it those features of the God of Hegel which make him look more like the God of Jesus Christ, render him more acceptable to the modern mind. Hegel regarded God or the Absolute as in its essence a self- diversifying unity. He conceived of God’s self-expression as a dynamic process that is discoverable in historical events. He stated that the Absolute spirit does not exist apart from the human spirits in which it’s progressively evolved.
Paul Tillich speaks of “being itself” or “the power of being” and this concept he equates with ‘God’, God is being-itself, he is ultimate reality;3 so to speak, God is a symbol for the ultimate reality; this is the basic thesis of his thought. For him the doctrine of a supernatural person, like all religious doctrine, is to be conceived as an attempt to symbolize an ultimate reality, “being- itself”, which is so ultimate that all that can literally be said about it is that it is ultimate. If the God of theism is a person, the often repeated charge that Tillich is really an atheist thus seems justified; yet Tillich can point out that in the past Christian theology has repeatedly found difficulty in the notion that God is a person in any straightforward or literal sense. 4
In the last century, the Danish writer Kierkegaard, who has had such a profound effect upon Christian thinking, and who also may be reckoned the forerunner of Existentialism, entered a violet protest against the whole system of Hegel who had tried to show that reality was a single spiritual whole, or Absolute Kierkegaard felt that Hegel’s use of reason not only left no real place for faith, but also wrongly substituted an abstract Absolute for a personal God who takes the initiative in revealing himself to men. 5 According to the religious tradition of Kierkegaard, God revealed himself in the historic person of Christ, in whom eternity meets time. It is Kierkegaard’s contention that God’s existence can be grasped only by being believed. His existence is assured to us, only when we “let the proof go” and execute the leap of belief. For instance Kierkegaard’s lines:
Therefore, anyone who wants to demonstrate the existence of God (in any other sense than elucidating the God- concept and without the reservation Finalis [ultimate reservation] that we have pointed out – that the existence itself emerges from the demonstration by a leap) proves something else instead, at times something that perhaps did not even need demonstrating, and in any case never anything better. For the fool says in his heart that there is no God, but he who says in his heart or to other: Jest wait a little and I shall demonstrate it-ah, what a rare if, at the moment he is supposed to begin the demonstration, it is not totally undecided whether the god exists or not, then, of course, he does not demonstrate it, and if that is the situation in the beginning, then he never does make a beginning – partly for fear that he will not succeed because the god may not exist, and partly because he has nothing with witch to being. 6
For him there are only two modes of being, that of God and that of the individual. He refers to them as God’s eternity and existence respectively. 7 God’s being in his eternal actuality and eternity belongs to him alone. The finite beings have a peculiar relation with God. They are neither cut off from him nor can they be identified with him. In a certain sense, God includes’ the order of existence in himself, but their being included is not by God’s free, creative causality. The peculiar feature of the being of finite existences is their becoming. Kierkegaard charges Hegel with being unable to understand real change witch necessarily follows from his general failure to grasp the meaning of finite existences. 8 By existence, Kierkegaard means exclusively a finite, temporal mode of being, which is essentially subject to becoming. Hence he is prevented from applying the term “existence” to God, considered in His own eternal mode of being. In speaking of God’s existence, he means the paradoxical fact or mystery of God’s becoming man in a temporal instant, the Incarnation. 9
2-Divine Personality
As Christian theology developed, the nature of God was thought of in terms of various attributes, such as omnipotence, omniscience and perfect goodness. He was also thought of a personal agent, one who has purpose and who acts to carry them out in the light of his knowledge. The divine attributes in general are of two types: attributes of perfection and attributes of imperfection. Attributes of perfection are positive nature and give higher ontological value and greater ontological effect to the object that they attribute. This is clear from the comparison between a live, knowing and capable being and a dead being which lacks knowledge and capability. Attributes of imperfection are the reverse of such attributes. When we analyze these imperfect attributes we see that they are negative and show a lack of perfection, such as ignorance, impatience, ugliness, illness, and the like. Therefore, it can be said that the negation of the attribute of imperfection is the attributes of perfection. For example, the negation is knowledge and the negation of impotence is power and capability.
The attempt to think all this through gives rise to various difficulties with witch philosophical theologians has been concerned since the early centuries of our era. But, there is a great deal of philosophizing about divine personality that is carried on from very different standpoints. What does it mean to claim that ‘God is personal’? The term “personal” has been used in a variety of ways. Here are four that have been at work in the claim that God is personal.
‘Personal’ may be used [a] to designate thing that belong to persons [as in personal property], [b] to characterize event or things that affect persons [as in personal tragedy], [c] to refer to conditional or places that are amenable to private exchange [as in a personal atmosphere], and [d] to refer to a person acting intimately or in an engaged way with other people (as in a personal relationship). When persons act personally as opposed to impersonally they may be affectionate or spiteful, but they reveal their individual characters, their beliefs and desires. Each of four meanings of ‘Personal’ these have been used in what we might call talk about God.
[a] some henotheists have held that God belongs to individual persons or groups. A henotheist acknowledges and reverences God, but, unlike a monotheist, does not deny that other gods exist. Because henotheists hedge an unqualified acknowledgment of the omnipresence and uniqueness of God, there has been an analogous hedge on the conviction that God is the God of all people or the whole cosmos, while God has been thought of as belonging to people; people have been thought of as belonging to God. The ownership of all creation by God is upheld in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and in the Quran [to God is the personal ownership [mulk] of the Heavens and the earth from the chapter the Light.]
[b] Judaism, Christianity and Islam have also depicted God these religions, our deepest pleasures are to be found in God and our sorrows are to be transfigured in a relationship with God.
[c] God has also been thought of as the reality in which one’s life unfolds, both public and private. In God we live and move and have our being.
[d] In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God is described as only creating the cosmos, but caring for it intimately. On this view, God knows created persons better than we know ourselves. Moreover, God’s character and intentions are disclosed in historic events, involving miracles, the prophecies of God’s incarnation.
Not all proponents of Judaism, Christianity and Islam uphold the personal nature of God. Some Philosophers and theologians permit personal descriptions of Cod only if these are understood to be metaphorical. But a wide range of philosophers treat monotheistic tradition as committed to the supposition that God is literally personal. The claim that theists believe God is a person is so prevalent that it is often assumed in philosophical texts and not independently argued. Belief in a personal Cod extends beyond Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Hinduism has important traditions in which God is non-personal, but it also has strands that depict God or Brahman as a person or like a person. A wide array of indigenous religions envisages God as a powerful, good person or person- like reality. 10
Thus, in the case of Judo-Christian-Islamic talk about God the realist assumption is that God exists as an unlimited personal being, so that in addition to all the millions of embodied human consciousnesses there is at least one further consciousness which is not embodied and which is the divine consciousness. Or in the case of Hindu language about the transpersonal Brahman the assumption is that in addition to (though ultimately as the true nature of) the millions of individual human consciousnesses there is the infinite and eternal consciousness of Brahman.11
It seems, then, that this swift and dazzling vision of Divine Personality may represent a true contact of the soul with the Absolute Life – a contact immediately referred to the image under which the self is accustomed to think of its God. Obviously in the case of Christian contemplatives this image will most usually be the historical Person of Christ, as He is represented in sacred literature and art. 12
In accordance with the philosophical discussions, some thinkers have attempted to grasp a Reality that is super personal. Thus Hegel held that Absolute Spirit can be adequately known only by the speculative intellect. Consequently, when he speaks of the Absolute as God he means by Cod (as Aristotle meant) self – thinking thought. The personal God of theism is pre-rational and imperfect representation of the Absolute. On the ascending scale of truth, religion occupies an intermediate place between art and philosophy.13
The view that God’s personal perfection rules out his timelessness have been particularly popular in twentieth century largely as a result of the work of group of theologians called Process Theologians, of whom an eminent representative is Charles Hartshorne. According to him, we regard people as fully personal if they are capable of love and if they are passive, and thereby responsive to their environment, as well as active, and there by able to take initiatives. In that case, however, God’s personal perfection requires that he be able to love and that he be both passive and active. God must therefore sympathize with his creatures and affected by what goes on in the world. Thus God undergoes joys and sorrows and his knowledge undergoes development. In short, God changes. But if God changes he cannot be timeless since a timeless being cannot really change it itself. 14
As Kierkegaard’s rejection of pantheism and the Hegelian universal was total, he could believe in only two terms, i.e., a personal transcendental God and the dependent finite man, who as a lonely individual stands before God, like Abraham, supported by his unconditional dedication to God.15 And also Kierkegaard’s contrast between subjectivity and objectivity has been widely used to express the difference between a personal and an impersonal attitude to God.
Now if we ask Christians how they think of the reality of God, many of them will insist that it does not depend on the assertions of an individual. They believe that this reality constitutes truth, and truth is something an individual can be right or wrong about; it certainly is not established because an individual says it is established. Catholics would want to emphasize these points. Truth, he would want to say, has nothing to do with subjectivity; it has an objectivity found in the Scriptures, in history, and in teachings of the Church. To say that subjectivity is truth is to tread the most dangerous of paths to found eternal truth on individual emotion and conjecture. 16
Kierkegaard, for instance, describes God’s truth as ‘eternal’ and ‘objective’. But for him, there is also the truth of man’s subjectivity, for his inward relationship of unity with God in faith. An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation – process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual. The reason why it is an uncertainty is that God utterly transcends man, so that He cannot be known in the way that ordinary objects are known; moreover, He is a personal being who loves us, so that it would be in appropriate to try to approach Him through objective knowledge which rambles comfortably on by way of the long road of approximation without being impelled by the urge of passion. Since we cannot prove God’s reality, we can approach Him only through faith and we are in the truth if our relationship is the authentic one of ‘passionate inwardness’. Although Kierkegaard makes much of paradox in this connection, the paradox lied not in God’s being in our relationship to Him through Christ. 17
Finally, I hope I have been able to give some indication of Kierkegaard’s use of the term ‘subjectivity’. In some ways it is a dangerous term to use, since we may think he means that whatever an individual says is true is true, or that whatever the majority says is true. Nothing could distort Kierkegaard’s views more. His use of subjectivity in relation to belief in God does not mean that there are no criteria of truth and falsity, right and wrong, depth and shallowness, involved. Since indeed there are criteria of them within what Kierkegaard calls ‘subjectivity’. But these criteria belong to realm of faith itself. The love of God is not based on the facts, but is itself the measure by which the Christian assesses the facts.
Notes
1. H. P. Owen, God, “Arguments for the Existence of”, in P. Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co and London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1972), vol. 4, P. 344.
2. Ibid.
3. Cornelius de Deugd, “Old Wine in new Bottles?” Tillich and Spinoza, in G. N. A. Vesey, ed., Talk of God, (The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 1969), P.135.
4. William P. Alston, “Tillich, Paul”, in P. Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co and London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1972), P.125.
5. Ninian Smart, Philosophers and Religious Truth, (London: SCM Press LTD, 1964), P.17.
6. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments: Johannes Climacus, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edan H. Hong, (Princeton, Now York: Princeton University Press, 1987), P. 43.
7. For a recent survey of this subject see C. Stephen Evans, Realism and Antirealism in Kierkegaard’s concluding Unscientific Postscript, in Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
8. M. T. Ansari, ed., Secularism, Islam and Modernity: Selected Essays of Alam Khundmiri, (New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, 2001), P. 197.
9. Jomes Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard, (Chicago: Henery Regnery Company, 1953), P.147.
10. Charles Taliaferro, “Personal”, in Brian Davies, ed., Philosophy of Religion: A Guide to the Subject, (London and New York: Continuum, 2003) PP. 95 – 96.
11. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), P.173.
12. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of “Spiritual Consciousness, (Minneola, New York: Dover Publications, INC, 2002), P. 289.
13. H. P. Owen, God, Arguments for the Existence of, P.347.
14. Brain Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, (Oxford University Press, 1982), P. 79.
15. M.T. Ansari, op, cit., P. 196.
16. D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), P. 205.
17. Patrick Sherry, Religion, Truth and Language – Games, (London: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1977), PP. 177 – 178.