2.1 The Title of the Book

The title in Danish is Philosophiske Smuler eller en Smule Philosophi. “Fragments” is not wholly satisfactory as a translation of “Smuler.” The Danish word is a very common term, frequently used at the dinner table to ask “for a little bit more” (en lille smule mere) of some item of food or drink. The word has a colloquial feel, while “fragments” seems a bit more formal. Certainly no English speaker would ask at the dinner table “for a little fragment more” of potatoes! Smuler could thus be translated as “bits” or “scraps.” M. G. Piety has in fact published an excellent translation of the book under the title Philosophical Crumbs (2009). That translation has the merit of conveying the whimsical and even humorous character of “Smuler.” Fragments as a whole shares in this humorous character, as I shall try to show. However, though “Fragments” as a translation is not ideal, I shall stick with it, mainly because it is the title under which the book is best known, used by Howard and Edna Hong’s translation (PF).Footnote ⁴

The title is undoubtedly intended to distinguish the book from the work of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel who claimed that what made his own philosophical work “scientific” was precisely its systematic character. On this view philosophy must be systematic to be genuine philosophy. Danish Hegelians had eagerly jumped on this bandwagon, and so in this context the phrase “philosophical bits” or “fragments” has an oxymoronic tone, like “giant shrimp.” The title itself thus marks the book as refusing the view that philosophy must be systematic in character. In this respect Kierkegaard is trying to emulate his philosophical hero Socrates, who developed his philosophy through dialogue with his contemporaries.

2.2 The Pseudonymous Author

As already noted, Fragments is attributed by Kierkegaard to a character named “Johannes Climacus,” though Kierkegaard put his own name on the title page as “editor,” which he had not done for his previous pseudonymous works. Kierkegaard originally intended to publish Fragments under his own name; the book was sent to the publisher this way and the original proofs show Kierkegaard himself as the author.Footnote ⁵ Since the pseudonym was a last-minute change, some commentators have claimed that the book is not really pseudonymous, but one that can safely be attributed to Kierkegaard himself (Thulstrup, Reference Thulstrup1962, lxxxv).

I shall take the pseudonym as the author. It is true that Kierkegaard only made a few changes to the proofs after deciding to attribute the book to Johannes Climacus, with most of those occurring in the Preface. One can infer from this that the character Climacus is likely close to Kierkegaard, perhaps much closer than other pseudonyms. However, it is also true that in the end Kierkegaard saw something about the book that made him think it was more suitable to attribute it to a pseudonymous character than to publish it under his own name. I think that this decision on his part was insightful and that taking the pseudonym seriously helps the reader understand the book better.

So who is Johannes Climacus and what is he like? Kierkegaard took the name from an actual figure, a monk from the Monastery of St. Catherine’s near Mount Sinai who around 600 AD published a book called The Ladder of Divine Ascent, under the name of Johannes Climacus (John the Climber). This work is an important text in ascetic spirituality, still read today, particularly in Eastern Orthodox churches. The book is a manual of how to develop the virtues of an ascetic saint and avoid the vices that block such spiritual development.

There is no evidence that Kierkegaard studied the book or even read it carefully. Rather, Kierkegaard seemed to be taken with the idea of spiritual development that the title of the book expressed. In an early journal entry, Kierkegaard describes Hegel as a “Johannes Climacus,” who “climbs up to the heavens by means of his syllogisms” (JP II, entry 1575). Prior to writing Fragments, Kierkegaard himself had written an unfinished and unpublished book about a fictional contemporary philosopher whom he calls “Johannes Climacus,” whose name was also supposed to be the title of the book. This Johannes seems to be a young and somewhat naïve man who takes seriously the dictum of the philosopher Descartes that philosophy must begin with universal doubt.

Johannes Climacus seems intended to show that such doubt is in fact impossible – a claim that Kierkegaard and some of his pseudonyms make in several of his published works. In my view, Kierkegaard was unable to finish the work because the central conceit did not lend itself to extended treatment. The situation of Johannes Climacus in the book is supposed to provide a kind of satire of modern philosophy, but the joke is one that cannot be extended for very long. It is a bit like a gag that would work well as the basis of a half-hour television sitcom episode, but could never be stretched into a full-length motion picture. That, at least, would partially explain why Kierkegaard did not finish the book and never published it.

The character who is the subject of Johannes Climacus has little in common with the author of Philosophical Fragments, other than the fact that both are philosophers of a sort. The former is serious, young, and naïve, while the author of Fragments is sophisticated, humorous, and ironical. The character of Climacus as author is perhaps best seen in the Preface, the part of the book that Kierkegaard changed the most when he decided to make the work pseudonymous.

The Preface is a puzzling blend of what Kierkegaard himself calls “jest and earnestness,” full of self-deprecating humor, but with an undertone that hints at a serious purpose. Climacus says his book is just a “pamphlet” or “little piece,” and that it has no role to play in the great intellectual movements of the day. In a passage that mocks the intellectual pretensions of contemporary Hegelians, Climacus confesses that he has no scholarly legitimacy, since his work cannot be seen as “a thoroughfare or transition, as concluding, introducing, or participating, as a coworker or as a willing follower, as a hero or at any rate as a relative hero or at least as an absolute trumpeter” (PF, 1). Climacus describes himself as too lazy to be a serious scholar, though he provides plenty of literary allusions that show he is well read. He even compares his situation to that of the Cynic Diogenes, who lived in a bathtub. When Diogenes’s city of Corinth was about to be besieged, most of the citizens were frantically busy preparing for the conflict, shoring up the walls of the city, sharpening weapons, and so on. The story is that Diogenes then began to roll his tub up and down the street, explaining that he did not want to be “the only loafer among so many busy people” (PF, 2). This seems to imply that Climacus’s book has no serious purpose.

However, near the end of the Preface, Climacus strikes a different tone, one of existential seriousness. He first asks “What is my opinion?” of the matters discussed in his book, and answers by refusing to answer: “Do not ask me about that. Next to the question of whether or not I have an opinion, nothing can be less important to someone than what my opinion is” (PF, 7). The last thing he would want is for a reader to embrace “an opinion” because the reader thinks Climacus holds that opinion. Climacus describes himself as one who is able “to dance lightly in the service of thought, as far as possible to the honor of the God…”Footnote ⁶ His “dancing” is made possible because he stakes his own life on his activity: “Then the dance is easy, for the thought of death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner” (PF, 8). But Climacus will not reveal his own standpoint and what his work means to him. “Do I have any reward for this? Do I myself, like the person who serves at the altar, eat of what is set on the altar? … That is my own business” (PF, 7).

Here we get some insight as to why Kierkegaard may have decided on the pseudonym. The book is a comparison of a philosophical view of the end or goal of human life with another view that is clearly religious in character and strongly resembles Christianity. Climacus is an ideal author to examine this relation, since he is both a philosopher of sorts and a person with religious interests, yet it is not clear where he himself stands. He is not clearly a partisan of either of the views he examines, and so he can be fair to both.

This is confirmed by the other work of Kierkegaard’s attributed to Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In this book, Climacus gives us much more insight about himself. He describes himself as a “humorist,” who is a kind of religiously concerned philosopher (CUP, 483).Footnote ⁷ Climacus says he is not a Christian, but he is very interested in Christianity and is interested in knowing what a person can do to become a Christian (CUP, 15–16). Postscript looks at Hegelian philosophy and its relation to Christianity, and Climacus affirms that he is an ideal figure to carry out such an investigation. As a humorist he is able to engage philosophers on their own turf, so to speak, but his sympathies to Christianity help him diagnose what he sees as an injustice toward Christianity that the Hegelians are guilty of.

These same qualities provide the author of Fragments the standing to compare a philosophical view that he attributes to Plato’s Socrates with a view that Climacus claims to invent, but which suspiciously resembles Christianity. As will become obvious, the claim that Climacus has invented the view he compares to the Socratic view is really a jest, and the book as a whole is suffused with ironical humor. Furthermore, while the two views are compared and contrasted, there is no attempt to say which is superior. It is easy to understand how Kierkegaard himself, while reading the proofs of the book, could have come to see that it would be better to attribute the book to a humorist rather than to publish it under his own name.

Kierkegaard himself had completed the requirements for becoming a pastor in the Danish Lutheran church, and at times during his life he seriously considered becoming a priest. In the course of this preparation, he actually preached at several churches in Copenhagen. At the time Fragments was published, Kierkegaard was already known as a Christian author, having published a number of sermon-like “Upbuilding Discourses” under his own name. The ironical and humorous character of Fragments needed an ironical and humorous person as author.

In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, a sequel to Fragments that Climacus “half-promises” at the end of the book, Climacus gives a kind of personal reaction to all of Kierkegaard’s early writings, which are mostly pseudonymous. In the course of giving his response to these writings, Climacus discusses his own earlier Fragments as well. Most notably, he provides a long footnote in which he responds to a German reviewer of the work. Climacus admits that the reviewer provides a summary of the book that “is accurate and on the whole dialectically reliable” (CUP, 274–75n). Despite this, Climacus is unhappy with the review, and says that “anyone who only reads the review will receive an utterly wrong impression of the book,” and, that the reviewer offers the reader “the most mistaken impression one can have of it” (CUP, 274–75n). The reason for the misunderstanding is that the review is purely “didactic,” but what makes the book distinctive is that it is in no way didactic. Instead, irony, humor, and satire pervade the work even though what emerges in the end “is old-fashioned [Christian] orthodoxy in its rightful severity” (CUP, 275n). It is clear that for Climacus himself (and probably, for Kierkegaard also), what is most important about the book is not its content, but the form in which that content is presented. We can thus see why Kierkegaard’s decision to attribute the book to Climacus the humorist was apt.

If Philosophical Fragments is fundamentally humorous and ironical, how does one avoid the pitfall of the German reviewer? In what follows I will attempt to explain many of the maneuvers and points that Climacus makes. In some ways this resembles trying to explain a joke, and it is notoriously true that a joke that has to be explained is not funny. In any case an explanation of a joke is generally not funny. There are two points in my defense. First, the account I will give will highlight its humorous and ironical character. Second, many contemporary readers need help to understand the humor and irony. Kierkegaard published Fragments in 1844 in a Denmark that could still be truthfully described as part of Christendom. He assumes his readers have at least an intellectual understanding of basic Christian doctrines as well as a familiarity with the Bible. Today we live in a post-Christian culture in which one cannot reasonably assume that the majority of readers will have this understanding. I need to explain how the humor works, however unfunny my explanations may be.

Actually, there is a kind of humor and irony in the situation that I think Kierkegaard would appreciate. In the book Kierkegaard has his pseudonym present “ordinary Christianity,” but he does so in a humorous and ironical way, reminding his readers of what they already know and helping them see its importance. However, in the contemporary situation, where a deep understanding of Christianity and the Bible is no longer generally present, many of Kierkegaard’s points may seem startling and original, even though they are anything but that. I think Kierkegaard would enjoy the irony and humor of the situation, in which “old-fashioned orthodoxy” is thought to be something novel. In saying this I do not of course mean to deny that Kierkegaard’s ways of communicating Christianity are indeed fresh and original.

2.3 The Title-Page Questions

Three questions are asked on the title page of Fragments: “Can an eternal consciousness have an historical point of departure? How can such a thing be of more than historical interest? Is it possible to build an eternal happiness on historical knowledge?”Footnote ⁸ The phrase “eternal consciousness” is best understood as a more formal, or perhaps philosophical, expression for what Christianity (as well as some other religions) calls eternal life or salvation. It is significant that Climacus uses this more philosophical expression. Some philosophical views, such as the Platonic view Climacus is going to consider, see eternal life not as something to be gained in time, but as something humans already possess. Humans are immortal souls, and the task is to gain an “eternal consciousness.” The task is to become conscious of the eternal status one already has.

Christianity has generally held that eternal life is linked to history in a twofold way. First, eternal life is seen as something that can be gained or lost by human persons in time. Second, the gaining or losing of eternal life is tied to a person’s relationship to an historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth.

These standard Christian convictions had become controversial by the early nineteenth century. Many intellectuals found it troubling that a person’s eternal destiny could be linked to history. These worries come in two forms, one ontological and the other epistemological. Ontologically, one might wonder how something as momentous as a person’s eternal destiny could be grounded in events that are contingent. Epistemologically, one might wonder how a person’s eternal destiny could be grounded in something as uncertain as historical knowledge. Both kinds of worries can be seen in Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant, Reference Kant1960). In this work, Kant tries to show that the essential content of a true religion can be derived from reason. Even if God has given humans a revelation of religious truth in history, Kant thought that once the content of that faith is known, it is possible to ground its essential core in reason in a way that makes faith logically independent of historical claims.

The epistemological worries were at least partly grounded in the development of historical Biblical criticism, which questioned what could be known about the historical Jesus as his story is presented in the Gospels. A number of important figures, including Spinoza, contributed to the development of this critical approach to Scripture, but G. W. F. Lessing’s publication of the “Fragments” of Hermann Samuel Reimarus was seminal. Lessing himself published an essay, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power” (Lessing, Reference Lessing1936), in which he claimed that if he had been a contemporary eyewitness to the events described in the Gospels, he would have been able to believe. However, Lessing says that his actual situation is very different. The events occurred many centuries ago, and the reports have been transmitted through a long chain of witnesses whose reliability is suspect. There is, therefore, for Lessing, an “ugly broad ditch,” between the “truths of reason” and “truths of history,” a ditch he says, with a touch of humor, he is not able to leap across with his old legs.

Lessing’s worries here may have more to do with the nature of history in general than the specifics of the historical evidence for the founding events of Christianity. He seems to think, as Kant probably did, that eternal life should be based on “truths of reason,” and that these differ in kind from historical truths.Footnote ⁹

We can see then that the questions on the title page were already live ones in Kierkegaard’s time. The first question is basically whether eternal life can depend on something historical. The second question is how eternal life could depend on history, if it indeed does. It was one that C. S. Lewis memorably expresses, describing, prior to his conversion, his own difficulty with the idea that salvation could depend on something historical “what I couldn’t see was how the life or death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now – except insofar as his example helped us” (Lewis, Reference Lewis and Hooper1979, 427). The third question brings to the fore the epistemological form of the worry about the dependence of eternal life on history. How could something as uncertain as historical knowledge be decisive for a person’s eternal destiny?

Climacus does not give categorical answers to any of these questions, but hypothetical ones. Fragments describes two different views of the relation between history and eternal life, but Climacus does not say which view is true or even which is superior. The view that he describes as “Socratic” clearly answers the questions by affirming that an eternal consciousness cannot be based on something historical, and that there is no way history could have this kind of importance. Historical knowledge cannot be the basis of eternal life.

The second view, which Climacus pretends to invent, has a different set of answers, at least to the first two questions. This second view, which I will usually call “the B Hypothesis,” answers the first question by affirming that eternal life could “have an historical point of departure” and thus could depend on something historical. It also provides an answer as to the second question by imaginatively presenting a story about how this might be possible. However, the B Hypothesis, while holding that eternal life does depend on historical events, rejects the claim that eternal life depends on historical knowledge, at least if historical knowledge is understood as something that historians base on evidence. Thus, the B Hypothesis may agree with the Socratic view on the third question.

So Fragments gives only conditional or hypothetical answers to the title-page questions. If the Socratic view is true, the questions will be answered in one way, but if the B Hypothesis is correct, at least the first two questions will be answered differently.

2.4 The Motto

Climacus provides a “Motto” for the book, taken from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.Footnote ¹⁰ However, Kierkegaard knew Shakespeare in German and then translated the German into Danish. Thus, Shakespeare’s “Many a good hanging has prevented a bad marriage” becomes (when translated back into English) “Better well-hanged than ill-wed.”

Climacus himself provides an explanation of the Motto in Postscript: “better well-hanged – than by an unhappy marriage to be made a systematic in-law of the whole world” (CUP, 3). Niels Thulstrup takes the Motto to contain an allusion to Christ’s crucifixion; it would be better to be crucified with Christ than to be married to the world (Thulstrup, Reference Thulstrup1962, 152). Thulstrup here assumes that the B Hypothesis is an ironical way of describing Christianity, an assumption that Climacus himself admits is correct at the end of the book (PF, 109). Nielsen objects to this reading of the Motto on the grounds that it implies that Climacus is a Christian author, which, as we have seen, seems to be contradicted by the book’s Preface, in which Climacus refuses to say where he stands (Nielsen, Reference Nielsen1983, 3, 22–23). However, Nielsen’s objection fails because the correctness of the Thulstrup reading does not imply that Climacus is a Christian. A person who is a non-Christian might well agree that Christianity should not be confused with some philosophical system such as Hegelianism. If Christianity is something essentially different than a human philosophical system, then any attempt to “marry” it to such a system makes Christianity to be something different than it is. Even someone who is not a Christian might see that such an attempt, even if well intentioned, does an injustice to Christianity, and perhaps to the philosophical view as well. Such a person might well think that it is better to allow Christianity to die a decent death than confusedly to make it something other than it is.

3.1 The Socratic View That the Truth Is within Every Human

Before looking at the B Hypothesis in depth, we need to examine the Socratic view more closely, since the B Hypothesis is defined in contrast to that view. Section A of Chapter One begins with the question “Can the Truth be learned?”Footnote ¹¹ Climacus immediately says that the possession of the Truth will be identical to virtue, because in Plato’s dialogues virtue is always defined as insight into the Truth (PF, 9). So it is clear that the Truth, in this case, is not merely cognitive awareness of facts, but something that transforms the learner, since virtue is a trait of the whole person.

The Danish term for truth here is “Sandheden,” which includes the definite article and is thus properly translated as “the Truth.” But why capitalize the term, as I am doing? The Danish term is capitalized, but in nineteenth-century Danish all nouns were capitalized, as is still the case with the German language today. This means that the translator of a noun always has a decision to make as to whether the noun is a common noun or a proper noun, which, of course, requires capitalization in English. My own view is that “the Truth” refers to a particular truth, not truth in general.

The evidence for this is found in Chapter One, where Climacus, in developing his B Hypothesis, describes the learner as lacking the Truth. Climacus then poses the question as to how the learner came to lack the Truth. He says the learner must originally have been created by God as possessing the Truth. If the learner has never had the Truth, then the learner would not have been human at all, but rather “merely [an] animal” (PF, 15). Therefore, this truth cannot be any old truth; it is the Truth that one needs to have or have had to be a human being.

The puzzle that the Socratic view is supposed to solve is one that is found near the end of Plato’s Meno. The problem is a dilemma. A person either knows the truth or does not know the truth. Either way, learning is impossible; one cannot learn what one already knows, but if one does not know the truth, it would be impossible to recognize it if one found it. The solution Plato’s Socrates puts forward is the famous doctrine of Recollection: The Truth is already present in every individual, and thus the learner merely needs to be reminded of what he already knows (PF, 9). Climacus then notes that this doctrine becomes the basis in Greek thought for a belief in the immortality of the soul, thus connecting the Socratic view to the questions posed on the title page. The ability of human persons to know the eternal Forms (on the Platonic view) points to their own eternal nature.

Socrates is praised for his “wonderful consistency” and the manner in which he “artistically exemplified” his view of the Truth (PF, 10). Socrates acted as a “midwife” who helped others give birth to the Truth, but he had been forbidden by the God to give birth himself (PF, 10).Footnote ¹² He therefore did not assume a superior position to other human beings by lecturing or offering a system of doctrine. Rather, he famously taught others by asking them questions. Climacus, at this point, claims that Socrates’s egalitarian practice is absolutely right, for even if there were a divine “point of departure” for the Truth, the relation of equality between humans that Socrates accepted would “remain the true relation between one human being and another” (PF, 10).

The implications of the Socratic view for the title-page questions are clear. The point in time at which a person recognizes the Truth is “something accidental, a vanishing point, an occasion” (PF, 11). The moment at which an individual realizes the Truth is also the moment at which the individual realizes that the Truth has been possessed eternally. As Climacus puts it, a person’s “self-knowledge is knowledge of God” (PF, 11). This means that no person can really be an authority to others; every person is essentially autonomous. Whether I have the help of Socrates or someone else to learn the Truth does not matter because I “possessed the Truth from the beginning without knowing it” (PF, 12). The temporal point of departure is “nothing,” and the genuine disciple of Socrates knows that the disciple really owes nothing to Socrates.

3.2 The B Hypothesis and “the Moment”

Climacus then abruptly moves to the alternative view, signaled by heading the second part of the chapter as “B.” No justification is given for considering any alternative. Rather, the section simply begins with an “if.” “If the situation is to be different, then the moment in time must have a decisive significance in such a manner that at no moment will I be able to forget it, neither in time nor in eternity” (PF, 13). This foundation for the development of the B Hypothesis is clearly labeled an assumption, not a view known to be true. On the basis of this assumption, Climacus delineates the major elements of a view that will be distinct from the Socratic view. Climacus simply asks whether there is any alternative to the Socratic view, and it looks to him as if this will only be possible if the moment has this significance. He then proceeds to describe the three elements of the B Hypothesis that will be different if it is really going to be different from the Socratic view. These elements are the “preceding state,” the Teacher, and the Learner, who will be called “the Disciple” after acquiring the Truth.”Footnote ¹³

3.3 The Interlocutor’s Interruption and Conclusion of Chapter One

Climacus concludes his invention in Chapter One by raising a strange question: Is the story he has just told conceivable? It seems an odd question since he must have thought through the invention to be able to tell the story. He answers by asking an analogous question: Can someone conceive of being born? Yes, but to conceive of being born, one must have been born (PF, 20). Similarly, he suggests, only the person who has experienced “the Moment” and been reborn can conceive of being reborn. This becomes a recurring theme of the book.

After raising the question of whether the story can be understood, Climacus introduces a new voice. At the end of each chapter, a dialogue occurs between Climacus and an imagined interlocutor. At the end of Chapter One, this character presents an angry protest against the “invention” of Climacus:

Climacus admits the accusation is true, and “hides his face in shame” (PF, 21). The shame is feigned, however. Climacus agrees that it is ludicrous to claim to invent something one has not invented, and he admits he is not the author. He then raises the question as to who the real author is, even offering to grant the interlocutor this status. Climacus assumes the interlocutor will decline the honor. Why so? Perhaps, he says, it is because no human being invented the story, but rather it came from the God himself (PF, 21–22).

Climacus describes the situation as “fascinating” and even says that it provides a “test” and “proof” of “the correctness of the hypothesis” (PF, 22). He cannot mean here that the B Hypothesis has been shown to be true, since he directly denies in the conclusion of the book that he has done this. Rather, I think Climacus means that this suggests the hypothesis is correctly formed; it is indeed different from the Socratic view of the Truth. On the Socratic view the Truth must be within every human. The B Hypothesis instead claims that no mere human possesses the Truth. If the B Hypothesis is the correct view of the Truth, then the story must be one that no human could invent, but could only come from the God.

4.1 The God’s Motivation to Become a Teacher

Climacus has already said that any alternative to the Socratic view would require the God to become the Teacher. It is clear that a divine teacher’s motivation must be different from that of Socrates. “The God needs no student in order to understand himself,” and Climacus assumes that the God would need no “occasion” to cause him to act (PF, 24). What might move the God to become the Teacher for humans? Climacus says that the answer must be love, “for love does not have the satisfaction of need outside itself but within” (PF, 24). Climacus then says, drawing on a traditional view of God, that God’s resolution “must be from eternity, even though, fulfilled in time, it expressly becomes the Moment” (PF, 25).

The love of the God for the Learner turns out to be fraught with difficulty, however. Inequality always creates problems in a love-relationship. Many novels and movies have explored the theme of love between one who is rich and powerful and someone who lacks these qualities. Romantic comedies often use this inequality as a premise, since romantic comedies need a problem that the couple must overcome. Genuine love desires mutual understanding, but understanding is difficult when the two parties are vastly different. It is hard to imagine a greater type of inequality than the love of God for a human person who is in untruth, and who therefore is estranged from God by a lack of understanding of the Truth.

Here again it is helpful to contrast the Socratic view of the Truth with the alternative that Climacus is composing. On the Socratic view the individual has the eternal Truth within and thus has a relationship to what is divine and eternal. The Socratic individual who has the Condition thinks “that, since he himself exists, God exists” (PF, 20). Self-knowledge leads to knowledge of God. However, the person who lacks the Condition and lacks the Truth is cut off from God. The God who wants a loving relationship with the Learner must somehow overcome this gap by overcoming the inequality.

4.2 The Parable of the King and the Maiden

Climacus insists that the inequality between the God and the Learner is qualitatively different than the gap between any humans, but nevertheless makes use of a human analogy to help readers understand. “There is no perfect earthly analogy” to the love between the God and humans, but Climacus decides he must “speak loosely” and provide one that may “awaken the mind to an understanding of the divine” (PF, 25–26). He then offers one of the best-known and most-loved parables in Kierkegaard’s authorship: the parable of the King and the poor Maiden.

Climacus assumes that what love seeks is a happy union, and that this requires “perfect understanding” on the part of both of the lovers (PF, 25).Footnote ¹⁶ The God wants to “win” the Learner, to achieve a relationship in which each shares himself fully with the other, but this cannot succeed if one party is unable to understand the other. Climacus takes for granted that the God understands the Learner; the problem is how the Learner can understand the God. Without mutual understanding no relationship of union is possible.

We already know that the God must transform the Learner by giving the Learner the Truth. Basically, giving the Learner the Truth amounts to helping the Learner understand God. This might seem easy for God to do; after all, God has traditionally been seen as omnipotent, able to do anything that is possible. Climacus insists, however, that this is difficult, even for the God. For the God to make himself understood “is not so easy if he [the God] is not to destroy that which is different [the Learner]” (PF, 25). God could simply annihilate the Learner and create a new person, but the God loves the Learner and wants a happy relationship with the person who already exists. If the God totally transforms the Learner, treating the Learner as an object to be operated on rather than a person participating in a relationship, the Learner would basically cease to exist. To solve the problem, the God needs to find a way to have the Learner participate in the transformation. Somehow the agency of the Learner needs to be preserved, even though on the B Hypothesis the Learner lacks the Condition and cannot gain the Truth on his own.

To help the reader understand both the problem and the God’s solution, Climacus provides his fairy tale. “Suppose, then, that there was a king who loved a lowly peasant girl” (PF, 26). One might think that this unequal love would be unproblematic. Would not the girl be overwhelmed by her good fortune in attracting a king? Could not the king command her to marry him if she were reluctant? The king’s concern is that the inequality would simply crush the maiden. Would she really be happy with him if she was aware that their relationship was completely one-sided? Could the girl “acquire the bold confidence never to remember what the king only wished to forget – that he was the king and she had been only a peasant” (PF, 27). The King does not want to be the woman’s benefactor but her lover. It is possible to be a benefactor to another person without the person’s help, but a genuine love-relationship requires free participation from both sides.

How can the King overcome the inequality and successfully woo the young woman? In sketching possible solutions, Climacus goes back and forth between the story of the King and the Maiden and the story of the God and the Learner. One strategy would be “an ascent,” in which the inferior party is elevated by the superior party. The God could “draw the learner up toward himself, exalt him, divert him with joy lasting a thousand years” (PF, 29). The Learner might be happy if this happened, but Climacus claims the happiness would be based on a deception, and “one is most terribly deceived when one does not even suspect it…” (PF, 29). Similarly, the King “could have appeared before the lowly maiden in all his splendor…and let her forget herself in adoring admiration” (PF, 29). Even if the girl would be delighted, the King would not be satisfied, since “he did not want his own glorification but the young woman’s” (PF, 29).

We can easily imagine other versions of the King’s relationship to the young woman that also involve a failure of understanding. Suppose the King simply orders the woman to marry him or else be executed? This would obviously not be a loving way to act. Suppose the King simply dazzled the young woman with fabulous balls and glamorous clothes? This would make the King the woman’s benefactor, but would the woman’s love be directed at the balls and clothes or at the King? The King wants to be loved for who he is, not simply for what he can do for his bride. Any exaltation of the woman achieved simply by the King’s fiat will not result in a relation of genuine equality.

Climacus says that the equality must be achieved by a descent on the part of the superior party. The reader knows how the fairy tale must go, and Climacus slyly does not actually finish the story but allows the reader to do so. The King must court the young maiden by putting on a disguise and pretending to be a peasant. By doing so the King makes it possible for the young woman to love himself, and not just his power and riches. The young woman will not be overwhelmed or coerced, but can respond freely.

Similarly, the God must reveal himself to the Learner by becoming human. The difference between the case of the King and the case of the God is that the King does not really become a peasant but only takes on a disguise (PF, 32). The God really descends to the level of the Learner: “For this is the boundlessness of love, that in earnestness and truth … it wills to be the equal of the beloved, and it is the omnipotence of resolute love to be capable of that which neither the King nor Socrates was capable, which is why their assumed characters were still a kind of deceit” (PF, 32). Climacus insists that the God would not only want to become human but would want to identify with even the lowliest humans. The incarnate God would become a poor servant, not a powerful king or rich merchant.

Climacus thus audaciously “invents” something like the Christian view that God became incarnate as a human. Once one grants that the God wants to be the Teacher, there is a kind of imaginative, poetic logic that requires an incarnation. At least, we can see that an incarnation would be a fitting way for God to accomplish this mission. However, the idea that the story of a divine incarnation can be invented just by attempting to conceive of an alternative to the Socratic view of the Truth is part of the jest, and Climacus more or less gives the joke away at the conclusion of Chapter Two.

4.3 The Possibility of Offense

At this point Climacus introduces the possibility that the God’s love expressed in this way may actually offend the Learner. The possibility is inherent in the freedom the God must grant the Learner. If the King comes to the maiden as the King, she will certainly accept him, but coming in the guise of a poor peasant introduces the possibility of a rejection. Similarly, the Learner may fail to respond with love when the God appears in the form of a lowly human. Climacus insists that the God has no choice about this, given the God’s love and resolute intention to win the Learner, for “any other revelation would be a deception” (PF, 33). Why is this so?

It is primarily because the God wants the Learner to understand his true character, which is love. It is love that requires that the God assume human form. However, this is an inherently risky kind of love. The undertaking is difficult, even for omnipotence. Omnipotently sustaining the universe is easy “compared with enduring the possibility of the offense of the human race when out of love one becomes its savior” (PF, 32). However, there is no alternative. If the Learner can only love the God who reveals himself in his omnipotent splendor, then the Learner would fail to grasp what is deepest in God’s character, which is love. If a person can love “only the almighty one who performs miracles” rather than the one “who humbled himself to be equal to you,” then that person is an unfaithful lover (PF, 33).

Climacus will have more to say about why the Learner might reject the incarnate God in Chapter Three. Here he merely hints that the issue is connected to human sinfulness. Human reasonFootnote ¹⁷ is close every moment “to the border of misunderstanding when the anxieties of guilt disturb the peace of love” (PF, 34).

4.4 The Interlocutor Again: The Poem as the Miracle

Just as was the case with the conclusion of Chapter One, the imagined interlocutor appears at the end of Chapter Two and makes a similar accusation. Once more he says that Climacus is guilty of plagiarism, but he now says the plagiarism is “the shabbiest ever to appear, since it is nothing more or less than what any child knows” (PF, 35). The implication is that Climacus has merely copied part of the Christian story, which any Danish child would learn, either at home or in a catechism class.

Again, Climacus does not deny the charge, but admits that the poem is not his invention. He once again raises the question as to who the real author is and suggests that the story he has told has no human author. Climacus’s conduct seems shabby because he did not steal from any human person, or even from the human race, but “robbed the deity” (PF, 35–36). The character of the poem makes it unlikely to be a humanly invented story. It would not be strange for a human to imagine that he was like God or even to imagine God as being like a human.Footnote ¹⁸ However, Climacus does not think that any human would conceive of God becoming human. Rather, Climacus thinks that anyone who encounters this story would recognize that this is a thought that “did not originate in my heart” (PF, 36). This is an allusion to I Corinthians 2:9, which says that what God “has prepared for those who love him” is something that “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived.” The Danish Bible translates this by saying that what God has prepared is “something that did not come out of any human heart.” This is a text that Kierkegaard frequently quotes or alludes to, and Climacus here agrees with Kierkegaard’s view that the surprising and even incredulous character of the Christian story is a mark of its truth, rather than a problem to be solved.

Climacus concludes that the story he has told, far from being his own invention, is the miracle (PF, 36. Definite article and italics original). His own response is awe and wonder, emotions that quickly replace the affected and ironical “shame.” At this point, it looks as if Climacus may not in fact be the neutral observer he initially appears to be, but someone who is at least attracted to the Christian view he has plagiarized. Alternatively, we might have here a vestige of Kierkegaard’s original intent to publish the book under his own name. Perhaps the short amount of time he had to make changes did not allow him fully to erase his own faith and replace it with the irony and lack of commitment of Climacus.

5.1 Socrates Again: The Limits of Reason

Chapter Three, like the previous chapters, begins with a return to Socrates. This makes sense if one purpose of the chapter is to show that the Socratic view lacks the resources to gain knowledge of God. If philosophical theology is going to work, it will have to be something that the Socratic view has the competence to develop. Climacus notes that even though Socrates has for centuries been praised as the thinker who “knew man best,” Socrates himself affirmed that he really did not understand himself, not knowing whether he was a “curious monster” or rather “a friendlier and simpler being, by nature sharing something divine (see Phaedrus 229c)” (PF, 37). Climacus affirms that Socrates thus sees human nature itself as paradoxical.

One might think that this uncertainty is a distressing situation, but Climacus insists that one should not “think ill” of the paradoxical, because a thinker who lacks a paradox is “like a lover without passion” (PF, 37). Human reason on this view is motivated by a passion, and that passion is stirred up by uncertainty.

Climacus next makes some psychological claims about passions in general. He says that every passion, when it reaches its highest point, “wills its own downfall” (PF, 37). No argument is given for this, though some examples of passions where this is true are provided. However, the correctness of the general claim is not really important. All Climacus needs to say is that this is true in the case of the particular passion that propels human thought. Human reason wills or desires to discover an “obstacle,” even though “the obstacle in one way or another may be its downfall” (PF, 37).Footnote ¹⁹ Climacus goes so far as to say that “the desire to discover something that thought cannot think” is present in all human thinking (PF, 37).

What can be said on behalf of these surprising and puzzling claims about human thinking? Climacus offers little in the way of argument, but seems to think this is something that one can just see to be true: “This passion of thought is fundamentally present everywhere in thought,” though we often do not notice what is in plain view because of “habit” (PF, 37). I believe we can see why he thinks this is true. Think of scientific discoveries. The discoveries that produce the most excitement are discoveries of entities or events that we do not know how to explain: A physicist stumbles on a new type of sub-atomic particle, or an astronomer observes a new kind of star. The response is not despair or resignation, but excitement. The discoveries are a spur to new thinking and new research. No scientist recommends that we view the new discoveries as brute facts that need no explanation. It is the essence of the scientific temperament to seek to understand and explain what we cannot yet understand and explain. The scientist constantly pushes to expand the universe of knowledge and explain what cannot be explained. Science is an imperialistic undertaking, always seeking to expand its domain.

Perhaps someday scientists will discover the ultimate explanation for everything, the final explanation for which there is no further explanation. If this happens, what should our response be? It seems that we could see this in two different ways: as failure or triumph. Perhaps it is a failure because something has been found that reason cannot explain. However, it could also be seen as a triumph; the scientific quest is now complete, the goal achieved. This is how Climacus sees things. The restless search of reason to explain and understand everything can be seen as a search for the limits of human reason, the discovery of something that cannot be understood further or explained. If reason found an ultimate limit or boundary, something it could not explain, then this defeat could also be seen as a victory, the culmination of the search. Science would have finally reached the end of the road.

5.2 Kant Versus Hegel on the Limits of Reason

The issue Climacus addresses here lay at the forefront of philosophical debates at the end of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Kant had posed the issue sharply. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant affirmed that he had found it necessary to “deny knowledge, to make room for faith” (Kant, Reference Kant2007, B xxx, p. 29). By “denying knowledge” Kant really means he wants to draw limits to knowledge. Contrary to the claims of his rationalist predecessors, Kant argued that human reason is limited and cannot achieve genuine knowledge of God or immortality. The Idea of God as the “Unconditioned Condition” of all things is one that reason necessarily forms, but not one that humans can achieve knowledge of. Human knowledge is limited to phenomenal reality, reality as it appears for us. We cannot achieve knowledge of “noumenal reality,” reality as it is “in itself.”

Hegel’s philosophy can be seen as a reply to Kant. Hegel tried to show that Kant’s project is incoherent, because for reason to recognize a limit as a limit, it must already be able to think beyond the limit. As Wittgenstein says in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to conceive of a boundary one must think both sides of the limit and thus have the potential to go beyond that limit (Wittgenstein, Reference Wittgenstein1922, 3).Footnote ²⁰ Hegel claims that if human reason is understood dialectically, it can grasp the Ultimate, or God. Dialectical reason does confront contradictions, but it can always “mediate” or resolve these contradictions.

Kant anticipated this Hegelian type of criticism and provides resources for a reply. How can the limits of reason be recognized without going beyond those limits? One answer Kant offers is that when reason tries to exceed its limits it falls into apparent contradictions, which Kant calls “antinomies” (Kant, Reference Kant2007; A 341–405, B 399–432). When reason attempts to gain knowledge of God or of the universe as a whole, it appears that contradictory claims can be rationally proven. The universe can be proved to be infinite in time and space but also finite. There must be a first cause that is uncaused, but it can also be proven that there is a cause for everything. Kant says that these apparent contradictions are actually fortunate, for they reveal to reason that it has transgressed its proper use.Footnote ²¹ Kant claims that the contradictions are only apparent and not genuine logical contradictions, and when reason observes its limits, the contradictions can be resolved.

How does this relate to Philosophical Fragments? Well, one could describe these Kantian antinomies in Kierkegaardian language as paradoxes. The content of the Absolute Paradox that Climacus describes is quite different from the antinomies of reason that Kant describes, but the function of the Paradox is very similar. The encounter with the Paradox reveals to reason its limits. The Paradox seems to reason to be a contradiction, but, contra Hegel, the contradiction in this case cannot be dialectically resolved. I shall later discuss what Climacus means by “contradiction,” but it clearly is supposed to be something that marks the limits of reason. Furthermore, what Climacus has already affirmed about how reason might view the discovery of “something that thought cannot think” will turn out to be true for the Paradox. The response of reason is ambivalent. The Paradox can be seen as the downfall of reason, but also as in some way its fulfillment.

5.3 The Encounter with the Unknown: Attempts to Prove God’s Existence

In the second paragraph of Chapter Three, Climacus, “in order to get started,” affirms that “we know what a human being is” (PF, 38). He puts forward the proposition as an assumption and says it is really equivalent to the Socratic view that the Truth is within us and can be achieved by recollection. Why make this assumption? The answer provided is that the only alternatives are forms of skepticism and relativism: “If the Socratic theory of recollection and every human being as universal man is not maintained, then Sextus Empiricus stands there ready to make the transition implied in ‘to learn’ not merely difficult but impossible, and Protagoras begins where he left off, …” (PF, 38). Sextus Empiricus was a leading defender of skepticism, and Protagoras is famous for his relativistic claim that “man is the measure of all things.”

Even when this assumption is made, however, a paradox lurks in waiting: “But then reason halts – just as Socrates did, because now the paradoxical passion of reason that wills the obstacle awakens, and, without really understanding itself, wills its own downfall.” (PF, 38–39).Footnote ²² This is an obscure claim, to be sure, and perhaps Climacus recognizes this, for he immediately provides an analogy. The situation of reason, he says, is the same as the paradox one finds in erotic love, the “paradox of self-love as love for another” (PF, 39). Erotic love has its ground in self-love; the person who falls in love with another is seeking his or her own happiness. However, when someone falls in love with another person, self-love is overcome and transcends itself. The person wants the happiness of the lover more than his or her personal happiness, though paradoxically this is how one’s own personal happiness is achieved. The analogy does not really explain the relation between reason and the “obstacle,” which is “the unknown,” but at least it gives us some intimation of how the relationship between reason and the obstacle is supposed to work.

When reason encounters the obstacle, Climacus says that it undermines the self-knowledge that has been assumed. This results in the Socratic puzzle noted at the beginning of the chapter, in which Socrates does not know whether he is a kind of monster, or “whether he has in his being a part that is gentler and more divine” (PF, 39).Footnote ²³ What is it that Socrates encounters that disturbs his self-knowledge? Climacus says that it is simply “the unknown” (PF, 39). Climacus decides to call this unknown “the God,” insisting it is “only a name” (PF, 39). This seems to be a jest, since Climacus immediately launches into a dense, complex discussion of attempts to gain knowledge of God through human reason.

Climacus first examines positive attempts to “demonstrate” the existence of God. He provides a scattershot list of objections, some of which are more substantive than others. The first we might call the “why bother” objection. The gist of this is that demonstrations of God have no value. Those who do not believe there is a God will not try to prove God’s existence. Since they do not think there is a God they will think all proofs will fail. However, those who already believe in God would find proofs to be unnecessary and even to be “foolishness” (PF, 39).

This objection is not convincing, but there is a defensible point in the neighborhood. It does seem that very few people are brought to belief in God through arguments of this sort, and it also seems true that it is mostly people who already believe in God who find the arguments sound.

Climacus quickly moves to a related objection, which has more weight, or at least has more philosophers on its side. Here he claims that one cannot prove the existence of God because one cannot prove the existence of anything. Here Climacus could appeal to philosophers such as David Hume, who famously argued that no “matter of fact,” or claim about something that really exists, can be proven. Hume thought proofs can only be given for conceptual truths, which depend on “relations of ideas” (Hume, Reference Hume and Steinburg1977, 15–16). In support of his claim, Climacus says that one does not “prove that a stone exists, but that some thing that exists is a stone” (PF, 40). Similarly, in a court of law, one does not prove that a criminal exists, but that the defendant who exists is a criminal. We never reason “to existence” but always “from existence” (PF, 40).

What is meant by “proof” here? It is clear that Climacus is thinking of a logical argument, which is a standard philosophical sense, but nonphilosophers often talk of the “proof of the senses” or appeal to facts that are alleged to prove something. With respect to this limited logical sense of proof, those who favor a Hume-type view of logical arguments will be sympathetic to Climacus, though like almost every view in philosophy, it is controversial. This is, by the way, not the only place in Fragments where Hume-type views appear. This is not accidental. Kierkegaard himself did not read Hume, but he did read with approval Johann Georg Hamann, a German philosopher who had studied Hume carefully and was greatly influenced by him.

In any case Climacus moves on quickly to another objection. He considers the idea that “God” is not a name, but a concept, and perhaps a being that satisfies that concept can be inferred from features of the natural world. Climacus agrees that the principle “God’s works…only the God can do” is correct, but uncertainty appears when one begins to ask whether nature unequivocally displays works that can only be explained by God. It is not immediately obvious that when we look at the natural world, we see unmistakable signs of God’s goodness and wisdom. On the contrary, there is much in nature that may produce doubt: “Do we not encounter the most terrible spiritual trials here…?” (PF, 42). When I see the world as God’s handiwork I see it from an “ideal standpoint” that I have presupposed. From this standpoint “I dare to defy all objections, even those that have not yet been raised” (PF, 42). Here it appears that Climacus is responding to what philosophers call “the problem of evil,” and sees it as a problem that requires faith to surmount.

Interestingly, Richard Swinburne, perhaps the leading proponent of arguments for God’s existence in the last hundred years, really concedes the point Climacus wants to make here. By “proof” Climacus means a deductive, logical argument that produces certainty and leaves no room for doubt. Swinburne’s arguments for God, however, are probabilistic in character. He tries to show that there are features of the natural world that make God’s existence probable, but he does not claim that they achieve the kind of certainty that one derives from a logical demonstration (Swinburne, Reference Swinburne1979). Climacus shows no interest in this kind of argument, and he here reflects Kierkegaard’s own views, which are generally critical of probability claims.

Climacus also briefly discusses the ontological argument for God’s existence, but he dispatches this argument in a footnote (PF, 41–42n). This argument claims that the concept of God implies that God must exist. God is a perfect being and must have all perfections. However, existence itself is a perfection, and so God must exist. Climacus considers the version of the argument given by Spinoza and offers a standard criticism of the argument that goes like this: It is true that when we conceive of a perfect being, we conceive of that being as existing, but that does not show that such a being actually exists as a matter of fact. When we think about God we think of him as possessing the highest degree of reality or being. However, this means we are really thinking of God’s nature and this does not show whether something that has this nature exists factually. Climacus says factual existence is binary and has no degrees. Factual being is “subject to the dialectic of Hamlet, to be or not to be” (PF, 41n). Either a thing exists or it does not exist, and nothing can be inferred about a factual matter simply from an understanding of a concept.

Climacus then offers one final objection, which is again somewhat obscure. He claims that when someone develops a proof of God’s existence, the existence of God does not follow immediately or directly from the proof. In order for the existence of God to come out of the proof, one must “let go of the proof,” and Climacus says that this “letting go” is a kind of personal contribution that amounts to a “leap” (PF, 42–43).

What does he mean? The best clue is a story he provides from ancient Greek philosophy, in which Chrysippus was trying to show Carneades how a new quality arises from a philosophical argument called a “sorites,” in which there is a chain of arguments.Footnote ²⁴ Carneades says he does not see how the new quality actually appears, and Chrysippus recommends that one should “pause for a moment” when recounting the argument, and then one could “understand it better.” Carneades replies that even if one goes to sleep, the problem will reappear. I think the point being made is that a logical argument, even a powerful one, does not automatically produce a belief. The person considering the argument can always doubt the conclusion, just as Carneades did. The gap between the logical conclusion and a person’s actual psychological state of belief cannot be bridged by argument but only by a person.

In all of Kierkegaard’s writings “the leap” refers to something that reflects a personal contribution. The point is that arguments by themselves do not automatically produce belief. The person must be willing to accept the argument. There is a proverb to this effect: “A man convinced against his will holdeth the same opinion still.” Or, in the words of Simon and Garfunkel, singing about a boxer, “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”Footnote ²⁵

However, the leap referred to here is not a blind leap or a leap into the dark. We often accept the conclusions of arguments without any effort, but even in these cases there must be a willingness to believe. Climacus would think that someone who is an atheist and denies the existence of God on the basis of some argument also is making a leap. Climacus says that the idea of converting someone to belief in God by an argument would be a great subject for a “crazy comedy” (PF, 43n). He does not really elaborate, but in a longer version of the footnote that was deleted before publication, an explanation is given: Proving God’s existence to an atheist would be funny, because there really are no atheists. People who think they are atheists are just people who refuse to allow what they know, “that God exists,” to have power over their mind.Footnote ²⁶ The footnote seems to imply that the atheist really knows that God exists but has repressed the knowledge.

Climacus concludes the discussion of attempts to prove God’s existence by affirming the Humean claim that proofs of God’s existence can only “elucidate the concept of God” (PF, 43). If one arrives at belief in God from an argument, there must have been a “leap,” and the leap is really an expression of faith. Socrates is once more cited as an authority. Climacus says Socrates invented the “physico-teleological” argument for God’s existence, a form of argument often called the “argument from design,” which infers the existence of God from the providential design evident in nature. However, Climacus says that Socrates really presupposes the God’s existence, and that it is only on the basis of this presupposition that the argument works. “At the God’s request, he casts out his net, so to speak, to catch the idea of fitness and purposiveness” (PF, 44). Climacus claims that the argument is not the basis of Socrates’s faith in the God; rather it is Socrates’s faith in the God that provides the basis for the argument. One can see here that Climacus does not reject theistic arguments altogether, but simply wants to claim that they cannot supplant or replace faith.

5.4 The Encounter with the Unknown and Negative Theology

If positive arguments for God’s existence do not succeed, what about “negative theology?” This form of thinking has roots in Neo-Platonism and a long tradition in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theology. It holds that we best conceive God by denying that God has the properties that can be observed in the created world. For example, created things are finite, physical, spatially and temporally located. God is infinite, nonphysical, and has no spatial or temporal location. One might think that when we conceive of God in this way, we are indeed conceiving of what Climacus calls the Unknown.

Climacus thinks that there is some kind of awareness of God when we think of the Unknown. There is no real knowledge of God from this, but reason “in its paradoxicality” continually is engaged with this “boundary” or “frontier” (PF, 44). The Unknown is a “frontier that is continually reached,” the concept of what is “absolutely different” (PF, 44). However, just because the Unknown is absolutely different, it cannot really be conceived. “Defined as the absolutely different, it seems to be at the point of being disclosed, but not so, because reason cannot absolutely negate itself…” (PF, 45). Since the Unknown is absolutely different, reason cannot provide any content for it. Any content provided is really arbitrary, and “reason has an attractive selection from what is available, and what the imagination can think of…” (PF, 45). So even though negative theology is right to think of the God as absolutely different, it really does not give humans any knowledge of God.

Climacus thus holds that no genuine knowledge of God can be achieved by unaided human reason, either through positive or negative natural theology. However, this conclusion really just brings us back to the B Hypothesis developed in Chapters One and Two. If humans lack the Condition, they cannot gain knowledge of God on their own. To say otherwise is to return to Socrates, and thus the objections Climacus raises for natural theology can be understood as reasons to think humans lack the Condition.

5.5 The Interlocutor Appears Again: Reason and the Paradox

At the conclusion of Chapter Three, the Interlocutor appears again. He objects that the view being developed is “so ludicrous that it probably has never occurred to anyone” (PF, 46). Climacus responds that this shows the coherence of his hypothesis. He says that if humans are to achieve knowledge of the God, they must come to know the God as absolutely different from them, but he claims that this is impossible for unaided reason, which cannot come to know what is absolutely different from itself.

What is the difference between humans and God that makes it impossible for humans to know God through their own power? One might think that the difference is metaphysical: God is infinite and humans are finite. Surprisingly, however, Climacus says that this is not so. Humans are created by God and because of this relationship of creation, humans do have a likeness to God. The absolute difference between God and humans is the result of “what humans owe to themselves,” and this difference can only be the condition of untruth, which Climacus calls sin (PF, 46–47). Thus the “absolute difference” between God and humans is not metaphysical, but moral and spiritual.

Socrates almost reaches this point. “The connoisseur of human nature became almost bewildered about himself when he came up against the different” and no longer knows whether he is a monster or something divine (PF, 47). Still, Socrates did not really grasp the consciousness of sin. Climacus says that only God can teach humans that they are sinful, “if the God wanted to be the Teacher” (PF, 47).

Climacus ends the chapter by asking whether this paradoxical knowledge of the God is conceivable. It might seem that the answer is no, since “reason certainly cannot think it, cannot hit upon it on its own” and if the message is proclaimed to reason, reason will not understand it, but “only senses that it will likely be its downfall” (PF, 47). Thus, reason has “strong objections” to the whole idea. Nevertheless, Climacus insists that this is not the whole story. Reason, when it is gripped by its “paradoxical passion,” wills its own downfall, which is exactly what the Paradox wills. Thus, Reason and the Paradox have a “mutual understanding” when this passion is present.

To help the reader understand this, Climacus once again appeals to the analogy of romantic love. “Self-love lies at the basis of love, but at its peak in its paradoxical passion it wills its own downfall” (PF, 48). Romantic love for another person wills the same thing, and thus self-love and love achieve a “mutual understanding” when the right passion is present (PF, 48). When this happens, self-love is not annihilated but is “taken captive” by love. The relation between reason and the Paradox is analogous to this, though the passion that makes this possible has another name.

5.6 The Appendix to Chapter Three: Offense as an Echo

What happens when this happy passion that makes it possible for reason and the Paradox to be on good terms is not present? This condition is also a passion, one that Climacus calls “offense.” Climacus provides a fuller account of offense in an Appendix to Chapter Three, entitled “Offense at the Paradox (An Acoustic Illusion)” (PF, 49).

Offense, like the happy passion in which reason and the Paradox are on good terms, is a relational passion, one that is the result of an encounter with the Paradox. The first thing to notice about offense is that it is “a suffering” (PF, 49). By this Climacus does not just mean that the passion is painful, though he does think that is true. Rather, he means “suffering” in an older etymological sense, in which to suffer involves passivity.Footnote ²⁷ The idea is that the attitude of reason toward the Paradox is really a passive response to the Paradox. Reason may think that its rejection of the Paradox is due to its own critical judgment, but it is actually the Paradox whose activity shapes the relationship of offense.

Once more Climacus turns to the analogy of romantic self-love and love to explain this. The selfish person who is unwilling to love becomes unhappy. Climacus thinks that the person who shrinks from love in this way is deeply wounded, but the wound can conceal itself and in fact gives to the unhappy self-lover an “illusory expression of strength that resembles action and can easily delude.” (PF, 49). Such a person may angrily denounce the person he has refused to love, or feign indifference, but the source of the suffering is precisely the refusal of love. Such a person may think he is acting autonomously, but in reality his state is a response to the love he has spurned. The case is similar when reason is offended by the Paradox. The offended consciousness is a sufferer and “has struggled with what is stronger” (PF, 50). In saying that offense is passive, Climacus does not mean that it is something that just happens to the offended person. It is an act, but the act is one provoked by the Paradox.

The Enlightenment era was a time in which many intellectuals thought that reason had critically judged religious faith and concluded that faith does not measure up. Reason is seen as active; religious faith is being judged. Climacus maintains that this gets things wrong. Offense does not originate with reason. Rather, offense “comes into existence” when reason encounters the Paradox (PF, 51). Once again we have “the moment,” a period of time where there is an essential change, and Climacus reminds the reader that it was the assumption that the moment was decisive that differentiated his story from the Socratic account of the Truth.

The appearance of the Paradox (God as a temporal human being) appears as foolishness to reason, something that cannot be understood. However, this claim of reason about the Paradox is simply what the Paradox claims about itself. Of course the content of the Paradox is something human reason cannot grasp; if this were not the case the Paradox would not be the Paradox but something that humans could have invented. Recall that the Paradox is supposed to be something that “did not originate in any human heart.” The accusation of reason that the Paradox is foolishness is actually an echo of what the Paradox itself says to reason. It is thus an “acoustic illusion.”

To make this clear, Climacus imagines Reason and the Paradox having a conversation, but the conversation involves a misunderstanding on the part of Reason, and the result is that there is no real dialogue, but rather a name-calling contest. Reason denounces the Paradox as something so improbable as to be absurd (PF, 52), but the Paradox replies that reason thereby shows itself to be a “blockhead or dunce” (PF, 53). The Paradox calmly explains that reason correctly understands that the Paradox is something reason cannot grasp but somehow thinks this is a problem. “Comedies and novels and lies must be probable,” but the Paradox could not and should not be probable, but rather is “the most improbable thing” (PF, 52).

If the offended reason does not denounce or attack the Paradox, it might “take pity” on the Paradox and try to help it out by providing an “explanation” to make the Paradox less irrational. Climacus finds this move on the part of reason to be even worse than denunciation (PF, 53). He says that the Paradox refuses to “put up with” this behavior, though it is not surprised, since “is that not what philosophers are for – to make what is supernatural ordinary and trivial” (PF, 53).

At the conclusion of the Appendix, the Interlocutor appears again and objects that Climacus is a plagiarizer. Many of the statements made about the Paradox in the Appendix are from familiar sources, and the Interlocutor provides the references. The allusions are from Tertullian, Hamann, Lactantius, Shakespeare, and Luther (PF, 53). Climacus once more pleads guilty and admits he has borrowed from these writers. However, he uses this fact to emphasize his point. All of the people he borrows language from to describe the paradox are people who were not offended. They did not see their descriptions of the Paradox as objections. If they are opponents of the Paradox then they are like “an opponent who absentmindedly does not attack an author but defends him” (PF, 54).

Climacus says that paying attention to offense is valuable, in that it clarifies, by contrast, the “happy passion,” which is the alternative response of reason to the paradox. He has not yet named this passion, though he will do so soon. He does, however, provide a succinct description of it at the end of the Appendix. It is a passion in which “reason surrenders itself and the Paradox gives itself” (PF, 54). What is most important about this description is that it is reason that surrenders itself. We might say, though Climacus might not like this way of putting it, that reason, when in the grip of the happy passion, in some way sees it as reasonable to accept something that is beyond the limits of reason.

Here we must remember Climacus’s view that reason itself is seeking a limit or boundary, an unknown “that thought cannot think.” If this is the case, then we can understand why the discovery of this limit could be seen as a completion or fulfillment of reason. It can at least be said that philosophers of the caliber of Kant and Wittgenstein have held that it was important for reason to recognize its limits. How might reason do this? If one says that reason can itself discover the limits of reason, then Hegel’s criticism of Kant lurks. How can reason discover the limit without in some way already surpassing it? Climacus suggests an answer: The discovery of the limit is not the result of reason’s own work but is the product of a revelation given to reason. Climacus thinks it is crucial to be clear about who starts the name-calling.

6.1 The Appearance of the Teacher

As already noted, Climacus begins Chapter Four with an explicit statement that he is now going to “continue the poem” begun in Chapters One and Two. So he now assumes that the God has made an appearance somewhere in human form. The God will appear as an ordinary person, “in the form of a servant,” to make it clear that he has come for all humans and not just the rich and powerful (PF, 55–56). It is important that the God is an actual human with a body, not just a spirit who appears in a bodily form. If the God only appeared to be an actual human, he would be a deceiver.

Climacus proceeds to describe the God’s appearance in an amusing way, blending allusions to the story of Jesus as presented in the four New Testament Gospels with claims that the story being told is a generic one of his own making. He thus humorously maintains the façade that he is inventing the whole story, while providing readers with obvious clues to remind them that this is actually a story they already know. We are not told which city the God appears in, since “which one is inconsequential,” but certain elements in the Gospels are nonetheless brought to mind. For example, though the God cannot send anyone else in his place, since his actual presence is essential, he might send a “forerunner to make people aware” (PF, 55). This brings to mind the story of John the Baptizer, who is given that role in the Gospels.Footnote ²⁸ Climacus imagines that one of the “professional teachers” in the town “might come secretly to the God in order to test his powers,” which brings to mind the story of Nicodemus, a rabbi who came to see Jesus at night.Footnote ²⁹

The appearance of the God is now “the news of the day,” but for the true disciple, it is much more than this. It is “the Moment,” the “beginning of eternity” (PF, 58). But how is this possible? The answer is that the disciple must receive the Condition from the God. We know from Chapter Three that the appearance of the God is also the Paradox, the appearance of the God at a particular moment in time as a human. Therefore, the contemporary disciple has an historical point of departure for achieving eternal happiness. However, for this to happen, the historical event must obviously not be something that is merely of historical interest, but instead must somehow make that eternal happiness possible (PF, 58).

How does this happen? Climacus has already given the answer: “It occurs when reason and the Paradox happily encounter each other in the Moment, when reason steps aside and the Paradox gives itself…” (PF, 59). He says this must happen in some “third thing” that is not identical either to reason or the Paradox. That third thing is the “happy passion,” which he now names; he calls it faith (PF, 59). Climacus now confirms what we have already surmised. This happy passion of faith is the Condition, which the Socratic view assumes humans already possess, but which the B Hypothesis assumes that humans lack and must acquire in time.

6.2 Is History Really Necessary?

Climacus will now proceed to answer the third of the three title-page questions: Is it possible to base an eternal happiness on historical knowledge? Since the B Hypothesis claims the Condition must be based on an historical event, one might think that the answer would be yes. If a person has to know about the God’s historical appearance to receive the Condition, it would seem that historical knowledge would be necessary for this to happen. We normally come to know about historical events by gaining historical evidence for that event. As I noted in Section 2, historical Biblical scholarship had resulted in skepticism on the part of some about the historical reliability of the Bible in general and the four Gospels in particular, thereby undermining the reasonableness of Christian faith if it depends on historical evidence.

One response to this skepticism was to attempt to show that the truth of Christianity does not depend on historical events at all. Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone can be read as an attempt to show that the essentials of religious truth can be justified without appeal to an historical revelation. Friedrich Schleiermacher had attempted to base Christian truth on religious experience. G. W. F. Hegel had claimed that his philosophy had vindicated Christian belief. Hegel described Christianity as the “absolute religion,” and he claimed that it is vindicated by his philosophical system, which expresses the same truth as Christianity though religion expresses this truth through “picture-thinking,” while philosophy expresses this same truth in a more “scientific” manner (Hegel, Reference Hegel1984).

Climacus sees all of these strategies as misguided, because they are essentially forms of the Socratic view, which holds that humans do have the Condition, the capacity to gain the essential Truth through use of unaided human reason. Fragments tries to show this by reminding readers of something they already know: That Christianity is essentially different from Greek philosophy. Thus these philosophical maneuvers do not really help Christianity, but introduce confusion about what Christianity is. Climacus makes no attempt to argue for this in an intellectual way; he thinks that if he gets into an intellectual debate about “the essence of Christianity” it will be impossible to decide the issue. This is partly because intellectual debates of this kind are interminable and irresolvable. He makes this point at the end of the book by humorously comparing such an argument to a group of monks trying to tell the history of the world who can never finish the story (PF, 109). Intellectual debates about the essence of Christianity are similarly interminable. However, Climacus also wants to avoid an intellectual debate because such a dispute presupposes a stance of “objectivity,” which prevents human individuals from looking at the question of eternal happiness in the right way, which requires existential concern. Instead of arguing about “the essence of Christianity,” he humorously reminds his readers of something they learned as children and still profess to believe.

Climacus thinks that all these contemporary strategies for defending Christianity actually betray Christianity. They do this by confusing Christianity, which purports to be based on a divine revelation in history, with a doctrine, or set of doctrines, that humans can Socratically know to be true. To short-circuit all these strategies, Climacus insists that what is crucially important is the God’s actual appearance. It is true that one of the things the incarnate God will do is teach humans, but what is crucial is not some profound truth that the God proclaims, but the identity of the God. “The God’s presence is not incidental to his teaching, but is essential. The presence of the God in human form … is precisely the teaching” (PF, 55). If Climacus’s invention, which clearly is a stand-in for Christianity, is to be something distinct from the Socratic view of the Truth, then there is no escaping history.

6.3 Must Historical Faith Be Based on Historical Evidence?

One way of responding to historical Biblical criticism is to argue that the historical evidence found in the Bible is adequate. Climacus has no interest in such a view. He responds by trying to show that the assumption that the truth of Christianity must be arrived at through scholarly historical inquiry is misguided.

Once again he proposes nothing new, but reminds his readers of what Christianity has traditionally taught about the origins of genuine faith: Genuine Christian faith is not a human achievement but a divine gift. This claim is one that almost all Christian theologians have affirmed. It is not, for example, a source of contention between Protestants and Catholics. Thomas Aquinas held that faith is not a naturally achievable virtue, but a supernatural virtue that is infused by God.Footnote ³⁰ Martin Luther and John Calvin held a similar view, though they use somewhat different language to make the point.Footnote ³¹ That faith is something God creates in a human person is something all Climacus’s readers would have learned as children in their Lutheran catechism class.Footnote ³² However, it is one thing to understand this as an intellectual doctrine and another to understand it existentially.

So how does the disciple who is historically contemporary with the God come to know the God? Even if God creates faith in the person, Climacus admits that there must be some historical ground for the person’s coming to know the God. It cannot be the God’s intention to live a human life in such a way that no one recognizes him, and thus Climacus says the God will “want something about himself to be understood” (PF, 56). If Climacus were discussing Christianity straightforwardly and not pretending to invent a narrative, then at this point one would expect a discussion of the miracles Jesus is said to have performed, or other historical evidence for Jesus’s divinity. However, Climacus veers away from any such discussion. He admits that the incarnate God will have to make his appearance known in some way, and he presumably knows about the doings of Jesus that are called “signs” in the New Testament. The Gospel of John, for example, describes Jesus as performing a number of signs and also claims that Jesus performed many more signs that are not recorded in the Gospel.Footnote ³³

Why does Climacus avoid discussing the signs that the God might provide? I think it is because he wants to emphasize that the signs are not decisive. Rather, what is decisive is the Condition the disciple receives from the God. Unless the Condition is received, any “accommodations” the God offers to his contemporaries will not be sufficient to make a person a disciple.

Though Climacus does not discuss the function of the signs, his view seems fully consistent with the way the signs are viewed in the New Testament. Signs are “pointers” to a truth, but they are not proofs.Footnote ³⁴ Signs can be ignored, and even when someone notices them, they must be interpreted. It is always possible to interpret a sign in various ways. In this case the signs point to the Paradox, which seems so improbable to ordinary human thinking that it will always be possible to deny the occurrence of the signs or reinterpret their meaning, rather than believe that a human being is divine. In the New Testament, many of Jesus’s contemporaries, who were eyewitnesses to his miracles, refused to believe in him, some of them claiming that he did the miracles he performed by virtue of demonic supernatural power, rather than by the power of God.Footnote ³⁵ Whatever “accommodations” the God offers to his contemporaries will be ineffectual if they do not receive the Condition.

Still, Climacus admits that the God will provide something that can help a person recognize the God. Whatever is provided could be seen as historical evidence for the God’s identity, but Climacus argues that such evidence cannot be decisive. He defends two theses about the role of historical information: (1) No amount of historical information by itself is sufficient for a contemporary person to acquire faith. (2) No particular amount of historical evidence is necessary for a contemporary person to acquire faith. Climacus himself seems to think these two claims can be intuitively seen to be true. However, for those for whom they are not immediately obvious, he offers help, using a standard philosophical strategy. He provides thought experiments.

The first thought experiment is straightforward. It is true that an historical contemporary will be in a better situation to gain historical information than those who live at a later time. “It is easy enough for the contemporary learner to acquire detailed historical information” (PF, 59). The problem is that knowing historical facts is insufficient to make a person a disciple. Even “knowing all the historical facts with the trustworthiness of an eyewitness – by no means makes the eyewitness a disciple” (PF, 59). A person may deny the facts or reinterpret them. A person who knows the facts may only care about them as historical events. However, to become a disciple the person must care about these events as something that decisively changes his or her life. Climacus asks the reader to imagine a contemporary who has “limited his sleep to the shortest possible time” so that he could accompany the Teacher and observe him (PF, 59–60). Going further, he imagines that this person who wants to know the historical facts has in his service “a hundred secret agents” who meticulously record the sayings and actions of the Teacher (PF, 60). Would this person necessarily be a disciple? Climacus says he will not be a disciple unless he receives the Condition from the God and is transformed. Without this, the historical inquirer can rightly “wash his hands” if he is accused of being historically sloppy. He has done everything possible to have accurate historical information, but that by itself does not make him a disciple. So it does seem that no amount of knowledge of historical facts by itself would make a person a disciple.

What about the second thesis? Once again, Climacus provides a thought experiment. He imagines a contemporary who has almost no historical information. This individual “has lived abroad and came home when that Teacher has only a day or two to live” (PF, 60). Then Climacus supposes that the individual is prevented by circumstances from coming to see the Teacher and arrives at the scene “only at the very end when he [the Teacher] was about to breathe his last” (PF, 60). Would this prevent this person from becoming a disciple? Climacus thinks the answer is no, it would not prevent this as long as “the Moment was for him [the Disciple] the decision of eternity” (PF, 60). Christian readers who know the New Testament may at this point be reminded of the good thief on the cross, who professed faith in Jesus as both were dying.Footnote ³⁶ In the Gospel narrative, Jesus promises the thief that he will be with Jesus that very day in paradise.

Those who share Climacus’s intuitions about his thought experiments will agree with him that no amount of historical evidence is sufficient to make a person a disciple, and no particular amount is necessary as long as what is available is sufficient to transform the Learner by giving him the Condition. Some minimal amount of historical knowledge may be necessary, but this knowledge does not have to be gained by scholarly historical inquiry.Footnote ³⁷

6.4 The Paradoxicality of Faith

In the latter part of Chapter Four, Climacus stresses the uniqueness of the faith which on his hypothesis is the Condition for eternal happiness. Faith is neither an item of knowledge gained through reason, nor is it something that can be achieved through an act of human willing. Here Climacus undermines the common stereotype of Kierkegaard as defending the idea that faith is a “leap” that is a heroic willing to believe something. Faith is not ordinary human knowledge, he says, because all human knowing either has as its object “the eternal” or else something purely historical. However, the Paradox does not fit into either category. It is not a truth of reason, known a priori, and it is not simply knowledge of historical facts, as we have seen. The genuine disciple “is in faith related to the Teacher in such a way that he is eternally concerned with his eternal existence” (PF, 62).

It is not an act of will either because “it is always the case that all human willing is effective only within the Condition” (PF, 62). This claim is obscure, but perhaps Climacus means something like this: I can will some end only if I have some understanding of what that end is and also have some reason to think that it is possible for me to achieve that end. However, if I could achieve eternal happiness by an act of will, then I would have the Condition and be able to know the eternal on my own, and we would be back to the Socratic view of the Truth. On the B Hypothesis, I only gain an understanding of the eternal by receiving the Condition from the God, and I cannot will what I do not understand. So, given the B Hypothesis, faith is not identical with humanly achievable knowledge or a human act of will.

6.5 What Can the Learner Do to Achieve Faith?

This does not mean that achieving and possessing faith does not involve the human intellect and will at all. We have already seen that although Climacus thinks faith in the Paradox requires human reason to “set itself aside,” this action is also a fulfillment of what reason itself is seeking. He consistently uses active language for reason’s response to the gift of faith offered by the Paradox. When the happy passion of faith is present, reason is said to “surrender itself,” something reason can do when a person is gripped by faith. Recognizing the limits of reason is not inherently unreasonable. Humans are finite creatures, and one might think it would actually be unreasonable to claim that there are no limits to human reason.

Similarly, though faith cannot be achieved by a human act of willing, Climacus does not see faith as something that the God forces on his disciples. The gift of faith is not given through a forced entrance. The incarnate God who is like the King who courts the maiden can only woo, not ravage, the beloved.

What is it that the human will can freely do? One might think that the answer is that reason can accept the gift of faith that is offered. I think this is not quite correct. A better answer is that the person can will to stop refusing the offer of the gift of faith. One might think that these two answers are identical, but there is an important difference. It might appear that Climacus’s “invention” diverges at this point from the orthodox Christian view, which is the view Climacus is humorously trying to remind his readers of. Traditional Christianity has claimed that humans are not capable of achieving a truly Godly condition through human works, and any view that holds that humans positively contribute to their salvation has been condemned by the Christian Church as the heresy of Pelagianism. So how does Kierkegaard’s Climacus avoid Pelagianism?

The answer is given early in the book. Climacus says that there is one point of agreement between the Socratic view of how a person gains the Truth and his B Hypothesis. The first thing the Teacher must do for the learner is to reveal to the Learner that he or she is in Untruth (PF, 14). This is something the Learner cannot discover by himself; he needs the God to reveal this to him. However, Climacus says this insight is not forced on the Learner, but is something the Learner can “recollect.” The Teacher is in this case, like Socrates, an “occasion” (PF, 14). Pointedly, he says this is true “even if the Teacher is the God.” This passage is in Chapter One and occurs prior to the imaginative development of Chapter Two, where Climacus says the God’s revelation must take the form of an incarnation. Climacus’s poem is not Pelagianism, because the Learner does not acquire some godly virtue by his own power; rather, the Learner recognizes himself as having no virtue, and even this is something he needs the help of the God to do. Recognizing I am in Untruth is not acquiring the Truth, any more than recognizing that my bank account is empty is acquiring money.

However, it is crucial that the Learner acquire this insight. Even if it is something revealed by the Teacher, it is still an insight the learner must acquire himself: “To this act of consciousness the Socratic principle applies … because I can discover my own Untruth only by myself, …” (PF, 14). Unless this awareness is present the Learner will resist the Paradox’s offer of faith, for if I believe I have the Truth and am not in Untruth, I will see no need of the transformation that Climacus describes as being “born again.” The person who lacks the consciousness of sin will see no need for the God-man who is the savior. Therefore, although the Learner cannot acquire the Truth through an act of will, the Learner can freely choose to recognize that he is in untruth. The Learner who lacks the consciousness of sin will refuse the Paradox, which is the means whereby the God offers the gift of faith. However, the one who has the consciousness of sin will no longer refuse that gift.Footnote ³⁸ The gift is not something that can be achieved by an act of will, but one can will to stop refusing the gift that God offers. So if one says the Learner must accept the gift, what this really means is that the Learner must stop refusing the gift. The gift itself is something that God infuses into the person, to use classical theological language.

6.6 Temporal Contemporaries and Genuine Contemporaries

Toward the end of Chapter Four, the Interlocutor appears again and has an extended exchange with Climacus. Initially, the “someone” who interrupts at this point seems somewhat confused about whether or not the people who were temporal contemporaries of the God have some kind of fortunate status. On Climacus’s account the people who lived at the same time as the God do not achieve the status of disciple merely by having historical information, so it is not clear that they benefit by their temporal contemporaneity. The Interlocutor senses this but thinks this cannot be correct: “Then the contemporary has no advantage whatsoever from being contemporary, and yet if we assume what you have assumed about the God’s making his appearance, it seems natural to regard the contemporary generation that saw him and heard him as blessed” (PF, 66).

Climacus agrees that this is in some sense a natural assumption, but calls it into question by contrasting the God’s appearance with another imagined historical event. “Suppose, as we read in old records, that an emperor celebrated his wedding for eight consecutive days with a festiveness the like of which had never been seen” (PF, 66). After elaborating on the gloriousness of this grand party, Climacus says that those who were contemporaries of this wedding celebration would be people who should be regarded “humanly speaking, as fortunate” (PF, 66). They were able to see, hear, and touch things that no one else had the privilege to experience. The splendor of the emperor’s party could be immediately recognized.

However, suppose the magnificence of the God’s appearance was of a wholly different kind, a magnificence that cannot be immediately experienced. In that case, one might be an immediate contemporary, that is a temporal contemporary, and yet completely miss out on the magnificence. Perhaps the quality that the immediate contemporary lacks is one that someone who lived later might have. “Thus, despite his being contemporary, a contemporary can be a non-contemporary; ergo the non-contemporary (in the sense of immediacy) must be able to be a contemporary by means of the something else by which a contemporary [in the immediate sense] becomes a genuine contemporary” (PF, 67).

Climacus drives home his point by an allusion to a Biblical passage that implies that there were immediate contemporaries of Christ who did not really recognize his status.Footnote ³⁹ They were historical contemporaries, but we could say that they might as well not have been contemporaries, since they completely failed to be aware of the God as the God. Climacus expresses this point by making a distinction between an immediate, historical contemporary, and what he calls a genuine contemporary, someone who actually knows the God. An immediate contemporary can fail to be a genuine contemporary, while someone who is not an immediate contemporary can be a genuine contemporary. Climacus has here already given the essential message of Chapter Five, which deals with the situation of those who lived later than the God’s appearance.

At this point the Interlocutor impatiently interrupts Climacus, complaining that he is “unable to get a word in edgewise.” He once again wants to accuse Climacus of plagiarism, claiming he “talks like a book,” taking passages from the Bible and changing the pronouns, including Jesus’s statement to some who claimed to be his disciples, that “I never knew you” (PF, 68). The Interlocutor, who now reveals he is rather dim, misses the point of these Biblical allusions by failing to see the difference between the story of the Emperor’s wedding and the story of the God’s appearance in history. The Interlocutor protests that the fact that the Emperor does not recognize someone who was at his wedding would not show that the person was not there, since one can hardly make the Emperor’s awareness the criterion that determines who was present at the wedding. Why would not the case of the God’s appearance be the same?

Climacus points out the difference. A person can be at the Emperor’s wedding without being known by the Emperor. However, the genuine contemporary of the God becomes that by virtue of receiving the Condition directly from the God. Thus, the God must know all those who are genuine contemporaries. “But if the one who comes later receives the Condition from the God himself, then he is a contemporary, a genuine contemporary – which indeed only the believer is and which every believer is” (PF, 69). At this point the Interlocutor claims to understand the point, wondering why he did not see this sooner and claiming already to “catch a glimpse of the far-reaching implications” of the view. Climacus casts doubt on this grandiose claim, confessing that he himself does not completely understand the view, raising a suspicion as to whether the Interlocutor has “understood the whole thing at once” (PF, 69).

Climacus concludes the chapter by offering to his conversation partner something analogous to a lawyer’s summation of his claims. The summation is simple. Historical contemporaneity with the God can only be “an occasion,” according to Climacus, although there are three different ways in which this can be the case. First, historical contemporaneity can be the occasion for acquiring historical knowledge. This, however, is a somewhat dubious advantage, since the historical information gained cannot by itself help the learner come to know the God. Second, historical contemporaneity could be the occasion for the learner “to concentrate Socratically upon himself” (PF, 70). In this case the God’s significance “vanishes.” Finally, being historically contemporary can “become the occasion for the contemporary as untruth to receive the Condition from the God and now to see the glory with the eyes of faith” (PF, 70). In this case the learner is a genuine contemporary, and Climacus says that all genuine contemporaries have a kind of first-hand awareness of the God, since they must receive the Condition from the God. Those who talk about the glories of being an historical contemporary fundamentally misunderstand the situation, and Climacus finishes with a humorous description of such a misunderstanding. The person who longs to have lived as an historical contemporary with the God thinks he is on an imaginative pilgrimage to the holy land, but is in reality on a fanciful “wild goose chase,” since the true holy land is not to be found on earth (PF, 70).

7.1 The Interlude as an Attack on Hegel

Why does Climacus pose the particular questions placed on the title page of the Interlude? The main target is Hegelian philosophy, at least as that philosophy was understood by Danish followers at the time. In what follows I will describe Hegel as understood by Kierkegaard and by those followers, without commenting on whether this is the best interpretation of Hegel. Hegel’s system provides a comprehensive account of the whole of human knowledge, beginning with logic but including science, religion, art, human history in general, and the history of philosophy. The system as a whole claims to show how Absolute Spirit, a philosophical term for God, has manifested itself in human history. The process is seen as a necessary one, following the imperatives of reason, though its rationality can only be understood in retrospect. Hegel famously says that history can be comprehended and seen as rational, but only retrospectively: “The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (Hegel, Reference Hegel1967, 13).

How is this relevant to Climacus’s project? Hegel claims that the truth of religion and the truth of philosophy are the same, though religion expresses its truth in “picture-language,” while philosophy expresses the truth in a scientific manner. The Christian religion is seen as the apex of religion, with the doctrine of the incarnation understood as a story that expresses the truth that God (Absolute Spirit) actualizes itself in human history. Hegel claims his philosophy has vindicated the Christian religion, by-passing any awkward questions about historical evidence for the events recorded in the Christian Gospels. Climacus responds that no historical truth whatsoever is necessary or can be known with certainty. If he is right then Hegel’s philosophy of history is fundamentally flawed at its heart, and it cannot fulfill the role of vindicating Christianity.

For Climacus, if the incarnation is a story that expresses a philosophical truth, we have returned to Socrates. Any religion that purports to be essentially different from Socrates must begin by proposing that human reason is unable to gain the essential truth about the human condition and needs a special revelation. Hegel’s philosophy might be true, but it is a variation on the Socratic view and is essentially different from Christianity.

The value of the Interlude is not limited to its criticisms of Hegelianism. The Interlude also has direct implications for historical apologetics and the ability of historical Biblical scholarship to undermine or establish Christian truth claims. Climacus affirms it can do neither. Christian truth can only be known through faith and faith cannot be derived from either philosophy or historical scholarship.

7.2 The Philosophy of Becoming: Essence and Existence

After the introduction, the Interlude poses a basic philosophical question about “becoming.”Footnote ⁴⁰ How does change of any kind occur? Climacus says that ordinarily change “presupposes the existence of the thing in which the change is taking place” (PF, 73). The reason for this is simple. A change must be a change in something and that something must persist through the change. If the result of the change is a new entity, then it is not the case that the old entity was changed. Instead, the old something has ceased to exist, and a new something has taken its place. Of course, for real becoming to occur, there must be some kind of change, but ordinary change is a change in what Aristotle called the accidental properties of a substance, not a change in essence. The thing changes in some way but the change does not change the fact that the entity exists and does not change the kind of thing it is.

The exception to this rule is the kind of change in which something new comes into existence. This kind of change is initially puzzling because it seems to violate the rule that an entity that is changing must persist through the change. One would think this would hold for something that comes into existence as well, since “if a plan is altered in its realization, then it is not that plan that is realized.” (PF, 73). Still, there must be some kind of change that occurs when the plan is actualized. Climacus says the change in this case is a change in being or existence, rather than a change in essence. It is a change in modality, from possibility to actuality. The content of the plan is not changed. It is the same plan whether it is possible or actual (PF, 74).

Though Climacus does not mention Kant at this point, his claim is very similar to Kant’s argument that the ontological argument for God’s existence, which attempts to argue that God as a perfect being that has all perfections must have the property of existence, fails because “existence” is not a property something can have or fail to have.Footnote ⁴¹ A possible five dollars is identical in concept to an actual five dollars. Similarly, Kant thinks that, if we come to believe that God exists, we do not change our concept of God, but come to believe that the God we conceive exists.

Climacus says that the rule that something must persist through change is still preserved in a way in the case of something that comes into existence. What comes into existence is a possibility, which is a kind of being, but something that is only possible fails to have the kind of reality an actual thing possesses. This claim could be understood in different ways, but perhaps Climacus is helping himself to a Platonic ontology. The realm of being is wider than the realm of actuality. Plato, of course, taught that universals like equality and goodness have a kind of reality. A universal is really a possibility, a possible way actual things can be. Climacus agrees. Possibilities are objectively real, but possible beings do not have the kind of reality that actual beings possess.

The discussion then moves to the Hegelian claim that the past is necessary. Climacus says flatly that “the necessary can in no way be changed because it always relates to itself and relates to itself in the same way” (PF, 74). One could express this in a “linguistic mode” by saying that what is necessarily true must always be true. If some object has property P at time T1 but not at time T2, then it is not the case that the object has that property necessarily.

Since what is necessary cannot undergo change, no change can be necessary. Anything that changes shows thereby that it is not necessary. The claim that actuality is a synthesis of the necessary and the possible (one made by Hegel) is false. Nothing necessary can change, and anything that changes thereby shows that it is not necessary.

From this he makes some strong metaphysical claims. “Nothing whatever comes to exist because it is necessary, any more than necessity comes into existence or anything in coming into existence becomes something necessary” (PF, 74–75).Footnote ⁴² I think this claim does indeed follow from his earlier points about necessity, being, existence, and essence. However, he moves from this to two other claims, the second of which seems more controversial than the first one: “All coming into existence occurs in freedom, not by way of necessity. Nothing comes into existence by way of a ground, but everything by way of a cause” (PF, 75). By “ground” here he clearly means a logical ground, and most philosophers would grant that a logical ground is not a cause. However, many deny the second claim that Climacus seems to think follows from it: “Every cause ends in a freely acting cause” (PF, 75). This seems to deny the possibility that the actual world is deterministic.

Climacus seems to be saying that determinism is the result of confusing a logical ground with a cause. Perhaps that is so in the case of Hegelian determinism, at least as Kierkegaard understood it, which holds that what is real is rational and must conform to logic. However, many determinists would claim that there are forms of determinism which hold that all events are the result of causes, not logical grounds, but that all causes are in turn causally determined.

Climacus gives a kind of response to this pattern of thinking as well. He says that determinism is alluring because we focus on “intervening causes,” which may indeed have deterministic causation. However, he thinks that causal chains must ultimately culminate, and the “first cause” must be “a freely acting cause” (PF, 75). Why this must be so he does not say, but he believes that there are two kinds of “first causes” that can initiate causal chains: One is the first cause of the whole of the natural world, and he surely has God in mind here. Second, he thinks that nature itself contains free human agents, who are “relative” first causes and can initiate causal chains.

Here Climacus seems to be helping himself to a classical picture of nature and human anthropology, one shaped by both Christian and Greek sources. The controversial nature of the claims may not matter much, for two reasons. First, his readers shared his assumptions. Second, the epistemological claims he derives from this metaphysics do not require the most controversial elements. All he needs to claim is that all historical events are contingent and not logically certain; many nontheistic philosophers would happily accept this claim.

7.3 Natural History and Human History

Climacus then distinguishes the history of nature from human history. “Everything that has come into existence is eo ipso historical…” (PF, 75). The natural world of rocks and trees and animals exists in time; these things are actualities and thus have a kind of history. However, humans, though part of that natural history, have a different character, because human existence contains possibilities (PF, 76). “That which comes to exist … can contain a redoubling – i.e. the possibility of a coming into existence within its original coming into existence” (PF, 76).

Human life is thus historical in a double way. Humans have, like plants and other animals, come into existence. However, humans have the power to perform free actions, and thus bring something new into existence. For Climacus, the whole of nature must be initiated by a “first cause” that acts freely, but within nature humans are also “relatively freely acting causes.”

This sounds like Climacus is here helping himself to natural theology, suggesting God is the first cause of the natural world. However, given the critique of natural theology in Chapter Three, this seems dubious. Perhaps Climacus, like Thomas Reid, thinks that ultimately all causality must be agent causality, and thus there must be a free agent that stands behind the natural world. However, all he really needs to claim is that what is historical is always contingent, and never necessary. Natural causality may be contingent whether or not nature is created, and so the apparent natural theology plays no essential role in the argument. The real claim is that whatever is historical is contingent and therefore not necessary. Human history is doubly contingent. It shares the contingency of nature, but adds the contingency introduced by human free action.

The illusion that history is necessary comes from confusing what is necessary with what is unchangeable. It is true that we cannot change the past. However, Climacus insists that this does not mean that historical events ever occur necessarily. To the contrary, the fact that some event occurred in history shows that it was not necessary. What is necessary cannot change, and what changes cannot be necessary. The difference between the future and the past does not stem from the necessity of the past: “The future has not occurred as yet, but it is not, because of that, less necessary than the past” (Italics original, PF, 77). Indeed, if the past were necessary, the future would be necessary as well. Or, more accurately, there would no longer be a distinction between what is past and what is future. Having knowledge of the necessity of the past would be like having infallible knowledge of the future. The kind of certain knowledge that what is necessarily true provides (as in logic) is precluded by the contingency of all that happens in time.

7.4 Apprehension of What Is Past

Having explained the nature of the historical, Climacus moves to his real goal: describing how we come to know or “apprehend” the past. He thinks that the idea that historical knowledge could be knowledge of what is necessary is absurd. The mere fact that something has come into existence shows it is not necessary, and it is even crazier to think that by coming to know the past, we could make what is past necessary. “If what is apprehended is changed in the apprehension, then the apprehension is changed into a misapprehension” (PF, 79–80).

There is a sense of “knowledge,” found in Plato as well as the ancient Skeptics, in which genuine knowledge requires certainty, and this implies that knowledge of empirical facts, except for facts about how things appear, is impossible. Genuine knowledge for Plato is knowledge of the Forms, knowledge of what is eternal. Climacus (and Kierkegaard) often talk about knowledge in this Platonic sense, and from this perspective, the term “historical knowledge” would be oxymoronic. Nevertheless, there are other senses of “knowledge.” Climacus admits that in ordinary speech we do talk about historical knowledge, and he says he will assume that there is such a thing (PF, 81). His task is to get clear about the nature of this kind of knowledge and how it is obtained.

Climacus agrees with the Skeptics that “immediate sensation and cognition cannot deceive” (PF, 81). However, historical knowledge is never immediate in this sense. Even knowledge of a star that I gaze at in the sky is not immediate. I can be certain of what immediately appears to me, but I cannot be certain that what I see has “come into existence” (PF, 81). In other words, I cannot know by immediate sense experience that what I am seeing is a star, an astronomical body with a history. Immediate experience is always of the present; what is past cannot be immediately observed. Not even facts about presently existing objects can be immediately observed, if those facts embody information about the history of those objects. So I can know with certainty that something is appearing to me that I call a star, but I cannot really know with certainty what is the real object I am seeing.

Whatever is historical is contingent, and this entails that historical knowledge must incorporate or deal with uncertainty. When we encounter the past, the proper response to this uncertainty is initially wonder (PF, 80). We wonder what really happened, and also how it happened. Something happened, but other possibilities could have occurred. The awareness of these alternative possibilities means our awareness of what has happened always involves some uncertainty. How do we know that this event happened rather than that one? The kind of certainty that comes from rational insight into what is necessarily true is thus impossible in the case of apprehending the past. What is necessarily the case cannot be otherwise but what is contingently the case could be or could have been otherwise, which introduces uncertainty.

One might think that Climacus would therefore become a skeptic about historical knowledge, but this is not the case. Rather, humans can gain historical knowledge, but they need a “faculty” that makes it possible to overcome this uncertainty (PF, 81). Climacus says that we humans do have such a faculty: It is called faith or belief (Tro). Although belief is what makes knowledge of history possible (in this loose sense of “knowledge”), he goes on to say that belief itself “is not a type of knowledge, but a free act, an expression of will” (PF, 83).

7.5 Belief as Credence and as Commitment

Contemporary philosophers are likely to misunderstand Climacus at this point, and many have conflated the view they mistakenly attribute to Climacus to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard has often been accused of having a “voluntarist” view of belief that holds that people can form beliefs by an act of will.Footnote ⁴³ I believe this is a mistake, and to avoid it we must clarify what Climacus means by “belief.” Many contemporary philosophers follow Locke and Hume in thinking of belief as a mental attitude toward a proposition. Belief is here understood as a “credence,” which is roughly how likely or probable a proposition seems to a given person at a particular time. It is plausible that people cannot directly control the credence a proposition has for them at a given time.

If one assumes that belief is a credence, Climacus’s claim that belief is an expression of will is mistaken. For example, it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, and thus my credence on this matter is fixed. In this sense of belief, I cannot just decide what I believe about a matter by an act of will. Perhaps over time I can change what I believe. I can decide to investigate matters, listen to others who defend some conspiracy theory, consciously seek out evidence on the other side. However, at any given moment, the credence of a proposition is not normally under my direct control. Many interpreters have thought that Climacus denies this.Footnote ⁴⁴

If one thinks of belief as a credence, then one will think of belief as the opposite of uncertainty. To the degree I have certainty, I have belief; to the degree I have uncertainty, I lack belief. Doubt here is equated with uncertainty of some degree. Climacus, however, does not equate doubt with uncertainty. Uncertainty is part of the human condition. What does he mean by “uncertainty?” Perhaps we could formulate his view in contemporary terms like this: Uncertainty is a recognition that whatever evidence I have for a belief is compatible with the belief’s falsity. Uncertainty is lack of proof, a recognition that things could be otherwise.

Uncertainty is not the same thing as doubt: Belief and doubt are two rival ways of responding to uncertainty.Footnote ⁴⁵ I can recognize the uncertainty of a proposition relative to the evidence I have, but still respond in different ways. This is possible because Climacus does not think of belief as a credence, but as commitment. Credences come in degrees; to have a higher degree of credence is to have a stronger belief. Commitments, however, are in one respect binary. A commitment is like an action. One performs an action or one does not. Similarly, one has a commitment or one does not. Commitments can differ in many ways. If I decide to commit to the Green Party, my commitment might be weak and tentative, or strong and unshakeable. However, there is a sense in which I either am committed or I am not. If one sees belief as a kind of commitment, then belief will share this binary character. To believe a proposition is to be for that proposition, and one is either for it or not.

This view of belief is similar to one defended by John Henry Newman (Newman, Reference Newman1985, 106–116). Newman criticizes Locke’s claim that belief is a mental attitude that comes in degrees by arguing that belief does not come in degrees. When I see a proposition as probable to some degree, I am really judging it with respect to my evidence, trying to see if it can reasonably be inferred from that evidence. For Newman this is a confusion because it equates believing some proposition P with believing that P has a certain degree of probability relative to a body of evidence. Belief in this Lockean sense seems very different from belief as a kind of commitment, and Newman notices that people are often strongly committed to a belief or set of beliefs, even if they don’t have much evidence, or even if they don’t know how probable the proposition is relative to whatever evidence they have.

To illustrate Newman’s point, think of the case of a follower of Donald Trump after the US presidential election in 2020. The devoted fan of Trump may have believed strongly that Trump really won the election of 2020 against Joe Biden, even if the fan had no good evidence for this belief. When confronted with evidence to the contrary, the Trump partisan may decide to disregard the evidence. It seems psychologically wrong, as a matter of empirical fact, to describe this kind of belief as a credence that is a function of evidence.

Now one might think the Trump partisan is an anomaly, maybe even a paradigm case of irrationality. If so, however, there is ample evidence that many of us are quite capable of being irrational in similar ways. We tend to look for and welcome evidence that confirms what we believe and want to believe, and we ignore or minimize evidence that goes against what we believe or want to believe.Footnote ⁴⁶ Simon and Garfunkel memorably sang about this in their song “The Boxer.” “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”Footnote ⁴⁷

We do not have to decide whether belief is a credence or commitment. People such as Locke and people such as Newman may be talking about two different things when they use the word “belief.” However, it does seem to me that when we are speaking of moral and religious beliefs, the commitment sense of belief is usually more appropriate. Credences as mental states can change quickly, but our belief commitments, though they can also change, have more stability. Take as an example belief in God. Someone who believes in God may have moments where the belief seems doubtful. A person’s credence at 2 a.m. in the morning may be very different than it is on Sunday morning in church. Whether the person is a believer is not primarily measured by credences at various moments, but by whether the person’s life as a whole reflects a commitment to the belief.

To understand Climacus’s view, it is helpful to look at his discussion of ancient Greek skepticism. Climacus says that the basis of ancient skepticism was a conviction that “immediate sensation and cognition cannot deceive” (PF, 82). The skeptic tried not to go beyond this certainty. Ancient skepticism was very different from modern philosophical skepticism. In the modern world, skepticism is seen as a problem: From Descartes onward, philosophers attempted to show how skepticism could be overcome. However, ancient skeptics did not see skepticism as a problem to be overcome but as the answer to life’s problems. The skeptic wanted to be a skeptic, seeing skepticism as the solution to the dogmatism that accompanied other philosophical views. The skeptic believed that skepticism made possible ataraxia, peace of mind or tranquility. Ataraxia is a goal that makes doubt worthwhile, and skepticism is a kind of worldview to which the skeptic is committed. The way to overcome skepticism on this view must be somehow to help the skeptic not want to be a skeptic any more. Skepticism is ultimately rooted in the will, not the intellect. The skeptic used the uncertainty of the human condition to make possible a willed commitment to skepticism. Those of us who are not skeptics refuse skepticism because we do not want to be skeptics.

Climacus thinks we can learn something important about belief from the skeptics. When we are talking about commitments to a view that we see as making our lives worthwhile, the skeptics show us that it is possible to free ourselves from all such commitments, at least as an ideal. In freeing themselves from beliefs, the skeptics thought they were freeing themselves from commitments and they saw this as a good thing. Climacus is saying that their example shows that the uncertainty of the human condition makes it possible to refuse to believe in the commitment sense. This refusal was not always easy for the skeptics. It was a strenuous project, a never-ending, never completed task for a lifetime. Skeptics did not have immediate voluntary control over all their credences. Rather, they worked toward a state of mind that was free of commitments to the extent possible. The goal toward which they worked was not easy; life tempted the skeptics in many cases to believe, just as it tempts non-skeptics sometimes to doubt. But the goal was one that human uncertainty made into a realistic possibility. The fact that humans can will to avoid belief-commitments shows that belief commitments are ultimately rooted in the will. “Will” here does not mean simply what I can decide to do in the moment. What I will is ultimately what I want, but what a person wants or desires is often something that cannot be altered or changed in the moment. I may have no more control over what I will at any given time than I have over my credences.

In saying that belief is an “expression of the will,” Climacus is not saying that we can simply decide to alter our credences. He is saying that our belief commitments are not simply a function of our credences. We humans can and do commit to beliefs without any conviction that the beliefs are probable, and we can even commit to beliefs that seem improbable or unlikely. That is a psychological truth. In Climacus’s sense of belief as a commitment, it is true that what humans believe is deeply shaped by what they want. To speak of what a person wills is simply to speak of a want that is determinative and motivating.

Climacus concludes that when we confront the uncertainty that is endemic to the human condition, we may respond in two ways: belief (or faith) and doubt. Belief and doubt are “opposite passions” (PF, 84). Belief is the “faculty” that allows us to avoid skepticism and make commitments in an uncertain world. Doubt is “a protest against any conclusion that wants to go beyond immediate sensation and immediate knowledge” (PF, 84). Both stances are psychologically possible.

7.6 Ordinary Faith and Faith in the Eminent Sense

In an “Appendix” to the Interlude, Climacus provides the payoff to the metaphysics and epistemology of history. Here we must remember why Climacus makes this excursion. The question is raised by his “B Hypothesis,” which holds that God became a human person in order to give humans the Condition that makes it possible for them to have the Truth. Since the God’s appearance will be an historical event, the disciple must somehow gain knowledge of this event. Climacus has argued that the Hegelian attempt to see history as a necessary process by which God enters human history is fundamentally misguided. History is contingent, and all historical knowledge involves uncertainty that requires faith.

In the Appendix, Climacus distinguishes two senses of faith. All historical knowledge involves uncertainty and thus requires what he calls “ordinary faith.” That alone is sufficient to show that a divine incarnation will require faith, for such an incarnation would be an historical event, and thus knowledge of it shares the uncertainty of all historical events. However, a divine incarnation is a special case. It involves not only the “contradiction” that all historical events share, that they have “come into existence” (PF, 86). A divine incarnation, Climacus says, involves a “self-contradiction” of a unique kind, and the resulting uncertainty is qualitatively greater than is the case with ordinary historical knowledge. This means that the faith that can grasp this historical event will not just be ordinary faith but faith in a “wholly eminent sense” (PF, 87). What does Climacus mean by this? What does he mean by “self-contradiction” here?

It is tempting to say that when Climacus speaks of a “self-contradiction,” he means a logical contradiction. One of the most basic principles of logic is that any proposition that is a logical self-contradiction is necessarily false. If this is what Climacus means, then faith in a divine incarnation would be decidedly irrational. It is this reading of Climacus that stands behind the common view that Kierkegaard himself is a radical fideist, who sees Christian faith as requiring a repudiation of reason.

However, this interpretation is mistaken. First, we must notice that Climacus says that history itself involves a “contradiction.” This shows that he does not generally use this term in the sense of logical contradiction, but in a sense that was common in the nineteenth century. Something is a contradiction if it is incongruous; elements that appear to be conflicting are somehow united. Climacus himself gives a great example of this in his later work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in a discussion of humor (CUP, 510–525). Here he claims that all humor (as well as tragedy) revolves around contradictions. The difference between tragedy and humor is that in the former the contradiction is painful, but in the latter it is not because there is a “way out” that cancels the contradiction.

7.7 In What Sense Is the Incarnation a Contradiction?

Still, what does Climacus mean when he calls the incarnation a “self-contradiction?” A strong case to be made that he does not mean a logical contradiction. We could begin with a basic principle of interpretation: One ought to adopt a charitable reading when possible. Seeing Climacus (and Kierkegaard) as believing that the incarnation is logically contradictory is hardly charitable. For one thing, Kierkegaard consistently defends Aristotle’s logic and criticizes Hegel for questioning the principle of noncontradiction. In Fragments Climacus makes a dig at the Hegelians over this issue. Hegelians had claimed that their “dialectical logic” allowed them to go beyond Aristotelian logic by affirming that both sides of a contradiction can be true, a truth that is found by reconciling them in a higher synthesis. Climacus quips that “saying yes and no to the same thing is not good theology” (PF, 53). This hardly seems like a philosopher who wants to repudiate the basic principles of logic.

This is confirmed by another passage found near the conclusion of Fragments, where Climacus offers an explicit defense of the Aristotelian principle of noncontradiction. He says what makes a “good dialectician” (really a good philosopher) is an ability to make “absolute distinctions,” but one can only make such distinctions if the principle of noncontradiction is true (PF, 108). Climacus then offers a classical Aristotelian defense of the principle (which he calls “the principle of contradiction” rather than “noncontradiction”). Any attempt to “cancel” the principle fails because “the thesis that the principle of contradiction is canceled is based upon the principle of contradiction, since otherwise the opposite thesis, that it is not canceled, is equally true” (PF, 108–109). This spirited defense of one of the bedrock principles of classical logic cannot be the work of an irrationalist who wants to affirm the truth of a logical contradiction.

A second reason to reject the idea that the incarnation is logically self-contradictory is this: Whatever contradiction is part of the incarnation must be something unique. Climacus calls it “the absolute Paradox” and does not think there is any parallel. There is nothing unique about a logical contradiction, however. Square circles, triangles with four sides, and propositions that are necessarily false but also true all have one quality: They are equally impossible in a logical sense. If the incarnation involved a logical contradiction, there would be nothing unique about it.

Louis Pojman saw this and actually thought it raised a problem for Kierkegaard (Pojman, Reference Pojman1984, 136–137). He argued that the incarnation was not absolute or unique because there are other things we can imagine that are even more absurd. Imagine that God became incarnate as a rock or a frog. Pojman thinks that what makes something an “absolute paradox” is simply that it is logically contradictory, but he claims that we can imagine many types of “incarnations” that are more absurd than the Christian doctrine, and thus the paradox is not “absolute.” A charitable interpreter would have looked for an account of a divine-human incarnation that would have been unique.

Another problem with the view that Climacus thinks a divine incarnation would be logically impossible is that to know this is the case would require a clear understanding of what it means to be divine and what it means to be human. We know that a square circle is logically impossible because we have a clear understanding of what it means to be square and what it means to be circular. To know that it is logically impossible for a human person to be divine one would have to possess a clear understanding of divinity and humanity. However, we have already seen that Climacus denies that humans have a clear understanding of God or themselves. Climacus compliments Socrates for grasping the difficulty of understanding what it is to be human, even saying Socrates sees human nature as paradoxical. One could certainly agree that it might seem unlikely or even impossible for God to become human, but to know this is logically impossible one would have to know what are the essential qualities of divinity and humanity, knowledge Climacus thinks we lack.

There is one final argument against the logical contradiction interpretation that is decisive. For this, I must briefly jump ahead to Chapter Five, which contains a passage in which Climacus clearly distinguishes a formal or logical contradiction from the kind of contradiction involved in the incarnation. He is discussing whether someone who has received the Condition from the God could provide the Condition to someone else. If this were to occur, Climacus says, we would have an “unthinkable” contradiction (PF, 101). Climacus says that the contradiction in this case would be “unthinkable” in a different sense than is the case for the incarnation (my italics, PF, 101).

What is the difference? Climacus says that in the case of the incarnation, there is no “self-contradiction,” and we can think about it freely, even “become preoccupied” with it, though it is perhaps “the strangest thing of all” (PF, 101). If, however, a contemporary received the Condition from the God, and then gave the Condition to a later follower, then the contemporary would be divine but would also not be divine. The contemporary would have to lack divinity to receive it from the God, but would have to be divine to give the Condition to a later disciple. He is clearly describing a formal contradiction here: “the God is the God for the contemporary, but the contemporary in turn is the God for a third party” (PF, 101). Climacus is loose with his language. He uses the term “self-contradiction” for the incarnation in the Interlude, but in Chapter Five he denies that the incarnation involves a self-contradiction. However, his intention is clear. There are different kinds of contradictions. The incarnation involves a kind of contradiction that must be distinguished from a logical contradiction.

But what kind of contradiction does it involve? To get clear on this point, it is necessary to look at other Kierkegaardian writings beyond Fragments. When we do this, the first thing to note is that the elements of the Absolute Paradox are the elements that Kierkegaard sees as composing human existence itself. In many places in Kierkegaard’s authorship, human existence is described as an unfinished synthesis of temporality and eternity. The most well-known passages are in The Sickness Unto Death, a work attributed to the pseudonym Anti-Climacus (SUD, 14). In Concluding Unscientific Postscript Climacus himself affirms that human existence is a striving to actualize what is eternal in time, and thus is an attempted synthesis of temporality and eternity (CUP, 92). A divine incarnation would be a fully realized union of eternity and temporality. In one sense we can understand this perfectly well, in that our own lives embody a striving to realize eternal ideals in time. The idea of a perfect synthesis of time and eternity is thus not absurd in the way it would be to say that a rock or a plant was divine.

However, we can also understand why it is so difficult to believe that a human being is divine. It is not that that we know this is logically impossible; to know that we would have to know what it is to be divine. Nevertheless, it seems impossible to us. It seems impossible because it “contradicts” all our experience. We strive to actualize our ideals in time, but we never fully succeed. It seems impossible because all our experience is against such a thing. To believe the God has become a human is to believe that eternal perfection has been fully realized in a temporal individual. Climacus does not describe this as logically impossible but it seems impossible to us because we have no experience of such a thing. It is, he says, “the most improbable thing” we can imagine (PF, 52).

It is because of this that the incarnation not only requires faith in the ordinary sense, but faith in a unique, “eminent sense.” Belief in the incarnation not only must deal with the uncertainty that is present in all historical beliefs, but the qualitatively different uncertainty that stems from what we are asked to believe: Something we have never experienced in our own lives or in the lives of any other humans we have encountered. Such an historical belief cannot be demonstrated to be true by ordinary historical evidence. Normally one might think that an historical eyewitness would be in a better position to gain knowledge of an event than someone who lived later. In this case, however, the unique uncertainty of what one is asked to believe simply dwarfs the differences that might arise between those who are in different historical positions. Most of Chapter Five is simply an elaboration of this point, which is already present in Chapter Four.

8.1 Differences between Later Disciples Who Lived at Different Times?

Climacus deals with the Interlocutor’s worries by discussing two different groups of later disciples, who are at opposite ends of the temporal spectrum. None of the differences turn out to be important for his purposes. Still, he begins by looking at the “first generation of secondary disciples,” and then examines the situation of the last generation, those who live 1843 years after the hypothetical appearance of the God.

The first generation of later disciples has the relative advantage of being closer to the events and thus closer to gaining certainty about the historical facts of the matter. However, in the previous chapter, Climacus has already argued that the historical information in question is not sufficient for faith among those who were historical contemporaries, and this is also true for the first later generation. It is true that we can imagine someone in that generation who seized all of the contemporary witnesses still alive and interrogated them, even using physical force and starvation to compel them to testify. Such a person might be closer to knowing the historical facts, though we should remember that Climacus insists that we can never really have certainty about any historical facts. The basic problem remains: Knowing the historical facts does not necessarily lead to faith, since the object of faith is the Paradox. What is necessary for faith to be a real possibility is for the prospective disciple to acquire the consciousness of sin, but this cannot be the result of simply knowing historical facts (PF, 93).

Climacus says that this first generation has one other advantage; they are closer to the “jolt” of the fact, and this means it will capture their attention and produce greater awareness. However, this is not an advantage in the sense of making faith easier to acquire, because what the person is aware of is (again) the Paradox. The awareness can just as easily lead to offense as to faith. Faith is not something that automatically follows from attention or awareness. If this could happen, then the immediate contemporaries who lived at the time of the incarnation would have an advantage, something Climacus has already rejected. Here, he repeats that claim by saying that, though the presence of the God in history is necessary, it is actually an advantage for his disciples if the God, after appearing in history, leaves and is no longer immediately present. If immediate contemporaneity has no advantage, then the relative immediacy of the next generation will similarly fail to be an advantage. So, none of the advantages of the first generation are advantages if one measures advantage by conduciveness to faith.

What about the last generation, the one that is alive 1843 years after the events? This generation lives a long time after the jolt. Over such a long time, people will likely have become familiar with the alleged appearance of the God, and what is familiar generally does not seem surprising. Hence, the last generation will not have the somewhat dubious advantage the first generation had; they will lack a clear awareness of the shocking and paradoxical character of the story and thus may not experience “the jolt.” However, this is far from an advantage, since it means they may fail to recognize the true nature of the story.

However, one might think that the latest generation does have one advantage: They can see the consequences of the event and by appreciating them recognize that the person claiming to be God must truly have been divine. His followers have gradually transformed the world for the better, and one might think this is strong evidence that the person whom those followers claimed to be God was really divine.

It is hard to see why anyone would take this argument seriously in the twenty-first century, when it has become much more common to argue that religion in general and Christianity in particular must be false because they have produced so many bad things. However, in the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon to see this kind of “whiggish” defense of Christianity: This faith must be true because it has done so much to make the world better.

Climacus rejects this alleged advantage of the latest generation for many reasons. First, it could, at best, amount to an argument that leads to probability, and he claims that the Absolute Paradox views claims that it is probable as “slander” (PF, 94), since the Paradox by definition is improbable. Perhaps he also thinks that a commitment of the sort that is called for cannot be based on probability. Those who become disciples may risk persecution and even death. Imagine someone who is asked to open a door that might contain a hungry lion. The person is unlikely to take the risk even if assured that the lion will probably not eat him.

Climacus also objects that this supposed advantage fails to take into account the nature of causal reasoning. The advantage is supposed to consist in the fact that the consequences caused by the initial events are so great that they must be the result of divinity. However, it is hard to see how any improvement in human history could be so great that it could only be the result of divine action. Climacus claims false views could have profound and good consequences.

The idea that the consequences of the incarnation could be so profound that they vindicate the truth of the Paradox is, according to Climacus, equivalent to the claim that “the fact” of the God’s appearance has become “naturalized” (PF, 95). The idea here is that the culture has become so permeated by faith that people growing up in that culture simply acquire faith by virtue of their nurture and education. Climacus claims this is impossible. Faith can indeed become a person’s “second nature,” but it is impossible to be born with such a second nature (PF, 96–97). Such an idea is as foolish as the claim of Apollonius of Tyana, who was not content with remembering his self before he was born, which might be possible on the Platonic view that souls preexist their human lives. Apollonius claimed to remember himself before he became himself (PF, 97). In any case, whatever beneficial consequences have occurred because of the incarnation have been the result of people who acquired faith and allowed this faith to transform their lives. Good consequences cannot make faith unnecessary because without faith there would have been no good consequences.

The conclusion is that there are no significant differences between the situation of the first generation and the last one. The first generation has the advantage of seeing clearly how difficult faith is, but this advantage does not necessarily make faith easier. The later generation has the advantage that the consequences make faith seem easier, but this turns out to be an illusion and thus no advantage at all.

8.2 The Situation of the Disciple at Second Hand

Having argued that there are no significant differences between those who were closer in time and those farther away in time from the incarnation, Climacus proceeds to examine the main question about the disciple at second hand. He argues that the question is indeed malformed. There are no second-hand disciples. There may be disciples who were contemporary with the God’s appearance and disciples who lived later. However, all disciples become disciples in the same way, by receiving the Condition (faith) directly from the God. Discipleship is always a first-hand relationship.

There is indeed a difference between the temporally contemporary disciples and the disciples who lived at a later time. Climacus describes the difference very succinctly; it is a difference in the “occasion” for faith. The temporal contemporaries of the God had their experience of the God as the occasion for faith. The disciple who comes later has a different occasion for faith, the testimony of those who believed: “By means of the contemporary’s report (the occasion), the person who comes later believes by virtue of the Condition he himself receives from the God” (PF, 104). The occasion for faith is different, but the essential condition for faith is the same: It is a gift received directly from the God.

These claims have an implication that is not obvious and has often been missed. One might think that Climacus’s “invention” of his poem, one that obviously is intended to mimic the incarnation, differs from the actual Christian story in one fundamental respect. When Climacus summarizes the narrative of his “poem,” he says only that the God will appear in the form of a lowly servant, provide some clues that point to his identity, and then die. No mention is made of the important Christian claim that Christ was raised from the dead.

It is true that Climacus does not mention the resurrection explicitly. However, his claim that every disciple, including those from later generations, receives the Condition directly from the God certainly implies that the God must be alive. Only a living agent could impart such a gift. The resurrection is implied by his account.

The main conclusion is no surprise: “There is no disciple at second hand. The first and the latest generation are essentially alike …” (PF, 104–105). There is nothing original in his view. Christians have always seen faith as a gift of God and not a human achievement. However, Climacus adds to this traditional view some claims that seem more questionable. In particular, he seems to imply that the quality of the historical evidence passed down to later generations is of no concern at all.

Two such claims stand out. The first is that the trustworthiness of the testimony handed down is of no concern to someone who comes later (PF, 102–103). Presumably Climacus thinks that this follows from the view that faith is a gift from God and not something that is based directly or immediately on historical evidence. However, it is not clear that it follows from this that the believer has no concern for the trustworthiness of the testimony that serves as the occasion for faith. If I believe the testimony of someone I must believe that the testimony is trustworthy, at least on this occasion.

Some philosophers have held that testimony should only be believed when we have evidence that the testimony is reliable. Climacus might well reject such a view. A good case can be made that testimony is a basic source of knowledge and that the default stance toward testimony is belief.Footnote ⁴⁸ Normally, when someone tells me something it seems reasonable to believe that person unless I have good reason not to. So it does seem that testimony could be a source of belief without making that belief something that is based on evidence. Climacus would no doubt hold that in the case of the Paradox, there is always the contrary evidence of the improbability of their testimony. Still, one would think that in the case of the believer, the person of faith must see the testimony as trustworthy despite the improbability of the content of the testimony. It seems psychologically impossible to believe what someone tells me while believing that the person is not telling the truth.

Does the fact that faith is something that God gives to the believer change things? One might think so. God could override the normal belief-producing process and simply cause the person of faith to believe regardless of the quality of the historical evidence is. Perhaps God does indeed do this at times.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, perhaps God might generally give faith to individuals in a manner that uses their normal cognitive faculties. The fact that the God provides signs to the contemporaries that point to his divinity supports that view. To be sure, signs are not proofs, and Climacus thinks that historical proof, in the case of the Paradox, is impossible. However, the signs provided must in some way point to or support the truth of the paradoxical claim that a particular human is God. While the signs do not make belief necessary, they do make it possible without requiring God simply to change the beliefs of the Disciple by fiat. Signs may support belief and make faith possible in a way that respects the cognitive faculties of the Disciple. The person who is willing to believe, which on Climacus’s view means the person with the consciousness of sin, can believe without seeing that belief as irrational, even though the person understands that it will appear irrational to someone who lacks that consciousness. The believer must not see faith as irrational when faith is present because when the “happy passion” of faith is present, reason and the Paradox are on “good terms.”

The second claim that Climacus makes about the historical testimony that seems questionable is that the quality and quantity of the historical evidence are completely irrelevant to the person of faith. Climacus has argued, successfully in my view, that no amount of historical evidence is sufficient for faith, and that no particular amount can be seen as necessary for faith. However, it does not follow from this that for the believer the quality of the historical evidence is unimportant. Climacus says that the contemporary generation only needed to leave behind these words: “We have believed that in such and such a year the god appeared in the humble form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died.” This rather skimpy historical evidence would be “more than enough” (PF, 104). But does this really follow from what he has argued?

Strictly speaking, Climacus is right that God could have used such sparse evidence to produce faith in the Disciple. God is omnipotent and could easily control any human thought process. Suppose, however, as already suggested, God wanted to produce faith in such a way as to employ the cognitive abilities of the Disciple, at least in the typical case. If so, God would ensure that more testimony is available than that sparse statement contains. The believer, if God does provide more substantial testimony, would surely value that testimony and be grateful for it. So even if historical testimony is not sufficient to produce faith, and even if God can produce faith in a person with little or no historical evidence, it does not follow that the evidence God provides would be unimportant or irrelevant to the believer. Notice that this does not undermine what I take to be Climacus’s main concern, which is to show that contemporary historical Biblical scholarship does not make faith impossible. The richness of the historical testimony far exceeds the sparse statement, regardless of what Biblical scholars make of that testimony.

8.3 The Equality of Believers

Climacus concludes his argument by affirming that God is an egalitarian. Those who live at the time of the God’s appearance and those who live at later times have equal opportunity to acquire faith, and he thinks that this is as it should be. “Would the God allow the power of time to decide whom he would grant his favor to, or would it not be worthy of the God to make the reconciliation equally difficult for every human being at every time in every place…” (PF, 106).

This egalitarian principle is appealing. However, there is a difficulty. Climacus has tried to show that this egalitarianism holds between the generation that was contemporary with the God’s appearance and later generations that only know of this through historical testimony. However, what of those who lived before the God’s appearance, and had no access to the historical testimony? And what about those who lived later but never heard the story because of accidents of geography? Climacus himself does not limit the egalitarianism to time but specifically mentions place as well. It is not immediately obvious how this egalitarianism is consistent with the B Hypothesis.

Climacus provides no solution to this problem in Philosophical Fragments. Perhaps he did not see this is necessary, since he is writing to people in Christendom, who certainly have access to the story and have plenty of testimony to consider. Perhaps such people must deal with their actual situation and respond to the testimony they have, leaving God to deal justly with those who lack the requisite historical information, without knowing exactly how God may do that.

However, it is not hard to come up with possible ways of satisfying the egalitarian principle while still holding that eternal life depends on faith in a God who appeared in history. Kierkegaard himself hints at a possible solution in an aside he once made about Socrates. In a late work, Kierkegaard says that what modern Christendom needs is another Socrates. He goes on to say that “he knows very well that Socrates was not a Christian” but affirms that he is confident that “he has long since become one” (PV, 54). In a humorous way, Kierkegaard here seems to affirm the possibility of what we might call post-mortem evangelism. The idea is that people who did not hear about the God’s appearance during their mortal life, or did not hear adequately, will be given a revelation after death and be given the possibility to respond. C. S. Lewis develops a similar view in a persuasive way in his work of imaginative fiction, The Great Divorce (Lewis, Reference Lewis1946). That is one way Climacus could defend the consistency of his egalitarian view of God with the claim that human salvation depends on historical events.

8.4 The Danger of Christendom

Near the end of Chapter Seven, the Interlocutor appears again. Climacus challenges him to submit any objections he has to the poem Climacus has supposedly created, and the Interlocutor obliges, posing an objection drawn from the “festivity” he says would surely be present in the later generations (PF, 107). The objection raised makes it evident that the Interlocutor is not very clear-headed and has not really understood Climacus’s account at all. However, Climacus patiently explains what is wrong with the objection.

The Interlocutor admits that those who lived at the time of the God’s appearance would have a difficult time. “I am well aware that the contemporary generation must really sense and suffer profoundly the pain involved in the coming into existence of such a paradox, or, as you put it, the God’s planting himself in human life” (PF, 107). However, the Interlocutor thinks that this suffering must surely be temporary: “But gradually the new order of things must succeed in pushing its way through victoriously, and finally will come the happy generation that with songs of joy harvests the fruit that was sown in tears in the first generation” (PF, 107). In effect the Interlocutor is saying that the persecution and struggle of the first generation will no longer occur when “the new order” has permeated all of society. If we drop the pretense that Climacus has invented a story, the Interlocutor is assuming that he lives in Christendom, a society which has been so thoroughly permeated by Christianity that persecution has been replaced by “ringing and singing” (PF, 107). This is really the view that Christian faith can become “first nature” and be acquired merely by being part of a Christian culture, and it has already been considered and dismissed by Climacus. However, Climacus clearly considers this issue to be of fundamental importance and is willing to revisit it. Why is that so? Why is it so important for him to deny the possibility of “Christendom” understood as a thoroughly Christian human society?

At this point, I think we see one of the major reasons why Kierkegaard wrote Philosophical Fragments. The book makes it clear that genuine Christianity depends on something historical, and cannot be identified with any philosophical doctrines. But why is history so important? In Chapter Three, Climacus argued that only by entering history can the God appear to us “outside” of our own consciousness. God can reveal himself to us as he is and not merely as something humans have created for their own purposes. He criticizes natural theology as a project in which we create a God in our own image, a God who is in reality an idol. This element of Kierkegaard’s thought would later have a profound effect on the theologian Karl Barth, who correctly saw that the blending of Christian faith with German nationalism was a disaster for Christianity. Rightly or wrongly, Barth thought that natural theology opens the door to a conflation of Christianity and nationalism, and thus rejected natural theology, holding that Christian faith must be rooted in God’s historical self-revelation.

However, it is not just natural theology that is the problem. What is wrong with natural theology on Kierkegaard’s view is that it threatens to domesticate Christianity by making it into a human creation. However, this can happen without the aid of natural theology. Kierkegaard thinks the whole idea of Christendom is really a way of domesticating Christian faith, and this can happen even in a church that thinks it is rooted in the Biblical revelation. A “triumphant” Christianity that is identified with a particular culture can no longer offer any genuine critique of that culture. The message of the God who comes from “outside” our consciousness to demand that we love our neighbors as ourselves is lost. For Kierkegaard, a genuine Christian, a follower of Jesus, must always be “the individual” who is willing to risk suffering and persecution. Jesus himself was tortured and killed by the political and religious establishments for his message of love, and Kierkegaard thinks the true follower of Jesus should be willing to suffer as Jesus did. In Works of Love Kierkegaard, writing under his own name, insists that people who truly love their neighbors as themselves are not likely to be celebrated as heroes but are likely to be mocked as foolish and naïve people who fail to understand how “the real world” works (WL, 191–204).

So at the end of Fragments, Climacus insists that there is no such thing as a triumphant Christian society, “for the faith that celebrates triumphantly is the most ludicrous of all” (PF, 108). Faith is the task of a lifetime, and is always faced with opposition. Any good consequences that come from faith are always hard-won and the victories are never lasting until God returns and finally defeats evil. The faith that makes transformation possible requires disciples who are willing to stand up to a social order that is never fully just, and these disciples must be willing to suffer as a result of their opposition to the established order. I would add that the danger of a culture with an established form of Christianity is similar to the dangers posed by other religions, such as Islam and Hinduism, when they attempt to control a society.

Kierkegaard’s critique of Christendom seems particularly relevant in the contemporary world. In the USA, in particular, there are attempts to use Christianity as a tool to make a particular political agenda successful. There are even overt attempts to support what is sometimes called “Christian nationalism,” despite the American tradition of the separation of religion and the state. Christian nationalists see the USA as a country that is or should be Christian, and think that this justifies the imposition of Christian beliefs and values by worldly means, including politics and even force. Kierkegaard thinks that such projects are deeply antithetical to the Christ who rejected worldly power as a means of transforming the world. Similar movements to Christian nationalism can be found in other countries with Christian backgrounds. Kierkegaard’s worries about blending Danish nationalism or Scandinavian ethnic pride with Christian faith, movements that in some ways prefigured the way “German Christianity” under the Nazis blended Christianity with German nationalism, continue to offer a prophetic warning the contemporary world needs to hear.Footnote ⁵⁰

8.5 The Moral

At the end of the book, Climacus drops the pretense that he has invented his poem, and admits that the whole discussion is about Christianity. “As is well known, Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical – indeed, precisely by means of the historical – has wanted to be the individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness…” (PF, 109). He even promises that if he ever writes a sequel, he will provide “the historical costume” for the project by explicitly discussing Christianity (PF, 109). This “half-promised sequel” is fulfilled in the first section of Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

Climacus adds a “Moral” at the end of Fragments, which makes it clear what the book intends to do and what it does not intend to do. The book, he says, “indisputably goes beyond the Socratic” (PF, 111). He does not mean that his hypothetical alternative to the Socratic view is true and the Socratic view is false, but just that they are essentially different views. To know which view is true one would have to consider “a new organ” (faith), a “new presupposition” (the consciousness of sin), a “new decision” (the Moment), as well as a “new teacher” (The God in time).

So Fragments is not an argument that Christianity is true and the Socratic view is false. It is an argument that they are distinct and should not be confused. What is included in the Socratic view? It is not just Socrates or even Platonism that is in view, but any view that holds that human reason has within itself the capacity to come to know the Truth that leads to eternal life or salvation. This would seem to include not only some philosophical views but many religions that base themselves on truths that human reason is supposed to be able to grasp. This would include versions of liberal Christianity, both in Kierkegaard’s day and our own, that hold that Christianity does not depend on Jesus Christ, understood as the divine Son of God, but on teachings of Jesus which we can recognize as true.

The real target of the book is best understood as views that claim to be Christian, but are really Socratic. This might include works such as Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, if one interprets that work as providing a version of Christianity that can survive independently of the Christian historical revelation, as well as Hegel’s attempt to “defend” Christianity by claiming its truth is something that is captured in Hegel’s own philosophical system. To all such views, Climacus offers his final riposte: “But to go beyond Socrates when one nevertheless says essentially the same thing as he does, only not nearly so well – that, at least, is not Socratic” (PF, 111). Views that eliminate the essential role of history but that claim to be Christian may embody the truth about the human condition, but it cannot be true that they are forms of Christianity.