Introduction

For any theological student of Kierkegaard's generation David Friedrich Strauss was an unavoidable phenomenon. His study of The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, was published in its first and second editions in 1835 and 1836 respectively, in the midst of Kierkegaard's time as a theology student. This work both established Strauss as a figure of European stature and effectively destroyed his career as a theologian, a pattern that has been repeated in many subsequent theological scandals, as academic theologians finds themselves challenging what are widely regarded as central elements of Christian faith and ethics.

Long before Strauss there had, of course, been many attacks on the historicity of the Church's founding texts, but these had mostly been intended as attacks upon the substance of Christian faith. What distinguished Strauss's work was, firstly, that it came from the pen of one who was himself a Church theologian and seemed to wish to continue to be so, and, secondly, that it argued its case for a mythical interpretation of the gospel with previously unmatched detail and consistency. Although the period after Strauss was to see a great flowering of historical reconstructions of the life of Jesus, Strauss had already effectively shown that there was little if anything in the gospel narratives that could safely be used for such a task. At a stroke, he unsettled what had previously been regarded as the sure historical base of Christian doctrine. As his biographer, Horton Harris wrote, ‘Voltaire and his friends had merely denied the traditional doctrines; Strauss had destroyed the foundations on which those doctrines stood.’¹In the wave of critical reappraisals of Christianity coming from the radical ‘young Hegelian’ left, the sheer scholarly authority of his work as well as its controversial thesis ensured that Strauss became one of the figureheads of the new movement, even if politically and in other respects he soon became outstripped by yet more radical voices. The Life of Jesus was one of those works that were discussed across society with passion and acrimony, not only by scholarly specialists and not only by those who actually read them. So, for example, we learn that the Jewess Naomi, the main female figure in Hans Christian Andersen's Only a Fiddler, was a partisan of radical thinking, succumbing to ‘the Straussian evaporation that dissolves everything historical into myths’, a quotation cited by Kierkegaard in his dissection of Andersen's work (SKS1, 49–50/EPW, 94).

Testimony to the importance of Strauss's role at this pivotal moment in the development of modern religious thought can be culled from many quarters, and includes those, such as Karl Barth, who were to be the doughtiest opponents of this kind of anthropologization of religion (as Barth saw it). Barth wrote that ‘It is simply a matter of fact that, besides Feuerbach, Strauss was the most characteristic exponent of the situation of theology in the period after Schleiermacher's death; that it quite simply was down to him that theology was confronted with that question, the question of history, in all its fundamental rigour.’² Or Harris again: ‘Strauss was not merely the most notorious theologian of the century; he was also unquestionably the most consequent. Other theologians might go only half-way; he could not. For him it was all or nothing and no half-and-half solutions for the theological problems of the time could satisfy him.’³ Or, as Kierkegaard's own contemporary, H. L. Martensen, put it, ‘His significance is that he confronted us with a great and decisive either/or.’⁴

It is, then, surprising that Kierkegaard says virtually nothing about Strauss in the published work, although we may well guess that he is comprised in such general formulations as ‘the whole newer development’ of From the Papers of One Still Living (SKS1, 17/EPW, 61) or ‘the modern mythical allegorizing trend’ of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript,⁵ and may be assumed to be part of the development of Left Hegelianism that Kierkegaard repeatedly castigates. But Kierkegaard was not ignorant of Strauss. As has been noted, he made extensive excerpts and summaries from Julius Schaller's The Historical Christ and the Philosophical Criticism of the basic Idea of the Work The Life of Jesus by Dr. D. F. Strauss and there are also important references to Strauss in the lectures by Marheineke. Kierkegaard's amanuensis notes on Martensen's lectures on the history of philosophy also contained references to Strauss.⁶ The auction catalogue of his library does not indicate that he actually owned The Life of Jesus itself, but he did own the two-volume Christian Dogmatics which were translated into Danish by Hans Brøchner (but, although Brøchner recalls their having frequently discussed Feuerbach, he says nothing about Strauss). Strauss's thought was, then, known to Kierkegaard, and, on the basis of the extent of the Schaller notes, of great interest to him. If Strauss was far from being the only or even the major representative of Left Hegelianism in Kierkegaard's developing intellectual universe, he typified what Kierkegaard found disturbing in that movement. In this regard the issues that come to the fore in Schaller's book provide one of the earliest statements of themes that will become central in Kierkegaard's mature theological – and especially Christological – thinking. But, as we have seen, Kierkegaard's issue here is not simply with the path taken by Left Hegelianism since he already judges the Right Hegelians, including Schaller himself, and despite their criticism of Strauss, as having surrendered the essential points of historical Christianity.

In what follows, then, I shall, firstly, summarize the main points of Strauss's career, focusing chiefly on the period of the 1830s and early 1840s. Then I shall turn to Kierkegaard and examine more closely the evidence for his acquaintance with and opinion of Strauss before commenting on the nature of the differences and similarities between them. In terms of this last operation, I shall largely focus on the question of Christology which, I believe, is clearly the most important point at issue in the encounter between the two thinkers. However, I shall also use material from Strauss's Christian Dogmatics to show how consistently the Straussian and Kierkegaardian approaches relate to each other, with particular reference to the question of immortality. Finally, I shall attempt to comment on what this historical footnote implies for our own contemporary reading of Kierkegaard and, more broadly, of the religious debates of the 1830s and 1840s.

David Friedrich Strauss, 1808–1874

Born near Stuttgart in 1808, Strauss, like many other talented young theologians of the period, became a student at the famous Tübingen Stift (or Seminary), where he read widely in Romantic and idealist philosophy and literature, as well as pursuing his theological studies. Somewhat curiously he wrote a prize essay in 1828 for the Catholic Faculty on the resurrection of the flesh, of which he famously wrote, that ‘as soon as I made the last full-stop, it was clear to me that there was nothing in the whole idea of resurrection’.⁷ Shortly afterwards, Strauss began to read Schleiermacher and Hegel – the latter being at that time virtually unread in his own alma mater. In 1831 Strauss took a parish post whilst continuing to wrestle with the religious significance of key Hegelian ideas, especially the tension between representational and conceptual thinking (Vorstellung and Begriff) and the implications of this tension for popular religion. At the same time he worked on his doctoral dissertation The Doctrine of the Restoration of all Things in its Religious-Historical Significance, a topic that allowed him to think further the choices to be made between a Schleiermacherian and an Hegelian approach. In the autumn of 1831 he managed to secure a period of study in Berlin, where he learned from Schleiermacher that Hegel had just died, to which news Strauss famously and ineptly replied ‘But it was for his sake that I came here!’

It seems to have been about this time that Strauss began seriously to plan his Life of Jesus. An important feature of the original conception was that it would be a work in two parts, constructed under the inspiration of a rather loose version of Hegelian dialectic. In Part One Strauss would enact the negation of the traditional historical basis of Christianity, in Part Two he would reinstate this in a speculative manner. This division survives in the published work, although the concluding dissertation on ‘The Dogmatic import of the Life of Jesus’ is little more than a footnote to the main bulk of the ‘negative’ historical work. It was therefore not implausible for F. C. Baur, who had been Strauss's teacher, to contrast his ‘positive’ method with Strauss's ‘negative’ criticism.

What, then, was Strauss's method in his ‘negative’ treatment of the historical materials of the life of Jesus. It was summarized in his own phrase ‘the mythical view’, but what did this mean?

Strauss's ‘Introduction’ to The Life of Jesus contains an extensive survey of the development of historical criticism of the biblical sources. These stretch back to the Ancient World, but there is, naturally, a special emphasis on the most recent, German discussion, against the background of deist and naturalist reinterpretations of Scripture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Typical of these is the view Strauss ascribes to Bolingbroke, that the Bible is ‘a collection of unauthentic and fabulous books’.⁸ Both the miraculous element of Scripture and the supposed moral shortcomings of biblical teaching were ridiculed. The climax of this movement came with H. S. Reimarus, extracts from whose researches on the gospels were published posthumously by G. E. Lessing as the renowned Wolfenbüttel Fragments. Typical of Reimarus's approach was the depiction of Moses as an impostor and ‘the despotic ruler of a free people’ and of the resurrection of Jesus as a ‘fraudulent pretence’ on the part of the disciples.⁹Elements of this naturalistic method were taken over into what Strauss calls the rationalist interpretation of Scripture. The rationalists generally shared the view that the Bible qua historical text should be treated in the same way as all other ancient texts, and that one should bring to it a general acceptance of the universal validity of the laws of nature. However, they did not ascribe attributions of miracles to deliberate deception. Rather, one had imaginatively to consider such reports as reflecting the effect that certain marvellous events had on the observers, so that ‘[t]he shining of [Moses’] countenance was the natural effect of being over-heated: but it was supposed to be a divine manifestation, not only by the people, but by Moses himself, he being ignorant of the true cause'.¹⁰ At first these methods were largely limited to the Old Testament, but in figures such as J. G. Eichhorn and H. E. G. Paulus, they begin also to be applied to the New.

The rationalist commentators typically assume a model of divine providence akin to Lessing's idea of an ‘education of the human race’, in which, over the course of centuries and millennia, initially crude misconceptions and superstitions about the natural and moral universe are refined into a religion of reason. In the course of this process sacrifice is replaced by moral conversion and improvement, and miracles by explanations. At the same time the rationalists still held to the idea that the biblical text was a more or less accurate portrayal of the events they describe or, at least, as they were experienced by those who wrote the text. As in a previous example, the assumption was that Moses' face really was shining when he came down from the mountain and the question was only to decide what the true explanation for this unusual phenomenon was. But was this kind of assumption safe and, if not, how might one begin to separate out what really belonged to the historical event reported in the text from what the text itself added?

This is where the idea of myth begins to come into its own. Starting with critics such as J. A. L. Wegscheider, the idea that there was an element of myth in the biblical narrative began to gain ground and preliminary taxonomies of myths began to be drawn up. Strauss mentions historical, philosophical, and poetic mythi, of which the first were ‘narratives of real events coloured by the light of antiquity, which confounded the divine and the human, the natural and the supernatural’; the second ‘such as clothe in the garb of historical narrative a simple thought, a precept, or an idea of the time’; and the third a blending of these, but so embellished by the imagination as to almost totally obscure the idea or event underlying it.¹¹

Strauss sets out his own case for the presence of myth in the New Testament with customary clarity and vigour. It is not a matter of ascribing intentional fictions to the evangelists, as the older naturalists had done, but simply of recognizing that the early Christians' belief that Jesus was the Messiah led them to see all his words and actions through the filter of Messianic myths. The application of this method is clearly exemplified in the first piece of the narrative to which Strauss turns his attention, the birth of John the Baptist. Demolishing attempts by various commentators to find a rational explanation for the miraculous elements in the narrative, Strauss brushes them aside to conclude that

It is hard for twenty-first-century readers to recapture the shock-value of such a conclusion – coming from one assumed to be a Christian theologian – but shocking it was, especially when Strauss went on to deal in the same way with Jesus' birth, ministry, death, and resurrection. With regard to the resurrection Strauss typically concludes that whatever their more precise content, the appearances to the disciples were essentially of the same kind as the appearance to Paul and impossible to regard ‘as an external, objective appearance of the real Christ’.¹³

As Strauss noted in the opening sentence of the ‘Concluding Dissertation’: ‘The results of the enquiry which we have now brought to a close, have apparently annihilated the greatest and most valuable part of that which the Christian has been wont to believe concerning his Saviour Jesus, have uprooted all the animating motives which he has gathered from his faith, and withered all his consolations.’¹⁴ However, he now proposes to restore with his right hand what he has taken away with his left and, by means of the speculative method to offer a Christology that can be meaningful in the modern world. Again he proceeds by surveying the history of orthodox, rationalist, and other Christologies. He pauses to take particular issue with Schleiermacher, and the latter's idea that Jesus is to be seen as the one in whom there existed the maximum level of God-consciousness and that it is in the influence of this God-consciousness that his redemptive power continues to be experienced. But, says Strauss,

No individual in particular can ever ‘present the perfect ideal’¹⁶ and if the ‘truth’ of Christology is the idea of the unity of the divine and human, representing this unity in the form of an individual life is only an inadequate representation of what is true only when predicated of the human race as a whole. ‘In an individual, a God-man, the properties and functions which the church ascribed to Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the race, they perfectly agree.’¹⁷ That the divine attributes are attributed only to one man is simply a ‘necessary result of the historical circumstances’ under which Christology developed.¹⁸ It is humanity, not the individual man Jesus, that

But what exactly does this somewhat flowery language mean? Strauss's answer moves from a rhetorical question to a simple assertion that leaves little room for doubt as to his intentions:

In relation to this, it may fairly be said that if Kierkegaard did not read it, it nevertheless corresponds perfectly to what he many times unmasks as ‘what the age demands’, namely, the subordination of the individual to ‘the race’.

But back, briefly, to Strauss. The controversy over The Life of Jesus led, unsurprisingly, to his being relieved of his post as tutor in the Tübingen Stift. Not only were subsequent Church posts closed to him, so too were academic positions. After a third edition of The Life of Jesus in 1838, in which Strauss partially back-pedalled on the radical position of the earlier editions, his Dogmatics of 1841 – or, to give the book its full title, Christian Dogmatics Presented in its Historical Development and in Conflict with Modern Science – offered a two-volume reinterpretation of the main headings of Christian teaching which, as Harris wrote, was ‘an exposition of the Christian faith without a personal God, without a divine and supernatural Jesus, without any miraculous events and without any life after death’²¹ – or, as Peter C. Hodgson put it more drily ‘The philosophical perspective of the book is that of a monistic pantheism.’²²

Strauss's life continued to be controversial. After a disastrous marriage to the opera singer Agnese Schebert he was elected to the Württemberg Assembly in 1848, where he experienced what many erstwhile young firebrands have discovered – that they do not have the stomach for the yet more radical ideas and actions of the next generation. His attack on a left-wing journal, The Neckar Steamboat, could almost be mistaken for an extract from Kierkegaard's attack on the ‘rabble-barbarism’ of The Corsair, when Strauss wrote of

Yet Strauss's self-image as one ‘who has raised himself above the masses’ was rudely punctured by Nietzsche, when, in the last year of Strauss's life, he lambasted the latter's last major theoretical work, The Old and the New Faith, as exemplifying the cultural philistinism of a spiritless age.²⁴ Here, it is Nietzsche who reminds us of Kierkegaard, for what Nietzsche sees in Strauss is profoundly akin to what Kierkegaard portrayed in A Literary Review and other works of Zeitkritik, namely a bourgeois world that, having left both Christianity and the sterner discipline of an age of warfare behind, still wants to regard itself as cultured, as aspiring to ideals, and productive of genius – a claim that both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche deride.

Schaller on Strauss

Schaller's critical study of Strauss provides the most substantial presentation of the latter's thought in Kierkegaard's journals, which, as we have seen, he studied in the summer of 1838. As the editors of SKS remark in their explanatory notes (SKS18K, 490), Schaller distinguished himself from many of Strauss's critics by the objectivity of his approach and by the fact that he did not simply dismiss the idea of using Hegelian thought to help understand Christianity but rather sought to show how this did not necessarily require understanding the New Testament text as literal. It is, of course, not Schaller himself we are concerned with here, but Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard's response to Strauss, and I shall follow only his notes, rather than attempting to give a more general summary of Schaller's argument.

Kierkegaard's marginal dating at the top of these notes suggests that he read Schaller in the summer of 1838, from 23 July to 21 August – which, as we have seen, was during the high-point of his reading of speculative theology. It is in this context that Kierkegaard sits down with Schaller's book. What does he find in it that merits excerpting or noting?

He begins by writing out a series of quotes, translated by him into Danish from the German original (with just a few words remaining untranslated), that set out the Straussian critique of traditional faith. The nub of this, familiar from the polemic of German idealists from Kant onwards against ‘positive’ religion, is that faith must cease to be an ‘act of submission to an alien hostile dominion, but much more the content-filled act of becoming free from, of negating, of overcoming every preceding alienation, the subject coming to consciousness of its own inwardness’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 318/292). In this perspective it is an error to exclude knowledge from faith or to say with Tertullian credo quia absurdum. To insist on ‘the facts’ is to insist on what can only be an object of consciousness but not a part of self-consciousness:

Against this concern with facts is to be set the centrality of Christ's person, which is, indeed, at the heart of his own teaching. However, and this is now Schaller's objection, even focusing on the person is a kind of ‘fact’ that has concrete, historical consequences. As he puts it, one could not believe Christ to be the God-man and remain a Jew.

The insistence of the mythical conception on the sacred narrative being merely ‘the sensuous garb of the religious ideas’ in relation to which the supposed historical facts are irrelevant is reinforced by its claims that these supposed facts are actually false or not susceptible to historical proof. Strauss's presupposition that the Idea cannot ‘pour its entire fullness into one exemplar’ and that ‘the predicates that the Church ascribes to Christ's person cannot be united in one individual’ leads him ‘on dogmatic and philosophical grounds alone’ to refuse to see the divine element in Christ in the same way as the Bible does (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 320/294). Strauss's understanding of the place of ‘facts’ in the overall system of knowledge leads him to the view that even if miracles were to be proved they would have nothing to offer to faith, which must be concerned with the Idea, the person to which the miracles were to point. But, says Schaller, even if Strauss were to have shown that the text was unhistorical, this still does not prove it to be mythical. That requires something more, namely, to show how the supposed facts could function as expressions of the religious self-consciousness, i.e., a self-consciousness that knew itself to be permeated by the divine Idea. The problem is that if the New Testament simply used the prevailing Jewish Messianic framework, this does not explain the distinctiveness of the Christian conception. If Judaism already expressed the idea of divine–human reconciliation, e.g., in its cult, the mythical view must explain why this needed to be surpassed – which it doesn't. Not only is history downgraded, argues Schaller, but myth itself, i.e., the forms of the actual religious consciousness, are not taken really seriously.

But there is a more fundamental question, namely, whether Strauss is correct in his view that ‘sensuous, factual immediacy is actually inessential to the idea of reconciliation’ – a form that can be skimmed off from the essential content – ‘or whether that immediate reality might not rather be conceived as a moment of the content itself’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 322/295).

What, then, is Strauss's fundamental view of the human being? As Schaller summarizes it, it goes like this. The state of nature is one in which Spirit and reality are divided and in which the human subject experiences nature as something alien or external to it, yet, also, as something by which it itself is limited and dominated. As a raw, empirical individual the human subject is bound to this state of natural self-alienation. As Spirit, however, it knows itself as responsible for itself and, in this knowledge, integrates its natural state as a subordinate element as well as recognizing its community with all other rational beings. In the realm of Spirit, then, the relation of the individual to society or to the species is essentially different from that of individual and species in any merely natural kind. Spirit, the free human subject, knows itself as a member of a community of free subjects, although ‘immediately’ this ‘is only present in the mode of possibility and not in accordance with its actuality’, i.e., as a state to be achieved through historical action (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 324/297).

The different stages of this realization are reflected in the history of religions and, of special interest in this context, in the transition from Judaism to Christianity. Judaism, on this view, ascribes all divinity exclusively to God, over against whom ‘the human being is lost in his finitude’ or, in the language of speculation,

This division is overcome for the Jew by the idea of the special relationship of belonging to the chosen people, but this idea is inherently incapable of expressing the true universality of spiritual existence, i.e., humanity.

But how is reconciliation to be understood in its divine aspect? Are we to imagine that the change is merely a change in human consciousness, ‘so that one simply removes the idea one once had of God's wrath’? Kierkegaard's notes leave the question unanswered at this point, but the issue of God's wrath is one to which, as we shall see, he returns.

When we move to a section entitled ‘Critique of the Straussian Christology’, Kierkegaaard notes that ‘Its chief failing is its lack of definition.’

But if we were really to take seriously the idea of Spirit as self-conscious individual identity, then ‘the concept of divine-humanity deriving from that is so far from dispensing with the God-man's historical appearance that it rather also includes the proof for the necessity of the historical appearance’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 326–7/299). If, with Strauss, we speak only of the species as divine-humanity, ‘there must nevertheless always be a point at which the individual participates in divine-humanity’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 327/299). Or, looking at it from another side, the Straussian emphasis on the species, the universal, in fact institutionalizes the impossibility of the individual becoming free from sin, even though Strauss denies the idea of sin, since it is only the species that is united with the divine in such a way that the individual will never entirely overcome its state of separateness. All in all, ‘the shaky deployment of the category “species” is precisely the chief moment and the chief failing in Strauss’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 327/299).

This criticism relates also to the next heading in Kierkegaard's notes, ‘The Idea of Reconciliation’. Here Schaller opposes two quite distinct views. On the one side is the view that ‘The new relation to God must in the first instance essentially take its point of departure from the side of God, for without this it becomes an empty movement within subjectivity's own limits . . . For in our knowledge truth is the absolute “prius” which we do not invent but discover . . .’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 328–9/300). Over against this is the view that Schaller takes to be that of speculative Christology, namely, ‘that in knowing God humanity is actually knowing itself’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 329/301). This has the paradoxical outcome of having the same effect as Judaism. Where Judaism forced the finite individual back onto himself, subjective idealism ‘break[s] off every actual relationship and thus, despite all its efforts and longings, remain[s] stuck in its firm and insuperable finitude’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 330/301). Only the recognition of genuine substantial difference on each side of the relation between spiritual beings opens the way for genuine self-knowledge.

Although we might have thought that there was much in this that Kierkegaard would welcome and even much that anticipates many of his own later attacks on ‘the system’ and ‘speculation’ (especially the issue of the subordination of the individual to the species), he interrupts his notes at this point to remark, rather condescendingly, that

This seems to be aimed not only at Strauss but also, and more particularly, at Schaller. The problem seems to be that Schaller has developed only ‘the possibility of God's relation to human beings’. Schaller's point that God must be regarded as personal is merely a presupposition that faith itself always makes. What matters to faith is rather the more concrete configuration of this relationship, i.e., whether ‘the wrathful God’ is actually reconciled.

Kierkegaard then returns to his note-taking, jotting down Schaller's reiterated argument that ‘only that religion can be called the absolute revelation in which God is revealed as a person and enters human consciousness as he is in and for himself’. Only this religion, Schaller argues, really annihilates the opposition between God and the world. But, once more, Kierkegaard interrupts himself with the remark that ‘this indeed shows that the opposition was purely logical and that the opposition that comes under the rubric of religious-moral views (sin, etc.) has not been touched on’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 331/303). These are important interjections, and I shall shortly return to their significance for our evaluation of Kierkegaard's position vis-à-vis speculative theology as a whole, but first turn to the completion of his notes on Schaller.

The next section of Schaller's book that Kierkegaard deals with is ‘The Personality of Christ’. Many of the substantial points, such as the need for a concrete, individual and personal revelation of the God-man are by now familiar. Kierkegaard, now sounding more appreciative of Schaller's endeavours, notes that ‘Against the mythical volatilization of the historical Christ the point has rightly been established that every spiritual step forward proceeds from the energy of individuality’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 335/306). In words that could almost be taken from Philosophical FragmentsKierkegaard notes, ‘That one person is to combine two within himself, namely his own and an alien nature, seems the hardest contradiction that can be offered to thought, but this is precisely the concept and essence of the person, that it does not have its existence in itself but in an Other . . .’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 335/306–7). The movement of faith is correspondingly one in which both ‘the difference from Christ and the union with him are made to appear more and more deeply’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 335/307).

Kierkegaard's notes then move to the question of miracles, where there seems once again (though not entirely clearly) to be an analogy between speculation and Judaism in the sense that both obscure the total miracle of Christ's appearing. The final section, which Kierkegaard breaks off after a few lines, deals with Christian life and philosophy, asserting that, as it developed historically, Christian faith did not ‘have the form of philosophical thinking, since it took its departure from what it felt and not from thinking about thinking’ (SKS18/KJN2 KK:2, 337/308). Even in the Middle Ages, theology was not philosophical but ‘believing and meditative thinking’ – philosophy was not subordinated to faith, but there was simply no urge towards philosophizing as an essential element in the spiritual life. Although the notes do not go on to develop the point, this, of course, undercuts one of the repeated claims made by Strauss, namely, that the true essence of Christian thought always had been essentially philosophical.

It is clear that Kierkegaard could have found many themes in Schaller that were to reappear in his own later work. Even if he limits Schaller's contributions to the level of ‘prolegomena’, he too will take up themes such as that of the principle of concrete individual personality, both with regard to the believer and to the Christ, the God-man. Moreover, lining up against Straussian speculation, we can see the emergence of such concepts as sin, the paradox of the Incarnation (‘the hardest contradiction that can be offered to thought’), the priority of God in reconciliation, and the rejection of ‘thinking about thinking’ as a medium of Christian reflection. But whilst this last is already found in the notes on Erdmann, Kierkegaard's reading of Schaller indicates a new and sharpened focus of opposition to speculation, namely, the focus on sin and on the contradiction between the holiness of God and the sinfulness of human beings.

Two strands are now emerging in the Kierkegaardian response to speculative thinking. On the one hand, as we have seen in the last chapter, Kierkegaard articulates a critical reservation with regard to the capacity of the self-reflection of human consciousness to engage what we might, roughly speaking, call ‘reality’. On the other hand, the notes on Schaller emphasize sin as the point at which this incapacity becomes decisively apparent and, with regard to which, if we ignore it, the most disastrous consequences will follow. This focus on sin is central to both Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxietyand also fed through to the later writings on Christology and suffering discipleship. Taken in isolation, however, this leads to the problem of human beings' God-relationship being severed from the interpretation of the overall configuration of human life in the world and the way is opened to the kind of radical dualism of Kierkegaard's last years, a dualism that many have found incompatible with the witness of historical Christianity.²⁵ However, if the tension between consciousness and reality is simply integral to the human condition as such (and not solely a mark of our falling away from an original perfection), then the ‘problem’ of correcting the speculative error is not simply to be solved by calling in a theology of redemption. In addition, it will require a fuller account of human being-in-the-world and of human beings' God-relationship apart from or prior to the specific shaping of that relationship in the dialectic of fall and redemption. And this, in turn, may involve developing a theology of creation in relation to which – and only in relation to which – the theology of sin and redemption becomes meaningful. In fact, I shall argue that this is just what we see in Kierkegaard's published works, if we take his so-called upbuilding works into account alongside the pseudonymous and late, radically Christian works. For now, however, we return to Kierkegaard's early, indirect, encounters with Strauss.

Marheineke on Strauss

Kierkegaard would hear more about Strauss in Marheineke's lectures on the History of Dogma, which, as we have seen, he began attending shortly after his arrival in Berlin in 1841. The context in which Marheineke turns his attention to Strauss is the discussion of Christology and, especially, the Christological idea of Christ as the God-man. In Kierkegaard's clipped notes, we hear Marheineke give a clear warning: Strauss has gone too far, or, more precisely, Strauss has overlooked something essential in Christology. And what is that? It is precisely the individuality of Christ. Strauss, he says, does not doubt the unity of the divine and human, but he will not allow this unity to occur ‘in one individual’ but only in a succession of examples that reciprocally complement one another. But this is to fail to grasp the genuine historicity of Christ. If the speculative starting-point is that of the abstract, ‘in-itself’ unity of the divine and the human – the idea that is to be realized in historical time – then Strauss's view merely takes us back to the beginning. Marheineke concedes that Strauss is correct in rejecting any kind of portrayal of the Incarnation that would make it ‘ex abrupto’ without any real connection with the rest of history, some supernatural ‘Deus ex machina’. Nevertheless, the idea of humanity itself, which requires the affirmation of the individual, is occluded in Strauss's thought.

If one does not allow this and says, with Strauss, that ‘humanity’ is the collective Son of God, ‘then real historicality is done away with’. ‘Christ is humanity, but in individuality’ (SKS19/KJN3: Notebook 9, 271/267).

Marheineke returns to his criticism of Strauss when he comes to the topic of ‘the goal of reconciliation’. Here, Strauss's flight from historicality has further consequences for the believer. Instead of a concrete, individual mediator between God and humanity, Strauss has only an idea, something which, Marheineke says, cannot serve to bring about a sense of reconciliation in the individual. But, Marheineke argues, reconciliation depends on Christ's actual obedience, in the flesh. ‘Obedience in the individual person must have its basis in the obedience Christ showed to his Father’ (SKS19/KJN3: Notebook 10:8, 292/289). But Christ's obedience is only the objective condition of our obedience, and it must be realized by each individual believer before reconciliation can be deemed complete. Even his death did not complete this, since real reconciliation must be appropriated by each individual. Thus too, we must not understand his death as a substitutionary sacrifice, but as the fulfilment of his obedience, and ‘obedience is more precious to God than sacrifice’ (SKS19/KJN3: Notebook 10:8, 292/289). We are reconciled to God when the reconciling characteristics of Christ's own life enter into us. But, for Strauss, all of this can only be rhetoric.

In some respects, Kierkegaard's own opposition to Straussian speculation seems to have some common ground with the moderate Christian idealism of theologians such as Schaller and Marheineke. Kierkegaard too sought to formulate the questions of Christology in such a way that detailed questions of historical fact are assiduously avoided, but his emphasis on the individual humanity of the God-man and his acceptance that this would be offensive to reason was antithetical to Strauss's definition of the God-man in terms of the race or universal humanity and, basically, reaffirms Schaller's view that a spiritual relationship can only exist where there are two distinct spiritual individualities. Yet Kierkegaard shares with the speculative theologians a conviction that the real interest of Spirit lies elsewhere than in the proof or disproof of historical facts. These elements combine into the well-known assertion from Philosophical Fragments that ‘The historical fact that the God has been in human form is the main thing, and the rest of the historical detail is not even as important as if, instead of the God, we were talking about a human being’ (SKS4, 300/PF, 103–4). Or, as he put it in Stages on Life's Way, ‘Spirit asks these two things: (1) Is that which is said possible? (2) Can I do it? But it shows lack of Spirit to ask these two things: (1) Is it real? (2) Has my neighbour, Christopherson, done it . . .?’ (SKS6, 407/SLW, 440). Later texts, such as Practice in Christianity and Judge for Yourselves, will go further in sketching elements of the life of Jesus that indicate the fittingness of his having been the God-man and that provide matter for imitation and, as I hope to show in Chapter 7 below, it is possible to construct a Kierkegaardian ‘Life of Jesus’. However, this is not a ‘Life’ based on historical-critical methods, although, equally, it is not simply ignorant of that research. As we might expect, Kierkegaard's specific disagreements with the speculative theologians presuppose a certain shared horizon with regard to the fundamental issues facing the theology of his day. To a considerable extent, this horizon is already that projected by Schleiermacher, namely, that theological assertions are only decisive to the extent that they articulate basic experiences of human self-consciousness. The question is how these basic experiences are to be interpreted – as a pre-cognitive feeling or as the seeds that can grow up into speculative knowledge; as a sense of sin and a desperate need for forgiveness, or as a free and autonomous participation in the common projects of the human species. A similar pattern of difference and similarity appears if we turn to an area of doctrine that was of especial importance to Kierkegaard, not least in the context of his critique of Hegelianism, namely, immortality. Here too, although Kierkegaard does not at this point engage textually with Strauss, the latter provides a near-perfect exemplar of where Kierkegaard thought contemporary speculative thought was going wrong.

The question of immortality

We have seen that Kierkegaard owned Strauss's Dogmatics, although there is no evidence for how much of it he actually read. Nevertheless, by looking at how Strauss deals with the question of immortality, we will be able to put further flesh on just how and why Kierkegaard had to distance himself from speculative theology. As we have already seen, Strauss had early on rejected the doctrine of resurrection and when Martensen met Strauss in the course of his post-graduation tour of Germany, he reported the latter as saying that Hegel's singular service was to have ‘annihilated the dream of a beyond, an other-world’. With particular regard to the doctrine of immortality, Martensen reports Strauss as saying ‘I had scarcely finished reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, before that belief fell away from me like a dead leaf.’²⁶ This, then, was clearly a central issue for Strauss himself – as it was for Kierkegaard. A comparison of their respective positions will thus serve to further focus their decisive differences.

Strauss addresses the subject by giving an overview of the Church's historical teaching, before examining modern revisionist approaches and concluding with his own speculative resolution of the question.²⁷ After 70 pages summarizing biblical and ecclesiastical eschatology he turns to ‘The Doctrine of Immortality of Modern Reflection’. Any reader who has followed Strauss thus far will be unsurprised by the opening words of this section, in which Strauss states that, ‘The modern “I” lets the whole rich dowry of ecclesiastical eschatology be put on the fire of criticism without any particular emotion, content to hold back only its own bare survival after death.’²⁸ This residual faith, he points out, is the most important of the three elements of religious ideals accepted by Kant: God, freedom, and immortality. Now, however, he is going to reductively reinterpret even this last remaining vestige of supernaturalism and to expose it as mere ‘egoism’. The ‘I’, he concedes, is justified in seeing itself as infinite and therefore on an equal footing with other-worldly divine beings, angels, and a Christ who will return at the end of time. But does the postulate of its own infinity suppose an ‘eternity’ that is, in fact, essentially ‘finite’ in character? That this is actually the case is seen by Strauss in the popular saying ‘We shall see each other again’, a motif that, having occupied a strictly subordinate place in ecclesiastical eschatology, has now become the chief point of modern eschatology. However, Strauss is convinced that such a regression to finite modes of thinking can only be an interim solution, and he hails the work of F. Richter and L. Feuerbach as signalling the true meaning of the speculative principle for faith in immortality, namely, ‘the breaking open of the final sanctuary’ and the destruction of ‘the newest deity, the immortal I’.²⁹

Strauss reviews recent attempts to ground the doctrine in moral, teleological, metaphysical, and even speculative arguments. In these last, Strauss sees a final, vestigial effort to interpret death as the liberation of the isolated self for a life of genuine universality. Yet such attempts obscure what Strauss sees as the inexorable conclusion of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, that the idea of Absolute Spirit does not offer hope of survival to individuals but, instead, absolutely requires there to be an infinite succession of individuals in and through which Spirit gradually or progressively realizes its infinite potential.³⁰ One such speculative argument (which is similar to what process theology has called objective immortality) is that human subjects are preserved as such, i.e., in their subjectivity, in the mind of God, despite ceasing to be independent centres of consciousness. Strauss is not impressed. As he sees it, individuation is entirely a modification of the universal human qualities of consciousness, will, and freedom by the conditions of organic existence and the individual is thus inherently limited by the law-bound materiality that is the basis of this modification. What lives as individual must pass away. Citing Feuerbach, Strauss comments ‘You yourself, qua determinate person, are only the object of consciousness, not consciousness itself, and you will depart from consciousness just as you once entered it, and in your place a new, fresh personality will enter into the world of consciousness.’³¹ Nor does he yield anything to another ‘speculative’ view which argues that those who have in this life learned to identify their true selves with the interests of Spirit will pass over into eternal life, leaving the merely ‘animal’ remainder of humanity to perish. Strauss regards it as patently implausible that any degree of moral activity could bring about a transformation in the metaphysical definition of any being, nor could any single species have two such contrary attributes as mortality and immortality and remain a single species. Even where Christ's own word is invoked as a ground for hope in immortality, Strauss directs his reader back to Schleiermacher, who, he claims, allowed no other immortality to Christ himself than the latter's continuing influence in the life of the Church.³²

And what is the positive dialectical counter-movement to such a consistent rebuttal of all attempts to argue for individual immortality? It is ‘that immortality is not primarily to be conceived as something future, but as a present quality of Spirit, as its inner universality, the strength by which it raises itself above everything finite to the idea’.³³ That the names of great men live on ‘eternally’ is merely the reflex of the fact that in this life they were concerned with what had the here-and-now character of eternity. Once more teasingly citing Schleiermacher, Strauss concludes

If we now turn back to Kierkegaard, it is the points of difference that most immediately leap out. Was it not precisely the incapacity of speculative thought to engage with the question of personal immortality that was to provide him with the guiding thread for his critique of the system in Concluding Unscientific Postscript? Here, in the section ‘Becoming Subjective’, Kierkegaard opposes to the pretensions of ‘objective’ or ‘world-historical’ knowledge a series of issues and questions that become completely altered when shown in the prism of subjectivity. These include what it is to die and what it means to be immortal. With regard to this latter, he insists that it is simply not a matter for objective knowledge. It is a matter, as he puts it, in which ‘instruction must be dialectically qualified in relation to the learner's qualifications’ (SKS7, 158/CUP1, 171). Noting that ‘some have found immortality in Hegel; others have not’, he argues that even if the system does have a place for eternity, it is not eternity of the kind that really interests one who is eager to learn about immortality (SKS7, 158/CUP1, 171). The problem is not the difficulty of the question. Indeed, the problem really only comes to the fore as and when the question is made simple, a point which he acknowledges came to be recognized by P. M. Møller in a treatise on immortality (a treatise that has often been regarded as anticipating Kierkegaard's own attack on the system, not only in terms of content but also in terms of Møller's use of humorous episodes interspersed with philosophical argumentation). And what is the simple version of the question? It is this: ‘Do I become immortal or am I immortal?’ (SKS7, 163/CUP1, 173).

Once the question is regarded in this way, it becomes clear that the question concerning immortality is and has to be inextricably bound up with subjectivity. It is ‘the subjective individual's most passionate interest’ (SKS7, 161/CUP1, 174) on which the whole construction of his ethical life hangs and, as the preceding pages of ‘Becoming Subjective’ have told us, it is precisely the ethical that should be the absolute for the individual, as it is the ethical that keeps any purely ‘systematic’ or ‘world-historical’ approach in its place. To ask about immortality without asking it subjectively, without asking what it would mean for me, now, in the way I live my life, is to manifest absent-mindedness. And that, complains Kierkegaard, is what a philosophical – read ‘objective’, ‘systematic’, ‘world-historical’ – approach invariably does. Indeed, part of the task of learning rightly – subjectively – to live with the question of immortality is to learn how to keep a metaphysical approach at bay or how not to philosophize about it. Nor, it should quickly be added, is this concern with the question of immortality a quirk of the writings ascribed to the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. The theme of ‘the expectation of an eternal happiness’ is equally – if unsurprisingly – central to the whole programme of upbuilding discourses with which Kierkegaard accompanied the pseudonymous works.

In these terms, then, Strauss's approach would seem to exemplify everything against which Kierkegaard is directing his attack. And as in the case of Christology, the issue seems precisely to centre on the nature of the concrete individual person and speculative thought's presumed indifference or hostility towards such concrete personality.

Yet, once more it would be wrong to draw a simple line between a ‘positive’ Kierkegaardian ‘personalist’ faith and Straussian negation. For just as Kierkegaard's defence of the historical fact of the Incarnation went hand in glove with a denial of the importance of the historical details of the life of Jesus, so too his insistence on the centrality of the question concerning immortality is joined with a complete uninterest in reflecting on what the post-mortem condition of human beings might be or be like. In one of his Christian Discourses of 1848 he strongly distinguishes between a proper religious concern with eternal life and inappropriate speculations about the actual configuration of such a life. The discourse in question is entitled ‘The Resurrection is at Hand, for the Just – and for the Unjust’. Here Kierkegaard asserts the view that, for Christianity, the idea of resurrection (and, hence, of immortality) is inseparable from the idea of judgement. This means that any attempt to discuss ‘survival’ is totally irrelevant, since the only thing that should concern us is how we will fare in the judgement, whether we are here and now living our lives in such a way as to merit inclusion with the just – or not.

Kierkegaard, no less than Strauss, wants to talk about something quite different from the kind of consolatory talk about ‘meeting again’ in the beyond that churchgoers might have expected to hear from the representatives of established Christendom. Rather than the scholarly defence of the historicity of Christian claims, Kierkegaard is clear that the basic issue between himself and both right and left speculative theologians concerns the basic character of what it means to be a human self, both with regard to the self's relation to the world (reality in the broadest sense) and its religious relation to God.

Conclusion

In one of the few articles devoted to the relationship between Kierkegaard and Strauss, F. L. Jackson argues that they are both manifestations of ‘the new faith’ that emerged in the nineteenth century. This new faith was not the simple abandonment but rather the transformation of Christianity, and it expressed itself in two main forms. The first – of which Strauss is one of the main representatives – pins its colours to the mast of humanity, conceived ‘as the objective totality of human activity, the material-historical process in which all individuals seek collectively to overcome the limitedness of their natural particularity through participation in a common technological, economic and cultural-scientific enterprise’.³⁵ The other form – with Kierkegaard as its prototype – transposes ‘the concept of the spiritual to refer to particular human subjectivity; to the immediate inward relation to self and this-worldly inwardness of the existing, self-conscious individual . . .’³⁶ As Jackson goes on to claim, ‘For Kierkegaard no less than for humanist theologians, reality is self-consciousness and God is spoken of only by the way’³⁷ and ‘Jesus Christ is for Kierkegaard no less than for Strauss a mere archetype: in this case the archetype of “the individual in particular” who is “higher than the universal” . . .’³⁸

But this scarcely does justice to Kierkegaard's own insistence on the ultimate reference of theological statements – including statements about Christ – to God. The question, then, is how far Kierkegaard can plausibly be read as a thinker of immanence without needing to engage the question of God. Of course, Kierkegaard agreed with Schleiermacher and the speculative theologians that it was best not to burden the proclamation of Christ with elements of myth, miracle, and a naive supernaturalism that were peripheral to the real issues of religious belief. But can we really read Kierkegaard without raising the question of God? The human experience of what Schleiermacher called a feeling of absolute dependence provides a starting-point for everything Kierkegaard will say about the God-relationship (and his characteristic use of this striking expression – the ‘God-relationship’ – already indicates a certain affiliation to Idealism). But the need for making this relationship a central and defining moment of subjective life is further deepened by his analysis of the inherent split between essence and existence in human life and the deepening of that split to the point of its becoming sinful – sinful, because the individual is revealed to be its ground or cause. This, then, is the trajectory we shall follow in the succeeding chapters, beginning with the movement that led Kierkegaard to open out what he saw as the immanent thought-world of German Idealism in such a way as to suggest a notion of divine transcendence as both the consummation and the annihilation of philosophy.