Catholic Theology After Kierkegaard

CATHOLIC THEOL OGY AFTER KIERKEGAARD
Catholic Theology after

Kierkegaard
JOSHUA FURNAL
1
3
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To April, ti amo per sempre .. .
Acknowledgements
Gratefully, I have incurred a number of debts and gained a number

of friends along the way; some will inevitably go unmentioned, but
have nonetheless made this book possible. The germ of this book
began as an experimental essay written for Marcus Pound, who first
helped me to see the difference between an experiment and a
research proposal. If it wasn’t for his abiding assistance and
encouragement, this book would have never got off the ground in
the first place. I first came to Durham to work with Gerard
Loughlin, who has been generous with his time and whose
comments have been perceptive. A special thanks goes to Lewis
Ayres for his informal guidance, generous hospitality, and unfailing
support with sharpening my argument. I am also thankful for a
serendipitous meeting in Trieste that led to important friendships
with Rosa Goglia, Antonio Russo, Gianluca Trombini, and Elvio
Fontana, who all helped me get better acquainted with the person
and archives of Cornelio Fabro.
I would like to thank Cullen McKenney, Andrew Brower-Latz,
Thomas Lynch, Matt Crawford, and Jonathan Benatti, who all took
the time to help me revise earlier drafts. I’d like to thank especially Jeff
Byrnes, who first prodded me to pursue graduate studies and con-
tinues to be for me a constant inspiration, a source of wisdom, and a
friend. Also, I am grateful to Dan Watts, who graciously gave of his
time, and whose conversations instilled confidence in my reading of
Kierkegaard. I will always be grateful for the encouragement and
indelible insight that David Burrell has offered me over the years.
Also I am thankful for Susannah Heschel, who championed my
work at a vulnerable moment—I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Thanks also to Chris Insole and to George Pattison who were
gracious PhD examiners and who both encouraged me to publish
the book. Finally, I’d like to thank Tom Perridge and two
anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press for seeing this
through the revision process. The quality of this book has been
much improved through such assistance.
Non posso dimenticare la mia inspirazione spirituale e il sostegno
della fede: Marco e Lucilla, Carmen, Alberto e Ricardo, Jose Maria
Castillo, e Tony Currer. Devo ringraziare Dio, in questo sentiero di
viii Acknowledgements
speranza, per la vostra amicizia che ci fa sperimentare una comuni-
cazione di vita profonda, e che ci fa crescere nella gioia dello
Spirito Santo. ‘Hasta Siempre’! Finally, I dedicate this labour of
love to my beloved April, who accompanied me through this entire
journey and who is ever-patient—she never ceases to remind me that
with God, all things are possible.
Contents
Abbreviations xii
Introduction: Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard 1

Rationale of Book: Why Study the Catholic Reception
of Kierkegaard? 5
Distinctive Contributions 8
Chapter Outline 9
1. Towards a More Ecumenical Reading of Kierkegaard’s
Theological Anthropology 13
1.1. Obstacles to an Ecumenical Reading of Kierkegaard’s
Theological Anthropology 15
1.2. Re-examining the Lutheran Structure of Kierkegaard’s
Theological Anthropology in Works of Love 19
1.3. Re-examining the Compatibility of Kierkegaard’s
Theological Anthropology in Catholic Perspective 29
1.4. Kierkegaard’s Non-Historicist Approach to the
Christian Faith 44
1.4.1. The Paradox of Divine Teaching in
Kierkegaard’s Socratic Thought-Experiment 46
1.4.2. The Epochal Equidistance of Divine Revelation:
The Autopsy of Faith and Contemporaneity 58
1.5. Conclusion: Retrieving the Broader Catholicity
of Kierkegaard’s Theological Anthropology 64
2. The Wider Catholic Reception of Kierkegaard’s
Writings in the Twentieth Century 67
2.1. The Kierkegaard Renaissance in Europe 68
2.2. Theodor Haecker 73
2.3. Romano Guardini 78
2.4. Erich Przywara 83
2.5. Erik Peterson 86
2.6. Jean Daniélou 91
2.7. Yves Congar 92
2.8. James Collins 95
2.9. Louis Dupré 98
2.10. Conclusion: A Kierkegaardian Tradition
within Catholicism 102
x Contents
3. The Theologian of Inwardness: Kierkegaard and the
Complementary Theological Vision of Henri de Lubac 104
3.1. De Lubac’s Historical and Theological Context 105
3.2. Establishing de Lubac’s Dependence upon
Kierkegaard’s Writings 111
3.2.1. Kierkegaard in The Drama of Atheist
Humanism 112
3.2.2. Kierkegaard in Paradoxes of Faith 115
3.3. Kierkegaard in de Lubac’s Fundamental Theology 117
3.4. Kierkegaard in de Lubac’s Theology of Grace 126
3.5. Kierkegaard and the Real Presence of Christ in
the Eucharist 134
3.6. Conclusion: Reading de Lubac and Kierkegaard
Together 141
4. Monstrance or Monstrosity? A Kierkegaardian Critique
of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics 144
4.1. Assessing Balthasar’s Critique of Kierkegaard’s
View of Anxiety 145
4.2. Re-evaluating Balthasar’s Theology of Anxiety
as Distance from God 153
4.3. Balthasar’s Critique of Kierkegaard’s View of
Aesthetics 156
4.4. Re-evaluating Balthasar’s Theology of Beauty as
the Distance between the Creation and Creator 159
4.5. Identifying the Christological Malfunction in
Balthasar’s Theology 168
4.6. Conclusion: Reading Kierkegaard Closer to Balthasar 175
5. Doing Theology with Cornelio Fabro: Kierkegaard,
Mary, and the Church 181
5.1. Fabro’s Context: The Leonine Revival and Modern
Atheism 182
5.2. Uncovering Kierkegaard 188
5.3. A Bridge between Two Worlds 192
5.4. Kierkegaard’s Mariology 198
5.5. The Ecclesiology of Newman and Kierkegaard 204
5.6. Concluding Remarks 210
Contents xi
Conclusion: Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard 214
Expanding Ressourcement 215
Kierkegaard (Still) Matters 217
Bibliography 221
Index 251
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations for Kierkegaard’s works are used in parenthet-

ical references throughout the main text:
CA Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple
Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of
Hereditary Sin, Kierkegaard’s Writings VIII, ed. Reidar
Thomte and Albert Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980).
CUP Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to
Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard’s Writings I, ed. and trans.
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992).
DCF Søren Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays,
Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion, trans. Sylvia
Walsh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
EUD Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses,
Kierkegaard’s Writings V, ed. and trans. Howard V.
Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton
EO Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, Kierkegaard’s
Writings III, ed. Lillian Marvin Swenson, trans. W. Lowrie
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944).
FSE Søren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination / Judge for Yourself!,
Kierkegaard’s Writings XXI, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990).
FT Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, Kierkegaard’s
Writings VI, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
JP Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, vol. 1, 1967; vol. 2, 1970;
vols. 3–4, 1975; vols. 5–7, 1978).
KRSRR Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon
Stewart (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005–14).
NB Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks (KJN), 11 vols., ed. Niels
Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H.
Kirmmse, George Pattison, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa
Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2007–).
Abbreviations xiii
Pap(irer) Søren Kierkegaard’s Papirer (SKP), 2nd enlarged edition by Niels
Thulstrup, with index, vols. 14–16 by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn
(Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78).
PC Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard’s
Writings XX, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
PF Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of
Philosophy/Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est,
Kierkegaard’s Writings VII, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
1985).
SKS Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim
Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, and Alastair McKinnon
(Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret, Copenhagen: Gads
Forlag, 1997–).
SUD Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian
Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening,
Kierkegaard’s Writings XIX, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
1983).
UDVS Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits,
Kierkegaard’s Writings XV, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
2009).
WA Søren Kierkegaard, Without Authority, Kierkegaard’s
Writings XVIII, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
WL Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s Writings XVI,
ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998).
In my research for this book I have referred to NB (Kierkegaard’s
Journals and Notebooks). Where this translation is not available, I have
cited the source by JP volume and entry, along with an accompanying
reference to Pap. (Søren Kierkegaard’s Papirer).
The following abbreviations for Aquinas’ works are used in parenthetical
references throughout the main text:
SCG Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, ed. Joseph
Kenny (New York: Hanover House, 1955–7).
ST I/II/III Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Latin Text and English
Translation, Introductions, Notes, Appendices, and Glossaries, ed.
Thomas Gilby [and others] (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1966).
The following abbreviations for de Lubac’s works are used in parenthetical
AH Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998).
xiv Abbreviations
C Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny
of Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988).
DG Henri de Lubac, The Discovery of God, Ressourcement: Retrieval
and Renewal in Catholic Thought Series (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1996).
MS Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural (New
York: Crossroad, 1998).
The following abbreviation for Luther’s works is used in parenthetical
AE Jaroslav Pelikan, H. J. Grimm, and Helmut T. Lehmann, eds.,
Luther’s Works, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–86).
The following abbreviations for von Balthasar’s works are used in paren-
thetical references throughout the main text:
DCA Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety (San
ET Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Word Made Flesh, Explorations
in Theology, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989).
GL 1 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, The Glory of the
Lord, vol. 1, ed. J. Fessio and J. K. Riches (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1982).
GL 4 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Realm of Metaphysics in
Antiquity, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 4, trans. Brian McNeil,
CRV, Andrew Louth, John Saward, Rowan Williams, and
Oliver Davies (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989).
Abbreviations for other cited works used in parenthetical references
throughout the main text are as follows:
CASK Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, 1st edn.
(Macon: Mercer University Press, 2008).
CC Daphne Hampson, Christian Contradictions: The Structures
of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
ESV The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Text
Edition (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011).
HG Encyclical Humani Generis of the Holy Father Pius XII,
12 August 1950 (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana),
http://w2.
vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-
xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html.
IO Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
Abbreviatio x
KAR George Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious:
From the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image (London:
Macmillan, 1992).
KEC Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition & Critique (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013).
KT Louis Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian (London: Sheed &
Ward, 1963).
KTL Amy Laura Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love,
Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought 9
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
MK James D. Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton
NJB New Jerusalem Bible, ed. the Very Revd Henry
Wansbrough (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985).
P Romano Guardini, Pascal (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1992).
PR Romano Guardini, Pensatori Religiosi, 2nd edn. (Brescia:
Morcelliana, 2001).
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be
called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the
world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved,
we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been
revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we
will be like him, for we will see him as he is.
1 John 3:1–2
As Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ix), when Holy Writ declares

that nothing is like God, it does not mean to deny all likeness
to Him. For, ‘the same things can be like and unlike to God:
like, according as they imitate Him, as far as He, Who is not
perfectly imitable, can be imitated; unlike according as they
fall short of their cause’, not merely in intensity and remission,
as that which is less white falls short of that which is more
white; but because they are not in agreement, specifically or
generically.
St Tommaso d’Aquino (ST I q. 4 a. 4 ad 1)
Just as the ocean, when it lies still this way, deeply

transparent, aspires to heaven, so the pure heart, when it is
still, deeply transparent, aspires solely to the good; or just as
the ocean becomes pure when it aspires only to heaven, so the
heart becomes pure when it aspires only to the good . . . If the
least thing comes between them, between the sky and the
ocean, between the heart and the good, indeed, even if it was
impatience in desiring the reflection, then the ocean is not
pure, then it does not purely reflect the sky.
Søren Kierkegaard (UDVS 121)
Introduction
Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard
According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Søren Kierkegaard

‘was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard
was a saint.’1 Moreover, upon receiving a letter announcing that one
of his former students had converted to Catholicism, Wittgenstein
wondered whether he had been partly responsible for the conversion
by having this student read Søren Kierkegaard.2 At first glance, this
might seem like a strange reaction to such news. Upon further
examination, however, Wittgenstein’s odd response is fitting. In this
book, I argue that although he is not always recognized as such, Søren
Kierkegaard was an important ally for Catholic theologians in the
early twentieth century leading up to the reform and renewal of the
Second Vatican Council. Indeed, properly understanding this rela-
tionship and its origins offers valuable resources and insights into
contemporary Catholic theology.
Of course, there are some negative preconceptions to overcome.
Historically, some Catholic readers have been suspicious of Kier-
kegaard, viewing him as an irrational Protestant irreconcilably at
odds with Catholic thought. Nevertheless, the favourable mention
of Kierkegaard in St John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio (n. 76)
is an indication that Kierkegaard’s writings are not so easily
dismissed. Most philosophers baulk at the claim that had Søren
Kierkegaard
1
Rush Rhees, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Oxford: Blackwell,
1981), 102.
2
Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Cape, 1990),
463–4.
2 Catholic Theology after
lived longer, he would have become a Roman Catholic. 3 Such wild
speculation has become synonymous for what is conventionally under-
stood as the Catholic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s work.4 And yet
during the twentieth century, Kierkegaard’s critique of the
established state church was decisive for some scholars in their
conversion to Roman Catholicism.5 It is well established that
although Kierkegaard had studied theology, his experience of
Roman Catholicism was limited—not to mention his knowledge of
St Thomas Aquinas.6 How- ever, this did not deter Catholic readers
from receiving Kierkegaard’s writings as a resource for grasping the
broader catholicity of their own tradition.
To be clear, this book does not seek to rehearse the threadbare debate
of whether Kierkegaard himself was actually a Protestant or
Catholic. Instead, I want to highlight the significance and the extent
to which Kierkegaard’s writings have been disseminated and
appropriated by Catholic thinkers. Throughout the twentieth
century, a small but representative body of work sporadically
appears that attests to the importance of Kierkegaard’s writings for
Catholic theology.7 On the
3
Not long after Kierkegaard’s death, Danish scholars began to speculate whether if
he had lived longer, he would have become Roman Catholic. See Georg Brandes,
Sören Kierkegaard: Ein Literarisches Charakterbild (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1879), 239.
‘Durch ihn ward das dänische Geistesleben zu jenem äußersten Punkte hingedrängt,
von wo ein Sprung geschehen muß, ein Sprung in den schwarzen Abgrund des
Katholizismus hinab, oder hinüber auf die Landspitze, von welcher die Freiheit
winkt.’ Later on, Høffding says that Kierkegaard had a ‘Sympathie mit dem
Katholi- zismus’, Harald Høffding and Christoph Schrempf, Sören Kierkegaard als
Philosoph (Stuttgart: Frommanns, 1896), 169. See the extensive treatment of
Brandes and Høffding in Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early
Impact and Transmission of His Thought (Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 1997), 228–82, 319–31.
4
For instance, the most cited account endorsing this perspective is Heinrich
Roos, Søren Kierkegaard and Catholicism, ed. Richard M. Brackett (Westminster,
MD: Newman Press, 1954).
5
Roos, Søren Kierkegaard and Catholicism, ix–xiii. For more on conversion, see
Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, especially 130–1, 288, 371–92, 386–7, 396.
6
George L. Stengren, ‘Thomism’, in Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová
Thulstrup (eds), Kierkegaard and Great Traditions, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana
6 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1981), 111. However, in his Journals Kierkegaard
does seem to be somewhat familiar with Johann Adam Möhler; see Papirer I A
37–8; II A 304; II C 29–31/SKS, Papir 59–60; DD: 178; KK: 5. Regarding
Catholicism, see Papirer I A 38; II A 265/SKS, Papir 60; DD: 132, 157, 162,
166; NB 14:41.
7
For an overview of French theological scholarship, see François Bousquet,
‘Kierkegaard dans la tradition théologique francophone’, in Kierkegaard Revisited,
Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 339–66. See
Introduction: Catholic Theology after 3
face of it, the small number would suggest that this topic in Catholic
theology is quite marginal, and even more so when considered in
relation to the wider concerns of Kierkegaard studies. However, this
book argues that Kierkegaard’s reception by Catholic thinkers was
nurtured in a wider context of reform and renewal in Catholic theology
leading up to the Second Vatican Council (1962–5).
But since there are stereotypes about Kierkegaard that resist a
‘Catholic’ reading of his writings, the central aim of this book is to
provide an account of the wider Catholic reception of Kierkegaard,
illuminating in particular the relevance of his writings for the ressour-
cement movement. By ‘ressourcement’, I have in mind the
emphasis on returning to patristic and biblical texts as a resource for
the reform and renewal of Roman Catholic theology, which was
first contested after the modernist crisis,8 but then later endorsed in
the decrees of the Second Vatican Council.9 During this time, this
emphasis was pejoratively referred to as ‘la nouvelle théologie’ by
critics.10 I have in mind a non-exhaustive list of Catholic
theologians associated with
also, Margaret Teboul, ‘La Réception de Kierkegaard en France 1930–1960’, Revue des
sciences philosophiques et théologiques 89 (2005), 315–36. For Kierkegaard’s reception
in German Catholic theology, see Adolf Darlap, ‘Die Rezeption S. Kierkegaards in der
katholischen Theologie’, in Heinrich Anz, Poul Lübcke, and Friedrich Schmöe
(eds), Die Rezeption Søren Kierkegaards in der deutschen und dänischen
Philosophie und Theologie. Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 22. und 23. März 1982 [Text
und Kontext, 15] (Munich: 1983), 225–38.
8
For more on the modernist crisis in Roman Catholicism, see Hubert Wolf (ed.),
Antimodernismus und Modernismus in der katholischen Kirche: Beiträge zum theolo-
giegeschichtlichen Vorfeld des II. Vatikanums, Programm und Wirkungsgeschichte des
II. Vatikanums Bd. 2 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1998). Also see, Darrell
Jodock, Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and
Anti-Modernism in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000).
9
For more on the historical and theological background of this seismic develop-
ment in Catholic theology, see Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray, Ressourcement:
A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012). Massimo Faggioli, True Reform: Liturgy and Ecclesiology in
Sacrosanctum Concilium (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2012). Jürgen Mettepennin-
gen, Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican
II (London: T&T Clark, 2010). Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and
Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to
Nuptial Mysticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Brian Daley, ‘The Nouvelle Theologie
and the Patristic Revival: Sources, Symbols and the Science of Theology’,
International Journal of Systematic Theology 7, no. 4 (2005), 363–82.
10
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, ‘La nouvelle théologie où va-t-elle?’, Angelicum
23 (1946), 126–45.
Jean Daniélou, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Edward
Schillebeeckx, Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan,
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Hans Küng, Karol Wojtyla, and Joseph
Ratzinger.
Rather than endorsing an anti-modernist retreat from history as
that which contaminates purely dogmatic statements, ressourcement
theologians embraced history as a theological category. At its root,
ressourcement theology shares a basic aim with Kierkegaard’s theo-
logical vision: ‘the historical is the occasion [for our eternal
blessedness], and yet is also the object of faith’.11 Yet as Brian
Daley has observed, this fundamental conviction led ressourcement
theologians to recover not only ‘a more social, more culturally
inclusive understanding of the reality of the church’, but also it led
them to recover ‘the patristic practice of spiritual or figural
exegesis, derived from Israel’s habit of continually reinterpreting its
own history and historical documents in the light of its present
religious experience of God as active in history’.12
The aim of this book is to invite both readers of Catholic
theology and readers of Kierkegaard to a mutually beneficial
dialogue about the signature ideas and themes of Kierkegaard. To
initiate this dialogue, I identify some of Kierkegaard’s signature
themes and ideas that are at work in the Catholic reception of his
writings, and I suggest that these ideas and themes are beneficial to
both groups. As a result, the reader’s conventional understanding of
the nature of ressourcement is broadened from being the sole
proprietorship of patristic scholars, to include engagement with
more modern thinkers like Søren Kier- kegaard. The argumentative
strategy in this book is to clarify two issues that should help the
reader gain a better sense of what is at stake. First, I re-examine an
enduring stereotype about Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology
that has been shared by Catholic thinkers and Kierkegaard scholars
alike, and has prevented more ecumenical readings of Kierkegaard’s
writings. Caricatures of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology
have prevented scholars from appreciating, not only the broader
catholicity of Kierkegaard’s ressourcement of the Christian
tradition, but also Kierkegaard’s influence upon important Catholic
thinkers in the twentieth century. Second, I briefly sketch a
historical account of some important events and thinkers that
11
Kierkegaard, Journal (NB 15:75). 12
Daley, ‘The Nouvelle Théologie’, 376.
provides a backdrop for the reader to better understand how the
Catholic reception of Kierkegaard’s writings carried on in the early
twentieth century despite negative stereotypes about him.
The desired outcome of this book can be expressed in a modest
threefold proposal: i) In light of the theological reflection on
Kierkegaard’s writings, and the tradition of Catholic reception
offered here, a new centre of gravity will be identified regarding a
more ecumenical approach to Kierkegaard, and the deeper cathol-
icity of the Lutheran structure of his thought will be uncovered;
ii) This new centre of gravity bears upon the Catholic reception
history of Kierkegaard’s writings by challenging conventional pre-
conceptions about the fruitfulness of Kierkegaard’s writings for
Catholic theology in general, as well as uncovering a
Kierkegaardian strand latent in Catholicism with ressourcement
theologians in particular; iii) In light of a new ecumenical approach
to Kierkegaard and its embodiment in the writings of ressourcement
theologians, contemporary Catholic theologians laying claim to the
legacy of ressourcement theologians should read Kierkegaard’s
writings as a theological resource, especially in the areas of
theological anthropology, theological aesthetics, and philosophical
theology. In this way, the nature and scope of ressourcement could
be expanded to include, not just patristic or medieval resources for
contemporary Catholic theology, but also more modern sources as
well.
RATIONALE OF BOOK: WHY STUDY THE

CATHOLIC RECEPTION OF KIERKEGAARD?
In the vast secondary literature on twentieth-century Catholic the-

ology, a nuanced account of the reception of Kierkegaard is notably
absent. Long-standing robust accounts of the influence of Heidegger,13
13
A notable example would be the works of Jean-Luc Marion and Louis-Marie
Chauvet. For more on Marion, see Lorenz B. Puntel and Alan White, Being and
God: A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel
Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011).
For more on Chauvet, see Hal St John, The Call of the Holy: Heidegger—Chauvet
—Benedict XVI, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons, T&T Clark
Studies in Fun- damental Liturgy (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012).
Glenn P. Ambrose,
Nietzsche, and Marx15 make the neglect of Kierkegaard even more
14
striking. Hence, this book provides a new perspective on Catholic

theology in general, and in particular, recent literature on ressource-
ment, which is noticeably silent on the influence of Kierkegaard’s
writings.16 Prior to this book, only a few explicit attempts have been
made in Kierkegaard studies to address Kierkegaard’s relation to,
and influence upon Catholic theology. However, there is an emerging
trend in recent Kierkegaard research that provides—or at least,
provides some of the groundwork for—a positive ecumenical
approach to Kierkegaard’s writings and spirituality.17
The Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet: Overcoming Onto-Theology with the Sacra-

mental Tradition (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). For more on Heidegger’s relation to
neo-scholasticism, see Peter S. Dillard, Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology:
A Neo-Scholastic Critique (London: Continuum, 2008). See also, Laurence Paul
Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). For Heidegger’s theological inheritance,
see George Pattison, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2013a). Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in
Martin Hei- degger’s Early Work, Oxford Theology & Religion Monographs
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Benjamin D. Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious
Origins: Destruc- tion and Authenticity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006).
14
Most Catholic thinkers engaging in discussions about Nietzsche today,
confront the following secular/radical theology trajectories exemplified in the following
works: Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010). John D. Caputo, Gianni Vattimo, and Jeffrey W.
Robbins, After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Lissa
McCullough and Brian Schroeder, Thinking through the Death of God: A Critical
Companion to Thomas J.J. Altizer (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2004). David Deane, Nietzsche and Theology: Nietzschean Thought in Christological
Anthropology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Bruce Ellis Benson, Pious Nietzsche:
Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). It is
significant that Nietzsche appears as an interlocutor in Pope Francis’ encyclical
Lumen Fidei §2.
15
Some trajectories include, but are not limited to the following works: Bruno
Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in
Times of Terror (London: Verso, 2012). Christopher Rowland (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Liberation Theology, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007). Marcella Althaus-Reid, Ivan Petrella, and Luiz Carlos Susin, Another
Possible World (London: SCM Press, 2007).
16
For instance, Kierkegaard is only mentioned twice in Flynn and Murray,
Ressourcement, 273–5. Only once in Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie, 4. And for all
the discussion of paradox, there is no mention of Kierkegaard in the first edition of
John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri De Lubac and the Debate Concerning
the Supernatural (London: SCM Press, 2005). Responding to critics in the second
edition, Milbank alludes to paradox in Cusanus, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and De
Lubac as a linchpin issue in dogmatic theology (29, n. 22).
17
For instance, see Joshua Furnal, ‘Toward a “Catholic” Reading of Kierkegaard’,
Reviews in Religion & Theology 21, no. 4 (2014), 435–43. See also, Gregory R. Beabout,
Nevertheless, the first explicit attempt is by the Italian Archbishop of
Chieti, Bruno Forte (b. 1949) with his short book Fare Teologia
dopo Kierkegaard.18 Forte’s book is geared toward a popular
audience and gives a brief thematic reflection upon Kierkegaard’s
signature concepts like the infinite qualitative difference between
God and humanity, the singularity of truth and the individual, and
even paradox and contemporaneity. Forte’s reflections include
quotations from Kierkegaard to introduce the reader to some
theological aspects of Kierkegaard’s writings. My contribution in
this book could be read as fleshing out some of these key themes in a
deeper, more engaged fashion with those figures who are an important
influence on Archbishop Forte.
A second explicit attempt is made by Jack Mulder’s Kierkegaard
and the Catholic Tradition, which comes in the form of a hypothetical
encounter that identifies potential dogmatic conflicts if
Kierkegaard’s writings were to be taken seriously by Catholics today.19
Mulder’s book creatively envisions potential Kierkegaardian
responses to dogmatic topics like purgatory and the salvation of
non-Christians, but fails to illuminate the actual Kierkegaardian
tradition already within Catholicism.
An important collection of essays edited by Jon Stewart entitled
Kierkegaard’s Influence on Catholic and Jewish Theology, is a third
explicit attempt that indexes the actual engagement of Kierkegaard by
some prominent Catholic and Jewish thinkers. 20 Whilst Stewart’s
volume brings legitimacy to my enquiry from within Kierkegaard
studies, it overlooks the massive contribution of Cornelio Fabro and
six (of the eight) additional Catholic thinkers that will be considered
in this book.21 Although this book is slimmer than Stewart’s
volume,
‘Kierkegaard Amidst the Catholic Tradition’, American Catholic Philosophical

Quar- terly 87, no. 3 (2013), 521–40.
18
Bruno Forte, Fare Teologia dopo Kierkegaard, Il Pellicano Rosso (Brescia:
Morcelliana, 1997).
19
Jack Mulder, Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition: Conflict and Dialogue
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
20
Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish
Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 10, tome
3 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012).
21
One notable exception is Ingrid Basso, ‘The Italian Reception of Kierkegaard’s
Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, in N. J. Capplehørn and H. Deuser (eds),
Kierke- gaard Studies Yearbook 2005 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005). See also,
Ingrid Basso, ‘Italy: From a Literary Curiosity to a Philosophical Comprehension’,
in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Southern, Central, and
Eastern Europe (KRSRR 8:2) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 81–151.
it provides more historical background that helps the reader better
understand how ressourcement theologians overcame (or set aside)
any alleged dogmatic conflicts that they found in Kierkegaard’s
writings. In the end, the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard’s writ-
ings was not antagonistic, but rather it was situated in the wider
development and renewal of Catholic theology in the twentieth
century.
DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS
As an essential supplement to Kierkegaard studies and recent lit-

erature on ressourcement in Catholic theology, this book critically
situates the relevance of Kierkegaard’s writings in the story of
reform and renewal in twentieth-century Catholic theology prior
to the Second Vatican Council. Specifically, this book provides an
original contribution to recent scholarship by: i) bringing together
Kierkegaard studies and Catholic theology in a mutually inform-
ative way to offer an account of the Catholic reception of Kierke-
gaard’s writings; ii) investigating a distinctive Protestant influence
on a Catholic renewal movement before the Second Vatican Coun-
cil, to illuminate a shared theological heritage between denomin-
ations as a new ecumenical resource; iii) highlighting theological
themes in Kierkegaard’s writings that have not been adequately
integrated with Catholic theology: his Mariology, his conception
of anxiety, and his portrayal of a natural desire for the supernatural;
iv) engaging with a range of writings from representative Catholic
thinkers during the twentieth century like Henri de Lubac and Hans
Urs von Balthasar, to provide a fresh perspective upon Kierke-
gaard’s writings that seeks to overturn common misconceptions;
v) for the first time in English, highlighting Cornelio Fabro as a key
figure in what has been heretofore an impoverished account of the
vibrant Kierkegaardian tradition within Catholicism; and vi) reach-
ing a new conclusion that Kierkegaard’s writings have stimulated
reform and renewal in Catholic theology, and should continue to do
so today. As a result, this book offers a more constructive and
representative account of Catholic engagement with Kierkegaard’s
thought in the twentieth century, showing what Kierkegaard’s
writings do for Catholic theology, and what conclusions they
pushed Catholic theologians to draw.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Ressourcement theologians working in a post-Tridentine context

gravitated toward Kierkegaard because his writings offered a
critique of a form of Christianity that Stephen Mulhall describes as
having ‘a form of amnesia about its own concepts, a failure to
remember and enact the true significance of the Christian form of
life’.22 For these Catholic thinkers, Kierkegaard’s writings became
attractive not least since they deployed ‘a curative strategy—
presenting reminders of the grammar of those concepts through
narratives of lives in which they are either embodied or tellingly
absent’—that in turn supplied ressourcement theologians with a
crucial strategy for their own project in modernity.23 In particular,
Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology was a welcome resource for
ressourcement theologians writing in an era when ‘philosophy
cannot say sin’. Yet, these theologians found in Kierkegaard the
shared common ground of a scriptural theological heritage:
Kierkegaard alerted them to the importance of a renewed emphasis
upon human subjectivity in the interpretation of Scripture and a
theology of history. In this light then, some important Catholic
thinkers saw Kierkegaard as a fellow pilgrim in the modern age
who was engaged in a similar task of ressourcement. It has been
only recently that some Kierkegaard scholars have begun to take
note of the way Kierkegaard thinks with the broader Christian
tradition at a profound level, and this book offers a historical
instance when Catholic thinkers were engaged in this cross-
fertilization, and were being formed by this exchange in return.
So, this book investigates the writings of emblematic Catholic
thinkers in the twentieth century to assess their substantial engage-
ment with Kierkegaard’s writings. I argue that Kierkegaard’s
writings have stimulated reform and renewal in twentieth-century
Catholic theology, and should continue to do so today. To
corroborate my
22
Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994b), 287.
23
Ibid.
argument, some exegetical, historical, and theological work needs
to be done. I have set out to do this by dividing the book into two parts:
in the first half, I focus on excavating the broader catholicity of the
Lutheran structure of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, and
surveying important moments in the Catholic reception of Kierke-
gaard’s writings in German, French, Italian, and English. In part
two, I focus on three representative figures in Catholic theology that
put Kierkegaard’s thought to work across the domains of
theological anthropology, theological aesthetics, and philosophical
theology. One of the common threads that keeps resurfacing
throughout this book is how the basic aim of ‘returning to the
sources’ in Catholic theology, and Kierkegaard’s paradoxical
presentation of the Christian faith and divine revelation as equidistant
to every epoch, begin to shed light on a new ecumenical approach to
Kierkegaard’s writings that is mutually beneficial for both
Kierkegaard studies and Catholic theology.
In the first chapter, I re-examine one of the most common stereo-
types about Kierkegaard for both Kierkegaard scholars and Catholic
theologians alike: that the theological anthropology of
Kierkegaard’s writings simply reiterates Martin Luther’s theology.
After assessing the validity of this stereotype and arguing for the
broader catholicity of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, a new
possibility opens up for more ecumenical readings of Kierkegaard’s
theology, and Kierke- gaard’s theological anthropology becomes,
not an obstacle, but rather a point of contact for readers of Catholic
theology and readers of Kierkegaard.
In the second chapter, I build upon the exegetical work of the
previous chapter to survey Kierkegaard’s relevance in pre-conciliar
Catholic theology by examining a number of Catholic thinkers
with a reform agenda, paying close attention to their emphases
and responses to Kierkegaard. During the early twentieth century,
Catholic thinkers attempted to rearticulate their faith for a modern
audience, not by separating historical and dogmatic claims,
but rather by showing how such claims are intertwined. I set
this historical backdrop by investigating the wider Catholic recep-
tion of Kierkegaard during the early twentieth century. Specific-
ally, I look at influential figures like Theodor Haecker, Romano
Guardini, Erich Przywara, and other Roman Catholic thinkers
typically associated with the generation preceding the ressource-
ment movement, as well as those theologians who brought about
its advent. Here I sketch the level of awareness that each of
these thinkers had of Kierkegaard’s writings at this time, and the
debates that ensued in light of this engagement. An entire book
could be written on any one of the figures treated in this chapter,
and space does not permit an exhaustive index of Catholic
engagement with Kierkegaard in Europe. However, this
representative historical sketch suggests that Kierkegaard’s writings
shared important concerns with Catholic thinkers working for
reform and renewal in the church, and shows how these thinkers put
Kierkegaard’s writings to work for that renewal of the Judeo-
Christian faith in the modern age.
After setting the exegetical and historical backdrop for a better
understanding of the Catholic inheritance of Kierkegaard’s theo-
logical anthropology, and his subsequent impact upon emblematic
Catholic thinkers in the twentieth century, I highlight how this
Catholic reception of Kierkegaard gets developed by ressourcement
theologians in unique ways. I have chosen to focus upon the
writings of Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Italian
Thomist, Cornelio Fabro. I select these three Catholic thinkers in
particular for two reasons: i) because of their importance for
debates across theological anthropology, theological aesthetics,
and philosophical theology in contemporary Catholic theology,
and ii) for their substantial engagement with Kierkegaard, which
provides a watershed moment in the Catholic engagement of
Kierkegaard’s writings in Europe.
In chapter 3, I argue that Henri de Lubac’s theology does not
represent a departure from Kierkegaard’s theological vision, but
rather that the writings of both complement one another in import-
ant ways. Indeed, one could argue that de Lubac is distinctively
shaped by Kierkegaard’s writings, and by looking closer at the
Kier- kegaardian aspects of Henri de Lubac’s theology, a new
insight into the basic aims of ressourcement can be gained. So as
not to leave the reader with a unidirectional analysis, I will interpret
Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the real presence of Christ in the
Eucharist in such a way that illustrates this compatibility with de
Lubac’s sacramental theology. My argument is that de Lubac and
Kierkegaard offer complementary, rather than contradictory
theological visions. Indeed, de Lubac is one central ressourcement
figure who puts Kierkegaard’s writings to work in his fundamental
theology and his theology of grace in a unique way that develops
the previous generation of the Kierkegaardian tradition in
Catholicism. I will conclude by suggesting that through such a
comparative analysis, a new perspective on the Catholic receptivity
of Protestant theological concerns before the
Second Vatican Council is illuminated. Rather than construing re-
ssourcement as a purely patristic enterprise, de Lubac’s engagement
with Kierkegaard shows how the scope of ressourcement can be
extended to include engagement with modern thought.
In chapter 4, I examine the writings of de Lubac’s protégé,
Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), to re-evaluate Balthasar’s
critique of Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety and aesthetics. My
argument is that there is a particular Christological problem in
Balthasar’s thematization of ‘distance’ in his theology of
anxiety and aesthetics, which could be better addressed if
Balthasar attended to Kierkegaard’s dialectical view of anxiety
and aesthetics. Alternatively, I suggest that instead of using
Kierkegaard as a Protestant foil, Kierkegaard’s Christology works
as a salutary corrective to Balthasar’s theological project.
Moreover, readers of Balthasar and Kierkegaard should find that
they share more compatible goals than is commonly recognized. In
chapter 5, I survey the constructive theological features of the
underexplored writings of the Italian Thomist, Cornelio Fabro
(1911–1995). I set the stage of Fabro’s historical context to suggest
that Fabro’s loyalty to the Thomist revival after Aeterni Patris
should not be interpreted as mutually exclusive with his desire to
negotiate the claims of the modern world. Instead, I focus on
Fabro’s recovery of Kierkegaard’s writings as a way into
understanding Fabro’s wider project of renewal in Catholic theology
in the modern age. Specifically, I draw upon Fabro’s treatment of
Kierkegaard’s Mariology and ecclesiology as two counter-
intuitive examples of Catholic theological renewal. Fabro draws
heavily upon Kierkegaard’s account of freedom and attempts to
provide concrete examples of Kierkegaard’s high regard for Mary
and his critique of Christendom in ways that parallel John Henry
Newman, and makes Kierkegaard more palatable to Cath- olic readers.
In this chapter, the reader will gain a better sense of Fabro’s lifelong
engagement with Kierkegaard. Fabro learned Danish and
translated Kierkegaard’s writings and journals into Italian to
overturn a common perception of Kierkegaard as merely a precursor to
atheistic existentialism. As a Thomist, Fabro is sensitive to the
Platonic and Aristotelian resonances in Kierkegaard’s writings.
By selecting de Lubac, Balthasar, and Fabro, my aim is not merely
to narrate a history of Catholic engagement with Kierkegaard, but
also to provide a range of representative entry points for
Kierkegaard’s writings to continue to stimulate reform and renewal in
Catholic theology today in the shadow
and spirit of the ressourcement movement.
1
Towards a More Ecumenical Reading

of Kierkegaard’s Theological
Anthropology
Kierkegaardian interiority is fundamentally Catholic.

Cornelio Fabro1
Before diving straight into the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard

and the specific ressourcement theologians who engaged with his
writings, it is necessary that a common stereotype about
Kierkegaard be re- examined. A preliminary note is required
regarding the compatibility of a ‘Catholic’ theological anthropology
and Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology for two reasons: i) some
scholars have portrayed Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology in
an exclusively Protestant fashion, which implies that one should
expect a theological impasse with ressourcement theologians; ii) one
of the desired outcomes of this book is to invite contemporary
Catholic theologians drawing on ressourcement theology to draw
upon the theology of Kierkegaard. If this outcome is to be achieved,
then there needs to be a ‘point of contact’ for such dialogue to take
place regarding the signature themes, topics, or ideas that are shared
between ressourcement theologians and Kierkegaard. My aim in this
chapter is to provide some of the important theological and
exegetical groundwork for this point of contact.
The common stereotype that I have in mind is the typical attitude
towards or caricature of Kierkegaard that sees him as a despairing
1
S. Kierkegaard and Cornelio Fabro, Diario, 2nd edn., vol. 1 (Brescia: Morcelliana,
1962), 95. Translation mine. By making such a claim, Fabro indicates that he is
critiquing an observation made by Emanuel Hirsch, who claimed that there was an
irreconcilable incompatibility between Kierkegaard and Catholicism. See Emanuel
Hirsch, Kierkegaard-Studien, vol. 2 (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1933), 808ff.
individual whose anthropology exhibits an exclusively Lutheran
structure which can be detached from any historical, metaphysical,
or epistemological commitments beholden to the Christian faith
(§1.1). Not only does this stereotype invite other clichés about Kier-
kegaard, but it also neglects the broader catholicity of
Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology that buttressed his writings.
This chapter is divided into two parts: the first part seeks to open
up the possibility of an ecumenical reading of Kierkegaard, and the
second part offers a more ‘Catholic’ approach to Kierkegaard’s
theological anthropology. In the first part of this chapter, I want to
provide a critical-constructive account of the broader catholicity of
the Lutheran structure of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology in
Works of Love, and uncover the spirituality latent in his theology of
creation and redemption in The Sickness unto Death and Upbuilding
Discourses to overturn a common stereotype (§1.2–1.3). My claim
is that the Lutheran structure of Kierkegaard’s theology invites,
rather than precludes ecumenical readings of Kierkegaard’s
writings. More- over, the coherence of Kierkegaard’s theology of
creation and redemption reveals a mystical character that shares an
important heritage with Catholic thinkers.
In the second part of this chapter, I want to highlight the
ecumenical promise of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology that
would have been attractive to ressourcement theologians:
Kierkegaard’s non- historicist emphasis on divine revelation as
equidistant to every epoch, and the overlap of Kierkegaard’s
theological anthropology with the theology of Thomas Aquinas. In
this chapter, I read these shared ressourcement aims back into
Kierkegaard’s non-Socratic reintegration of faith and history in his
account of divine pedagogy in Philosophical Fragments and
Concluding Unscientific Postscript (§1.4). As an alternative to a
non-ecumenical and historicist reading of Kierkegaard, I offer a
more ecumenical reading of Kierkegaard’s theological
anthropology. In light of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology
and his theology of creation and redemption, a path is cleared for a
more ecumenical reading of Kierkegaard, and the contours of
Kierkegaard’s theology lay the groundwork for how our understanding
of ressourcement can be expanded. In this book, my overall argument is
that ressourcement theologians in the twentieth century did not
allow negative preconceptions of Kierkegaard’s theological
anthropology to stop them from appropriating some of his signature
ideas in their own writings. Indeed, like the ressourcement
theologians, both Catholic
Kierkegaard’s Theological 1
theologians and Kierkegaard scholars today should also discover
the ecumenical promise in Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology.
1.1. OBSTACLES TO AN ECUMENICAL READING

OF KIERKEGAARD’S THEOLOGICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
If a dialogue between the theological anthropology of

Kierkegaard’s writings and ressourcement theologians hangs on
Tridentine stereotypes about the boundary markers of Protestant
and Catholic thought (as if we were dealing with monolithic entities),
then a dialogue about a shared theological anthropology may seem
forlorn or polemical from the start. In fact when reading some
Kierkegaard scholars, these polemical stereotypes frequently
surface. For instance, Daphne Hampson expresses a familiar picture
of Kierkegaard that both Kier- kegaard scholars and Catholic
readers of Kierkegaard often accept:
Kierkegaard is not a Catholic who thinks in terms of our receiving
infused grace, enabling us to do what we could not do unaided. The
Lutheran Reformation overturned such ways of thinking, shedding
also the Aristotelian metaphysics through which alone it could make
sense.2
It is important to pause and assess the assertion that Hampson
makes here (and repeatedly throughout her work on Kierkegaard).
Follow- ing Dan Watts, we can divide Hampson’s assertion into two
premises:
1) Kierkegaard correctly discerned the metaphysical and epis-
temological foundations of Christianity, on his distinctively
Lutheran understanding of the latter.
2) ‘We today’ can no longer find these epistemological and
metaphysical doctrines at all credible. Therefore, ‘we today’
can no longer find (Lutheran) Christianity at all credible.3
To support the first premise, Hampson provides some evidence
in support of Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity being
2
Daphne Hampson, KEC, 56 n. 27.
3
Daniel Watts, ‘Recent Work on Kierkegaard’, British Journal for the History of
Philosophy 23, no. 1 (2015), 185–92.
distinctively Lutheran. However, Hampson’s first premise can leave
the reader with the impression that by shoring up the Lutheran
aspects of Kierkegaard’s theology of faith, grace, and works, more
ecumenical readings of Kierkegaard are therefore out of bounds.4
For Hampson, a Lutheran theological anthropology entails an
extrinsic view of salvation—that is, ‘the human being is only able
to come “to” himself, to become an integrated whole, as he is based
in another (which is God)’ (CC 12).5 Hence for Hampson, Luther’s
notion of alien righteousness inaugurates the ‘transfer of gravity’ of
personhood from an ontology of substance to a more relational one. 6
Although some might argue that this substance/relation dichotomy
is anachronistic and the vocabulary in question needs to be
contextualized, Hampson argues that Luther’s extrinsic soteriology
entails the competition between God’s action and the autonomous
human being. On this restrictive reading, one Tridentine stereotype
can be played off against another:
Trent (and Catholicism more generally) as we shall see has a very
different sense of ‘freedom’. To Catholic ears, the Lutheran position
has often sounded deterministic. It belongs to human dignity, to the
dignity of the creation which God has made, that God does not simply
overwhelm us or control us. The human must be allowed to perform a
free act in relation to God. Hence the Tridentine talk of ‘freely co-
operating’ with God’s grace. There is present a different sense of
freedom. For Catholicism, God respects our freedom. For Luther this
would not make sense. To speak of a freedom in relationship to God
is, for him, not to understand that God is God. We must rather allow
God to deliver us into freedom. For Catholicism we have a ‘base’ on
which to stand (creation) also in relationship to God. For Luther we
are falling apart; we must first base ourselves in God through faith
before we can begin to speak of human freedom. One could put this
difference in the following way: is it that God fulfills a previously given
sense of self (the Catholic understanding, leading to a linear model), or
is it that God first gives us a new sense of self, which will entail a
break with the past (so giving us the dialectical nature of the
Lutheran model)? The pre-
4
Daphne Hampson, CC, 11–12, 16–18, 39, 51, 85, 90, 263, 284.
5
‘instilled in us without our works, by grace alone’ (AE 31: 299).
6
‘The Christian, therefore, is not righteous formally, not righteous according
to substance or quality .. . but righteous according to a relation to something’ (AE
12: 329).
supposition of the Lutheran model is that the selves we find ourselves to
be ‘by nature’ do not represent the selves that we were intended to be
at all, but rather represent sin. (CC 44–5)7
On Hampson’s restrictive reading, the self and God directly
compete for agency. If it were otherwise, then God ‘must be
absolutely fundamental to the self being itself ’, although the
‘Christian has a new sense of self, which is not a sense of self as a self-
subsisting entity but rather a sense that he lives excentrically to himself
’ (CC 12).8 However, it is worth remembering that in an early
ecumenical perspective, like the Second Council of Orange (529)
for example, it was stated that there is no natural inclination in the
will that would render superfluous the divine initiative of grace or
the intervention of the Holy Spirit.9 But on Hampson’s more
competitive understanding of agency, a ‘Lutheran’ understanding
of faith becomes more synonymous with autonomy or consent:
in Luther’s case the human being must once and again consent to
dependence on God (for the temptation is to set oneself up in the face
of God), so also for Kierkegaard there is no constant self. Such an
understanding relates sin to the conception of original sin, which is
7
For more on Hampson’s defence of these Tridentine stereotypes, see Daphne
Hampson, ‘Reply to Laurence Hemming’s Review of Christian Contradictions’,
New Blackfriars 86, no. 1001 (2005), 24–47. ‘Were it in fact the case—as you
imply Laurence—that Catholicism is at one with Lutheran thought, then
Catholicism would in itself be schizophrenic. For how could it be both that through
grace God “establishes” us in ourselves and that we live “from” the future, the
Lutheran sense of excentricity; both that we strain towards that vision which is
knowledge, and that basing ourselves extra se in God we are turned towards the
world; both that it is for us to become deiform, and that, in ourselves nothing, we
turn to another?’ (p. 36).
8
For more, see Daphne Hampson, Swallowing a Fishbone?: Feminist Theologians
Debate Christianity (London: SPCK, 1996), ch 1.
9
Heinrich Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma [Enchiridion symbolorum:
definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum] (Fitzwilliam: Loreto
Publica- tions, 2010), 178, Canon 5: If anyone says, that just as the increase [of
faith] so also the beginning of faith and the very desire of credulity, by which we
believe in Him who justifies the impious, and (by which) we arrive at the
regeneration of holy baptism (is) not through the gift of grace, that is, through the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit reforming our will from infidelity to faith, from
impiety to piety, but is naturally in us, he is proved (to be) antagonistic to the
doctrine of the Apostles, since blessed Paul says: We trust, that he who begins a
good work in us, will perfect it unto the day of Christ Jesus [Phil. 1:6]; and the
following: It was given to you for Christ not only that you may believe in Him, but
also, that you may suffer for Him [Phil. 1:29]; and: By grace you are made safe through
faith, and this not of yourselves; for it is the gift of God [Eph. 2:8]. For those who say
that faith, by which we believe in God, is natural, declare that all those who are alien to
the Church of Christ are in a measure faithful [cf. St Augustine].
disobedience, hubris (pride). By contrast, to have faith is to consent to
that relationship of creature to Creator intended in creation. (KEC 223)
To me, Hampson’s competitive reading of divine and human
agency seems like an oversimplification of a more complex issue
that is debated even in Luther studies. For instance, Hampson notes
(but does not seem convinced by) recent developments in the
Finnish Lutheran perspective (CC 19ff.). On the Finnish reading of
Luther, the presence of Christ in the Christian was something that
Luther actually endorsed, and it was his subsequent followers who
exagger- ated his extrinsic view of the competition between divine
and human agency.10 Hence, the renewed emphasis in Finnish
Lutheran scholarship on donated or gifted righteousness by
grace and participation in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:3–4).11 On my
view, the Finnish reading
10
Cf. AE 26: 129. See also, Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, Union with Christ:
The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
Consider also important sections from the most recent document entitled From
Conflict to Communion by the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity: ‘The image
[the joyful exchange, in which we receive Christ’s righteousness and Christ takes
our sin] shows that something external, namely Christ’s righteousness, becomes
something internal. It becomes the property of the soul, but only in union with Christ
through trust in his promises, not in separation from him. Luther insists that our
righteousness is totally external because it is Christ’s righteousness, but it has to
become totally internal by faith in Christ. Only if both sides are equally emphasized is
the reality of salvation properly understood’ (§108). ‘Thus, our righteousness is
external insofar as it is Christ’s righteousness, but it must become our
righteousness, that is, internal, by faith in Christ’s promise’ (§112). ‘If God declares
someone righteous, this changes his or her situation and creates a new reality. God’s
judgment does not remain “outside” the human being’ (§115).
<http://www.lutheranworld.org/sites/default/files/From%20Conflict%20to%
20Communion.pdf> (accessed 10 May 2015).
11
Tuomo Mannermaa and Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna, Two Kinds of Love: Martin
Luther’s Religious World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010). See also, Tuomo
Man- nermaa, ‘Theosis as a Subject of Finnish Luther Research’, Pro Ecclesia 4, no. 1
(1995), 37–48. It is also worth noting that this ecumenical theological anthropology
is not limited to Lutheran scholarship, but also extends further into Reformed
scholarship as well. For more, see John Booty, ‘The Spirituality of Participation in
Richard Hooker’, Sewanee Theological Review 38, no. 1 (1994), 9–20. W. J.
Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in
Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Michael J. Christensen
and Jeffery A. Wittung (eds), Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and
Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2007). Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and
Ascension (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). Arnold Huijgen, Divine
Accommodation in John Calvin’s Theology: Analysis and Assessment (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). Charles Raith, Aquinas and Calvin on Romans:
God’s Justification and Our Participation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
of Luther appears to be a more charitable way of opening up
Kierkegaard’s distinctively Lutheran understanding of
Christianity to more ecumenical readings.12 In the next section, I
will provide one example of an ecumenical reading of Kierkegaard
as an alternative to the restrictive reading that Hampson offers.
1.2. RE-EXAMINING THE LUTHERAN STRUCTURE

OF KIERKEGAARD’S THEOLOGICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY IN WORKS OF LOVE
I turn to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love to resist a commonly held

presupposition that Kierkegaard’s writings simply reiterate Martin
Luther’s theology in every instance—a conflation that historically,
both Catholic thinkers and Kierkegaard scholars respectively have
embraced. One does not have to look far into treatments of Kierke-
gaard’s theology to find preconceptions about the antithetical nature
of Kierkegaard’s writings to the Catholic faith. For instance,
Daphne Hampson claims that Kierkegaard’s theology ‘stands in a
Lutheran tradition of Nachfolge and not a Catholic imitatio
tradition’.13 And yet Hampson’s claim must be weighed against the
evidence in Christopher Barnett’s recent work where he argues that
Kierkegaard’s writings are actually ‘a reiteration and advance’ of
the Catholic imitatio tradition.14 Kierkegaard scholar, Amy Laura
Hall also endorses the Lutheran presupposition throughout her
concentrated reading of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (1847).15
Hall claims that
12
I’m not attempting to settle the debate about whether or not the Finnish school
is faithful to Luther’s actual thought. Rather, my claim is that because of the
historical connection between Luther and Kierkegaard, the existence of the Finnish
Luther interpretation should relax Hampson’s restrictive reading of Kierkegaard’s
Lutheran theology so as not to rule out more ecumenical readings of Kierkegaard’s
theology.
13
Hampson, CC, 266. Hampson frames the difference between these two ‘anti-
thetical’ spiritual traditions as the difference between viewing the Christian believer as
‘a little Christ’ (Lutheran) versus becoming like Christ (Catholic), see Hampson, KEC,
270–1.
14
Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Farnham: Ashgate,
2011), 188. For more, see ch. 6 in Barnett.
15
Amy Laura Hall, KTL.
Kierkegaard can be read as providing ‘a dense commentary’ on
Luther’s treatise entitled the Freedom of a Christian (1520).16
Hall also claims that ‘a productive reading’ of Works of Love sees
Kierkegaard as deliberately indicting the reader using Luther’s
notion of Law and Grace so that the reader might ‘request the
radical grace requisite for any work of love’ (KTL 12).
Hall is right to emphasize the importance of Works of Love for
understanding Kierkegaard’s writings as a whole (KTL 49). However,
I propose that in Works of Love, Kierkegaard does not offer an
endorsement, but rather an indirect critique of Luther’s theology in
Freedom of a Christian. Where Luther seeks to convince Pope Leo
X that faith alone justifies the believer and the merit in good works
is merely a deception, Kierkegaard claims that the suspicion of
merit in good works can itself lead to self-deception to such an
extent that even an expression of love becomes suspect. Alternately,
Kierkegaard views human works of love toward others as the
expression of our faith in God. But in order to lend support to this
claim, I must briefly inspect the first chapter of Works of Love,
which is entitled ‘The Hidden Life of Love and its Recognisability
by its Fruits’.
In part, Kierkegaard takes the title for his reflection directly from
Luke 6:44, ‘For each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not
gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush’
(ESV). Indeed, it is no coincidence that Luther also comments on
this
16
Hall, KTL, 37. Hall is not the only commentator to adopt the Lutheran precon-
ception. For more, see M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary
on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20–1. See
also, Craig Hinkson, ‘Luther and Kierkegaard: Theologians of the Cross’,
International Journal of Systematic Theology 3, no. 1 (2001), 27–45. Also see Hinkson,
‘Will the Real Martin Luther Please Stand Up! Kierkegaard’s View of Luther versus
the Evolving Perceptions of the Tradition’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International
Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 21: For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!
(Macon: Mercer University Press, 2002), 37–76. Also in the same volume, see Lee
Barrett’s ‘Faith, Works, and the Uses of the Law: Kierkegaard’s Appropriation of
Lutheran Doctrine’, 77–109. Also Andrew Burgess’ article ‘Kierkegaard’s Concept
of Redoubling and Luther’s Simul Justus’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International
Kierkegaard Com- mentary, vol. 16: Works of Love (Macon: Mercer University Press,
1999), 39–56. WL is thought to be the ‘first visible result’ of Kierkegaard’s serious
interaction with Luther’s theology, see Regin Prenter, ‘Luther and Lutheranism’, in
Thulstrup and Thulstrup, Kierkegaard and Great Traditions, 131. Joel D. S.
Rasmussen and David Yoon-Jung Kim, ‘Martin Luther: Reform, Secularization, and
the Question of His True Successor’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and the
Renaissance and Modern Traditions: The- ology [KRSRR 5:2] (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2009), 173–217.
same text in his treatise. In fact, Kierkegaard even mentions Luther
later on in this reflection (WL 30). This link alone may tempt some
hasty readers to interpret it as providing evidence of Kierkegaard’s
endorsement of Luther’s theology. But such a temptation requires
more scrutiny. For in order to distinguish good fruit from bad,
Luther says in his treatise on Christian liberty that good works
necessarily flow from belief, and evil works necessarily flow from
unbelief.17 Here, Luther stakes his analysis on rightly identifying
Christ as the source of our justification by faith alone and
distinguishing that source from the necessary but still deceptive
result which is good works.18 Luther implies that in God’s
economy, we should not trust the result to indicate the presence of
the source because living our life as if the merit of our good works
could put us in the black, is merely to be deceived by a counterfeit
accounting practice.19 Luther illustrates this point with a fable about
a ‘dog who runs along a stream with a piece of meat in his mouth
and, deceived by the reflection of the meat in the water, opens his
mouth to snap at it and so loses both the meat and the reflection’
(AE 31: 356). In Luther’s story, the salvific activity of faith occurs
on the riverbank and the reflection in the stream is to be avoided
since it stands for the deception of merit in good works. This brings
Luther back to comment on the gospel passage about good fruit in
order to show how good works unmis- takably flow from faith:
Fruits do not bear the tree and the tree does not grow on the fruits . . .
on the contrary, the trees bear the fruits and the fruits grow on the
trees. As it is necessary, therefore, that the trees exist before their
fruits and the
17
M. Luther, AE, vol. 31: Career of the Reformer I (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1958). Luther says that ‘true faith in Christ is a treasure beyond comparison which
brings with it complete salvation and saves man from every evil’ (AE 31: 347). And he
goes on to say that an unbelieving person ‘is not served by anything. On the
contrary, nothing works for his good, but he himself is a servant of all, and all
things turn out badly for him because he wickedly uses them to his own advantage
and not to the glory of God’ (AE 31: 355). Henceforth, AE [volume]: [page
number].
18
Luther says ‘those who do not recognize the gifts bestowed upon them through
Christ, however, Christ has been born in vain; they go their way with their works
and shall never come to taste or feel those things’ (AE 31: 367).
19
Quoting Scripture, Luther says ‘“Thus you will know them by their fruits” (Matt.
7:20). All this remains on the surface, however, and very many have been deceived by
this outward appearance and have presumed to write and teach concerning good
works by which we may be justified without even mentioning faith’ (AE 31: 362).
fruits do not make trees either good or bad, but rather as the trees are,
so are the fruits they bear; so a man must first be good or wicked
before he does a good or wicked work, and his works do not make
him good or wicked, but he himself makes his works either good or
wicked. (AE 31: 361)
From the citation above it can be seen that for Luther, belief is
always the source of good works and unbelief is always the source
of wicked works.20 Bearing Luther’s comments in mind, it is
conceivable that Kierkegaard’s mention of Luther and the reflection
on ‘fruit’ in Works of Love could lead some interpreters to also look
for an endorsement of Luther’s theological position here. Yet I want
to claim that if we look more closely at how Kierkegaard treats this
passage of Scripture, we may find a criticism of Luther’s theological
position.
Where Luther needs to distinguish himself morally from the Pope
in his treatise, Kierkegaard actually discourages his reader from
Luther’s task of busily ‘tracking down hypocrites’ seeking to
‘unmask or even shame every hypocrite who comes near him’, because
such an endeavour is, according to Kierkegaard, ‘hardly the fruits of
love’ (WL 32). Kierkegaard views the preoccupation with the
demand to see other people’s fruit in order to judge their interior
status with God as a kind of ‘merit-scepticism’ that mistrusts a
person’s behaviour in advance. The outworking of such a suspicion
of good works is ‘that one should believe nothing which he cannot
see by means of his physical eyes’ (WL 23). According to
Kierkegaard, this merit-sceptic ‘ought to give up believing in love’ for
‘fear of being deceived’. Playing with the misrelation of original and
copy, Kierkegaard says that ‘the one deceived is still related to love,
and the deception is simply that it is not present where it was
thought to be; but the one who is self- deceived has locked himself
out and continues to lock himself out of love’ (WL 24). Since the
deception is the copy without the presence of the original, eternity is
where the original is present and the copy is no more. This is why
Kierkegaard says that the one who is self-deceived ‘has prevented
himself from winning the eternal’ because in eternity ‘he cannot
dispense with love and cannot escape discovering that he has lost
everything’. Kierkegaard’s claim here is not that faith alone ‘really
binds the temporal and eternal’, but rather it is love which is
20
Consider remarks like: ‘from faith flow forth love and joy in the Lord, and from
love a joyful, willing, and free mind, that serves one’s neighbour willingly and takes no
account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss’ (AE 31: 367).
21
‘before everything else and remains when all else is past’. Kierke-
gaard criticizes scepticism because of its posture of mistrust that
doubts an expression of love in advance as a deception and risks
mistaking even the God of love for a deceiver.
For Kierkegaard, love’s revealed fruit gestures toward the
whence of love.22 Kierkegaard says this source is ‘hidden or is in
that which is hidden’, and may be described as ‘a human being’s
most inward depths’ from which ‘proceeds the life of love’ (WL
26). This source ‘withdraws itself into remoteness and hiding; even
if you have thrust in as far as possible, the source is still always a bit
farther in’. These comments indicate a view that differs
substantially from Luther who could identify the source and result
of all things whether it is the Creator or wickedness within the
creature. But here Kierkegaard implies that the source and result of
love repel our grasp, and yet humans still are already addressed by,
and respond through the gift of love:
As God dwells in the light from which streams every beam which
lights the world and yet no one can penetrate back by these paths to
see God, for the path of light changes to darkness when one turns
toward the light: so love dwells in the hidden or is hidden in the
inmost depths. (WL 26)
To describe this mystery, Kierkegaard compares the hidden life of
love to a ‘quiet lake’ that
is fed deep down by the flow of hidden springs, which no eye sees, so
a human being’s love is grounded, still more deeply, in God’s love. If
there were no spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then there
would be neither a little lake nor a man’s love. As the still waters
begin obscurely in the deep spring, so a man’s love mysteriously begins
in God’s love. As the quiet lake invites you to look at it but the
mirror of darkness
21
Kierkegaard’s position here bears a striking similarity to St Thomas’ view of
the relation of love and faith as presented in Otto Hermann Pesch, ‘Existential and
Sapiential Theology: The Theological Confrontation between Luther and Thomas
Aquinas’, in Jared Wicks (ed.), Catholic Scholars Dialogue with Luther (Chicago:
Loyola University Press, 1970), 59–82, esp. 74–5.
22
Cf. Søren Kierkegaard. EUD, 127: ‘What is the good, where is the perfect to be
found? If it exists, where is its source? .. . [can we] find out what the good and perfect
is without learning where it came from, would [we] be able to recognize the eternal
source without knowing what the good and perfect is?’
prevents you from seeing through it, so love’s mysterious ground
in God’s love prevents you from seeing its source. (WL 27)
Significantly, Kierkegaard urges that ‘when you think you are
seeing [the source], then it is a reflection which deceives you, as if it
were the bottom, this which only conceals the deeper bottom’.
Kierkegaard goes on to make the following analogy, just as ‘the
clever cover to a treasure appears to be the floor, in order to
completely hide the treasure, so the reflection deceptively appears
to be the depth of the source—but only conceals that which is still
deeper’.
In Luther’s story about the dog and the reflection, the salvific
activity of faith occurs on the riverbank and the reflection in the
stream is to be avoided since it is the deception of good works,
whereas Kierkegaard’s analogy, takes us through the deception in
order to get at the deeper mystery of God’s love which generates the
love of the human being. In Luther’s theology, love of the human
being is always a good work which is secondary to, and can even
deceive faith;23 but Kierkegaard says that love is the movement of ‘the
23
Consider the following passages from Luther’s Commentary on Galatians
(1535): ‘They [Luther’s opponents] teach faith in a way that attributes more to love
than to faith; for they imagine that God regards and accepts us on account of the
love with which we love God and our neighbour after we have already been
reconciled. If this is true, then we have no need whatever of Christ. In this way they
serve, not the true God but an idol of their own heart—an idol they have made up
for themselves. For the true God does not regard or accept us on account of our
love, virtue, or newness of life (Rom. 6:4); He does so on account of Christ. But
they raise the objection: “Yet He commands that we love Him with all our heart.”
All right, but it does not follow: “God has commanded; therefore we do so.” If we
loved God with all our heart, etc., then, of course, we would be justified and would
live on account of that obedience, according to the statement (Lev. 18:5): “By doing
this a man shall live.” But the Gospel says: “You are not doing this; therefore you
shall not live on account of it.” For the statement, “You shall love the Lord,”
requires perfect obedience, perfect fear, trust, and love toward God. In the
corruption of their nature men neither do nor can produce this. Therefore, the Law,
“You shall love the Lord,” does not justify but accuses and damns all men, in
accordance with the statement (Rom. 4:15): “The Law brings wrath.” But “Christ is
the end of the Law, that everyone who has faith may be justified” (Rom. 10:4).’ (AE
26: 398); Or consider how Luther comments on Paul’s phrase “faith working through
love” (Gal. 5:6): Luther says that the sophists apply this passage in support of their
doctrine that we are justified by love or by works. For they say that even when faith
has been divinely infused—and I am not even speaking of faith that is merely
acquired—it does not justify unless it has been formed by love. They call love “the
grace that makes one acceptable”, namely, that justifies, to use our term, or rather
Paul’s; and they say that love is acquired by our merit of congruity, etc. In fact, they
even declare that an infused faith can coexist with mortal sin. In this manner, they
completely transfer justification from faith and attribute it solely to love
eternal in itself ’ and the link between the ‘fresh and everlasting life’ of
God and ours (WL 27).
After his discussion about the recognizability of love’s fruit,
Kierkegaard recalls Luther’s comparison of trees and fruit but
adapts it by adding a third element. For Kierkegaard, ‘the tree is known
by its fruits’, but it ‘is also known by its leaves’ (WL 28). So, if
someone could identify the tree by the appearance of its leaves,
there is no contradiction between form and content until the fruit
season demonstrates whether it ‘really was not the tree which
according to the leaves it appeared to be’ (WL 29). Kierkegaard
also says that no one should ‘regard [words] as sure marks of love’
because ‘by such fruits or by their being merely leaves, one should
know that love has not had time for growth’ (WL 29). Only
‘immature and deceitful love is known by the fact that words and
techniques of speech are its only fruit’ and thus, if a human love ‘is
really to bear fruit and consequently be recognisable by its fruit, it
must form a heart’. Indeed for Kierkegaard, having ‘a heart in this
natural sense is infinitely different from forming a heart in the eternal
sense’ which is ‘the essential condition for bearing love’s own fruit
by which it is known’ (WL 30). Unlike Luther’s soteriology24—
whereby, the salvific status of a
as thus defined. And they claim that this is proved by St. Paul’ (AE 27: 28; cf. AE
24: 321); Or again, Luther says that ‘Faith and hope must remain, so that we may be
justified by the former and encouraged by the latter to persevere in adversity.
Finally, we are servants of one another through love, because faith is not idle even
though love is tiny and weak. Thus when I command you to walk by the Spirit, I
make it abundantly clear that you are not justified by love. Moreover, when I say
that you should walk by the Spirit and should not obey the flesh or gratify the
desires of the flesh, I am not requiring of you that you strip off the flesh completely or
kill it, but that you restrain it’ (AE 27: 68).
24
Consider the dualism of love and faith in Luther’s nuptial theology: ‘Christ is
God and man in one person. He has neither sinned nor died, and is not con-
demned, and he cannot sin, die, or be condemned; His righteousness, life, and
salvation are unconquerable, eternal, omnipotent. By the wedding-ring of faith he
shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are His bride’s. As a matter of fact,
He makes them His own and acts as if they were his own and as if he himself had
sinned; He suffered, dies, and descended into hell that He might overcome them all.
Now since it was such a one who did all this, and death and hell could not swallow
him up, these were necessarily swallowed up by him in a mighty duel; For His
righteousness is greater than the sins of all men, His life stronger than death, His
salvation more invincible than hell. Thus the believing soul by means of the pledge
of its faith is free in Christ, its bridegroom, free from all sins, secure against death
and hell, and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ
its bridegroom. So He takes to Himself a glorious bride, “without spot or wrinkle,
cleansing her by the washing of water with the word” (Eph. 5:26–7) of life, that is,
person is independently established in faith prior to and distinguish-
able from good works—Kierkegaard implies here that the
innermost depths of a person’s faith is constitutive of and formed
through our participation in the mystery of God through the infused
theological virtue of love.
So if, in the search for certainty between belief and good works,
Luther mistakes the natural sense for the eternal sense here, and
what Luther identifies as fruit may only be leaves, then what shall
we make of love’s fruit? Kierkegaard says that whether our words
or deeds are mere leaves or love’s fruit, only time will tell. There is no
feasible way to guarantee in advance that the saying of a single word
or that the doing of a single deed will furnish the certainty that we
have indeed made love’s fruit visible and circumvented deception once
for all. No, Kierkegaard says ‘it all depends on how the deed is done’
and ‘how the word is said and, above all, how it is meant’ (WL 30).
But even in admitting the decisive factor of appropriation,
Kierkegaard quickly says it still ‘holds true that there is nothing, no in
such a way, of which it can unconditionally be said that it
unconditionally proves the presence of love or that it
unconditionally proves there is no love’ (WL 31). For appropriation
in love is not a universal a priori but rather it is an individualizing
gift of grace that at once elicits within us the task and demand of love
for others. Thus, Kierkegaard tells his readers that we are not
encouraged ‘to get busy judging one another’, and neither are we to
meant ‘to work in order that love becomes known by its fruits’, but
rather we are meant ‘to work to make love capable of being
recognised by its fruits’ (italics mine). Kierkegaard’s subtle distinction
here highlights the importance of not mistaking the means for ends,
or of instrumentalizing love into some reward. But even here, we
are still not meant to ‘judgingly demand continually and perpetually
to see the fruits in the relationship of love with one another’ (WL
32).
In closing, Kierkegaard reemphasizes that instead of being
sceptical of love, it is imperative that ‘one must believe in love’,
because only those who mistrust love insist ‘upon seeing the fruits’.
Here Kierkegaard
by faith in the Word of life, righteousness, and salvation. In this way He marries her
in faith, steadfast love, and in mercies, righteousness, and justice (Hosea 2:19–20)’
(AE 31: 351–2).
associates love with non-sight and doubt with sight, not in order to
reintroduce scepticism, but rather to remind us how faith stands in
for sight and how love stands in for mistrust. By insisting on seeing
another’s fruit, there is always the danger that we might ‘see some-
thing as less than it actually is’, but we must remember that even
when it is hidden from view, ‘love also can see something as greater
than it is’ (WL 33). Once ‘one has learned to know [love] by its
fruits, one again returns to the beginning—to believe in love—and
returns to [love] as the highest’. Love is the highest because even
though the fruit may ‘make it manifest’, it is not reducible to that
fruit, because ‘the life itself is still more’ than ‘all the fruits which
one could enumerate at any moment’. Indeed for Kierkegaard, love
itself is ‘known and recognised by the love in another’, and only ‘he
who abides in love can recognise love, and in the same way his love is
to be known’ (WL 33).
In sketching this brief comparison between Luther and Kierke-
gaard, one may be persuaded to reconsider Hall’s original claim about
reading Works of Love as ‘a dense commentary’ on, and
endorsement of Luther. Upon a closer reading of the text, one might
make the counterclaim that Kierkegaard offers instead a parody of
Luther, which carries within it an implicit criticism of an extrinsicist
interpretation of grace. For Kierkegaard, grace names the life of
God, the source of all love which does not exact recompense but spares
nothing and gives all in love, so much that the ‘one who loves is
what he is only by being in You!’ Here Kierkegaard draws upon an
important scriptural passage:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone
who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love
does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us
in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live
through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved
us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since
God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has
ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is
perfected in us. (1 John 4:7–12)
Because grace does not compete with human agency, and Christ is the
source and goal of the merit of our good works, then God’s gracious
initiative comes to light. In this respect, Kierkegaard’s theology
here bears a remarkable affinity with Aquinas who said that charity
‘presupposes faith, because the will cannot tend to God with perfect
love, unless the understanding has right faith about him’ (Summa
Theologica II–II q. 4 a. 7 ad 5). In short, Hampson’s
invitation to Catholics to better understand ‘the Lutheran structure’
of Kierkegaard’s thought actually invites the kind of ecumenical
reading of Kierkegaard that I have provided (CC 264).
With the distinction between the restrictive and more ecumenical
reading of Kierkegaard made clear, it becomes more feasible to be
hesitant, indeed suspicious of a widespread assumption that Kier-
kegaard simply reiterates Luther’s sola fide theology—which is
often used to pigeonhole Kierkegaard as an irrationalist. Seeing this
difference demonstrates the need—especially for Catholic readers
of Kierkegaard—to reconsider their hasty dismissal of him. In fact,
let us not miss (as the English translation unfortunately sets us up to
do) the implicit references to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in part
two of Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est.25 There, the English
renders the title as ‘The Practice of Love by the Church’, whereas
in German ‘das Liebestun der Kirche’ should be translated ‘The
Work of Love by the Church’, in order to better reflect the German
translation of Kierkegaard’s Der Liebe Tun.26 Space does not permit
us to explore this here, but suffice it to say that Benedict XVI’s
emphasis upon love as a work that must be performed by a
community in concreto is an extension of Kierkegaard’s argument
for love forming faith. In the next section, I will add further
evidence to my argument by uncovering the Catholic inheritance of
Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology.
25
<http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-
xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html> (accessed 10 May 2015). Kierkegaard
also makes an appearance in Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1969), 39.
26
I am so grateful to Werner Jeanrond for pointing this out to me. See Werner
G. Jeanrond, A Theology of Love (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 166, n. 108. Cf.
Søren Kierkegaard, WL, 44–90. For more on Kierkegaard, see Sharon Krishek,
Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See
also, Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving. M. Jamie Ferreira, ‘The Glory of a Long
Desire: Need and Commandment in Works of Love’, in Ingolf Dalferth (ed.), Ethik der
Liebe: Studien zu Kierkegaards ‘Taten der Liebe’ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002),
139–53.
1.3. RE-EXAMINING THE COMPATIBILITY OF
KIERKEGAARD’S THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
IN CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE
Just as it would be a mistake to ignore the distinctive contributions

of the respective ideas of Luther and Kierkegaard by making one
individual’s thought a proxy for the other, so one would expect
that it would be a mistake to do this with a more distant comparison
between Catholic thinkers and Kierkegaard. However, if we follow
Hampson’s suggestion that it is best to step back from ‘Luther the
man’ and instead examine the Lutheran structure of Kierkegaard’s
thought, then perhaps a case could be made that there are shared
presuppositions in Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology that are
also attractive to Catholic thinkers.
For instance, one shared point of departure in the theological
anthropology of Kierkegaard and Catholic thinkers can be found
by examining Kierkegaard’s writings.27 For instance, in The
Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard’s pseudonym ‘Anti-Climacus’
describes the human person as both a spiritual and material self-
relation that relates itself to both God and neighbour. 28 For Anti-
Climacus, selfhood is not a brute fact but rather a task or activity
that must be achieved by holding together an expansive (infinitude,
eternity, freedom) and a limiting (finitude, temporality, necessity)
pole (SUD 29, 35, 68). Indeed, striving to become a self is a
universal task that also includes the particular gift of divine
cooperation in becoming a self ‘before God’. For Anti-Climacus
then, selfhood is a sacred task that involves both human freedom
and divine action.
Louis Dupré rightly says that in Kierkegaard’s theological
anthropology, one can only become an individual ‘in the
confrontation with God’, but ‘the conditions for such a confrontation
are lacking’ because in modernity there is no proper distinction
between God and humanity (SUD 99, 117, 122, 127).29 The
obstacle that Kierkegaard faces in
27
C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco: Baylor
28
Søren Kierkegaard, SUD, 13.
29
Louis Dupré, ‘The Sickness unto Death: Critique of the Modern Age’, in Robert L.
Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 19: The Sickness unto Death
(Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 85–106, esp. 88.
communicating his theological anthropology is that his reader is
caught in the malaise of modernity, and the language of God or
divine revelation must be rehabilitated. So Anti-Climacus focuses
on the divided self, and divides his book into two parts: the first half
treats despair, the finite and infinite, possibility and necessity,
whereas the second half transitions from despair and personal
responsibility, to sin and our failure to achieve moral perfection.
This leads Anti-Climacus to say that despair is sin, by which he means
the refusal or neglect to be oneself (SUD 77, 81).
In the Lutheran picture, sin separates God from humanity and it is
only through a repentant consciousness that one can obtain a correct
conception of God. Yet for Anti-Climacus, it is the other way
round: repentant consciousness presupposes a correct conception of
God, rather than a depraved state—hence, one’s awareness of sin
hinges upon living one’s life ‘before God’ (SUD 80–2, 89, 101, 106).30
This is an interesting approach when one considers Hegel’s
evaluation of the Fall of humanity as a form of progress toward
self-consciousness.31 However, reading Sickness unto Death in
isolation from Kierkegaard’s other works gives rise to the false
impression that all he offers is a theological anthropology of ‘doom
and gloom’.
In this way, George Pattison reminds us how important it is to
read Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses alongside his
pseudonymous writings if we are to hold together Kierkegaard’s
theology of creation, Fall, and redemption in our understanding of
his theological anthropology.32 Moreover, Pattison highlights how
Kierkegaard’s account of the good is intertwined with his theology of
grace.33 Indeed, Pattison says that for Kierkegaard:
That the possibility of the God-relationship of faith is the gift that God
is always, daily giving us is not something that can be known by one
who is unconcerned as to whether the gifts of being, consciousness,
and volition are for his ultimate good or not.34
30
Dupré, KT, 88.
31
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The
Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, One-Volume Edition (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), 215ff.
32
George Pattison, ‘Philosophy and Dogma: The Testimony of an Upbuilding
Discourse’, in Edward F. Mooney (ed.), Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard:
Philosophical Engagements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 155–62.
33
Ibid., 162. 34
Ibid.
But Pattison frames the difference between Kierkegaard and a
Thom- ist view of human creatureliness as the subtle difference
between an emphasis upon the ontological status (individual
substance of a rational essence) and hyper-ontological freedom (a
relation of personal and temporal dependence).35 Indeed, Pattison
places the emphasis upon human concern as the locus of the imago
Dei. Yet, Pattison also says that Kierkegaard and Luther are at odds
as well, because for Kierkegaard, ‘Existence as such and not merely
the religious crisis brought on by our failure to keep divine law is
the matrix of the impulse toward the good in which the possibility of
faith becomes manifest.’36 Thus in Pattison’s view, Kierkegaard
offers a distinctive theological anthropology that cannot be equated
with a purely Lutheran or Thomist perspective. However, my
argument is that by interrogating Kierkegaard’s distinctive
theological anthropology, there is still much to be shared across
confessional lines. In fact, it would be worth looking at a few
passages in Kierkegaard’s writings that reveal his theology of
creation and redemption.
Kierkegaard develops his theological anthropology in concert
with the biblical, patristic, and medieval insistence upon seeing the
human being as imago Dei (Upbuilding Discourses in Various
Spirits, 192. Henceforth, UDVS). For Kierkegaard, the life we lead
as a creature before God invites a posture of gratitude toward the
Giver of life for the goodness of life, and orients our lives toward
such goodness by virtue of our being there. Kierkegaard’s theology
of human existence as a gift from God comes from two passages of
Scripture:
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your
children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy
Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:13)
Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above,
coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or
shadow due to change. In fulfilment of his own purpose he gave us
birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first
fruits of his creatures. You must understand this, my beloved: let
everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your
anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Therefore rid yourselves
of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with
meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.
But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive
themselves. (James 1:17–22)
35
Ibid., 161. 36
Ibid.
In light of these two passages, Kierkegaard believes that being a
human creature involves being possessed by a natural desire for the
Giver of every good and perfect gift. In his own reflection on these
passages, Kierkegaard speaks of an Edenic ‘echo’ that summons ‘long-
ing from its secret hiding place’ where the ‘fruit of the knowledge,
which the man [Adam] relished, planted the tree of the knowledge
in his inner being, which bore its fruits’ (EUD 126–7). For
Kierkegaard, this echo signals not only the divided self of original
sin, but also the hidden fruit of love and grace, which abounds all the
more (Rom. 5:20). Indeed, for Kierkegaard it is the apostle who
explains ‘the condition that makes it possible for him [the human
being] to receive the good and perfect gift. This condition God
himself has given, since otherwise the good would not be a gift’
(EUD 136). Also, Kierkegaard says that this creaturely condition of
being toward the good, is also a ‘perfection’, which is not an earthly
need or gift, but rather theo-logal which comes from God as infused
gift (EUD 136). Moreover, Kierkegaard deploys a theological
insight here that is central to the theological anthropology of
Aquinas:
Infused virtue is caused in us by God without any action on our part,
but not without our consent. This is the sense of the words, ‘which
God works in us without us’. As to those things which are done by us,
God causes them in us, yet not without action on our part, for He
works in every will and in every nature. (ST I–II q. 55 a. 4 ad 6)
In his own words, Kierkegaard says that ‘to need the good and
perfect gift from God is a perfection; therefore the gift, which is
intrinsically perfect, is also a perfect gift because the need is
perfect’ (EUD 136, 297–326). So for Kierkegaard:
in a beautiful sense the human heart will gradually (the grace of God
is never taken by force) become more and more discontented—that is,
it will desire more and more ardently, will long more and more
intensely, to be assured of grace . . . [and] the more he [the human
being] needs God, the more deeply he comprehends that he is in need
of God, and then the more he in his need presses forward to God, the
more perfect he is . . . to need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is
perfection itself. (EUD 303)
In my view, Kierkegaard’s account of human nature’s path toward
perfection bodes well for the Catholic reader looking for a shared
theological sensibility. In Kierkegaard’s own words, he speaks of
the journey from creation to redemption in terms of a path from a
‘first
self ’ to a ‘deeper self ’ (EUD 314). Importantly this is not another self,
but rather a deepening (perfecting?) of one’s nature with a ‘new
quality and qualification’ (SUD 79), which reflects a new understand-
ing of the kind of God that one leads one’s life ‘before’.37 By
qualification, Anti-Climacus intends the appropriation of leading
one’s life before God, and by quality, Anti-Climacus refers to the
criteria of the paradox, absurd, offence, which have to do ultimately
with divine revelation and the Incarnation of Christ (SUD 83). The
offence arises with the awareness of my proximity to God in Christ
and God’s gracious concern with me (SUD 83, 126). For Anti-
Climacus, the Incarnation is an invitation to intimacy and union
with God (SUD 85–7). Indeed, despair is the refusal of this personal
invitation in the form of conscious rebellion or sheer ignorance
(SUD 95–8).38 This refusal has pride at its root: the refusal or fear to
embrace forgiveness because forgiveness implies that one has
sinned in the first place (SUD 109–11). Moreover, Jamie Ferreira
rightly says that for Anti- Climacus, faith integrates the intellect and
will with the conscious, imaginative appropriation of the
paradoxical.39 Is the paradoxical merely a non-explicit faith? No, for
Anti-Climacus it is the acknowledgement of the ‘infinite qualitative
difference’ between creation and the Creator (SUD 99). This means
to acknowledge both a difference between God and humanity, and a
likeness between God and humanity in Christ (SUD 126). This
difference and likeness is held together in and by the Spirit. So for
Anti-Climacus, living the Christian life becomes leading one’s life
‘before Christ’ our ‘goal and criterion’ (SUD 113–14). Hence
Ferreira describes The Sickness unto Death as ‘ultimately a strong
reminder of the possibility of forgiveness and grace’.40
There is coherence to Kierkegaard’s theology of creation and
redemption that invites Catholic readers to pay closer attention. For
instance, Pattison says that for Kierkegaard ‘to desire the good is to
desire God’ because
the possibility of coming to be able to do good is, in other words, already
present in our living, moving, and having our being in God, that is, in
37
M. Jamie Ferreira, Kierkegaard, Blackwell Great Minds (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009), 162.
38
For more, see Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy
of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 184ff.
39
Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 164. 40
Ibid., 149.
the life we ‘always already’ have as creatures. To be the recipient of
God’s good gifts is therefore not something we shall only experience
in that Promised Land to which God is leading us, but is the very
condition of human existence. The condition that is given as the
possibility of redemption is nothing other than the condition by which
creation is maintained in being.41
Pattison’s description here and Anti-Climacus’ view of selfhood as
a task, activity, achievement (SUD 13), is a reminder that in Kierke-
gaard’s theological anthropology our union with God is rooted in
the attunement of freely desiring the good in love.
For Kierkegaard, ‘The expectancy of an eternal salvation will help a
person to understand himself in temporality’ (EUD 259). In his own
words, Kierkegaard says that this is because ‘a human being,
insofar as he participates in the good, does so through God’ who
‘begins and completes the good work in a person’ (EUD 134). In
fact, for Kierke- gaard it is God that ‘gives the condition along with
the gift’ (EUD 134; cf. Philosophical Fragments 14–18, 58–9, 62–9.
Henceforth, PF). This principle coheres with Aquinas’ theological
anthropology which argues that our ‘will needs to be prepared by
God with grace, in order that [we] may be raised to things which are
above [our] nature’ (ST II–II q. 6 a. 1 ad 3).42 For instance, Aquinas
says that
love always precedes hope: for good is never hoped for unless it be
desired and loved. Hope also regards the person from whom a man
hopes to be able to obtain some good. With regard to this, hope
precedes love at first; though afterwards hope is increased by love.
Because from the fact that a man thinks that he can obtain a good
through someone, he begins to love him: and from the fact that he
loves him, he then hopes all the more in him. (ST I–II q. 62 a. 4 ad 3)
Since virtue operates for good, it is necessary for virtue of any kind
that it operate well for the good, i.e., voluntarily, readily, with delight
and firmly. These are the conditions of virtuous operation which are
not found in any operation unless the agent love the good for which he
is working, because love is the principle of all the voluntary affective
powers. For, that which is loved is desired when it is not possessed;
there is pleasure when it is possessed; and those things which prevent
one from having what has been loved cause sadness. Also, those
things
41
Pattison, ‘Philosophy and Dogma’, 159.
42
For more, see Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1997), 35–40.
which are done out of love are done steadily, rapidly and with delight.
Therefore love of the good, for which virtue operates, is necessary for
virtue. (De Caritas a. 2 ad)
An act of love always tends towards two things; to the good that one
wills, and to the person for whom one wills it: since to love a person is to
wish that person good. Hence, inasmuch as we love ourselves, we
wish ourselves good; and, so far as possible, union with that good. So
love is called the unitive force, even in God, yet without implying
composition; for the good that He wills for Himself, is no other than
Himself, Who is good by His essence. (ST I q. 20 a. 1 ad 3)
Like Kierkegaard, Aquinas says that our basic loving concern is an
implicit endorsement of the inherent goodness of creation. In
Thom- ist terms, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo teaches that the
priority of Love founds Being as a free gift. As Ferreira notes, in
Anti-Climacus’ theological anthropology,
the synthesis of soul and body in space and time is a relation,
analyzable into the tensions between its dynamic opposing tendencies.
This ‘synthesis’ is not yet a ‘self ’, but it has the potential to relate itself
to itself— to become aware of itself and to take charge of itself.43
In this way, Josef Pieper speaks of hope as a basic feature of the
pilgrim structure of the human creature, whose essence is composite
becoming. In other words, Pieper says that the path one must follow ‘is
not a direction- less back-and-forth between being and nothingness; it
leads to realization, not to annihilation, although this realization is “not
yet” fulfilled and the fall into nothingness is “not yet” impossible’.44
For Aquinas, the pilgrim’s ‘being on the way’ is oriented toward the
comprehension of eternal beatitude (ST III q. 15 a. 10). This means
that the pilgrim is oriented toward a future good that is both now and
not yet fulfilled.45 Because of the temporal nature of the pilgrim’s
journey, both grace and human freedom are involved in achieving this
task this side of glory:
Although in the order of nature grace comes midway between nature
and glory, nevertheless, in the order of time, in created nature, glory is
not simultaneous with nature; because glory is the end of the
operation of nature helped by grace. But grace stands not as the end of
operation,
43
Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 152.
44
Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 97–8. Cf. ‘faith does not have certainty’ (De Veritate q.
14 a. 1 ad 7).
45
Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 91–5.
because it is not of works, but as the principle of right operation.
Therefore it was fitting for grace to be given straightway with nature.
(ST I q. 62 a. 3 ad 3)
This emphasis upon hoping in God’s future good for my life is
intimately connected to what Aquinas has to say about despair.
Indeed, like the theological anthropology of Kierkegaard, Aquinas also
says that despair is a sin because ‘despair consists ina man ceasing to
hope for a share of God’s goodness’ (ST II–II q. 20 a. 3 ad).46
Nevertheless for Pieper, this means that there is an objective
uncertainty that is bound up in the pilgrim structure of the human
creature.47 Hence, simply recognizing that you have been created ‘to
exist’ is not enough: what really matters is when someone says ‘it is
good that you exist; how wonderful it is that you are!’ However, this
requires a ‘continuation and perfection by the creative power of
human love’.48 For St Augustine, coming into existence, being
sustained in, and drawn toward true happiness involves being seen
by God.49 This theological anthropology coheres with Anti-Climacus’
emphasis upon the interaction of human freedom and divine initiative
in the task of the self ‘relating itself to itself, and in willing to be
itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it’
(SUD 14). For Aquinas, this means that perseverance (or ‘striving’
in Kierkegaard’s terms) becomes the task of the pilgrim: the ‘object
of hope is the future good considered, not absolutely, but as arduous
and difficult of attainment’ (ST I–II q. 40 a. 1 ad 2). Commenting on
this passage, Pieper says that hope requires prayerful, cooperative
patience that looks forward to a new, practically inexhaustible
future.50
Recently, Lee Barrett has traced the basic features of
Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology back to St Augustine’s
theology of the restless heart seeking to rest transparently in God
(SUD 14, 30, 49, 82, 131).51 I would also add that Thomas Aquinas’
theology of participation is not far off the mark in this regard.
Consider Aquinas’ observation:
As Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ix), when Holy Writ declares that nothing
is like God, it does not mean to deny all likeness to Him. For, ‘the
same
46
For more, see Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 116–23. 47
Ibid., 128.
48
Ibid., 174.
49
Augustine and Henry Chadwick, Confessions, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), xxxi (46), 301.
50
Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 124.
51
Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and
Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), ch. 2.
things can be like and unlike to God: like, according as they imitate
Him, as far as He, Who is not perfectly imitable, can be imitated;
unlike according as they fall short of their cause’, not merely in
intensity and remission, as that which is less white falls short of that
which is more white; but because they are not in agreement, specifically
or generically. (ST I q. 4 a. 4 ad 1)
It is important to remember that Aquinas has a scriptural passage in
mind here:
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called
children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does
not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s
children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do
know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see
him as he is. (1 John 3:1)
In light of the scriptural tradition and the Thomistic commentary on
such a passage of Scripture, Kierkegaard’s remark about rest and
reflecting the image of God is striking:
Just as the ocean, when it lies still this way, deeply transparent, aspires to
heaven, so the pure heart, when it is still, deeply transparent, aspires
solely to the good; or just as the ocean becomes pure when it aspires
only to heaven, so the heart becomes pure when it aspires only to the
good .. . If the least thing comes between them, between the sky and the
ocean, between the heart and the good, indeed, even if it was impatience
in desiring the reflection, then the ocean is not pure, then it does not
purely reflect the sky. (UDVS 121)
Therefore, it is interesting how in an important essay, Christopher
Barnett argues that there is a mystical strand in the Lutheran
structure of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, which can be
traced back from Luther to Johannes Tauler, Meister Eckhart, and
ultimately to Thomas Aquinas.52 For Barnett, there is an
unmistakable mystical influence on the formation of Kierkegaard’s
theological anthropology.53 Indeed, Barnett argues that the mystical
character of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology maps onto the
exitus-reditus itinerary of the German mystical tradition, which is
rooted in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and a theology of
mystical union with
52
Christopher B. Barnett, ‘The Mystical Influence on Kierkegaard’s Theological
Anthropology’, in Roman Králik (ed.), Acta Kierkegaardiana 6: Kierkegaard and
Human Nature (Toronto: Kierkegaard Circle, 2013), 105–22.
53
Barnett, Kierkegaard, chs. 2 & 3.
God as the chief end of creation. In fact, Barnett argues that the
main source for the ‘Lutheran’ structure of Kierkegaard’s mystical
theology is a medieval Catholic by the name of Johannes Tauler. 54
For instance, Barnett highlights passages in Kierkegaard about
‘resting transparently from nothing to nothing’, and through them, he
illustrates Kierkegaard’s mystical theology of union with God
through self-dispossession.55 In Barnett’s view, Kierkegaard’s
emphasis on our utter dependence upon God and how the human
creature receives being from God, is a theological position that can
be traced back to Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas.
But one might ask, is Kierkegaard’s construal of our movement
towards God in terms of ‘becoming as nothing before God’ at odds
with a Thomist or mystical view? Not necessarily. For Anti-Climacus,
the self ’s nothingness has to do with the contrasting elements that
must be harmonized with God’s help (SUD 13–16). This is not a
view that Aquinas rejects: ‘Even as creatures are made from
nothing, so are they reducible to nothing, if so it pleased God’ (De
Potentia, q. 5 a. 4 ad 9). Indeed, Aquinas draws upon St Augustine for
support of this view:
Augustine says (De Civ. Dei vii, 30) that God so governs things by his
providence that he allows them to exercise their own movements.
Now the proper movement of nature since it proceeds from nothing is
to return to nothing. Therefore God allows the nature that comes from
nothing to return to nothing: and consequently he does not keep things
in existence. (De Potentia, q. 5 a. 1 n. 16)
Elsewhere Kierkegaard says that because ‘God created the human
being in his image’, we (rather than the lilies and birds) have ‘the
infinitely more glorious’ task of resembling the invisible God (UDVS
192). For Kierkegaard, this theme of ‘becoming as nothing’ surfaces as
the human creature’s struggle on the purgative journey toward God
(EUD 325). For Augustine and Eckhart, this journey involves the
detachment from worldly goods and the renunciation of self-
mastery.
54
For more, see Steven Ozment, Homo Spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the
Anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther (1509–16) in the
Context of Their Theological Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1969). Also see, Simon
D. Podmore, Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial
(Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013).
55
For more, see Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality
and Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), ch. 7. See also, Rowan Williams, On Christian
Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 239–64.
This is a view that is not alien to Kierkegaard, especially in
passages where he advocates relating at once absolutely to the
Absolute and relatively to the relative (Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, 325). Also, Kierkegaard has an emphasis upon
maintaining an upbuilding, or sanctifying relationship toward our
eternal beatitude as an interior epiphany of God’s presence (EUD
321–2). Hence, Kierkegaard can say that
to need God is man’s highest perfection, makes life more difficult, it
does this only because it wants to view man according to his
perfection and bring him to view himself in this way, because in and
through this view man learns to know himself. (EUD 312)
Now, this leads me to assess Hampson’s second premise (from

§1.1): ‘we today’ can no longer find (Lutheran) Christianity at all
credible. Readers of Kierkegaard: Exposition & Critique (2013), may
be familiar with Hampson’s earlier critique of Christianity in After
Christianity (1996) and may detect an echo in the issues that
Hampson criticizes in her reading of Kierkegaard:
▪ An endorsement of an inscrutable God that is beyond ethics or
reason (KEC 50).
▪ An endorsement of a traditional Christology (KEC 85).
▪ An endorsement of an outdated view of causality (KEC 91).
▪ An endorsement of sin having a social dimension (KEC 130).
▪ A disparagement of a historical–critical approach to biblical
studies (KEC 86).
Hampson also takes issue with the fact that Kierkegaard is a ‘supernat-
uralist’ rather than a ‘naturalist’ (KEC 4). In other words, Hampson
criticizes the view that she sees Kierkegaard endorsing: ‘that God is
held to intervene once and again, but in a cyclical pattern, bringing
his purposes to fulfilment’ (KEC 4). In Hampson’s view ‘there can
in this sense be no interventions’ because it is unintelligible to claim
(as Kierkegaard does) that ‘God is actively present in the moment’
(KEC 5). Hampson goes on to say that for Kierkegaard, ‘in each
moment God is quite fundamental to the self being itself. There is
no substantial self and no talk of an analogia entis. His is a relational,
not a Catholic-Aristotelian conception’ (KEC 252).
It is unfortunate that the bulk of Hampson’s criticism amounts to
either faulting Kierkegaard for the theological presuppositions of
his Christian faith, or rehearsing common misconceptions about
Kierkegaard that persist, despite recent attempts by Kierkegaard
scholars to disabuse readers of them. Indeed, the bulk of Hampson’s
second premise hangs on the assertion that Kierkegaard repudiates
an ‘outdated’ Aristotelian metaphysics of substance. 56 It is true that
in his portrayal of the self, Kierkegaard downplays the notion of
substance to emphasize agency. Kierkegaard does this because his
sources give him a deterministic picture ‘of Aristotle treating divine
and human agency as parallel phenomena’.57 However, it is worth
mentioning that just because Kierkegaard downplays Aristotle in this
regard, it does not imply that Kierkegaard repudiates Aristotle
altogether. In fact, several scholars have shown how Kierkegaard
operates ‘within an Aristotelian conceptual scheme when he
interprets his notions of change, modality, and agency in ways that
fit his own purpose’.58
An alternative explanation could be that Kierkegaard makes these
decisions for theological reasons. In other words, Kierkegaard
downplays Aristotle’s deterministic view of divine and human
agency, because this view contradicts the presuppositions of
Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology. It is also worth
mentioning that Aquinas
56
One should not dismiss out of hand how, in contemporary philosophy, the topic
of hylomorphism has received greater attention, such that one might be led to think
of it not as a monolithic theory, but a family of related theories in a philosophical
tradition. For more, see M. C. Nussbaum and A. O. Rorty (eds), Essays on
Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), ch. 3. Also see, Kit Fine,
‘Things and Their Parts’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23, no. 1 (1999), 61–74.
John Haldane (ed.), Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical
Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 125–42. Mark
Johnston, ‘Hylomorph- ism’, Journal of Philosophy 103, no. 12 (2006), 652–98.
Kathrin Koslicki, The Structure of Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Jeffrey E. Brower, Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change,
Hylomorphism, and Material Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
57
Harvard Løkke and Arild Waller, ‘Physics and Metaphysics: Change, Modal
Categories, and Agency’, in Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (eds), Kierkegaard and
the Greek World: Aristotle and Other Greek Authors [KRSRR 2:2] (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2010), 43.
58
Løkke and Waller, 45. For more on Kierkegaard’s Aristotelian inheritance, see
Cornelio Fabro, ‘La “Pistis” Aristotelica nell’Opera di Søren Kierkegaard’, Proteus:
Rivista di Filosofia 5, no. 13 (1974), 1–24. See also, Fabro’s ‘Aristotle and Aristotelian-
ism’, in Thulstrup and Thulstrup, Kierkegaard and Great Traditions, 27–53. Also see,
John Durkan, ‘Kierkegaard and Aristotle: A Parallel’, Dublin Review 213 (1943),
136–48. George J. Stack, ‘Aristotle and Kierkegaard’s Existential Ethics’, Journal
of the History of Philosophy 12, no. 1 (1974), 1–19. More recently, see Norman
Lillegard, ‘Passion and Reason: Aristotelian Strategies in Kierkegaard’s Ethics’,
Journal of Religious Ethics 30, no. 2 (2002), 251–73. See also, Ingrid Basso, Søren
Kierkegaard e la Metafisica di Aristotele: un percorso di lettura (Milan: Albo
Versorio, 2014).
scholars have made similar claims about Aquinas employing an
Aristotelian grammar to his own distinctive ends because of an
operative theology of creatio ex nihilo—a view that Kierkegaard
shares with Aquinas, but not with Aristotle.59 As Cornelio Fabro
has shown,60 Aquinas often deploys non-Aristotelian elements in
his metaphysics, such as his Neo-Platonic notion of ‘participa-
tion’—that is, existence does not belong to the essence of what is
caused, since it has received its being from something else—precisely
because of his theology of creation and redemption. This distinction
between ‘Being’ (ens commune) and ‘God’ (ipsum Esse subsistens)
maps onto Thomas’s distinction between the remit of what we
would now call metaphysics and theology (cf. ST I q. 1 a. 7). This
marks an important difference between Aquinas and other commen-
tators on Aristotle.
It is also worth mentioning that Aquinas has a unique theological
anthropology that may be more compatible with Kierkegaard’s model
than previously framed. For Aquinas, creatures do not furnish their
own esse, but rather receive esse from God. Aquinas fleshes this
idea out in terms of act and potency: ‘that which I call esse is the
actuality (actualitas) of all acts, and for this reason it is the
perfection of all perfections’ (De potentia 7.2 ad 9). This journey is
oriented towards becoming who we are: ‘every excellence of any
thing belongs to it according to its esse. For man would have no
excellence as a result of his wisdom unless through it he were wise’
(Summa Contra Gentiles 1.28). Although Aquinas articulates this
journey in terms of ‘causality’, he nonetheless understands it in
terms of our absolute dependence upon God. Moreover, it is the
Holy Spirit that non-competitively brings about our moral perfection
by grace, and enables our capacity to reflect God’s image. Indeed,
as St Augustine says, if we are image- bearers of God, then we are
also capable of a relationship with God;
59
David B. Burrell, ‘Divine Action and Human Freedom in the Context of
Creation’, in Thomas F. Tracy (ed.), The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological
Explorations (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 103–9.
David B. Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective, Challenges in
Contemporary Theology (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), ch 1. David B. Burrell,
Creation and the God of Abraham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
chs. 2 & 3. David Burrell, ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered’, Modern Theology 29, no. 2
(2013), 5–21.
60
Cornelio Fabro, La Nozione Metafisica di Partecipazione secondo San Tommaso
d’Aquino (Rome: EDIVI, 2005). See also, Cornelio Fabro, Partecipazione e Causalità
secondo S. Tommaso d’Aquino [1960], vol. 19 (Rome: EDIVI, 2010).
because of grace and the Incarnation, our God-relationship is utterly
gratuitous and non-frustrating (De Trinitate 14.8).61 In accordance
with Augustine, Aquinas also believes that by grace through faith
and in works of love, the human creature tends toward the good and
therefore is on a journey towards union with God, the beginning
and end of all things.62
The theological principle here is that no finite creature is esse, but
receives esse from God. This means that there is a non-coincidence
between essence and existence as the human creature journeys
toward God, for whom essence and existence are transparent. In
this way, when speaking of the relation of ‘participation’ in being,
Aquinas deploys a philosophical term in a theological manner to
talk about the relation of creatures to the Creator—‘the unique
Good’ (In III Sent. d. 23 q. 2. a. 1). 63 But for Aquinas (like Augustine
and indeed Kierkegaard) the opaque character of this desire to rest
transparently in God is necessarily ‘tensed’ as restlessness, since ‘the
knowledge of faith does not bring rest to desire but rather sets it
aflame, since every man desires to see what he believes’ (SCG
3.40.5). Elsewhere, Aquinas says that even ‘evidence taken from
Divine authority does not make a thing apparent in itself, and such is
the evidence referred to in the definition of faith’ (ST II–II q. 4 a. 1
ad 5). Yet, despite faith’s restlessness (due to the gap between
theological expression and the divine mysteries of faith), the
judgement of faith still lays hold of divine truth. As Romanus Cessario
says, for Aquinas
Concepts are important for expressing what we believe. But because
divine Truth is infinitely more profound than its conceptual
61
‘although the human mind is not of the same nature as God, still the image of
that nature than which no nature is better is to be sought and found in that part of us
than which our nature also has nothing better. But first of all the mind must be
considered in itself, and God’s image discovered in it before it participates in him.
For we have said that even when it has lost its participation in him it still remains
the image of God, even though worn out and distorted. It is his image insofar as it is
capable of him and can participate in him; indeed it cannot achieve so great a good
except by being his image.’
62
‘Charity loves God above all things in a higher way than nature does. For
nature loves God above all things inasmuch as He is the beginning and the end of
natural good; whereas charity loves Him, as He is the object of beatitude, and
inasmuch as man has a spiritual fellowship with God. Moreover charity adds to natural
love of God a certain quickness and joy, in the same way that every habitus of virtue
adds to the good act which is done merely by the natural reason of a man who has
not the habit of virtue’ (ST I–II q. 109 a. 3 ad 1).
63
For more, see Jan Aertsen, Nature and Creature: Thomas Aquinas’s Way of
Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1988).
expressions, belief incessantly tugs the believer toward a deeper pene-
tration of the divine mysteries. Only the act of love ultimately bridges
the gap between concept and reality.64
This is why Thomas speaks of faith as imperfect knowledge (ST I–II
q. 67 a. 3; De Veritate q. 14 a. 2) and an opaque certainty (De Veritate
q. 14 a. 1 ad 8). Contrary to widespread assumption, there is much
here in Aquinas that coheres with Kierkegaard’s theology of faith.
Indeed in the theological anthropology of Aquinas, God communicates
by grace what was incommunicable by nature. 65 But this generates the
question of how God communicates our eternal beatitude and
saving truth to us. On this point, Aquinas speaks of our perfection in
terms of a pupil and teacher:
the perfection of the rational creature consists not only in what
belongs to it in respect of its nature, but also in that which it acquires
through a supernatural participation of Divine goodness . . . [our]
ultimate happiness consists in a supernatural vision of God: to which
vision man cannot attain unless he be taught by God, according to Jn.
6:45: ‘Every one that hath heard of the Father and hath learned
cometh to Me.’ Now man acquires a share of this learning, not indeed
all at once, but by little and little, according to the mode of his nature:
and every one who learns thus must needs believe, in order that he may
acquire science in a perfect degree; thus also the Philosopher remarks
(De Soph. Elench. i, 2) that ‘it behooves a learner to believe’. Hence
in order that a man arrive at the perfect vision of heavenly happiness,
he must first of all believe God, as a disciple believes the master
who is teaching him. (ST II–II q. 2 a. 9)
It is interesting that Kierkegaard also maintains this image of pupil
and teacher when he speaks of how we come to learn the truth. In
the next section, I will provide one example of how Kierkegaard’s
conception of divine teaching coheres with what Aquinas says
above. To sum up the first part of this chapter, I have argued that
critical exegesis of Kierkegaard’s writings allow for an ecumenical
interpretation of them that is not repelled by the Lutheran structure
of Kierkegaard’s
64
Romanus Cessario, Christian Faith and the Theological Life (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 98. Aquinas also says that ‘belief has
something in common with science and understanding; yet its knowledge does not
attain the perfection of clear sight, wherein it agrees with doubt, suspicion and
opinion. Hence it is proper to the believer to think with assent: so that the act of
believing is distinguished from all the other acts of the intellect, which are about the
true or the false’ (ST II–II q. 2 a. 1 ad).
65
Cited in Cessario, Christian Faith, 108.
theological anthropology, but instead invites us to press through any
stereotypical impressions about Kierkegaard to arrive at the deeper
catholicity of his theological anthropology. In doing so, I suggested that
a common stereotype held by both Catholic thinkers and
Kierkegaard scholars should be resisted.66 In the second part of
this chapter, I investigate Kierkegaard’s paradoxical presentation of
the Christian faith and divine revelation as equidistant to every
historical epoch, and how Kierkegaard’s non-historicist view of the
Christian faith does not restrict it to either the patristic or the
modern period, but rather expands the range of objects for
contemplation in such a way that overlaps with the basic aims of
ressourcement theologians.
1.4. KIERKEGAARD’S NON-HISTORICIST

APPROACH TO THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
One of the basic aims of ressourcement theology is to recover a

theology of history—that is, an affirmation of God’s action in and
through history, and an affirmation of human freedom and respon-
sibility.67 In Kierkegaard’s idiom, one might say a theology of
history is concerned with the relation of that which has a beginning
and end (time), and that which is without beginning or end
(eternity). The difficulty of such a task is giving an account of the
continuity between the historical development of past events and
salvation history—that which has a beginning yet does not end—in
such a way as to retain the decisive character of a single event like
the Incarnation. Both the writings of ressourcement theologians and
Kierkegaard’s writings endorse the sacramental character of time—
that is, in the words of Jean Daniélou a view that says, ‘salvation is no
longer merely promised
66
Although more recently, Kierkegaard’s ambiguous relation to Luther has
become a well-known fact in Kierkegaard studies. See Rasmussen and Kim,
‘Martin Luther’, 173–217.
67
Jean Daniélou, ‘The Conception of History in the Christian Tradition’, The
Journal of Religion 30, no. 3 (1950), 171–9. I am gratefully indebted to Lewis
Ayres for bringing this article to my attention. This view goes back to Hugh of St
Victor, a medieval theologian that Kierkegaard deeply admired, see Journals, 1850;
X2 A 353 / SKS NB 15:21–4.
but given, and only its manifestation is awaited’.68 Or as
Kierkegaard puts it, the eternal ‘does not want to have its time but
wants to make time its own and then permits the temporal also to
have its time’.69
Although some have scoffed at attempts to show the
compatibility of Catholic theology and Kierkegaard’s writings,70
one obvious Kier- kegaardian concept that negotiates continuity
amid change is repetition.71 Indeed, this concept does lend itself to
appropriation by contemporary heirs of ressourcement theologians
concerned with the ‘non-identical repetition’ of moral and doctrinal
development.72 But I will not treat this concept here because—whether
the concept was
68
Daniélou, ‘The Conception of History’, 174. Also see, Joseph S. Flipper, Between
Apocalypse and Eschaton: History and Eternity in Henri de Lubac (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2015). As a shared basic aim, endorsing a theological view of history
sets both Kierkegaard and ressourcement theologians apart from Karl Marx’s materialist
view of history. For more, see ‘The German Ideology’, in David McLellan (ed.),
Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 14.
For more on Kierkegaard’s importance here, see ‘La Salvezza nell’Abbandono alla
Divina Provvidenza’, in Cornelio Fabro, Tra Kierkegaard e Per una Definizione
dell’Esistenza, ed. Christian Ferraro (Florence: Vallecchi, 1952), 56–9. Fabro says
that ‘historical materialism, as a doctrine and praxis, is the most prominent symbol
of the sickness unto death that Western civilization suffers from’ (p. 15, translation
mine).
69
Kierkegaard, UDVS, 11. For more, see Arne Grøn’s excellent essay on Kierke-
gaard, time, and history in Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward, eds.,
The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 435–55. Also see, George Pattison, Eternal God /
Saving Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), ch. 8.
70
For an ardent dismissal of Catholic readings of Kierkegaard, see Hampson, CC,
263–4. For a legitimization of Catholic appropriations of Kierkegaard, see Stewart
(ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish Theology.
71
For a full account, see Niels Nymann Eriksen, Kierkegaard’s Category of Repe-
tition: A Reconstruction (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000). See also, John D.
Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic
Project, Stud- ies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987), ch. 1.
72
For instance, see John Milbank, ‘The Sublime in Kierkegaard’, The Heythrop
Journal 37, no. 3 (1996), 298–321. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond
Secular Reason, 2nd edn. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 278–326. Milbank, Sus-
pended Middle, 60; John Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology
(London: SCM Press, 2009), 145–74. See also, Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On
the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, Challenges in Contemporary Theology
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 18–35, 109, 160, 221–4. Catherine Pickstock,
Repetition and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also see, Marcus
Pound, Theology, Psychoanalysis, Trauma, Veritas Series (London: SCM Press, 2007),
ch. 2. Following Milbank, Clare Carlisle suggests a similar link between
Aristotelian virtue ethics, repetition, and ressourcement in ‘The Self and the Good
Life’: see Adams, Pattison, and Ward, The Oxford Handbook of Theology and
Modern European Thought, 19–39.
73
perhaps too close to Hegel’s dialectics, or to Freud’s interpretation
of compulsory behaviour,74—ressourcement theologians engaging
with Kierkegaard’s writings during the twentieth century did not
reach for this analogue.75 Instead, I will get at the meaning of this
concept from another route.
In this section, I want to explore Kierkegaard’s non-historicist
approach to the Christian faith as he confronts the paradoxical
problem of endorsing a theological view of history from a contin-
gent perspective in the flux of time. My argument is that Kierke-
gaard’s terms of art, ‘autopsy of faith’ and ‘contemporaneity’ are a
shorthand way of talking about the epochal equidistance of divine
revelation. In my view, Kierkegaard endorses a reintegration of
faith and history in the modern age, a task that ressourcement
theologians also sought to achieve. I contextualize my approach
to these Kierkegaardian ideas with an eye towards his non-Socratic
presentation of divine pedagogy in Philosophical Fragments and
Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In the end, I suggest that the
continuity of faith across the biblical, patristic, medieval, and
modern period is a view that both Kierkegaard and ressourcement
theologians share in common.
1.4.1. The Paradox of Divine Teaching in Kierkegaard’s

Socratic Thought-Experiment
In Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
Kierkegaard’s fictive author, Johannes Climacus, claims to present
merely a thought-experiment about what Christianity is, and, unlike
Kierkegaard himself,76 he disavows being a Christian or a religious
person (CUP 483, 557, 597, 617). The central problem of
Climacus’
73
Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Modern
European Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 6.
74
‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914)’, in Steven J. Ellman,
Freud’s Technique Papers (London: Karnac Books, 1991), ch. 3.
75
Although many had read Fear and Trembling, there is little textual evidence
indicating that Catholic theologians during the early 20th century had substantially
engaged Kierkegaard’s Repetition.
76
Of his entire project, Kierkegaard says, ‘My task is to get persons deceived—
within the meaning of truth—into religious commitment’, as cited in EUD x, cf. JP
VI 6533 (Pap. X2 A 196 / SKS NB 14:31).
authorship is phrased as a gloss on G. E. Lessing: ‘Can a historical
point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can
such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an
eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?’ (PF 1).77 In other
words, how can one conceptualize an encounter between the histor-
ical and the eternal without the encounter itself becoming merely a
further reflection and reiteration of the historical? The epigraph to
Climacus’ authorship is referred to as ‘Lessing’s problem’ or Lessing’s
‘broad and ugly ditch’,78 and it is meant to problematize dogmatic
notions of the Incarnation and our natural desire for God by calling
into question the possibility of even conceptualizing a necessary (could
not be otherwise) transition from eternity to history without plagiar-
izing that transition from a contingent (could be otherwise) source. 79
Throughout Climacus’ sprawling authorship, Lessing’s problem of the
knowledge of God and the anxiety of plagiarizing that idea serve an
impetus to the enquiry itself. 80 Although Climacus takes his point of
departure, as well as the terms of the debate from Lessing, Climacus
77
Quoting G. W. Leibniz, Lessing says, ‘it is not so easy to decide between the three
hypotheses, and much further reflection is needed to reach a conclusion’, in
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Hugh Barr Nisbet, Philosophical and Theological
Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50. For more on Lessing,
see the invaluable introduction by Nisbet on pp. 1–22. For more on Lessing’s
relation to the Enlightenment and German Idealism, see Frederick C. Beiser, The
Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1987), 61–81. See also, Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children:
German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 244–82.
78
Lessing and Nisbet, Philosophical and Theological Writings, 87.
79
For Hegel, this problem was ‘resolved’ by the inexplicable necessity of contin-
gency; see George di Giovanni, ed. and trans., Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The
Science of Logic, Cambridge Hegel Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010b), 478–9. See also, Klaus Brinkmann, and Daniel O.
Dahlstrom (eds), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences in Basic Outline. Part 1, Science of Logic, Cambridge Hegel Translations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010a), §145, 215–17. For more, see
Stephen Houlgate, ‘Necessity and Contingency in Hegel’s Science of Logic’, The Owl
of Minerva 27, no. 1 (1995), 37–49. The dilemma of the relation of necessity and
contingency was not unique to German Idealism and is not lost on ancient writers,
especially Thomas Aquinas and his Islamic predecessors; see Burrell, Faith and
Freedom, n 59, 76–90.
80
My reading of Climacus follows very closely to that of Stephen Mulhall, ‘God’s
Plagiarist: The Philosophical Fragments of Johannes Climacus’, Philosophical Investi-
gations 22, no. 1 (1999), 1–34. See also, Stephen Mulhall, IO, 323–53.
indirectly provides a defence of Christianity in the form of an attack—
rather than vice versa.81
With the anxiety of plagiarizing the idea of God, and Lessing’s
problem of ‘the direct transition from historical reliability to an
eternal decision’ (CUP 96), Climacus begins his thought-
experiment with an important question: how can the truth be
learned? (PF 9). Climacus calls upon Socrates himself in order to
portray the complex question of whether the pupil can be said to
actually ‘seek’ the truth:
a person cannot possibly seek what he knows, and, just as impossibly, he
cannot seek what he does not know, for what he knows he cannot
seek, since he knows it, and what he does not know he cannot seek,
because, after all, he does not even know what he is supposed to seek.
(PF 9)82
In order to respond to the problem of seeing the truth (due to the
lack of evidence), and the problem of not having a distinct idea of
that truth to start with, Climacus distinguishes between two modes
of learning the truth: the Socratic and the non-Socratic hypotheses.
For Climacus, the Socratic hypothesis is the possibility that we
learn the truth by remembering it. In this way, it is presupposed
that the pupil is already in possession of, indeed has the capacity for
understanding the truth, but just needs an occasion (or teacher) to
remind them of it (PF 24). Importantly, both the teacher and the
pupil stand in the same relation to the truth that needs recollecting
(PF 23). Hence, it does not matter from which teacher the pupil
remembers the truth—the teacher is a contingent factor in the
pupil’s remembering the truth that emerges from within them (PF
12). Since the teacher is merely an arbitrary occasion, and since the
pupil originally possesses the truth anyway, the pupil owes the
teacher nothing: the copyright stays with the pupil.
81
For a parallel reading of Climacus and Lessing, see Cornelio Fabro, ‘La Feno-
menologia della Fede: Ambiguità della Fede in Søren Kierkegaard’, Archivio di
Filosofia, 1–2 (1957), 188–97. The notion of a ‘leap’ is often attributed to Kierkegaard
but actually comes from Lessing’s salto mortale; see Lessing and Nisbet, Philosophical
and Theological Writings, 246, 251. For more on Kierkegaard’s notion of the ‘leap’, see
Ronald R. Johnson, ‘The Logic of Leaping: Kierkegaard’s Use of Hegelian Sublation’,
History of Philosophy Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1997), 155–70. For Lessing’s influence
on Johannes de Silentio’s Fear and Trembling, see Lasse Horne Kjaeldgaard, ‘“The
Peak on Which Abraham Stands”: The Pregnant Moment of Søren Kierkegaard’s
“Fear and Trembling”’, Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 2 (2002), 303–21.
82
Cf. Meno, 80e. Plato, Meno and Other Dialogues, trans. Robin Waterfield
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 113.
By way of contrast, Climacus sketches the non-Socratic hypothesis,
which is the possibility that we learn the truth only from ‘the god’.
In this way, what the pupil discovers is their untruth and the
incapacity to obtain for themselves, not only the truth, but also the
condition for understanding it—the god gives both to the pupil (PF
14). Hence, the pupil and the god do not stand in the same relation
to the truth and it does matter from which teacher the pupil learns—
the teacher is necessary to the pupil’s learning and receiving the
capacity to understand the truth. The result of an encounter with
the god is re-birth: ‘the one who is born again owes no human being
anything, but owes that divine teacher everything’ (PF 19). From
this perspective, in so far as the truth is, there is indebtedness to the
god. However, from the Socratic perspective, there is no
indebtedness, since the truth origin- ates with the pupil. From the
non-Socratic perspective, such a claim is blatant plagiarism (PF 61).
Stephen Mulhall puts it this way:
If he has properly absorbed what his teacher teaches, he can help
others to learn that lesson only by helping them to learn from his
teacher; he must not even present himself as an occasion for them to
learn, but rather find a way of removing himself entirely from the scene
—a way of bridging other learners to the teacher without allowing
them to assign any kind of authority to him, not even the authority of
one who prepares the way to the teacher (for the teacher is the way).
(IO 353)
With the non-Socratic approach to learning the truth, there is an
indispensably indirect mode of communication alluded to in the
quote above.83 Precisely because the pupil is in untruth and stands
in a necessary relationship to the god, the communication takes an
indirect form so as not to deceive the pupil with the illusion of the
god’s dispensability as well as to ‘maintain the learner’s bold confi-
dence’ and freely given love (PF 27–8). From the Socratic view, deceit
is inevitable and freedom is compromised if the teacher was to ‘let
the pupil go on thinking that he actually owed him something,
whereas the teacher was supposed to assist him to become sufficient
unto himself ’ (PF 30). Alternately, the non-Socratic view links the
pupil’s indebtedness to the god’s love—since the god’s love ‘must
be not only an assisting love but also a procreative love by which he
gives birth to
83
For more on Kierkegaard’s use of indirect communication, see Katherine
Rams- land, ‘Grice and Kierkegaard: Implication and Communication’, Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 48, no. 2 (1987), 327–34.
the learner, or as we have called him, one born again’, and so, ‘the
learner owes him everything’ (PF 30).
For the pupil, the difficulty arises in distinguishing untruth from
truth, deceit from love, Socrates from the god, innovation from
indebtedness. The matter is not decided, as Voltaire suggests, by
just ‘opening your eyes’.84 No, for Climacus the matter becomes
rather tricky because with the non-Socratic view, the relation is not
merely between the god and the pupil—eternity and history—since
‘the god will appear in the form of a servant’ (PF 31) and ‘the form
of the servant was not something put on’ (PF 32). The god is not
identifiable by peeking underneath ‘the plebeian cloak, which, just
by flapping open would betray the king’, but rather the self-revealed
formal features of the servant are necessary to know the god of
‘love that suffers, love that gives all’ (PF 33). For the king cannot
directly elicit the poor maiden’s love as an unequal without
allowing ‘understanding and equality [to] disappear’, thus making
the love unhappy (PF 28). No, the mysterious form which risks
misunderstanding from the start is the way that the god leads (or
‘misleads’?) the pupil into the truth—despite the gap of the pupil’s
infinite and qualitative inequality:
For love, any other revelation would be a deception, because either it
would first have had to accomplish a change in the learner (love,
however, does not change the beloved but changes itself) and conceal
from him that this was needed, or in superficiality it would have had
to remain ignorant that the whole understanding between them was a
delusion (this is the untruth of paganism). For the god’s love, any
other revelation would be a deception. (PF 33)
As Climacus later says, the difficulty is not necessarily
understanding ‘that the God becomes a particular human being’ but
that ‘he becomes a lowly and despised human being’, since the
‘paradox is that Christ entered into the world in order to suffer’
(CUP 596–7). For the non- Socratic view, ‘it is love that gives rise
to all this suffering, precisely because the god is not zealous for
himself but in love wants to be the equal of the most lowly of the
lowly’ (PF 34). So the self-revelation of the god’s love as mystery is
the form that the god’s love assumes in and as Christ. And in light
of the self-revelation of God’s love in
84
François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Histoire de Jenni, ou le Sage et L’athée (London:
1775), 61.
Christ, Stephen Mulhall says, ‘We are, it seems, dependent on the god
for our idea of him as dependent on us’ (IO 334).
At this point, Climacus brings the threat of plagiarism that was
originally targeted at the Socratic perspective, and rolls the charge
back onto the non-Socratic view, casting doubt on the possibility of
knowledge of God in general and the Incarnation in particular as
merely human invention, a poetic deceit (PF 35). After all, how would
the pupil distinguish whether their teacher was Christ or merely
Socrates? To this, Climacus says:
Presumably it could occur to a human being to poetize himself in the
likeness of the god or the god in the likeness of himself, but not to
poetize that the god poetized himself in the likeness of a human being,
for if the god gave no indication, how could it occur to a man that the
blessed god could need him? (PF 36)
Stephen Mulhall frames the issue this way: ‘any modern follower of
Socrates who claimed that the non-Socratic hypothesis was a human
invention would be committed to claiming that she can not only
think, but could also have thought up, what she is committed to
regarding as unthinkable’ (IO 332). But it is precisely with the
difference between the thinkable and unthinkable that Climacus
began his thought-experiment. In both approaches, by virtue of the
historicality of the pupil and teacher, such an encounter would be eo
ipso contingent (PF 60). Yet the truth that the pupil obtains is
eternal—that is, either by virtue of the immortality of the soul
(Socratic) or by the grace of the god (non-Socratic). However with
the non-Socratic hypothesis, the teacher and teaching are
necessarily inseparable (PF 55). Thus, the non-Socratic hypothesis
gives rise to the paradox of understanding the relation between
contingency and necessity which was previously outlined in the
epigraphic reference to Lessing’s problem at the beginning of
Climacus’ authorship.
So, if ‘paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without
paradox is like the lover without passion’ as Climacus suggests,
then ‘the ultimate paradox of thought’ is ‘to discover something
that thought itself cannot think’ (PF 37). Revisiting Lessing’s
problem of the relation of the historical and the eternal, Climacus
grants that the known is what can be thought and says, ‘let us call
this unknown the god. It is only a name we give to it’ (PF 39). Now,
Climacus sets aside the possibility of ‘proofs’ for the existence of God
as circular, because such arguments tend ‘to have assumed that he
exists’ or does not exist
in advance (PF 40). Instead, Climacus sets out to show how human
understanding is ‘continually colliding with this unknown, which
certainly does exist but is also unknown and to that extent does not
exist’ (PF 44). Moreover, Climacus argues that the
understanding does not go beyond this; yet in its paradoxicality the
understanding cannot stop reaching it and being engaged with it,
because wanting to express its relation to it by saying that this
unknown does not exist will not do, since just saying that involves a
relation. (PF 44)
Thus, Climacus draws a crucial distinction between seeing this
unknown as ‘a frontier’ or alternately as ‘the absolutely different’.
For Climacus, if the unknown is pictured in terms of the latter, then
it ‘is continually arrived at, and therefore when the category of
motion is replaced by the category of rest it is the different, the
absolutely different’ (PF 44). For Climacus, the problem is that ‘this
difference cannot be grasped securely’, because ‘at the very bottom
of devout- ness there madly lurks the capricious arbitrariness that
knows it itself has produced the god’ (PF 45). As Mulhall has
rightly pointed out, either the non-Socratic view ‘must be itself
unthinkable or it must be surreptitiously helping itself to an idea of
something other than the absolutely unthinkable—thus collapsing
the distinction between human beings and the absolutely different’
(IO 340). So from the Socratic perspective, the non-Socratic claim
to know the unknown god and the absolutely different helps itself to
knowledge that is claimed to be beyond thought—hence, as a
product of reflection, ‘the god has become the most terrible
deceiver through the understanding’s deception of itself. The
understanding has the god as close as possible and yet just as far
away’ (PF 46).
But suppose we conceive the unknown instead as a frontier? For
Mulhall, then there is no such thing as unthinkable thoughts, and the
task becomes not seeing the unknown as ‘the boundary of the think-
able, but at best a boundary within the boundary of the thinkable’
(IO 342). The upshot of thinking the unknown as a frontier then for
Climacus raises the question of divine self-revelation in history:
If a human being is to come truly to know something about the
unknown (the god), he must first come to know that it is different
from him, absolutely different from him. The understanding cannot
come to know this by itself (since, as we have seen, it is a contradiction);
if it is going to come to know this, it must come to know this from the
god, and if it does come to know this, it cannot understand this and
consequently cannot come to know this, for how could it understand
the absolutely different? (PF 46; emphasis mine)
In other words, we only come to know the unknown through the
god making it known to us, and yet, if we do in fact come to know,
we can only say that we know because—according to Christian
theology—the condition to know has been gifted by the Triune God
who is unknowable since God reveals Himself as mystery.85 The
distinction between God and creation is absolute, and the causal
relation between God and creation is non-reciprocal—theologians
tend to describe this relation in terms of gift. For the relation
between the pupil and the god is a necessary one; however, the
relation between the god and the pupil is not, because it is freely
given—what theologians refer to as grace. The difference between
necessity and grace, then, is the difference between logical derivation
and the freely and lovingly, indeed, we might in this sense say
‘unimaginable’ gift of existing. Moreover, the tension is not carving
up the world in terms of necessity (could not be otherwise) and
contingency (could be otherwise), but rather seeing the sheer
wonder of creation as that which could-not-have-been-at-all yet
freely-and- lovingly-given-to-be.86 Hence, this relation to the unknown
God manifests itself spontaneously as wonder—an immediate
incongruity with the way things are supposed to go based on
previous experience. And wonder is no respecter of persons,
whether believer or unbeliever.
For Climacus, picturing the unknown as absolutely different is a
failure to understand analogical language and ‘confuses the
difference with likeness’ (PF 46). Moreover, ‘in its paradoxical passion
the understanding does indeed will its own downfall’ (PF 47). The
problem of the understanding’s own downfall, as Climacus himself
observes, is that ‘everything [the understanding] says about the
paradox it has learned from the paradox, even though, making use of
an acoustical illusion, it insists that it itself has originated the
paradox’ (PF 53). For Climacus, such an acoustical illusion repels the
understanding and ‘offense comes into existence with the paradox’ (PF
51). Indeed, Climacus says that the ‘offense remains outside the
paradox—no wonder, since the paradox is the wonder’ (PF 52). Just as
Climacus warns of picturing the unknown
85
Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 207. See also, David B. Burrell, Knowing the
Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1986).
86
Cf. Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 179.
as the absolutely different rather than as a frontier, he—who is not a
religious thinker—sets out two ways of seeing the paradox: intellec-
tually, in terms of offence as a logical contradiction, or existentially, in
terms of faith as irreducible gift, which Socratically understood ‘is not a
knowledge’ (PF 62). Hence, Climacus says that ‘faith itself is a wonder,
and everything that is true of the paradox is also true of faith’ (PF
65). For Kierkegaard, faith is paradoxical and it is connected to the
unknown. As we have seen, Climacus construes the unknown in spatial
terms of a ‘frontier’, and later we will see how Kierkegaard
temporalizes this spatial term when he speaks of ‘the autopsy of
faith’ or the confluence of eternity and time as ‘the moment of
vision’ (Concept of Anxiety, 88–9).
‘Suppose’, Climacus hypothesizes, ‘that the difference in
intellectual endowment is the difference in being able to state
more and more clearly that it is and remains a mystery for existing
human beings’ (CUP 213–14). Importantly, in Climacus’
presentation there is the distinction between the god and the human
being, and there is the non-reciprocal relation of dependency
between them both.87 Clima- cus says that it is a ‘blessing’ that ‘one
relates oneself to this mystery without understanding it, only having
faith’, and that ‘the maximum of any eventual understanding is to
understand that it cannot be understood’ (CUP 214). Although
Kierkegaard has read very little of St Thomas,88 what he has his
pseudonym say here portrays a remarkable inner unity with the
Angelic Doctor.89 The affinity with Thomas in respect to the
distinction and non-reciprocal causal relation between God and
creation can be detected when Climacus speaks of revelation—that is,
communicating the truth in such a way that what is said can be
appropriated as if it were one’s own:
No one is resigned as God, because he communicates creatively in such a
way that in creating he gives independence vis-à-vis himself. The
most resigned a human being can be is to acknowledge the given
independence
87
Ibid., 154 n. 24; cf. ST I. q. 44–6.
88
George L. Stengren, ‘Thomism’, in Thulstrup and Thulstrup, Kierkegaard and
Great Traditions, 98–120. See also, Benjamin Olivares Bøgeskov, ‘Thomas Aquinas:
Kierkegaard’s View Based on Scattered and Uncertain Sources’, in Jon Stewart
(ed.), Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2008), 183–206. For more on Kierkegaard’s engagement with patristic sources, see the
rest of Stewart’s volume dedicated to the issue.
89
For more, see Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 116, 135, 146, 174.
in every human being and to the best of one’s ability do everything in
order to truly help someone retain it. (CUP 260)
Here Climacus distinguishes God from creation and observes that
this independence is a gift which comes into focus for existing human
creatures in their relation to one another. With regard to the para-
doxical distinction between the unknown god and creation,
Climacus says that ‘more understanding goes no further than less
understanding’ (CUP 607). Thus, what is required to answer
Climacus’ opening question—Can the truth be learned?—is to not
‘confuse the spheres’ (CUP 388) by treating an existential challenge
as if it were an intellectual problem.90 Here, Climacus’ view
converges with that of Aquinas:
‘God is known to men through faith. In comparison with the know-
ledge that we have of God through demonstration, this knowledge
through faith surpasses it, for we know some things about God
through faith which, because of their sublimity, demonstrative reason
cannot attain’ . . . ‘the intellect does not grasp the object to which it
gives assent in the act of believing’ .. . ‘the intellect assents through
faith to things presented to it, because of an act of will and not because it
is necessarily moved by the very evidence of the truth’ .. . ‘one who
believes gives assent to things that are proposed to him by another
person, and which he himself does not see. Hence, faith has a knowledge
that is more like hearing than vision’ . . . ‘there is for man some
knowledge of God which is higher than the knowledge of faith: either the
man who proposes the faith sees the truth immediately, as is the case
when we believe in Christ; or he takes it immediately from one who
does see, as when we believe the Apostles and Prophets’ . . . ‘an item of
belief is not made perfectly present to the intellect by the knowledge of
faith, since faith is of things absent, not of things present’. (SCG 3.40)
From the Socratic perspective, faith always requires a ‘crucifixion
of the understanding’ (CUP 600). For Mulhall, the upshot of
Climacus’ thought-experiment is that what is difficult about
Lessing’s problem is not conceptually ‘recognizing divinity in
imperfection, but the practical one of recognizing oneself—a sinner
—as nevertheless lov- able by god, as having something of the
divine that an incarnate god
90
Stephen Mulhall, Faith & Reason, Interpretations (London: Duckworth, 1994a),
50. See also, Michael Weston, ‘Kierkegaard: The Literature of Freedom’, in James Giles
(ed.), Kierkegaard and Freedom (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 180.
might redeem’ (IO 348). Mulhall’s interpretation of faith crucifying
the understanding has several theological implications:
First, the understanding suffers through its relation to the god; it must,
indeed, undergo a self-inflicted crucifixion if it is to maintain that rela-
tionship. Second, an acoustical illusion is central to that relationship—the
understanding is unwittingly but ineliminably indebted to the paradox
for its words about the paradox. And finally, the understanding needs
to step aside—to resign its self-given position of importance in
relation to the paradox. (IO 348)
Curiously, the pseudonym Johannes Climacus shares the same
name as the saint who is famous for his theological reflection on
‘the ladder of ascent’.91 In a similar way, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym
has been helping the reader climb up a dialectical ladder by way of
his sprawling thought-experiment. But just before the end of the
climb, Clima- cus kicks the ladder out from under the reader:
Just as in Catholic books, especially from former times, one finds a
note at the back of the book that notifies the reader that everything is
to be understood in accordance with the teaching of the holy universal
mother Church, so also what I write contains the notice that
everything is to be understood in such a way that it is revoked, that the
book has not only an end but has a revocation to boot. (CUP 619)
Kierkegaard scholars continue to debate the significance of Climacus’
revocation since it does not make much sense that an anonymous
pseudonym would also feel the need for self-censorship. 92
But bearing in mind Climacus’ comments about wonder and seeing
with the eyes of faith, then such a revocation could be seen as
91
For more on the mystical ladder of the original ascetic, see Jonathan L. Zecher,
The Role of Death in the Ladder of Ascent and the Greek Ascetic Tradition , Oxford
Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For more on the
Wittgensteinian ramifications of this idea, see James Conant, ‘Must We Show What
We Cannot Say?’, in Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (eds), The Senses of Stanley
Cavell (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 242–83. James Conant, ‘Kierke-
gaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense’, in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam
(eds), Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell (Lubbock: Texas Tech
University Press, 1993), 195–224. James Conant, ‘Putting Two and Two Together:
Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors’, in
Timothy Tessin and Mario Von der Ruhr (eds), Philosophy and the Grammar of
Religious Belief (London: Macmillan, 1995), 248–331.
92
See the respective essays of Jamie Ferreira and Alastair Hannay in Rick Anthony
Furtak, Kierkegaard’s ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’: A Critical Guide,
Cambridge Critical Guides (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
being faithful to his ascetic namesake. As Stephen Mulhall astutely
observes:
The true teaching of the Postscript is that one must stop doing
philosophy altogether—not just restrict one’s philosophizing to
attacks on the impulse to philosophize about faith, but stop
philosophizing. It means realizing that even the Postscript, with its
unremitting attack on philosophical pretensions, still retains
philosophical pretensions which must be abandoned or revoked ...
the persona [that Climacus] presents to the reader embodies not the
truth but a further version of the misapprehension to which he is
opposed, in the hope that we can recognize ourselves in him and so go
beyond the perspective he pre- tends to occupy.93
According to Mulhall, the saintly revocation of Climacus reveals
the ‘extremity of writerly self-abnegation’ that avoids ‘the claim to
authority apparently in the act of authorship by owning that one’s
every word is owed to another’, hence the revocation should be seen
not as ‘finding one’s way to words hitherto unspoken but as finding
a way to mean what one says when one utters even the most
common or familiar of words’ (IO 353). Thus, Climacus’
revocation at the end of his authorship can be seen as putting
forward ‘old fashioned orthodoxy in its rightful severity’ (CUP 275)
as the resource that provides the language to readers to help them
mean what they say, even in the most unfamiliar circumstances.
So far, I have suggested that Kierkegaard offers a non-historicist
approach to the Christian faith, which overlaps with the basic aims
of ressourcement theologians. Moreover, I have suggested that
Kierke- gaard’s description of creation, redemption, and the
historical character of divine teaching actually coheres with
important contours of Thomist thought. In the next section, I will
bring the previous discussions to bear upon how Kierkegaard
discusses the recovery of ‘old fashioned orthodoxy’ in terms of an
autopsy of faith. Again, my claim is that Kierkegaard actually
shares the basic task of ressourcement theologians: a paradoxical
relation of faith and history in the modern age.
93
Mulhall, Faith & Reason, 51–2.
1.4.2. The Epochal Equidistance of Divine Revelation:

The Autopsy of Faith and Contemporaneity
When one normally sees the word ‘autopsy’, one thinks of a corpse
spread out on an examination table, ready for inspection to see the
cause of its demise. But when ‘autopsy’ is juxtaposed to ‘faith’, it
becomes unclear what the object of inspection is—whether a less-
than-living ‘object’ of faith is under scrutiny by more enlightened
minds, or whether it is the source of faith that is actually inspecting
those of us who take ourselves to be learned. The phrase ‘autopsy of
faith’ (Troens Autopsi) only appears a few times, and is primarily used
by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, in Philosophical
Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. By qualifying this
technical procedure with a religious notion of faith, Climacus notes
the difficulty of bringing the (deceased?) god before one’s eyes for
inspection. What is needed then is an eyewitness: someone who
claims to have seen the god. In other words, if an autopsy of faith
cannot be reliably performed first hand, then in order to perform it,
we must have second-hand evidence from the (third person)
perspective of a reliable witness as an occasion for seeing the god
for ourselves. And so, Climacus appeals, not only to the practice or
act of faith, but also to reflection upon the content of faith
(tradition), and notes a similarity between the task of the pathologist
and that of the patrologist—one who inspects textual bodies of
evidence from the patriarchs of the faith who have long since passed
away but whose witness is made contemporary with the reader. But
in reflecting upon the act and content of faith, does the gap between
first and second hand still remain? Climacus says that to be
contemporary in this respect implies seeing ‘with the eyes of faith’,
yet not as
an eyewitness (in the sense of immediacy), but as a believer he is a
contemporary in the autopsy of faith. But in this autopsy every
noncon- temporary (in the sense of immediacy) is in turn a
contemporary. If someone coming later, someone who may even be
carried away by his own infatuation, wishes to be a contemporary (in the
sense of immediacy), he demonstrates that he is an imposter,
recognizable, like the false Smerdis, by his having no ears—namely, the
ears of faith—even though he may have the long donkey ears with which
one, although listening as a contemporary (in the sense of immediacy),
does not become contemporary. (PF 70)
In this passage, Climacus suggests that when conducting an autopsy
on the source of faith, it is possible for those who are not
immediately
present to be made present and those who are immediately present
to be made as if they were not.94 The difference is not a matter of
curiosity or historical evidence but faith. In other words, Climacus
draws a distinction between striving to see God for oneself, and the
theological reflection upon the reports of such a practice by those
witnesses, thus emphasizing the primacy of the practical over the
theoretical. In short, when the striving to see God for oneself is
made present to the believer in the autopsy of faith, as Nicholas
Lash says, he or she does not ‘seek prematurely to behold’ because
this is to ‘substitute credulity for faith’.95 The point Climacus makes
is quite similar to the one Christ makes regarding salvation in his
story about the master of the house locking the door:
You may find yourself standing outside knocking on the door, saying
‘Lord, open to us’, but he will answer, ‘I do not know where you
come from.’ Then you will start saying, ‘We once ate and drank in
your company; you taught in our streets’, but he will reply, ‘I do not
know where you come from; away from me, all evil doers!’ (Luke 13:25–
7 NJB)
In Kierkegaard’s Journals, we read that faith is neither fantasy, cog-
nition, historical knowledge, nor tangibility,96 but rather that ‘all
faith is autopsy’.97 Kierkegaard continues, ‘all knowledge is
concerned either with teaching or with historical knowledge about
the teacher’,98 and ‘by having merely historical information about
the wonder, a person never comes further’.99 But striving ‘to be a
contemporary’, Kierkegaard says, is not the same thing as being
94
Compare Climacus’ remarks with N. F. S. Grundtvig’s essay ‘Trustworthy and
Authoritative Witnesses’, in N. F. S. Grundtvig, What Constitutes Authentic
Christianity? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), ch 3. ‘ . . . it might be expected
normally that in the writings of an apostle addressed to the Church, we will be able to
discern the Christian articles of faith, regardless of whether they are specifically
pointed out or merely presupposed’ (p. 71). ‘Contemporaneity’ or ‘simultaneity’ is a
theme that surfaces also in the work of Baron Friedrich Von Hügel (1852–1925). See
Friedrich von Hügel, Eternal Life: A Study of Its Implications and Applications, 2nd edn.
(London: T&T Clark, 1913). For more, see David Law’s essay on von Hügel and
Kierkegaard in Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish
Theology, 75–96.
95
Nicholas Lash, Theology on Dover Beach (London: Darton, Longman and Todd,
1979), 163. Earlier in this essay, Lash says that ‘To confess the transcendence of the
mystery of God is, amongst other things, to acknowledge that our experience and
knowledge of God is mediated by those structures of particular meaning in which
we order the flow of experience as we seek to discern what is, in fact, the case’ (p.
159).
96
PF 197; Pap. V B 6:7 1844/SKS PS ms.2.
97
PF 198; Pap. V B 6:8 1844. 98
Ibid.; Pap. V B 12:4 1844/SKS PS ms.4.
99
PF 199; Pap. V B 12:8 1844.
able to say, ‘We ate and drank before his eyes, and the teacher taught
in our streets’, yet without having known the teacher, which, after all,
only the believer (the person not immediately contemporary) did, and
without being known by the teacher, and if the situation nevertheless
is such that the teacher gives the condition, then one of course cannot
know him without being known by him, and one knows him only
insofar as one is known. (PF 198; Pap. V B 12:7 1844)
Here, Kierkegaard suggests that the teacher gives, not only the con-
dition for knowing, but also the opportunity, as if the pupil lacked
these two criteria. I will have more to say about this later, but for now,
I want to observe that Kierkegaard claims that our knowledge of
God must come from God.
But, Kierkegaard asks the reader, ‘is this all conceivable? For the
single individual does relate himself absolutely to the absolute
teacher—that is, to the god—and all faith, as we said before, is
indeed autopsy’.100 From the perspective of the one who dissects and
inspects, this task is very much an active one, and the passive object of
inspection is quite indifferent to the ordeal. But Climacus cautions
theoretically interested readers in search of certainty in ‘the
reliability of autopsy’ because if the object of faith is not made
‘dialectically clear’ then ‘rare learning and great acumen are
expended on particulars’ and ‘the issue becomes only more and more
difficult’ due to the risk of ‘changing faith into something else, into
another kind of certainty’ (CUP 11). How- ever, regarding the
seeking and being sought in the autopsy of faith, there is no gap
between first and second hand; Kierkegaard and Climacus are on
the same page:
there is not and cannot be any question of a follower at second hand,
for the believer (and only he, after all, is a follower) continually has
the autopsy of faith; he does not see with the eyes of others and sees only
the same as every believer sees—with the eyes of faith. (PF 102)
In short, the autopsy of faith refers to the discovery of being able to
see and do nothing at all on one’s own—not even with an outward,
retrospective gaze in reflective observation, or through the report of
an eyewitness testimony—but nevertheless being enabled by God with
the gift of faith to see the truth of, and for oneself, through one’s
own introspective and prospective glance in the search for self-
knowledge,
100
PF 215; Pap. V B 6:17 1844.
101
knowledge of God, and the knowledge of the good. In other
words, it is the capacity of being made to see by virtue of being
seen by the god—a gaze that has particular significance in the book
of Hebrews:
The word of God is something alive and active: it cuts more incisively
than any two-edged sword: it can seek out the place where soul is
divided from spirit or joints from marrow; it can pass judgement on
secret emotions and thoughts. No created thing is hidden from him;
everything is uncovered and stretched fully open to the eyes of the
one to whom we must give account of ourselves. (Heb. 4:12–13 NJB)
Seen in this regard, the autopsy of faith is not so much a task to
perform by dispassionate observers as much as a procedure that
human creatures undergo. For Kierkegaard, this procedure is per-
formed by the Word of God, which refers not just to the divine
wisdom found in Scripture, but also to the divine wisdom encoun-
tered in Christ himself who sees into the innermost depths of an
individual.102 Indeed, Kierkegaard also speaks of ‘the mirror of the
Word’ to refer to Christ who reflects back to us, not our external
appearance, but the truth of our innermost self. In fact, the gaze of
Christ is often portrayed in Kierkegaard’s reflections on sin and
forgiveness—most often with women in the Gospels. 103 So the aut-
opsy that faith performs upon the human creature involves not only
revealing the knowledge of the truth of one’s own self as being capable
of nothing at all,104 but also involves the expectation of being
addressed by God’s love, and the transformation of one’s way of
seeing that accompanies such an encounter.105 This ‘autopsy of
101
For more on Kierkegaard’s paradoxical stance (introspective/prospective–
retrospective/outward) of self-knowledge, see Daniel Watts, ‘Kierkegaard and the
Search for Self-Knowledge’, European Journal of Philosophy 21, no. 4 (2013), 525–49.
102
For more, see Søren Kierkegaard, FSE, 25–35.
103
For instance, see Søren Kierkegaard, DCF, 108–15. The recent encyclical
Lumen Fidei also uses this image: ‘Christ is the mirror in which [believers]
find their own image fully realized’ (§22).
104
Kierkegaard says that the believer ‘continually keeps his eyes on God, that he,
although he himself is capable of nothing at all, with God is capable of ever more
and more’, in Kierkegaard, EUD, 325. See also, FSE, 76–81, 116, 131–3.
105
For more treatment of this insight elsewhere in Kierkegaard’s authorship, see
M. Jamie Ferreira, ‘Equality, Impartiality, and Moral Blindness in Kierkegaard’s
“Works of Love”’, The Journal of Religious Ethics 25, no. 1 (1997), 65–85. Arne
Grøn, ‘Ethics of Vision’, in Ingolf U. Dalferth (ed.), Ethik der Liebe: Studien zu
Kierkegaards ‘Taten der Liebe’ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 111–22.
faith’ is what is involved in ‘the look’, not in a Sartrean sense, but
in Kierkegaard’s existential and theological sense of a life lived
‘before God’.106
One might think that by viewing ‘history’ as a theological category,
one would idealize the past and be nostalgic in the present, refusing to
confront issues in the future. However, this is precisely the position
that both ressourcement theologians and Kierkegaard resisted.
A more constructive reading of this ressourcement and
Kierkegaard- ian position interprets time, and one’s life in and
through time as sacramental—that is, not an idealized past but an
open stance toward the present and future that humbly receives time
as the gift which ‘educates us for eternity’ in Kierkegaard’s idiom.
For Kierkegaard, ‘the moment of vision’ is not the fixed, timeless
gaze of the Greek statue chiselled in stone. Rather, for Kierkegaard,
one’s life in and through time as a whole is seen as the dynamic,
sustained ‘moment’ or stance in which one learns to see time as ‘the
atom of eternity’, and be fully present in and across time, almost
bringing it to a halt, amid the vanishing flux. In this way,
Kierkegaard brings human subjectivity back to centre stage to
highlight the importance of humility, passion, and how we are
attuned to the world as the site of God’s activity and oriented
toward the future in and with faith, hope, and love. This is the
unknown frontier that each one of us must confront, but not as ‘a
flight from the future’ in nostalgia, as Edward Schillebeeckx has
argued, but in such a way that we learn properly to see God, the
future of humankind.107 How do we learn to approach the future in
the right way? Both ressourcement theologians and Kierkegaard
point to Christ as the one who leads the way for humanity revealing
the eternal in, and the redemption of, time.108
106
For more, see Walter Lowrie, ‘“Existence” as Understood by Kierkegaard and/
or Sartre’, in The Sewanee Review, 58, no. 3 (1950), 379–401.
107
Edward Schillebeeckx, God the Future of Man (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968).
108
For more, see Pattison, Eternal God / Saving Time, 123–31. Pattison says that
for Kierkegaard, ‘eternity does not give us knowledge of or mastery over time, but,
in time, detaches us from reliance on and identification with time whilst
simultaneously, qua suffering and qua obedience, guarding against the self-
forgetful hubris of identifying ourselves with the eternal and absolute knowledge
that is proper solely to God’
(128) Consider a remark from Kierkegaard’s Journal: ‘Christ really relates tangentially
to the earth (nor can the divine relate in any other way): He had no place where he
could lay his head. A tangent is of course a straight line, it only touches the circle at
one single point’ (SKS NB 9:49 [1849]).
So the autopsy of faith theologically refers to being addressed
and transformed by the Word, the seeing of oneself with one’s own
eyes before God, and lastly, the death to self that the human
creature undergoes in order to be contemporary with the
illuminating Word. It’s the movement from Voltaire’s view, ‘In
order to know if he is a God, I ask only one thing of you: that is
to open your eyes’,109 to St Augustine’s, ‘It is a further matter to
say that when a man sees something which is good, God in him sees
that it is good’.110 The difference between the conventional and
theological sense of ‘autopsy of faith’ is the difference between
interrogating and being interrogated by that which one set out to
interrogate in the first place.111 It is also a difference in the act and
content of ‘seeing’. In the conventional respect, ‘seeing’ is a
judgement that the observer endorses reflectively in the act of judging
the object before one’s eyes. Whereas in the theological aspect,
‘seeing’ is hardly a perception but rather reflectively opaque and
resists mastery—in other words, the eyes of faith do not ‘see’, but
as the author of Hebrews has it, ‘can guarantee the blessings that we
hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen’ (Heb.
11:1 NJB). In fact, ‘faith’, like ‘judgement’, can refer to both the act
and content. So in speaking about either the act or content of faith,
it is important not to confuse the secondary place of the latter for
the primacy of the former—as if faith were merely a product of
one’s interrogative deliberation upon clear and distinct perceptions
of an idea. It is good to remember that it is the risen Christ who asks
St Thomas the doubter: ‘Have you believed because you have seen
me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to
believe’ (John 20:29). For Kierkegaard, the eyewitness and the
reader of the eyewitness’s report are equidistant from the self-
revelation of God. Hence, Kierkegaard says that ‘every follower is only
a witness, but the latest one is just as good as the first’; this is not to
denigrate the value of the Fathers, but rather to show that ‘the
one
109
Voltaire, Histoire de Jenni, 61.
110
Augustine and Chadwick, Confessions, Bk 13, ch. 38.
111
For instance, see the relevant discussion in Søren Kierkegaard, WA, 93–108.
Kierkegaard says ‘To ask whether Christ is profound is blasphemy and is an attempt
(be it conscious or unconscious) to destroy him in a subtle way, since the question
contains a doubt with regard to his authority and attempts in impertinent straight-
forwardness to evaluate and grade him, as if he were up for examination and should be
catechized instead of being the one to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth ’
(WA 102).
who comes later believes through the contemporary, but not in him,
stands in just as free a relation to the god as the contemporary does’
(PF 216).
Perhaps now we might be in a better position to see, in a later
chapter, the relevance of Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘autopsy of faith’
for a patrologist like Henri de Lubac, who shares a similar concern
about retrieving the sources of the Christian faith and yet not being
deluded by privileging one epoch above another, as if the self-
revelation of God is not equidistant for all. However, what might be
less clear to us now is how the autopsy of faith remains a real
dilemma for both believers and unbelievers alike. Far from being a
‘proof ’ for the existence of God, the autopsy of faith deprives the
believer and unbeliever of objective evidence—that is, a fact which
need not be interpreted; hence, from our contingent perspective how
might one come to learn the truth or even discern the god’s eternal
presence in history? This question anticipates later chapters on Hans
Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics and Christology, and
Cornelio Fab- ro’s comparison of the ecclesiology of John Henry
Newman and Kierkegaard.
1.5. CONCLUSION: RETRIEVING THE BROADER

CATHOLICITY OF KIERKEGAARD’S
THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
In this chapter, I have addressed two obstacles to my central argu-

ment: i) that Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology is antithetical
to the Catholic faith (§1.1); and ii) the problem of an historicist
reading of Kierkegaard (§1.4). In doing so, I have laid the thematic
groundwork to help the reader see how Kierkegaard shares a basic
aim with ressourcement thinkers: that of recovering a deeper
catholicity of a theological anthropology and theology of history in
the modern age (§1.2–1.3). In my view, there is still plenty of room
for additional ecumenical readings of Kierkegaard’s theological
anthropology, which must be reconsidered in light of the
widespread misconceptions that I identified in part one of this
chapter. Before, it seemed that there would be much for Catholic
theologians to demur regarding Kierkegaard’s theological
anthropology. However, I have argued
that a more ecumenical approach to Kierkegaard’s writings allows
for these objections to be forestalled in light of all that is shared in
common.
In light of the theological reflection and exegesis of
Kierkegaard’s writings in this chapter, it is no wonder that
ressourcement theologians in the twentieth century gravitated
toward Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology. In fact, Henri de
Lubac endorsed Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology as
‘Pauline’, and compared Kierkegaard with Maurice Blondel.112
Moreover, in Cornelio Fabro’s introduction to his Italian translation
of The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, Fabro says
that these two books ‘are close to the kind of “edifying treatises”
found in patristic and medieval times about the human misery and
torment that stings the sinful soul that wants to escape from the face
of God’.113 Fabro goes on to say that, although Kierkegaard writes
under a ‘profoundly Lutheran inspiration’, this still does not negate
the ‘realism of Catholic spirituality’.114 There are more examples of
Catholic engagement with Kierkegaard’s writings, but it is
important for both Kierkegaard scholars and contemporary Catholic
theologians especially, to recover examples of a post- Tridentine
context that sought to overcome significant historical and
theological impasses in modernity. My claim in this book is that
these Catholic thinkers provide a unique example of this phe-
nomenon, which had important ramifications for the reform and
renewal of the Second Vatican Council and subsequent ecumenical
developments.115 It would seem that Kierkegaard’s writings still
continue to escort the reformers today, even within Christian
traditions
112
Henri de Lubac, Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996),
170–1, 188. For more on Blondel’s influence on de Lubac, see Antonio Russo,
Henri De Lubac: Teologia e Dogma nella Storia: L’Influsso di Blondel, La Cultura
(Rome: Studium, 1990). In this passage, de Lubac cites as his source Tisseau’s
French translation of Johannes Hohlenberg’s L’Oeuvre de Søren Kierkegaard
(Copenhagen 1940/Paris 1960), 75, 82–3. Although there were German translations
available, Tisseau’s French translation of The Sickness unto Death was published in
1947, three years after de Lubac published The Drama of Atheist Humanism.
113
Søren Kierkegaard, Il Concetto dell’Angoscia/La Malattia Mortale, trans. Cor-
nelio Fabro (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), v. Translation mine.
114
Ibid., xxii. Translation mine.
115
For more, see Christopher Ruddy, ‘Ressourcement and the Enduring Legacy
of Post-Tridentine Theology’, in Flynn and Murray, Ressourcement, 185–201. See
also, the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification:
<http://www.vatican.va/roman_
curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_31101999_cath-
luth-joint-declaration_en.html> (accessed 20 May 2015).
beyond his own (FSE 211). My overall argument in this book is that
Kierkegaard’s writings have stimulated reform and renewal in
twentieth-century Catholic theology, and should continue to do so
today. In the next chapter, I will take up this question in light of the
wider Catholic reception of Kierkegaard’s writings. Kierkegaard shares
important theological sensibilities that will aid ressourcement
theologians in renewing Catholic theology in the modern age. In
subsequent chapters, I turn to the writings of particular Catholic
reformers to offer a representative model of engagement with
Kierkegaard’s writings.
2
The Wider Catholic Reception

of Kierkegaard’s Writings in
the Twentieth Century
In the previous chapter, I interrogated the validity of an enduring

stereotype regarding the exclusively Lutheran structure of Kierke-
gaard’s theological anthropology. At first glance, this stereotype
resists the possibility of an ecumenical approach to Kierkegaard’s
writings. However, I suggested that it neglects the broader
catholicity of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, which invites
more ecumenical readings of Kierkegaard than scholars have
previously permitted. As an alternative, I offered an account of
Kierkegaard’s compatibility with the basic aims of ressourcement
theologians.
Building upon my constructive account of an ecumenical approach to
Kierkegaard’s writings, in this chapter* I assess briefly the wider
Catholic reception to suggest that stereotypes of Kierkegaard did not
prevent many Catholic thinkers from seeing Kierkegaard as an ally,
appropriating his writings in their project of reform and renewal
during the twentieth century. I will survey the Catholic reception of
Kierkegaard’s writings across the German-, French-, and English-
speaking world to argue that there is significant engagement in the
twentieth century, which coincides with the beginnings of theological
renewal in Catholic theology and the dissemination and translation of
Kierkegaard’s writings in Europe. With the wider Catholic reception in
view, the reader will be better equipped to see how Kierkegaard’s
influence develops in the writings of particular ressourcement
theologians examined in later chapters.
* The material in this chapter comes from my PhD dissertation (2013) and review
article (2014), which were both written independently of Christopher Barnett and
Peter Sajda’s chapter on this topic in Jon Stewart, Blackwell Companion to Kierke-
gaard (Wiley Blackwell, 2015).
2.1. THE KIERKEGAARD RENAISSANCE
IN EUROPE
After Kierkegaard’s death in 1855, it took many years for his writings
to emerge in translation outside of Denmark.1 In his book-length
chapter on the German reception of Kierkegaard, Heiko Schulz
provides an invaluable bibliographic goldmine.2 Importantly,
Schulz admits that there were ‘only very few’ German references to
Kierkegaard in his lifetime.3 However, this fragmentary pre-
reception stage leading up to the turn of the century does not
eliminate common stereotypes about Kierkegaard. For instance,
many German scholars during that time exclusively focused on
Kierkegaard’s post-1850 writings and his critique of the Danish
church, enlisting him for ‘atheist and sectarian’ purposes.4 Indeed,
one year after Kierkegaard’s death, the Catholic historian Joseph
Edmund Jörg (1819–1901) seized upon this image and
simultaneously praised Kierkegaard for his critique of Protestant-
ism, and yet ‘criticiz[ed] him for having failed to draw the
appropriate conclusion’ of endorsing Roman Catholicism.5
This fragmentary picture of Kierkegaard’s thought was soon sup-
plemented in Germany by the intellectual concerns of the Tübingen
theologian, Johann Tobias Beck (1804–1878).6 Beck introduced Kier-
kegaard’s writings to his students Albert Bärthold (1804–1892) and
Christoph Schrempf (1860–1944)—who both would go on to prod-
uce some of the first translations of Kierkegaard in Germany.
Besides translating excerpts from Kierkegaard’s writings, in 1880
Bärthold wrote one of the first books about the theological
relevance of Kier- kegaard.7 By 1902, the Catholic thinker Rudolf
Kassner had started his Kierkegaard reading group in Vienna, and
Kassner had started to produce articles that popularized
Kierkegaard’s aesthetics.8 Schulz also observes how Kassner played
an influential role in introducing Kierkegaard’s writings to both
Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Lukács.9
1
Habib Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of
His Thought (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), xvii.
2
Heiko Schulz, ‘A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard’,
in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception (Farnham: Ashgate,
2009), 307–419.
3
Ibid., 310. 4
Ibid. 5
Ibid., 313. 6
Ibid., 314.
7
Albert Bärthold, Zur theologischen Bedeutung Søren Kierkegaards (Halle: Fricke,
1880).
8
Schulz, ‘A Modest Head Start’, 322. 9
Ibid., 324–6.
Catholic Reception of 6
As Schulz rightly notes, Bärthold was ‘consistently sympathetic’
towards Kierkegaard, but Schrempf was unable to prevent his own
‘scepticism and malaise’ (after leaving the priesthood) from
entering his own presentation of Kierkegaard. Commenting on ‘the
dubious quality’ of Schrempf ’s translations, Schulz says that his
‘repeatedly revised, highly idiosyncratic, and at times breathtakingly
free rendi- tions of the Kierkegaardian texts soon became the
authoritative voice at least for many German Kierkegaard
scholars’—especially, prominent theologians like Barth,
Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, and philosophers like Heidegger, Jaspers,
and Adorno.10 Schulz says that Schrempf spread ‘his own, highly
eclectic, and often polemical message’ privileging Kierkegaard’s
pseudonymous writings to ‘promote and justify religious unbelief
and/or scepticism’.11 This is a common misconception that feeds
into the ‘secular’ Kierkegaard that gets embedded in translation.
The ‘secular Kierkegaard’ stereotype will be promoted in the
twentieth century by some prominent German philosophers and
theologians, and it is appropriated eventually by the ‘death of god’
theology in Anglophone scholarship.
By 1922, less than twelve volumes of Kierkegaard’s writings (out of
twenty-eight) were available in Schrempf ’s German translation.12
Between 1923 and 1929, the major (but not the only) secondary
literature on Kierkegaard in German was written by Eduard
Geismar and Torsten Bohlin. This was also during the time when Karl
Barth was moving away from his initial enthusiasm with Kierkegaard,
leaving his student Hermann Diem to pick up where Barth left off.13
It would not be until the period of the first centenary of
Kierkegaard’s death (1950–1969) that Emanuel Hirsch would
produce a complete and reliable twenty-eight volume translation of
Kierkegaard’s writings in
10
Schulz, ‘A Modest Head Start’, 316. 11
Schulz, ibid., 317.
12
Søren Kierkegaard, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Christoph Schrempf, vol. 12 (Jena:
E. Diederichs, 1922). Schulz observes that volumes 10–12 were Schrempf ’s own
‘infamous Kierkegaard biography’ and his ‘numerous forewords and afterwords’.
By 1935, Schrempf ’s edition had expanded to sixteen volumes (Schulz: 316). For more
on Schrempf, see Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, 311–38. For a survey of the
theological reception of Kierkegaard in Germany at that time, see Werner Elert, Der
Kampf um das Christentum: Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen dem evangelischen
Christentum in Deutschland und dem allgemeinen Denken seit Schleiermacher und Hegel
(Hildesheim: Olms, 2005).
13
Hermann Diem, Philosophie und Christentum bei Søren Kierkegaard (Munich:
Kaiser, 1929).
German. Although Hirsch also wrote ‘the magisterial’ Kierkegaard
Studien (1930–1933), Schulz says that Hirsch:
productively appropriates the Kierkegaardian framework in such a
way as to put his own account of the presuppositions for adequately
and convincingly communicating the Christian truth on the agenda—
an account, which in part deliberately deviates from the one
Kierkegaard had given .. . [that is,] an equally fatal and dangerous
mixture of conservative Lutheranism and political decisionism à la Carl
Schmitt .. . [In fact, Hirsch] was one of the first German theologians
who ‘successfully’ integrated the ideas of [Kierkegaard] into the
framework of a Nazi-ideology.14
In Germany, this early reception was known as the Kierkegaard
Renaissance and it tended to characterize Kierkegaard as either a
Romantic literary figure or as the anti-Hegelian forerunner of exist-
entialism. This reception provided the stereotypes that eventually
led to the occlusion of the theological import of Kierkegaard’s writings
— especially in the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and
Karl Jaspers. Of Karl Jaspers, Schulz says that his ‘whole
philosophical enterprise’ was to recover the ‘significance of
philosophy under the anti-metaphysical and post-religious
conditions and challenges of modernity’—that is, ‘to do away with
the specifically Christian presuppositions and intentions which in
reality prove indispensable for Kierkegaard’s entire thought’.15
In comparison with German scholarship, the Italian reception of
Kierkegaard’s writings was delayed until the 1930s.16 One
prominent strand of thought in this Italian context was Franco
Lombardi’s (1906–1989) work on the ‘new humanism’ of Ludwig
Feuerbach and Kierkegaard. According to Ingrid Basso, Lombardi
was responsible for the misconception that Kierkegaard’s thought
can be reduced to his critique of Hegel, which subsequently results in
irrationalism.17 Another
14
Schulz, ‘A Modest Head Start’, 346–7. For more on Hirsch’s reception of
Kierkegaard, see Matthias Wilke, Die Kierkegaard-Rezeption Emanuel Hirschs: eine
Studie über die Voraussetzungen der Kommunikation christlicher Wahrheit (Tübin-
gen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). For more on Hirsch’s influence on the German reception of
Kierkegaard’s Christology, see Schulz, ‘A Modest Head Start’, 375ff.
15
Ibid., 352.
16
For more on the Italian dependence on German scholarship, see Giuseppe
Mario Pizzuti, Tra Kierkegaard e Barth, l’Ombra di Nietzsche: La ‘Crisi’ come Odissea
dello Spirito (Venosa: Osanna, 1986), 21–100.
17
Basso, ‘Italy: From a Literary Curiosity to a Philosophical Comprehension’, in
Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Southern, Central,
and
misconception of Kierkegaard in the Italian reception pertains to
Kier- kegaard’s relation to atheistic existentialism. Several
misconceptions and distortions were embedded in the Italian
reception of Kierkegaard’s writings, which, the Italian Thomist,
Cornelio Fabro (1911–1995) worked hard to correct. In response,
Fabro also sought to clarify and highlight Kierkegaard’s theological
relevance for Catholicism— especially, Kierkegaard’s critique of
rationalism and his soteriological emphasis upon the truth.18 Basso
says that ‘Fabro opened a new period of Kierkegaard studies, which
brought to an end a phase of vague and mediated works, and moved
toward a new critical and philological one.’19 We will have more to
say about Fabro in a later chapter that is dedicated to him.
Most accounts of Kierkegaard’s reception in France begin with
the momentous influence of Jean Wahl’s (1888–1974) Études
Kierkegaar- diennes (1938)—that is of course, after the impact of
the German reception in the writings of Karl Barth, Martin
Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers to name but a few. 20 Although Wahl
himself criticized the Catholic portrayal of Kierkegaard,21 he was
closely linked at the Sorbonne to several Catholic thinkers like
Jacques Maritain and
Eastern Europe [KRSRR 8:2] (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 87. For more, see Cornelio
Fabro, ‘Kierkegaard in Italia’, Il Veltro 25, nos. 1–3 (1981), 79–89.
18
For more, see Giuseppe Mario Pizzuti, ‘Cornelio Fabro: Traduttore e Interprete
di Kierkegaard in Italia’, Humanitas 39, no. 2 (1984), 127–38. Giuseppe Mario Pizzuti
(ed.), Veritatem in Caritate: Studi in Onore di Cornelio Fabro (Basilicata: Ermes,
1991), 7–20. See also, Flavio Capucci, ‘Cornelio Fabro Interprete di Kierkegaard’,
Studi Cattolici 256 (1982), 364–7.
19
Basso, ‘Italy’, 90.
20
For more, see Edward Baring, ‘Anxiety in Translation: Naming Existentialism
before Sartre’, History of European Ideas 41, no. 4 (2015), 470–88. For more on Wahl
in relation to Hegel and Heidegger, see Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential:
Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2007), 85f. For more on Wahl’s relation to Lévinas, see Samuel Moyn, Origins of
the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2007), 177f. See also, D. Parodi, ‘Philosophy in France, 1937–
1938’, The Philosophical Review 48, no. 1 (1939), 1–30. Also, see Stephen J.
Brown, ‘Currents and Cross-Currents in Post-War France’, Studies: An Irish
Quarterly Review 36, no. 142 (1947), 211–16. See also, Tom Rockmore, Heidegger
and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism, and Being (London: Routledge,
1995). Also see, Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism
(New York: Routledge, 2003), ch. 3. Prior to Wahl, there is the reception in Austro-
Hungary (Lukacs, Buber, Kassner, Kraus von Hoffmansthal, Kafka, and Max
Brod). Even in France, Wahl’s work was already responding to Lev Shestov’s anti-
rationalist reading.
21
Jean Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin,
1938), 380.
22
Gabriel Marcel. Moreover, due to the rise of Heidegger’s philosoph-
ical influence in Europe, a ‘return to the sources’ was emphasized
among philosophers, and Kierkegaard’s popularity is not uncon-
nected from this philosophical ressourcement. According to a
review of Wahl’s book, Theodor Adorno says that, despite the
unimpressive role of Kierkegaard in French philosophy to date,
Heidegger ‘may safely be regarded as a pupil of Kierkegaard’, and
anyone following in the wake of Heidegger must necessarily ‘[go]
back to the sources of the existential fashion now current in
Germany’.23 Adorno says that Wahl’s book ‘serves this purpose’.24
For all its contributions to the field, Études frames the way
subsequent Catholic authors will approach Kierkegaard
biographically—and this is not without caricature. For instance,
Alejandro Sánchez and Azucena Palavicini say that Wahl is
responsible for presenting not only a metaphysical view of Hegel,
but also ‘a belligerent Kierkegaard, a kind of anti- philosopher,
whom [Wahl] sometimes compares to Pascal, an anti- rationalist
who defines the limits of knowledge and the starting point of
faith’.25 As Eric Pons observes, ‘Wahl’s reception is flawed because
he receives Kierkegaard’s Papirer through multiple
intermediaries’.26 Yet, Wahl says that ‘the word “existence” in the
philosophical sense that it is used today was employed for the first
time and discovered by Kierkegaard’.27 Thomists like Étienne
Gilson and Jacques Maritain28 latched on to this observation, but
discarded Kierkegaard along the way in exchange for Henri Bergson,
in what eventually became known as
22
Alejandro Cavallazzi and Azucena Palavicini Sánchez, ‘Jean Wahl: Philosophies
of Existence and the Introduction of Kierkegaard in the Non-Germanic World’, in
Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 395.
23
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Review: Études Kierkegaardiennes by Jean Wahl’, The
Journal of Philosophy 36, no. 1 (1939), 19. For more, see Peter Šajda’s
‘Theodor
W. Adorno: Kierkegaard’s Triumphs and Defeats’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s
Influence on Philosophy: German and Scandinavian Philosophy, Kierkegaard Research:
Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 11 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 3–48.
24
Adorno, ‘Review’, 19.
25
Cavallazzi and Sánchez, ‘Jean Wahl’, 399.
26
See Eric Pons, ‘The French Reception of the Papirer’, in Niels J. Cappelørn,
Hermann Deuser, and Jon Stewart (eds), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 353; 346–65.
27
Jean Wahl, Petite histoire de ‘l’existentialisme’: suivie de Kafka et Kierkegaard
(Paris: Limoges, 1947), 12; as cited in Cavallazzi and Sánchez, ‘Jean Wahl’, 402.
28
For instance, see Nathaniel Kramer, ‘Jacques Maritain: Kierkegaard As
“Cham- pion of the Singular”’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 217–32; esp. pp. 223ff.
29
‘existential’ Thomism. It is undeniable that Wahl’s Études is a water-
shed mark in the French reception of Kierkegaard. 30 After Wahl’s
contribution, it is not surprising that many Catholic theologians in
France would be drawn to Kierkegaard, but read him in light of a
Thomistic perspective. Kierkegaard had already become established as
a major figure in the German, Italian, and French intellectual tradi-
tions. Indeed, it would seem that any account of a Catholic reception of
Kierkegaard must begin and end with the Kierkegaard Renaissance
in Europe—but there is more to the story than that.
2.2. THEODOR HAECKER
Habib Malik’s penetrating analysis of the European impact and

transmission of Kierkegaard’s writings concludes with Theodor
Haecker (1879–1945). Malik says that after Haecker, ‘there came
forth a few individuals who followed his lead in attempting to claim
Kierkegaard for the Catholic tradition, and to express
Kierkegaardian insights in Catholic terms’.31 Malik goes on to say
that the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard ‘represents a radical way
of raising the legitimate question of Kierkegaard’s relation to
Catholicism, both
29
For more on Bergson and the French philosophical context of this era, see Gary
Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001), chs. 3–4. For more on ‘existential Thomism’, see
John
F. X. Knasas, Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2003), chs. 6–7; esp. pp. 14–17. Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions
of Thomism (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 80–7.
30
For more, see Bousquet, ‘Kierkegaard dans la tradition théologique franco-
phone’, Kierkegaard Revisited (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 339–66. See also,
Teboul, ‘La Réception de Kierkegaard en France 1930–1960’, Revue des sciences
philosophiques et théologiques 89, no. 2 (2005), 315–36.
31
Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, 390. One of these thinkers is Miguel de
Unamuno, see Malik’s treatment (pp. 284–7). For more, see Jan E. Evans, ‘Miguel
De Unamuno’s Reception and Use of the Kierkegaardian Claim That “Truth Is
Subject- ivity”’, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 64, no. 2/4 (2008), 1113–26. See also,
George Pattison, ‘Paradox and Mystery: Catholic Existentialism,’ in Anxious
Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (London: Macmillan,
1999), 194–201. Other Catholic thinkers would be Eugen Biser, Friedrich von
Hügel, and Thomas Merton, see relevant chapters in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s
Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources,
Reception and Resources, vol. 10, tome 3 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012).
historically as regards his own acquaintance with it, and theologically
in terms of affinities between his positions and Catholic doctrine’.32
Markus Kleinert says that Haecker was ‘one of the dominant
figures’ who ‘advanced and steered’ the ‘German-language Kierke-
gaard reception’, and the German reception was ‘inextricably inter-
twined with Haecker’s “own encounter with Kierkegaard”’.33
According to Haecker himself, the writings of Kierkegaard were
virtually unknown to the French- and English-speaking world at
that time.34 In 1913, Haecker wrote his first essay entitled, Kierke-
gaard and the Philosophy of Inwardness.35 After the publication of
Satire und Polemik (1914–20),36 Haecker was received into the
Cath- olic Church, spending the next several years learning Danish
and translating Kierkegaard and Newman into German.37 Haecker
was also arrested and banned from speaking either at the
university or on the radio because he was an outspoken critic of
Nazism.38 On the
32
Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, 390.
33
Markus Kleinert, ‘Theodor Haecker: The Mobilization of a Total Author’, in
Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 91. See also, Karin Masser, Theodor Haecker: Literatur in
theologischer Fragestellung (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986), 339–63. In fact, one sees that
at the root of the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard, there is an appropriation of
Haecker’s/Kierke- gaard’s critique of modernity and a simultaneous rejection of
Kierkegaard as a Protestant foil of irrationality. For more, see Werner Becker, ‘Der
Überschritt von Kierkegaard zu Newman in der Lebensentscheidung Theodor
Haeckers’, Newman- Studien 1 (1948), 251–70. It is worth noting how Fabro’s
translation strategy follows that of Haecker, with a comparison of Kierkegaard and
Newman, and an emphasis upon the theological writings and Journals. However,
Fabro does not malign Kierke- gaard for being a Protestant.
34
See Theodor Haecker, ‘Søren Kierkegaard’, in Heinz-Horst Schrey (ed.), Søren
Kierkegaard (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), 19. See also
Haecker’s, Sören Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit (Munich: Verlag
J. F. Schreiber, 1913), 5–6. For more on the literary reception of Kierkegaard in
Germany before 1920, see Christian Wiebe, Der witzige, tiefe, leidenschaftliche Kier-
kegaard: zur Kierkegaard-Rezeption in der deutschsprachigen Literatur bis 1920, vol.
311, Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter,
2012). For a helpful bibliography and a portrait of Haecker’s reception of Kierkegaard,
see Kleinert, ‘Theodor Haecker’, 91–114.
35
Haecker, ‘Søren Kierkegaard’.
36
Theodor Haecker, Satire und Polemik, 1914–1920 (Innsbruck: Brenner-Verl.,
1920).
37
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (London: Harvill Press, 1950), xiii.
38
Ibid. Haecker’s journal documents his arrest and his critique of German
nationalism. Also, Alexander Dru provides an invaluable introduction to Haeck-
er’s work. Dru is perhaps less well known than his English translations of
Kierkegaard, Péguy, Burckhardt, Haecker, Blondel, de Lubac, and Balthasar. Dru
was introduced to Kierkegaard through Haecker’s writings and in turn introduced
dust jacket of the English translation of Haecker’s Journal, Jacques
Maritain said that Haecker was ‘a man of deep insight and rare
intellectual integrity—a “Knight of Faith” to use Kierkegaard’s expres-
sion’. Interestingly, Tracey Rowland traces the influence of
Haecker’s translation of John Henry Newman on Pope Benedict
XVI; however, she neglects the impact of Haecker’s work on
Kierkegaard.39
As Allan Janik suggests, had Haecker not translated and redis-
covered Kierkegaard’s Two Ages in 1914 for the German-speaking
world, it is highly unlikely that Theodor Adorno, Martin Buber,
Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Karl Jaspers would
have accessed the Dane’s notion of ‘idle talk’ on their own.40 That
said, Haecker was not the first to translate Kierkegaard into
German. However, Janik says that Haecker was (unlike the
translations by the Lutheran minister Christoph Schrempf) the first
to reliably translate ‘a major work of Kierkegaard’ in such a way
that ‘set the tone for the reception of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre
generally’.41 Also it is worth noting that Haecker translated
Kierkegaard’s theological writings because they had been omitted
from Christoph Schrempf ’s translations. Of the pseudonymous
works, Haecker said that Kierkegaard’s
Kierkegaard to the English-speaking world. For more, see George Pattison, ‘Great
Britain: From “Prophet of the Now” To Postmodern Ironist (and after)’, in Jon
Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009),
250. See also, John Heywood-Thomas and Hinrich Siefken, ‘Theodor Haecker and
Alexander Dru: A Contribution to the Discovery of Kierkegaard in Britain’,
Kierkegaardiana 18 (1996), 173–90.
39
Tracey Rowland, Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark,
2010), 11–12. Rowland does briefly recognize Haecker’s ‘dedication’ to
Kierkegaard on p. 20, but only in relation to Alexander Dru and no more.
40
For more on Haecker’s reception of Kierkegaard and his relation to other
German philosophers, see Allan Janik, ‘Haecker, Kierkegaard and the Early
Brenner: A Contribution to the History of the Reception of Two Ages in the
German-Speaking World’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard
Commentary, vol. 14, vol. 14: Two Ages (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1984),
190, 220. See also, John
M. Hoberman, ‘Kierkegaard’s “Two Ages” and Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity’, in
Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 14: Two Ages
(Macon: Mercer University Press, 1984), 240–1. Supposedly, Martin Heidegger had a
‘love–hate’ relationship with Haecker for decades, see Theodore J. Kisiel, The Genesis
of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 321.
Wittgenstein felt so indebted to Haecker that he donated some of his family money
to him, see Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Cape, 1990),
109.
41
Janik, ‘Haecker, Kierkegaard’, 191. In 1909, Schrempf left the Lutheran
Church and much of his later popularization of Kierkegaard was influenced by this
step (his twelve-volume German edition of Kierkegaard’s writings appeared
between 1909 and 1922).
‘really precious theological ideas are not found in those works’.42 In
a posthumous essay that received the unfortunate English title
Kierke- gaard the Cripple (1948), Haecker himself says that:
Kierkegaard’s ideas required a different climate if they were to
develop harmoniously and fit into the eternal philosophy of being, and
the theology of the infallible Church. As a result, they were often
confined within wholly heterogeneous elements and did not attain the
fruitfulness to which they were entitled by their real meaning and
function.43
According to Haecker, Kierkegaard’s ‘place is to be found in
Thom- istic philosophy and theology, where it belongs, which
language would have shielded him from his absurd philosophy of
the absurd as divine truth in the light of human understanding’:44
It has always proved my greatest disappointment and is incomprehen-
sible to me, not to find in [Kierkegaard] that strong and clear, burning
intellectual desire for the unalloyed perfection and purity of the true
doctrine so impressively demonstrated in the letters of the apostles,
the early fathers, the history of the Church and of the saints, and
which at the same period gave Newman no rest until with sorrow he
was forced for the sake of truth to abandon the Anglican Church, and
return to the Church.45
Haecker is right to distinguish Kierkegaard from Newman in
ecclesial terms; however, this should not indicate that their
commitments or intellectual targets were incongruous.46 But we are
left with a real question as to whether the Christology and ecclesiology
of Kierkegaard and Newman can be reconciled—I will address this
topic in a later chapter.
42
Kleinert, ‘Theodor Haecker’, 105 n. 49. For more, see Gerhard Schreiber,
‘Christoph Schrempf: The “Schwabian Socrates” as Translator of Kierkegaard’, in
Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: German Theology [KRSRR
10:1] (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 275–319.
43
Theodor Haecker and C. van O. Bruyn, Der Buckel Kierkegaards [Kierkegaard
the Cripple] (London: Harvill Press, 1948), 13.
44
Ibid., 14.
45
Ibid., 20. Haecker is not the only Catholic at this time to compare Kierkegaard to
Newman, see Regis Jolivet and W. H. Barber, Introduction to Kierkegaard
(London: Frederick Muller, 1950), 65. ‘Kierkegaard also has a notion of
development as continuity which exactly corresponds with the reflections Newman
had just published in 1845 in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.’
46
For a more harmonious view, see M. Jamie Ferreira, ‘Leaps and Circles:
Kierke- gaard and Newman on Faith and Reason’, Religious Studies 30, no. 4 (1994a),
379–97.
However, what unites Kierkegaard, Newman, and Haecker is an
emphasis upon ‘wonder’ and how it resists conceptual mastery. On
the topic of wonder, Haecker says, ‘There is one thing that has
come to full maturity in me: the understanding that I do not
understand God: the sense of the Mysterium. That prevents me
from misunderstanding the things of this world.’47 Acknowledging
this comparison of Kierkegaard and Newman, Alexander Dru
sums up Haecker’s position: ‘the ultimate mystery of existence is
the safeguard of truth and knowledge, the only safeguard against
the inadequate attempts to explain everything, and the absurd
denial of meaning’.48 In 1949, Dru was preparing translations of
Haecker and published two articles49 about Haecker’s relation to
Kierkegaard in the Downside Review which appeared alongside one
of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s first articles printed in English. In one
article about Haecker, Dru reminds the reader that ‘What Kierke-
gaard meant by faith, which he so often and misleadingly defines as
being “against” reason, is in line with Newman’s description of
conscience.’50
Haecker’s foundational place in the Kierkegaardian tradition in
Catholicism is important because of his translation of the writings
of Newman and Kierkegaard, and his subsequent influence upon
important figures. Indeed, Haecker’s work on Kierkegaard is also
important to signal because it precedes that of Karl Barth51 and
47
Haecker, Journal in the Night, 47. For more on Newman, see Gerard Loughlin,
‘The Wonder of Newman’s Education’, New Blackfriars 92, no. 1038 (2011), 224–
42.
48
Haecker, Journal in the Night, xli, 74. Dru mentions that the context of New-
man’s sermon ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’ is an attempt to articulate a similar point.
See John Henry Newman, James David Earnest, and Gerard Tracey (eds), Fifteen
Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 251ff.
49
The first article is a condensed version of what appears as the introduction to
Dru’s translation of Haecker’s Journals, see Alexander Dru, ‘Haecker’s Point of View’,
Downside Review 67, no. 209 (1949a), 260–75; Alexander Dru, ‘On Haecker’s
Meta- physik des Gefühls’, Downside Review 68, no. 211 (1949b), 35–45.
50
Dru, ‘On Haecker’s Metaphysik’, 40.
51
‘The post-war Catholic recovery of the Fathers would also have been very
different without Blondel—but it would have been different too without the
immediacy of the challenge of existentialism. Barth’s Anselm, Barth’s Calvin,
even Barth’s St Paul, owe a lot to Barth’s Kierkegaard’, in Rowan Williams, Why Study
the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church (London: Darton Longman & Todd,
2005), 98. Barth’s brief exposure to Kierkegaard came in the 1920s during his revision
of Der Römerbrief (2nd edn., 1922), but his Danish muse had been discarded by the
1930s. See Bruce
L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and
52
Paul Tillich —two figures that are often associated with
introducing Kierkegaard to the world of theology. During this time
period, it was the translations by Theodor Haecker and Der Brenner
that provided a more accurate picture of Kierkegaard in Germany.
Haecker focused on the edifying discourses, the Journals, and the
Book on Adler—books that Schrempf ’s translations had overlooked.
Being both critical and appreciative of Kierkegaard, Haecker spun
Kierkegaard’s critique of the church into a more sympathetic love
for the church. This can be seen in his comparison between
Kierkegaard and John Henry Newman—an unexpected dialogue
partner in a time when Kierke- gaard was being compared with
Nietzsche. In short, Heiko Schulz rightly indicates that ‘it was not
Schrempf, but the Brenner circle (Haecker, in particular) which
proved instrumental for spreading the Kierkegaardian gospel to a
wider German-speaking audience’.53
2.3. ROMANO GUARDINI
The next prominent figure to introduce briefly is the Italo-German

Catholic priest and philosopher Romano Guardini (1885–1968).
Guardini is significant, not just because of his impact upon
influential ressourcement theologians,54 but also because of his early
engagement with Kierkegaard as a mystical thinker.55 For Robert
Krieg, ‘Guardini
Development, 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 4 n. 10, 217, 235ff. For
more, see Sean A. Turchin, ‘Introducing Christianity into Christendom:
Investigating the Affinity between Søren Kierkegaard and the Early Thought of Karl
Barth’ (Uni- versity of Edinburgh, 2011 [PhD thesis]). See also, Philip G. Ziegler,
‘Barth’s Criti- cisms of Kierkegaard—a Striking out at Phantoms?’, International
Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 4 (2007), 434–51. Carl S. Hughes,
Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of
Eros (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 15ff, 195ff.
52
Tillich claims to have been exposed to Kierkegaard at university in 1905,
however he would not go on to write about Kierkegaard until much later. For more,
see Schulz, ‘A Modest Head Start’, 342.
53
Ibid., 330. See also, Alessandra Granito, ‘Kierkegaard Contemporaneo: sull’attua-
lità di una recensione letteraria a partire dalla ricezione Haekeriana’, in Isabella Adinolfi,
ed., Kierkegaard Duecento Anni Dopo (Genoa: Il Melangolo, 2014), 97–131.
54
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Romano Guardini: Reform from the Source (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010). See also, Massimo Borghesi, Romano Guardini:
Dialettica e Antropologia (Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1990).
55
For instance, see Der Ausgangspunkt der Denkbewegung Soren Kierkegaards
(Kösel, 1927), Vom Sinn der Schwermut (1928), and Unterscheidung des
Christlichen (Mainz, 1935). Of Guardini, Balthasar said that he was
‘profoundly affected by
reiterated Kierkegaard’s conviction concerning the singular
character of revelation as known within the Judeo-Christian
scriptures and tradition’.56 As early as Spring 1925, Guardini was
teaching courses on Kierkegaard in Berlin, and he had taught
prominent students like Hannah Arendt, Hans Urs von Balthasar,
and Josef Pieper.57
When Romano Guardini presents the thought of Kierkegaard, the
genre that he often compares Kierkegaard with is that of mystical
theology and Christian psychology.58 The primary theme that Guar-
dini traces in Kierkegaard’s works is that of melancholy or depression,
and the primary texts that Guardini engages with are Christoph
Schrempf ’s German translation of The Sickness unto Death and My
Point of View as an Author.59 Guardini often reads Kierkegaard in a
flat-footed way, taking everything that is presented as
autobiography. However for Guardini, Kierkegaard’s fictive author
Anti-Climacus provides ‘the interpretive key’ to understanding
Kierkegaard’s authorship (PR 33). Guardini supports his
autobiographical approach to Kierkegaard’s writings with relevant
passages from Kierkegaard’s Jour- nals.60 Although this approach
does not generate a psychologically healthy exemplar for Guardini,
he still sees Kierkegaard’s writings as useful for Catholic readers.
In his essay entitled Der Ausgangspunkt der Denkbewegung
Søren Kierkegaards (1927), Guardini says that the usefulness of
Kierkegaard’s
Kierkegaard’ in Balthasar, Romano Guardini, 77. For more on Guardini and

Kierke- gaard, see the excellent essays by Peter Šajda, ‘Isolation on Both Ends?
Romano Guardini’s Double Response to the Concept of Contemporaneity’, in Niels
Jørgen Cappelørn, H. Deuser, and K. B. Söderquist (eds), Kierkegaard Studies
Yearbook 2010: Kierkegaard’s Late Writings (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 201–22.
Also see, Peter Šajda, ‘The Choice of Onself: Revisiting Guardini’s Critique of
Kierkegaard’s Concept of Selfhood’, Filozofia 66, no. 9 (2011), 868–78. See also,
Peter Šajda, ‘Romano Guardini: Between Actualistic Personalism, Qualitative
Dialectic and Kinetic Logic’, in Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology:
Catholic and Jewish Theology, 45–74.
56
Robert Anthony Krieg, Romano Guardini: A Precursor of Vatican II (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 31.
57
Krieg, Romano Guardini, 91. The title of Guardini’s 1925 course was
‘Christian- ity and Culture in View of Søren Kierkegaard’. He would teach on
Kierkegaard again in the autumn of 1925 and autumn of 1927 (Krieg, 222 n. 22).
58
Romano Guardini, PR.
59
In passing, Guardini will acknowledge snippets from Either/Or, Concept of
Anxiety, Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and
Stages in Life’s Way.
60
Often, Guardini only cites the first volume of Theodor Haecker’s German
translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals.
writings can best be seen by reading him as an exemplar of
‘vitalism’ who develops a theology of personhood in the condition
of modernity—an emphasis not dissimilar to Guardini’s own
interests (PR 29). In particular, Guardini highlights Kierkegaard’s
emphasis upon selfhood as taking up a stance in relation to God and
to oneself (PR 35). With Kierkegaard, Guardini finds a way to
speak about human creatures as dependent upon God (PR 39).
However, as a result of his autobiographical approach, Guardini
does fall into some common interpretive traps, such as seeing
Kierkegaard fully endorsing Romanticism (PR 54–7), or interpreting
Kierkegaard’s notion of a ‘leap’ as a volitional endorsement of
logical contradiction (PR 59), or reading Kierkegaard’s notion of
‘indirect communication’ as referring to the ineffable (PR 68), and
his notion of ‘paradox’ as irresponsibly embracing
incomprehensibility (PR 71).
Although Guardini’s method of reading does not allow him to
grasp Kierkegaard’s point fully, this does not stop Guardini from
using Kierkegaard to flesh out a theology of melancholy in his essay
entitled Vom Sinn der Schwermut (1928). Here, Guardini strings
together a list of long quotations from Kierkegaard’s Journals and
Point of View in an attempt to portray what depression feels like.
Guardini faults Kierkegaard for escaping too often into solitude,
which perpetuates such a melancholic state (PR 102). Guardini’s
treatment of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on silence raises an interesting
question regarding the difference between enclosing reserve, the
demonic, and learning silence from the lilies and the birds. On the
face of it, a person could be conceivably solitary and silent in all
three states. However, it seems that Guardini is only aware of what
he calls ‘bad melancholy’ in Kierkegaard’s writings and spends the
rest of his essay trying to sketch a theology of ‘good melancholy’.
For Guardini, ‘bad melancholy’ leads the person away from God
and toward eternal perdition, whereas ‘good melancholy’ leads a
person toward God in faith (PR 112–14). From Kierkegaard,
Guardini learns that for the finite human creature, melancholy lights
up their relation to the Creator God—indeed, Guardini says that
melancholy is ‘the call of God’ upon a person’s life and is ‘the cost
of eternity’s birth in the person’ (PR 111). Instead of positively
endorsing depression as a theological virtue per se, Guardini
cautions the reader to avoid melancholy, because it can invite the
double temptation of reducing one’s life to the infantile by
privileging the immediacy of nature and the senses, or by inviting a
monastic withdrawal from the world which
privileges the immediacy of religious experience (PR 116). In the end,
Guardini says that Kierkegaard offers a theologically informed
image of humans as ‘boundary dwellers’ between eternity and time
(PR 119). By way of conclusion, Guardini points the reader in
search of relief from melancholy to Christ in Gethsemane, and yet
Guardini does remind the reader that there is no solution on earth
for melancholy (PR 120). There is an interesting connection to be
made between Guardini’s account of melancholy here and (his
student) Hans Urs von Balthasar’s account of anxiety. In a later
chapter, I will sketch the implications of what Guardini leaves
unanswered in his theology of melancholy, and how it finds an
explicit answer in Balthasar’s theology of anxiety. However, it is
worth noting briefly how Guardini connects Kierkegaard to Blaise
Pascal and places Kierkegaard into a counter-Enlightenment
trajectory (as opposed to Alasdair MacIntyre’s unfortunate portrayal
of Kierkegaard as another post-Kantian figure perpetuating
Enlightenment ideals in After Virtue61).
In his book on Blaise Pascal (1935), 62 Guardini suggests that Pascal
has solutions to the problems of modernity that Kierkegaard falls prey
to as ‘an isolated individual, struggling against the Church’ (P
17).
However, Guardini says that Kierkegaard
gains a share in [guadagna quota] the capacity of an elevated form of
existence; he opens new horizons and he is able to see higher things; a
new faculty of judgment is awakened in him and he is able to evaluate
and love at a higher level. (P 24)
In this way, Guardini rehabilitates Kierkegaard’s notion of the
decisive leap by situating it alongside Pascal’s Memorial (1654),
which makes good on the perceived shortcomings of Kierkegaard’s
religious stage of existence (P 25).
Ultimately, Guardini succumbs to the stereotype that I addressed
in the previous chapter, because he detects an overly pessimistic
and Lutheran theology (P 301). For instance, when discussing the
61
For MacIntyre’s account, see Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in
Moral Theory, 3rd edn. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 39–
52. For the debate surrounding MacIntyre’s account of Kierkegaard, see
John
J. Davenport et al., Kierkegaard after Macintyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and
Virtue (Chicago: Open Court, 2001). See also, John Lippitt, ‘Getting the Story Straight:
Kierkegaard, Macintyre and Some Problems with Narrative’, Inquiry 50, no. 1 (2007).
62
Romano Guardini, P. All translations are mine.
hiddenness or unknowability of God, Guardini distinguishes Pascal
from Kierkegaard saying that Pascal would know nothing of the
absolute incommensurability of the holiness of God and sinfulness
of humanity which Kierkegaard allegedly poses (P 156).63 Guardini
views Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology as illustrating a
Reformed understanding of total depravity, which regards humanity
as not just performing sinful acts but rather as sinful in itself (P
207). Guardini’s initial concern about Kierkegaard’s perspectivism
in his account of the stages transforms into suspicious grounds for
dismissal when Kierkegaard speaks theologically of the depravity of
the human being. Even though Guardini places Kierkegaard in
the Pascalian tradition of distinguishing the god of philosophers
from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (P 45), Guardini is
convinced that Kierke- gaard’s god is too scandalously ‘wholly
other’ and self-subverting to preserve humanity from being
shipwrecked when the individual irrationally relates to an unknown
god (P 211–12). Guardini believes that ‘in Kierkegaard there is the
complete resignation of every logical security’ which results in ‘the
negation of every fruitful aspect of logic in the positive sense and
culminates in the concept of the absurd’ (P 214). For Guardini, the
positive contribution that Kierkegaard makes to Christian theology
is ‘to delineate Christian Truth on the basis of the problem of being
human’ and ‘to develop the complexity of that Truth according
to the central theme of the stages of human existence’ (P 281).
It should be noted that although Guardini owned a number of
Kierkegaard’s works, his reading of Kierkegaard is largely based on
only three pseudonymous works: The Concept of Anxiety,
Philosophical Fragments, and The Sickness unto Death.64 To be
fair, Guardini’s evaluation of Kierkegaard is not entirely negative,
and he is sympathetic to Kierkegaard’s discussion of anxiety and
contemporaneity with Christ. Moreover, Peter Šajda notes how
Guardini uses Kierkegaard’s ‘Lutheran’ thought to argue for a
Catholic ecclesiology by extending what Kierkegaard says about
Christ, to apply to
the church after the ascension.65
63
Recently, Simon Podmore has problematized this ‘neo-orthodox’
understanding of Kierkegaard’s notion of an ‘absolute qualitative difference’ as
pivoting on sin, and argues that this has more to do with grace and forgiveness; see
Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss
64
Šajda, ‘Romano Guardini’, 52. 65
Ibid., 69.
In some respects, Guardini compares Pascal to Kierkegaard as if
to grasp a Catholic understanding of a Protestant crisis of faith. In
the end, Guardini appreciates Kierkegaard at arm’s length but
ultimately holds up Pascal as the Catholic exemplar par excellence.
However, in a critical review of Guardini’s book, Cornelio Fabro
re-frames Guar- dini’s treatment of both Pascal and Kierkegaard as
religious exemplars that show us:
i) ‘the vanity of abstract reason for knowing the living and
true God’;
ii) ‘the necessity of Jesus Christ for introducing us to the
knowledge of God’;
iii) ‘the knowledge of our own suffering in order to orient
ourselves in the knowledge of God in Christ’.66
For Fabro, the Pascalian ‘heart’ finds expression in Kierkegaard,
and Fabro argues that the emphasis upon the heart is ‘not the
substitution of the rational sphere but rather its completion, and it
hinges upon the Infinite. Even St. Thomas affirmed that God draws
nearer to us with love rather than with knowledge, because love draws
the beloved directly.’67 Fabro continues to explain that the ‘heart’ is
then ‘the whole expression of the individual’s spiritual life which by
now judges everything “before God” as Kierkegaard would say’,
and is a vital resource for humanity which ‘has forgotten God
because it has withered at the desiccated fonts of reason’.68 I will
discuss Fabro more in a later chapter, but it is important that he
circumvents Guardini’s stereotype of Kierkegaard in this way.
2.4. ERICH PRZYWARA
The next prominent Catholic thinker who needs to be mentioned is

Erich Przywara SJ (1889–1972). Przywara is probably best known for
his famous dispute with Karl Barth regarding the notion of
‘analogy
66
Cornelio Fabro, ‘Il “Pascal” di Romano Guardini’, Il Fuoco VI, no. 1 (1958), 3–6.
All translations are mine. For more on Pascal’s theology, see William Wood, Blaise
Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
67
Fabro, ‘Il “Pascal”’, 6. 68
Ibid.
69
of being’. Indeed, Przywara is also known for presenting Kierke-
gaard as essentially an anonymous Catholic in his Das Geheimnis
Kierkegaards (1929)70 after spending some time lecturing in Davos
with Paul Tillich.71 Although more comprehensive work still needs to
be done on Przywara’s actual reception of Kierkegaard, Christopher
Barnett has provided a helpful essay that allows readers to obtain a
sense of Przywara’s engagement with Kierkegaard’s writings.72 One of
the main reasons why Przywara took an interest in Kierkegaard’s
writings was because Kierkegaard was a modern thinker who illu-
minated the relationship between human beings and God in terms of
difference and presence—something that would feature as a
centrepiece in Przywara’s understanding of analogia entis.73 It should
also be noted that in 1930, Karl Barth attended Przywara’s lectures
on Kierkegaard in Basel.74 Przywara writes during the high point of
the German reception of Kierkegaard, citing in his preface works by
Christoph Schrempf, Theodor Haecker, Romano Guardini, Torsten
Bohlin, and Eduard Geismar, among others. Przywara’s book dis-
cusses the interpretive complexity of Kierkegaard’s
pseudonyms,
69
Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal
Rhythm (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). For more on this dispute, see Keith
L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T&T Clark, 2010). Also,
see the relevant essays in Thomas Joseph White, The Analogy of Being: Invention of
the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). For more
on Przywara, see Thomas F. O’Meara, Erich Przywara, S. J.: His Theology and His
World (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). See also, John R. Betz,
‘Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part One)’, Modern
Theology 21, no. 3 (2005), 367–411. John R. Betz, ‘Beyond the Sublime: The
Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two)’, Modern Theology 22, no. 1
(2006), 1–50. Kenneth
R. Oakes, ‘Three Themes in Przywara’s Early Theology’, The Thomist 74 (2010),
283–310. See also relevant essays in Thomas Joseph White and Bruce
L. McCormack (eds), Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-
Protestant Dialogue (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013).
70
Erich Przywara, Das geheimnis Kierkegaards (Munich and Berlin: Verlag von
R. Oldenbourg, 1929).
71
O’Meara, n 69, 111. Przywara noted how he grew fonder of Kierkegaard, but
how Tillich became more enthralled with Schelling. For more, see Thomas
O’Meara, ‘Paul Tillich and Erich Przywara at Davos’, Gregorianum 87, no. 2
(2006), 227–38.
72
See Christopher B. Barnett, ‘Erich Przywara: Catholicism’s Great Expositor of
the “Mystery” of Kierkegaard’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on
The- ology: Catholic and Jewish Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception
and Resources, vol, 10, tome 3 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012a), 131–51. See also,
Cornelio Fabro, ‘Spunti Cattolici nel Pensiero Religioso di Søren Kierkegaard’,
Doctor Com- munis 26, no. 4 (1973), 251–80.
73
O’Meara, Erich Przywara, 77. 74
Ibid., 216 n. 24.
spirituality, and his ideas in general. Przywara also has a bit to say
about Kierkegaard’s ‘personal Mariology’75—a topic that I will
return to in a later chapter.
What is perhaps less known is the extent of Barth’s indebtedness
to Przywara’s presentation of Kierkegaard. Walter Lowrie says in
his introduction to Kierkegaard’s ‘Attack on Christendom’ that
Przy- wara’s Catholic portrayal of Kierkegaard is partly responsible
for Barth’s later rejection of Kierkegaard.76 Indeed, Barth is quoted
as saying, ‘If I were to follow Kierkegaard, I might as well go over
there [the Vatican]’.77 Although it has been argued that the majority
of Barth’s criticisms of Kierkegaard are misguided, 78 what Barth
says about Przywara’s influential portrayal of Kierkegaard remains
significant. For instance, Barth’s staunch resistance to Emil
Brunner is resourced by Przywara’s Catholic portrayal of
Kierkegaard:
The ‘No!’ with which we have to oppose Brunner applies even if he
should one day return to the form of his doctrine which follows
Kierkegaard and Heidegger. There is no fundamental difference between
that form and the one which he seems to wish to adopt now . . . Brunner’s
conception of the Roman Catholic doctrine is insufficient and not
authoritative. If he had derived his information from the works of E.
Przywara he would have found that this great exponent of the doctrine
of analogy long ago used a phrase of the fourth Lateran Council and
also the whole Kierkegaardian dialectic to interpret the ability to
despair and real despair in a Roman Catholic sense.79
75
Przywara, Das geheimnis Kierkegaards, 114.
76
For Barth’s rejection of Kierkegaard, see ‘A Thank you and a Bow—
Kierkegaard’s Reveille’ and ‘Kierkegaard and the Theologians’, in Karl Barth,
Frag- ments Grave and Gay, ed. Eric Mosbacher and Hans Martin Rumscheidt
(London: Fontana, 1971), 95–101, 102–4. It should also be noted that Barth had read
Przywara’s book on Kierkegaard, see Karl Barth, Karl Barth—Eduard Thurneysen
Briefwechsel, Band II: 1921–1930 (Ga V.4), ed. Eduard Thurneysen, Karl Barth
Gesamtausgabe (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1974), 668. For this reference, I am
gratefully indebted to Dr Hans-Anton Drewes at the Barth Archive in Basel. Also,
Karl Barth famously said that ‘Kierkegaard needs occasionally to be corrected with
Kant’ in reference to Kierkegaard’s discussion of placing the individual higher than
the universal in Fear and Trembling. For more on Barth’s Kantian corrective, see
David Clough, Ethics in Crisis: Interpreting Barth’s Ethics (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005), 39ff.
77
Søren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon ‘Christendom’, 1854–1855, trans. Walter Lowrie
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), xvi. Lowrie provides only anecdotal
evidence of Barth saying this.
78
For more, see an excellent article by Ziegler, ‘Barth’s Criticisms’, 434–51.
79
Emil Brunner, Karl Barth, and J. Baillie, Natural Theology: Comprising
‘Nature and Grace’ (London: The Centenary Press, 1946), 116. For this
reference, I am
What emerges from this citation is the extent to which Barth
acknowledges his own indebtedness to Przywara’s Catholic
portrayal of Kierkegaard. Moreover, what also emerges at this point
in the Euro- pean reception of Kierkegaard is how Barth plays a less
constructive and a more reactionary role when his indebtedness to
the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard is uncovered. Although
Przywara’s book tends to be scoffed at today by Kierkegaard
scholars, the scope of its influence shows that it should not be so
quickly dismissed.
2.5. ERIK PETERSON
Erik Peterson (1890–1960) is a very important theologian whose

writings are often neglected in the English-speaking world. Pope Bene-
dict XVI has referred to Peterson as a ‘distinguished theologian’
who ‘never found in his life a true place where he could obtain
recognition and a permanent home’ (cf. Heb. 13:14). Reflecting
upon his first encounter with Peterson’s Theological Tractates,
Benedict says:
I read the book with increasing curiosity and let myself be truly
impas- sioned by it because in it I found the theology I was seeking: it
is a theology that uses all the seriousness of history to understand and
study texts, it analyzes them with the full gravity of historical research
and does not relegate them to the past. Indeed, in his research .. .
[Peterson] comes into contact with the One from whom theology itself
derives: the living God . . . Thus I learned from him, in a most essential
and profound way, what theology really is.80
Indeed, the historian John Connelly has argued that Peterson’s exe-
gesis of Romans 9–11 in The Church of Jews and Pagans (1934)
was instrumental in stemming the tide of Catholic anti-Semitism,
and would later shape the Catholic reconsideration of Judaism in
Nostra Aetate.81 Although it is beyond the scope of this book, the
influence of
gratefully indebted to Dr Peter Zocher and Dr Hans-Anton Drewes at the Barth

Archive in Basel.
80
‘A Foreigner Searching for Eternity’, in L’Osservatore Romano, 8 December
2010, number 49, p. 16. The International Symposium on Erik Peterson took place
at the Vatican on 25 October 2010.
81
John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on
the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 185–6.
Kierkegaard’s writings upon Jewish–Catholic dialogue in the work
of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel82 and the later views of Johannes
Oesterreicher83 is something that scholars have neglected.
In light of such a monumental influence on Catholic theology, it
is important to remember Peterson’s own admission that ever since
his university years, Kierkegaard had been his ‘spiritual mentor’
who ‘saved him making worse errors’.84 In fact, Peterson is one of
the early Catholic readers of Kierkegaard who sought to overturn
misconceptions that would contribute to the Nazi appropriation of
Kierkegaard.85 As Barbara Nichtweiss recounts, in 1923 Peterson
wrote a letter to Theodor Haecker in which he criticized the
82
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel observed that ‘Kierkegaard’s thought showed a
marked leaning to Catholic ideals in its ascetic tendencies’ in Abraham Joshua
Heschel, A Passion for Truth (New York: Farrar, 1973), 260. I am deeply indebted
to Professor Susannah Heschel for raising this point with me. For more, see Daniel
Berthold-Bond, ‘Abraham Joshua Heschel, A Passion for Truth’, Review of
Rabbinic Judaism 5, no. 2 (2002), 265–78. See also, Jack Mulder’s essay on Heschel in
Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish Theology, 155–
70.
83
Oesterreicher says that Kierkegaard was ‘a mentor of my youth’ and it was
Kierkegaard’s book entitled For Self-Examination, and particularly Kierkegaard’s
comments on the parable of the Samaritan where Oesterreicher says he ‘first found
the counsel to read the Word of God as we ought. To read it with profit, we must
say again and again: “It is I who am addressed”, “It is I for whom the message is
meant”’, in John M. Oesterreicher, The New Encounter between Christians and
Jews (New York: Philosophical Library, 1986), 97–8 n. 33. Although Oesterreicher
did not produce a book on Kierkegaard, it is interesting that there are many
references to Kierkegaard that appear in the newsletter for Christian–Jewish
encounter, Freiburger Rundbrief: [Nr. 25/28, 1954] p. 55; [Nr. 37/40, 1957] p. 105;
[Nr. 45/48, 1959] p. 12; [Nr. 53/56, 1962] pp. 33, 72; [Nr. 57/60, 1964] p. 18; [Nr.
73/76, 1968] pp. 6–7; [Nr. 81/84, 1970] p. 116; [Nr. 89/92, 1972] p. 104. It should
also be noted that Oesterrei- cher later distanced himself from his earlier
proselytizing views. I am deeply indebted to Professor John Connelly for pointing
this out to me.
84
Barbara Nichtweiss, Erik Peterson: neue Sicht auf Leben und Werk (Freiburg:
Herder, 1992), 99ff.
85
Hampson, KEC, 173. Also see, Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler:
Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985), ch 4; esp. p. 121. See also, Dorothy Emmet, ‘Kierkegaard and The
“Existential” Philosophy’, Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 16 (1941), 257–
71. ‘To make Søren Kierkegaard spiritually responsible for the present war would
have as little, and perhaps as much, truth in it as the facile explanations which made
Hegel responsible for the last one. But it is part of the demonism of policies of
power and ambition to be able to pervert to their own ends religious ideas which in
their intention are a protest against those very ambitions; and, by so doing, to win a
response from people who, in a dim, unconscious way, are feeling after the ideas
themselves, but have neither the powers of self-criticism nor of radical thinking to
resist travesties of them which appear to justify their own self-assertion .. . Both Nazi
apologists and their Confes- sional or independent opponents are consciously or
unconsciously moved by a way of
questionable presentations of Kierkegaard’s theology by Eduard
Geismar and Emanuel Hirsch.86
For Peterson, the theological issues centred on Kierkegaard’s
view about the authority of Christian dogma and its relation to the
Chris- tian life. Peterson first encountered the writings of
Kierkegaard through the German translations at the turn of the
twentieth century. Peterson was attracted to Kierkegaard’s critique
of the ‘bourgeois Christianity’ of the Danish state church. Like
Kierkegaard, Peterson was also formed in a Pietist context and took
great interest in Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon interiority.87 There
is much more to be said about Kierkegaard’s influence on
Peterson’s view of the church, sacraments, dogma, martyrdom,
history, and Christology, but there is not enough space to do it
justice here.88 This can be evidenced in an incipient way in one of
Peterson’s journal entries from 1918:
Kierkegaard and the Catholic Church are the two poles of my spiritual
existence. Must I choose only one of them? Subjectively, my life
fluctu- ates back and forth between them, sometimes toward the one,
but then it soon yields to the other one. Is this standing-in-between
[Dazwischen- stehen] not essentially Protestant?89
In September of 1947, Peterson received a request from a publisher to
write the preface for the Italian translation of Kierkegaard’s The
Sick- ness unto Death, but he never did.90 Perhaps this was because
Peterson already knew that Cornelio Fabro was working on his own
translation of it (eventually published in 1953) as well as
Kierkegaard’s Journals (1948–51).
thinking which puts the decision of the individual, made in the concrete moment,
above any objective or universal norm of ethics or of reason by which it can be
either justified or criticized . . . I want to try to take some of the ideas, of which Nazi
apologists give us a secularized travesty, and look at them as they were struck out of
the fire of a religious struggle by that extraordinary poet-prophet Søren
Kierkegaard’ (pp. 257–8).
86
Nichtweiss, Erik Peterson, 102. For more on Peterson’s correspondence with
Hirsch, see eadem, 123ff. For more on Peterson’s friendship with Haecker and other
German readers of Kierkegaard that were Catholic converts, see eadem, 107–14.
87
For more on Peterson’s pietism, see Adele Monaci Castagno (ed.), L’Archivio
Erik Peterson all’Università di Torino: Saggi Critici e Inventario, Collana di Studi del
Centro di Scienze Religiose (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2010).
88
For more, see Nichtweiss, Erik Peterson, 99–201.
89
Ibid., 126. Translation mine. 90
Ibid., 68.
From 8 to 13 April 1947, Peterson participated (along with
Cornelio Fabro, Jacques Maritain, and Étienne Gilson) in a week-
long academic conference on existentialism at the Angelicum in
Rome.91 Whereas Maritain and Gilson focused their papers on
aspects of existential Thomism, Fabro gave the first conference
paper—in the presence of Pietro Parènte and Réginald Garrigou-
Lagrange—on ‘The Meaning of Existentialism’,92 arguing for a shift
in focus from Hei- degger to Kierkegaard, ‘whose thought
converged toward both Aris- totelian idealism and Catholicism’.93
Summing up the conference, Charles Boyer SJ said that in the
contributions of Fabro and Peterson, ‘a Kierkegaard who is
predominantly and purely religious’ had been discovered.94
At this conference, Erik Peterson presented a paper about Kierke-
gaard’s influence on contemporary Protestant theology. In stark
contrast to his former Göttingen colleague Karl Barth, Peterson
claimed that Kierkegaard’s ‘influence upon nineteenth-century
Protestant The- ology was significant’.95 Peterson says that ‘the
current popularity of Kierkegaard still requires an interpretation’
because ‘the indirect communication which was central to
Kierkegaard’s thought now seems to have been transformed into
direct communication’.96 Peterson
91
A week-long summary of this conference can be found in L’Osservatore Romano
9–15 Aprile, 1947.
92
Cornelio Fabro, ‘Il Significato dell’Esistenzialismo’, in Esistenzialismo: Atti della
settimana di Studio indetta dall’Accademia di S. Tommaso, 8–13 Aprile 1947, Acta
Pont. Academiae Romanae S. Thomae Aq. (Rome: Marietti, 1947), 9–39.
93
L’Osservatore Romano, 12 Aprile 1947, n. 35, p. 2. Translation mine.
94
L’Osservatore Romano, 15 Aprile 1847, n. 37, p. 2.
95
Erik Peterson, ‘Kierkegaard e la Teologia Protestante’, in Carlo Boyer SJ (ed.),
Esistenzialismo: Atti della Settimana di Studio Indetta dall’Accademia di S. Tommaso,
8–13 Aprile 1947, vol. XIII, Acta Pont. Academiae Romanae S. Thomae Aq. (Turin:
Casa editrice Marietti, 1947), 127–32; esp. p. 127. All translations are mine. Compare
Peterson’s claim with the omission of Kierkegaard in Karl Barth, Protestant
Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background & History (London: SCM
Press, 2001). In the preface of the English translation of this book, Colin Gunton
says that ‘Of Kierkegaard, Barth famously said that his was a school in which one
must learn but neither remain nor return, in some contrast to his judgment of
Schleiermacher. Is that why there is no chapter on him? I suspect that the reasons
are rather complex, but centre on the fact that there is a respect in which
Kierkegaard did not belong in the century, and certainly has little to offer to the book’s
main thesis about Schleiermacher and his dominance’ (xv–xvi). For Peterson’s critique
of Barth, see ‘What is Theology?’ in Erik Peterson, Theological Tractates, ed. and
trans. Michael J. Hollerich, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011), 1–14.
96
Peterson, ‘Kierkegaard und der Protestantismus’, in Erik Peterson, Marginalien
zur Theologie (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1956), 128.
continues, ‘everyone knows how to talk about anxiety, paradox, and
risk, but the original meaning of Kierkegaard’s thought is slowly falling
from view’. Peterson says that we must remember that Kierkegaard
himself was a Lutheran theologian and a son of a ‘pietist merchant’. For
Peterson, Kierkegaard’s problems with Protestantism begin here,
and his economic independence allowed him to be critical of his
national church.97 Moreover, Kierkegaard’s pietism stands as ‘an
immanent critique of Protestantism itself ’, which was motivated by the
‘practical consequences of Nominalism in orthodox Lutheran
theology’.98 For instance, Peterson says that the doctrine of forensic
justification ‘elim- inates every human activity in regard to divine
activity’ and infused grace becomes ‘imputed divine favour’. Indeed,
for Peterson this nominalism is exemplified in Lutheran theological
anthropology when it asserts a distinction between real existence and
ideal existence—that is, the person is ‘a sinner on earth and yet
justified before God in heaven’. Hence, Peterson argues that
Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom is reacting against a theology
that has turned ‘salvation into an ideal fact, and the faith which
saves into an intellectual act based upon a contradiction between
the visible (reality of sin) and the invisible (decree of God)’.
Peterson’s argument is that Kierkegaard critiques this theology
because it renders human works of charity ‘devoid of any meaning
before God’ because it ‘threatens the sola fide of the grace of
Christ’.
In short for Peterson, ‘the Pietist impulse in Kierkegaard against
the orthodox theology of his own day, only has a real significance
for those Catholics who find themselves before the problem of their
own vocation’.99 Peterson observes that Luther’s theology ‘starts
with Adam and only arrives at the ideal salvation of the second
Adam’, but that Kierkegaard’s theology ‘begins with the
singularity of the God-Man (second Adam), and subsequently asks
for the singularity of his followers, bringing them necessarily to
asceticism’.100 This is what Kierkegaard means with his phrase
‘witness to the Truth’, which refers to the martyrs, and marks the
infamous controversy between Kierkegaard and his bishop.101 In
conclusion,
97
Ibid., 129.
98
For more on Kierkegaard’s pietism, see Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and
Holiness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
99
Ibid., 130. 100
Ibid., 130–1 n. 9.
101
Peterson was also fond of this phrase, see his essay ‘Witness to the Truth’, in
Peterson, Theological Tractates, 151–81. See also, Erik Peterson, Zeuge der Wahrheit
(Leipzig: Hegner, 1937). Also see, Frithard Scholz, ‘Zeuge der Wahrheit—ein
anderer
Peterson says of Kierkegaard that although he himself was not a
martyr, Kierkegaard still ‘remained within Protestantism, and became
its victim’.102 For Peterson, ‘the leap’ Kierkegaard had in mind was not
merely ‘liberation from the immanentism of idealist philosophy’,
but also liberation from ‘the iron cage that the dogmatism of Luther
had locked humanity within’, which Peterson identifies as ‘a
betrayal of human existence’.103 Peterson’s analysis here provides
an important insight into the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard at
this time, but one should not neglect the autobiographical fact that
Peterson was received into the Catholic Church after his encounter
with Kierkegaard.104
2.6. JEAN DANIÉLOU
The prominent place Kierkegaard receives in Jean Daniélou’s

(1905–1974) manifesto for ressourcement theology has been over-
looked in secondary literature on la nouvelle théologie.105 In fact,
the return to biblical, patristic, and liturgical sources only accounts
for the first section of Daniélou’s clarion call for liberation from ‘a
rationalised theology that treats God like any other object of
thought’.106 Alongside a retrieval of patristic sources, Daniélou sug-
gests that contemporary philosophical influences must be explored
in order to maintain some contact with contemporary life. What was
required to engage with contemporary issues was not merely the
Kierkegaard’, in Alfred Schindler (ed.), Monotheismus als politisches Problem?: Erik

Peterson und die Kritik der politischen Theologie, Studien zur Evangelischen Ethik
(Gütersloh: Mohn, 1978), 120–48. For more on the controversy between
Kierkegaard and Bishop Martensen, see Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A
Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50–2, 80–7, 401–10. See
also, Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 2.
102
Peterson, ‘Kierkegaard e la Teologia Protestante’, 131.
103
Peterson, ‘Kierkegaard e la Teologia Protestante’, 132.
104
For more, see Hollerich’s fine introduction to Theological Tractates, xi–xxx. For
more on Peterson’s view of Kierkegaard, see his essay, ‘Kierkegaard und der
Protes- tantismus’, 17–27. See also, Umberto Lodovici, ‘Il Bacio di Giuda: la
recezione di Kierkegaard e Peterson’, in Kierkegaard Duecento Anni Dopo (Genoa:
Il Melangolo, 2014), 315–27.
105
Jean Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse’, Études 249
(1946), 5–21.
106
Ibid., 6. Translation mine.
patristic world-picture as such, but also a critical gesture that could
be understood in that contemporary setting. Daniélou specifically
mentions Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard as figures whose
imagin- ations ‘require theological thought to expand to their scale’
by calling theologians to distinguish between ‘the garment of truth
from the truth itself ’. Daniélou says that just because the words of
Christ never pass away, this does not ‘persuade us to dispense with
changing our ways of expression’. So, instead of viewing contemporary
figures with suspicion, Daniélou says that Marx, Darwin, and Hegel can
‘represent an enlarge- ment of our vision of the external world’, and
existential philosophy in particular serves as an even more profound
resource with an emphasis on human freedom, historicity, and
subjectivity.107 Importantly, Da- niélou mentions figures like Pascal,
Kierkegaard, Barth, Gabriel Marcel, and Max Scheler as examples of
Christian faith which he distinguishes from the atheistic
existentialism of Nietzsche and Sartre.108
Daniélou especially highlights Kierkegaard, rather than Nietzsche
or Dostoevsky as a prominent resource for rehabilitating
contemporary Catholic theology.109 In particular, Daniélou
mentions Kierke- gaard’s The Concept of Anxiety as a robust
theological account of original sin, which demonstrates a major role
that theology still has to play in contemporary discourse.110
According to Daniélou, Kierke- gaard becomes a vital resource for
resisting ‘a theology that treats God as an object’, and for affirming
‘the mystery of the personal God, hidden in darkness, where no one
can penetrate, but who only reveals Himself by love’. It is precisely
here that a vista opens up regarding the extent to which
Kierkegaard’s influence can be traced in the work of those
ressourcement theologians who followed in Daniélou’s wake.
2.7. YVES CONGAR
It is often overlooked that the French Dominican theologian, Yves

Congar (1904–1995) wrote a remarkable essay entitled Actualité de
107
Ibid., 13–14. 108
Ibid., 14.
109
For more about why Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche appear together
at this time in reception history, see George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the
Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
ch. 10.
110
Daniélou, ‘Les orientations’, 16.
111
Kierkegaard (1934). Congar’s essay provides a biographical
introduction to Kierkegaard that precedes Jean Wahl’s Études
Kierkegaar- diennes (1938)—although Congar is dependent upon a
few of Wahl’s earlier essays. However, Congar acknowledges that
the timeliness of his essay is due to the popularity of the
Kierkegaard Renaissance in the writings of Karl Barth, Martin
Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers.112 And yet Congar prefaces his
biographical introduction to Kierke- gaard by marvelling at the
range of Kierkegaard’s ecumenical influence upon various figures
like Karl Barth, a Catholic convert like Erik Peterson, and a Russian
Orthodox thinker like Nikolai Berdyaev.113
Whatever defects one might find in Kierkegaard’s writings, Congar
makes a deplorable remark saying that they can be traced back to
the ‘moral fervour, the dry and scorching hitlérien pietism’ of his
father. The severe childhood upbringing and the break-up with Regine
Olsen provide Congar with a psychological rationale that explains
why Kierkegaard wrote in pseudonyms which mask his ‘profound
personality’ . . . ‘that lacked a total spiritual unity with the author of
the literary creation’.114 Although Congar misses the literary and
philosophical point of Kierkegaard’s fictive authors, Congar’s
view of the pseudonyms as alibis of a disturbed psyche will allow the
biographical approach to continue unreflectively.
Congar also observes that Kierkegaard’s work does not represent
an ‘entire philosophy’ but rather it ‘constitutes an intersection of
vital problems, that imposes a question and engages an attitude’,
which is
111
Additional references to Kierkegaard may be found in, Y. Congar, Vraie et
fausse réforme dans l’Église (Paris: Cerf, 1950), 180, 184, 202; Y. Congar, The Mystery
of the Temple, or, the Manner of God’s Presence to His Creatures from Genesis to
the Apocalypse, trans R. F. Trevett (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1962),
57.
Y. Congar, Lay People in the Church: A Study for a Theology of Laity
(Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1965), 298, 417; Y. Congar, Dialogue between
Christians: Cath- olic Contributions to Ecumenism (London: G. Chapman, 1966a), 11;
Y. Congar, Jesus Christ (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966b), 116; Y. Congar, The
Crucial Questions on Problems Facing the Church Today (New York: Newman
Press, 1969), 25;
Y. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. D. Smith (New York: Crossroad,
1997), 150. Y. Congar, Écrits Réformateurs, ed. J. P. Jossua (Paris: Cerf, 1995), 273.
112
Yves Congar, ‘Actualité de Kierkegaard’, La Vie Intellectuelle 25 (1934a), 9. For
more, see Brother Emile of Taizé, Faithful to the Future: Listening to Yves Congar
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013), ch. 1.
113
Congar, ‘Actualité de Kierkegaard’, 11. Both Congar and Daniélou viewed
Peterson as ‘a guide for the “return to the sources” animating theological renewal
prior to the Second Vatican Council’, see Peterson, Theological Tractates, n 95,
xiii.
114
Congar, ‘Actualité de Kierkegaard’, 14. Translation mine.
‘an existential point of view and must be understood, for the most
part, as a reaction against the philosophical romanticism of
Hegel’.115 With the methodological difference between Hegelian
resolution and Kierkegaardian dilemmas in view,116 Congar says
that the upshot of Kierkegaard’s contribution is the ‘primacy of the
individual above the “general”’ public which gives way to an
articulation of ‘a philosophy of existence that resigns speculative
thought to benefit from an attitude of obedience before God, of
conformity to the living God’.117 Congar rightly points out that
Kierkegaard offers, not merely a doctrinaire elaboration of an
existential point of view, but rather a therapeutic and philosophical
method ‘to be oneself, to exist’, which awakens the reader’s
conscience.118 Unlike Erik Peterson, however, Congar claims that
the way Kierkegaard handles the Incarnation betrays his
indebtedness to the Lutheran ‘watch words’ of sola fide and sola
gratia, which reiterates Luther’s theological view of ‘sin’ and ‘faith’ as
the foundation of all reality.119
Whatever Congar finds theologically objectionable in Kierkegaard,
there is no mistake that for Protestantism, Kierkegaard is ‘the pre-
cursor of a renewal’.120 To his credit, Congar does not restrict Kier-
kegaard’s relevance to only Protestantism but also says that for
Catholics especially, Kierkegaard cannot be dismissed because he
‘reveals a true Gospel’, and he offers to Catholics ‘the path of a soul
mate’.121 In a prescient manner, Congar discovers in Kierkegaard
the resources and language to make the claim that Christianity ‘is not
wish fulfilment or a last resort that allows us to lead our lives on any
other principles, but rather it is that unique demand whereby the
whole of our lives is oriented’.122 Congar concludes his essay by
saying that Kierkegaard merits our attention, not because he offers a
dogmatic system, but rather because Kierkegaard exhibits an
edifying attitude that our times require in order to better understand
the present cultural situation in all its complexity.123 In the end, Congar
leaves the question open as to whether Kierkegaard’s Lutheran-
influenced views of sin and faith remain at odds with Catholic
theology.
115
117
Ibid., 19–20. Translation mine. 118
119
121
Yves Congar, ‘Notes Bibliographiques: Kierkegaard et Luther’, Foi et Vie 57
(1934), 713. This quote also appears in ‘Actualité’, 31.
122
Congar, ‘Actualité de Kierkegaard’, 32. 123
Ibid., 34.
2.8. JAMES COLLINS
Moving away momentarily from the German and French Catholic

reception, I now want to highlight the work of the American phil-
osopher, James D. Collins (1917–1985), who is perhaps the first
Thomist to substantively engage the writings of Kierkegaard in
Eng- lish.124 The fruit of his labour is expressed in The Mind of
Kierkegaard (1953), where Collins provides an introduction to
Kierkegaard’s biography, his use of pseudonyms, stages of
existence, his relation to Hegel, faith, social criticism, and his
critique of Christendom.
Commenting on the therapeutic role of Kierkegaard’s pseud-
onyms, Collins says that they ‘remind us that the habit of wisdom is
a hard won perfection and in no way identical with the ability to
state and defend a scholastic thesis, whether of Hegelian or Thomist
origin’.125 Here, Collins refers the reader to a similar point that is
made by Étienne Gilson in his 1948 Aquinas lecture.126 Collins
relies upon Étienne Gilson’s account of Kierkegaard in Being and
Some Philosophers but qualifies it as ‘somewhat misleading’ because
Gilson ‘formulates the major contrast between Kierkegaard and Hegel
as that between subjective existence and objective knowledge’
(MK 294
n. 22). For Collins, Gilson’s contrast here lacks nuance because
‘Kierkegaard directed his fire against “pure thought”, rather than
against abstract thinking and objective knowledge as such’, which
indicates that Kierkegaard was ‘opposed to philosophical
abstraction only when it claimed to give an exhaustive, systematic
account of the real’ (MK 294 n. 22). In fact, Collins goes on to say
that had Kierke- gaard ‘known the texts, he would have agreed with
Aquinas that [logic] is concerned with the universe of being,
precisely in its logical status as conceived by the mind, whereas
metaphysics is directed primarily and properly toward being in its
physical reality and act
124
Collins was also published in Italian, see James D. Collins, ‘Fede e Riflessione in
Kierkegaard’, in Cornelio Fabro and Nicola Abbagnano (eds), Studi
Kierkegaardiani (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1957). Another early Thomist to engage
Kierkegaard in English is Ralph McInerny, ‘Ethics and Persuasion: Kierkegaard’s
Existential Dialectic’, The Modern Schoolman 34 (1956), 219–39.
125
James D. Collins, MK, 39–40.
126
Étienne Gilson, History of Philosophy and Philosophical Education (Milwaukee:
Marquette University Press, 1948). See also, Étienne Gilson, Being and Some Philo-
sophers (Toronto: PIMS, 1949), 142–53.
of existing’ (MK 121). Collins collapses the distance that Gilson
puts between Kierkegaard and Aquinas by observing that the
Kierkegaardian distinction between the eternal being of God and the
existence of the God-Man bears comparison with St. Augustine’s reflec-
tions on God as He Who Is—the eternal and immutable being—and as
the God of Abraham, the God Who has become incarnate in the
temporal, changing order for our salvation. (MK 298 n. 13)
Collins claims that ‘Kierkegaard fuses the two questions of whether
God exists as a real being (Deum esse) and what is the meaning and
intrinsic nature of God’s existence of real being (Dei esse)’ in order to
make the point that since the ‘latter transcends our natural intelli-
gence, [Kierkegaard] disqualifies natural intelligence from demon-
strating the former. Added to this is [Kierkegaard’s] identification
of the latter question with that of the Incarnation of the Son of God’
(MK 298 n. 13).
In reflecting on Johannes de Silentio’s emphasis upon
Abraham and his critique of Kantian ethics, Collins says that
‘Abraham’s silence calls to mind several doctrines in the moral
philosophy of St. Thomas . . . especially those associated with the
disposition of freedom’.127 Here Collins corrects Maritain’s critique
of Kierkegaard ‘for separating universal law and individual
conscience’ by saying that Kierkegaard does not oppose these but
rather relates them both to ‘God’s wisdom and justice’ in a way
that coincides with ‘Maritain’s own remarks on the need to
interiorize the natural law and appropriate it as the principle of
one’s individual conduct’ (MK 289 n. 23). Importantly, Collins
distances Kierkegaard from being labelled an irrationalist by
making the following three points: 1) Kierkegaard ‘admitted the
rights of reason in the nonexistential fields of the empirical
sciences and logic’; 2) Kierkegaard permitted ‘some moral and
religious understanding of the order of existence and subjectivity’;
3) Kierkegaard ‘championed the omniscience of God and the
correlative intelligibility of all aspects of being (which are known
comprehensively or “systematically” by God and which will be
known by us in a systematic way, when we pass from time to
eternity)’ (MK 293 n. 21). Collins rightly says that Kierkegaard
resisted the conflation of points
127
MK 96; Collins specifies that he has in mind the passage where ‘St. Thomas
emphasises that God Himself is the mensura suprema et excedens of all human acts
and their moral worth (ST II–II, 17, I, c.)’ (MK 289 n. 22).
1 and 3, but criticizes Kierkegaard for overlooking ‘the alternative of a
thoroughly finite and realistic way of grasping the order of
existence through the speculative judgment of existence’ (MK 294 n.
21). Collins identifies this as a weakness that invites the misdirected
charge of irrationalism, but it only serves to emphasize the ill-
equipped nature of Kierkegaard’s philosophy for a speculative turn
in Thomism— Collins concludes this digression by directing the
reader to the work of Cornelio Fabro.
Collins also draws on the work of ressourcement theologian
Henri de Lubac to say that in his Edifying Discourses,
‘Kierkegaard’s personal devotion to the thought of our absolute
equality before God is comparable to Proudhon’s dedication to the
idea of justice’ (MK 302
n. 17).128 Collins uses this insight to open up Kierkegaard’s
‘persistent orientation’ toward religious existence and to highlight
what it means to become a Christian in Christendom (MK 208). The
upshot of Kierkegaard’s understanding of religious existence is that
this transformation is not rooted in a philosophical basis but rather
in ‘the distinction between natural and revealed religion’, which
upholds ‘its non-systematic character but also its connection with
faith, as a paradoxical affirmation of the presence of the eternal in
time’ (MK 212).
For Collins, what is lacking in Kierkegaard ‘is any sense of the
Church as a present actuality, as something more than an ideal to be
developed later on in the concrete order, when circumstances are
more favourable’ (MK 216). Resisting the temptation to enlist Kier-
kegaard himself as a Catholic, Collins says that Catholicism was not
‘one of the serious alternatives’ entertained by Kierkegaard; however,
Catholicism stands as a virtuous exemplar to Protestantism for
showing ‘the communal factor in religious life’ which is needed for
sharing ‘the burden of a responsible use of freedom, in regard to an
eternal outcome’ and cultivating ‘a genuine church, having
authority and a full sacramental order’ (MK 217). Collins also notes
how
Kierkegaard’s attack upon Protestant Christendom has led some
readers to turn away entirely from Christianity and others to move
closer toward Catholicism. He himself followed a much less forthright
course, a course which he did not propose as a model for others to
128
For more, see Henri de Lubac and Robert Elliott Scantlebury, [Proudhon et le
Christianisme]. The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon (London: Sheed &
Ward, 1948). See also, Simon D. Podmore, ‘Struggling with God: Kierkegaard/
Proudhon’, Acta Kierkegaardiana 2 (2007), 90–103.
follow. He took his own stand on the dangerous buttress of Protestant-
ism, rather than in the secure building of Catholicism. He preferred to
stand in discrimine rerum, on the razor edge of the religious situation,
pointing out the ‘normality’ of the Catholic teaching on the Church,
the sacraments, and religious authority, without inquiring more closely
into its claims of truth or sharing visibly in its life. His own vocation
was to remain a gadfly among Protestants, reminding them that their
only justification is to provide the incorruptibly critical conscience of
the Christian community, and that they must not try to convert the
reforming principle itself into a counternorm and countertradition.
(MK 219)
Here, Collins portrays Kierkegaard’s critique of the Danish state
church as no more than ‘a department of the state’ which ‘under-
mines moral seriousness and the transcendence of Christianity’ by
conflating ‘the rights and duties of temporal citizenship and being
reborn in Christ’ (MK 218). This is a critique that will be put to use in
a later chapter on Cornelio Fabro.
2.9. LOUIS DUPRÉ
Finally, one Catholic thinker who has examined Kierkegaard’s

works at length is Louis Dupré (b. 1925). In his book Kierkegaard
as Theologian (1958), Dupré explores Kierkegaard’s religious
upbringing, his understanding of sin, grace, faith, Christology, and
ecclesiology.129 Dupré begins his book in the shadow of James
Collins with a quote about the necessity of investigating
Kierkegaard’s religious writings for their enduring relevance to
Christianity. Although Kier- kegaard lambasted the Protestant
Church, Dupré quickly puts to rest any attempt to convert
Kierkegaard into a Catholic—although one can discover ‘the
apparent relation of many of his ideas with Catholic
129
Louis Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian (London: Sheed & Ward, 1965).
This is the English translation of Louis Dupré, Kierkegaards theologie, of de dialectiek
van het Christen-worden (Utrecht: Hete Spectrum, 1958). Dupré had published on
Kier- kegaard as early as 1955, see Louis Dupré, ‘S. Kierkegaard: Schets van zijn
innerlijke ontwikkeling’, Streven 9 (1955), 217–25. Also see, Louis Dupré, ‘La
Dialectique de l’Acte de Foi chez Soeren Kierkegaard’, Revue Philosophique de
Louvain 54 (1956), 418–55. For more, see the bibliography in Paul J. Levesque,
Symbols of Transcendence: Religious Expression in the Thought of Louis Dupré,
Louvain Theological & Pastoral Monographs 22 (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1997).
doctrine’ (KT x). Dupré also observes that what often attracts both
Protestants and Catholics to Kierkegaard is ‘his aversion to the idea
that Christianity is simply a stabilizing factor of society, a
significant ornament of Western civilization, or a conservative force
which can save modern man from losing his identity in an
impetuous world’ (KT x). Moreover, Kierkegaard offers an account
‘of the role which freedom plays in the acceptance of faith and
grace’ as well as ‘the reintegration of Christian asceticism in the
sola fide doctrine of the Reformation’, not to mention his ‘notion of
authority’ (KT xi). Drawing on Romano Guardini’s treatment of
Kierkegaard,130 Dupré says that
Only consciousness of sin makes the relation to oneself into a
conscious relation to God, for the consciousness of a disproportion
implies that in reference to which the relation to oneself is
disproportionate. Thus consciousness of sin, the beginning of
religious experience, brings a new determination into the conscious
living of being-a-person. (KT 80)
Here, Dupré rightly uncovers Kierkegaard’s theology by emphasizing
the revelation of sin as ‘the first act of the redemption’ which at
once alienates us from God but also returns us to Him (KT 81). For
Kierkegaard, consciousness of sin is not only necessary for
becoming a Christian, but also necessary for becoming authentically
human, as Dupré rightly observes: ‘God clarifies man to himself;
only before God does he realize the infinite meaning of his
existence and become fully committed to it’ (KT 81). This process
of salvation for Kierke- gaard does not just happen without
resistance but is marked by suffering—which he views as both a
gift and task—which Dupré connects to the imitatio Christi
tradition (KT 171).131 Hence, Dupré argues that Kierkegaard does
not advocate any problematic notion of natura pura but rather:
grace has its origin in the very humiliation of man, and not after. It is
in the consciousness of sin itself that God’s grace comes to him. As
soon, therefore, as a person feels profoundly guilty before God, he has
already left sin behind. (KT 92)
I will pick these themes back up in a later chapter on Balthasar and
anxiety, but it is important to see how Dupré highlights for Kierkegaard
130
Romano Guardini, ‘Der Ausgangspunkt der Denkbewegung S.
Kierkegaards’, in Unterscheidung Des Christlichen (Mainz, 1935), 469–72.
131
For more, see Barnett, Kierkegaard, 169f.
the way the ‘consciousness of sin and forgiveness of sin evoke each
other with the internal necessity of two dialectical moments’ which
originate in ‘God’s absolutely free and redemptive intervention’ (KT
92).132 Again, Kierkegaard is not advocating that nature stands
outside of grace since ‘new life consists not in a rebirth to another
nature, but in a new relationship with God, a novelty of faith’ (KT 96).
Indeed, ‘faith is at once divine grace and the highest human activity’
(KT 97):
Redemption is not an external gift which envelops man without affect-
ing him interiorly, but a God-given task which puts his intellectual
and volitional life to the decisive ordeal of becoming spirit . . . Only a
living faith in God’s redemption can revitalize the past in the present
and recall man from fleeting time. (KT 100)
Against the common misconceptions of Kierkegaard’s notion of faith,
Dupré rightly says that for Kierkegaard, ‘Faith is at once act and
gift’ to such an extent that it is a ‘result of freedom and grace
together’ which is ‘induced by God’ (KT 101). This is an important
point that must not be overlooked, and I will come back to it in the
next chapter on de Lubac’s engagement with Kierkegaard:
It would be wrong to confine Kierkegaard’s theology of grace . . . to an
appropriation of transcendent truth. The concept of ‘condition for
faith’ implies something much richer than pure understanding. Just as
faith is not restricted to an act of the intellect (PF IV 254), but
involves the whole man, so the condition on which faith depends
transforms man in his totality. (KT 102)
For Kierkegaard, ‘the activity of the human will in faith becomes
possible only through a choice by God Himself: only within the
limits of the datum of grace, which transcends all freedom, can faith
be called free’ (KT 103). For Dupré, this sets Kierkegaard apart
from most Reformation theologians because he ‘firmly maintains
that each step preparatory to the reception of God’s grace must
itself already be grace’ (KT 104). At the same time, Dupré
disabuses the reader of any suspicion that Kierkegaard advocates
any theory of predestination, but rather establishes the ‘two real
terms’ of God’s initiative and gives full weight to our active response
(KT 107).
132
For more, see Louis Dupré, ‘Of Time and Eternity in Kierkegaard’s Concept
of Anxiety’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 8:
The Concept of Anxiety (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985), 111–32. Also see how
this insight relates to ‘the infinite qualitative difference’, in Podmore, Kierkegaard and
the Self.
In light of this, Dupré rightly connects Kierkegaard’s comments
about the individual’s God-relation as manifesting love of
neighbour. Indeed for Kierkegaard, I am not the one who selects
which neighbour receives my charity, but rather ‘our duty is to love
those whom we see’ (WL 154), such that ‘whomever God places in our
path becomes of himself an object of love’ (KT 162). Thus, Dupré
draws from Kierke- gaard’s Works of Love, noting that we are not to
first ask ‘Who is my neighbour?’ but rather ‘Who is my God?’,
because the ‘answer to this question also defines my neighbour, for
every man to whom I have a divine obligation is my neighbour’ (WL
30; KT 162). Although Dupré does not make this connection,
Kierkegaard virtually repeats the teaching that God gave to Saint
Catherine of Siena: ‘for love of me [God] and love of neighbour are
one and the same thing. Since love of neighbour has its source in me,
the more the soul loves me, the more she loves her neighbours.’133 This
theological insight, coupled with what Kierkegaard has said about the
role of grace and works in the book of James, aligns Kierkegaard
with the Catholic teaching of participation—an important Thomist
theme that is recovered by Cornelio Fabro. Although Dupré does
not frame it in these terms, he does come close when quoting at
length a passage from Kierkegaard’s Journals:
Grace is generally taken to be a dead decision, made once for all; instead
it must tend to effort, since it is, to quote Baader, an anticipation. But to
make an effort is always so difficult that in Christian life the most
comfortable state is, in a sense, death, because then there is no longer
any question of effort. (as cited in KT 165; cf. Pap. X2 A 223 / SKS NB
14:49 1849)
In response, Dupré says that: ‘Grace truly anticipates only when
there is something to follow. Without effort there is no grace, because
grace is fulfilled only through effort. This does not imply
justification by works, but it does imply co-operation’ (KT 165).
The upshot of Kierkegaard’s theological position for Dupré is that:
‘Grace frees man only from the worry of saving himself by his own
effort: his salvation no longer depends on this effort, but on God’s
mercy alone. The strain of the effort is removed—but not the effort
itself ’ (KT 166).134 In the end, Kierkegaard shows us that ‘freedom
itself is grace’
133
Saint Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, The Classics
of Western Spirituality (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980), 36.
134
For more on the Augustinian inheritance of Kierkegaard’s soteriology, see
Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), chs. 6 & 8.
and that the Christian ‘sees all his efforts as a result of God’s
meeting with him in Christ’ (KT 170).
2.10. CONCLUSION: A KIERKEGAARDIAN

TRADITION WITHIN CATHOLICISM
In this chapter, I have sketched the wider context of the early Catholic
reception of Kierkegaard’s writings. Again, any one of these figures
could merit more exhaustive treatment in a book dedicated to them,
but what I have suggested here is that there is a Catholic
engagement with Kierkegaard’s writings that coincides with the
beginnings of theological renewal in twentieth-century Catholic
theology and the dissemination and translation of Kierkegaard’s
writings in Europe. It is no coincidence that a significant portion of
the labour in the dissemination of Kierkegaard’s works is shared by
Catholic scholars. In part, it may be inferred that Catholic thinkers
were attracted to Kierkegaard’s work because of a significant
theological and philosophical overlap in the values shared between
Kierkegaard and Cath- olic teaching. For instance, the Catholic
translators of Kierkegaard (like Haecker and Fabro) were interested
in his contribution toward their own debates concerning the relation
of reason and revelation, nature and grace, and the establishment of
an anti-totalitarian authority in the wake of modernity. These
translators found a rich resource in the writings of Kierkegaard, and
both St Thomas Aquinas and the Blessed John Henry Cardinal
Newman were compared to Kierkegaard at this stage in order to
assess Kierkegaard’s relevance. For some of these thinkers,
Kierkegaard’s writings are specifically mentioned as contributing to
their conversion to Catholicism (such as Peterson).
As we have seen from the brief survey of eight Catholic thinkers,
most of them have been sympathetic towards Kierkegaard despite
his life story, radical philosophy, and Protestantism, although this
sym- pathy has been accompanied by harsh judgements in some cases.
Some thinkers have fully identified Kierkegaard with Catholicism
and others with Luther. However in the previous chapter, I re-
examined the Lutheran stereotype about Kierkegaard’s writings to
suggest that Cath- olic readers (and some Kierkegaard scholars)
should reconsider their assessment of Kierkegaard and the broader
catholicity of his theological
anthropology. With this wider context in view, I will go on to
consider three particular figures that inherit this mode of early
Catholic engagement, and yet develop it in an original way. I will
select Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar as two
representative theological figures in pre- and post-conciliar Catholic
theology who substantially engage with Kierkegaard’s writings. I go on
to discuss Kierkegaard’s influence in the writings of Cornelio Fabro,
an important Italian Thomist who provides a watershed moment in
the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard’s writings in Europe. In short,
it is through representative figures like de Lubac, Balthasar, and
Fabro that the Kierkegaardian tradition latent within Catholicism
uncovers the invitation to contemporary Catholic theologians to
engage with Kierkegaard’s writings.
The Theologian of Inwardness

Kierkegaard and the Complementary
Theological Vision of Henri de Lubac
‘God’ is, not because our grammar is outworn;

but that grammar lives and generates worlds
because there is the wager on God.
George Steiner1
Revelation gives us the key,
but we may not yet know how to use it;
or perhaps we may fear
to enter that sphere of mystery
which it suddenly opens for us.
Henri de Lubac2
In the first half of this book, I argued that the influence of Kierke-
gaard’s writings is not restricted to confessional boundaries, and a
more ecumenical approach to Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology
can challenge enduring stereotypes about the relevance of Kierke-
gaard’s writings to Catholic thought. After setting the exegetical
and historical backdrop for a better understanding of the Catholic
inheritance of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, and his
subsequent
1
George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 4.
2
Henri de Lubac, MS, 137.
Kierkegaard and Henri de 1
impact upon emblematic Catholic thinkers in the twentieth century,
I now turn to Henri de Lubac’s theology. In this chapter, I argue that
de Lubac does not represent a departure from Kierkegaard’s
theological vision, but rather that their writings complement one
another in important ways. Indeed, one could argue that de Lubac’s
theology is distinctively shaped by Kierkegaard’s writings. In fact, by
looking closer at the Kierkegaardian aspects of Henri de Lubac’s
theology, a new insight into the basic aims of ressourcement can be
gained.
To support this claim, I will reconstruct Henri de Lubac’s theo-
logical anthropology and place it in the wider context of the project of
ressourcement (§3.1). Against this backdrop, I will attempt to estab-
lish, not only Kierkegaard’s influence upon de Lubac’s life story
(§3.2), but also offer a close reading of several of de Lubac’s important
works in order to highlight the convergence of de Lubac’s theology
with Kierkegaard’s writings (§3.3). Moreover, I will interpret
Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist
in a way that illustrates this compatibility with de Lubac’s sacramental
theology (§3.4). My argument is that de Lubac and Kierkegaard
offer complementary rather than contradictory theological visions.
Indeed, de Lubac is one central ressourcement figure who puts
Kierkegaard’s writings to work in his fundamental theology and his
theology of grace in a unique way that develops the previous
generation of the Kierkegaardian tradition in Catholicism. I
conclude by suggesting that through such a comparative analysis, a
new perspective on the Catholic receptivity of Protestant theological
concerns before the Second Vatican Council is illuminated. Rather
than construing ressourcement as a purely patristic enterprise, de
Lubac’s engagement with Kierkegaard shows how the scope of
ressourcement can be extended to include engagement with modern
thought.
3.1. DE LUBAC’S HISTORICAL AND

THEOLOGICAL CONTEXT
After two World Wars, the Roman Catholic Church faced new
challenges and opportunities that it was not conversant with
because
of its official anti-modernist stance. 3 In 1946, de Lubac published
Surnaturel, a book that initially would lead him to be censored by
religious authorities, but he later became one of the most important
protagonists animating the reforms and renewal of the Second Vati-
can Council.4 Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger) once said that encountering de Lubac was ‘an essential
milestone on my theological journey’ because de Lubac showed
him ‘how much more relevant theology is the more it returns to its
center and draws from its deepest resources’. For Ratzinger, de
Lubac was ‘deeply sympathetic’ with ‘what is said by our most
modern contemporaries’ and even shares their questions as his
own to such an extent that ‘the Fathers become our
contemporaries’.5 Moreover, Brian Daley says that in 1946 Jean
Daniélou issued a
manifesto calling for a broad change of emphasis and style in the
development and communication of theology within the Catholic
Church . . . [which was] permeated by an attitude of worship, as well
as governed by rational consistency; it must speak in a language that
contemporary non-Christians can at least understand and regard as
plausible; and it must be more than simply an intellectual exercise—it
must lead a believer to deeper concern for society’s needs, based on
the exigencies of faith.6
3
For more on the modernist crisis in Roman Catholicism, see Marvin Richard
O’Connell, Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis
(Wash- ington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994). Lester R. Kurtz, The
Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), ch. 2. Jodock, Catholicism Contending with
Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context
4
Joseph A. Komonchak, ‘Theology and Culture at Mid-Century: The Example of
Henri De Lubac’, Theological Studies 51, no. 4 (1990), 579–602. Also see, Bruno Forte,
‘Nature and Grace in Henri De Lubac: From Surnaturel to Le Mystere du
Surnaturel’, Communio 23 (1996), 725–37.
5
Henri de Lubac, C, 11.
6
Daley, ‘The Nouvelle Théologie and the Patristic Revival: Sources, Symbols and
the Science of Theology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7, no. 4 (2005),
362–3. Ressourcement theologians wanted to ‘treat God not as an object, but as the
Subject par excellence, who reveals himself when and as he will; as a result, it must be
penetrated, first of all, with a religious spirit. Second, it must respond to the experi-
ences of the modern mind, and take cognizance of the new dimensions which
science and history have given to mind and society. Finally, it must become a concrete
attitude before existence—one unified response that engages the whole person, the
inner light of a course of action in which the whole of life is engaged’, in Daniélou,
‘Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse’, Études 249 (1946), 7.
Along with Daniélou, Henri de Lubac had founded Sources
Chrétiennes earlier in 1943, which provided translations of, and
commentary on non-Latin patristic writings. Their goal was to
recover the patristic insights of biblical interpretation that had fallen
from view in medieval scholasticism and the Counter-Reformation.
Brian Daley says that for ressourcement theologians, ‘the work
of the theologian is always inseparable from a contemplation of the
presence and saving acts of God in history, as presented in the
scriptures and interpreted in the continuing, time-bound tradition
of the community of faith’.7 Rather than an anti-modernist retreat
from history as that which contaminates purely dogmatic sentences,
ressourcement theologians embraced history as a theological cat-
egory. At its root, ressourcement theology shares a basic aim with
Kierkegaard’s theological vision: ‘the historical is the occasion [for
our eternal blessedness], and yet is also the object of faith’.8 For
Daley, this fundamental conviction led ressourcement theologians
to recover not only ‘a more social, more culturally inclusive under-
standing of the reality of the church’, but also led them to recover
‘the patristic practice of spiritual or figural exegesis, derived from
Israel’s habit of continually reinterpreting its own history and
historical documents in the light of its present religious experience
of God as active in history’, which they believed was ‘the key to the
traditional Christian understanding of the church: not simply as an
institutional structure, but as the living, corporate Mystery formed
by the Holy Spirit to unite all humanity with the redeeming God’.9
Moreover, Daley says that for de Lubac, Catholic theology ‘must
remain in contact with the whole tradition in which biblical faith has
continually sought understanding, rather than being enclosed in an
intellectual system, whether scholastic or modern, that has lost sight
of its own historical and cultural limitations’.10
One central aspect of the whole tradition that de Lubac recovers
in his theological anthropology is the notion of the soul as the locus
of God’s redemptive activity upon the human individual. One might
say that de Lubac recovers the doctrine of the soul’s transformation
and
7
Daley, ‘The Nouvelle Théologie’, 372. 8
Kierkegaard, Journal (NB 15:75).
9
Daley, ‘The Nouvelle Théologie’, 376. 10
Ibid., 377.
purification as a way of speaking theologically about human existence
before God. In his own words, de Lubac says that
God did not make us ‘to remain within the limits of nature’, or for the
fulfilling of a solitary destiny; on the contrary, He made us to be brought
together into the heart of the life of the Trinity . . . [and the Church] is
a place where this gathering together of all things in the Trinity begins
in this world; ‘a family of God’, a mysterious extension of the Trinity
in time, which not only prepares us for this life of union and gives us a
sure guarantee of it, but also makes us participate in it already.11
In his early work entitled Catholicism (1937), de Lubac says that
the soul is given to us by God for the contemplation and imaging of
‘the God whose being is Love’, which is also regulative of human
practice (C 117). The central thesis of de Lubac’s book is that ‘in
reality Catholicism is essentially social’—even ‘in the heart of its
mystery, in the essence of its dogma’ (C 15). Here de Lubac homes
in on the historical character of divine revelation as it meets us in
word and sacrament (C 141). For de Lubac, God became human in
time ‘to deliver us from time, but by means of time’ (C 144).
This means that for de Lubac, ‘God acts in history and reveals
himself through history’ (C 165).
There are important consequences then for how Scripture is inter-
preted through the development of history. Indeed, for de Lubac,
every created being (including the church) is subject to the law of
historical development (C 230). However, de Lubac says that this
development is anything but straightforward, since ‘outbursts of
sudden energy are followed by long barren periods, and not every
promise of progress is followed by fulfilment’ (C 232). This sentiment
is echoed in The Splendor of the Church, where de Lubac says that
even when
diversities do become divergences, [the Catholic theologian] will not
start to worry as soon as the Church starts to feel them. He will not
have to reflect for very long to see that they have always existed in the
Church and always will; and that if they were ever to come to an end it
would only be because her spiritual and intellectual life had come to
an end.12
11
Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1999), 237.
12
Ibid., 252.
Hence, de Lubac says that ‘Fidelity to a tradition, moreover,
is never servile repetition’, but rather comprises ‘the two-fold task
of restatement and adaptation’ (C 306–7). De Lubac speaks of the
renewal of the church in terms of ‘a continual state of rebuilding’
upon ‘eternal foundations’, which entails ‘changes in style’ that are
‘adapted to our own needs and problems’ (C 322). In this way, de
Lubac argues that ‘a return to the sources of antiquity will be the
very opposite of an escape into a dead past’ (C 322). Moreover, he
claims that this also entails rejecting ‘the notion that the
modern age has experienced outside the Church only error and
decadence’ (C 323). Like Kierkegaard’s view of the
contemporaneity or epochal equidistance of divine revelation, so
too for de Lubac, ‘humanity is made up of persons who have all the
same one eternal destiny in whatever category or century their birth
has placed them’ (C 232). Now, detecting the Kierkegaardian
resonance in de Lubac’s theological anthropology is not a
straightforward task. For instance, Lewis Ayres has noted that the
difficulty of de Lubac’s theological method of stacking quotation
and allusion with dense footnotes, often
means that isolating his own cast on the material he offers is more
likely to involve isolating strategies of quotation, adaptation and
compilation than it is a simple process of distinguishing statements
which are his from those that are not. At times, however, he also
captures with remarkable precision the key common themes of the
pre-modern traditions for which he is trying to create a voice
within modern Catholic debate.13
Moreover, Ayres has argued for the central place of soul in de
Lubac’s theological anthropology, and how de Lubac wants to ‘obtain
an accurate description of human life, and the ultimate end of this
life is a full maturation of our growth into the vision of God, and
our capacity for that growth rests upon the existence of the soul’.14
Yet it is interesting how the terms of art that Kierkegaard uses (like
atom of eternity,15 or
13
L. Ayres, ‘The Soul and the Reading of Scripture: A Note on Henri De Lubac’,
Scottish Journal of Theology 61, no. 2 (2008), 180.
14
Ibid., 182 n. 18.
15
‘The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity’ (CA 88).
the ocean reflecting the sky16) also appear in de Lubac’s theological
descriptions of the soul:
There is in man an eternal element, a ‘germ of eternity’, which already
‘breathes the upper air’, which always, hic et nunc, evades the tem-
poral society. The truth of his being transcends his being itself. For he
is made in the image of God, and in the mirror of his being the
Trinity is ever reflected. But it is only a mirror, an image .. . Only by
acknowledging himself to be a reflection could he obtain complete-
ness, and only in his act of adoration could he find his own inviolable
depths. (C 358–9)
Although de Lubac cites Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism in the
footnote here, one might say that de Lubac employs the
Kierkegaard- ian terminology used by Maritain to mediate this
Christian heritage in modern parlance. Importantly, de Lubac
employs such terms not just because they are in vogue, but rather
because he views Kierke- gaard as an ally in the resistance against
merely materialist accounts of human life that lack reference to the
transcendence of the human towards the divine.17 Nevertheless,
there is reason to investigate further the nature of de Lubac’s
affinity with Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology. Especially
since it is difficult to ignore the way the encyclical Humani Generis
(1950) condemns ‘dogma being expressed by the concepts of
modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or
existentialism’ (HG 14–16). Why would such a condemnation be
given if all that ressourcement theologians were aiming for was a
retrieval of the patristic heritage? I want to suggest that the papal
condemnation of existentialism (and the subsequent censorship of
de Lubac)18 is also an indication of de Lubac’s use of
16
‘Just as the ocean, when it lies still this way, deeply transparent, aspires to
heaven, so the pure heart, when it is still, deeply transparent, aspires solely to the
good; or just as the ocean becomes pure when it aspires only to heaven, so the heart
becomes pure when it aspires only to the good .. . If the least thing comes between
them, between the sky and the ocean, between the heart and the good, indeed, even
if it was impatience in desiring the reflection, then the ocean is not pure, then it does
not purely reflect the sky’ (UDVS 121).
17
For more on the history of a doctrinal emphasis upon deification before the
Second Vatican Council, see Adam G. Cooper, Naturally Human, Supernaturally
God: Deification in Pre-Conciliar Catholicism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014),
ch. 1.
18
For more, see Joseph Komonchak, ‘Humani generis and Nouvelle Théologie’,
in Flynn and Murray, Ressourcement, ch. 9.
Kierkegaard in his theology. But this is to get ahead of ourselves. In
the following sections, I would like to reconstruct the more explicit
references to Kierkegaard in de Lubac’s work to emphasize the
convergence between these two theological visions.
3.2. ESTABLISHING DE LUBAC’S DEPENDENCE

UPON KIERKEGAARD’S WRITINGS
Most introductions to Kierkegaard’s thought and writings19 identify

how Kierkegaard (the Socrates of Christendom), elaborates certain
themes and concepts such as paradox, bearing witness to the truth,
indirect communication, and the scandal and interiority of faith. In
reading secondary literature on Kierkegaard, it does not take long to
figure out that the way Kierkegaard communicates in his writings
becomes just as important as what is being said. For Kierkegaard,
pedagogy becomes an authorial concern to such an extent that the
medium is the message—especially for divine pedagogy. However,
the problem is that in Christendom everyone is presumed to be a
Christian already and knows too much to understand properly how
human subjectivity relates to what it means to become a Christian.
So Kierkegaard must remove the obstacle of excess knowledge,
tricking the reader out of what they think they already know, in
order to present anew the scandal of the Christian faith. Now, the
claim I am making here is that the pedagogical strategy that Kier-
kegaard takes up bears an affinity to the way Henri de Lubac
presents his theology to his readers. In fact, I argue that in de
Lubac’s writings there are Kierkegaardian themes and terminology
in his account of the relationship between grace and nature, human
freedom and divine action.
Although Humani Generis expressed an explicit condemnation of
existentialism, de Lubac communicated his understanding of a
renewed Catholic theology by employing key terms and patterns of
19
A few good introductions to Kierkegaard’s work are: George Pattison, The
Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). See
also, Ferreira, Kierkegaard, Blackwell Great Minds (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Also see, C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge
argumentation from the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. In fact,
Christopher Barnett has pointed to Kierkegaard’s defence of the
validity of religious claims in a secular age, his critical rejection of
an historicism that reduces divine transcendence to mere facticity,
and his characterization of faith as the paradoxical gift of openness
before God, to make the bold claim that Kierkegaard ‘makes de
Lubac’s intellectual enterprise possible’.20 Although there may be
an affinity in the way both Kierkegaard and de Lubac offer critical
responses to modernity, one still could ask whether de Lubac’s
work is specifically indebted to Kierkegaard, or whether this affinity
indicates a general Christian response to the crises of the interwar
years. Thus in this chapter, I want to put forward the best possible
case for a specific indebtedness to Kierkegaard’s writings. But is the
appearance of Kierkegaardian elements merely an ornamental
feature of de Lu- bac’s theology? I want to suggest that it is not. My
claim is that there is a convergence between de Lubac’s theology and
Kierkegaard’s writings which goes much deeper than rhetorical
flourish.
To support this claim, I assess some of de Lubac’s most
important works in order to demonstrate his appropriation of
Kierkegaard’s writings. The upshot of my argument is to highlight
the non-patristic influences upon ressourcement theologians in
general, as well as the ecumenical role of Kierkegaard’s writings in
particular, stimulating the reform and renewal of Catholic theology
during the twentieth century. In order to assess further how de
Lubac’s theology exhibits Kierkegaardian aspects, I will provide
wider support by looking in particular at de Lubac’s The Drama of
Atheist Humanism (1944), Paradoxes of Faith (1945), The
Discovery of God (1945), and The Mystery of the Supernatural
(1965).
3.2.1. Kierkegaard in The Drama of Atheist Humanism

By the time de Lubac writes The Drama of Atheist Humanism,
much of the available Kierkegaard scholarship in France was
dependent
20
Christopher B. Barnett, ‘Henri De Lubac: Locating Kierkegaard Amid The
“Drama” Of Nietzschean Humanism’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence
on Theology: Catholic and Jewish Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception
and Resources, vol. 10, tome 3 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012b), 97–110; p. 109.
21
upon scholarship in Germany. However, de Lubac’s treatment of
Kierkegaard shows that he had read not only Philosophical Fragments
and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but that he was also good
friends with the French translator of these works, Paul Petit (1893–
1944).22 Now, Petit took part in the Christian Resistance and was
killed in prison by the Nazis. However, he was one of the early
Catholic readers of Kierkegaard who earnestly suggested that had
Kierkegaard lived longer, he would have become a Roman Catholic. 23
Although de Lubac does not endorse this view of Kierkegaard himself
(AH 111), he says of Petit’s work on Kierkegaard, that it was ‘not at all
for him some literary or speculative pastime. He committed his soul
to it, just as he was to commit his life, as a believer, as a
magnificent Christian, as a seeker of God.’24
In a similar way to Karl Löwith, de Lubac plays Kierkegaard off
against Nietzsche on various subjects in his Drama.25 Although the
21
For more on the quality of French and German scholarship on Kierkegaard, see
Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi, Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in
Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 89–122, 279–304. Jon Stewart,
‘France: Kierkegaard as a Forerunner of Existentialism and Postructrualism’, in Jon
Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Northern and Western
Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 421–74.
22
Cf. AH 102, 111. For more on Petit’s invaluable contribution to French schol-
arship on Kierkegaard, see Jacques Lafarge, ‘Kierkegaard dans la tradition
française: les conditions de sa réception dans les milieux philosophiques’, in Niels
Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart (eds), Kierkegaard Revisited, Kierkegaard
Studies. Monograph Series (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 274–90.
23
Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Petit, Post-Scriptum Aux Miettes Philosophiques
(Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 8 n. 2. ‘Impartialement, il semble bien pourtant qu’elle ait été
dans les dernières années de sa vie de plus en plus nettement orientée vers le
catholicisme’. Plusieurs critiques ‘liber-penseurs’ comme Brandès et Höffding ont
exprimé l’avis que K., s’il était ne plus tard, aurait été catholique. D’autre part, des
convertis et des catholiques éminents comme Th. Haecker, Erick Przywara, Erik
Peterson, Heidegger, R. Guardini, Peter Wust, Aloïs Dempf, se réclament de lui.
Nous croyons que c’est à juste titre. L’œuvre de K. a en effet ce mérite de faire toucher
du doigt l’impossibilité pour l’Enkelte (c’est-à-dire l’individu autonome, la
personne qui a une conscience) de se passer de l’autorité de l’Eglise .. . Loin d’être
opposée à la conception catholique de l’église, comme on le croit parfois, la
conception kierke- gaardienne de l’Enkelte en est donc complémentaire.’
24
Henri de Lubac, At the Service of the Church: Henri De Lubac Reflects on the
Circumstances That Occasioned His Writings (San Francisco: Communio Books,
1993), 49f. n. 49.
25
Karl Löwith, Kierkegaard und Nietzsche; oder, Philosophische und Theologische
überwindung des nihilismus (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1933). See also, Karl Löwith,
Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts
(Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1998), 304–11, 341–9, 383–97. For a more recent com-
parison and bibliography, see Markus Kleinert’s chapter entitled ‘Kierkegaard
and
structure of de Lubac’s treatment of Kierkegaard follows on from
available assessments by world-renowned philosophers of his day, the
content of de Lubac’s treatment of Kierkegaard differs dramatically.
For instance, Jean Wahl fails to sufficiently distinguish Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard in his broad-brush comparison, saying, ‘we see that the
ideas of existence and transcendence are conjoined in Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche’; however, it is just that ‘Kierkegaard describes the
movement of transcendence as The Eternal whereas Nietzsche
describes it as The Eternal Return’.26 Importantly, de Lubac can see
a difference between these figures, and Kierkegaard shines through as
an ally for Catholic theologians seeking to renew Catholic theology in
the twentieth century.
So what does Kierkegaard offer to de Lubac’s theology in the
Drama? In his own words, de Lubac says that Kierkegaard’s Philo-
sophical Fragments presents ‘by way of hypothesis, the fact of the
Incarnation, that supreme paradox of the incursion of God into
history, or of the eternal into time’—in other words, ‘a kind of
philosophy of dogma’. Whereas Kierkegaard’s Postscript offers ‘a
philosophy of faith’ that shows ‘in what conditions the individual
receives the mystery (Kierkegaard calls it the paradox) into himself
without stripping it of its essentially mysterious quality’ (AH 102–3).
De Lubac says that ‘the quite simple truth that Kierkegaard is never
weary of repeating’ is that the ‘real individual is face to face with a real
God’ (AH 103). Both Kierkegaard and de Lubac portray the act and
content of faith in the search for God as a kind of ‘autopsy’, that
is an attempt to see the truth of and for oneself with one’s own eyes,
and yet faith is very much a disorienting way of seeing in the face
of mystery. For both Kierkegaard and de Lubac, faith is irreducibly
paradoxical—not in the sense of a logical contradiction but rather
as a real dilemma that unbelievers and believers inhabit together
(AH 104–5). It is for this reason that de Lubac describes
Kierkegaard as ‘the philosopher of transcendence’ and the
‘theologian of inwardness’ (AH 103). In other words, what
Kierkegaard offers to de Lubac’s theology is the claim that the
knowledge of God is neither illusory nor impossible in modernity,
but rather dilemmatic, and
Nietzsche’, in John Lippitt and George Pattison (eds), The Oxford Handbook
of Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 402–20.
26
Cf. Jean Wahl’s Preface to Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: Introduction à sa philosophie
(Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 4–5. Translation mine.
wonderfully so (AH 106). Hence, de Lubac venerates Kierkegaard
as ‘the herald of transcendence’ in an age ‘carried away by
immanentism’ (AH 111).
For de Lubac, the theological task at hand is twofold: i) to
diagnose the church’s failure to communicate properly with modern
culture; and ii) to defend Catholic doctrine as an answer to a
fundamental aspiration of contemporary society.27 Indeed, de
Lubac’s method for accomplishing this dual task is often
characterized as celebrating marginal and eccentric figures in order
to illuminate and integrate traditional forms of philosophical and
theological understanding, thus transforming Catholic theology in
his wake.28 However, viewing de Lubac’s treatment of Kierkegaard
only in terms of the single chapter he devotes to him in the Drama,
would leave the reader with the sense of a marginal influence (at
best) upon de Lubac’s theology, and my original claim could be
dismissed as hyperbole. However, if the case could be made that de
Lubac continually draws upon Kierkegaard throughout his life then
my claim gains better traction.
3.2.2. Kierkegaard in Paradoxes of Faith

For instance, Kierkegaard’s presence can be detected in de Lubac’s
Paradoxes of Faith (1945).29 In this early work, de Lubac organizes
a variety of intentionally fragmentary quips around several topics
that, when viewed together, shore up important themes in
Kierkegaard’s writings: Paradox, Christianity, Witness, Spirit,
Truth, Interiority, Faith. In the preface of his book, de Lubac says
that since ‘the expression of a thought is inevitably partial, in the
sense that it is incomplete, its elaboration in connected discourse
may sometimes
27
Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, xii.
28
Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nup-
tial Mysticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 85. For more about the biographical
details of de Lubac’s life and how his theology is situated against a neo-scholastic
tradition, see Francesco Leopoldo Bertoldi, De Lubac: Cristianesimo e Modernità,
Collana Lumen (Bologna: Ed. Studio domenicano, 1994), 30–62. Boersma, Nouvelle
Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 25–9. David Grumett, De Lubac: A Guide for the
Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 7–24.
29
Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987). This
English translation is a combination of two books by de Lubac that are separated by
a decade: Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes (Paris: Editions de Livre, 1945), and Henri de
Lubac, Nouveaux Paradoxes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1955).
mislead and make it appear partial in the other sense of the word’.
So, de Lubac decides to present the material in this book in an
intentionally fragmentary way so as to assume the
misunderstanding of the reader in advance and to ‘Let the paradox
be’ for the reader to decide. Reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s decision to
write as one without authority through his fictive authors,
commonly referred to as pseudonyms, de Lubac says that ‘the
frequently incomplete reflections’ in this book ‘are not intended to be
the discoveries of a solitary mind’. The last thing that de Lubac
reminds his reader of in the preface is that ‘the Gospel is full of
paradoxes, that man himself is a living paradox, and that according
to the Fathers of the Church, the Incarnation is the supreme
Paradox’. Here is an instance where de Lubac presents a patristic
insight in a Kierkegaardian register. For both Kierkegaard and de
Lubac, paradox outstrips conceptual resolution and marks ‘the
search or wait for synthesis’ implicit within theological language: ‘the
provisional expression of a view which remains incomplete, but
whose orientation is ever towards fullness’.30 In fact, de Lubac won-
ders whether ‘all substantial spiritual doctrine must not of necessity
take a paradoxical form’.31 Although de Lubac explicitly resources
much of his theology with materials from the Catholic tradition, he
does say in The Discovery of God that
It is the philosophy which nourished me, and my thought continues to
live in that climate. I should like to be able to show that it is still
richer and more nourishing, that it has more sap and is more fertile,
than even its adepts imagine . . . our ambition has been, and still is at this
moment, simply to recall some eternal truths in a language that is not
too antiquated. (DG 207)
We learn from de Lubac’s memoir that it was not philosophy in
general, but Kierkegaard in particular that nourished him during
his ‘dark years’ of theological exile. In 1953, de Lubac remembers
receiving an encouraging note from a ‘faithful friend’ that was ‘dis-
creetly transcribed for me, without a word of commentary’ from
Kierkegaard’s Journals, which de Lubac says ‘helped me in the bad
days to “hold on”’.32
30
Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes (1945), 9. 31
Ibid., 13.
32
Henri de Lubac, At the Service, 87. ‘Each generation prepares someone who
will announce Christianity in earnest. The more it persecutes and mistreats him, the
more too it detaches his spirit from the world, so completely that God alone
remains. And
Although the patristic content of de Lubac’s theology is undeni-
able,33 it is my claim that Kierkegaard’s writings provide the grammar
that allows de Lubac to frame his diagnostic and apologetic task as
a Catholic theologian in the modern age. I take this not to mean that
de Lubac could have selected any modern thinker to convey his
patristic message. Rather that the way Kierkegaard communicates
his concerns, and the fact that Kierkegaard shares a similar
diagnostic and apologetic task illuminates de Lubac’s fundamental
theology and his theology of grace. Brian Daley rightly observes
that behind the patristic retrieval associated with ressourcement
theology ‘lay hermeneutical questions about the significance of
theological language’—namely, ‘Can language about God ever be
understood with the same analytical clarity, the same literal assurance
of reference, which common sense normally attaches to scientific
statements about worldly experience?’.34 I now turn to reconstruct
how Kierkegaard’s writings feature for de Lubac at a pivotal stage
in his thought, The Discovery of God (1945).
3.3. KIERKEGAARD IN DE LUBAC’S

FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGY
After sketching the problem of God’s absence in modernity, de Lubac

turns to focus on the problem of representing the unrepresentable
God in The Discovery of God. According to David Schindler, The
Discovery of God represents ‘the original point of departure for de
Lubac’s thought’ (DG ix), which was previously sketched in
Catholi- cisme (1937) and Surnaturel (1946)—works that
eventually led to de Lubac’s conflict with Vatican censors.35
Although there are fewer
Christianity begins to be real for this man only when he is so unhappy and so
tormented in this world that he seems a killjoy with all his suffering.’
33
Henri de Lubac, At the Service, 317–19. ‘The timeliness of the Fathers of the
Church is not a superficial timeliness .. . Every time, in our West, that Christian
renewal has flourished, in the order of thought as in that of life (and the two orders
are always connected), it has flourished under the sign of the Fathers.’
34
Daley, ‘The Nouvelle Theologie and the Patristic Revival: Sources, Symbols and the
Science of Theology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7, no. 4 (2005), 381.
35
For more on de Lubac’s censorship, see Joseph A. Komonchak’s essay
‘Humani Generis and Nouvelle Théologie’, in Flynn and Murray, Ressourcement,
138–56. See
explicit references to Kierkegaard, there still remains an implicit
presence throughout the structure of the book. For instance, de
Lubac tells his reader that the kind of enquiry under way is ‘deliber-
ately fragmentary’,36 like ‘marginal notes’ that are meant to
‘provoke the reader to .. . find God!’ (DG 3). Here de Lubac confronts
a theological problem: how can God pervade human thought and
language, without being a mere extension of it? Although de Lubac
draws upon the ancient Christian tradition as a resource in his
response, to safeguard theology from the threat of anthropomorph-
ism, my claim is that the shape of de Lubac’s response is an
extension of the shape of the argument found in Kierkegaard’s
Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript—
books that de Lubac described as ‘masterpieces of the philosophical
and religious literature of all time’ (AH 102).
In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard’s fictive author Johannes
Climacus puts forth a controversial argument: if Christianity is true,
then essential truth lies beyond the limits of human understanding. 37
The controversial aspect of this argument is that Climacus claims to
state intelligibly a truth that we are incapable of understanding.
Now, Kierkegaard’s authorship repeatedly returns to this issue in
various ways and, as a result he draws a distinction between two
modes of human understanding. For instance, the epigraph of The
Concept of Anxiety reads: ‘Socrates was great in “that he
distinguished between
also, Antonio Russo, Henri De Lubac, vol. 3, Teologi Del 20 o Secolo (Milan: San Paolo,
1994), esp. chs. 7–8.
36
John Milbank accounts for the fragmentary aspect of de Lubac’s work by
appealing to a political motivation behind de Lubac’s text, whereas Reinhard Hütter
disagrees and says that this fragmentary aspect occurs because of contradictory claims
in the text that indicate de Lubac’s confusion. My argument is that the form of de
Lubac’s text is neither political stammering nor an indication of confusion, but
rather the shape of de Lubac’s theology is deliberately Kierkegaardian. For more on
the debate between Milbank and Hütter, see Sean Larsen, ‘The Politics of Desire:
Two Readings of Henri De Lubac on Nature and Grace’, Modern Theology 29, no. 3
(2013), 279–310.
37
For this portrayal of Kierkegaard, I am gratefully indebted to an unpublished
paper ‘Kierkegaard and the Limits of Thought’ by Dan Watts. It is interesting that
David Burrell’s reading of Aquinas fits very well with this reading of Kierkegaard, see
David B. Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (London: Routledge, 1979), ch. 2.
38
what he understood and what he did not understand”.’ Or consider
Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments:
Presumably it could occur to a human being to poetize himself in the
likeness of the god or the god in the likeness of himself, but not to
poetize that the god poetized himself in the likeness of a human being,
for if the god gave no indication, how could it occur to a man that the
blessed god could need him?39
And later in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus says:
The person who understands the paradox (in the sense of understand-
ing it directly) will, misunderstanding, forget that what he at one time in
the decisive passion of faith grasped as the absolute paradox (not as a
relative paradox, because then the appropriation would not be faith),
that is, as that which absolutely was not his own thoughts, can never
become his thoughts (in the direct sense) without changing faith to an
illusion. If he does so, he will later come to see that his absolutely
believing that it was not his own thoughts was an illusion. In faith,
however, he can very well continue to preserve his relation to the
absolute paradox. But within the sphere of faith there can never be
the circumstance that he understands the paradox (in the direct sense),
because, if that happens, then the whole sphere of faith drops out as a
misunderstanding.40
So, for Kierkegaard, when it comes to stating intelligibly a truth that
we are incapable of understanding—such as the task of theology—it
becomes necessary to disambiguate what Dan Watts has called
‘aesthetic-intellectual understanding’ from ‘ethical-religious under-
standing’.41 In other words, it is the distinction between
‘objects that can be grasped in the aesthetic-intellectual mode,
which can be contemplated without bearing upon the way one leads
one’s own life as such’; whereas ethical-religious matters ‘resist
such disinterested contemplation, and bear directly upon the course
of one’s own
38
Kierkegaard, CA, 3.
39
Søren Kierkegaard, PF, 36.
40
Søren Kierkegaard, CUP, 580.
41
Daniel Watts, ‘Kierkegaard and the Limits of Thought’ (University of Essex:
unpublished paper).
42
existence’. There will be more to say about this in the next chapter
on Balthasar’s theological aesthetics. However, going back to Kierke-
gaard’s original controversial claim, it could be rephrased in this
way: ‘Christianity is suitably represented in an ethical-religious
way as incapable of being suitably represented in an aesthetic-
intellectual way.’43 Or to put it in its classical articulation: faith is
always seeking understanding.
Now, the way that de Lubac leads his reader into this disambigu-
ated response to the problem of representing the unrepresentable
God is through a parable entitled ‘Our Knowledge of God’ at the
beginning of The Discovery of God. De Lubac tells a story of a boy that
is caught mocking the preacher’s ‘abstract formulae and pious plati-
tudes’ and is rebuked by the headmaster: ‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to
you that it is the most difficult subject to speak about that you can
think of?’ (DG 3). Commenting on the story—perhaps indirectly of
himself—de Lubac says that this boy could not let go of this
question and it was ‘his first contact with the twofold mystery, of
God and man’—a mystery that St Thomas paradoxically says, we
have the capacity to understand, but cannot be understood (DG 12
n. 24).44 As we shall see, de Lubac extends Kierkegaard’s argument
and further illuminates it from within the Christian tradition.
By contrasting two modes of understanding, de Lubac
specifically draws upon Kierkegaard’s critique of exhaustively
defining the infinite so that it becomes the finite:
That does not, strictly speaking, mean that we realize increasingly ‘the
infinite distance between God and man’—to use Kierkegaard’s
expression—as though God withdrew his greatness from us in propor-
tion as the infinite grows in us, and as we come the better to see that
the divine is not ‘simply the superlative of the human’.45
42
Ibid. 43
Ibid.
44
Cf. ST 1.87.1. References to the Summa Theologiae will be abbreviated as ST
1.2.4.5 for part 1, question 2, article 4, reply to objection 5 (if needed) and will be
cited from St Thomas Aquinas, ST I, ST II, ST III, edition as shown in the list of
Abbreviations.
45
DG 117–18; cf. Journals JP X1 A 135 / SKS NB 10:57. De Lubac’s references
to Kierkegaard are misleading in the English translation and should rather be
written in the footnote as JP X1 A 48 and 679 [1849] / SKS NB 9:48; NB 12:134; X2 A
320 [1850] / SKS NB 14:142. One of de Lubac’s quotes from Kierkegaard actually
comes from JP X5 A 98 / SKS NB 28:9.
It is appropriate then that de Lubac identifies a difference between
‘the God of Aristotle and the God of St. Thomas’ which, in turn allows
him to resist agnosticism, since ‘the knowledge of God remains
concealed beneath the need to criticize any representation of God’,
so that if ‘God conceals himself, it is in his very presence’ (DG 92). For
de Lubac, transcendence ‘necessarily implies immanence’, such that if
‘God is transcendent, then nothing is opposed to him, nothing can
limit him nor be compared with him: he is “wholly other”, and
therefore penetrates the world absolutely’ (DG 94). Of course, de
Lubac is able to connect these claims back to Augustine, Thomas,
and Maximus—but what we have been attending to here is how
these claims are an extension of, indeed shaped by Kierkegaard.
What is at stake, then, in contemporary debates for de Lubac is
that the distinction between Creator and creatures can, and can
continue to be made in spite of our ‘tendency to confuse the Author
of Nature with the Nature through which he reveals himself
obscurely, whose characteristics we cannot help employing in order
to think of him’— that is, the danger of ‘what should have been a
sign becomes a screen’ (DG 22).46 That is why de Lubac says that
The infinite is not a sum of finite elements, and what we understand of
it is not a fragment torn from what remains to be understood. The
intelligence does not do away with the mystery nor does it even begin to
understand it; it in no way diminishes it, it does not ‘bite’ on it: it
enters deeper and deeper into it and discovers it more and more as a
mystery. (DG 117)
So it makes sense then that following the opening parable, de Lubac
inserts an intermezzo entitled Abyssus abyssum invocat (Abyss calls
to abyss), which separates the first chapter from, and characterizes the
formal features of, the mystery alluded to in the opening pages.
Interestingly, the image of an abyss remains with de Lubac, even in
his later comments on Vatican II.47 However, a cursory reading of
Kierkegaard’s writings would show that the human self-relation is
often construed as an abyss, and the individual’s God-relation is
also
46
For more on analogical knowledge, see Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 64–75.
47
See Henri de Lubac and James R. Dunne, The Church: Paradox and Mystery
(Shannon: Ecclesia Press, 1969), 1.
described—albeit in qualitatively distinct—abysmal terms.48 For
this abyss imagery, de Lubac draws upon Sermon 44 by the
Dominican mystic Johannes Tauler, who is also an important
influence on Kierkegaard (DG 7 n. 9).49 Yet, Kierkegaard and de
Lubac appropriate this abyss imagery in such a way as to
characterize the twofold mystery of the God–human relation as an
Abyss-abyss—introducing a doubling effect of vertigo to the
problem of representing the unrepresentable God.
De Lubac frames his enquiry with the possibility of self-
deception which threatens to subvert, not only his edifying
discourse, but also indict his knowledge of God as illusory: ‘Was
Moses right, or Xen- ophanes? Did God make man in his image, or
is it not rather man who has made God in his?’ (DG 5). If both the
self-relation and the God-relation are characterized as an abyss,
then how does one distinguish transcendence from immanence
amid the vertiginous heights and depths of our reflection? How does
one know that the voice Moses heard was not merely the echo
chamber later described by Xenophanes? What is ‘I am who I am’
if not this very kind of maddening reverberation? De Lubac argues
that
If the idea of God in the mind of man is real, then no fact accessible to
history or psychology or sociology, or to any other scientific discipline,
can really be its generating cause. No observable ‘process’ suffices to
account for it. And in that sense it has no genesis ... it cannot be
reduced to the result, itself deceptive, of some empirical
transformation. (DG 17)50
48
The best treatment of this aspect of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology
to date is Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss
49
For more on Tauler’s influence on Kierkegaard, see Barnett, Kierkegaard,
Pietism and Holiness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 6–28, 64–95, passim. See also, Peter
Šajda’s essay, ‘A Teacher in Spiritual Dietethics: Kierkegaard’s Reception of Johannes
Tauler’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval
Traditions, vol. 4 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 265–88. Also see, Podmore,
Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial
(Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013).
50
Later on, de Lubac says, ‘God is not “a point of origin in the past”: he is a
“sufficient reason in the present” (in the past and future as well, and during the
passage of time) .. . God is not merely the principle and the term, at the beginning and
at the end: the Good of every good, the Life of all living things, the Being of all beings,
he is also at the heart of all things . . . the Absolute at the heart of the relative’ (DG
63–5). For more on knowing the unknowable Creator, see Burrell, Faith and Freedom,
20–33. In explaining the formal features of God’s Simpleness and Eternity, Burrell
finds Kierkegaard helpful on numerous occasions. Cf. David B. Burrell, Exercises in
Religious Understanding (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974). See
In other words, de Lubac draws attention to the knowledge of God
presented suitably in an ethical–religious way which is also
incapable of being suitably represented in the disinterested
contemplation of the aesthetic–intellectual mode of understanding.
Instead of pushing de Lubac toward an endorsement of atheism, the
threat of self- subversion opens up this insight for de Lubac:
Every human act, whether it is an act of knowledge or an act of the
will, rests secretly upon God, by attributing meaning and solidity to
the real upon which it is exercised. For God is the Absolute; and
nothing can be thought without positing the Absolute in relating it to
that Absolute; nothing can be willed without tending towards the
Absolute, nor valued unless weighted in terms of the Absolute. (DG
36)
To be clear, de Lubac says that the knowledge in question is not
purely intellectual because ‘our affirmation of God is not the
conclusion of an argument’ (DG 38), but rather existential—‘I bear
the proof within me’ (DG 41). De Lubac explicitly says that ‘we are not
dealing here with a natural intuition of God which would be, so to
speak, right from the start, a natural or necessary accompaniment of
the human spirit. On the contrary, even mystical and supernatural
gifts never attain more than a partial and fleeting anticipation’ (DG
45 n. 15). For de Lubac, the nature of this ‘proof ’ does not grant
certainty, but rather takes on the sense of probing into the depth of
mystery, looking for what we do not know, much like in Anselm’s
riddle-phrase ‘That- than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought’.51
To make this point, de Lubac uses a chimerical image taken from
Kierkegaard’s Journals: ‘Pure reason is a fantasy’ much like the
‘witch who ended by eating her own stomach’ (NB 15:25).
Employing this image, de Lubac says that if the knowledge of God
could be suitably represented in an aesthetic– intellectual way, then
the knower would be ‘like the witch who ended by devouring her
own innards, nothing would remain but the
also, Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas

(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).
51
For more on the distinction of a riddle from a proof, see ‘Riddles and Anselm’s
Riddle’, in Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 267–89. Of Anselm’s riddle-phrase, de Lubac
later says that it ‘shows him, by its recognition of his limitations, the secret of the
only way of surmounting them’ (DG 78).
unthinkable equality of nothing to nothing’ (DG 69). In light of this
discussion, it can be seen how de Lubac explicitly draws attention to
the problem of self-subversion that permeates Kierkegaard’s
writings, and does so in a Kierkegaardian way.
In The Discovery of God, de Lubac brings the reader, through
wonder and ancient worship, back to consider their own existence
as the site of God’s presence. De Lubac’s extension of
Kierkegaard’s argument would not be complete without a
revocation to boot. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes
Climacus refers to the Catholic method of safeguarding church
teaching in his revocation (CUP 619), whereas de Lubac ushers the
reader straight into the priest’s Eucharistic prayer just before
consecrating the host—but instead of the host being broken into
fragments, the reader is left with an ellipsis as the sign of a more
promissory meaning yet to come. It is here that de Lubac echoes the
revocation of the original and pseudonymous Johannes Climacus
saying, ‘No mystical ladder reaches its end unless we renounce it’
(DG 156). This revocation in the form of a liturgical fragment
directs and transforms de Lubac’s previous arguments regarding
desire, participation, and the real distinction between Creator and
creatures into a prayer to God. And it is with this gnomic revocation
that de Lubac opens up the lives of the saints as the concrete moral
example in which to ‘see’ the natural human desire for God:
Perhaps it will be enough to see a man who has seen, and to believe
on his testimony. For that is the miracle which is endlessly repeated,
generation after generation . . . [that] Through his testimony, through
the man who has seen, I really see. (DG 158)
Again, de Lubac extends the argument of Kierkegaard’s fictive

author, Johannes Climacus, that we covered in an earlier chapter. In
Kierke- gaard’s book, Climacus levels the gap between the first
generation of believers and ours, which also levels the gap between
the saint and the contemporary follower: ‘there is not and cannot be
any question of a follower at second hand, for the believer (and only
he, after all, is a follower) continually has the autopsy of faith; he
does not see with the eyes of others and sees only the same as every
believer sees—with the eyes of faith (PF 102). The only gap that
exists for Climacus is the ‘enormous difference between knowing
what Christianity is and being a Christian’—the distance between
hypothesis and testimony (CUP
380). For Climacus, the qualitative difference between an observer and
a participant ‘is repelling. It does not make it easy to enter into what
it introduces; on the contrary, it makes it difficult’ (CUP 381). In
short, de Lubac extends Kierkegaard’s argument by removing the
aura of a neutral hypothesis and transforming his enquiry into a
revealing testimony of the Christian faith in the modern age.
One last structural extension of Kierkegaard’s writings to note is
de Lubac’s postscript to The Discovery of God. Shortly after the
publication of The Drama of Atheist Humanism and The Discovery of
God, de Lubac’s critics sought to help him detach his own
constructive theology from ‘non-Catholic existentialists’ like
Kierkegaard.52 It is significant that Kierkegaard’s work received
critical reviews, which led him to add at the end of Concluding
Unscientific Postscript a section entitled ‘An Understanding with
the Reader’ (CUP 617). Hence, in later editions of The Discovery of
God, de Lubac follows Kierkegaard and attaches a similar postscript
in order to defend himself against such critics. In this later edition,
de Lubac heeded their comments by adding detailed footnotes
often at page-length as an indication of his sources—a practice of
arguing through one’s footnotes that bears a striking resemblance
to Kierkegaard (CUP 33–5, 73–4, 206–7, 274–7, 418–19, 514–19).
Interestingly, de Lubac notes that this ‘supplementary explanation
gave rise to new problems, so that the more one explained oneself
the more explanation was necessary’ (DG 206). In his own defence,
de Lubac emphasizes that what has been said is drawn from the
‘double treasure’ of Scripture and the church’s vast tradition (DG
205). In responding to the ‘well- intentioned and authoritative’
reviewers (DG 206), de Lubac says that ‘to speak of God is as
dangerous as it is necessary’, and if you ‘wait to find words worthy
of God you would never speak at all’ (DG 205). Nevertheless, in his
Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, de Lubac quotes an excerpt
from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death:
52
For an example of Thomist critics, see David L. Greenstock, ‘Thomism and the
New Theology’, The Thomist 13 (1950), 567–96. In reference to de Lubac
specifically Greenstock proclaims, ‘there is no need to go outside Thomism to find a
truly existential philosophy; on the contrary, the intellectual realism of Aquinas
is the best antidote for the excessive voluntarism of the non-Catholic
existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Sartre’ (594).
No teaching on earth has ever really brought God and man so close
together as Christianity, nor can any do so, for only God himself can
do that, and any human fabrication remains just a dream, a precarious
delusion. But neither has any teaching ever protected itself so
painstak- ingly against the most dreadful of all blasphemies, that after
God has taken this step it should be taken in vain, as if it all merges
into one— God and man—never has any teaching been protected in
the same way as Christianity, which protects itself by means of the
offence. (SUD 117)
Reflecting on this passage, de Lubac argues that
The believer has at his disposal a sure criterion to distinguish the truly
sacred from the false, for he is enlightened by God’s historic
revelation, inaugurated in the Old Testament and fully accomplished
in Christ, in whose person remains God even as he reveals himself,
not only as close as possible to man, but as becoming man himself.53
To recapitulate, there are only a few explicit references to Kierkegaard
in The Discovery of God; however, these citations highlight the wider,
implicit Kierkegaardian aspects of de Lubac’s fundamental
theology. I have pointed to the central problem of representing the
unrepresentable God in de Lubac’s favourite book by Kierkegaard,
and I have paid special attention to these references and to the
revocation and postscript that is repeated in de Lubac’s book. Even
though de Lubac does make an attempt to respond to his critics in
the postscript of The Discovery of God, it would not be until his
later book The Mystery of the Supernatural that his critics received
a robust response.
3.4. KIERKEGAARD IN DE LUBAC’S

THEOLOGY OF GRACE
I have been arguing that there is a convergence between Kierkegaard’s

theological vision and de Lubac’s. To support this claim, I have drawn
on some of his early works, and now I turn to consider one of de
Lubac’s most influential books, The Mystery of the Supernatural
(1965). I have drawn attention to the paradoxical claim of Kierke-
gaard’s Fragments: if Christianity is true, then essential truth
lies
53
Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1984), 298.
beyond the limits of human understanding. I now want to show
how de Lubac develops this paradoxical claim in his account of our
natural desire for the supernatural—or to use de Lubac’s own
words, ‘the Christian paradox of humanity’. Here de Lubac
provides the patristic support for a central aspect of Kierkegaard’s
theological anthropology—that is, human beings are at once temporal
and eternal, finite and infinite.54 Now, the way de Lubac endorses
this theological affirmation is in stark contrast to the position of his
critics who advocate a ‘separated theology’—that is, partitioning
the world into a semi-detached universe with the order of grace
logically and struc- turally separate from the order of nature. For de
Lubac, such a separated theology places theology (and its claims) in
dire straits.
David Schindler has framed de Lubac’s paradoxical theology of
grace in this way: ‘On the one hand, if grace did not somehow—
always already—touch the soul of every human being, the Christian
fact would remain an essentially “private” matter of urgent concern
only to those who were already believers’ (MS xvi). On the other
hand: ‘if the order of grace were not essentially gratuitous—that is,
did not really add something to nature that could not be anticipated
or claimed by nature itself—then the Christian fact would lose its
newness and its proper character as divine gift’ (MS xvi). Either
way, severing the order of grace from nature fails to satisfy two
important conditions: i) the public witness of Christian martyrdom,
and ii) the gratuity of God’s free gift of salvation.
Readers of Kierkegaard may detect in Schindler’s presentation of
de Lubac’s theology of grace an extension of Anti-Climacus’
attempt to ‘confess Christ in the midst of Christendom’ in Practice
in Chris- tianity (PC 220). For Anti-Climacus, once it is established
that everyone is already a Christian by virtue of being human, then
the struggle to become a Christian is over and we can all carry on with
the next novelty as a matter of course. Anti-Climacus calls it a ‘fallacy’
to believe that ‘we as such are all Christians. For if this is taken as
given, a militant church seems to be an impossibility’ because
‘wherever it is assumed that there is an established Christendom,
there is an attempt to form a triumphant Church’, and for Anti-
Climacus, ‘the Church
54
Kierkegaard, SUD, 13. For another instance of de Lubac’s endorsement of
Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, see de Lubac, Theology in History (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 170–1.
militant is in the process of becoming, whereas an established
Chris- tendom is, is not becoming’ (PC 211).55 De Lubac’s problem
with the established anti-modernist theology of grace and nature is
that it actually undermines Christianity in particular, and religious
faith in general, as Anti-Climacus says: ‘In the Church militant, it was
piety to confess Christianity; in established Christendom, it is piety to
conceal it’ (PC 217).56 So, Schindler rightly says that de Lubac is left
with the theological problem of ‘how human persons in the natural
order can be interiorly directed to the order of grace that fulfils
them, without in the least possessing this grace in anticipation, and
without being able at all to claim it for themselves’ (MS xvii). As we
shall see, de Lubac’s reply to this question is to affirm the real value
of the natural order of creation and highlight creation’s destiny for
communion with God in freedom and love (MS 19). On the face of
it, there is nothing that immediately suggests a Kierkegaardian shape
to de Lubac’s theological problem. Moreover, a glance through the
index of The Mystery of the Supernatural would not furnish any
explicit references to Kierkegaard. However, there is a convergence
between Kierkegaard’s thought- experiment in Philosophical
Fragments and de Lubac’s book. The clue is best seen by comparing
the table of contents of both books.
In the ‘thought-project’ of the first chapter of Philosophical
Frag- ments, Kierkegaard begins with the paradoxical claim about
how Christianity intelligibly asserts a truth-claim that is incapable
of being suitably represented in an aesthetic–intellectual mode of
understanding. The other key convergence is with the third chapter
and its appendix: ‘The Absolute Paradox’ and ‘Offense at the
Paradox’. A similar structure emerges in de Lubac’s The Mystery of
the Super- natural, with its opening chapters dedicated to ‘The Two
Tendencies of the [Inadequate] Hypothesis’ and chapters 6 to 9
regarding ‘The Christian Paradox’ and its rejection by common
sense. Although de Lubac has come under fire from his critics and
religious superiors for his engagement with thinkers like
Kierkegaard, it seems that he has removed the explicit references
but left the argument intact for those
55
Anti-Climacus uses the medieval terminology of the militant Church—which
struggles against sin and the principalities and powers on earth—and triumphant
Church, which is in heaven after the final judgement. Today, the term of the militant
Church is replaced with ‘the pilgrim people of God’.
56
For more on this discussion, see de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis, 191ff.
with eyes to see. This observation is borne out in remarks made by
de Lubac, such as,
If we begin by disassociating the two orders completely, in order to
establish the existence of a natural order that could be fully and finally
self-sufficient, we are all too likely to end up by seeing not so much a
distinction as a complete divorce. And we may risk also losing the
profound sense of their ‘infinite qualitative difference’. (MS 35)
Here is an unmistakable reference to Kierkegaard that de Lubac has
used earlier in his writings, but without naming its source. Prior to
Humani Generis (1950), de Lubac would not hesitate to drop
Kierke- gaard’s name here, but afterwards, he leaves it to the reader
to make the connection. De Lubac does this again later on:
Between nature as it exists and the supernatural for which God
destines it, the distance is as great, the difference as radical, as that
between non- being and being: for to pass from one to the other is not
merely to pass into ‘more being’, but to pass to a different type of
being. It is a crossing, by grace, of an impassable barrier. (MS 83)
Here de Lubac makes an explicit reference to Lessing’s problem as it is
discussed in Concluding Unscientific Postscript:
the transition whereby something historical and the relation to this
becomes decisive for an eternal happiness is a µscάβÆσØ3 sN3 ¼ººø ªśuo3;
[shifting from one genus to another] ... a leap for both the
contemporary and the one who comes later .. . [Lessing made] an
illusory distinction between contemporaneity and noncontemporaneity.
(CUP 98)
Now for de Lubac, the claim of a ‘pure nature’ in a separated theology
of grace repeats the problem that Kierkegaard confronts in his writ-
ings. In de Lubac’s theological register, the dilemma of natura pura is
that of having to bite the bullet for either Pelagianism or Baianism.
In other words, in order for ‘pure nature’ to reach the moral
perfection of grace, it either has to attain it actively (autonomy) or
passively (heteronomy). De Lubac says that
in either case, we arrive at a hypothetical creature who has no kind of
relationship of love with God; at a ‘beatitude’ which the creature
requires and which God owes him. In the ‘purely natural world’
where this creature lives, all idea of God’s free gift is lost. (MS 48)
In both cases, de Lubac says that moral perfection is construed in
terms of an extrinsic finality and ‘not a destiny inscribed in a man’s
very nature, directing him from within, and which he could not
ontologically escape, but a mere destination given him from outside
when he was already in existence’ (MS 68–9). The problem with
this separated theology of grace is that it posits a ‘purely natural’
universe from which we can obtain ‘natural’ happiness and
imagines a parallel universe that happens to be ‘supernatural’,
which equally requires us to obtain happiness by implication. De
Lubac rightly says that ‘whether we add the two together or set
them up against each other, we can hardly hope to find in them the
gratuitousness we are looking for’ (MS 62). And it is precisely the
gratuity of God’s free gift of grace that is at stake here for de Lubac.
In defence of his own position, de Lubac charitably cites the
infamous encyclical Humani Generis that was allegedly written in
protest against his own earlier theological position, which he now
claims was written in haste (MS 50 n. 57).
In this book, de Lubac extends Climacus’ paradox in terms
of the scholastic tradition. For Climacus, the paradox was whether
Christianity could be thought, and remain outside of thought. But
de Lubac draws this somewhat abstract question into the neo-
scholastic interpretation of a pure nature, which, according to
him, would be the equivalent of endorsing the undesirable Socratic
position: that the truth of Christianity comes from within, rather
than without human thought. Hence, there is no such thing as
revelation, only wish fulfilment. So when de Lubac characterizes
the rejection of the paradox of Christian revelation in terms of
‘offence’, he specifically targets Cajetan as the ‘unfaithful
Thomist’ who gives rise to the modern anthropological turn by
‘blurring the paradox of faith’ (MS 166). For de Lubac, the limits of
nature are absolutized when Cajetan says that ‘reasonable nature is
a closed whole within which the active capacities and tendencies
are in strict correspondence’, such that ‘natural desire does not
extend itself beyond the faculty of nature’ (MS 140).
[W]e are dealing with an ‘understanding of faith’, which must always
presuppose at its base, as a first and permanent condition, the gift of
faith itself. We are dealing with a search which is constantly guided
by that faith. With such a guide it cannot take a false turning. It never
tries to get beyond it . . . Faith has its own light, which can be far
brighter in the intellect of a simple believer than in that of the finest
theologian. The effort of ‘understanding’ cannot be directed to
anything but a better reflective realization of the gift of faith—
something not only of value in itself, but fulfilling a need in this. For
both reasons such an effort is fully
justified. But, let me say again, it develops wholly within that gift, and at
every stage will be measured closely against it in its results. (MS 165)
In light of de Lubac’s description here, it is helpful to remember

that for Kierkegaard, the Christian mystery calls for ‘a crucifixion
of the understanding’, since the understanding is ‘continually
colliding with this unknown, which certainly does exist but is also
unknown and to that extent does not exist. The understanding does
not go beyond this; yet in its paradoxicality the understanding
cannot stop reaching it and being engaged with it’ (PF 44). But
again, de Lubac refers to Kierkegaard’s paradox between the
clashing form of two modes of understanding: the ‘idea of mystery
is perfectly acceptable to reason once one has admitted the idea of a
personal and transcendent God. The truth we receive from him
about himself must exceed our grasp, simply because of its superior
intelligibility: understood, it can never be grasped’ (MS 171). This
sheds a bit more light on de Lubac’s remark that ‘the whole of
dogma is thus but a series of paradoxes, disconcerting to natural
reason and requiring not an impossible proof but reflective
justification’ (C 327). Indeed, de Lubac goes on to observe that
People frequently reason as though all the mystery were on God’s
side, and there was nothing in man that eludes the grasp of common
experience or natural reasoning. Our whole nature should, in theory
at least, be comprehensible to us, and we have the key to understand-
ing all its manifestations. But this is somewhat illusory When we
have said everything the mind can take in, everything definable that is
to be said about ourselves, we have as yet said nothing, unless we
have included in every statement the fact of our reference to the
incomprehensible God; and that reference, and therefore our nature
itself in the most fundamental sense, is not really understood at all
unless we freely allow ourselves to be caught up by that incomprehen-
sible God. No one must think that we can understand man otherwise
than by grasping him in his movement towards the blessed obscurity
of God. (MS 209)
Although de Lubac is dependent on Étienne Gilson in some respects

here, it is because of Kierkegaard’s influence that there is an
important divergence between Gilson and de Lubac. De Lubac’s
theology can be distinguished from other thinkers during this time
like Gilson, who failed to adequately distinguish Kierkegaard from
atheistic
57
existentialism. The difference between Gilson and de Lubac can
be put this way: for Gilson, paradox does not feature in his
Christian philosophy;58 for de Lubac, the Christian paradox is his
‘entire Credo’, since
the ‘desire to see God’ cannot be permanently frustrated without an
essential suffering . . . for a good and just God could hardly frustrate me,
unless I, through my own fault, turn away from him by choice. The
infinite importance of the desire implanted in me by my Creator is
what constitutes the infinite importance of the drama of human
existence . . . this desire is not some ‘accident’ in me. It does not result
from some peculiarity, possibly alterable, of my individual being, or
from some historical contingency whose effects are more or less
transitory. A fortiori it does not in any sense depend upon my
deliberate will. It is
57
Étienne Gilson, Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Armand
A. Maurer and Laurence K. Shook (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
2002), 417. Gilson says, ‘To speak of “existential philosophy” today immediately
brings to mind names like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, and others, whose
philosophical opinions are not always the same, and to which no Thomism, conscious
of its own nature, could under any circumstances fully align itself.’ For more on
Gilson’s dismissal of Kierkegaard, see Francesca Aran Murphy, Art and Intellect in
the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson, Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political
Philosophy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 193, 215–17.
58
Recall Gabriel Marcel’s criticism of Gilson: ‘I would be disposed, for my part,
to think that there is Christian philosophy only there where this paradox, this
scandal, is not only admitted or even accepted, but embraced with a passionate and
unrestricted gratitude. From the moment on when, to the contrary, philosophy seeks
by some procedure to attenuate this scandal, to mask the paradox, to reabsorb the
revealed datum in a dialectic of pure reason or mind, to this precise degree it ceases
to be a Christian philosophy. Along these lines, very close to us, the extraordinary
influence exercised by Kierkegaard in reaction to Hegelian idealism is explicable.
That is a key point to which I will soon return, once the translations currently being
done have appeared, those of Sickness unto Death, Repetition, and The Concept of
Anxiety. If I had to address a criticism to Mr. Gilson, it would perhaps be that of not
placing this paradox at the heart of the definition he gives to Christian
philosophy’, in Gregory
B. Sadler, Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in
France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 165. An
additional point of divergence between Gilson and de Lubac is that for the former,
Thomas is Aristotelian, but not for de Lubac: ‘Under different forms, and with
accentuations varying from one century and school to another, Christian philosophy
thus developed the concept of a human nature which is open to receive a
supernatural gift. Such a concept was unknown, of course, in ancient philosophy.
There is nothing Aristotelian about it—though St. Thomas Aquinas, faithful to his
method of concili- ation and without any historical scruple, sometimes finds ways to
express it in Aristotelian terms. But nor is it Platonic or Plotinian. Though
theoretically justifiable by reason, the fact remains that it was wholly shaped and
developed in direct dependence on Christian revelation’ (MS 119).
in me as a result of my belonging to humanity as it is, that humanity
which is, as we say, ‘called’. For God’s call is constitutive. My
finality, which is expressed by this desire, is inscribed upon my very
being as it has been put into this universe by God. And, by God’s will,
I now have no other genuine end, no end really assigned to my nature
or presented for my free acceptance under any guise, except that of
‘seeing God’. (MS 54–5)
Reading de Lubac’s comments about the mystery of faith in light of
Kierkegaard’s contrast between two modes of understanding, it can
be seen how de Lubac’s remarks converge with Kierkegaard’s
claim that Christianity is suitably represented in an ethical–religious
way as incapable of being suitably represented in an aesthetic–
intellectual way:
if I should be able to declare unequivocally that God gives himself to
me, and makes himself to be seen by me freely, and quite independ-
ently, then that supernatural gift must be clearly seen to be free not
merely in relation to some generic nature, abstract and theoretical, but
actually in relation to the concrete nature in which I, here and now,
share. (MS 61)
Hence, de Lubac offers ‘a return to the point of view of past
tradition, which was far more “personalist” and far more
“existential” (though not existentialist!) than its language always
leads one to suspect’ (MS 63). In particular, de Lubac points to
Thomas, who ‘does not reason from a “disexistentialized” human
essence’ (MS 67). For it is Thomas, after Augustine, who
advocates an ‘element of inwardness—which we also call
transcendence—which belongs to the creating God “who is more
interior to me than I am myself”’ (MS 78). Here we cannot
overlook the importance of de Lubac’s earlier remark about
Kierkegaard as the ‘theologian of inwardness’ (AH 103). This
inwardness is Kierkegaard’s Augustinian way of speaking about the
spiritual life of a person, indeed the realm of the soul’s activities.59
59
For more, see Robert Puchniak, ‘Augustine: Kierkegaard’s Tempered Admir-
ation of Augustine’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and the Patristic and
Medieval Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 11–22. Robert Puchniak,
‘Kierkegaard’s “Self” and Augustine’s Influence’, in Heiko Schulz, Jon Stewart, and
Karl Verstrynge (eds), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2011), 181–94. See also, Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of
Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013).
Now, de Lubac’s theology of sanctification is implied in his theo-
logical account of human existence before God. Indeed, what de
Lubac says about the individual believer, also applies to the church.
Elsewhere, de Lubac goes on to say that
All that we say of the person of Jesus Christ, the Word of God made
flesh, applies analogically to his real presence in the Eucharist and to his
‘mystical body’ (i.e., the Church, considered as an eschatological reality,
who has Christ for her head and those who are sanctified for her
members).60
De Lubac’s remarks about individual and ecclesial sanctification
bear upon his remarks about the real presence of Christ in the
Eucharist. In fact, de Lubac develops this thought in one of his most
famous remarks: ‘The Church produces the Eucharist, but the
Eucharist also produces the Church.’61 In the next section, I would
like to trace a similar line of theological thinking in Kierkegaard’s
Discourses at the Communion on Fridays.62
3.5. KIERKEGAARD AND THE REAL PRESENCE

OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST
In The Splendor of the Church, de Lubac argues that ‘Christ in his

Eucharist is truly the heart of the Church’.63 In this section, I would
like to highlight the way in which Kierkegaard endorses this same way
of thinking. Contrary to anti-ecclesial stereotypes about
Kierkegaard, when Kierkegaard writes about the Eucharist, it is not
in the abstract but rather he writes a series of thirteen short
reflections that were meant for a specific liturgical setting of the
Friday Eucharistic service in Copenhagen’s Cathedral, ‘The Church
of Our Lady’. From 1209 to 1536, this was a Catholic church that
was named after St Mary and it
60
Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis, 299. De Lubac cites a passage from Søren
Kierkegaard, Knud Ferlov, and Jean-Jacques Gateau, Traité du désespoir, Essais (Paris:
Gallimard, 1949), 225.
61
Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church, 133.
62
Kierkegaard DCF.
63
Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church, 160.
is where Kierkegaard’s funeral took place in 1855. Although
Kierke- gaard is perhaps best known for his ‘Attack on
Christendom’, David Law reminds us that ‘the Eucharist was of
enormous and central importance for Kierkegaard’, and that
‘confession, absolution, and the Eucharist were the only ecclesial
actions which Kierkegaard continued throughout his life’.64 Rather
than being suspicious of human desire or the sacraments,
Kierkegaard wants to use these Eucharistic writings to awaken our
desire for God. In fact, Kierkegaard says that his entire authorship
definitively points toward these Eucharistic reflections, which are
aimed toward helping readers to prepare themselves for that
‘decisive point of rest, at the foot of the altar’ (WA 165).
Recently, Carl Hughes has argued that Kierkegaard wrote about the
Eucharist in such a way as to ‘solicit readers to join and extend the
forms of performances that they evoke’—that is, ‘to stir a longing
for God that should govern every aspect of one’s life outside the
church walls’.65 The edifying aim of these Eucharistic reflections
was appropriate in the liturgical context for which they were
intended, since the congregation would then proceed to participate
in the Eucharistic celebration to which these reflections pointed. In
a similar way, these Eucharistic discourses reflect Kierkegaard’s
own authorial strategy, which aimed to stand aside and motivate his
reader to put the book down and to act. In a journal entry from
1850, Kierkegaard says ‘in connection with Christianity, I would
stress another aspect of the concept of mystery: the ethical-
religious’. Indeed, Kierkegaard insists that ‘Christianity understood
very well that with respect to serving the truth, what matters especially
is the transformation of the individual, so that one becomes a suitable
instrument of the truth’. Later, Kierkegaard says of the divine mystery
that
64
David Law, ‘Kierkegaard’s Understanding of the Eucharist’, in Robert L. Perkins
(ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 17: Christian Discourses and the
Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (Macon: Mercer University Press,
2007),
275. For more, see Michael Plekon, ‘Kierkegaard and the Eucharist’, Studia
Liturgica 22 (1992), 214–36. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, ‘Søren Kierkegaard at Friday
Communion in the Church of Our Lady’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International
Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 18: Without Authority (Macon: Mercer University
Press, 2007b), 255–94. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, ‘Longing for Reconciliation
with God: A Fundamental Theme in “Friday Communion Discourses”, Fourth Part
of Christian Discourses’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian
Söderquist (eds), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2007a (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2007), 318–36.
65
Hughes, Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in
a Theology of Eros (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 13.
certainly, Christianity has never been—indeed, it has abhorred being—a
mystery in the sense of existing only for a few brilliant minds who
have become its initiates. No: God has chosen the lowly and the
despised— but still there was no lack of initiation. It is not an
intellectual but an ethical initiation, personality’s enormous respect
for inclusion in the Christian community, and this respect is not
expressed in assurances and by making a fuss, but existentially, in action
. . . I never forget that with respect to Christianity, a shoemaker, a
tailor, a workman is just as much a possibility as the most learned
person and the most brilliant intellect. (NB 15:12–15)
Now, in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the divine mystery, he also
distinguishes between what is seen and unseen in his sacramental
theology. Hughes notes how even the vocabulary Kierkegaard
deploys for receiving the sacrament [at gaae til Alters] indicates a
physical action that can be translated literally as ‘to go to the altar’.
Yet, Kierke- gaard distinguishes this visible action from the unseen
communion [Samfund] with Christ in the Eucharist.66 When the
Hongs used ‘communion table’ instead of the more accurate
translation of ‘altar’ or ‘Eucharist’, this reflects their own
denominational terminology rather than Kierkegaard’s own
understanding. However, Hughes is right to observe that for
Kierkegaard, the transformation of desire becomes the way in which
we ‘see’ forgiveness and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.67
Hence, Hughes says that Kierkegaard’s description of our
communion with God in terms of a generative longing disrupts ‘the
Lutheran tendency to define the Christian life exclusively in terms of
sin and forgiveness’.68
So what does Kierkegaard say specifically about the connection
between the Eucharist and human yearning? Kierkegaard draws upon
some key scriptural passages to develop his reflections on the Euchar-
ist. For Kierkegaard, the purpose of the Eucharist is communion
with Christ, who is really present at the altar. Kierkegaard’s
theology in his Eucharistic discourses can be grouped into three
movements: receiving forgiveness, giving thanks, and deepening
our longing for God. Indeed for Kierkegaard, God is the one who
enables and satisfies the Eucharistic longing ‘to renew communion
with our Saviour and Atoner’, a reciprocal longing that Kierkegaard
describes as laying hold of us, which makes us long to lay hold of it
(DCF 37). Indeed, Kierkegaard describes this longing in terms of a
gift from God—that
66
Ibid., 217 n. 1. 67
Ibid., 98. 68
Ibid., 107.
is, Christ’s desire to share in this Eucharist with us (Luke 22:15).
Moreover, Kierkegaard describes the movement of this Eucharistic
desire in scriptural terms, referring to the action of the Holy Spirit
(John 3:8). Kierkegaard says ‘comprehend it you cannot, nor should
you’, but rather, ‘you should use the longing’ by the work of the
Spirit because ‘God gives himself in these gifts’ (DCF 39).
However, Kierkegaard also notes how a ‘person can ignore its call’
and ‘can resist it’ even ‘prevent its deeper formation’ in them (DCF
40). So, Kierkegaard urges the reader to ‘receive it with gratitude as
a gift from God, then it will become a blessing to you’ (DCF 40).
One example of this longing that Kierkegaard provides in his
journals is that of the Blessed Virgin:
Mary sought something that was not her own, something that was
entrusted to her—and by God—something she had had: in this way
we should seek lost innocence, to come into God’s kingdom as
children. She sought it tirelessly. She sought it in the temple. (NB 15:34;
cf. Luke 2:41ff)
Thus, Kierkegaard presents the Eucharist as a sacrament that invites
both divine and human action in a non-competitive fashion, saying
that God awakens this longing in our soul and it is our
responsibility to be good stewards of this longing (DCF 40).
Kierkegaard says that it is God who ‘gives the time of grace “this
very day”, but the human being is the one who must seize the time
of grace “this very day”’. Indeed, Kierkegaard says that with God,
‘there is a linguistic difference between us, and yet we strive to
understand you and to make ourselves intelligible to you’ (DCF 54).
God gives this Eucharistic longing to the believer, God gives
himself to the believer through this longing, such that the believer’s
longing for the Eucharist is the longing for union with God. For
this reason, Kierkegaard says, ‘I long all the more heartily to
renew my communion with him who has also made satisfaction for
my sin’ (DCF 47). In short, Kierkegaard presents the Eucharist, not as
the termination of our longing, but rather the intensification of it.
Kierkegaard has more to say about the restlessness that longs for
transparent rest, when he discusses Christ’s invitation to give rest to
the weary and burdened soul (Matt. 11:28). Kierkegaard reminds us
that
The gospel will not be an escape, consolation, and alleviation for a
few troubled people; no, it applies to all those who labour and are
heavy laden, that is, it applies to everyone and requires of every
person that he shall know what it is to labour and to be heavy laden.
(DCF 51)
For Kierkegaard, Christ’s invitation contains a requirement: an
awareness of, and repentance for one’s sin. Kierkegaard says that
‘only the penitent properly understands what it is to pray for rest
for the soul, rest in the only thought in which there is rest of a
penitent, that there is forgiveness’ (DCF 52). As Kierkegaard pens
these words, he has in mind the statue of the Risen Christ that was
made by Bertel Thorvaldsen, which stands behind the altar in The
Church of Our Lady with arms outstretched and the words ‘Come to
me’ chiselled into the base.
It is precisely these words, ‘Come to me’, that Kierkegaard says
we are meant to hear at the altar—the very voice of the Risen
Christ. Indeed, another mode of Christ’s real presence in the
Eucharist is his voice, the one who communicates his words and his
own life to us. In hearing the voice of Christ in the Eucharist, it is
Christ who also knows us intimately, and so we follow Christ,
listening and obeying his every word (John 10:27). Kierkegaard
says that
[Christ] understands you completely, far better than you understand

yourself. You have only to rejoice (oh, the infinite felicity of love!) in his
love—to be silent and to give thanks! To listen and to give thanks;
yes, for when you are silent, then you understand him, and best when
you are completely silent; and when you give thanks, then he
understands you, and best when you give thanks always. So happy is a
person’s love with which he loves God. (DCF 71)
Importantly, Kierkegaard says that ‘the divine service does not

center as usual on the pulpit, but on the altar. And at the altar what
is essential above all is to hear his voice’ (DCF 58). Kierkegaard insists
it is not the priest who gives Christ to us, but Christ himself who
communicates his own life to us in the Eucharist. Although Kierke-
gaard does not use these Eucharistic reflections to explain the doc-
trine of Ex opere operato, he does seem to take for granted a view that
the efficacy of the Eucharist depends upon the faithfulness of Christ
and his blessing that is given to us in this holy meal (Luke 24:51).
For Kierkegaard, Christ not only blesses the bread and the wine,
‘his holy body and blood’ (DCF 99), but Christ is the blessing that
we partake in, and indeed the blessing we are meant to become.
Lest we think that the efficacy of this sacrament depends solely
upon us, Kierke- gaard says that, ‘At the altar you are able to do
nothing at all. Satisfaction is made there—but by another; the
sacrifice is made— but by another; the atonement is
accomplished—by the Atoner’
(DCF 85–6). Kierkegaard reminds his reader that ‘you stand
entirely in need of grace and the blessing’, and yet ‘the meal itself is
the blessing’; indeed, ‘at the altar he is the blessing’ because ‘he is
present at the altar’ (DCF 87).
Kierkegaard’s understanding of the real presence of Christ in the
Eucharist is also informed by his theology of the atonement,
sacrifice, and Christ as the High Priest who knows our predicament,
and who has overcome it (Heb. 4:15). Here Kierkegaard offers a
view of Christ’s suffering that does not encourage a person to
‘despairingly shut yourself up with your sufferings, as if no one, not
even he, could understand you’. No, in Christ we come to
‘suffering’s highest point, but also to suffering’s limit’ (DCF 95).
At the foot of the altar, Kierkegaard says we encounter ‘the
Consoler’ who ‘can entirely put himself in your place’ and enable you
to ‘become yourself the one who consoles others’ (DCF 96). In this
way, Kierkegaard envisions that when Christ is lifted up, he draws
all people to himself (John 12:32). Indeed, divine compassion both
elicits humility, and brings about the inclusion of the marginalized
(Luke 18:13).
Scholars have noted how Kierkegaard’s theology of redemption
is tied to his theology of the Incarnation and his theology of the
Eucharist. It is Christ who stands in our place in the Incarnation
and Atonement, and it is Christ who becomes present to us in the
Eucharist. One cannot help but detect an echo of Athanasius’ the-
ology in Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon Christ becoming one with us
so that we can become one with Christ.69 Kierkegaard says that ‘All,
each one individually, receive at the altar the pledge that their sins
are forgiven them’ (DCF 114). Kierkegaard also describes the purpose
of the sacramental, real presence of Christ in the Eucharist in terms
of contemporaneity (Samtidighed) with Christ. In his journals,
Kierke- gaard says that
The condition for a human being’s salvation is the faith that
everywhere and at every moment there is an absolute beginning . . . A
beginning always has a double impetus: in the direction of what has
gone before and in the direction of the new. The new begins to the
same degree that it pushes against the direction of the old. (NB 15:42)
69
Robert Puchniak, ‘Athanasius: Kierkegaard’s Curious Comment’, in Jon
Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Traditions [KRSRR 4]
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 3–10.
Indeed for Kierkegaard, this contemporaneity with Christ means
that ‘absolutely every human being is equally near to God’ and,
Kierke- gaard adds: ‘in being loved by him’ (DCF 126). In
Kierkegaard’s understanding of the love of Christ, this love covers a
multitude of sin (1 Pet. 4:8). For it is Christ who is the covering that
hides [at Skjule] the multitude of sin. Kierkegaard explains that
Christ hides our sin ‘with his holy body’ (DCF 141), not from God,
but from us; from our refusal to appropriate and receive forgiveness
due to guilt or pride (WA 182). Here Kierkegaard reminds us that
Christ ‘gives you himself as a hiding place’ and our life is hidden
with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). As Sylvia Walsh says, Kierkegaard’s
point is that ‘love and forgiveness stand in a reciprocal as well as
proportional relation to one another, each eliciting and
strengthening the other’ (DCF 32).
Kierkegaard says that in the Eucharist, it is Christ who
overcomes our own self-deception with his love, which overwhelms
our hearts (1 John 3:20). In receiving the forgiveness of sin,
Kierkegaard says that we are being made aware of our sin and the
forgiveness of sin at once. But this is not to burden us with our sin,
but rather to help us lay it aside so that it no longer presents itself as
an obstacle to our communion with Christ and our love of
neighbour. In his own words, Kierkegaard reminds his reader that
Christ ‘is present at the altar where you seek him; he is present there
—but only in order once again from on high to draw you to himself ’
(DCF 124). Moreover, Kierkegaard says that, with the words of
institution (1 Cor. 11:23), ‘it must be his voice you hear when he
says, “this is my body”. For at the altar there is no speaking about
him; there he himself is personally present, it is he who speaks—if
not, then you are not at the altar’ (DCF 58). For Kierkegaard, the
Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. Christ
accompanies the believer wherever they go, and yet wherever
Christ is, so is the altar (DCF 60). Kierkegaard says that the task is
‘on leaving the altar, still to remain at the altar’ during the week and
at work (DCF 60).
For Kierkegaard, God gives himself in this Eucharistic longing. It is
in this insatiate longing that we encounter the infinite God. God is
in the longing that is for Him, but Kierkegaard adds that the
Eucharist is not just a ritual meant for believers, but rather the love
that is experienced in the Eucharist is poured out in the real
presence of Christ in the love of neighbour that is also for Him.
Kierkegaard offers two reflections on the relationship between the
forgiveness of sin and the love of neighbour (Luke 7:47).
Kierkegaard describes this
process as forgiveness ‘loving forth love’ in another (DCF 132).
Again Walsh says that ‘forgiveness is not dependent on how much
one owes or on one’s ability to repay a debt, yet the person who is
forgiven the most should love the most in return’ (DCF 32). In
short, the Eucharist is not the end, but rather the generative source
of transformation in the Christian’s life. Put differently, we might
say that for Kierkegaard, the Eucharist makes the church. However,
we should give Kierkegaard the final word:
You receive [Christ] himself, in and with the visible sign he gives you
himself as a cover over your sins. As he is the truth, you do not then
come to know what truth is from him and now are left to yourself, but
only remain in the truth by remaining in him. As he is the way, you do
not then come to know from him what way you must go and now, left
to yourself, must go your own way, but only by remaining in him do
you remain on the way. As he is the life, you do not then have life
handed over by him and now must shift for yourself, but only by
remaining in him do you have life—in this way he is also the hiding
place; only by remaining in him, only by identifying yourself with
him are you in hiding and there is a cover over the multitude of your
sins. For that reason the Lord’s Supper is called communion with him. It
is not merely in remembrance of him, not merely a pledge that you
have communion with him, but it is the communion, this communion
that you then must strive to preserve in your daily life by living more
and more out of yourself and identifying yourself with him, with his
love, which hides a multitude of sins. (DCF 143)
3.6. CONCLUSION: READING DE LUBAC

AND KIERKEGAARD TOGETHER
This chapter has provided a brief survey of Henri de Lubac’s theo-

logical anthropology and I have placed it in the context of the wider
project of ressourcement (§3.1). I have established, not only
Kierke- gaard’s influence upon de Lubac’s life story (§3.2), but also
I have offered an interpretation and a close reading of several
important works by de Lubac in order to highlight the convergence
of de Lubac’s theology with Kierkegaard’s writings (§3.3). In order
to not leave the reader with a unidirectional analysis, I have
attempted to reconstruct Kierkegaard’s Eucharistic reflections in a
way that
converges with de Lubac’s theology (§3.4). My argument is that de
Lubac and Kierkegaard offer complementary theological visions,
rather than contradictory ones. Indeed, de Lubac is one central
ressourcement figure who puts Kierkegaard’s writings to work in
his fundamental theology and his theology of grace in a unique way
that develops the previous generation of the Kierkegaardian
tradition in Catholicism.
Yet, this way of telling the ressourcement story might appear to
some scholars as misunderstanding a crucial aspect of what David
Grumett has recently identified as the ‘classic ressourcement
method- ology’, which prides itself on ‘returning to the great
sources of the Christian tradition—scripture, patristics, and the
liturgy—and applying the Christian vision there presented to the
modern era’.70 From this picture of ressourcement, one could begin
to think that it was a two-step process of first returning, and then
applying the ancient insights of the Fathers to a contemporary world
—as if there was a ‘pure retrieval’ untarnished by context-laden
application. Is it not rather the case that in returning to the source,
the excavator automatically brings how the source will be applied?
The method- ology of this chapter attempts to bridge Catholic
theology and Kier- kegaard studies to show that the task of
ressourcement is not primarily a retrieval of an ancient world-picture
which in turn is subsequently grafted onto contemporary debates,
but rather is a mode of retrieval that is already a confrontation with
contemporary figures and debates—in and as retrieval. Hence, Hans
Urs von Balthasar rightly says, ‘Despite their historical and
scholarly appearance, all Henri de Lubac’s works clearly refer to
the present’ (AH 9). In short, ressourcement is not merely a
historical retrieval and interrogation of the past faith tradition, but it
is also retrieval and interrogation of oneself (and one’s situation)
before God. Thus, as Kevin Hughes rightly says, ressourcement is
not ‘a nostalgic retreat to the theological safety of premodern
Christendom. Rather, it is a vital struggle for the proper diagnosis
of our present condition.’71
If the current literature on ressourcement tends to delineate the
‘return to the sources’ into two stages—first a retrieval, then
70
David Grumett, ‘Henri de Lubac: Looking for Books to Read the World’, in
Flynn and Murray, Ressourcement, 237. Emphasis mine.
71
Kevin L. Hughes, ‘The Ratio Dei and the Ambiguities of History’, Modern
Theology 21, no. 4 (2005), 645.
application to the modern world—then against this picture of re-
ssourcement, I suggest that de Lubac is not only a good example of
how to do a retrieval, but also that the writings of Søren
Kierkegaard are constitutive of de Lubac’s retrieval. Rather than a
picture of ‘the sources’ as a whole which has since been fragmented,
de Lubac offers a picture of ressourcement that is situated in the
contemporary world, inquisitive of the church’s tradition, and
reflexive in regards to one’s own existence before God. My claim
has been that de Lubac’s retrieval cannot be separated from his
existential, Kierkegaardian interests—a more modern source whose
impact has not been appreciated sufficiently by previous
scholarship. Indeed, de Lubac deliberately draws on the basic aims
of Kierkegaard’s writings as an aid to his unique diagnostic and
apologetic task. What results is a broader understanding of the task
of ressourcement that is at once able to negotiate the authorities of
the faith and engage in speculative questions already marked by
contemporary concerns.
Monstrance or Monstrosity?
A Kierkegaardian Critique of Hans Urs von
Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics
Creation as a whole has become a monstrance of God’s real

presence.
Hans Urs von Balthasar1
He deserves to be called a theologian, however,
who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God
seen through suffering and the cross.
Martin Luther2
We look not to the things that are seen
but to the things that are unseen;
for the things that are seen are transient,
but the things that are unseen are eternal.
St Paul (2 Cor. 4:18)
In the first half of this book, I argued that the broader catholicity of
the Lutheran structure of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology
has stimulated reform and renewal in twentieth-century Catholic
theology, and that this should expand the scope of contemporary
portrayals of ressourcement theology. In the previous chapter,
I examined the Kierkegaardian aspects of Henri de Lubac’s ressource-
ment theology to argue that de Lubac develops the Kierkegaardian
1
Hans Urs von Balthasar, GL 1, 420. Henceforth, GL 1: page number.
2
Luther, AE XXXI, 52; Heidelberg Disputation, paragraph 20. <http://book
ofconcord.org/heidelberg.php#20> (accessed 20 May 2015).
Kierkegaard and Hans Urs von 1
tradition within Catholicism in original ways for his own
theological project. However, Catholic thinkers have not always
responded positively to Kierkegaard in every respect. In this chapter,
I will examine the writings of de Lubac’s protégé,3 Hans Urs von
Balthasar (1905–1988) to re-evaluate Balthasar’s critique of
Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety (§4.1–4.2) and aesthetics (§4.3–4.4).
My argument is that there is a particular Christological problem in
Balthasar’s thematization of ‘distance’ in his theology of anxiety
and aesthetics, which could be better addressed if Balthasar attended
to Kierkegaard’s dialectical view (§4.5). Alternatively, I suggest that
instead of using Kierkegaard as a Protestant foil, Kierkegaard’s
Christology is a salutary corrective to Balthasar’s theological project.
Rather than viewing Balthasar’s critique of Kierke- gaard as a piece of
counter-evidence to my overall argument in this book, I conclude
that readers of Balthasar and Kierkegaard should find that they share
more compatible goals than is commonly recognized.
4.1. ASSESSING BALTHASAR’S CRITIQUE OF

KIERKEGAARD’S VIEW OF ANXIETY
In the winter term of 1926–7, long before his personal friendship

with Karl Barth began,4 Balthasar was first introduced to Kierkegaard’s
3
Henri de Lubac refers to Balthasar as a kind of contemporary Church Father:
‘instead of wearing himself out like so many others in the effort to rejuvenate the
old Scholasticism for better or worse by a few borrowings made from philosophies
of the day, or even of renouncing, again like so many others, any organized
theological thought, von Balthasar makes a fresh start at outlining an original
synthesis, of radically biblical inspiration, which sacrifices nothing of the elements
of traditional dogmatics. His extreme sensitivity to the developments of culture and
to the ques- tionings of our age inspires such boldness in him. His intimate
knowledge, attested to by his earlier works, of the Fathers of the Church, of Saint
Thomas Aquinas and of the great spiritual leaders, allows him to attempt the
venture. It is on them that he has long been nourished; he is their successor today,
without any servility just as without any betrayal, so much has he assimilated their
substance’, in de Lubac, Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996),
594–5. For more on the relationship between de Lubac and Balthasar, see Michael
Figura, ‘Das Geheimnis des Überna- türlichen. Hans Urs von Balthasar und Henri
de Lubac’, in Magnus Striet and Jan Heiner Tück (eds), Die Kunst Gottes verstehen:
Hans Urs von Balthasars theologische Provokationen (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), 349–
66.
4
For more, see Stephen D. Wigley, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar:
A Critical Engagement (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 1–5. See also, Benjamin Dahlke,
Karl Barth, Catholic Renewal and Vatican II (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 98–102,
writings by Romano Guardini in Berlin.5 In his writings, Balthasar
occasionally praises Kierkegaard; indeed, one of his earliest books, The
Christian and Anxiety (1951),6 was generated out of his engagement
with one of Kierkegaard’s most significant works. However,
Balthasar later reflects upon this encounter as ‘my misfortune’.7
Many commentators, particularly Joseph Ballan8 and John
Cihak,9 have provided a helpful index of Balthasar’s engagement
and disagreement with Kierkegaard. Yet, despite the sizeable
commentary on Balthasar’s treatment of Kierkegaard,10 Balthasar’s
commentators fail to offer a critical
121–7. For a wider context that predates Balthasar, see Amy Marga, Karl Barth’s
Dialogue with Catholicism in Göttingen and Münster: Its Significance for His Doctrine
of God (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), passim.
5
Manfred Lochbrunner, ‘Guardini und Balthasar: Auf der Spurensuche einer
geistigen Wahlverwandtschaft’, Forum Katholische Theologie 12 (1996), 229–46. The
text that they studied was Concluding Unscientific Postscript with specific reference to
Kierkegaard’s engagement of Lessing (233 n. 15). Guardini’s Kierkegaard seminar
took place not long before Hannah Arendt and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
arrived in Berlin. In fact, Hannah Arendt, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Josef Pieper
were all students of Guardini. For more, see Robert A. Krieg, Romano Guardini:
A Precursor of Vatican II (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 8–11.
For more on Guardini’s treatment of Kierkegaard, see Peter Šajda, ‘Isolation on
Both Ends? Romano Guardini’s Double Response to the Concept of
Contemporaneity’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian
Söderquist, Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2010: Kierkegaard’s Late Writings
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 201–22. See also, Peter Šajda, ‘Romano
Guardini: Between Actualistic Personalism, Qualitative Dialectic and Kinetic
Logic’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierke- gaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and
Jewish Theology, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 10,
tome 3 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 45–74.
6
Hans Urs von Balthasar, DCA. In the case of a direct quotation, the English
pagination will be followed by the original in German.
7
Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work: In Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius,
Press 1993), 57.
8
Joseph Ballan, ‘Hans Urs von Balthasar: Persuasive Forms or Offensive Signs?
Kierkegaard and the Problems of Theological Aesthetics’, in Jon Stewart (ed.),
Kier- kegaard’s Influence on Theology: Catholic and Jewish Theology, ed. Jon
Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 10, tome 3
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 3–24.
9
John R. Cihak, Balthasar and Anxiety (London: T&T Clark, 2009), ch. 3.
10
See Edward T. Oakes, Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von
Balthasar (New York: Continuum, 1994), 52, 134. Francesc Torralba-Roselló,
‘Teo- logia de l’Angoixa: Kierkegaard i Urs von Balthasar’, in Joan Busquets and
Maria Martinell (eds), Fe i teologia en la història: estudis en honor del Prof. Dr.
Evangelista Vilanova (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1997),
449–56. Peter Henrici, ‘Hans Urs von Balthasar: ein katholischer Kierkegaard?’, in
Anton E. van Hooff and Peter Reifenberg (eds), Gott für die Welt: Henri de Lubac,
Gustav Siewerth und Hans Urs von Balthasar in Ihren Grundlagen: Festschrift für
Walter Seidel (Mainz:
evaluation of the undesirable theological implications of his hasty
dismissal of Kierkegaard. Before these undesirable implications can be
brought to the fore, I must critically assess Balthasar’s dismissal of
Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety and aesthetics.
According to Balthasar in The Christian and Anxiety, anxiety is
sin that distances the believer from God. But for Kierkegaard, anxiety
can have a positive use for faith, since anxiety is how freedom
presents itself as a possibility and it is the threshold that demarcates
the limit and ground of aesthetics. Although the current usage of the
term ‘anxiety’ in philosophy and psychoanalysis is historically
indebted to Kierkegaard’s account of anxiety, a comparative analysis
with current scientific literature is beyond the remit of this chapter. 11
However, it will be helpful to assess Balthasar’s critique of
Kierkegaard by revisiting Kierkegaard’s original argument.
At first, Balthasar lauds Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety
(1844)12 as an unparalleled study in the history of theology—save
that of Thomas Aquinas—that we are only now beginning to appre-
ciate (DCA 31). However, Balthasar’s initial enthusiasm for
Kierke- gaard quickly fades because Balthasar thinks (unlike
Kierkegaard’s
Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2001), 304–14. Jörg Splett, ‘Der Christ und seine

Angst erwogen mit Hans Urs von Balthasar’, Anton E. van Hooff and Peter
Reifenberg (eds), in Gott für die Welt: Henri de Lubac, Gustav Siewerth und Hans
Urs von Balthasar in Ihren Grundlagen: Festschrift für Walter Seidel Anton E. van
Hooff and Peter Reifen- berg (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2001), 315–31.
Aidan Nichols, Scattering the Seed: A Guide through Balthasar’s Early Writings on
Philosophy and the Arts (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 129ff, 145. Stefan Endriß, ‘Hans
Urs von Balthasar versus Sören Kierkegaard: ein Beitrag zur Diskussion über das
Verhältnis von Theologie und Ästhetik’ (Doctoral thesis, Trier, 2006), 333–77. Mulder,
Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition: Conflict and Dialogue (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2010), 125ff. Anthony Cirelli, ‘Facing the Abyss: Hans
Urs von Balthasar’s Reading of Anxiety’, New Blackfriars 92, no. 1042 (2011),
705–23.
11
For the historical account, see Samuel Moyn’s excellent account in Judaken
and Bernasconi, Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context, 279–304. For an
acknowledgement of Kierkegaard’s influence in psychoanalysis, see Renata Salecl, On
Anxiety (London: Routledge, 2004), 32, 48, 53. However, in most recent scientific
textbooks on anxiety, Kierkegaard is not mentioned, see Martin M. Antony and
Murray B. Stein (eds), Oxford Handbook of Anxiety and Related Disorders (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009). Stanley Rachman, Anxiety, 2nd edn., Clinical
Psychology, a Modular Course, (Hove: Psychology Press, 2004). Also see, David A.
Clark and Aaron T. Beck, Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders: Science and
Practice (London: Guilford, 2011). For a synthesis of Kierkegaard and
psychoanalysis, see Pound, Theology, Psychoanalysis, Trauma, Veritas Series
(London: SCM Press, 2007).
12
Kierkegaard. Henceforth, CA.
pseudonym) that anxiety was not original to human nature, but
rather a consequence of the Fall (DCA 133–6). Therefore, like all
other consequences of the Fall, Balthasar sees ‘sin-anxiety’
[Sünden- angst] as contingent to human nature and opposed to
grace which ‘fundamentally removed’ [grundsätzlich
weggenommen] anxiety in Christ’s work of redemption and remains
forbidden to Christians (DCA 89/48). Since Balthasar sees anxiety
as something sinful and external to human nature, he was troubled
by the fact that Kierke- gaard’s fictive author, Vigilius Haufniensis,
locates anxiety in Adam before the Fall, ‘in the state of innocence’
(CA 41). In short, Balthasar constructs his entire theology of anxiety
in response to, and in disagreement with Kierkegaard. Hence,
according to Balthasar,
Anxiety remains for [Kierkegaard] a matter of the finite mind
horrified by its own limitlessness, and God and Christ are rarely
mentioned explicitly . . . [Kierkegaard’s presentation of anxiety] did not
free itself sufficiently from [philosophy and psychology] and so its
ultimate fate was a twofold secularisation. (DCA 32)
Balthasar’s charge that the insufficiently theological account of anx-
iety put forward by Haufniensis fails to acknowledge the self-imposed
limit that the fictive author places on his investigation of a ‘psycho-
logical treatment of the concept of “anxiety” .. . [that] constantly
keeps in mente and before its eye the dogma of hereditary sin’ (CA
14).13 In order to see why Balthasar’s assessment is misguided, we
must revisit the argument of Haufniensis.
Haufniensis begins the first chapter of his analysis with an age-
old theological question: Is Adam’s first sin just like everyone’s? (CA
25). If we answer this question negatively, then hereditary
sinfulness is a result of Adam’s first sin and the precondition of
everyone’s first sin (CA 30). While this negative answer seems
quite orthodox, for Haufniensis this answer uncovers a puzzle that is
not so easily solved. If Adam’s first sin is not like his second or Cain’s
forty-third, precisely because Adam’s sin was the first, then there is
an infinite regress of causality for the human race. Adam’s first sin
as the uncaused first cause would actually place him ‘outside the
race, and the race would not have begun with him but would have
had a
13
For more on this doctrine and its sources, see Pier Franco Beatrice, The
Transmission of Sin: Augustine and the Pre-Augustinian Sources (Oxford: Oxford
beginning outside itself ’ (CA 30). But perhaps we are meant to take
‘the first sin’ not in a sequential fashion but rather in a quantitative
manner—as if Adam’s first sin is greater than that of his
descendants. But Haufniensis says that this still does not solve the
puzzle because this would imply that in order for Adam’s first sin to
be different than his descendants, a quantity must be added in the
form of his offspring (CA 30). By virtue of that quantitative
addition, a lesser quality of sin is supposed to emerge in his
offspring which can then be contrasted with Adam’s. The result is
that we first place the race and Adam on level ground, only to go on
and then differentiate between them. Whether Adam’s first sin is
taken sequentially or quantitatively, Haufniensis argues that
differentiating the first sin of Adam from that of the race prevents
the history of the race from ever beginning— not even if we were to
displace the problem on to Cain, Christ, or Archbishop James
Ussher (CA 33–4).
Haufniensis’ point is that the sin of Adam’s offspring does not
presuppose hereditary sinfulness but rather that ‘sin presupposes
itself, that sin comes into the world in such a way that by the fact
that it is, it is presupposed’ (CA 32).14 To suggest the causal link of
hereditary sinfulness as the condition for the first sin of the race is
to invent a myth about a zero-point ‘which denies the leap and
explains the circle as a straight line, and now everything proceeds
quite naturally’ (CA 32). For Haufniensis, hereditary sinfulness
names the generational possibility of sin, whereas sin itself is the
actual qualitative leap of the individual. There is no causal
relationship between the quantitative sinfulness of the race and the
qualitative sin of the individual. For Haufniensis, the first sin of
Adam and that of his descendants is a ‘qualitative leap’ that is
occasioned in anxiety (CA 47). The leap is situated between two
moments: that of discovering the possibility of freedom, and that of
becoming anxious for the actualization of this possibility.15
Haufniensis says that ‘between these two moments lies the leap,
which no science has explained and which
14
For more on the relation of Haufniensis’ notion of the Fall and John Milton’s,
see John S. Tanner, Anxiety in Eden: Kierkegaardian Reading Of ‘Paradise Lost’
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also, Dennis Richard Danielson (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), ch. 8.
15
Arne Grøn, CASK, 19.
no science can explain’ (CA 61). So in Haufniensis’ view, sin enters
the world in anxiety but through the qualitative leap of freedom
(CA 54). For Haufniensis, ‘anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,
which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and
freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of
finiteness to support itself ’ (CA 61). Hence, Haufniensis treats anxiety
as the threshold of the aesthetic, but also of the religious. The
fundamental principle here is that our experience of ourselves and
the world outstrips our best current narrations of them. This
principle gets carried over from what Kierkegaard has to say about
aesthetics, anxiety, and theology. George Pattison says that like the
aesthetic
angst too exists in the tension between the ideal and the real, between
the unconditional freedom of the human subject and the phenomenal
conditionedness of human life as it is lived. As such, angst is the
condition, or state, out of which the subject must, in freedom,
become responsible for itself, in faith or in sin, becoming or failing
to become itself.16
But Balthasar detects a secularizing tendency in Haufniensis’
account of anxiety that allegedly reveals an inescapable reality
from which God is removed and replaced by nothing (DCA 136–
8). It is true that Haufniensis says anxiety ‘signifies essentially
nothing’ (CA 62), and that ‘anxiety and nothing always correspond
to each other’ constantly and reciprocally (CA 96). But it is not the
case that anxiety removes God from the picture; rather, Haufniensis
makes the opposite claim in the final chapter, that anxiety can be
‘saving through faith’ (CA 155ff). Pattison rightly says that for
Kierkegaard, ‘the transcendent character of freedom, and its rela-
tion, in this very transcendence, to nothingness, can be illuminated’
by considering ‘the task of becoming subjective (that is, becoming
the freedom we are) as interdependent with the human longing for
an eternal happiness’ (KAR 60–1).
In Balthasar’s estimation, Haufniensis advocates a picture of anx-
iety that is necessary to human nature and therefore irredeemable.
Alternately, Balthasar’s counter-claim is that anxiety is contingent
to human nature and therefore redeemable in Christ. What
Balthasar’s
16
George Pattison, KAR 60.
critique overlooks is Haufniensis’ actual claim: anxiety is necessary
and redeemable through the theological virtue of faith. At best,
anxiety calls us to something that we may or may not have the
capability of achieving on our own. In other words, anxiety can be
the condition of an implicit awareness of maturing beyond what
Kierkegaard calls ‘the aesthetic sphere’ where one comes to see
that one’s life has not lived up to its ethical potential. When
sin and unfreedom are elements of one’s own self-relation, then the
likelihood of becoming free is eclipsed. However, Haufniensis does
not stop here. If unfreedom was able to close itself off entirely
from the possibility and challenge of freedom, then anxiety would
never manifest. Yet, anxiety manifests when we are affected by the
possibility of freedom such that there still remains a relation to
the possibility of freedom even in unfreedom. The ambiguity of
anxiety is such that we at once resist this possibility and we are
influenced by it. For Haufniensis, to say that anxiety is a necessary
feature of human existence does not mean that anxiety is also irre-
deemable. Haufniensis says that one must ‘learn to be anxious in
order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety
or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in
the right way has learned the ultimate’ (CA 155). But how, and
from whom are we to learn it? For Haufniensis, how one deals with
the possibility and challenge of freedom in anxiety ‘depends simply
and solely on the energy of the God-relation in him’ (CA 110). So
Kierkegaard’s dialectical approach to both aesthetics and anxiety is
that, although experience outstrips our narration of it, narration can
give to experience an indirect, yet true and liberating perception
through faith.
For Haufniensis, anxiety is an important feature of one’s relation
to God and can be saving through faith. Haufniensis positively
evaluates anxiety as an instructive and iconoclastic mood ‘because
it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness’
(CA 155). Haufniensis says that ‘whoever is educated by anxiety is
educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility
is educated according to his infinitude. Therefore possibility is the
weightiest of all categories’ (CA 156). Haufniensis’ tone is not
mortifying, but edifying: ‘possibility will discover all the finitudes,
but it will idealize them in the form of infinity and in anxiety
overwhelm the individual until he again overcomes them in the
anticipation of faith’ (CA 157).
It is in this way that ‘he who passes through the anxiety of the
possible is educated to have no anxiety, not because he can escape
the terrible things of life but because these always become weak by
comparison with those of possibility’ (CA 157). George Pattison
rightly observes that although anxiety reveals ‘the void that under-
mines all finite certainties, it can serve to educate us up to faith. It is
the vertigo of freedom but also the summons to assault the infinite.
For faith, the nothingness of angst is the narrow gate by which faith
itself comes into being.’17 For Haufniensis, anxiety is inherently
iconoclastic: ‘Anxiety discovers fate, but just when the individual
wants to put his trust in fate, anxiety turns around and takes fate
away’ (CA 159). Anxiety drives the same iconoclastic question that
St Augustine asked of himself in Confessions: ‘What do I love
when I love my God?’,18 and anxiety disrupts our attempts to
subordinate the course of our lives to only one overarching and
unchanging plot line for all time. Something that Augustine was also
aware of when he said: ‘My life is a distension in several directions .. .
I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand . . . until that
day when, purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow
together to merge into you’.19 For what earthly object or goal could
satisfy the whole of one’s life? Paradoxically, the nothingness of the
individual’s God-relation indirectly brings the meaning of the
individual’s whole life into view as anxiety exposes the way
‘finitude always explains in parts, never totally’ and ‘with the help
of faith, anxiety brings up the individuality to rest in providence’
(CA 161). It is in this way that Haufniensis wishes to deliver the
reader over to dogmatics because ‘he who in relation to guilt is
educated by anxiety will rest only in the Atonement’ (CA 162).
Does this positive view of anxiety imply that the devout must
remain constantly anxious? On the contrary, Haufniensis says that
anxiety is a necessary but not a sufficient component of faith. As such,
anxiety does not immediately deliver us over to faith, but rather
anxiety can save through faith (CASK 150). For Haufniensis, one
must learn to be anxious in the right way—that is, in such a way
17
George Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith: An Introduction to His
Thought (London: SPCK, 1997), 103.
18
Augustine and Chadwick, Confessions, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 183 [X, vi (8)].
19
Confessions XI, xxix (39).
that leads to faith rather than misunderstanding anxiety as an
impediment to faith. But does Haufniensis’ view imply that anxiety
is annihilated in faith? No, Haufniensis says that faith ‘extricates itself
from anxiety’s moment of death’ (CA 117). As Arne Grøn rightly
says, faith saves us not from anxiety per se, but rather ‘from the
anxiety that makes us unfree’ (CASK 148). So it is fitting that Kierke-
gaard’s other fictive author, Johannes de Silentio, reminds us in
Fear and Trembling that ‘only the one who was in anxiety finds
rest’ (FT 27). However, since Balthasar thematized anxiety as
distance from God, it was not possible for him to appreciate this
iconoclastic feature of Kierkegaard’s argument, which could actually
be used to supplement the basic aims of Balthasar’s theology of
anxiety. In the next section, I will put a finer point on my
assessment, and highlight the theological problem that arises in
Balthasar’s account as a result.
4.2. RE-EVALUATING BALTHASAR’S THEOLOGY

OF ANXIETY AS DISTANCE FROM GOD
As I have suggested, for Balthasar the core feature of anxiety is ‘the

distance of the sinner from God’ [die Distanz des Sünders von Gott]
(DCA 133/80). Of course, Balthasar does not think that God created
humans inclusive of this feature. On the contrary, humans were
created in the image of God for union with Him. Any distance that
currently exists between humans and God must be a result of a
significant shift from God’s creative intention. Of course, Balthasar
naturally views the Fall as such a shift, and it is not a stretch to view
the Fall as both anxiety inducing and as a kind of distancing. In this
way, Balthasar views anxiety as primarily sinful because it ‘throws
a person back upon himself, closes him off, constricts him, and
makes him unproductive and unfit’ (DCA 89). This inward-looking
and stagnating state serves to maintain a person’s distance from
God, keeping them in sin. Balthasar sees the Hebrew Scriptures as a
constant struggle to work out this sinful anxiety. Yet Balthasar
thinks that ultimately the Law could never resolve that distance, but
could only function as a constant reminder of it (DCA 71).
In the New Testament, Balthasar’s view of anxiety as an expression
of a human being’s distance from God creates something of a
puzzle concerning Christ’s nature. If anxiety is distance from
God, and if
Christ is both fully God and fully human, then it looks as though
there is no distance for him to experience. Yet as anxiety is deeply
connected to the human condition, Balthasar wants to allow that
Christ experienced anxiety—indeed, liberated Christians from ever
experiencing it. Balthasar’s resolution of this difficulty is to speak
of Christ as having an epistemic limitation in his human nature. In
other words, objectively the fully human nature was not distant
from his divine nature as God, but as fully human, he could not
know that relation to its fullest extent in order to be free from
anxiety.20 In this way, Christ shares our anxiety and ultimately
redeems it. Indeed, according to Balthasar, God became human so that
‘anxiety is drained to the dregs upon the Cross in the actual
abandonment of the Son by the Father’ (DCA 75). In Balthasar’s
view, Christ’s redemption of anxiety does not give humans a new
nature but rather an opportunity to return to that primordial unified
nature which was anxiety-free.
Now, if anxiety is primarily sinful, then Christ’s experience reveals a
second type of anxiety. Thus, anxiety loses its exclusively sinful
status when it is experienced by the sinless Christ (Luke 3:38; Heb.
4:15). This new Christian-anxiety arises because, in Christ’s
experience of anxiety it did not cause him to turn away from, or to
increase distance from God, but rather caused him to draw closer to
God. In Christ, anxiety finds its limit; it falls away in union with
God. However for Balthasar, the primary example of this is
Christ’s struggle in Gethsemane.
According to Balthasar, in Gethsemane Christ experiences
a final, precipitous plunge into the abyss of anxiety that immediately
breaks over him: vicariously, for every sinner and every sin, he suffers
the anxiety of facing the God of absolute righteousness. All that the
Old and New Covenants know of anxiety is here gathered together
and infinitely surpassed, because the person who in this human nature
is frightened is the infinite God himself . .. It is, furthermore, the
vicarious suffering of this Pure One for all the impure, that is,
experiencing that anxiety which every sinner by right would have to
go through before the judgment seat of God and in being rejected by
him. (DCA 74–5)21
20
For this point, I am indebted to a conversation with Jeff Byrnes.
21
Because Balthasar’s soteriology makes Christ absorb mental anxiety in this
way, Balthasar’s description of vicariousness exhibits here a striking resemblance to
a core Mormon doctrine of atonement. For more, see Douglas James Davies, An
Introduc- tion to Mormonism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
148ff. Douglas James Davies, Joseph Smith, Jesus, and Satanic Opposition:
Atonement, Evil and the
As descendants of Adam and Eve, anxiety becomes a constant chal-
lenge for us. As Balthasar sees it, there are two choices available to us:
either Christians are faced with sinful anxiety which distances them
from God and is to be avoided; or Christians are offered a new kind of
anxiety which is venerated as a mystical participation in Christ’s
passion. Once we have opted for one or the other, Balthasar claims
that the church can remove ‘sin-anxiety’ and can provide anxiety-
free access to God (DCA 96–7). And yet, there still remains a
possibility for true believers to attain the mystical experience of
Christ’s anxiety (DCA 105–6). In both scenarios, anxiety can be
seen as human suffering—which is ignored in the first type and
positively evaluated in the second type. It is precisely here that
Balthasar’s disagreement with Kierkegaard and his alternative
theology of anxiety shows itself to be detrimental to human
flourishing by failing to account properly for the phenomenon of
anxiety.22
No figure has generated a more theological interpretation of the
phenomenon of anxiety than Kierkegaard. Balthasar knew this, and
thought Kierkegaard was wrong because Kierkegaard’s view was in
keeping with the ‘Old Testament’ view of sin-anxiety which did not
sufficiently address Christ. For all of Balthasar’s merit, it is clear
that he believes there is a difference between the anxiety faced by
Chris- tians and non-Christians (DCA 90–1). Yet modern
philosophers have seen parallels in figures like Job and Abraham
with their own interests with anxiety. These figures in the Hebrew
Scriptures are engaged in struggles with God that they recognize as
determining their salvation. As Kierkegaard reminds us in Fear and
Trembling, the author of Hebrews treats Abraham’s actions as the
fountainhead of faith itself (Heb. 11:8–12). I think there is sufficient
reason for us to have doubts about clearly distinguishing ‘Old
Testament’ anxiety as sinful and ‘New Testament’ anxiety as
praiseworthy. If the phenomenon of anxiety manifests across
covenants and faiths, then we might have reason to think that it is
not really contingent to human
Mormon Vision (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 133–51, 163–74. For an attempt to portray
Balthasar’s positive evaluation of human suffering in a more ‘orthodox’ manner,
see Mark A. McIntosh, Christology from Within: Spirituality and the Incarnation in
Hans Urs von Balthasar (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), ch.
6.
22
This is a point that Cihak uncritically makes of Balthasar, see Cihak, Balthasar
and Anxiety, 268.
existence and that we should not expect to find anxiety-free access
to God.23
Balthasar’s antagonism toward Kierkegaard’s picture of anxiety
also extends to an antagonism toward Kierkegaard’s view of
aesthetics. In the next section, I suggest that there is a correlation
between the way Balthasar equates the failure of aesthetic
judgement in perceiving Christ, and the way he equates anxiety
with sin. My claim is that this correlation occurs in the course of
disagreeing with Kierke- gaard’s view of anxiety and aesthetics,
and that had Balthasar taken Kierkegaard’s writings more seriously,
he might have dodged the theological problem I have identified. I
will assess why Balthasar repudiates Kierkegaard when sketching
the basic contours of his own theological aesthetics.
4.3. BALTHASAR ’S CRITIQUE OF KIERKEGAARD’S

VIEW OF AESTHETICS
Balthasar begins his essay, ‘Revelation and the Beautiful’ (1959),24

by making a great deal of his title’s ‘Both/And’ approach and chas-
tising Kierkegaard for emphasizing ‘unwittingly the sad omission of
any possible conjunction between the two concepts of the title,
concepts which, since Kierkegaard’s eruption into the Protestant
and Catholic thought of our century, have dominated Christian
ideology’ (ET 95). As George Pattison has rightly observed,
Kierke- gaard uses ‘aesthetic’ in two different ways: ‘on the one hand
it relates to “aesthetics” in the sense of the fine arts; on the other
hand it is used as an ethical term to describe the life which fails to live
up to its ethical
23
Perhaps it is a good thing that after nearly forty years of praying to be
protected from all anxiety, the 2011 edition of the Roman Missal substitutes the
word ‘anxiety’ with ‘distress’? The Archdiocese of New York issued a brief
statement explaining that anxiety had taken on a too specifically psychological
meaning, while distress was ‘a more comprehensive description of human fear and
pain of body and mind’. For more, see the 2006 discussion transcribed here,
<http://www.adoremus.org/ 0706USCCBMeeting.html> (accessed 21 May 2015). Also
see, paragraph 54 in Litur- giam authenticam,
<http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/docu
ments/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20010507_liturgiam-authenticam_en.html> (accessed 21
May 2015). I am indebted to the liturgical prowess of Andy Doyle for these references.
24
Hans Urs von Balthasar, ET, 95–126. Henceforth, ET: page number.
25
potential’. So, from Kierkegaard’s perspective, to give a
theological account of aesthetics would be either to talk about God
in fine art, or about God in the life which fails to live up to its
ethical potential. For Kierkegaard, neither way of speaking about
God is theologically appropriate in a strict sense. 26 Yet, Balthasar
rejects Kierkegaard’s ‘austere’ interpretation of aesthetics because
Balthasar thinks that Kierkegaard hives aesthetics off from the
ethical and religious sphere (ET 95; cf. GL 1:50). In particular,
Balthasar claims that Kierkegaard’s aesthetic offers a ‘much admired
but incredibly false analysis of Mozart’ which involves ‘an
antireligious cynicism’ that lacks ‘an understanding of what the
daimon meant to Plato’ (ET 96).27
In order to absolve Kierkegaard of these allegations, three brief
corrections need to be made to Balthasar’s superficial dismissal of
Kierkegaard: i) had Balthasar read Kierkegaard’s religious (rather
than pseudonymous) writings, he would have discovered that Kier-
kegaard was neither anti-religious nor a cynic; ii) had Balthasar
read Kierkegaard’s dissertation on Plato, he would have discovered
that Kierkegaard had considerable knowledge of Plato’s daimon;28 and
iii) on the issue of Kierkegaard separating the aesthetic from the
other spheres at the expense of the unity of the transcendentals, I
submit that although Kierkegaard illustrates the aesthetic, ethical,
and religious life view with individual characters, it does not follow
that these are individual standpoints that rival one another
throughout the global population, but rather that these life views are
better construed as distinct but ultimately inseparable ideals under
which the individual sees and leads their own life in seeking the
good, true, and
25
George Pattison, ‘Kierkegaard: Aesthetics and “the Aesthetic” ’, The British
Journal of Aesthetics 31, no. 2 (1991), 140.
26
To be clear, I’m not advocating that Kierkegaard is against all things beautiful
or revelatory of meaning. For more on Kierkegaard’s dialectical view of aesthetics,
see Christopher B. Barnett, From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren
Kierkegaard (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), ch. 3.
27
Some have shown that Kierkegaard’s analysis is not false, but in fact coheres
with what critics have said of Mozart. For instance, see T. H. Croxall, ‘Kierkegaard and
Mozart’, Music and Letters XXVI, no. 3 (1945), 151–8. Others have argued more
recently that Kierkegaard offers a satire of romanticism here, rather than a straight-
forward assessment; see Shao Kai Tseng, ‘Kierkegaard and Music in Paradox?
Bring- ing Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Terms with Kierkegaard’s Religious Life-
View’, Literature and Theology 28, no. 4 (2014), 411–24.
28
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to
Socrates: Together with Notes of Schelling’s Berlin, Kierkegaards’s Writings II, ed.
and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong Lectures (Princeton: Princeton
29
beautiful. Nevertheless, despite his superficial dismissal of Kierke-
gaard, Balthasar does make an interesting observation concerning
the family resemblance regarding the notion of the aesthetic
between Kierkegaard and Maurice Blondel (ET 103; cf. GL 1:51).30
In the end, Balthasar fails to appreciate how Kierkegaard’s
Christ- ology offers a dialectical critique of romanticism which, as
George Pattison rightly says, was ‘unable to achieve a definitive
affirmation of meaning or truth; conscious of the dark flux of time, it
has an evil premonition, an anxiety, coiled in its heart, and in this
anxiety it intuits its ultimate succumbing to guilt and despair’ (KAR
53). Indeed, like the author of Qoheleth, Balthasar fails to observe
that Kierkegaard is a humorist and ‘an observer of the human
situation’ who ‘has lived through and seen through the nullity of the
unhappy consciousness of Romanticism which is also the unhappy
consciousness implicit in all forms of aesthetic experience and
expression’ (KAR 55). According to Pattison, Kierkegaard believes
that ‘the aesthetic consciousness itself prepares the way for its own
downfall, especially in the way in which Romanticism gives voice
to feelings of melancholy, premonition and anxiety’ (KAR 56). As
Pattison observes, for Kierkegaard ‘art is not merely the
sublimation of suffering in beautiful images’, because the artist is
‘an unconscious sacrifice, who does not understand and therefore
cannot escape from his situation of suffering and alienation’, and
the artist’s
29
For instance, the unity of the good, true, and beautiful is precisely what is at
stake for Kierkegaard in the task of ‘existential contemporaneity’ since the ‘true is
not superior to the good and the beautiful, but the true and the good and the
beautiful belong essentially to every human existence and are united for an existing
person not in thinking them, but in existing’ (CUP 348). See also, Kierkegaard’s
criticism of Xenophon’s view of Socrates: ‘instead of the good, we have the useful,
instead of the beautiful the utilitarian, instead of the true the established, instead of
the sympathetic the lucrative, instead of harmonious unity the pedestrian’, in
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, 25. For more, see an excellent article by Daniel
Watts, ‘Subjective Thinking: Kierkegaard on Hegel’s Socrates’, The Bulletin of the
Hegel Society of Great Britain 61 (2010), 23–44.
30
Balthasar’s translator, Alexander Dru took this observation to heart in the
introduction of Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, and, History and
Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan, Ressourcement: Retrieval &
Renewal in Catholic Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), esp. pp. 54, 70.
Although there is no textual evidence that shows Blondel was even aware of
Kierke- gaard, it is noteworthy that only one other Catholic philosopher had made
this observation before Balthasar, and that is in an article originally published in
1955 by Cornelio Fabro; see Cornelio Fabro, Dall’Essere all’Esistente, [1st edn.
1957] (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1965), ch. 8; esp. pp. 428, 433.
‘addiction to beauty reinforces and perpetuates his inability to see that
split between ideality and reality which gives his images their pecu-
liarly intense allure’ (KAR 57). The fortunate consequence for Kier-
kegaard is that the inability to detect a gap between ideality and reality
is not immune from anxiety. Pattison says that for Kierkegaard,
anxiety is ‘the absolute frontier between the aesthetic and the reli-
gious’; it is ‘the moment of choice, a moment towards which the
aesthetic points, though not able to encompass it itself ’ (KAR 60). As
I discussed above, Kierkegaard’s positive evaluation of anxiety is,
as Pattison observes, ‘an implicit acknowledgement of the
unanswered claims made by reality on the poetic consciousness’
(KAR 59). In other words, for Kierkegaard, anxiety is ‘both the
ground and limit of the aesthetic consciousness’ (KAR 63). But as I
will point out in the next section, Balthasar’s theological aesthetics
has no room for this view. At this point, it should be clear to the
reader that Balthasar both disagrees with and misunderstands
Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety and aesthetics. In the next section, I
will assess the viability of Balthasar’s constructive alternative.
4.4. RE-EVALUATING BALTHASAR ’S THEOLOGY

OF BEAUTY AS THE DISTANCE BETWEEN
THE CREATION AND CREATOR
In his essay entitled ‘Revelation and the Beautiful’, Balthasar sketches

his own theological aesthetics, which has the chief aim of making
beauty a foundational theological category rather than other
categories such as truth or the good. By theological aesthetics,
Balthasar intends an account of how the glory of God can be seen in
natural and artistic beauty. In order to make his claim about the
sense perception of uncreated-grace-in-creation plausible, Balthasar
first draws upon the resources of Scripture, liturgy, and what he
calls the Christian experience of beauty as the link between the
finite and infinite.
Balthasar laments the hiving off of the beautiful from the true and
the good, construing this gap as a kind of Fall from a previous state
of grace: ‘whereas previously there was a generally accepted
metaphysics establishing a living bond between the immanent
sciences and the
transcendent Christian revelation, it has now become quite unreal
and ineffectual and has been abandoned in favor of the immanence
of the sciences’ (ET 96). For Balthasar, the tragic consequence of
frag- menting the transcendental unity of Being is that a false
dualism is created in theology ‘on the ground of scholastic ontology
itself ’ which divorces the verum from the bonum, separating
‘theoretical and practical reason’, and Balthasar places the blame,
not on Adam and Eve, but Kierkegaard (ET 193–4; cf. 96). Although
Kierkegaard’s view of the aesthetic shares the same target as
Balthasar’s view—the transcendental idealism of Kant, and its
radicalized version in Fichte31— George Pattison says that for
Kierkegaard (like Balthasar), art receives ‘a privileged position within
consciousness, since it is able to create and communicate a sense of
unity’; however, unlike Balthasar, this unity does not belong to the
domain of ‘natural science, existential experience and theology’,
since these ‘can only postulate [unity] as a desideratum’ (KAR 46).
Also unlike Balthasar, Pattison says that for Kierkegaard the
‘privilege of art is precisely its limitation. The unity which art offers
quite simply does not resolve the question of unity in other spheres
of life, and so the wholeness which poetry and art achieve cannot be
looked for in the world’ (KAR 46). Hence, Kierkegaard often describes
aesthetic experience in terms of daydreaming.
Ed Oakes claims that Balthasar’s rationale for ‘starting with the
transcendental of beauty’ was that ‘it was Balthasar’s conviction
that the order in which these transcendentals are approached is
utterly determinative for the way theology can credibly present the
mysteries of the Christian religion to an increasingly skeptical
public’.32 After
31
For more, see Pattison, KAR, 1–34. Pattison observes that Kierkegaard, like
Hegel (and we could easily insert Balthasar), ‘seeks to show how, in Romanticism, the
dialectics of art point beyond themselves, requiring a shift into another sphere or
dimension of consciousness; like Hegel he sees the fate of art as being
circumscribed by a historical development in which the dynamics of interiorization,
the Christ-event and the overcoming of the “unhappy consciousness” of the Middle
Ages (and, also, of Early Romanticism) played major roles. But whereas Hegel
looked in the direction of an objectively valid system of knowledge, recapitulating
in a logically rigorous form the inner meaning of art, Kierkegaard looked instead to
what Hegel called “subjective Spirit”, that is, psychology. For Kierkegaard it was in
the crises and exigencies of individual, personal life that the religious decision
chiefly came into play, setting a definitive barrier to the claims of art and aesthetics’
(43). See also, Pattison, ‘Kierke- gaard: Aesthetics’, 140–51. Eric J. Ziolkowski,
‘Kierkegaard’s Concept of the Aesthetic: A Semantic Leap from Baumgarten’,
Literature and Theology 6, no. 1 (1992), 33–46.
32
Edward T. Oakes, ‘The Apologetics of Beauty’, in Daniel J. Treier, Mark Hus-
bands, and Roger Lundin (eds), The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts
(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 212.
lamenting the gap created by the independence of aesthetics from
Christian revelation in the contemporary wasteland of a
‘warped and stunted Protestant Weltanschauung’ (ET 96), Balthasar
tells an elaborate story to locate the source of the problem of
scepticism about the correspondence of the form and content of
worldly beauty, in order to overcome this scepticism with divine
beauty.
A desirable outcome of such a reordering of the foundations of
metaphysics would be to subvert the sway of anaemic biblical
critics and theologians who have excavated Scripture for a
scientifically precise ‘truth’ and discarded the aesthetic value of
revelation as such.33 For Balthasar, this theological method is
wrongheaded, since revelation is encountered in the person of
Christ, as attested to in Scripture and tradition, and perceiving the
form of revelation is constitutive of seeing Christ’s suffering and
death in the crucifixion as beautiful (ET 113). By adding natural
and artistic beauty to his Christological link between uncreated
grace and creation, Aidan Nichols says that for Balthasar, Christ’s
suffering on the cross becomes ‘an open window on the
transcendentals’, indeed ‘the supreme presentation of the aesthetic
form’.34 Nichols sums up the central claim of Balthasar’s
theological aesthetics in this way:
33
In his own words, Balthasar’s essay is not meant to ‘dwell on the justifiable
complaint that recent dogmatic mores are lacking in any real feeling for beauty (all too
often in their style)’, but rather ‘to concentrate on the far greater danger menacing
speculative theology, namely, the kind of paralysis induced by a biblical criticism
which dominates the whole field and claims to have a monopoly of scientific precision
in the modern sense’ (ET 97).
34
Aidan Nichols, A Key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness
and Truth (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2011), 20–1. In his essay
‘Revelation and the Beautiful’, Balthasar says, ‘The cross is the first aim of the
incarnation, indispensable as long as the world continues, and whatever share is
given in the joy of the resurrection it cannot replace the duty of finding redemption
through the cross and of sharing deeply in the passion itself. For this reason, the
glory inherent in God’s revelation, its fulfilment beyond measure of all possible
aesthetic ideas, must perforce remain hidden from the eyes of all, both believers and
unbelievers, though in very various degrees .. . insofar as the veil over the face of
Christ’s mystery is drawn aside, and insofar as the economy of grace allows,
Christian contemplation can marvel, in the self-emptying of divine love, at the
exceeding wisdom, truth and beauty inherent there. But it is only in this self-
emptying that they can be contemplated, for it is the source whence the glory
contemplated by the angels and the saints radiates into eternal life .. . the paradoxical
events with which God “shocks” sinful man are seen as an invitation and stimulus to
overleap the bounds of a closed world of finite ideas and to share in God’s self-
manifestation and openness, something to which the creaturely condition itself
points, though unable to attain it .. . the humiliation of the servant only makes the
concealed glory shine more resplendently, and the descent
The transcendental we call ‘the beautiful’, can help restore the
integrity of a Christologically-given revelation of the God of all being.
The significance of the beautiful is that it indicates how an object
might be outside us, facing us, and yet at the same time draw us into
itself. Of all the transcendentals, the beautiful is the closest to our
senses. It is, therefore, more directly present to us than are the other
transcendental properties of being. The beautiful is a fully objective
property of being, but it is the nature of this property to be
communicative, to communicate itself to observers. The beauty is
reality under the aspect of form, known as such by imaginative
intuition, just as truth is reality as best known through propositions, by
the intelligence, and goodness is reality as best known through values,
by the moral sense.35
Nichols says that by putting natural and artistic beauty forward as ‘the
possible vehicle of divine self-manifestation’ and ‘the actual revelation
of God in Christ’,36 Balthasar’s theological aesthetics attempts to
overcome the classic stalemate of analogia entis between Barth and
Przywara.
Balthasar assigns the failure of modern aesthetics to the attempt
to separate divine splendour from concrete forms of worldly
beauty.37 In response, Balthasar takes a twofold approach to repair
the damage and put aesthetics back on its proper, theological
course. First, Bal- thasar attempts to mend the modern conception
of worldly beauty by reuniting the form of beauty with the
splendour of the sublime, as a counter-position to Kant’s
separation of them.38 Essentially,
into the ordinary and commonplace brings out the uniqueness of him who so abased
himself ’ (ET 113–14).
35
Nichols, A Key to Balthasar, 25. For more, see Aidan Nichols, ‘Von
Balthasar’s Aims in His Theological Aesthetics’, The Heythrop Journal 40, no. 4
(1999), 409–23. See also Mark McIntosh’s entry on Balthasar in Ian S. Markham
(ed.), The Student’s Companion to the Theologians, vol. 38, Blackwell Companions
to Religion (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 355–66.
36
Nichols, A Key to Balthasar, 42.
37
For a fuller treatment of Balthasar’s distinction between form/splendour, see
D. C. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth:
A Philosophical Investigation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), esp.
chs. 3 & 5.
38
Immanuel Kant and Nicholas Walker, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), §1–22. For more on Kant’s aesthetics, see Lewis White Beck,
Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
1969), 438–501. Also see, Hannah Ginsborg, Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology (Fall
2008 Edition) [cited 5 April 2013]; available from <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2008/entries/kant-aesthetics/> (accessed 21 May 2015). Also see, Andrew Ward,
Kant: The Three Critiques (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), chs. 9–12. The most recent,
Balthasar wants to re-enchant the universe by recovering the
purpos- iveness of worldly beauty. To counteract the problem of
scepticism about the correspondence of form and content,
Balthasar turns to
J. W. von Goethe and F. W. J. Schelling to find a philosophically
viable, yet theologically reconfigured, aesthetic alternative.39
Baltha- sar’s Romantic turn to Weimar Classicism is not
unprecedented for German-speaking Catholic intellectuals.40 In fact,
Balthasar’s theological aesthetics can be viewed as an attempt to
recover the rich Catholic tradition indebted to Schelling that
precedes Balthasar by three generations but which had fallen out of
favour in the wake of the Leonine revival of neo-scholasticism.41 So,
if beauty ceases to be sacramental in modernity, then Balthasar
wants to re-enchant beauty with its primordial sacramentality.
In his first volume on theological aesthetics entitled The Glory of
the Lord, Balthasar starts with beauty in the abstract as
inexhaustible and indefinable in order to offer an alternative account
to Kant’s portrayal of beauty as a particular phenomenon reducible
to personal
full-blooded re-articulation of Balthasar’s position can be found in David Bentley

Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2003), 1–34. ‘Perhaps the most immediately suggestive aspect of the
huge theological trilogy of Hans Urs von Balthasar is the great reversal it effects —
simply in its sequence—of Kant’ (139 n. 141). And yet, Balthasar’s notion of the
sublime can also be used to support a position contrary to Hart’s, see Clayton
Crockett, A Theology of the Sublime (London: Routledge, 2001), 32.
39
For more, see Balthasar’s interview, ‘Geist und Feuer’, in Herder-
Korrespondenz 30 (1976): 76, cited in W. T. Dickens, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s
Theological Aesthetics: A Model for Post-Critical Biblical Interpretation (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 252–3 n. 51. For more on the
development and debates in German Idealism, see Frederick C. Beiser, German
Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002). See also, Gary
J. Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern
Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
40
For more on Weimar Classicism, see Simon Richter, The Literature of Weimar
Classicism, vol. 7, Camden House History of German Literature (Martlesham: Boydell
& Brewer, 2005). See also, Roger H. Stephenson, Studies in Weimar Classicism:
Writing as Symbolic Form (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), ch. 2. For Balthasar’s relationship
to this movement, see Kevin Taylor, ‘Hans Urs von Balthasar and Christ the Tragic
Hero’, in Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller (eds), Christian Theology and Tragedy:
Theologians, Tragic Literature, and Tragic Theory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 133–48.
41
For more, see Thomas F. O’Meara, Romantic Idealism and Roman
Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1982), 188–91. The best treatment of Balthasar’s engagement with
Schelling is by Stephan van Erp, The Art of Theology: Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s
Theological Aesthetics and the Foundations of Faith (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), esp.
ch. 7.
taste that is resistant to logical deduction and commands universal
assent at once.42 The closest Balthasar comes to explaining the
meaning of his distinction between worldly and divine beauty is
with a pseudo-Heideggerian argument from the Latin etymology of
the word ‘beautiful’ (formosus) as the result of the combination of
‘aspect’ (species) and ‘attractive’ (speciosa), which also introduces
Balthasar’s distinction between beauty as the form (Gestalt) and
splendour of God’s glory (Herrlichkeit) in creation (GL 1:20). For
Balthasar, beauty is displayed in the form, and that which shines
forth from ‘the form’s interior’ (GL 1:151).
After his proposal to mend the modern conception of worldly
beauty, Balthasar’s second move is to reattach the determinate con-
tent of worldly beauty to the flowering of divine beauty as a tran-
scendental category. From Balthasar’s perspective, Kant has lopped
the budding flower of divine beauty in exchange for the stem of
worldly beauty. To make his point, Balthasar says that the ‘form
as it appears to us is beautiful only because the delight that it
arouses in us is founded upon the fact that, in it, the truth and
goodness of the depths of reality itself are manifested and
bestowed’ (GL 1:118; emphasis mine). Balthasar says that ‘we
“behold” the form; but, if we really behold it, it is not as a detached
form, rather in its unity with the depths that make their appearance
in it. We see form as the splendour, as the glory of Being’ (GL
1:119). In other words, as Francesca Murphy has aptly put the
matter, for Balthasar, ‘reality is intrinsically aesthetic, and
analogical’.43
42
GL 1: 18.
43
Francesca Aran Murphy, Christ the Form of Beauty: A Study in Theology and
Literature (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 132. By uncovering the depth and unity
of beauty’s form, Balthasar acknowledges his debt to Goethe’s Faust (GL 1:18). Indeed,
Balthasar’s debt to The Metamorphosis of Plants is evident later in this work when
Balthasar calls Christ ‘the mother-plant’ (GL 1:224) and speaks of the importance
of seeing the life-principle of the plant as an argument for the immortality of the
soul (GL 1:391; 442). For more on Balthasar’s debt to Goethe, see Ulrich Simon’s
essay, ‘Balthasar On Goethe’, in John Riches (ed.), The Analogy of Beauty: The
Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 60–76. Far
from a passing reference, Balthasar’s description of beauty as comprised of form and
splendour uses Goethe’s logic of polarity—which identifies the interaction of two
inseparable but distinct poles without dissolution—to underscore his notion of
beauty in such a way that does not sever it from teleology; a subtlety that provides
Balthasar an opportunity to endorse the causality of the concept of beauty with the
corresponding object. For more on Goethe’s disagreement with Kant, see Jennifer
Mensch,
Rather than endorsing personal taste as an external source of
judgement about beauty, Balthasar insinuates an ‘interiority’ into
the surface itself. Since beauty always refers to a particular form-
artefact, then, for Balthasar, we only ‘really behold’ it when we
judge that the shining-artefact refers back to the ‘light’ of the
transcendental categories of ‘unity, truth, goodness and beauty, a light
at one with the light of philosophy, [which] can only shine if it is
undivided’ (ET 107). For Balthasar, the interiority of the surface
indicates ‘its incorp- oration into the structure of essences, of subjects
and objects and their intertwining’—something that Balthasar thinks
is jeopardized in Kant’s aesthetics. However, detecting the depth of
a surface is tricky, as Balthasar himself admits:
the event of the beautiful is not to be held utterly transcendent, as if it
derived solely from outside and above. To ascribe such an event to
‘being’ while detaching it from the ‘coming to be’ would be to annul
metaphysics by the very act which seeks to establish it. Admittedly it
is very difficult to retain the two dimensions simultaneously, that of
the transcendent event impinging from above and that of an immanent
object bound up with a certain structure . . . it also points to the task of
theology. (ET 107–8)
Balthasar admits that discerning the difference-and-connection
between worldly and divine beauty is the difficult task of
theological aesthetics, but what appears to be less difficult for
Balthasar is how that same theological task positively evaluates the
ugliness of human suffering as beautiful.
For all of Balthasar’s criticism of Kierkegaard, it appears that
Balthasar has not escaped his own paradox en route to making his
claim about the harmony of worldly and divine beauty. In
describing natural and artistic beauty as the link between the finite
and infinite,
‘Intuition and Nature in Kant and Goethe’, European Journal of Philosophy 19, no.
3 (2011), 431–53. See also Kenneth Westphal’s essay, ‘Kant, Hegel, and the Fate of
“the” Intuitive Intellect’, in Sally S. Sedgwick (ed.), The Reception of Kant’s
Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 283–305. Balthasar cannot bring himself to endorse Goethe’s
pantheism. For instance, Balthasar explicitly says, ‘the living God is neither an
“existent” (subordinate to Being) nor “Being” itself, as it manifests and reveals
itself essentially in everything that makes its appearance in form’ (GL 1:119). For
more on Goethe’s religious and philosophical perspective, see H. B. Nisbet’s
‘Religion and Philosophy’, in Lesley Sharpe (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Goethe (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2002), 219–31.
and affirming a qualitative distinction between Creator and creation,
Balthasar is constrained to speak of worldly beauty in terms of its
‘form’ and divine beauty in terms of an indefinable ‘super-form’
(Übergestalt).44 Balthasar’s incongruity here is in affirming both a
quantitative and qualitative understanding of the relation between
God and creation. When affirming beauty’s link between the finite
and infinite, Balthasar uses a quantitative (degrees of more or less)
understanding of beauty’s participation in the source of all being.
But when he affirms an absolute distinction between the source of
being and a property of being, Balthasar employs a qualitative register.
How can ‘beauty’ name and distinguish both the epiphany and the
phenomenon in a way that prevents idolatry? This is a point where
Balthasar’s rejection of Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety as the ground
and limit of aesthetics would be a helpful corrective.
Balthasar’s deployment of the ‘Christ-form’ is his attempt to iron
out the paradoxical (qualitative and quantitative) relation between
worldly beauty (form) and divine beauty (Super-form). With the
icon of the ‘Christ-form’, Balthasar claims that beauty is at once the
characteristic and origin of being:
If a concept that is fundamental to the Bible has no kind of analogy in the
general intellectual sphere, and awoke no familiar echo in the heart of
man, it would remain absolutely incomprehensible and thereby a
matter of indifference. It is only when there is an analogy (be it only
distant) between the human sense of the divine and divine revelation
that the height, the difference and the distance [der Abstand, die
Ferne] of that which the revelation discloses may be measured in God’s
grace. (GL 4:14)
From this quote, we might frame Balthasar’s dilemma as: either the
analogy of divine revelation is unintelligible or it is intelligible. If,
on the one hand, Balthasar emphasizes the absolute difference
between Creator and creation, then there is no analogy of divine
revelation, because that absolute difference [Abstand] between
the source and characteristic of being becomes unintelligible (if
‘what’ is created, then ‘what’ is uncreated?).45 However, on the
other hand, if
44
For a critique of a similar aim in Karl Rahner’s theology, see William J. Hill,
‘Uncreated Grace: A Critique of Karl Rahner’, The Thomist 27 (1963), 333–56. For
a sympathetic treatment, see Peter Joseph Fritz, Karl Rahner’s Theological
Aesthetics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014).
45
For more, see Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (London: Routledge, 1979),
47–76. See also, ‘Ideology, Metaphor and Analogy’, in Nicholas Lash, Theology on the
Balthasar emphasizes the remote distance [Ferne] between Creator
and creation, then the source of being risks becoming intelligible
but indistinguishable from another characteristic of being—indeed,
humanly speaking, just another ‘what’ in the universe.
So, it becomes very important that Balthasar’s ‘Christ-form’ en-
sures that the analogy of divine revelation is intelligible, revelatory
of an absolute difference between Creator and creation, and yet
sheds light on beauty as naming the uncreated source (however
distant) and property of creation. Thus, Nichols says that for
Balthasar, the ‘Christ-form’ is like ‘an artistic masterpiece’, because
it ‘knows no external necessity in either divine or human reality, yet
once we apprehend it we see that it “must” be as it is’.46 So for
Balthasar, the Christ-form concretizes the analogia entis,47 carrying
its own verifi- cation on its face, and in being directly recognizable,
provides the structural guarantee required for perceiving the form
of, and responding to, divine revelation.48 This leads us to identify a
Christo- logical malfunction in Balthasar’s theology because of his
divergence from Kierkegaard.
Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986). Herbert McCabe says that ‘God, for
St. Thomas, is a cause only in an extended sense of the word. For one thing his
characteristic effect is not itself a form, for a form is that by which a thing is a
certain kind of thing, but an existent being is not a certain kind of being. Existence,
he says, is the actuality of every form. It is by their forms that things exist. God
alone does not have a form by which he exists, but is sheer existence. Moreover
God, for St. Thomas, is not a causal explanation of the world. In his view we arrive
at a causal explanation when we detect something whose nature it is to have such
and such effects. Finding a causal explanation is seeing the nature of some cause
and seeing how the effects must flow from it. Nothing of this kind happens in our
knowledge of God; what we know of him does not serve to explain the world, all that
we know of him is that he must exist if the world is to have an explanation’, in St
Thomas Aquinas, Herbert McCabe, and Thomas Gilby, Knowing and Naming God
(1a. 12–13), Summa Theologiae (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
102. It is no coincidence that Balthasar jettisons St Thomas when it comes to
formulating his aesthetic theory, see James
J. Buckley, ‘Balthasar’s Use of the Theology of Aquinas’, The Thomist 59 (1995),
517–45.
46
Nichols, A Key to Balthasar, 37.
47
Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (London: Sheed & Ward,
1964), 74.
48
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpret-
ation (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 55.
4.5. IDENTIFYING THE CHRISTOLOGICAL
MALFUNCTION IN BALTHASAR ’S THEOLOGY
Now, to make the general claim about the link between divine self-
manifestation and beauty more specifically Christological, Balthasar
offers an account of the Incarnation as the hypostatic union of
beautiful form and divine content. Although he provides no textual
evidence, Balthasar claims that Kierkegaard reduces an encounter
with Christ to interpreting merely a sign rather than being
enraptured by the evidential and persuasive depth-dimension of the
‘genuine “legible” form’ (GL 1:153). Here, it seems that Balthasar
has attributed a claim by Nietzsche to Kierkegaard—a common
conflation that reflects European scholarship at this time.49
However, the issue for Balthasar is the actual recognizability of
Christ as the God-Man: ‘Christ is recognized in his form only when
his form has been seen and understood to be the form of the God-
man, and this, of course, at once demands and already supposes
faith in his divinity’ (GL 1:153). To support this claim, Balthasar
reaches for his Goethean register:
just as a natural form—a flower, for instance—can be seen for what it
is only when it is perceived and ‘received’ as the appearance of a
certain depth of life, so, too, Jesus’ form can be seen for what it is only
when it is grasped and accepted as the appearance of a divine depth
transcending all worldly nature. (GL 1:153–4)
Now, Balthasar reads Kierkegaard as denying the recognizability of
Christ as the God-man.50 Presumably, Balthasar’s remark here
refers to a passage by Kierkegaard’s fictive author, Anti-Climacus,
in Prac- tice in Christianity (1850).51 Just as Balthasar makes his
claim about the recognizability of Christ on the grounds of
requiring and presupposing faith, so Anti-Climacus makes his
claim about Christ’s unrecognizability on such grounds.
49
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols:
And Other Writings, ed. A. Ridley and J. Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 29–30. [Christ] ‘spoke only about what was inside him
most deeply: “life” or “truth” or “light” are his words for the innermost—he saw
everything else, the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language itself, as having
value only as a sign, a parable’.
50
Balthasar makes this point again about Kierkegaard in Hans Urs von Balthasar
and Joseph Ratzinger, Two Say Why (London: Search Press, 1973), 31–6.
51
Søren Kierkegaard, PC.
If Balthasar encourages us to see the cross as an open window on
the transcendental properties of being, then Kierkegaard says that this
is a mistake, because ‘if temporality were the uniform transparency of
the eternal, then every eternal willing in a person and every willing
of the eternal would be directly recognisable’.52 But Kierkegaard
points to the fact that when God’s son ‘was revealed in human
form, was crucified, rejected by temporality; in the eternal sense, he
certainly willed the eternal, and yet he became recognizable in
temporality by being rejected and thus he accomplished but little’.
And yet, Kierke- gaard concludes,
No cause has ever been lost in the way the cause of Christianity was
lost when Christ was crucified; and no one has ever, in the sense of
the moment, accomplished as little by a life solely committed to
sacrifice as did Jesus Christ. Yet, in the eternal sense, at that same
moment he had accomplished everything, because he did not foolishly
judge by the result, which was not yet there either, or rather (for here
is the conflict and the battlefield for the two views on what it means to
accomplish something) the result was indeed there. (UDVS 91)
So, the context in which Anti-Climacus writes is one in which the
Christian faith is taken for granted and his concern is that ‘people
delude themselves into thinking that all Christianity is nothing but
direct communication’, nothing more than ‘the professor’s
profound dictations’, and have forsaken the teacher for the teaching
(PC 123). For my purposes here, I could state the contrast this way:
Anti- Climacus presents the problem of doing theology after
Balthasar. In other words, Anti-Climacus’ concern is the opposite of
Balthasar’s worry—that is, in misrelating the divine content of
worldly beauty, the content is taken for granted as self-evident and
the form discarded. Ironically, the inattention to form is the result
that Balthasar despised about historical criticism. To be more precise
than Balthasar, Anti-Climacus does not claim that Christ is merely a
sign, but rather, to use a fond phrase of St John Paul II, that Christ
is ‘a sign of contradiction’ (PC 124; cf. Luke 2:34).53 This is a
crucial distinction
52
Kierkegaard,UDVS, 89. Instead of viewing temporality as the uniform
transparency of the eternal, Kierkegaard suggests that they are related as echo to
sound, hence temporality is ‘the refraction of the eternal’ (UDVS 90).
53
See Pope John Paul II, Sign of Contradiction (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1979).
for Anti-Climacus. On the one hand, a sign does not coincide with
that to which it refers and its non-coincidence points away from itself,
generating a search for a meaning which is not self-evident (PC
124). On the other hand, a sign of contradiction ‘draws attention to
itself and, once attention is directed to it, shows itself to contain a
contradiction’ (PC 125).
Anti-Climacus says that a sign of contradiction ‘stands in contrast
to what one immediately is’, so in terms of Christ as the God-man,
‘immediately, he is an individual human being, just like others, a
lowly unimpressive human being, but now comes the contradiction—
that he is God’ (PC 126). For Anti-Climacus, as the sign of
contradiction, Christ ‘discloses the thoughts of hearts’ (PC 126).
Anti-Climacus argues that one sees Christ as the God-man, not in the
way that one disinterestedly admires the beauty of a flower, but
rather as ‘one sees in a mirror, one comes to see oneself, or he who
is the sign of contradiction looks straight into one’s heart while one
is staring into the contradiction’ (PC 127).54 The contradiction that
is generated in the encounter ‘is a riddle’ that as one ‘is guessing the
riddle, what dwells within him is disclosed by the way he guesses’—
the ‘contradiction confronts him with a choice, and as he is
choosing, together with what he chooses, he himself is disclosed’
(PC 127). The problem with the ‘majority of people living in
Christendom today’, Anti-Climacus says, is that they ‘no doubt live
in the illusion that if they had been contemporary with Christ they
would have recognized him immediately despite his
unrecognizability’ (PC 128). For Anti-Climacus, they ‘utterly fail to
see how they betray that they do not know themselves; it totally
escapes them’ (PC 128). Anti-Climacus puts it this way: ‘he was
true God, and therefore to such a degree God that he was
unrecognizable—thus it was not flesh and blood but the opposite
of flesh and blood that inspired Peter to recognize him’ (PC 128). In
short, Anti-Climacus is concerned that when theologians ramp up
the self-evidential power of Christ, they make Christ into a cliché.
In hastily dismissing Kierkegaard, Balthasar puts in jeopardy that
which he works so hard to defend: seeing the form of Christ in and
through faith.
54
Kierkegaard’s distinction between faith and sense perception bears a striking
similarity to the distinction St Thomas uses when he says of the Eucharist that
‘Christ’s true body and blood in this sacrament cannot be detected by sense, nor
understanding, but by faith alone which rests upon Divine authority’ (ST IIIa q. 75
a. 1).
Joseph Ballan correctly identifies the ‘fundamental opposition’
between Kierkegaard and Balthasar: ‘Balthasar’s Christology, while
by no means downplaying Christ’s suffering humanity, nonetheless
incorporates that aspect of Christ’s existence into a higher, glorious
unity’; whereas Kierkegaard ‘does not take this speculative step,
preferring to tarry with the Ungestalt, dwelling upon the form of
Christ’s deformity, the suffering of God in humanity, without
sublat- ing that deformity in a higher unity’.55 In other words,
Balthasar claims that the Incarnation requires and presupposes that
the unified form of divinity and humanity is available to, and
grasped by the senses, whereas Kierkegaard sees the Incarnation as
requiring but actively precluding such sensate apprehension.
In Balthasar’s own words, the task of theology is to see the form-
lessness of Christ on the cross as ‘a mode of his glory’ because it is
‘a mode of his “love to the end”, to discover in his deformity
(Ungestalt) the mystery of his transcendental form (Übergestalt)’
(GL 1:460). It seems that Balthasar acknowledges the difficulty of
the first task, but not the second task of demonstrating beauty-in-
deformity. Moreover, Balthasar explicitly holds out the apologetic
promise of making such a positive evaluation of human suffering:
‘How could we, however, understand the “beauty” of the Cross
without the abysmal darkness into which the Crucified plunges?’
(GL 1:117). Yet, Balthasar goes so far to claim that in seeing the
Christ-form, one sees the whole, and is persuaded, indeed
enraptured by the sight: ‘the figure which Christ forms has in itself
an interior rightness and evidential power such as we find—in another,
wholly worldly realm— in a work of art or in a mathematical
principle’, and ‘this rightness, which resides within the reality of the
thing itself, also possesses the power to illumine the perceiving
person by its own radiant light, and this is not simply intellectually
but in a manner which transforms man’s existence’ (GL 1:465–6).
For Balthasar, everything hangs on the ability to discern the
difference between worldly and divine beauty and to experience
that difference as painfully beautiful:
God’s grace in fact is bestowed on the world so that, filled with
divine power, it may—groaningly and in pain—struggle through into
the light
55
Ballan, ‘Hans Urs von Balthasar’, 21. For more on Kierkegaard’s Incognito
Christology, and the school of thought that emerged from it, see David R. Law,
Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
of eternity. The beautiful, then, will only return to us if the power of
the Christian heart intervenes so strongly between the other world
salvation of theology and the present world lost in positivism as to
experience the cosmos as the revelation of an infinity of grace and
love—not merely to believe but to experience it. (ET 109; emphasis
mine)
A valid question might be raised here: what if one is not persuaded
by ‘seeing the form’? However, Balthasar has already anticipated
this question: ‘God’s art in the midst of history is irreproachable,
and any criticism of his masterpiece immediately rebounds on the
fault-finder’ (GL 1:172); indeed, should one not be persuaded or ‘if
such a mistake is suspected, it will at once be shown to have been
because of a defect in one’s own vision’ (GL 1:486). There is an
important shift taking place here. Previously, aesthetic judgement
was thought to be a universal human capacity, and the sublime a pre-
theological category. But with Balthasar’s revision, aesthetic
judgement becomes a limited capacity available only to Christians,
and the sublime becomes very much a theological category for
those with eyes to see.
According to Nicholas Lash, there are two kinds of Christian
theologians: ‘those who not only affirm that the world has
meaning and purpose, but who also affirm that this meaning and
purpose may be more or less straightforwardly discerned, grasped,
“read off” our individual or group experience’, and those who
affirm ‘that the world has meaning and purpose, [but] deny that this
meaning and purpose may—whether in respect of particular events
or of large-scale patterns in human history—be straightforwardly
discerned, grasped, or “read off” our individual or group
experience’.56 Using Lash’s distinction, I would like to suggest
that this characterizes one important difference in the theological
aesthetics of Balthasar and Kierkegaard. Rather than developing his
theory of beauty from sources external to Christian revelation,
Balthasar attempts to offer a theology that ‘develops its theory of
beauty from the data of revelation itself with genuinely theological
methods’, which allows theology to retain aesthetics as ‘a good
part—if not the best part—of itself ’ (GL 1:117). Balthasar claims
that ‘the real locus of beauty’ is ‘the apprehension of an expressive
form in the thing’ that already possesses a ‘depth- dimension
between its ground and its manifestation’, which in turn
56
Lash, Theology on Dover Beach (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979),
161–2.
‘opens up the ontological locus of the truth of being’ (GL 1:152).
For Balthasar, there is a difference between worldly beauty and
divine beauty, and yet beauty stretches across both realms in such a
way that even human suffering can be positively evaluated as
beautiful. Since Balthasar singles out Kierkegaard as the primary
villain in his aesthetic saga, it was important to evaluate the
accuracy of Balthasar’s judgement. I have suggested that Balthasar
fails to properly understand Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety and
aesthetics, and could have avoided a Christological problem in the
way he thematized in his theological aesthetics the distance between
the divine and human nature of Christ, and the distance between
creation and the Creator. It is significant that the above criticisms
are reinforced by the fact that Balthasar’s portrait of anxiety as
distance from God is not an isolated assertion, but rather permeates
the whole of his theology. For instance, a sympathetic reader of
Balthasar like John Cihak argues that it is out of The Christian and
Anxiety (1951) in particular, that Balthasar ‘delineates and develops
in [his] subsequent works his theological anthropology, Trinitarian
theology, Christology, soteriology and ecclesiology’.57
Therefore, any suggestion (like Balthasar’s) that human suffering
should be positively evaluated as beautiful is flatly rejected by Kier-
kegaard because mystical and ordinary beauty can be used to
deaden the senses to real suffering in the world. The important
nuance Kierkegaard brings to this issue is that ‘If a person is to will
the good in truth, he must will to suffer everything for the good’
(UDVS 99). This is not the same as positively evaluating suffering as
beautiful tout court. The difference is that ‘a person may have
suffered a whole lifetime without its being possible in any way to
say truthfully of him that he has willed to suffer all for the good’.
Moreover, this rejection can be found in the book that Balthasar
detests, Kierkegaard’s Either/ Or, which recalls the story of Phalaris
the tyrant of Akragas, who tortured his enemies over an open flame
and turned their screams into beautiful music.58 By presupposing
unity in the form of the God-man’s direct recognizability, Balthasar
leads the reader toward
57
Cihak, Balthasar and Anxiety, 12.
58
‘What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but
whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are
transformed into ravishing music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims
whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen bull, and slowly tortured over a
steady fire; their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears so as to strike terror into
his
the grotesque—appraising human suffering as if it was an artistic
representation to be contemplated disinterestedly;59 whereas Kierke-
gaard wants to lead the reader away from making such a categorical
error since ‘direct recognisability is paganism’ because ‘if one can see it
in him, then he is eo ipso a mythological figure’.60 My observation
here is not new: Karl Rahner’s charge of paganism, or more precisely,
Nestorianism is something that has haunted Balthasar’s legacy for
some time.61
In this chapter, I have outlined Balthasar’s criticism and
alternative response to Kierkegaard’s view of anxiety (§4.1–4.2)
and aesthetics (§4.3–4.4). I have surveyed briefly the basic aims of
Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, giving special attention to the
way Balthasar’s thematization of distance features as a
Christological problem, and
heart; when they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music’
(Swensen/Johnson EO 19).
59
Balthasar refers to God as ‘O You who heal us by wounding us!’ in Hans Urs von
Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 116.
60
Kierkegaard, CUP, 600.
61
‘[Balthasar’s position on suffering] does not help me to escape from my mess
and mix-up and despair if God is in the same predicament .. . From the
beginning, I am locked into its horribleness while God—if this word continues to
have any meaning—is in a true and authentic and consoling sense the God who
does not suffer, the immutable, and so on .. . Perhaps it is possible to be an orthodox
Nestorian’, in Karl Rahner, Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews,
1965–1982, ed. and trans. H. Biallowons, H. D. Egan, S. J. Imhof, and P. Imhof (New
York: Crossroad, 1986), 124–7. Balthasar’s ability to access (or at least his claim to
have access) to the Son’s forsakenness by God, or the relations between the divine
hypostases has led more recent theologians to express reservations about
Balthasar’s theological speculation. For instance, Tina Beattie critiques Balthasar,
saying that ‘the more vulnerable Christ becomes in the passivity of his dying, the
more distant from God he becomes, and the more masculine qualities of power,
violence, wrath and retribution must be asserted within the fatherhood of God’, in
Tina Beattie, New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (London: Routledge,
2006), 227. Lyra Pitstick has argued that Balthasar often splits the hypostatic nature
of Christ in such a way that amounts to ‘the destruction of Chalcedon’, in Alyssa
Lyra Pitstick, Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic
Doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), p. 440 n.
69; cf. pp. 293ff. Karen Kilby has argued that this Christological problem of
distance extends, not just to the Atonement, but also to Balthasar’s treatment of the
Trinity; see Karen Kilby, ‘Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Trinity’, in Peter C. Phan
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 215; and Karen Kilby, Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 94–122. Advocates of Balthasar’s rationale of distance
have used it to promote the ‘abysmal dissimilarity’ of the sexes; see Angelo Scola,
The Nuptial Mystery (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 27, 72, 134, 285, 335, 363.
For more, see Simon Oliver, Karen Kilby, and Thomas O’Loughlin (eds), Faithful
Reading: New Essays in Theology and Philosophy in Honour of Fergus Kerr, OP
(London: T&T Clark, 2012), chs. 9 & 10.
how this problem is connected to Balthasar’s misinformed critique
of Kierkegaard (§4.5). Although a critical reader may be resistant to,
and suspicious of, Balthasar’s theological account of beauty (natural
and artistic), and its transparency to the source of being and
Christian revelation, I would like to conclude by indicating a way
forward by identifying a shared goal between the theological aesthetics
of Balthasar and Kierkegaard. To close, I would like to highlight
Kierkegaard’s relevance to the wider aims of ressourcement in
contemporary Catholic theology.
4.6. CONCLUSION: READING KIERKEGAARD

CLOSER TO BALTHASAR
Matthew Eggemeier says that ‘Balthasar’s restoration of aesthetics to

a place of primacy in Christian theology represents an important
attempt to describe [an] alternative ontology—a Christian
sacramental ontology’.62 Moreover, it is a ‘sacramental ontology’
that Hans Boersma offers as the interpretive key to the ‘essence’ of
ressourcement theology.63 Although Boersma admits that
ressourcement theologians ‘did not set out to establish a particular
theological system or school’,64
62
For relevant discussion and bibliographical information, see Matthew
T. Eggemeier, ‘A Sacramental Vision: Environmental Degradation and the
Aesthetics of Creation’, Modern Theology 29, no. 3 (2013), 359; 338–60.
Eggemeier says that ‘Balthasar’s practice of ressourcement is characterized by a
retrieval of pre-modern pictures of the world as a means of healing the pathologies
of modernity’ (p. 355). Eggemeier goes on to say that ‘As the aesthetic religion par
excellence, the Christian claim is that God can be perceived by the senses of sight,
touch, sound, smell, and taste . . . [but] Balthasar views the modern era as a particularly
inauspicious time for seeing the form insofar as the frame of technological nihilism
discloses things as mere resources bereft of transcendental significance. The result
is that moderns have become virtually blind to the spiritual depth of creation and
perceive it only as raw material for maximizing the efficiency of human projects’
(p. 358).
63
It should be noted that Boersma borrows this phrase from Dennis Doyle—who
was referring to de Lubac’s ecclesiology—and applies it to all the figures covered in his
book. See Dennis M. Doyle, ‘Henri de Lubac and the Roots of Communion Ecclesi-
ology’, Theological Studies 60, no. 2 (1999), 226–7. As cited in Boersma,
Nouvelle
Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 243 n. 249.
64
Hans Boersma, ‘Analogy of Truth’, in Flynn and Murray, Ressourcement, 157.
what united them was their view that ‘all of existence—nature and
the supernatural—was connected by way of an overall sacramental
ontology’.65 Boersma says that it is ‘the conviction that historical
realities of the created order served as divinely ordained,
sacramental means leading to eternal divine mysteries’.66 In other
words, it is an interpretation of history that views ‘external,
temporal appearances [as] contain [ing] the spiritual, eternal realities
which they represented and to which they dynamically pointed
forward’.67
Now, Boersma says that ‘sacramental ontology’ is a response to
secularization, a process that he calls ‘the desacramentalizing of the
West’.68 For Boersma, the object of recovery for all ressourcement
theologians is a sacramental ontology against ‘the agnosticism, imma-
nentism, and relativism of Modernism’, and the ‘intellectualism of
neo-Thomism’, both of which are teeming with ‘confidence in the
ability of discursive reason to access and possess theological
truth’.69 By reading these nouveaux theologians through the lens of
‘a sacramental ontology’, Boersma says, it ‘allows us to take
seriously their disavowals of the Modernist theology of the turn of
the twentieth century’.70 For Boersma, a ‘sacramental ontology’ is
not just the ‘essence’ and ‘key’ to understanding the movement, but
it also affords him a kind of rhetorical and hermeneutical buffer
around each ressourcement figure steering them away from any
potential ‘modernist’ pitfall.71
On the face of it, Balthasar’s repudiation of Kierkegaard
reiterates Heidegger’s earlier dismissal: despite Kierkegaard’s
‘penetrating’ psychological analysis, he ultimately comes up short
on providing an adequate ontology.72 Interestingly, Balthasar agrees
with Heidegger
65
Ibid., 161. 66
Ibid., 289. 67
Ibid.
68
Ibid., 15. 69
Ibid., 158–9. 70
Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie, 17.
71
Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie, 20–1. ‘The fundamental difference between Mod-
ernism and nouvelle théologie lay precisely in the latter’s sacramental ontology’. It
is not difficult to see how Boersma uses this neologism to circumvent the
ambiguous historical relationship between the ressourcement movement and its
inheritance of Catholic modernism. For more, see Gerard Loughlin’s excellent
essay ‘Nouvelle Théologie: A Return to Modernism?’, in Flynn and Murray,
Ressourcement, 36–50. See also, Gerard Loughlin, ‘Catholic Modernism’, in David
Fergusson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology
(Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 486–508.
72
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 494 n. 496. See
also, Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and
Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 283–340.
about affirming Kierkegaard as a psychologist—the best since St
Thomas (DCA 31)—indeed, Balthasar even agrees with Heidegger
about dropping the theological implications of Kierkegaard’s ‘pene-
trating’ analysis of anxiety (DCA 32). Instead of rehabilitating Kierke-
gaard’s psychology against Heidegger’s secularization of it,
Balthasar interprets Heidegger as hatching the egg that Kierkegaard
laid. Even though Balthasar and Heidegger may come to differing
conclusions regarding a proper account of what the world is like, it
would seem that Kierkegaard still provides much of the conceptual
terrain for both figures.
In the previous chapter on de Lubac, I suggested that Kierkegaard’s
writings resist any ‘decline and fall’ narrative of history that often
trips up contemporary readers of ressourcement theologians,
causing them to privilege the medieval against the modern tout
court. With such claims, the repudiation of Kierkegaard as the
‘modern Protest- ant’ in Balthasar’s theological aesthetics
undesirably sets up contemporary Catholic theologians to fall prey
to what Charles Taylor has called ‘the view from Dover Beach’,
which claims that contemporary culture has fallen away from an
earlier state of innocence that comprises the ‘withdrawing roar’ of
a moral horizon of ‘traditional beliefs and allegiances’.73 Whether
this view is put forward in a negative or positive light, this
assumption about how ‘old views and loyalties are eroded’ enables
the plausibility of an account of our contemporary ‘loss of belief ’—
whether that is seen as ‘shedding harmful myths or losing touch with
crucial spiritual realities’.74 Taylor says that
What this view reads out of the picture is the possibility that Western
modernity might be powered by its own positive visions of the good,
that is, by one constellation of such visions among available others,
rather than by the only viable set left after the old myths and legends
have been exploded. It screens out whatever there might be of a
specific moral direction to Western modernity, beyond what is
dictated by the general form of human life itself, once old error is
shown up (or old truth forgotten).75
Under the sway of ‘the view from Dover Beach’, the task of
theology can be reduced to preening oneself with unswerving
certainty amid
73
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), 570.
74
Ibid., 571. 75
Ibid.
the tumult of culture wars. This diminished task can create an
environment where theologians inadvertently adopt either a
tendency toward relativism or toward a ghetto mentality when
trying to make sense of the deposit of faith for today.
In this chapter, I have suggested that Balthasar’s theological aes-
thetics follows a similar plotline in his narration of the loss of
beauty after the Reformation. Yet Kierkegaard offers a view of
divine revelation that is equidistant in every epoch. So, how does
Kierkegaard’s dialectical view of theological aesthetics offer a
contribution to ressourcement theology? Kierkegaard would not
reject Balthasar’s claim that ‘Creation as a whole has become a
monstrance of God’s real presence’. Instead, he would want to hold
that claim in tension with St Paul’s insistence that ‘We look not to
the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the
things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are
eternal’ (2 Cor. 4:18). Or as Kierkegaard says in his journals: ‘in
order that faith can be faith, immediate straightforwardness is denied
.. . thus the object of faith does not admit of artistic representation’
(NB 15:51).
In his chapter entitled ‘Kierkegaard and the Aesthetics of the
Icon’, Christopher Barnett makes the case that, contrary to what
critics (like Balthasar)76 have assumed, Kierkegaard actually has a
dialectical view of theological aesthetics, rather than a view that
keeps aesthetics and religion in opposition.77 The issue of
contention is not that for Balthasar beauty has the power to make
someone a Christian, and for Kierkegaard beauty has the power to
delay someone from becoming a Christian. Rather following Jean-
Luc Marion, Barnett says that Kierkegaard deploys poetic or
‘aesthetic imagery’ in his writings, which can function as either an
icon or an idol for the reader. 78 Barnett traces Kierkegaard’s
dialectical use of the term ‘image’ or ‘picture’ [Billede] to claim
that Kierkegaard uses the term in this way to convey how a picture
can draw the observer into disinterested
76
Barnett, From Despair to Faith, 49–51.
77
Barnett, From Despair to Faith, ch. 3.
78
Barnett, From Despair to Faith, 68. Barnett explores how for Kierkegaard,
these moral exemplars are found both in Scripture and in objects of nature: the
clouds of autumn, the lilies and the birds, the human being, the ocean, even John the
Baptist, Paul, Job, Anna, the Tax Collector, and Jesus Christ. For more on the
icon/idol distinction in Marion, see Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
inspection, or refract the observer’s gaze toward higher things—in
Kierkegaard’s case, a concrete moral exemplar. Barnett’s point is
that Kierkegaard employs this literary device in his authorship, not
because (as Balthasar claims) he views aesthetics as categorically
antagonistic toward religion, but rather because Kierkegaard
believes that they are fundamentally integrated. So, the pedagogical
task for Kierkegaard is not to elicit admirers, but imitators of Christ.
To support this claim, Barnett surveys the many ‘icons of faith’ in
Kierkegaard’s authorship, which allows the reader ‘to indirectly, but
truly perceive the divine’.79 In short, Barnett indicates a very
perceptive way that both Kierkegaard and Balthasar share similar
goals of ‘attending to the form of Christian existence’, in their
respective projects. Perhaps this is why Kierkegaard chooses to
treat something as elusive and pronounced as anxiety, which tends
not to submit to an account of its determinate content. The
manifestation of anxiety and beauty resists our subsequent attempt
to retrieve, clarify, and classify its source—thus, revealing a limit to
our capacity to give an exhaustive account of the way the world is
as it is primordially encountered.
So perhaps Kierkegaard’s writings can offer to readers of
Balthasar what David Burrell and Elena Malits have described as
the post- conciliar move away from the ‘earlier preoccupation with
an “ontology” of the sacraments—what is happening and how it is
being effected’ to an approach that focuses upon the ‘uses of ritual
patterns as a prism for displaying the human dimensions of
sacramental action’. In this way, by ‘focusing on sign, questions
of “causality” are transposed into a properly sacramental key’ as
‘human activities carried out in a believing community, with the
goal of enhancing its unity by relating that community to the Lord
and its members to one another’.80 Although this would push
Kierkegaard closer to endorsing an ecclesiology that he typically is
not associated with, it does antici- pate the next chapter on Cornelio
Fabro.81
To recapitulate, my argument in this chapter was that Balthasar’s
negative evaluation of Kierkegaard’s view of aesthetics (§4.1–4.2) and
79
Barnett, From Despair to Faith, 75.
80
David B. Burrell and Elena Malits, Original Peace: Restoring God’s Creation
(New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 42.
81
For more on Kierkegaard’s sacramental imagination as it relates to church
architecture and liturgy, see Hughes, Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric
and Performance in a Theology of Eros (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
anxiety (§4.3–4.4) led him to take up an undesirable theological
position that could have been avoided if he had taken Kierkegaard
more seriously. After contrasting the theological positions of Balthasar
and Kierkegaard, I identified a Christological problem in
Balthasar’s theological aesthetics (§4.5). I concluded by indicating
a way that the distance between the theological aesthetics of
Kierkegaard and Baltha- sar could be mitigated. My overall claim is
that Kierkegaard has, and should continue to stimulate reform and
renewal in Catholic theology. In the next chapter, my study turns to
the Italian Thomist Cornelio Fabro in order to complement de
Lubac’s and Balthasar’s engagement of Kierkegaard’s writings.
Doing Theology with Cornelio Fabro

Kierkegaard, Mary, and the Church
Philosophy must keep up its guard against the desire to be edifying.

G. W. F. Hegel1
As philosophy of the act of being,
Thomism is not another existential philosophy,
it is the only one.
Etienne Gilson2
Throughout this book, I have argued that although he is not always

recognized as such, Søren Kierkegaard has been an important ally
for Catholic theologians in the early twentieth century. For the first
time in English, I introduce in this chapter the constructive theological
features of the underexplored writings of the Italian Thomist,
Cornelio Fabro (1911–1995). Instead of providing an exhaustive
account of Fabro’s distinctive reading of Kierkegaard or Thomas, I
would first like to lay the essential groundwork for demonstrating
Fabro’s importance for constructive theology today. In the first
section, I set the stage of Fabro’s historical context to suggest that
Fabro’s loyalty to the Thomist revival after Aeterni Patris should not
be interpreted as incompatible with his desire to negotiate the
claims of the modern world (§5.1). In the second section, I focus on
Fabro’s recovery of Kierkegaard’s writings (§5.2) as a way into
understanding Fabro’s wider project of
1
Section 9 of the Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Unpublished trans-
lation by Terry Pinkard, 2008.
2
Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas (London: Gol-
lancz, 1957), 368.
renewal in Catholic theology in the modern age (§5.3). Specifically,
I draw upon Fabro’s treatment of Kierkegaard’s Mariology (§5.4)
and ecclesiology (§5.5) as two counter-intuitive examples of Catholic
theological renewal. I conclude with some observations regarding
how Fabro’s constructive theological contribution deepens and
expands our current understanding of ressourcement theology
today.
5.1. FABRO’S CONTEXT: THE LEONINE REVIVAL

AND MODERN ATHEISM
To some readers, Kierkegaard and St Thomas Aquinas are

antithetical thinkers. In defence of such a preconception, these
readers point to a deep Thomist suspicion of Kierkegaard’s so-called
‘irrationalism’—like that portrayed by Alasdair MacIntyre. 3 Yet, many
Kierkegaard scholars have debunked this portrayal as a common
misconception.4 However, it is rare to find someone who would
identify themselves as both a Kierkegaardian and a Thomist. In fact,
to the English-speaking world, Cornelio Fabro is not much more
than an obscure footnote in the history of Thomism. This footnote
often signals Fabro’s groundbreaking recovery of the Neoplatonic
concept of participation in Thomas’ metaphysics.5 However, such
treatment risks reducing Fabro’s legacy to his doctoral thesis and
fails to convey the breadth
3
MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 3rd ed, 2007), 39–56.
4
For instance see, Davenport et al., Kierkegaard after Macintyre: Essays on
Free- dom, Narrative, and Virtue (Chicago: Open Court, 2001). Lippitt, ‘Getting
the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, Macintyre and Some Problems with Narrative’,
Inquiry 50, no. 1 (2007), 34–69. John J. Davenport, Narrative Identity and Autonomy:
From Frank- furt and Macintyre to Kierkegaard (London: Routledge, 2012). Anthony
Rudd, Self, Value, and Narrative: A Kierkegaardian Approach (Oxford: Oxford
5
Fabro, La Nozione Metafisica di Partecipazione secondo San Tommaso
d’Aquino (Roma: EDIVI, 2005). Fabro finished his dissertation in 1937 and published it
in 1939. For more, see Alain Contat, ‘L’étant, l’esse et la Participation selon
Cornelio Fabro’, Revue Thomiste 111, no. 3 (2011), 357–403. See also, Alain Contat,
‘Le Figure della Differenza Ontologica nel Tomismo del Novecento (Prima Parte)’,
Alpha Omega 11, no. 1 (2008a), 77–129. Alain Contat, ‘Le Figure della Differenza
Ontologica nel Tomismo del Novecento (Seconda Parte),’ Alpha Omega 11, no. 2
(2008b), 213–50. Also, see the excellent collection of essays edited by Ariberto
Acerbi, Crisi e Destino della Filosofia: Studi su Cornelio Fabro (Roma: Edizioni
Università della Santa Croce, 2012). Gabriele De Anna, Verità e Libertà: Saggi sul
Pensiero di Cornelio Fabro (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2012). Perhaps
Kierkegaard and Cornelio 1
the only other chapter-length
and depth of the rest of his life’s work, such as advising the
Congrega- tion for the Doctrine of Faith and the preparatory
meetings of the Second Vatican Council on which he served as
peritus,6 or translating the writings of Søren Kierkegaard into Italian
and appropriating his insights for Catholic theology. Indeed, Fabro
goes so far as to claim that Kierkegaard’s writings arrive not
infrequently at the threshold of Catholicism, or to be more precise,
Thomism.7
Although Fabro is virtually unknown in the English-speaking
world, his Kierkegaard scholarship and his appropriation of Kierke-
gaard in his Thomism is a desirable asset for contemporary Catholic
theology. In particular, by uncovering the theological affinities of
Kierkegaard and Thomas, Fabro’s writings offer a fruitful pathway
for re-framing theology in the post-conciliar Church especially after
the encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998)—a document that gives a remark-
able endorsement of Kierkegaard.8 With the exception of seventeen
treatment of Fabro in English is in Helen James John, The Thomist Spectrum (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1966), 87–107.
6
Fabro was nominated as a member of the preparatory commission and peritus
for the Second Vatican Council in 1960. He contributed a study on atheistic
existentialism to the schema for the Constitution De deposito fidei pure
custodiendo, which, in the end, did not make it past the chief censor, Prof. Joseph
Ratzinger. See, Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak, eds., History of
Vatican II: Announcing and Preparing Vatican Council II, vol. 1 (Maryknoll: Orbis,
1995), 241, 410–29. See also, Jared Wicks, ‘Six Texts by Prof. Joseph Ratzinger as
Peritus before and During Vatican Council II’, Gregorianum 89, no. 2 (2008), 233–
311.
7
Rosa Goglia, Cornelio Fabro: Profilo Biografico, Cronologico, Tematico da Inediti,
Note di Archivio, Testimonianze (Roma: EDIVI, 2010), 190. See also, Cornelio Fabro,
‘Kierkegaard e San Tommaso’, Sapienza IX (1956), 292–308. See also, Fabro’s
article ‘Faith and Reason in Kierkegaard’s Dialectic’, in Howard A. Johnson and
Niels Thulstrup, A Kierkegaard Critique: An International Selection of Essays
Interpreting Kierkegaard (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 156–206. Rather
than rehearsing Fabro’s arguments in these two essays, this chapter will take
Fabro’s view for granted and develop further avenues of interest.
8
John Paul II says that Kierkegaard shows us how ‘faith liberates reason from
presumption, the typical temptation of the philosopher’ (n. 76).
<http://w2.vatican.va/ content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-
ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio. html> For more, see Wayne J. Hankey, ‘Practical
Considerations About Teaching Philosophy and Theology Now’, in Restoring Faith in
Reason: With a New Translation of the Encyclical Letter Faith and Reason of Pope
John Paul II: Together with a Commentary and Discussion, ed. Laurence Paul
Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons (London: SCM Press, 2002), 199–205. Robert
Sokolowski, ‘The Autonomy of Philo- sophy in Fides et Ratio’, in Restoring Faith
in Reason: With a New Translation of the Encyclical Letter Faith and Reason of Pope
John Paul II: Together with a Commentary and Discussion, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming
and Susan Frank Parsons (London: SCM Press, 2002), 277–91.
journal articles, virtually all of Fabro’s writings remain untranslated
into English. God in Exile (1968)9 is the only book that was
published in English and it did not focus on Thomas or his
metaphysics, but rather, modern atheism. My claim in this chapter
is that Fabro’s discovery of Kierkegaard’s theology beneath his
atheistic commentators (such as Heidegger and Sartre), is just as
revolutionary as his discovery of Thomas beneath his neo-
scholastic commentators. Indeed, Kierkegaard is just as much an
influence on Fabro as Thomas10 and much of Fabro’s work
introduces the Catholic inheritance of Kierkegaard’s thought to
those already familiar with Thomas, and re-introduces the
originality of Kierkegaard’s writings to those for whom his
theological significance has been overlooked in continental
philosophy.
Prior to Fabro’s groundbreaking work, it was difficult for some
Catholic readers of Kierkegaard to see his compatibility with
Catholi- cism, due to the misperception that Kierkegaard was a
representative of atheistic existentialism and irrationalism.11 Fabro’s
work corrects this misunderstanding by reading Kierkegaard closer
to the Aristotle of St Thomas, and by suggesting that Kierkegaard’s
Lutheran critique of the state church did not amount to an anti-
ecclesiology, but rather a very fruitful resource for ecumenism. In
this chapter, I will introduce and explore the constructive features of
Fabro’s theology which remains tragically underexplored. To
demonstrate Fabro’s contemporary relevance, I must now briefly
situate Fabro in his Leonine context and within the emergence of the
European reception of Kierkegaard in order to then underscore how
Fabro’s work seeks to overturn the influence of neo-scholasticism
and modern atheism.
9
Cornelio Fabro, God in Exile: Modern Atheism, trans. Arthur Gibson (West-
minster: Paulist Newman, 1968). For more, see Andrea Robiglio, ‘La Logica dell’-
Ateismo: il Principio di Non Contraddizione secondo C. Fabro’, Divus Thomas 102,
no. 1 (1999), 120–43. See also, Andrea Robiglio, ‘Aspetti di Introduzione
all’Ateismo Moderno di Cornelio Fabro’, Divus Thomas 100, no. 3 (1997), 139–64.
10
Cornelio Fabro, Rosa Goglia, and Elvio Celestino Fontana, Appunti di un
Itinerario: Versione Integrale delle Tre Stesure con Parti Inedite (Roma: EDIVI,
2011), 85. In Fabro’s personal library, there are 312 Kierkegaard-related titles and
only 185 titles related to St Thomas; see Goglia, Fabro: Profilo Biografico, 162. Fabro
had always wanted to write an introduction to Kierkegaard but never did, even
though he continued to write about Kierkegaard until the end of his life (cf. Goglia
Fabro: Profilo Biografico, 60).
11
To see the paradigm shift that Fabro caused, compare the review of Fabro ’s work
in Pietro Parente, ‘Il Vero Volto Di Kierkegaard’, L’Osservatore Romano 11, no. 3
(1952), 3.
The distinctiveness of Fabro’s project begins to come into focus
by reading his works in comparison with several works of the
Thomist revival after Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris
(1879).12 Wayne Hankey has described Aeterni Patris as ‘the
courageous war plan of an embattled church’ that engendered a
movement that fatefully mirrors the very philosophical context
which it endeavoured to supplant.13 Pope Leo XIII set out two aims
for his theologians and philosophers: use St Thomas to separate
philosophy from and subordinate it to theology. As Hankey
persuasively argues, separating theology from philosophy required
an emphasis on ‘the Aristotelian aspects of Thomas’ thought’ and
‘its Platonic elements played down’ in order to make the sciences
independent from each other. Whilst subordin- ating philosophy to
theology required that once ‘the ground of theology in a revelation
to faith was stressed and the dependence of theology on philosophy
diminished, the sciences were easily subor- dinated to ecclesiastical
theology’.14 As a result, the desired opportunity for genuine
dialogue with the modern world became more difficult, if not
impossible. Pope Leo’s dilemma generated various genres of
Thomism that internalized the dilemma all the way down.15
However, it is not until Fabro’s project that the Neoplatonic
12
For more on the background of neo-scholasticism and Pope Leo XIII’s relation
to that movement, see Gerald A. McCool, Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The
Search for a Unitary Method (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 17–36,
226–8. See also, Gerald A. McCool, From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of
Thomism (Fordham University Press, 1989), 5–35. Gerald A. McCool, The Neo-
Thomists (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994), 25–40. For an
assessment of Fabro’s distinctive contribution to these debates, see Parts I and II of
George Lindbeck, ‘Participation and Existence in the Interpretation of St. Thomas
Aquinas’, Franciscan Studies 17 (1957), 1–22, 107–25.
13
Wayne Hankey, ‘Making Theology Practical: Thomas Aquinas and the Nine-
teenth Century Religious Revival’, Dionysius 9 (1985), 90.
14
Ibid., 93.
15
Recently the unintended consequence of various Thomism(s) has been deftly
examined; see Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Malden: Blackwell Pub-
lishers, 2002). Notably, it is Mark D. Jordan who draws inspiration from the form of
Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms in order to assess ‘the rhetorical force’ involved in
twentieth-century Thomism’s claim to an authoritative rewriting of Thomas; see
Mark D. Jordan, Rewritten Theology: Aquinas after His Readers (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006), 3. Also see, Mark D. Jordan, ‘The Modernity of Christian Theology or
Writing Kierkegaard Again for the First Time’, Modern Theology 27, no. 3 (2011), 442–
51. For Jordan’s dependence upon Fabro, see Mark D. Jordan, ‘The Grammar of
Esse: Re- Reading Thomas on the Transcendentals’, The Thomist 44, no. January
(1980), 1–26. For a good introduction to Fabro’s version of Thomism, see Guido
Mazzotta, ‘Ipotesi su Fabro’, Euntes Docete 50 (1997), 213–31.
metaphysics of participation in Thomas comes to the fore in an
engagement with continental philosophy, which receives a distinct-
ively Kierkegaardian, rather than Kantian, shape. 16 Indeed, it was
precisely Kierkegaard’s critique of rationalism that was desirable to
Fabro in a time when neo-scholasticism could not manage such
critical distance.17
After Henri de Lubac opened up the possibility of a critical and
theological engagement with modern atheism in Drama of Atheist
Humanism (1944)—an approach that Pope Pius XII subsequently
condemned in Humani Generis (1950)—Fabro’s work brought the
much needed proficiency with the history of atheism to re-frame the
terms of debate for Catholic engagement with the contemporary world.
In 1959, Fabro’s work on atheism led him to establish the European
Institute of the History of Atheism at the Pontifical Urbaniana Uni-
versity. Fabro’s God in Exile (1968)18 began as a set of lectures that
Fabro gave as a visiting professor at Notre Dame University from
February to May in 1965.19 Rosa Goglia says that Fabro had about
16
See Wayne Hankey, ‘Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern Cold and Postmodern
Hot’, in Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric, and Community, ed. Lewis Ayres
and Gareth Jones (Routledge, 1998a), 147–8. Wayne J. Hankey, ‘From Metaphysics
to History, from Exodus to Neoplatonism, from Scholasticism to Pluralism: The
Fate of Gilsonian Thomism in English-Speaking North America’, Dionysius 14
(1998b), 157–88. Hankey sees Fabro’s work as a genuine advance in twentieth-century
Thomist thought. Others have criticized Fabro’s interpretation of participation; see
Rudi A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aguinas (Leiden: Brill,
1995), 147, 151, 158 n. 155, 170 n. 118, 184–6, 222. However, recently some Thomists
have come to the defence of Fabro against Rudi te Velde’s judgement; see Gregory
T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Washington, DC:
Catholic Univer- sity of America Press, 2008), 237–43. See also, Jason A. Mitchell,
Being and Partici- pation: The Method and Structure of Metaphysical Reflection
According to Cornelio Fabro, 2 vols. (Roma: Ateneo Pontificio Regina
Apostolorum, 2012), 485–92. For more on Kant’s influence on neo-scholasticism
and neo-Thomism, see Norbert Fischer, Kant und der Katholizismus: Stationen einer
wechselhaften Geschichte (Frei- burg: Herder, 2005), 485–96, 515–52. For the
scholastic inheritance of Kant’s own thought, see Cornelio Fabro, ‘Il Trascendentale
Moderno e il Trascendentale Tomis- tico’, Angelicum 60 (1983), 534–58. For a
more recent account, see Christopher
J. Insole, Kant and the Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem (Oxford: Oxford
17
For more on neo-scholasticism, see Ulrich Gottfried Leinsle, Introduction to
Scholastic Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
2010), ch. 7.
18
Fabro, God in Exile: Modern Atheism. For more on Fabro’s American
reception, see my chapter entitled ‘God in Exile in the USA’, in Fabro e Brentano:
per un nuovo realismo, ed. Antonio Russo (Roma: Studium, 2014), 245–52.
19
Fabro, Goglia, and Fontana, Appunti di un Itinerario, 75. n. 67.
thirty to forty students signed up for his class entitled, ‘Principles of
Immanence and the Genesis of Atheism’.20 God in Exile is an
updated translation of Fabro’s earlier two-volume work,
Introduzione all’Ateismo Moderno (1964),21 and represents over a
decade of his engagement with figures like Marx, Feuerbach, Hegel,
and Heidegger.
Fabro’s massive tome comprises over 1,200 pages and is divided
into nine parts. The English subtitle aptly depicts the central thread
of Fabro’s book: ‘A Study of the Internal Dynamic of Modern
Atheism from Its Roots in the Cartesian Cogito to the Present Day’.
Fabro’s argument is that the Cartesian cogito is the seed that
contains and yet evolves into modern atheism. Although this claim
is anachronistic in respect to the faith of Descartes himself, what Fabro
latches on to here is how the quest for certainty after Descartes
divides the mind from the world in terms of inner and outer,
bracketing the creative activity of God by focusing instead on the
productivity of human rationality. In Fabro’s own words, he says
that the ‘chief aim of this volume is to chart the main thrust of the
void gouged by the Cartesian cogito insofar as it has driven man to
that blank despair’.22
Fabro arrives at ‘the inner nucleus of modern atheism’ by first
defining the phenomenon, and then showing how it came to be by
charting important philosophical controversies in a tour de force:
examining the work of figures like Descartes and Spinoza, to
Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley, up to d’Holbach, Lessing, Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach Engels, Marx and Lenin, to Bradley
and Dewey, on into Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Heidegger, to the
dialectical theologies of Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, and Bonhoeffer, to
the radical theologies of Robinson and Altizer. At the end of each
part of the book, the translator Arthur Gibson has attached some of
Fabro’s clippings in the form of appendices. Gibson also provides a
helpful introduction that summarizes the book, which helps orient
the reader. It is worth noting that against the claim of ‘death of god’
theologians, Fabro says that:
Kierkegaard does indeed stand at the antipodes of the latest Protestant
theologizing of the Altizer sort, the theology that desists from any
20
Goglia, Fabro: Profilo Biografico, 131.
21
Cornelio Fabro, Introduzione all’Ateismo Moderno (Roma: Editrice Studium,
1964). For more on this text, see Robiglio, ‘Aspetti di Introduzione all’Ateismo
Moderno di Cornelio Fabro’, 139–64. See also, Robiglio, ‘La Logica dell’Ateismo’,
120–43.
22
Fabro, God in Exile, xli.
critique of modern atheism and indeed claims to start from it .. .
Kierkegaard does categorically reject the ‘death of God’ and he
refutes the negative conclusions of Hegel and Feuerbach; and this not
only [stems] from theological motives [but also] because of his own
deep religious aspiration.23
In some respects, Fabro’s genealogy of atheism stood unrivalled
until its argument was further nuanced by Michael J Buckley’s At
the Origins of Modern Atheism (1987),24 or Charles Taylor’s
Sources of the Self (1989).25 Indeed, prior to Taylor’s monumental
work, it would have been difficult to find in the English-speaking
world a more resourceful compendium of the history of modern
atheism, than Fabro’s God in Exile (1968). So, it was Fabro’s staunch
resistance to neo-scholasticism and its rationalistic orientation 26 that
led him to encounter Kierkegaard and incorporate Kierkegaard’s
critique of modern philosophy into his own thinking as a way of
overturning ‘the dominant interpretation of the Scholastic and Neo-
Scholastic tradition which portrayed Aquinas as an Aristotelian’.27
5.2. UNCOVERING KIERKEGAARD
Prior to 1948, Italian Kierkegaard scholars struggled to distinguish

themselves from the interpretive strategies of their French and Ger-
man predecessors, which were constructed upon a small portion of
Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. It was not until Fabro’s
introduction and translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers
(1948–65) that the theological aspects of Kierkegaard’s
writings
23
Fabro, God in Exile, 1040–1.
24
Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale
25
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
26
Fabro, Goglia, and Fontana, Appunti di un Itinerario, 29. In fact, Elvio Fontana
calls for a study to be done just on this topic alone in his essay ‘Fabro e il
Neotomismo Italiano alla Soglia del Concilio’ in Giampietro De Paoli, ed., Cornelio
Fabro e il Neotomismo Italiano dopo il Concilio (Roma: Bibliotheca Edizioni,
2011), 107–35.
27
Fabro, Goglia, and Fontana, Appunti di un Itinerario, 32.
came into focus for many Catholic readers.28 According to Andrea
Scaramuccia, Fabro’s translation of the Journals ‘was at the time
the most extensive edition in translation, surpassing those of
Haecker in German, Dru in English, and Tisseau in French. Even
today it is second only to the collection by the Hongs’.29
In his account of his own intellectual development, Fabro recalls
his first encounter with Kierkegaard as ‘partly a disgrace’ [una
mezza disgrazia] due to Christoph Schrempf ’s ‘unintelligible jargon’
in the German translation of The Concept of Anxiety, which Fabro
read in the National Library of Rome in 1940—a year after
publishing his dissertation on Thomas’ metaphysics of
participation.30 Fabro was drawn to this book because it was ‘in
vogue’, and since the ‘Kierke- gaard’ he first encountered was
through second-hand knowledge, it led him to see how Kierkegaard
was being ‘exploited to negate philosophy and deviate from
theology, in order to give a free pass to the latest forms of French
and German immanentism and various dialectical theologies’.31
Fabro identifies two obstacles that prevented Kierkegaard’s writings
from taking on a more prominent role in Italy:
On one hand, the obstacle of secularisation—whether socialist or
liberal—which cannot receive the Christian message of Kierkegaard
and continues to overwhelm the culture of Italy, already guided by
[Benedetto] Croce or [Giovanni] Gentile at the time of fascism and
now continued especially by cultural centres and social-communist
publishing houses. On the other hand, there is the obstacle of the
deafness of the Catholic environment.32
28
Franca Castagnino, Gli Studi Italiani su Kierkegaard, 1906–1966, Collana del
Centro di Ricerche di Storia della Storiografia Filosofica 2 (Roma: Edizioni
dell’Ate- neo, 1972), 5–29. See also, Cornelio Fabro, Problemi dell’Esistenzialismo
(Roma: Editrice del Verbo Incarnato, 2009). For more, see ch. 1 of the recent PhD
thesis by Marco Strona, ‘Verità dell’Essere e Metafisica della Libertà: Cornelio Fabro
Interprete di Kierkegaard’ (Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm, 2013), 17–54. See
also, Ingrid Basso, ‘Cento Anni di Studi Kierkegaardiani in Italia: 1904–2004’, in
L’Edificante in Kierkegaard, ed. Isabella Adinolfi and Virgilio Melchiorre (Genova:
Il Melangolo, 2005), 305–26.
29
Andrea Scaramuccia, ‘The Italian Reception of Kierkegaard’s Journals and
Papers’, Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, no. July (2003), 367. Fabro worked from
the second edition of Kierkegaard’s Samlede Værker (eds. Drachmann, Heiberg, &
Lange: 1920–1936), which contained a glossary and index. Fabro also used the 1869
Reitzel, as well as Thulstrup’s 1968 edition of Papier, see Goglia, Fabro: Profilo
Biografico, 163.
30
31
Fabro, Goglia, and Fontana, Appunti di un Itinerario.
32
For Fabro’s own account, see Fabro, ‘Kierkegaard in Italia’, 89.
Contrary to the fragmentary presentation of Kierkegaard by Italian
existentialists like Nicola Abbagnano, Enzo Paci, and Enrico Castelli,
Fabro discovered that Kierkegaard had in fact ‘an original speculative
genius and a profound religious consciousness’ that fuelled ‘the
persuasive force of [Kierkegaard’s] critique of the Hegelian dia-
lectic’.33 In Fabro’s view, this insight was often overlooked because
of the state of European Kierkegaard studies, which was partly
indebted to Jean Wahl’s Etudes Kierkegaardiennes (1938). Fabro
comments that:
[Wahl] hastily portrayed speculative problems and presented superficial
approximations of theological themes primarily based upon German
translations. Kierkegaard’s blazing success in all of Europe, in the
first half of this century was largely based upon this equivocation.34
It was Fabro’s newfound commitment to reading Kierkegaard in
Danish, and to recovering a more theological reading of
Kierkegaard that enabled him ‘more than anything else, to endure
the enormous hardship of the war’.35 But most of all, it was his
friendship with Prof. [Erik] Peterson that matured during the war,
which was the decisive stimulus for knowing the authentic
Kierkegaard as theologian and philosopher, essayist and polemicist. It
was [Peter- son] that recommended to me the itinerary of Papirer as
the first and only hermeneutical guide, which made me read in the
German translation the celebrated essayist, writer and theologian
Theodor Haecker, his personal friend who also, like him, was received
into Catholicism under the decisive influence of the great Dane.36
Through such a connection to both Erik Peterson and Theodor
Haecker, Fabro came closer to the circle of influential friendships
connected to ressourcement figures like Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs
von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger. Importantly, Fabro saw
himself as inheriting the earlier Kierkegaardian Catholic tradition of
Theodor Haecker, Erik Przywara, Romano Guardini, and Erik
Peterson.37 It is a tradition that Fabro says:
33
34
Ibid., 84.
35
Ibid., 85.
36
Fabro, Goglia, and Fontana, Appunti di un Itinerario.
37
Fabro has in mind the translations and essays of Theodor Haecker, Erik
Przywara’s essay comparing Newman and Kierkegaard (1948), Erik Peterson’s
essay on Existentialism and Protestant Theology (1947), and Romano Guardini’s
essay on
vigorously stimulated the German soil for a renewal in Catholic thought
from a Kierkegaardian perspective but . . after the war, the influence
of Kierkegaard on Catholic theology was suffocated by the invasion
of the anti-metaphysical ontology . . . [of] Heidegger, [by] more
boisterous [chiassoso] and influential representatives like Karl
Rahner.38
Hence, Fabro emphatically states that his ‘encounter with Kierke-
gaard has been no less decisive than that of St. Thomas’.39 Fabro
goes on to say that:
just as the metaphysics of Thomas forever liberated me from the
formal- ism and emptiness of scholastic controversies, so Kierkegaard’s
Christian existentialism liberated me from an inferiority complex
toward thought; or to be more precise, toward the babble of the
continuous stream of systems in modern and contemporary
philosophy, revealing to me their anti-human and anti-Christian
background.40
Fabro is drawn to Kierkegaard’s work because ‘it is realist,
without falling into dogmatism; it is dialectical, without falling into
scepticism; it is phenomenological with an exceptional intuition,
without
the origin of Kierkegaard’s thought (1927). For more, see Theodor Haecker and
Alexander Dru, Søren Kierkegaard (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 33,
39,
58. Haecker and Bruyn, Kierkegaard the Cripple (London: Harvill Press, 1948), 20.
Haecker, Journal in the Night (London: Harvill Press, 1950), 140, 170–1. See also, Dru,
‘Haecker’s Point of View’, Downside Review 67, no. 209 (1949), 267. Dru, ‘On
Haecker’s Metaphysik des Gefühls’, Downside Review 68, no. 211 (1949), 39–41.
For more on the importance of Haecker and Dru, see Heywood-Thomas and
Siefken, ‘Theodor Haecker and Alexander Dru: A Contribution to the Discovery of
Kierke- gaard in Britain,’ Kierkegaardiana 18 (1996) Pattison, ‘Great Britain: From
“Prophet of the Now” To Postmodern Ironist (and after)’, in J. Stewart (ed.),
Kierkegaard’s International Reception, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 250.
38
Cornelio Fabro, Soren Kierkegaard: Opere (Firenze: Sansoni, 1972c), lxi. Fabro’s
first problem with Rahner is that he characterizes the metaphysics of St Thomas as a
‘metaphysics of cognition’ in the Kantian vein of Joseph Maréchal, which
ultimately extracts Thomas from his historical situation. Fabro’s second problem
with Rahner is his attempt to update this Kantian characterization of Thomas with
the idiom of Martin Heidegger so as to conflate the actus essendi with the ‘presence
of consciousness’ of Dasein, resulting in an idealism which equates being and
thinking. For more, see Cornelio Fabro, La Svolta Antropologica di Karl Rahner
[1974], vol. 25 (Roma: EDIVI, 2011). See also, Karen Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theology
and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004), 13–48. Similar to Fabro’s review in the
same year, compare Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Review of Karl Rahner's Geist im Welt’,
Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 63 (1939), 371–9. Cf. Rowan Williams and
Mike Higton, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (London:
SCM Press, 2007), 92–3.
39
40
Ibid. For more on scholastic controversies, see Leinsle, Introduction to Scholastic
Theology, ch. 4.
falling into nihilism’.41 Fabro attributes these desirable aspects to
the fact that Kierkegaard sat at the feet of the Greeks and sees
Kierkegaard as explicitly ‘reclaiming the classic realism’ of Plato and
Aristotle.42 It is for this reason that Fabro detects a conceptual
affinity between Kier- kegaard and Thomas.43 Thus, Fabro claims that
Kierkegaard’s writings rise ‘above the arid confines of the
Reformation’ and offer:
to the Catholic theologian precious resources for the preparation of a
phenomenology of theological problems, in particular those related to
faith: it could therefore lead to a renewal of traditional theology and
offer to the modern person an integral theology cordis et mentis.44
Fabro writes during a time when the emergence of existentialist
thought in Italy carried on despite Pope Pio X’s previous
condemnation of modernism in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907).
But Fabro seeks to uphold the fundamental principles of Thomism
as well as engage the pressing issues of contemporary modernity in
dialogue between these two worlds.
5.3. A BRIDGE BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
The difference that Fabro’s reading of Thomas makes can be seen

in his article entitled, ‘The Absolute in Thomism and
Existentialism’ (1951), where he builds a bridge between Pope Leo
XIII’s world and that of the demands of the modern world. Fabro
identifies a tension in Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis
(1950), which he sees as an extension of the Leonine project that
attempts to balance on the one hand,
the search for the evidence of each and every object through all
possible routes that autonomous human consciousness has at its
disposal; and on the other hand, the foundations of faith which
transcend the
41
42
Ibid. For a more recent argument along these lines, see Rudd, Self, Value, and
Narrative, chs. 2 & 6.
43
For more, see Fabro, ‘Kierkegaard e San Tommaso’, 292–308. See also, Cornelio
Fabro, ‘L’Esistenzialismo Kierkegaardiano’, in Storia della Filosofia Vol. 2, ed. Corne-
lio Fabro (Roma: Colletti, 1959a), 839–67.
44
Cornelio Fabro, S. Kierkegaard Diario (3rd Ed.), vol. 1 (Brescia: Morcelliana,
1980b), 130. As cited in Scaramuccia, ‘The Italian Reception’, 367.
particular conditions of a given cultural epoch and place humanity
before the meaning and goal of its destiny on earth in the plan of
divine Providence.45
Now, Fabro rightly says that this conflicted requirement indicates a
path for theologians and philosophers to follow without specifying
how to concretely fulfil such a task once for all. The warnings
against philosophy in this encyclical ironically reminds Fabro of the
first half of the 13th century when it was prohibited to read
Aristotle. Yet Fabro argues that it was precisely through the
beneficial use of philosophy in theology that the Church preserved
‘the most substantial interpretation of Being that Greek
civilization had obtained, and enabled the faith to amplify the
horizon of human universality’.46
Aware of the new errors that could potentially arise from a
devout Catholic scholar’s attempt to empirically justify the
foundations of faith, Fabro attempts to clarify what encyclicals like
Pascendi Domin- ici Gregis (1907) and Humani Generis (1950)
precisely condemn. Fabro says that the claim to universal progress
as articulated in communism, dialectical materialism, and atheism
is at odds with the Catholic faith. Fabro also resists the fact that
the theological notion of the soul also falls from view in modern
anthropological accounts. From Fabro’s perspective, these papal
encyclicals invite Catholic scholars to engage seriously with
modern thought to discern its contemporary significance and
value.47
Now, Fabro sees his own work as attempting to make good on
such a legacy by determining the precise significance of existentialism,
and studying the relationship between existentialism and Thomism.
Fabro says that the contemporary Catholic scholar ‘can no longer
remain indifferent to these two issues by dismissing them with
general affirmations because contemporary philosophy has a struc-
ture of its own which includes, but is not reducible to any familiar
schema of subjectivism, rationalism, or irrationalism’.48 After treating
various concepts in the existential thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl
Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger,49 Fabro presents Kierkegaard to the
45
Cornelio Fabro, ‘L’Assoluto nel Tomismo e nell’Esistenzialismo’, Salesianum 13
(1951), 185.
46
Ibid., 186. 47
Ibid., 186. 48
Ibid., 187.
49
Elsewhere, Fabro says of these prominent figures of the Kierkegaard-Renaissance
that they all offer disconcerting treatments of Kierkegaard and they have
‘betrayed
reader as a prime candidate for building a bridge between
continental philosophy and Catholic theology. Fabro notes how these
thinkers are indebted to Kierkegaard, and yet all of them suppress
the theological import of his work in order to carry out their own
projects.
By seeking a better understanding of the contemporary significance
of Thomas’ notion of participation, Fabro says that the Thomas
who emerges ‘does not yield to the prior Scholastic temptation of
Plato- nizing Christianity’, nor does he fall prey to the
contemporary temptation ‘of the Aristotelian Averroists who
separate reason and faith’, rather Thomas ‘radicalises the notion of
being (esse, actus essendi) in culmination with action’.50 The
upshot of Fabro’s work is that Thomas’ grammatical enquiry
finally becomes detached from ‘the rationalistic tradition delivered
in the traditional Scholastic manuals (Roselli, Zigliara, Remer,
Gredt) and from addressing historical, sociological, and
apologetic concerns (Gilson, Maritain, Olgiati)’.51 Instead, the
Thomas who emerges from Fabro’s work is one who ‘draws
upon the culture of his time and signals its movements, but above
all who commits himself to the generative inspiration of the
Greek, Roman, and Patristic sources to reach a way of thinking that
is released from unilateral qualms and capable of universal
openness’.52 Fabro portrays the trajectory of his life’s work as
recovering Thom- istic metaphysics in light of the crisis of
modern atheism and the theological import of Kierkegaard’s
writings. Kierkegaard’s writings helped Fabro to distinguish his
version of Thomism from ‘the Greek- Scholastic tradition’ by
emphasizing the distinctive aspects of the theological
anthropology of St Thomas—especially ‘the real distinction in
creatures between essence and the act of being [atto di essere]’, and
how Thomas rejects ‘the extrinsicist conception of esse as “acci-
dens additum” (which Avicenna endorsed)’ or how St Thomas
‘moves
Kierkegaard’s message by turning its meaning and scope on its head in a way that
feeds into the old things that Kierkegaard was wanting to refute, indeed had
refuted’. Fabro says that instead of Kierkegaard, ‘Sartre opted for Descartes’,
‘Heidegger opted for Kant-Hölderlin-Hegel-Nietzsche’, ‘Jaspers opted for Kant-
Hegel-Nietzsche- Weber’, and ‘Karl Barth opted for the Reformed tradition’. See,
Fabro, Soren Kierke- gaard: Opere, liv–lv.
50
51
Ibid. For more, see Andrea Robiglio, ‘Phénoménologie et Ontologie: Cornelio
Fabro et l’Université de Louvain’, Revue Thomiste 111, no. 3 (2011), 405–36. See also,
Andrea Robiglio, ‘Gilson e Fabro: Appunti per un Confronto’, Divus Thomas 17, no. 2
(1997), 59–76.
52
away from Avicenna when he attributes (with Averroes) a form of
necesse esse, dependent upon God, for spiritual creatures’.53 Kierke-
gaard’s writings also helped Fabro to distinguish his version of
Thomism from ‘the modern subjectivism of immanence that makes
consciousness the origin of “being” and universalizes the essence of
freedom’. Fabro’s Thomism benefited from Kierkegaard’s emphasis
upon the real presence of the world, which ‘gives itself to
consciousness in the reality of nature as object to be verified as
either true or false, and gives itself in the responsibility of the
concrete person as subject to be judged as either right or wrong’.
Finally, Fabro’s Thom- ism benefitted from Kierkegaard’s writings
to resist ‘the ethical empiricism of left-wing existentialism (and
Marxism) that reduces humanity to an historical fact’. In short,
Kierkegaard’s writings helped Fabro’s Thomism to posture itself
toward ‘understanding existentialism in terms of the emergence of
the single existing individual as a person before God and before
Christ, so that the responsibility of acting recalls the responsibility
of thinking and one flows from the other through the “leap” of the
decision’.54 Fabro identifies three aspects of Kierkegaard’s writings
that would be attractive and beneficial to contemporary students
of Thomas: i) a critique of idealism that defends the principle of
non-contradiction, which comes close to defending an Aristotelian
notion of ‘essence’; ii) an ethical defence of individual human
freedom which is available to all; and iii) a critique of the religious
compromise of the Enlightenment and liberal Protestant theology.55
For Fabro, these desirable aspects stem from Kierkegaard’s notion
of the act of existing ‘before God’, which undergirds Kierkegaard’s
‘positive dialectic of the finite and infinite, time and eternity,
freedom and grace, God and the individual’.56
53
Cornelio Fabro, Breve Introduzione al Tomismo (Roma: Editori Pontifici,
1960), 15.
54
Fabro, Goglia, and Fontana, Appunti di un Itinerario, 91–2. For more, see
Ariberto Acerbi, ‘Note e Discussioni—Un Inedito di Cornelio Fabro sulla Libertà’,
Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 99, no. 3 (2007), 509–16. Ariberto Acerbi and Luis
Romera, ‘La Antropologia de Cornelio Fabro’, Anuario Filosófico 39, no. 1 (2006),
101–31. See also, Ariberto Acerbi, La Libertà in Cornelio Fabro (Roma: Edizioni
Università della Santa Croce, 2005). For more, see Cornelio Fabro and Ariberto
Acerbi, L’Io e l’Esistenza e Altri Brevi Scritti (Roma: Università della Santa Croce,
2006), 177–98.
55
Fabro, ‘L’Assoluto nel Tomismo’, 196.
56
Ibid. For these reasons, Fabro says that it is not just beneficial to read Thomas
closely with Kierkegaard, but also Augustine; see Cornelio Fabro, ‘Sant’Agostino
e
On Fabro’s reading of Thomas, ‘being can never be fully resolved in
concepts and there is not an exhaustive concept of being’.57 Fabro
distinguishes Thomas from Heidegger58 when Fabro argues that for
Thomas ‘human freedom founds itself on reason but does not derive
from it’, and that for both Kierkegaard and Thomas ‘the act of faith
is the supreme accomplishment of human freedom which gives
itself to God, inserting time into eternity’. In short, what Fabro’s
Thomism learns from Kierkegaard is a metaphysical sense of the
act of human existing, which preserves rather than threatens human
freedom. Stated positively, Fabro incorporates Kierkegaard’s
understanding of human existence before God to illuminate his
earlier insight about Thomas’ picture of participation of creature in
Creator, which David Burrell has described as a sharing in ‘God’s
creative activity, so that the creature itself is a relation’.59 This view
coheres with Guido Mazzotta’s observation that for Fabro ‘the
participated esse of the entity [ens] radically distinguishes itself
from an essence, which is altogether limited’; alternately, Fabro
argues that ‘only the participated esse of the ens is able to
transcendentally relate the finite and infinite’.60
l’Esistenzialismo’, in Sant’Agostino e le Grandi Correnti della Filosofia

Contemporanea (Atti del Congresso Italiano di Filosofia Agostiniana, Roma 20–23
Ottobre 1954), ed. Ed. (Roma: Edizioni Agostiniane, 1956), 141–69.
57
Fabro, ‘L’Assoluto nel Tomismo’, n 45, 198.
58
The earliest that Fabro engages with Heidegger is in a book review of De
l’Essence de la Vérité, in Divus Thomas, LII, Piacenza 1949, p. 105–6. For more on
Fabro’s engagement with Heidegger, see Cornelio Fabro, ‘L’Essere e l’Esistente
nel- l’Ultimo Heidegger’, Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana 38 (1959b),
240–58. Cornelio Fabro, ‘Il Ritorno al Fondamento: Contributo per un Confronto
fra l’Onto- logia di Heidegger e la Metafisica di S. Tommaso d’Aquino,’ Sapienza
26 (1973a), 267–78. Cornelio Fabro, ‘L’Interpretazione dell’Atto in S. Tommaso e
Heidegger’, in Atti del Congresso Internazionale Tommaso d’Aquino nel suo Settimo
Centenario, ed.
A. Piolanti (Napoli: Edizioni Domenicane Italiane, 1975), 505–17. Cornelio Fabro,
‘L’Angoscia Esistenziale come Tensione di Essere-Nulla, Uomo-Mondo nella Pros-
pettiva di Heidegger e Kierkegaard’, Psichiatria e Territorio 4, no. 1 (1987 [1980]),
9–24. See also, Tito Di Stefano, ‘Cornelio Fabro Interprete di M. Heidegger’, in
Cornelio Fabro: Ricordi e Testimonianze, ed. Giuseppe Mario Pizzuti (Potenza:
Ermes, 1996), 25–8.
59
Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (London: Routledge, 1979), 138.
60
Guido Mazzotta, ‘Cornelio Fabro e l’Università Urbaniana’, Euntes Docete 48,
no. 3 (1995), 322. In his own words, Fabro says that the ‘ontological distinction’ is not
‘the distinction between possibility and actuality, but rather essentia and esse as power
and action [potenza e atto]’, such that for Fabro ‘esse is not existentia, but the
profoundly intimate action of every existent reality, esse is pure action in God and
participated in creatures’ so that ‘every creature is given the real composition
of
In this way, Fabro’s Thomism gains a deepened sense of the
metaphysical structure of the finite that exists through time, such that
theology does not reduce itself to accumulating proofs that
demonstrate either the rationality of the act of faith, or the
supernatural transcendence of that same act of faith.61 Fabro
emphasizes that ‘the “overcoming of metaphysics” does not put
metaphysics completely aside’.62 Hence, Fabro claims that ‘the
theological shape of ontology does not rest upon the fact that Greek
metaphysics has been assumed by the ecclesiastical theology of
Christianity and elaborated from this’, but rather it ‘rests upon the way
in which it has, from the beginning, uncovered the ens as ens’.63 The
Kierkegaardian insight here has been recently stated succinctly by
George Pattison:
Kierkegaard never denies that human beings are creatures, but he
does not define this creatureliness in terms of some ontological
essence: the human being is not an individual substance of a rational
essence but a being in dynamic and temporally charged ecstatic and open
dependence on God and this dependence first becomes actual in the
individual’s concern for the good. It is neither solely nor primarily in
terms of our ontological status but in terms of our hyper-ontological
freedom . . . that we become capax dei, open to the possibility of the
God-relationship.64
Although Pattison relates this Kierkegaardian stance to Rahner, it
is actually Fabro that fleshes this position out more explicitly. In the
first half of this chapter, I have situated Fabro in his historical
context by showing how he confronted the impoverished state of
both Thom- istic and Kierkegaard studies in Europe. I have
indicated that the distinctive contribution of Fabro’s re-discovery of
both Thomas and Kierkegaard allowed him to confront his own
intellectual targets.65 Specifically, I highlighted how Fabro
emphasized the religious instances of Kierkegaard’s thought,66 and
how Kierkegaard provided Fabro with a positive alternative to
materialist notions of history in
essence and esse’, because ‘whether infinite or finite, esse is always and only action: the
infinite is esse per essenza and the finite is and has esse per partecipazione’, in
Fabro, Dall’Essere all’Esistente (Brescia: Morcelliana, [1st ed. 1957] ed, 1965),
419–21.
61
Fabro, ‘L’Assoluto nel Tomismo’, 198–9. 62
Ibid., 199.
63
Ibid., 200.
64
George Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century:
The Paradox and the ‘Point of Contact’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), 100.
65
Goglia, Fabro: Profilo Biografico, 227–33.
66
Cornelio Fabro, ‘Influssi Cattolici sulla Spiritualità Kierkegaardiana’, Humanitas
17 (1962), 501–7.
67
Marxism. Also, Fabro disassociated Kierkegaard’s theological and
philosophical positions from Hegel,68 and combined Kierkegaard’s
thought with Aristotelian realism.69 In this way, we can begin to see
how Fabro incorporated some of Kierkegaard’s insights in his
version of Thomism. But what is it about Kierkegaard’s writings
that lends itself to such appropriation?
In the first part of this chapter, I focused on how Fabro brings
both Thomas and Kierkegaard together, making a genuine
contribution to Thomism in the twentieth century. In this second
part, I want to turn the question around by exploring what aspects
Fabro sees in Kierke- gaard’s writings that reveal a distinctive
Catholic sensibility. Instead of speculating about Kierkegaard
himself, Fabro interrogates a Cath- olic sensibility in Kierkegaard’s
writings.70 To support this claim, I will spend the rest of this
chapter looking at three brief examples of Fabro’s emphasis on
Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, Mariology, and
ecclesiology.
5.4. KIERKEGAARD’S MARIOLOGY
In this section, I will show how Fabro draws upon Kierkegaard’s high
regard for Mary to illustrate his account of the relation of human and
67
Fabro, Tra Kierkegaard e Marx: per una Definizione dell’Esistenza, ed. C. Ferraro
(Firenze: Vallecchi, 1952).
68
C. Fabro and C. Ferraro, La Prima Riforma della Dialettica Hegeliana (Roma:
Editrice del Verbo Incarnato, 2004).
69
Goglia, Fabro: Profilo Biografico, 227. For more on the influence of Aristotle on
Kierkegaard, see Fabro, ‘La “Pistis” Aristotelica nell’Opera di Soren Kierkegaard’,
Proteus: Rivista di Filosofia 5, no. 13 (1974), 3–24. Cornelio Fabro, ‘Actuality. Reality’,
in Concepts and Alternatives in Kierkegaard (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, 3) (Copen-
haghen: C. A. Reitzel, 1980a), 111–13. See also, Fabro’s extended analysis
‘Aristotle and Aristotelianism’, in Thulstrup and Thulstrup, Kierkegaard and Great
Traditions [Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana 6] (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1981), 27–53. For a
comparison of Thomas and Kierkegaard on infused virtues, see Mark A. Tietjen ’s
essay, in Robert L. Perkins, International Kierkegaard Commentary: Christian
Discourses and the Cisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, vol. 17 (Macon: Mercer
70
Cornelio Fabro, ‘Kierkegaard e il Cattolicesimo’, Divus Thomas 19, no. 1 (1956),
67–70. See also, Fabro’s comment in Johnson and Thulstrup, A Kierkegaard Critique:
An International Selection of Essays Interpreting Kierkegaard, 193: ‘I have no intention
of trying to make a Catholic, much less an unconscious Thomist, out of
Kierkegaard’.
divine freedom. In this way, Fabro attempts to make Kierkegaard
more palatable to Catholic readers. Indeed, for Fabro:
Freedom is the basis for truth, and in this, in the choice and decision
of one’s own purpose [proprio scopo] and in the qualification of one’s
own being [proprio essere], there is no difference between human
freedom and that of God. For this reason, in the annunciation to Mary,
God waited to hear her response . . . But Mary also waited to respond, in
order to respond as she should with the freedom that is ordered toward
the good . . . Since freedom is, and can only be, the primordial origin by
which the infinite issues itself in living and knowing, it is the
inexhaustible source that nourishes the disquiet and unquenchable
yearning of love and it is the extreme longing, by which freedom
identifies itself, the arrival far beyond the river of time.71
Here Fabro latches onto human freedom, which is one of the key
themes in Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, and connects
it with the human desire for the good.72 Significantly, Fabro
illustrates this point with the first disciple of Jesus: Mary, his
mother. For Fabro, this is not a passing illustration that grafts a
Catholic sensibility onto Kierkegaard’s writings. On the contrary,
Fabro draws this illustration from Kierkegaard. For those who read
Kierkegaard through Karl Barth, it may be alarming that a ‘hyper-
protestant’ like Kierkegaard would have anything good to say about
the veneration of the Virgin Mary.73 Tucked away in the appendix
of Walter Lowrie’s translation of Kierkegaard’s Fear and
Trembling, Lowrie observes that ‘It would be interesting and
edifying to make an anthology of the passages in which Søren
Kierkegaard speaks of the Blessed Virgin’, because, Lowrie
continues, ‘surely no Protestant was ever so much engrossed in
this theme, and perhaps no Catholic has appreciated more
profoundly the unique position of Mary’.74 Now, much has been
written on Kierke- gaard’s theology of the Incarnation,75 but
Fabro’s scholarship directly responds to Lowrie’s clarion call for
Italian Catholics to reinvigorate
71
Fabro and Acerbi, L’Io e l’Esistenza, 198.
72
For more, see C. Fabro, Riflessioni sulla Libertà (Roma: Editrice del Verbo
Incarnato, 2004), chs. 6–8.
73
Cf. Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, I, 2, 153–7.
74
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; the Book on Adler, trans. Walter Lowrie,
Everyman’s Library (London: Random House Publishing, 1994), 288. n. 50.
75
For instance, see Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology. See also, Murray
Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997). Cornelio Fabro, ‘Cristologia Kierkegaardiana’, Divinitas 16,
no. 1 (1972a).
the Catholic world with Kierkegaard’s thought.76 So, the distinctive
theological feature that Fabro identifies in his reading of Kierkegaard is
not just the Incarnation, but also the Annunciation. Fabro says that
the Gospel writer portrays the Virgin Mary as receiving ‘a request
from Above that was both a consensus but also a supreme risk of
freedom for both of them, as the Christian tradition has clearly seen,
and which has found a profound echo again in Kierkegaard’, whom
Fabro calls, ‘the poet and theologian of the Annunciation’.77 For
Fabro, Kierkegaard writes in the stance of expectancy, which, after
Mary’s ‘Yes’, becomes a constitutive feature of Christian
discipleship.78 Fabro’s observation here is valid today in
Kierkegaard studies, as the prominent place of Mary continues to be
overlooked.79
In response to Lowrie’s request, Fabro catalogues how
Kierkegaard constantly refers to Mary in his Journals as ‘full of
Grace’, ‘the pure Virgin’, the ‘faithful Virgin’, the ‘Madonna’, and
the ‘Mother of God’.80 Yet it is not just the use of the Catholic titles
that Fabro is interested in, but rather Fabro observes how
Kierkegaard focuses on the ‘existential situation’ of ‘the divine
maternity of Mary’.81 For instance, in Fear and Trembling,
Kierkegaard’s fictive author, Johannes de Silentio, contrasts the
distinctive faith of Abraham and Mary:82
‘Who was as great in the world as that favoured woman, the mother of
God, the Virgin Mary? . . . To be sure, Mary bore the child wondrously,
but she nevertheless did it “after the manner of women” [Gen 18:11
KJV],
76
See Walter Lowrie, ‘Søren Kierkegaard’, Religio XI (1935), 1–15.
77
Fabro, Riflessioni sulla Libertà, 11. For more, see Cornelio Fabro,
‘Kierkegaard Poeta-Teologo dell’Annunciazione’, Humanitas III (1948), 1025–34.
78
For more, see Cornelio Fabro, ‘Kierkegaard e la Madonna’, Mater Ecclesiae 7,
no. 3 (1971), 132–44. For a more recent Catholic Feminist perspective
corroborating this point, see Tina Beattie, God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate: A Marian
Narrative of Women’s Salvation (London: Continuum, 2002).
79
For instance, Wanda Berry’s essay on ‘The Silent Woman’ in Kierkegaard
overlooks Fabro’s theological point, see Céline León and Sylvia Walsh, Feminist
Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1997), 287–306.
80
See Pap. I A 68, 172, 190, 232; II A 31, 68; VIII A 338; X2 A 64; X3 A 57; X4 A 454,
521, 572; XI1 A 40, 45, 141, 184; IX A 12/SKS AA:6, 22; Papir 150, 258:8, 78; NB 2:216;
NB 5:11; NB 12:194; NB 18:14; NB 25:30, 92; NB 26:25; NB 28:94, 99; NB 29:92; NB
30:14. See also, Fabro, ‘Spunti Cattolici nel Pensiero Religioso di Søren Kierkegaard’,
Doctor Communis 26, no. 4 (1973b), 269–70.
81
Cornelio Fabro, ‘Kierkegaard, Poeta-Teologo dell’Annunciazione’, as cited in:
<http://www.corneliofabro.org/documento.asp?ID=552> (accessed 23 May 2015).
82
Søren Kierkegaard, Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong, Fear and Trembling;
Repetition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 58, 64–5. Henceforth, FT.
and such a time is one of anxiety, distress, and paradox. The angel
was indeed a ministering spirit, but he was not a meddlesome spirit
who went to other young maidens in Israel and said: Do not scorn
Mary, the extraordinary is happening to her. The angel went only to
Mary, and no one could understand her .. . When, despite this, she said:
Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord—then she is great, and I believe it
should not be difficult to explain why she became the mother of God. She
needs worldly admiration as little as Abraham needs tears, for she was no
heroine and he was no hero, but both of them became greater than
these, not by being exempted in any way from the distress and the
agony and the paradox, but became greater by means of these.’ (FT
64–65)
Commenting on de Silentio’s comparison between the existential
situation of the maternal faith of Abraham and Mary, Stephen
Mulhall wonders whether Abraham’s
title ‘father of faith’ has a less honorific and more productive (or
rather, reproductive) sense—that to call him a father of faith means
not so much that he is exemplary of faith as that true faith is
something that he fathered, something represented not so much in him
as in his offspring (both immediate and ultimate)?83
Later, Mulhall says that the upshot of de Silentio’s comparison is
that Abraham’s ‘fatherhood is dependent upon another’s acceptance
of motherhood’, which confirms Kierkegaard’s earlier point in the
book that ‘the maturity of faith is reached in identification with
femaleness rather than maleness’.84 It is interesting that St Thomas
Aquinas also reaches for the figure of Isaac when he talks about
hope as being born by faith.85
Now, Fabro is alive to this theological point and says that by
holding Mount Moriah and the Annunciation together, Kierkegaard
presents his reader with ‘two decisive points in the story of
humanity that indicate the extreme limit of dedication to which the
creature, supported by Grace, may never traverse’.86 Fabro
concludes that for Kierkegaard, Mary is
the ‘prototype’ of the ‘Extraordinary’, and her fiat, which the same
God awaits for the fulfilment of the Incarnation and salvation of
humanity, is
83
Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 375.
84
Ibid., 377. 85
ST II-II q. 17 a. 7 obj 3.
86
Cornelio Fabro, ‘Kierkegaard, Poeta-Teologo dell’Annunciazione’, Humanitas III
(1948), 1025–34 (1028).
a completely voluntary and free fiat in the acceptance of divine mater-
nity, that makes Mary the model for every Christian in the acceptance of
the divine will. With this, Kierkegaard renounces and denounces the
central nucleus of the Protestant theology of grace and accepts,
perhaps inadvertently, the essence of the Catholic doctrine of the
imitation of Christ.87
Fabro’s point here is borne out in a passage in Kierkegaard’s Book
on Adler:
Let us mention the highest instance, from which we believers ought to
learn. When the angel had announced to Mary that by the Spirit she
should give birth to a child—no, this whole thing was a miracle, why then
did this child need nine months like other children? O what a test for
faith and humility! That this is the divine will, to need the slowness of
time! Behold, this was the cross. But Mary was the humble believer;
by faith and humility she came to herself, although everything was
miracu- lous. She remained the same quiet, humble woman—she
believed.88
And again, Fabro points to Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon Mary as
the one who enables the believer to hear the Word of God, which
read in a Lutheran context seems odd:
That a woman is presented as a teacher, as a prototype of piety, cannot
amaze anyone who knows that piety or godliness is fundamentally
womanliness . . . From a woman, therefore, you also learn the humble
faith in relation to the extraordinary, the humble faith that does not
incredulously, doubtingly ask, ‘Why? What for? How is this possible?’—
but as Mary humbly believes and says, ‘Behold, I am the handmaid of
the Lord’ [Lk 1:38]. She says this, but note that to say this is actually
to be silent. From a woman you learn the proper hearing of the Word,
from Mary, who although she ‘did not understand the words that were
spoken’ yet ‘kept them in her heart’ [Lk 2:19]. Thus she did not first
demand to understand, but silent she hid the word in the right place,
since it is, of course, the right place when the Word, the good seed, ‘is
kept in a devout and beautiful heart’ [Lk 8:15]. From a woman you learn
the quiet, deep, God-fearing sorrow that is silent before God, from
Mary; it indeed happened, as was prophesied, that a sword did pierce
her heart [Lk 2:35], but she did not despair—either over the prophesy or
when it was fulfilled.89
87
Ibid. 88
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; the Book on Adler, 154.
89
Kierkegaard, Without Authority, ed. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 149. See also, PF 34; CUP 260.
It is important that in Kierkegaard’s works, both Mary and
Abraham here, and Adam—in The Concept of Anxiety90—do not
understand the words spoken to them, but must act in faith;
surrendering, rather than demanding understanding in advance.
Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon silence is often misunderstood, and it
is important to be clear that by silence he implies non-
communication rather than unintelli- gibility. Jamie Ferreira says
that Abraham’s faith is ‘not found in a negative distancing from
actuality, from the finite world. Faith is not a matter of other-
worldliness; it is not acosmic, but rather receives the world back
again once one has been willing to give it up’.91 Moreover, as Stephen
Mulhall says, for Kierkegaard:
faith’s ability to establish and maintain itself in human existence does
depend upon its capacity to make itself manifest in discourse—in sacred
texts, in rituals, in communal memory . . . [which is] like a maternal
function, a matter of incarnating the father’s spirit or better nature in
words (incarnating the Word?). In this sense, there can be no ultimate
discontinuity or alienation between faith and language, and so no
essential hiddenness in Abraham.92
It is this aspect of the interaction of human and divine freedom that
Fabro draws upon in Kierkegaard’s work in order to illuminate
Thomas: because in both Thomas and Kierkegaard, ‘the freedom of
acting is the moment of decision towards the Absolute and for the
Absolute’.93 On the face of it, faith is indistinguishable from
Socratic ignorance.94 And it is precisely this concrete example of
humility that Kierkegaard is after in his attempt to help his readers
understand what it means to imitate Christ. Kierkegaard knows that
his reader needs such concrete examples, and this is why he turns
to, not only Mary, but also to the saints for moral guidance on how
to lead one’s own life as a Christian.
90
Kierkegaard, Thomte, and Anderson, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple
Psycho- logically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 44.
91
Ferreira, Kierkegaard, Blackwell Great Minds (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009),
54. For more, see M. Jamie Ferreira, ‘The Point Outside the World: Kierkegaard
and Wittgenstein on Nonsense, Paradox and Religion’, Religious Studies 30, no. 1
(1994b), 29–44. See also, M. Jamie Ferreira, ‘Describing What You Cannot
Understand: Another Look at Fear and Trembling’, Kierkegaardiana 24 (2007),
86–101.
92
Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, 376.
93
Cornelio Fabro, ‘La Liberta’ in Hegel e Tommaso d’Aquino,’ Sacra Doctrina
17 (1972b), 182.
94
Cf. Plato, Apology 20e–21a.
Fabro says that he is drawn to the ‘Socrates of the North’ because
Kierkegaard’s own library betrayed the fact that he ‘was nourished
by reading Fathers of the Church’ and beyond, such as the writings
of St Athanasius, Johannes Tauler, St Alphonsus Maria de Liguori,
St Teresa, St Alphonsus Rodriguez, and the oratory of Abraham a
Sancta Clara.95 For Fabro, Kierkegaard’s critique of modern
philosophy is iconoclastic since these philosophers want ‘to
preserve a god that is no longer God’, and in turn, Fabro says that
Kierkegaard’s critique of a modern theology follows in the same
vein because of its tendency ‘to preserve a Christianity which is not
really Christianity but something more secular, something that is no
longer for human beings the Absolute of existence’.96 Kierkegaard’s
critique of modern philosophy and theology led Fabro to compare
Kierkegaard’s writings with those of John Henry Newman. The
British historian Bernard Reardon says that Newman is ‘the
outstanding religious figure of his century, with the sole exception
of Kierkegaard, a man of whom he himself had probably never
heard’.97 To see how and why Fabro held these seemingly disparate
figures together, we must now turn to the ecclesiology of Newman
and Kierkegaard.
5.5. THE ECCLESIOLOGY OF NEWMAN

AND KIERKEGAARD
After the Second Vatican Council, Fabro saw some of his fellow
theologians (like Hans Küng and Karl Rahner) falling prey to a non-
explicit faith that Fabro understood as inadvertently endorsing
95
Cornelio Fabro, ‘Critica di Kierkegaard all’Ottocento’, Atti del XV Congresso
nazionale di filosofia: Messina 24–29 settembre 1948. Crisi della civilta. Ragione e
irrazionalismo (1949), 384–5. See also, Fabro, ‘Influssi Cattolici sulla Spiritualità
Kierkegaardiana’, 504ff. Fabro, ‘Spunti Cattolici’, 251–80. For more on the
influence of Catholic piety in Kierkegaard, see Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and
Holiness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). See also the various essays by Christopher
Barnett and Peter Šajda in Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern
Traditions: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 5 Tome II, Kierkegaard Research: Sources,
Reception and Resources (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009).
96
Fabro, ‘Critica di Kierkegaard all’Ottocento’, 384–5.
97
Bernard M. G. Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore: A Century of Religious Thought
in Britain (Harlow: Longman, 1971), 127.
the dissolution of dogmatic faith and the elimination of the church.98
In his 1976 article, ‘The Problem of the Church in Newman and
Kierkegaard’, Fabro argues that the problem facing the Catholic
Church is not a rejection of this or that particular dogma, but rather
the overcoming of the need for faith itself. 99 Thus, Fabro draws on the
shared commitments of Søren Kierkegaard and John Henry
Newman in order to find the resources necessary to confront
what he sees as the secularizing tendencies at work in post-
conciliar Catholic theology.
However, comparing Newman and Kierkegaard may seem
counter-intuitive, since Newman was eventually received into
Roman Catholicism and Kierkegaard remained outside the Church
as a critic. Yet, Fabro describes their resemblance in terms of their
shared critique of the Established Church as perpetuating the
process of secularization, which he sees extending into late-
twentieth-century post-conciliar theology through the writings of
Hegel and Heidegger. In doing so, Fabro seeks to recover Newman
and Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon the Church Militant—that is, the
church that struggles against sin and the principalities and powers
on earth, as opposed to the Church Triumphant in heaven. Although
Fabro uses this medieval terminology to make sense of the
ecclesiology of Newman and Kierkegaard, the term can be better
understood by what Lumen Gentium describes as the ‘pilgrim
people of God’.100
Now, Fabro characterizes Newman’s response to secularization
with Pascal’s existential dilemma: either atheism or the Roman
Cath- olic Church.101 Moreover, Fabro says that for Newman, both
the existence of God and the unity of the spiritual life are
connected in an existential commitment.102 This is evident in the
opening of Newman’s book on the Church Fathers:
The Church is ever militant; sometimes she gains, sometimes she loses;
and more often she is at once gaining and losing in different parts of her
98
Cornelio Fabro, ‘Il Problema della Chiesa in Newman e Kierkegaard’, Inter-
nationale Cardinal Newman Studien (1978), 132.
99
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard’, 120.
100
<http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_
const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html> (accessed 24 May 2015).
101
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard’, 123. Fabro refers to §547–549 of Pascal’s
Pensées.
102
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard,’ 125.
territory. What is ecclesiastical history but a record of the ever-
doubtful fortune of the battle, though its issue is not doubtful?
Scarcely are we singing Te Deum, when we have to turn to our
Misereres: scarcely are we in peace, when we are in persecution:
scarcely have we gained a tri- umph, when we are visited by a
scandal. Nay, we make progress by means of reverses; our griefs are
our consolations; we lose Stephen, to gain Paul, and Matthias replaces
the traitor Judas.103
Here Newman offers us an understanding of the Church militant as
moonlit—sometimes in full view, other times not visible.104
Newman wants to emphasize that this sporadic appearing represents
failures to be what the Church claims to be in this world, which is
always about anticipatory living out of what is already, but not fully
yet. What Newman offers the contemporary church is a view of
Christian existence in the modes of appearing, showing, discerning,
witnessing to that which is real.105 In support of this view, Fabro
points to the back story of Newman’s conversion in Apologia Pro
Vita Sua106 and his letter to the Duke of Norfolk in defence of papal
infallibility as two indications of Newman’s ecclesiological
commitment to remain inside the Church. Based on these texts,
Fabro mentions three fundamental principles that Newman upheld:
1) The primacy of revelation and dogma against construing faith as
weak reason or
103
John Henry Newman, The Church of the Fathers (Leominster: Gracewing,
2002), 1.
104
Cf. Lubac and Dunne, The Church: Paradox and Mystery (Shannon: Ecclesia
Press, 1969), 16–17, 64 n. 140. See also, Joseph Ratzinger’s comments on the image of
Church as moon in Balthasar and Ratzinger, Two Say Why (London: Search Press,
1973), 76–9.
105
Thomas J. Norris, ‘Faith’, in I. T. Ker and Terrence Merrigan, The Cambridge
Companion to John Henry Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009),
75. See also, John Henry Newman, Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations
(London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1849), 207. Newman also says,
‘A revelation is not given, if there be no authority to decide what it is that is given’,
in Development, 89.
106
John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. I. T. Ker, Penguin Classics
(New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 182–3. ‘I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in
God, and if I am asked why I believe in God, I answer that it is because I believe in
myself, for I find it impossible to believe in my own existence . . . without believing
also in the existence of Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being
in my conscience .. . I believed in a God on a ground of probability, that I believed in
Christianity on a probability, and that I believed in Catholicism on a probability,
and that these three grounds of probability, distinct from each other of course in
subject matter, were still all of them one and the same in nature of proof, as being
probabilities—probabilities of a special kind, a cumulative, a transcendent
probability but still probability’.
prejudice; 2) An emphasis on the Church Militant with its sacra-
ments and rites as conduits of grace; 3) A critique of the Established
Church through a retrieval of the faith of the Fathers. 107 For John
Macquarrie, the parallel between Kierkegaard and Newman can
best be seen in their writings on the problem of ‘faith and reason
and defending the autonomy of faith against the encroachments of
those rationalists who claimed an omni-competence for reason’.108
Like- wise, Fabro portrays Kierkegaard’s response to the
elimination of the church as a dilemma between ‘either the Church
militant or paganism’, which is not entirely unrelated to Fabro’s
portrayal of Newman’s dilemma of ‘either Roman Catholicism or
atheism’.
However, George Pattison has recently framed the shared theo-
logical question between Kierkegaard (in Philosophical Fragments)
and Newman (in University Sermons) as primarily ‘Christological:
how might human beings living under the sway of sin come to
recognize and receive the revelation of a sinless human life in Christ?’.
Only subsequently does their question become ecclesiological:
‘how might that revelation be communicated to others by those who
first received it?’.109 To answer the ecclesiological question, both
Kierke- gaard and Newman point to the concrete moral example of
the martyrs—the witnesses to the Truth—as the means of transmis-
sion.110 Yet, the answer to the Christological question is inferred
from the ecclesiological problem for Newman, but for Kierkegaard,
the original transmission of faith to the saints cannot be wholly self-
evident, that is, ‘derived from a purely empirical or a posteriori
knowledge of the Church’s history’. Pattison says that for Kierke-
gaard, ‘the individual’s relation to the revelation of God in
Jesus
107
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard’, 126–7.
108
John Macquarrie, ‘Newman and Kierkegaard on the Act of Faith’, in Newman
and Conversion, ed. Ian T. Ker (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 82.
109
Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century, 195. As
Pattison rightly says, Kierkegaard argues that the claim of historical continuity
between the contemporary and early church depends upon ‘a decision as to what
counts as relevant to faith and this decision is—epistemologically if not temporally
— prior to any act of reading’, in other words, the claim of historical continuity
‘would itself need to be demonstrated historically, but this must rely on criteria that
are essentially non-historical, that is, that concern the individual’s own
understanding of faith and what it requires of us’ (193–4).
110
John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford
between A.D. 1826 and 1843, ed. Mary Katherine Tillman, 3rd edn. (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 91–2.
Christ must have a basis other than the mere fact of participation in
the life of the Church’.111
Now, this is not to say that Kierkegaard lacks or even shuns
sacramental theology—a cursory reading of his Communion Dis-
courses would dispel such a hasty conclusion. Rather, returning to
Fabro’s interpretation, Kierkegaard emphasizes the Church
Militant, rather than the Church Triumphant. In other words,
Kierkegaard anticipates the view stated in Lumen Gentium: ‘the life
of the Church is hidden with Christ in God until it appears in glory
with its Spouse’ (n. 49). It is this hiddenness of the church in Christ
that prevents Kierkegaard from prematurely privileging Newman’s
claim of historical continuity. The theological upshot of
Kierkegaard’s epistemic humility is not to approach life in
resentment, but gratitude. Or to say, with George Pattison, since
‘there can be no inerrant historical transmission of Christianity that
acquires its validity from anything other than the commitment of
each individual Christian’, then we must, ‘receiv[e] our lives—as
do the lilies and the birds—direct from God’s hand as a good and
perfect gift, a gift of love’.112 Although some may construe this
divergence between Newman and Kierke- gaard as irreconcilable,
Fabro attempts to show how it can be construed as a difference in
emphasis.
In this light, Fabro observes that both Kierkegaard and Newman
level their critique of Christendom from the standpoint of the
Church Militant as described in the New Testament (for
Kierkegaard) and tradition (for Newman).113 Rather, Fabro points to
Practice in Chris- tianity, where Kierkegaard’s fictive author, Anti-
Climacus, opposes the State to the Church to say that the Church
Militant is not the Church Triumphant.114 Moreover, Kierkegaard
says that since Christ is the way, the truth, and the life (Jn 14:6),
this implies that ‘the truth
111
Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century, 197. New-
man emphasizes the historical continuity of the primitive and contemporary church
in terms of its tradition and liturgy, whereas from Kierkegaard’s perspective,
matters of faith—whether the infallibility of the Bible or Magisterium—cannot be
decided upon historical grounds alone.
112
Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century, 212.
113
For more on Newman’s critique of Christendom and its influence on Vatican
II, see I. T. Ker and Terrence Merrigan, Newman and Faith, Louvain Theological &
Pastoral Monographs 31 (Louvain: Peeters Press, 2004), 117–42.
114
Kierkegaard, Hong, and Hong, Practice in Christianity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991). ‘Lord Jesus Christ, it is indeed from on high that you draw
a person to yourself (Jn 12:32), and it is to victory that you call him, but this of
course
does not naturally consist in knowing the truth, but in being the
truth’, which is not ‘a product or result of history’.115 Pilate
can claim full possession of historical continuity with Christ, even
to physically see Christ but, despite that, he still fails to directly
recognize the truth (PC 214). For Anti-Climacus, truth is not a result
that is already achieved like the invention of gunpowder—with a
predeces- sor who spends twenty years inventing it and a successor
that spends much less time improving that invention. Rather for
Anti-Climacus, truth is the way:
only the person who has travelled the way can triumphally celebrate;
but he is no longer in this world, he is now on high, as Christ was indeed
also the way when he ascended to heaven . . . [so] a Church triumphant
in this world is an illusion, that in this world we can truthfully speak
only of a militant Church. But the Church militant is related, feels
itself drawn, to Christ in lowliness . . . [thus] a Church triumphant is
always understood [as] a Church that wants to be the Church
triumphant here in this world. (PC 209)
Anti-Climacus does not jettison the theological category of the
Church Triumphant altogether, but rather places it in its proper
context, saying ‘a Church triumphant in eternity is entirely in order,
corresponding to Christ’s being raised on high’ (PC 209). The prob-
lem for Anti-Climacus is that once it is established that truth is a
result that has already been achieved, then i) faith becomes a mode
of social morality, and ii) everyone is already a Christian by virtue
of being human, hence the struggle is over and we can all carry on
with the next novelty as a matter of course. Anti-Climacus’ problem
is that this triumphalistic attitude actually undermines Christianity
in particular and religious faith in general: ‘In the Church militant,
it was piety to confess Christianity; in established Christendom, it is
piety to conceal it’ (PC 217).
Now Fabro detects here a ‘a very precise Catholic demand for the
Church’ as described in the New Testament, which is that the
Church
means that you call him to struggle and promise him victory in the struggle . .. Keep
us from .. . delud[ing] ourselves into thinking ourselves to be members of a Church
already triumphant here in this world. Your kingdom certainly is not here in the
world; there is room for it only if it will struggle and by struggling make room for itself
to exist. But if it will struggle, it will never be displaced by the world either; that
you will guarantee’ (PC 201).
115
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard’, 129. Cf. PC 205.
Militant empowers the single existing individual to imitate Christ in
the world.116 Fabro also says that Kierkegaard’s ‘rupture with estab-
lished Christendom’ is not provoked by Kierkegaard’s despair, but
is rather an acute critical gesture that is bound up with his
understanding of the Church Militant as the Church of the martyrs
who bore witness to Christ.117 By comparing Newman and
Kierkegaard, Fabro overturns one of the more prevalent
misconceptions of Kierkegaard which has deterred Catholic
theologians from serious engagement— that is, his negative view of
the church.118 However, Fabro’s claim is that both Newman and
Kierkegaard are ‘without a doubt prophetic thinkers for us today’,
and that they both offer a critique of Chris- tendom that should be
read in light of ‘the continuity of thought and life between the
contemporary Church and the ancient Church’.119 Although Fabro is
not typically associated with the ressourcement movement in pre-
conciliar theology, there is enough evidence to include Fabro in
this renewal movement: indeed, furnishing the groundwork for
some of its central insights.
5.6. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Secular/radical theologians have often laid claim to extending Kier-

kegaard’s work in pronouncing the death of God,120 but this
common misreading of Kierkegaard asserts that his critique of
Christendom
116
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard’, 129–30.
117
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard’, 138. Cf. JP X3 A 415–16.
118
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard’, 120–39. Although Fabro is not mentioned in
recent Kierkegaard scholarship, his insightful comparison has been corroborated,
see Ferreira, ‘Leaps and Circles: Kierkegaard and Newman on Faith and Reason’,
Reli- gious Studies 30, no. 4 (1994), 379–97.
119
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard’, 133. In fact, as George Pattison has shown,
although he was not technically a reformer himself, ‘Kierkegaard’s “attack on
Chris- tendom” would become central to twentieth-century theological debates
about the nature of the Church and its relation to society and, especially, to modern
society’; see Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century,
199.
120
For a critique of secular theologians’ appropriation of Kierkegaard, see Pattison,
Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century, 202–13. See also, George
Pattison, ‘From Kierkegaard to Cupitt: Subjectivity, the Body and Eternal Life’, The
Heythrop Journal 31, no. 3 (1990), 295–308.
121
implies an anti-ecclesiology. But Fabro seeks to describe this
reading of Kierkegaard as a misunderstanding, and instead he
offers the following alternative:
The Kierkegaardian principle simply says that in order to be a Christian,
it is not enough to accept a creed from a church in which one is
baptised as a member. To be saved, one needs to live in the every day
reality of this faith because Christianity is not a doctrine but a
communication of existence that must separate us from collusion with
the aspirations of worldly gain: career, wealth, pleasure, prestige. It is
this that constitutes in concreto the Imitation of Jesus Christ. Through
this principle, the Church has its basis for Kierkegaard, and explains
his polemic against the situation of the State Church.122
Fabro reminds us that one cannot be a second generation Kierke-
gaardian because one cannot perform the critical abseil without
depending upon the structure which one criticizes. Hence for all of
his critical remarks, Kierkegaard presupposes, indeed loves the church.
So, Kierkegaard’s criticism of the church is best understood as finding
fault with the church for not being what it really should be, and claims
to be. By declaring this in terms of the church being absent, Kierke-
gaard thereby reinforces the underlying assumption that the church
is being what it is not and not being what it is. Thus, Kierkegaard’s
problem with the church is disappointment not disbelief: he believes
too much, not too little.
In the face of the contemporary crisis of faith, Fabro puts Kierke-
gaard before us because Fabro values how Kierkegaard, albeit as some
kind of Lutheran, still possesses a strangely Catholic sense of the
church—in terms of its structure, performance, sociality, and sacra-
ments.123 Indeed, Fabro turns to Kierkegaard’s writings in order to
break up an overly secure notion of ecclesial presence, and to New-
man as one who had embraced the church, but who gets his view of
the church from his wrestling with being an Anglican—a view of
the
121
For an endorsement of reading Kierkegaard’s writings as anti-ecclesiology, see
David R. Law, ‘Kierkegaard’s Anti-Ecclesiology: The Attack on “Christendom”,
1854–1855,’ International journal for the Study of the Christian Church 7, no. 2
(2007), 86–108.
122
Fabro, ‘Newman e Kierkegaard’, 128.
123
For more on where Kierkegaard gets this Catholic sensibility, see Barnett,
Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness. See also, Stewart, Kierkegaard and the Patristic
and Medieval Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), Also, Fabro, ‘Spunti
Cattolici,’ 251–80.
church that Catholicism typically finds difficult to sustain as the
fluidity of development cools into solidity of structure and category.
With both Kierkegaard and Newman, Fabro is resourcing Catholi-
cism, not simply with its own internal resources—as most of the other
ressourcement theologians tended to do—but instead, Fabro resources
Catholicism with the broader catholicity of the Christian tradition
that had been lost to view. In this light, Fabro is a fellow traveller with
someone like Yves Congar, but because Congar read Kierkegaard
too closely to Luther, Congar failed to see the resemblance between
Kierkegaard and Newman.124 In the end, Fabro’s comparison
between Kierkegaard and Newman highlights the need for reform
and renewal in light of the Catholic tendency to think in terms of
stable structures of grace which can be seen to under-emphasize
human action, and needs to be rejuvenated by an emphasis on
grace as a continually renewed act.
In this chapter, I have shown the distinctive contribution that
Fabro offers, not only to Thomist studies, but also to Kierkegaard
studies. To do this, I have shown what Fabro learns from Kierkegaard
and the Catholic sensibility Fabro identifies in Kierkegaard’s writings.
My study of Fabro here has not been an exhaustive attempt, but
rather a representative one that shores up for the English-speaking
world the originality of Fabro’s approach. As a result, my hope is
that readers engaged in Catholic studies and Kierkegaard studies
would turn to Fabro’s work in order to further flesh out a mutual
exchange that benefits both disciplines. To accomplish this, more of
Fabro’s writings must be translated into English. But this task must
be left for another day. For now, it has been my claim that
Kierkegaard was just as influential for Fabro as Thomas, and that
this was not merely circumstantial, but necessary to the ongoing
development of Catholic theology and Kierkegaard studies. Jamie
Ferreira has it right when she concludes that:
An appreciation of the significance of Kierkegaard’s writings will,
therefore, have to include his reception by very different kinds of
124
Congar, ‘Actualité De Kierkegaard’, La Vie Intellectuelle 25, 9–36. See also,
Congar, ‘Notes Bibliographiques: Kierkegaard et Luther’, 712–17. See also,
Paul
D. Murray, ‘Expanding Catholicity through Ecumenicity in the Work of Yves Con-
gar’, in Flynn and Murray, Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-
Century Catholic Theology, 457–81.
audiences . . . much of the lasting impact of Kierkegaard’s writings will
be on readers who find in these writings something that resonates
with them, that provokes them in profound ways, that awakens them
to something of value in themselves, and helps them revision and
cope with their lives.125
125
Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 196.
Conclusion
Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard
While geniuses prophetically show the future they do so in

fact owing to a profounder recollection of what has gone
before. Development is certainly not a step back but a return,
and that is originality.
Søren Kierkegaard, Journal (1849 X2 A 207 /
SKS NB 14:41)
This book was written during the two-hundredth anniversary of

Søren Kierkegaard’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the Second
Vatican Council. Both celebrations gathered together a global com-
munity of scholars, who were convinced, not merely of the
historical significance of their reason for celebrating, but that this
historical significance has an enduring relevance. I have tried to
inhabit that celebratory mood throughout this book, but I have
refused to let either party carry on without the other. Instead, my
aim has been to bring these two disparate celebrations closer
together.
This book was borne out of my frustration with the preconception
that Kierkegaard studies and Catholic studies have little in common,
are even antithetical to one another. To demonstrate that this pre-
conception is actually a misconception, I set out to show how these
two disparate disciplines have an unacknowledged historical and
conceptual indebtedness to each other, which could be mutually
edifying if that relationship were constructively explored,
articulated, and celebrated. My claim in this book is that
twentieth-century Catholic theology. In the first part of this book, I
examined the broader catholicity of Kierkegaard’s theological
anthropology and surveyed
Conclusion: Catholic Theology after 2
the wider Catholic reception of Kierkegaard’s writings in the early
twentieth century. In the second part, I assessed how various
aspects of Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology and the Catholic
reception of Kierkegaard gets further developed in the theology of
Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Cornelio Fabro. My
aim has not been merely to narrate a vital moment in the history of
Catholic engagement with Kierkegaard, but rather to provide
representative entry points for contemporary readers of
Kierkegaard’s writings to continue to stimulate reform and renewal
in contemporary Catholic theology in the wake of the
ressourcement movement.
Rather than taking my claim as merely a historical observation,
I would like to sharpen it further by saying that the enduring rele-
vance of Kierkegaard’s writings should continue to stimulate
reform and renewal in contemporary Catholic theology. But in
order to make good on my claim, two proposals must be issued in
the form of a conclusion: i) those contemporary Catholic
theologians that see themselves as doing theology in the wake of
ressourcement theologians should read Kierkegaard; and ii)
Kierkegaard’s writings should no longer be assumed to undermine
the Catholic faith, but rather be seen as an indispensable dialogue
partner for investigating and articu- lating that faith today.
EXPANDING RESSOURCEMENT
Neglecting the twentieth-century Catholic reception of Kierkegaard

leads to some negative consequences. First and foremost, overlooking
Kierkegaard’s reception in Catholic theology is symptomatic of
restricting the available resources of Catholic theologians to only
those figures from the fourteenth century and earlier. This negative
consequence is borne out in several contemporary accounts of re-
ssourcement theology, which restrict its focus in just this way. For
instance, Jürgen Mettepenningen describes nouvelle théologie as a
‘return to the thirteenth-century Thomas Aquinas’ that ‘served as
the preparatory step and permanent support in a return to the
sources of the faith’.1 Hans Boersma describes the primary task of
nouvelle
1
Jürgen Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology: Inheritor of Modern-
ism, Precursor of Vatican II (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 11. This
perspective
théologie as ‘taking seriously Christianity’s encounter with
Platonism’ in order ‘to recover the church fathers, particularly the
Eastern theologians, well known for their Platonist-Christian
proclivities’.2 Even John Milbank says of nouvelle théologie that the
‘initial aim was ressourcement—a recovery of the riches of Christian
tradition, especially prior to 1300’.3 Finally, Charles Taylor says
that ressourcement is primarily ‘a return to the Patristic sources,
particularly the Greek fathers’.4 Although these descriptions rightly
highlight the recovery of the patristic material, they only tell part of
the story. Indeed, Catholic engagement with Kierkegaard reveals
that there were contemporary resources available to Catholic
theologians which allowed them to resist the undesireable effects of
the Enlightenment, which manifested in the form of neo-
scholasticism and modern atheism.
A second negative consequence is a distortion of the basic aims
of ressourcement: what has been widely asserted as the goal of
ressourcement amounts to only one of the original stated aims of
Jean Danié- lou’s programme.5 According to Daniélou, a return to
the Fathers was a necessary but not sufficient resource for engaging
contemporary issues. Indeed, Aidan Nichols says that Daniélou held
that it is increasingly important for Catholic theologians to follow
‘these alien philosophers onto their own home ground, the better to
respond to them’.6 So from its inception, ressourcement was an
engagement with contemporary philosophers as much as it was a
historical retrieval of the Fathers, liturgy, or Scripture. The specific
importance of Kierkegaard as one of the contemporary philosophers
can be seen in the favourable place he is given in Daniélou’s original
essay.7 It is in
is echoed in Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering (eds), Ressourcement

Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of
Romanus Cessario, O.P, (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
2010).
2
Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 12.
3
Milbank, Suspended Middle: Henri De Lubac and the Debate Concerning the
Supernatural (London: SCM Press, 2005), 2.
4
Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007),
848 n. 39.
5
Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse’, Études 249
(1946), 5–21. In his essay, besides a summons to scriptural, patristic, and liturgical
renewal, Daniélou devotes an entire section to a call for an engagement with
contemporary philosophy.
6
Aidan Nichols, ‘Thomism and the Nouvelle Théologie’, The Thomist 64 (2000), 4.
7
Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes’, 13–16. Daniélou mentions Kierkegaard
five times in this essay.
light of this that the need for an account of the Catholic reception of
Kierkegaard becomes increasingly clear.
In this book, I have shown (albeit, not exhaustively) how my first
proposal for contemporary Catholic theologians to read Kierkegaard
could be motivated by seeing Kierkegaard’s relevance for the work
of emblematic figures like Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar,
and Cornelio Fabro. But as I have indicated in the first half of this
book, there is a Kierkegaardian tradition already in the generation
preceding these figures that is worth exploring as well. For a
Catholic theologian like de Lubac, Kierkegaard safeguards the
Christian faith from becoming ‘romantic sentimentalism’ or
reduced to ‘Hegelian intellectualism’.8 For Fabro and de Lubac in
particular, Kierkegaard provided constructive strategies in
confronting the twin threat of neo- scholasticism and modern
atheism. In so far as these two threats persist today, contemporary
Catholic theologians would be wise to re-examine the resources
available in Kierkegaard’s writings.
Further research could be done in this respect with a closer look
at the writings of Cornelio Fabro. For instance, the distinctiveness
of Fabro’s version of Thomism as opposed to that of Étienne
Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Joseph Maréchal, could be a book-
length study in itself. This research could then go on and examine
how Fabro’s Thomism compares with that of John Milbank or
Alasdair MacIntyre. Another line of enquiry could be to assess the
nature of Fabro’s critique of Karl Rahner’s theological
anthropology. There are hun- dreds of recordings and texts
available in Rome at the ‘Cornelio Fabro Cultural Project’ and the
Fabro Foundation library. A great service could be done to both
Kierkegaard studies and Catholic studies by translating and
disseminating Fabro’s work at the intersection of these two
subject areas.
KIERKEGAARD (STILL) MATTERS
The vital importance of Kierkegaard’s writings for contemporary

theology is, among other things, that he stands as an influential
philosopher who bridges, rather than widens, the divide between
8
Henri de Lubac, Drama of Atheist Humanism, 106.
secularism and religious faith. In a recent article, George Pattison says
that Kierkegaard
was among the first Christian thinkers really to grasp—existentially as
well as intellectually—that, after the Enlightenment and the
democratic revolutions of the nineteenth century, Christianity could
no longer be assumed to be the fallback position of any well-meaning
citizen . . . [and that] We can’t go back behind the Enlightenment by
invoking an authority that has lost its power to compel. Christianity
may have significant reservations and criticisms vis-à-vis the
ideologies of modernity, but it needs to recognise the reality of what
has been called the condition of modernity.9
Although Kierkegaard had a delayed reception in Europe, he
focused this issue for both secular and religious thinkers alike. For
modern theologians in particular, Kierkegaard deepened their
understanding of the unity of the individual subject and human
freedom by taking seriously the threat of despair and self-deception
in our contemporary age, signalling our dependence upon God as
our only independence (UDVS 182). In short, Pattison says that by
drawing upon Scripture and the medieval mystical tradition,
Kierkegaard shows how ‘Faith resolves the otherwise irresolvable
tensions at the centre of human existence.’ In doing so, Kierkegaard
put the first person perspective and the love of neighbour back on
the map for contemporary thinkers, who had been told that
subjectivity only impeded ‘scientific’ endeavours.
The Kierkegaard Renaissance spawned by the writings of Karl
Barth, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers, tended to take Kierke-
gaard’s disenchantment with the institutional state-church as a point
of departure.10 Three schools of thought emerged out of the increas-
ing availability of Kierkegaard’s writings in Europe that
respectively wanted to lay claim to Kierkegaard’s inheritance. The
first group of radical theologians (god is dead a/theology) viewed
Kierkegaard as a pioneer of secularism. The second group of neo-
orthodox theologians
9
George Pattison, ‘Passionate Thinker’, The Tablet 267 (4 May), no. 8996
(2013b), 6–7.
10
Although, Heiko Schulz says that contrary to Karl Barth, Emil Brunner ‘tended
to favour Kierkegaard’s “middle works”, especially the pseudonymous ones up to
1849, over against the late writings from the Kirkekamp period’ in Schulz, ‘A
Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard’, in J. Stewart (ed.),
Kierkegaard’s International Reception (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 338.
tended to portray Kierkegaard as a critic of the believer’s accommo-
dation to secular, bourgeois Christendom. This book has focused on
a third group of Catholic thinkers, some of whom read
Kierkegaard’s critique as an indirect endorsement of Catholicism.
The focus of this book has been on the influence that
Kierkegaard’s writings had on Catholic theology—particularly for
Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Cornelio Fabro.
Throughout this book, I have advocated for a positive and
substantial engagement with the writings of Søren Kierkegaard by
Catholic thinkers. I have argued that Kierkegaard’s writings have
stimulated reform and renewal in twentieth-century Catholic
theology, and should continue to do so today. To support this
argument, I turned to examine the broader catholicity of
Kierkegaard’s writings, with a particular focus upon Kierkegaard’s
theological anthropology. Building upon an ecumenical approach
to Kierkegaard’s theology, I surveyed the Catholic reception of
Kierkegaard’s writings across the German-, French-, Italian-, and
English-speaking world to argue that there is significant
engagement in the twentieth century, which coincides with the
beginnings of theological renewal in Catholic theology and the
dissemination and translation of Kierkegaard’s writings in Europe.
In light of the first two chapters, I suggested that the influence of
Kierkegaard’s writings was not restricted to confessional
boundaries, and a more ecumenical approach to Kierkegaard’s
theological anthropology could challenge enduring stereotypes
about the limit, scope, and relevance of Kierkegaard’s writings to
Catholic thought.
Then, I turned to de Lubac as a model of positive engagement
with Kierkegaard and then to Balthasar as a model that needed to be
corrected. My point here was to show how vital a resource Kierke-
gaard’s writings were for de Lubac, and should have been for
Baltha- sar. For the first time in English, I just scratched the surface
of the wealth of Cornelio Fabro’s engagement with Kierkegaard’s
writings. As a result of, and in conclusion to my argument, I would
like to make two modest proposals: i) for contemporary Catholic
theologians to read Kierkegaard; and ii) to jettison the
presupposition that Kierkegaard’s theology works at cross-purposes
with the reform and renewal of Catholic theology. My hope is that
the work here in this book contributes to making good on these two
proposals. In the end, it has been my claim throughout this book that
twentieth-century Catholic theology, and should continue to do so
today.
What I have attempted to show at every turn is how, for
important Catholic thinkers, Kierkegaard’s writings offered them
the resources for, as Pattison says, ‘[t]aking seriously the task of
Christian witness in a world that is no longer in awe of the authority
of hierarchies or Scriptures’.11 Nevertheless, the field is much larger
than the three central figures that this book has treated. So, I leave it
to others to fill out further the representative sketch that I have
provided in this relatively short compass. As a result of my case, we
can now see how Kierkegaard’s writings matter for the trajectory
upon which contemporary Catholic theology finds itself. However,
the question remains: can contemporary Catholic theologians afford
to neglect Kierkegaard’s writings whilst laying claim to carrying on
the legacy of the ressourcement theologians?
11
Pattison, ‘Passionate Thinker’.
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Index
Abraham 82, 96, 155, 200–3

Boersma, Hans 175–6, 215
Absolute 39, 52–4, 60, 82, 97, 119, 122n,
Boyer, Charles 89
123, 128, 139, 166–7, 192, 203–4
Brunner, Emil 85, 218n
Accommodation 18n, 219
Buber, Martin 75
Adaptation 109
Bultmann, Rudolf 69, 187
Adorno, T. W. 69, 72, 75
Burrell, David 41n, 118n, 122n, 179, 196
Aesthetics 68, 84n, 156ff, 178
Byrnes, Jeff 154
Aeterni Patris 185
Altizer, Thomas, J. J. Cajetan, Thomas 130
187 Calvin Jean, Calvinism 18n
Analogia entis (analogy of Being) 39, Carlisle, Clare 45n
83–5, 162, 166–7 Catholicity 2, 14ff, 212
Annunciation 199–201 Causality 39, 41, 148, 164n, 179
Anselm of Canterbury 123 Cessario, Romanus 42–3
Anxiety 81–2, 90, 145–56, 201 Chenu, Marie-Dominique 4
Aquinas, Thomas 2, 23n, 27, 32–7, 40–3,
Christology 12, 39, 70n, 98, 158, 161–2,
54–5, 73, 83–4, 95–6, 102, 118n,
167f, 171–3, 174n, 207
120–5, 132n, 170n, 177, 182,
Christendom 12, 85, 90, 95, 97, 111,
184–8, 191, 201, 215
127–8, 135, 142, 170, 208–10,
Arendt, H. 79, 146n
219
Aristotle 40–1, 121, 184, 192–3, 198n
Christianity 9, 15, 19, 39, 46–8, 79n, 88,
Athanasius 139, 204
94, 97–9, 115, 116n, 118–20,
Atheism 123, 182–8, 193–4, 205–7, 217
124–8, 130, 135–6, 169, 194, 197,
Augustine of Hippo 17n, 36–42, 63, 96,
204, 208–18
101n, 121, 133, 148n, 152, 195n
Church 2–4, 11, 17n, 28, 56, 59n, 68,
Autonomy 17, 129, 207
74–8, 88, 90–1, 97–8, 105–9, 115,
Autopsy of Faith 46, 54, 58–64, 114, 124
124–8, 134–8, 141–3, 155, 179n,
Avicenna 194–5
183–5, 193, 205–12, 218
Ayres, Lewis 44n, 109
Creation 16–18, 23, 30–8, 41f, 53–5,
61–3, 80, 121, 128, 144, 159ff
Balthasar, Hans Urs von 4, 8, 12, 64,
Creator 122n, 124, 132, 159ff, 196
74n, 77–9, 81, 142, 144ff, 190,
Collins, James 95–8
191n
Congar, Yves 92–5, 212
Barnett, Christopher 19, 37–8, 84, 112,
Connelly, John C. 86–7
178–9
Contemporaneity 7, 46, 58f, 59n, 82,
Barth, Karl 69, 71, 77, 83–6, 89, 92–3,
109, 129, 139–40, 158n
145–6, 162, 187, 194n, 199, 218
Conversion 1–2, 74, 91, 102, 190, 205–6
Basso, Ingrid 7n, 70–1
Beattie, Tina 174n, 200n
Daley, Brian 4, 106–7, 117
Beauty 158ff
Daniélou, Jean 44, 91–3, 106–7, 216
Being 30–5, 38, 41–2, 76, 84, 95–6, 108,
De Lubac, Henri 6n, 11, 64–5, 97, 100,
110, 122n, 129, 132–3, 160–7,
104ff, 186, 190, 217
169, 173, 175, 181, 191n, 193–9,
Descartes, René 187, 194n
206n
Development (of doctrine) 8, 44–5, 65,
Berdyaev, Nikolai 93
76n, 106, 108, 206n, 212, 214
Blondel, Maurice 65, 74n, 77n, 158
2 Ind
Dionysius the Aeropagite 36 God 4, 7, 16–27, 30–2, 41–4, 47–8,
Divine Teaching 14, 43, 46f, 57, 126 53–5, 59–65, 77, 80–3, 90–102,
Dostoevsky, F. 92 107–10, 113–14, 117–37,
Doyle, Andy 156n 140–50, 153ff, 187, 195–208
Dru, Alexander 74n, 77, 158n, 189, 191n Goethe, J. W. von 163–8
Dupré, Louis 29, 98–102 Goglia, Rosa 186
Good 23n, 30–42, 61, 110n, 122n,
Eckhart, Meister 37–8 157–9, 173–7, 197–9
Ecclesiology 82, 98, 184, 204ff Grace 15–20, 24n, 26–7, 30–43, 51–3,
Ecumenical (interpretation) 13ff, 43, 82n, 90, 99–105, 126ff, 166,
46, 171–2, 195, 200–2, 207, 212
65–7, 93, 104, 112 Grøn, Arne 45n, 153
Equidistance 10, 44, 58f, 109, Grumett, David 142
178 Erp, Stephan van 163n Grundtvig, N. F. S. 59n
Eternal life 4, 25, 35, 39, 43–5, 107–10, Guardini, Romano 78f, 146, 190
116, 127–9, 150, 161n
Eternity 22–5, 47–8, 62, 76, 96–7, 114, Haecker, Theodor 73f, 84, 88, 102, 113n,
169, 176 189–91
Eucharist 124, 128, 134–41, 178, 208 Hall, Amy Laura 19–20, 27
Existentialism 12, 70–1, 89, 92, 110–11, Hampson, Daphne 15–19, 28–9, 39–40
132, 183n, 184, 191–5 Hankey, Wayne 185–6
Extrinsicism 16–18, 27, 129, 194 Happiness 36, 43, 47, 129–30, 150
Heidegger, Martin 5–6, 69–75, 85, 89,
Fabro, Cornelio 7–8, 12–13, 40n, 41, 93, 113n, 132n, 176–7, 184, 187,
45n, 48n, 65, 71, 74n, 83, 88–9, 191, 193, 194n, 196, 205, 218
97, 101–3, 181f, 217 Hegel, G. W. F. 30, 46–7, 70, 72, 87n, 92,
Faith 4, 10–11, 14, 16–33, 42–4, 54–7, 94–5, 132n, 160n, 181, 187–8,
64, 77, 80, 83, 90, 94, 97, 99–100, 190, 194n, 198, 205
106–7, 111–14, 119–20, 125, 128, Heschel, Abraham Joshua 87, 146n
130–3, 139, 142, 147, 150–3, Heschel, Susannah 87n
168–70, 178–9, 185, 192–7, Highest (perfection) 27, 39, 100,
200–9, 211, 215–18 139, 202
Fall 30, 148, 153, 159 Hirsch, Emanuel 13n, 69–70, 88
Ferreira, Jamie M. 33, 35, 203, Historicism 112
210n, 212 History 4–5, 9, 14, 44–7, 50, 52, 57,
Feuerbach, Ludwig 70, 187–8 62, 76, 86, 92n, 106n, 107–8,
Fichte, J. G. 160, 187 110n, 114, 122, 147, 149, 172,
Forgiveness 33, 61, 82n, 100, 136–41 176–7, 182, 186, 188, 197,
Forte, Bruno 7, 106n 206–9, 215
Francis, Pope 6n Høffding, Harald 2n
Freedom 16, 29, 31, 35–6, 44, 49, 92, Holy Spirit 17, 25n, 31, 33, 41, 107,
96–101, 111, 128, 147–52, 137, 202
195–203 Hope 25, 34–6, 62–3, 201
Freud, S. 46 Hügel, Friedrich von 59n, 73n
Future 17n, 35–6, 62, 122n, 214 Hugh of St Victor 44n
Hughes, Carl 135–6
Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald 3n, Hughes, Kevin 142
89 Geismar, Eduard 69, 84, 88 Humani Generis 110–11, 129–30, 186,
Gift 17n, 18, 21n, 23, 26, 29–35, 53–5, 192–3
60–2, 99–100, 112, 123, Humility 62, 139, 202–3, 208
127–37, 208 Hütter, Reinhard 118n
Gilson, Étienne 72, 89, 95–6, 131–2, 181, Hylomorphism 40n
194, 217
Ind 2
Imitation (of Christ) 202, 211 Kierkegaard Renaissance 68f, 93,
Immanentism 90–1, 110, 115, 159, 165, 193n, 218
176, 189 Kilby, Karen 174n, 191n
Incarnation 33, 42, 44, 47, 51, 90, 94, 96, Küng, Hans 4, 204
114, 116, 139, 161n, 166–74,
199–201 Lash, Nicholas 59, 172
Indirect Communication 49n, 80, 89, 111 Leap 48n, 80–1, 91, 129, 149–50, 195
Infinite 7, 30, 33, 83, 99, 120–1, 127–9, Leibniz, W. G. 77n
132, 140, 152, 154, 159, 165–6, Leo XIII, Pope 185, 192
195–6, 197n, 199 Leonine Revival 12, 163, 181f
Inwardness 74, 114, 133 Lessing, G. E. 47–8, 51, 55, 129, 146n, 187
Irrationalism 1, 28, 70, 82, 96–7, 182, Lindbeck, George 185n
184, 193 Liturgy 91, 124, 134–5, 142, 156n, 159,
179n, 208n, 216
Jaspers, Karl 69–71, 75, 93, 132n, 187, Locke, John 187
193, 194n, 218 Loughlin, Gerard 176n
Jeanrond, Werner 28n Love 20f, 36, 42–3, 49–50, 61–2, 78, 81,
John Paul II 1, 169, 183n 83, 92, 101, 108, 128–9, 138–41,
Judgment 18n, 81, 97, 154 152, 161n, 171–2, 199, 208,
Justification 18n, 21, 24n, 65n, 90, 98, 211, 218
101, 131 Löwith, Karl 113
Lowrie, Walter 85, 199–200
Kafka, Franz 71n Lumen Fidei 6n, 61n
Kant, Immanuel 85n, 160–5, 186n, Lumen Gentium 128n, 205, 208
191n, 194n Luther, Martin 10, 16–29, 44n, 91, 94,
Kierkegaard, Søren 102, 144, 212
Common stereotypes 3–5, 10, 13f, 44, Lutheran 14f, 30, 37–9, 43, 65, 70, 75,
67–70, 81–3, 102–4, 134, 219 81–2, 90, 94, 136, 184, 202, 211
Writings
The Book on Adler 78, 202 McCabe, Herbert 167n
The Concept of Anxiety 54, 65, 79n, McCool, Gerald A. 185n
82, 118, 132n, 147, 189, 203 MacIntyre, Alasdair 81, 182, 217
Concluding Unscientific Malik, Habib 2n, 68n, 69n, 73
Postscript 14, 39, 46, 57–8, Maréchal, Joseph 191n, 217
79n, 113–14, 118–19, 124–5, Mary, mother of Jesus 12, 134, 137,
129, 146n 198–203
Fear and Trembling 46n, 85n, Marion, Jean-Luc 5n, 178
153, 155, 199–200 Maritain, Jacques 71–2, 75, 89, 96, 110,
For Self-Examination 87n 194, 217
Journals 2n, 44n, 59, 72, 74n, 78–9, Martyrdom 88, 90–1, 127, 207, 210
88, 101, 116, 123, 137, 139, 178, Marx, Karl 6, 45n, 92, 187, 195, 198
188–9, 200 Maternity 200–2
Philosophical Fragments 14, 34, 46, Metaphysics 15, 40–1, 95, 159, 161, 165,
58, 79n, 82, 113–14, 118–19, 126, 182–6, 189, 191, 194, 197
128, 207 Milbank, John 6n, 45n, 118n, 216–17
Practice in Christianity 127, Militant 127–8, 205–10
168, 208 Miracle 124, 202
Sickness unto Death 14, 29–33, 65, Modernism 3–4, 106–7, 128, 176, 192
79, 82, 88, 125, 132n Möhler, Johann Adam 2n
Upbuilding Discourses 14, 30f, 97, Moment, the 39, 54, 62, 109n,
134, 135n, 208 159,
Works of Love 19–28, 101 169, 203
Mulhall, Stephen 9, 47n, 49–57, 201–3
2 Ind
Murphy, Francesca 132n, 164 Possibility 30–4, 147–52, 196n, 197
Mystery 23–6, 50–4, 59n, 77, 92, 104, Promise 18n, 34, 45, 108, 209n
107–8, 114, 120–3, 131–6, Protestant 1–2, 8, 11–15, 68, 74n, 83,
161n, 171 88–94, 97–9, 102–5, 145, 156,
161, 171, 187, 190n, 195, 199, 202
Natural desire (for the supernatural) 8, Prototype 201–2
17n, 32–4, 42, 47, 124–7, 130–7, Przywara, Erich 83–6, 113n, 162, 190
140, 150, 199 Pure nature 99, 129–30
Nazism 70, 74, 87, 113
Necessity 29–30, 47n, 51–3, 83, 100, Radical theology 6n, 187, 210, 218
116, 167 Rahner, Karl 4, 166n, 174, 191, 197,
Neo-Platonism 41, 182–5 204, 217
Neo-scholasticism 115n, 130, 163, Rationalism 71, 186, 193
184–8, 216 Ratzinger, Joseph/Benedict XVI 4, 28,
Neo-Thomism 176, 186n 75, 86, 106, 183n, 190, 206n
Newman, John Henry 12, 74–8, 102, Realism 65, 125n, 192, 198
190n, 204–12 Reardon, Bernard 204
Nichols, Aidan 161–2, 167, 216 Redemption 14, 30–4, 41, 57, 62,
Nichtweiss, Barbara 87–8 99–100, 139, 148, 154, 161n
Nietzsche, Frederich 6, 78, 92, 113–14, Reformation 15, 99–100, 107, 178, 192
168, 187, 194n Repetition 45, 79n, 109
Nouvelle Théologie 3, 91, 106n, 176n, Resurrection 63, 138, 161n
215–16 Ressourcement 3–4, 9, 44f, 62, 91, 105–7,
117, 142–3, 175–6, 190, 215–16
Oesterreicher, Johannes (John) 87 Revelation 10, 14, 30–3, 44–6, 50–4, 58f,
Ontology 160, 175–9, 191, 197 63–4, 79, 99, 102–9, 126, 130,
132n, 156, 159, 161–2, 166–7,
Paradox 6n, 7, 33, 46f, 90, 97, 111–20, 172–8, 185, 206–7
126–32, 152, 161n, 165, 201 Righteousness 16–18, 25n, 31, 154
Parente, Pietro 89, 184n Robinson, John 187
Participation 18, 26, 36, 41–3, 101, Roman Missal 156n
124, 155, 166, 182, 186, 189, Romanticism 70, 80, 94, 157n, 158,
194–6, 208 160n, 163, 217
Pascal, Blaise 72, 81–3, 92, 205 Rowland, Tracey 75
Pascendi dominici gregis 192–3 Russo, Antonio 65n, 118n, 186n
Patristics 63, 76, 77n, 106, 116,
117n, Sacramental 44, 62, 88, 97–8, 108,
142, 145n, 204, 207, 216 135–6, 139, 170n, 179, 207, 211
Pattison, George 30–4, 62n, 150–2, Sacramental ontology 175–6
156–60, 197, 207–8, 210n, Šajda, Peter 72n, 79n, 82, 122n,
218–20 146n, 204n
Paul, the Apostle 17n, 24n, 25n, 65, Salvation 7, 16, 18n, 21n, 25n, 34, 44,
77n, 144, 178, 206 59, 90, 96, 99, 101, 127, 139, 155,
Peterson, Erik 86f, 93–4, 102, 113n, 172, 201
190 Sartre, J. P. 62, 70, 92, 125n, 184,
Petit, Paul 113 193, 194n
Philosophy 9, 57, 70–6, 91–7, 102, 110, Schelling, F. W. J. 84n, 163, 187
114–16, 125, 132, 147–8, 165, Schillebeeckx, Edward 4, 62
181–9, 191–4, 204, 216n Schleiermacher, Friederich 89n
Pieper, Josef 34n, 35–6, 79, 146n Schrempf, Christoph 68–9, 75, 78–9,
Pietism 87n, 90–3 84, 189
Pius XII, Pope 186, 192 Schulz, Heiko 68–70, 78, 218n
Platonism 12, 132n, 157, 185, 192–4, 216
Podmore, Simon 82n, 122n
Ind 2
Second Vatican Council 1–3, 8, 12, 65, Temporality 22, 29–35, 45, 54, 96, 98,
93n, 105–6, 110n, 183, 204, 214 110, 127, 169, 176, 197, 207n
Secularization 6n, 69, 88n, 112, 148, 150, Transcendence 59n, 98, 100, 110,
176–7, 189, 204–5, 210, 218–19 112–15, 121–2, 131–3, 150, 159,
Self, selfhood 17, 29, 34–40, 80, 122 165, 197, 206n
Sin 9, 17, 18n, 24n, 25n, 27, 30–3, 36, 39, Transcendental 157–69, 171, 175n
61, 65, 82, 90, 92, 94, 98–100, Trent, Council of 9, 15–17, 65
128n, 136–41, 147–55, 161n, Trinity 108–10, 174n
205, 207 Truth 7, 31, 42–3, 46n, 48–64, 70–1,
Socratic Hypothesis 46–55 76–7, 82, 87n, 90, 92, 98, 100,
Soul 61, 65, 94, 101, 107–10, 113, 127, 110–11, 114–16, 118–19, 126–8,
133, 137–8, 164n, 193 130–1, 135, 141, 158–9, 161–8,
Sources Chrétiennes (book series) 107 173, 176–7, 199, 207–9
Spinoza, B. 187
Subjectivity 9, 62, 92, 96, 111, 218 Virtue 24n, 26, 31–5, 42, 51, 61, 80–1,
Sublime 162, 163n, 172 127, 149, 151, 198n, 206n, 209
Suffering 50, 62n, 83, 99, 117, 132, 139,
144, 154–5, 158, 161, 165, 171–4 Wahl, Jean 71–3, 93, 114, 190
Watts, Daniel 15, 61n, 118n,
Tauler, Johnnes 37–8, 122, 204 119, 158n
Taylor, Charles 177, 188, 216 Weimar Classicism 163
Thomism 54n, 57, 71–6, 89, 95–7, Williams, Rowan 77n
101–3, 125n, 130, 132n, 176, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1, 56n,
180–6, 192–8, 212, 217 75
Tillich, Paul 78, 84, 187 Wonder 36, 53–4, 59, 77, 124
Word of God 61, 87n, 134, 202

Catholic Theology After Kierkegaard

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CATHOLIC THEOL OGY AFTER KIERKEGAARD

Catholic Theology after

Gratefully, I have incurred a number of debts and gained a number

Introduction: Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard 1

The following abbreviations for Kierkegaard’s works are used in parenthet-

As Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ix), when Holy Writ declares

Just as the ocean, when it lies still this way, deeply

According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Søren Kierkegaard

RATIONALE OF BOOK: WHY STUDY THE

In the vast secondary literature on twentieth-century Catholic the-

striking. Hence, this book provides a new perspective on Catholic

The Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet: Overcoming Onto-Theology with the Sacra-

‘Kierkegaard Amidst the Catholic Tradition’, American Catholic Philosophical

As an essential supplement to Kierkegaard studies and recent lit-

Ressourcement theologians working in a post-Tridentine context

Towards a More Ecumenical Reading

Kierkegaardian interiority is fundamentally Catholic.

Before diving straight into the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard

1.1. OBSTACLES TO AN ECUMENICAL READING

If a dialogue between the theological anthropology of

1.2. RE-EXAMINING THE LUTHERAN STRUCTURE

I turn to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love to resist a commonly held

Just as it would be a mistake to ignore the distinctive contributions

Now, this leads me to assess Hampson’s second premise (from

1.4. KIERKEGAARD’S NON-HISTORICIST

One of the basic aims of ressourcement theology is to recover a

1.4.1. The Paradox of Divine Teaching in Kierkegaard’s

1.4.2. The Epochal Equidistance of Divine Revelation:

1.5. CONCLUSION: RETRIEVING THE BROADER

In this chapter, I have addressed two obstacles to my central argu-

The Wider Catholic Reception

In the previous chapter, I interrogated the validity of an enduring

2.2. THEODOR HAECKER

Habib Malik’s penetrating analysis of the European impact and

2.3. ROMANO GUARDINI

The next prominent ﬁgure to introduce brieﬂy is the Italo-German

Kierkegaard’ in Balthasar, Romano Guardini, 77. For more on Guardini and

2.4. ERICH PRZYWARA

The next prominent Catholic thinker who needs to be mentioned is

2.5. ERIK PETERSON

Erik Peterson (1890–1960) is a very important theologian whose

gratefully indebted to Dr Peter Zocher and Dr Hans-Anton Drewes at the Barth

2.6. JEAN DANIÉLOU

The prominent place Kierkegaard receives in Jean Daniélou’s

Kierkegaard’, in Alfred Schindler (ed.), Monotheismus als politisches Problem?: Erik

2.7. YVES CONGAR

It is often overlooked that the French Dominican theologian, Yves

Moving away momentarily from the German and French Catholic

2.9. LOUIS DUPRÉ

Finally, one Catholic thinker who has examined Kierkegaard’s

2.10. CONCLUSION: A KIERKEGAARDIAN

The Theologian of Inwardness

‘God’ is, not because our grammar is outworn;

3.1. DE LUBAC’S HISTORICAL AND

3.2. ESTABLISHING DE LUBAC’S DEPENDENCE

Most introductions to Kierkegaard’s thought and writings19 identify

3.2.1. Kierkegaard in The Drama of Atheist Humanism

3.2.2. Kierkegaard in Paradoxes of Faith

3.3. KIERKEGAARD IN DE LUBAC’S

After sketching the problem of God’s absence in modernity, de Lubac