C. Stephen Evans's introduction to Kierkegaard provides an authoritative and admirably lucid guide to the Danish thinker. Evans approaches Kierkegaard primarily as a philosopher – rather than as a religious writer, theologian, psychologist, cultural critic, or any of the other appellations earned by this provocative and elusive author – but also as a resolutely Christian thinker. He is particularly successful in situating Kierkegaard's work in the context of recent moral philosophy, and also in conveying the practical value of its enduring application to our ethical and religious lives. Evans seems to be less interested in locating Kierkegaard within the history of philosophy: the reader gains very little sense of his debt to and dialogue with both ancient and modern philosophers – Plato and Aristotle, Schelling and Hegel – nor of his polemical opposition to influential Danish contemporaries such as Heiberg, Martensen, and Grundtvig.
Evans has a warm, engaging style, and by staying close to Kierkegaard's texts he acquaints the reader with a range of the best-known works: he discusses at some length Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, The Sickness Unto Death and Works of Love. An author clearly has to be selective in introducing Kierkegaard's voluminous authorship, but notable omissions in this case are the strange but important philosophical novella, Repetition, and The Concept of Anxiety, which especially influenced the philosophies of Heidegger and Sartre. And given Evans's interest in Kierkegaard's contribution to virtue ethics, it is perhaps surprising that he does not give more attention to the fascinating discussions of faith, love, hope, patience, courage, and so on in many of the ‘Upbuilding Discourses’ that consistently appeared alongside the more explicitly philosophical works during the 1840s.
The book's introductory chapter offers a brief overview of Kierkegaard's life, dwelling far less than some other commentators on the way in which his break-up with his fiancée Regine Olsen not only affected him personally, but provided material – at the very least in the form of a subtext – for several of his subsequent philosophical works. This chapter also addresses key questions about the overall significance of Kierkegaard's thought: Is Kierkegaard a philosopher? Is he of interest only to religious people? Evans's convincing answers to these questions are ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ respectively. He also provides a characteristically respectful but firm response to commentators of a postmodern bent, arguing for the coherence of Kierkegaard's rich and diverse authorship (much of it written under a variety of pseudonyms), and thus defending the philosopher's own retrospective claim that his oeuvre is unified by an overarching Christian purpose.
Chapter 2 discusses further the issue of pseudonymity, and shows how Kierkegaard's distinctive method of ‘indirect communication’ reawakens the Socratic philosophical tradition of provoking people into examination of their views, beliefs, and ways of life. Chapter 3 discusses the themes of selfhood, truth, and subjectivity that are central to Kierkegaard's thought, focusing mainly on the 1846 text, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which, with its rallying cry of ‘Become who you are’, was to provide twentieth-century philosophers with some of the key tenets of ‘existentialist’ thought. However, Evans challenges an overly Sartrean reading of Kierkegaard as a proponent of ‘radical choice’, such as that presented by Alasdair MacIntyre, and emphasizes instead the rationality and reasonableness of Kierkegaard's views. This exemplifies Evans's rather conservative interpretation of Kierkegaard, which tends to portray the latter as having more in common with Thomas Aquinas than with Sartre – or, for that matter, than with Luther.
In the next three chapters, Evans provides a detailed and illuminating account of the three ‘stages’ or ‘spheres’ of existence – the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious – which appear in many of Kierkegaard's texts, and which structured his reflections on ‘the task of becoming a Christian’ throughout the 1840s. The concluding chapter, which seeks to demonstrate Kierkegaard's contemporary relevance, is perhaps the weakest part of the book: it contains nothing on Kierkegaard's searing, influential, and still-pertinent critique of ‘the present age’ in his 1846 review of Thomasine Gyllembourg's novel, Two Ages, and focuses instead on arguing that Kierkegaard's reinvigoration of Christian thought presents a challenge to the secular liberalism prevalent in modern Europe.
Such a reading of Kierkegaard is certainly justified, but it is part of a larger picture within which it is difficult to regard ‘Christianity’ as an answer to the questions, or the problems, of human existence in general and of modern life in particular. Evans overlooks the way in which Kierkegaard's Christian commitments are themselves made questionable, and even problematized, within his own work: besides the use of pseudonyms who are more or less Christian than their creator, we often find equivocation between metaphysical and existential or hermeneutic interpretations of theological doctrine, and between ‘realist’ and ‘non-realist’ positions. In one journal entry, Kierkegaard writes that ‘God himself is this: how one involves oneself with him’.
These aspects of his work combine to make Evans's depiction of Kierkegaard's ‘theistic worldview’ appear rather simplistic. Indeed, throughout his book Evans seems to take for granted a traditional Christian conception of God which, while certainly not directly challenged by Kierkegaard, is at least elusive in many of his writings. For Kierkegaard, what it means to be or to exist ‘before God’ remains a live question for every person – regardless or whether or not she actually poses such a question.
Sylvia Walsh's Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode provides a natural complement to Evans's introduction, for it consolidates the latter's emphasis on Kierkegaard as a Christian thinker, and also fills in most of the gaps in Evans's shorter, more selective study. Among the numerous English-language scholarly works on Kierkegaard, a relatively small portion approach his thought from a primarily theological perspective. This is probably due in part to Kierkegaard's emphasis on the existing person's relationship to religious beliefs, rather than to the ‘objective’ content of those beliefs, but nevertheless it is difficult to gain an appreciation of his thought without considering its theological background and orientation. Walsh's study is an outstanding contribution to the field that explores theological themes central to Kierkegaard's work while remaining faithful to his emphasis on the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of Christian faith.
Thinking Christianly starts with a fascinating account of the various theological influences on Kierkegaard, beginning with his father, Michael Kierkegaard, who exposed his young son to Bishop Mynster's sermons, to Sunday morning worship at the local Lutheran church, and to Sunday evening meetings of the Herrnhuters, a Moravian pietist group. At university, Kierkegaard's commitment to Christianity waned while his theological influences broadened: the student was introduced to rationalist and ‘natural’ theology, to anti-rationalist thinkers such as Schleiermacher and Grundtvig, and to the ‘speculative dogmatics’ inspired by Hegel's philosophy. Also included in this opening chapter are a concise overview of Kierkegaard's authorship, and brief accounts of his engagement to Regine Olsen; his damaging run-in with the tabloid weekly, The Corsair, in 1846; his response to the Danish political revolution of 1848; and his polemical attack on the Danish state church after the death of Bishop Mynster in 1854, which continued until his own death the following year.
The remaining chapters of the book focus in turn on a series of theological topics, including God, sin, Christology, and the Christian virtues. In each case Walsh contextualizes Kierkegaard's thought by outlining biblical, patristic, and more modern doctrines concerning God's nature, original sin, the atonement, and so on, providing a useful resource for those students and scholars who, having read Kierkegaard from a philosophical perspective, are unacquainted with Christian theology and its history. Walsh also provides clear, detailed summaries of Kierkegaard's position as set out in a very wide range of his works; by emphasizing the religious discourses as much as the better-known pseudonymous texts, she achieves a more balanced and comprehensive representation of his authorship than most other commentators. Without discussing other secondary literature in the body of the text, she provides meticulous references to an impressive range of English-language scholarship.
Although in many respects this book deserves to become a classic, certain features lessen its overall impact. Most obviously, Walsh confines herself to exegesis and even paraphrase of Kierkegaard's works, rather than offering interpretation and analysis. At the very end of the book there are a couple of paragraphs in which she offers her own views, but the rest of the text is almost entirely devoid of opinion. Her self-effacing style certainly has its advantages in letting her subject speak for himself, but it nevertheless seems a shame that such an able commentator declines to pursue at least some of the questions that arise from Kierkegaard's work.
Furthermore, while Walsh makes an effort to make her book accessible to those unfamiliar with Kierkegaard's writings, on several occasions she fails to provide the explanations of key terms and ideas that are necessary for such readers. For example, in her chapter on Kierkegaard's religious anthropology, she writes that, according to The Concept of Anxiety, ‘dogmatics represents the beginnings of a “new science” or “second philosophy” (Christian theology) whose essence is transcendence or repetition, the recovery of existential truth through a relation to the eternal in time’ – a thought that is familiar (though by no means straightforward) to Kierkegaard scholars, but which needs to be unpacked for less experienced readers. We are told later in this chapter that, ‘Because human beings succumb to sin by positing an unwarranted actuality instead of the eternal in the exercise of freedom, temporality, like sensuousness, comes into being as sinfulness’, and such passages may indicate that the author is rather too close to Kierkegaard's texts to be able to appreciate their difficulty and to question their meaning. Similarly, in a discussion of Kierkegaard's critique of ‘the present age’ in her final chapter, Walsh mentions his claim that ‘reflection’ is an oppressive force characteristic of modern times, without explaining what is meant by ‘reflection’ or even indicating that this is an issue of interpretation.
Another limitation is a tendency to miss opportunities to highlight connections between the explicitly Christian material presented in Kierkegaard's religious discourses, and theological themes implicit in the pseudonymous works, which would serve to illuminate the latter texts in particular. For example, Walsh notes the reflections on the gift in some of Kierkegaard's ‘Upbuilding Discourses’, but does not show how these echo the less direct invocation of this theme in both Repetition and Fear and Trembling. In Repetition Kierkegaard portrays a young man who, in crisis after breaking his engagement, is inspired by the Book of Job. Like Abraham's miraculous ability to ‘receive a son a second time’, Job's declaration that ‘The Lord gave, the Lord took away; blessed be the name of the Lord!’ expresses both an idea of divine gift and one aspect of what Kierkegaard calls ‘repetition’. More generally, given the importance of the theme of the gift in Kierkegaard's work – and also in contemporary theology and philosophy of religion – it might be expected to receive rather more attention than Walsh gives it.
This being said, Walsh's book is a clear, reliable, and erudite guide to a somewhat neglected aspect of Kierkegaard's authorship. It represents a considerable scholarly achievement, and will be essential reading, at least as a starting point, for graduate students of Kierkegaard's theology, and also for philosophers seeking to refresh or to deepen their appreciation of this thinker.
