Pseudonymity and Maieusis

Kierkegaard's indirect communication has been, undoubtedly, the most intriguing and scholarship-spinning subject of his entire authorship. It is one of the reasons so many different schools of thought have adopted him today. One wonders, where would Kierkegaard scholarship be without his indirect communication? What would the swathes of theologically disinterested Kierkegaard scholars have to get excited about if all he gave us was a clear set of doctrinal assertions in place of the ironical labyrinth of hobbitholes that is his authorship, continually baffling and evading every eager interpreter who ventures its depths? Indeed, Kierkegaard is often best-known and best-caricatured for his pseudonyms, the assorted character-authors he created. Some of these curious figures express his own views, some offer exaggerated versions of his views, and some outright contradict his views. Kierkegaard's contemporaries were forced to trawl through authors like Constantin Constantius, Nicolaus Notabene, and Vigilius Haufniensis, to engage with his thought—and having read them, one could not be sure which parts Kierkegaard even meant, nor how he meant them.Footnote ¹

It was these pseudonyms, with their webs of erotic seduction, satirical verbosity and poetic despair that caught the Copenhagen imagination far more acutely than Kierkegaard's “religious” discourses (published simultaneously in Kierkegaard's own name). Although there are many ways in which Kierkegaard's own perceptions of his authorship are interpreted, we can say, at least, what he says the pseudonymous texts were there for: they were supposed to draw us into the world of the “aesthetic”—that is, the unreligious—to catch us there, showing us the despair of such a life, and thereby leading us away from it, drawing us closer to God. Although many have contested this notion of his “golden thread” of authorial intent,Footnote ² this is how Kierkegaard believed much of his indirect communication functioned. That is, of course, if we dare to believe him.Footnote ³

Indirect communication is often referred to as the “maieutic” method. This is the midwife-like process of subtly drawing the hearer into the truth rather than delivering the truth into them. The maieutic communicator is seen as a “midwife” because they are merely playing the facilitating role of enabling the truth to come to light within the hearer, and even taking things away from the hearer without them knowing.Footnote ⁴ The maieutic does not “cause” the truth to be known (just as the midwife cannot cause a baby to be born); they merely assist the process. Ultimately, the truth must come alive for the individual; they must grasp it for themselves. The concept of maieusis, as Kierkegaard knew it, originated with the subject of his master's thesis, Socrates. Kierkegaard's methodological relation to the Greek philosopher is well noted,Footnote ⁵ even though we must remember, as Mjaaland holds, that Socrates's influence on him “cannot be limited to a [mere] ‘theory’ of communication.”Footnote ⁶ That said, emphasizing methodological points of contact between the two gadflies remains inevitable and essential in any foray into Kierkegaardian indirect communication.

What, then, was Socrates's “method”? In many ways, it is not too dissimilar to a kind of self-pseudonymity, in which the overtness of the teacher's identity and authority fades into the background as they “teach.” Socrates's philosophical endeavors did not involve taking students under his wing in order to transfer knowledge as a commodity. Rather, he spent his time teaching his students about knowledge, probing them to think (for themselves) about their very attitude towards attaining knowledge. Take, for example, the following instance of one of Socrates's engagements with his students, recorded in Plato's Theaetetus:

It was such maieutic questioning that lay behind Socrates's perennial use of irony. It is evident (to us, if not always to his actual students) that the way he sought to achieve the final “product” of a wise student was not overtly observable through what he actually communicated to them. The hope, rather, is that they will come to realize the truth about knowledge for themselves in a far more profound way. Kierkegaard, of course, spoke admiringly of such an approach:

The “outer,” of course, refers to the words Socrates says, and the “inner” to what he actually means to communicate via the words, even as those words do not seem to pertain to what he seems to mean. It is no wonder then, with such infuriating ambiguity, that Socrates was a great aggravator to the Sophists of the Athenian marketplace. As Mooney notes, “Socrates says with a wink, “I know nothing!” (yet speaks on).”Footnote ⁹ Unlike his contemporaries, he taught philosophy always as one appearing in complete ignorance of the subject in question; indeed, as one “without authority.” It is here, of course, that we see the essential connection between Socrates's and Kierkegaard's methods. Indeed, it is clear that Kierkegaard saw himself as something of a Socrates too,Footnote ¹⁰ the bustling coffee shops and literary columns of Copenhagen becoming his very own Agora. Kierkegaard sought to amplify, to lure, to hide, and to manifest himself in different guises and poses in his task of attempting to induce Christianity into Christendom. The use of the pseudonyms, representing apparently contrary or half-contrary versions of particular perspectives which Kierkegaard wanted to highlight, precisely mirrored Socrates's approach to knowledge in that something was being communicated which could not be (directly) found in the content of the words themselves. In the same way that Socrates could feign ignorance in order to draw his students into the truth, so Kierkegaard expresses pseudonymous perspectives that aim to prod the reader in a particular direction without them knowing it.

However, Kierkegaard's use of the maieutic did not simply take up “Christianity” as thematic fodder for such a method; rather, he felt that communicating the content of Christianity itself necessitated the method. Indeed, it should not be forgotten that Kierkegaard's use of indirect communication was not the mere repetition of Socratic irony;Footnote ¹¹ it had a very particular theological purpose. Before approaching this broader theological purpose, however, we should first ask: what are the theological implications of indirect communication upon the “listener”?

Indirect Communication and Responsive Freedom?

What does Kierkegaard think is happening when somebody becomes the recipient of indirect communication? One way he seems to describe the process is that of the deliberate representation of a paradox to the listener. Confronted by an apparent incongruity, the listener is intrigued to the extent that they engage with the material in a unique way that may not have been possible had they been presented with the same material in a straightforward manner. This is because their own involvement in attaining the information would have been diminished. With indirect communication, however, listeners are drawn into the knowledge process on an existential level, as Kierkegaard defines it:

This “dialectical knot” is a summons for the hearers to step up and grasp the truth for themselves with no other compulsion than the intrigue of the “knot.” In such an instance, the communicator may appear to have vanished, though actually they have orchestrated the entire didactic moment.

As noted, this approach has been well affirmed in Kierkegaardian scholarship, particularly for its propensity to affirm individual choice. David Law, in Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, suggests: “this process of inculcating subjectivity in the individual cannot be carried out directly or objectively because this would override the autonomy and freedom to choose that is essential for genuine appropriation of the truth.”Footnote ¹³ Benjamin Daise, in Kierkegaard's Socratic Art, makes a similar (though not identical) point regarding the importance of human autonomy: “Kierkegaardian indirect communication. . . aims at shaping the world in such a way that each recipient of the communication is fundamentally free to choose to shape the world as one sees fit.”Footnote ¹⁴ Although it is true that the individual should not be forced down a cul-de-sac by perpetual direct communication, in the context of the entire authorship, it is clear that Kierkegaard's burden is not to induce a “general” concept of human freedom, but to provide a theological parameter for how one views the communication and reception of the Gospel.

We see this distinction borne out especially in Philosophical Fragments, where “the Socratic” is continually contrasted against the sui generis “moment” of Christian revelation.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, where the Socratic teacher believes the truth already exists within the learner and thus need only call it to “recollection,” the Christian teacher or preacher aims to show that the learner is, in fact, “in error.”Footnote ¹⁶ Although Kierkegaard notes that the learner's debilitated condition is their own doing, changing this condition cannot come from another “free” act because they are already “bound”:

Although the Socratic teacher may also highlight the erroneous condition within the learner, they cannot take them any further because, unlike Christ, they themselves are not “the teaching”: “the Socratic lies precisely in this, that precisely because the learner is himself the truth and has the condition for understanding this, he can push the teacher away; yes, the Socratic art and heroism lay precisely in helping people to do this.”Footnote ¹⁸ Kierkegaard (or, Johannes Climacus) then adds the key contrast between this kind of teaching and distinctly Christian teaching. With Christianity, because it is not the learner but the teacher who is the truth, the learner cannot merely discard the teacher once they have “learned” the doctrine: they “must hold firmly onto the teacher.”Footnote ¹⁹ Because the ultimate teacher in the reception of Christian truth is Christ Himself, the learner paradox is transformed. The teacher no longer lies in the background of the learning event, He is the learning event, and is subsequently the only possible liberator of the learner's erroneous condition:

For Kierkegaard, to accept Christian truth is not simply to accept a doctrine, but the teacher Himself. This remains fundamental to how the preacher understands their own unique role in conveying the “teaching” of Christianity, which—unlike any other teaching—insists upon the unique inseparability of teaching and teacher.

Thus, for Kierkegaard, we—the learners—are not the harbingers of choice and change; Christ is the one who confronts us and moves us to act in a particular way, freed from our bondage by liberation. It is this conviction of being freed by—and for—Christ that shapes Kierkegaard's attraction to maieutic communication rather than an anxiety over human freedom per se. Indeed, as is evident in Practice in Christianity, it is Christ Himself who becomes “the master of maieutics and the final reason for using the maieutic method.”Footnote ²¹ Kierkegaard's overall goal is to induce a particular kind of existential response conducive to the Gospel. In nineteenth-century Danish Christendom, such response was entirely lost in a torrent of apathy, induced by the numbing regularity of direct communication: “since it has been demonstrated, and on an enormous scale, that Christianity is the truth, now there is no one, almost no one, who is willing to make any sacrifice for its sake.”Footnote ²² This reveals the kernel of Kierkegaard's communicative concerns. If direct communication reigns indefinitely, no one need put his or her life on the line because the truth becomes merely true, or absent-mindedly true, rather than true to the extent of radical personal cost. Wherever the truth of the Gospel has become domesticated to the world's level, any direct communication can no longer induce the hearers to stake their lives upon it (which ultimately means such truth has not been communicated in its fullness). Therefore, for Kierkegaard, the Christian is not “free to choose to shape the world as they see fit,” as Daise suggests, but free to shape the world as Christ sees fit, now that they have been liberated from the bondage of sin. The Christian is existentially awakened to “practice” their Christian faith—to live as if it is real, true and effectual. They do choose to act, but this choosing is a spiritual awakening to a particular kind of action that is, at no point, separable from the holistic message of Christianity.Footnote ²³

What will now follow is a brief account of Kierkegaard's theological presuppositions behind his indirect communication, demonstrable particularly in his later work, Practice in Christianity. It is from this basis that we will begin to see the force of the dialectic between the indirect and the direct, particularly when seen at their most extreme.

A Theology of (In)direct Communication

As noted, Kierkegaard's indirect communication was not the product of methodological application to the theological, but rather was a clear consequence of the theological. That is, he did not find Socrates's method and seek a subject with which to experiment it; he found Christianity and realized its inseparable connection to the maieutic capabilities that Socrates had also required for communicating existential knowledge in general. For Kierkegaard, of course, his theological approach to indirect communication always remained contextually angled. In Practice in Christianity the need for indirect communication of Christian truth is tied specifically to the situation of Danish Christendom, where an overabundance of direct communication had annihilated the necessary existential response to the Gospel:

For Kierkegaard, these chillingly statuesque preachers taught the most glorious Christian doctrines as though they were perfectly uncontroversial and, even mundane: “in the modern approach everything is made as direct as putting one's foot in a sock.”Footnote ²⁵ Primarily, this phrase refers to the act of “directly” communicating the doctrine of the incarnation, which Kierkegaard felt was often preached as neatly and matter-of-factly as if it were no different from the most mundane daily chore. There is something about the doctrine itself that necessitates an appropriate mode of communication. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, Jesus Christ is the “Sign of Contradiction,”Footnote ²⁶ whose incarnation should not be assimilated into human categories of thought like a piece of data, but should actually offend us. Kierkegaardian indirect communication, then, is an appropriate response to Christology. The problem with direct communication, in this sense, is that it neutralizes the scandal of the Christological paradox into a segment of information, evacuating it of all power to induce faith.Footnote ²⁷ Jesus becomes an object of our observation, not the living paradox in whom we strive to believe.

Kierkegaard's problems with direct communication often recur throughout the authorship around the same point regarding the disconnection between the hearing and heeding of information. A famous line in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript captures this well: “in a Christian country it is not information that is lacking; something else is lacking.”Footnote ²⁸ Where all people think themselves already “Christian,” where the preachers preach by rote, disconnected from the content of their message, this “something else” refers to the existential appropriation of the truth for genuine faith. It is not that information is unnecessary in itself, but that its perpetual non-application has rendered the informative overload absurdly self-defeating in its purpose. Kierkegaard ridicules the inherent irony that occurs when a direct communicator subverts the very purpose of their communication as an exact consequence of their communicative method. He tells the story of a man who—directly and passionately—announces his philosophy to the world that “one should not have any followers or disciples!” Such a man, Kierkegaard says, having been so convincing in his speech, would immediately gain ten followers who fall at his feet and begin to proclaim the very same doctrine—that “one should not have any followers or disciples!”—to others.Footnote ²⁹ In being totally converted by the message, they totally contradict it, proving that that communicative form was inappropriate to its content. For Kierkegaard, Christendom's preachers—in their enslavement to absolute directness—often ensured their sermons remained unheard, unapplied, and unfaithful to the theological message itself, thereby defeating the entire reason for its communication.

It is evident, then, that Kierkegaard's indirect communication, as a response to the misuse of direct communication, relies not simply upon an appetite for witty irony but is based heavily upon doctrinal presuppositions within the Christian message. This is often overlooked by those wishing to mine the Kierkegaard corpus for philosophical or literary gems divorced from Kierkegaard's theological intentions.Footnote ³⁰ While some delight in his use of the indirect method in isolation, Kierkegaard himself saw it as inseparable from other forms of direct communication.Footnote ³¹ To this end, he critiques his beloved maieutic mentor for his reluctance to move beyond the singular use of the indirect: “Socrates [plays] the ignorant one and remains that until the end,” but, he adds, “this tactic cannot and ought not to be maintained to the end.”Footnote ³² Clearly, there is a dialectical relationship between the direct and the indirect here: the indirect is incomplete by itself, and is necessarily subordinate (in an undefined sense) to the direct. What Kierkegaard began to realize was that, although the listener may need indirect communication for existential response, the speaker may—ironically—avoid existential response to their own message by removing themselves from its life-changing implications. That is, if one were to continue the maieutic method indefinitely, one might avoid the necessary persecution that accompanies the defense of the truth: “the dubiousness of the indirect method in the proclamation of Christianity is that it could be an attempt to avoid suffering for the doctrine.”Footnote ³³

Indeed, it is far easier to hide oneself in cleverly devised pseudonyms and exaggerations than to stand up and be counted. An 1848 journal entry reveals Kierkegaard's intentions to overhaul his maieutic guise: “The thing to do now is to take over unambiguously the maieutic structure of the past, to step forth definitely and directly in character, as one who has wanted and wants to serve the cause of Christianity.”Footnote ³⁴ Of course, Kierkegaard had always sought to serve the cause of Christianity, but this deliberate change is significant in the way in which he chooses to do that.Footnote ³⁵ As he does so, he does not dispense with the maieutic, he merely reallocates it.

Just to confuse things further, Kierkegaard leaves various related comments in his journals which are baffling at best, such as: “When a person uses the indirect method, there is in one way or another something demonic [about it]—but not necessarily in the bad sense.”Footnote ³⁶ Whatever it can mean to have “good” or “bad” demons in one's communicative method,Footnote ³⁷ it is evident that Kierkegaard sensed a residual tension between the direct and the indirect. He did not want to let go of the indirect even as he sought to downplay it.Footnote ³⁸ Rather, he saw that it was valuable in a particular context: “Christianity needed a maieutic and I understood how to be that, although no one understood how to appreciate it. The category ‘proclaim Christianity, confess Christ’ is not appropriate in Christendom—here the maieutic is exactly right.”Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, Kierkegaard is fully aware that indirect communication served a particular function, “to shake up the illusions” of Christendom, but not at the expense of the fact that “Christianity, after all, has grace to proclaim.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Contrary to expectation, “proclaim” is indeed the operative word for Kierkegaard. To “proclaim” something means to show a clear and unambiguous link between what one says, what one means, and what one does as they say it. Certainly, the tension between indirect and direct communication is at its most complex wherever Kierkegaard considers the Christian necessity of preaching itself, which appears to stand in absolute contrast to the maieutic method.

Direct Proclamation and “Street Preaching”

The category of “proclamation” is not traditionally associated with the life of the Melancholy Dane. Yet it must always be remembered that Kierkegaard was, in fact, a preacher. An occasional preacher, perhaps, but a preacher nonetheless, whose preoccupation with sermonic communication spanned the entirety of his writing life.Footnote ⁴¹ The Copenhagen churches in which he preached still stand today; he stood in their pulpits and exposited the Bible with exhortation and derived authority. He also published his many upbuilding discourses, which comprise the largest single portion of his authorship. These discourses are, for the most part, direct, homiletical, and deliberately unpseudonymous: “all the upbuilding writing has been direct communication.”Footnote ⁴² Kierkegaard was aware that in order to preach directly, one's life must become a part of the communication itself. It is for this reason that he says: “Truly it is a risk to preach!”Footnote ⁴³ Preaching is “risky” because preachers themselves are (indirectly) communicating whether their sermon “works” or not by how much it has (or has not) affected their own life. No preacher is afforded the luxury of being a mere passive conveyor-belt of information. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, preaching is much more difficult, even, than acting. This is because, in the theatre, the audience knows that an actor is acting, whereas the preachers of Christendom often had to pretend that they were not acting in their pulpit performance, to which Kierkegaard remained both unamused and unpersuaded:

When preachers are to preach directly, their life and their sermon are woven together intrinsically. Otherwise, for Kierkegaard, such an act ceases to be genuinely Christian preaching.

It is the conflation of the preacher's words and their existential actions that prompted Kierkegaard's imaginative thinking on the appropriate setting for the Christian sermon. He reflects that “there should be preaching every day,” though it should take place in “small chapels” rather than “great churches.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He adds: “But an enormous auditorium, a mass of people, a scholar-orator, and then a roaring—it is appalling. It would be all right if it were a matter of market prices.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The disdain for this kind of preaching scenario stems from the fact that these grand Copenhagen orators spoke and were heard in such a way that the content of what they said could not take root through the expectation brought about by the sermon's aesthetic setting. The speaker and their sermon could be too easily placed “at an artistic distance from actuality.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Kierkegaard's homiletical criticisms did not mean he wanted to change the act of proclamation per se, nor even its content. Indeed, Kierkegaard's understanding of the Gospel's doctrinal tenets—though corrective of truncated Lutheran emphases—remains classically Lutheran.Footnote ⁴⁸ Hinkson notes that Kierkegaard's conception of the implications of sin “exactly parallels Luther.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The Gospel is good news that warrants a hearing because the hearer may be saved from the debilitating effects of sin through faith in Christ's vicarious Atonement.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, speaking of the Eucharist (the existential moment in which the Gospel's inherent forgiveness may be received by the believer), Kierkegaard again reflects Luther, saying: “Christ first sups with you, and only then do you sup with him. Grace is everything.”Footnote ⁵¹ His problem with Copenhagen's preachers is not that the content of their Gospel needs any reinterpretation. It is rather that as a direct consequence of their preaching, this very message could no longer be heard nor—crucially—followed.Footnote ⁵²

In response to what he saw as the statuesque preaching of Christendom, Kierkegaard wanted proclamation to become actualized for both speaker and hearer.Footnote ⁵³ Precisely because Kierkegaard believed that the message Luther preached was so vital for humanity to hear and heed,Footnote ⁵⁴ he perceived that the bourgeois inconsequentiality of the grand pulpit ran counterintuitive to the existential demands of the message. Both speaker and hearer ought to be thereby freed from both the desire for worldly acclaim and from responsive passivity: “It is this failure to demand or enable an active response on the part of the listener that Kierkegaard criticizes most strongly in preaching of his time.”Footnote ⁵⁵ For Kierkegaard, Copenhagen's purportedly “Lutheran” preachers no longer truly preached Luther's Gospel because their message had become aesthetically obscured and existentially debilitating: “There is incessant preaching in Christendom about what happened after Christ's death, how he triumphed and his teachings triumphantly conquered the whole world—in short, we hear nothing but sermons that could more appropriately end with ‘Hurrah’ than ‘Amen.’”Footnote ⁵⁶ For Kierkegaard, such preaching does violence to the Gospel by pretending to proclaim its importance whilst subtly perpetuating the illusion of peaceful tranquility that was inherent within Christendom.

To those who know Kierkegaard's philosophical legacy, Kierkegaard's alternative suggestion to this fatal condition (with a little help from his favorite Reformer), is more than a little surprising: “Luther was absolutely right in saying that preaching really should not be done in churches but on the street. The whole modern concept of a pastor who preaches in a church is pure hallucination.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, on the street, the preacher is removed from the distant prestige of the pulpit and is thereby propelled into a kind of existential reality: “A nobody who preaches gratis on the street—even if he makes observations that are ever so objective—remains a subjective and vivifying person.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Here we see one of Kierkegaard's key communicative insights: the form of the sermon must communicate something about its content precisely by how—and where—it is communicated. If the forgiveness of the Atonement is really as astounding as the preacher says it is, then its effect upon them ought to be overtly demonstrable, not only in word and action but even in location, which may well be an outworking of the former. For Kierkegaard, in that context, there is little other reason for someone to muster up the courage to preach on the street than that their message has so gripped them that they want it to infiltrate everyday reality. So, Kierkegaard concludes, “preaching should not be done in churches but on the street, right in the middle of life, the actuality of ordinary, weekday life.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Although Kierkegaard's thoughts on street preaching do not pervade his authorship by any means, where these intriguing references crop up in his journals we can see that they are not actually divorced from his primary existential-theological concerns. This means that, although such comments are indeed polemical, they are far from being flippant, and we may actually be forced to take them seriously if we want to understand what Kierkegaard is getting at regarding Christian communication. Indeed, the idea of the great philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, standing on a box in the town square with a bullhorn, is an admittedly bizarre thought. However, it is in no way inconsistent with his view of proclamation. For Kierkegaard, although the paradox of preacherly authority always looms large,Footnote ⁶⁰ nonetheless the Gospel must be preached with such existential urgency and self-abandonment because it deals with life and death in such stark contrast.Footnote ⁶¹ Kierkegaard knew that street preaching, precisely in its inappropriate outrageousness, offered one of the most fertile opportunities for demonstrating one's subjective appropriation of the Gospel. What better way to show that the Gospel is real, then—that its eschatological and existential hope has truly liberated the one who proclaims this good news—than to render oneself a social absurdity in the middle of the street for it? This is the place, after all, where one least expects to hear a sermon. In Kierkegaard's Copenhagen, where the impact of the average sermon normally ceased the very moment one left the church building, a sermon on the street could not be so easily escaped.

Although the idea of street preaching remains (ironically) “hidden” in the unpublished depths of Kierkegaard's latter journals, this does not mean that the idea was not seriously contemplated as a genuine possibility. One of the most sustained reflections appears in the midst of the attack literature period, where he was attempting to face Christendom's hypocrisy head-on, and bearing the full personal implications.Footnote ⁶² The reflection occurs in a journal entry (8 April 1855) as a draft for a piece in the secular Fædrelandet newspaper. Here, although he excuses himself from the task of street preaching due to his own physical fragility,Footnote ⁶³ it is clear that he attempted to outwork his theory of street preaching first through his attack literature,Footnote ⁶⁴ and even gestured that the way had to be “prepared” before street preaching could be truly unleashed in all earnestness.Footnote ⁶⁵ In one sense, the attack literature could well have been what he had in mind as this “preparation” for truly existentialised proclamation to begin, even if it were to be ultimately fulfilled by another.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is even possible that had Kierkegaard lived through the aftermath of his stress-inducing “attack” period (1854–55), there would have been movements towards a more fleshed-out account of how Christian street preaching might become a possible and necessary means of Christian proclamation in Christendom.

What might we do with Kierkegaard's curious street preaching reflections today? Street preaching, of course, carries all sorts of negative connotations in the modern world. Ironically, the late Fred Craddock—in a book in which he uses Kierkegaard's indirect communication to re-imagine the concept of preaching—critiques street preaching precisely because its form does not fit the content of the Gospel:

Here, Craddock asserts the impropriety of impassioned street proclamation because it does not fit the appropriate outworking of Christian witness. As an influential homiletician, his counter-arguments in favor of more narratival and ambiguous preaching styles had the intention of marrying the Gospel's content to a congenial communicative form: to “induce” rather than to “assert.” Craddock's emphasis on the indirect in a world of exclusively direct communication was a corrective perhaps akin to Kierkegaard's own corrective task. But it is the lack of simultaneity in the approach that most misrepresents Kierkegaard. Holding the indirect at the ultimate expense of the direct not only misinterprets the nuances within Kierkegaard's overall thought scheme, but is completely opposite to Kierkegaard's arguments for street preaching, in which the very form of street preaching may well become precisely essential to the content of the Gospel.

For Kierkegaard, the Gospel must remain an overt proclamation through the medium of an existentially-involved communicator whose very willingness to communicate in such a mode testifies to the content of the message.Footnote ⁶⁸ Kierkegaard, as Socratically playful as he is, will not let us get away with hiding from that which may seem the appropriately inappropriate way to proclaim the Gospel in certain contexts: “What Christendom needs at every moment is someone who expresses Christianity uncalculatingly or with absolute recklessness.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This is a far cry from the cunning hiddenness of the pseudonyms. It is not a call for the abstract rantings of a disconnected hell-preacher (the archetypal caricature of the street preacher); it is a call for calculated uncalculatedness, whereby the preacher knows precisely why they ought to preach in such an apparently incautious manner: because, it seems, their very message demands it.

It is in forgetting Kierkegaard's inherently dialectical approach that usually renders Kierkegaard either a direct or an indirect communicator. Having sketched the nuances inherent in both of Kierkegaard's primary approaches to communication, it remains to be seen how it may be possible to recall and incorporate the importance of both of them, and to do so without compromise.

Midwife Meets Madman: A Dialectical Proposal

The image of such radically direct communication as street preaching seems very much at odds with the notion of the maieutic midwife. For, although the midwife remains essential for Kierkegaard, the street proclaimer is a truly existential demonstrator of Christianity. Ironically, because the street preacher demonstrates Christianity existentially, this means they do not “fit” within Christendom: “We are all Christians: and then if one is earnest about existentially expressing Christianity, all would laugh, would find it a ridiculous exaggeration, and the man would be regarded as mad.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The figure of the “madman” crops up a number of times in the authorship, often ironically. Kierkegaard knew that he himself was regarded within Copenhagen as “a half-mad eccentric”:Footnote ⁷¹ “Most ridiculous of all is that. . . in Christendom. . . there are 1,000 preachers, approximately 2 million Christians, and they all flatly regard me as mad.”Footnote ⁷² This seemed more than a little absurd to him because he felt that he was attempting to be a genuine witness of Christianity and was ostracized for it in a supposedly Christian society.

To stand up with such overt directness is to lay down the subtlety of the indirect. However, although Kierkegaard is content to be regarded as “mad” for the sake of the Gospel, nonetheless, he stands by the maieutic method as being uniquely necessary in Christendom. The maieutic is essential for invoking subjectivity in those who think they already know the truth, though it remains a mere instrument which is inadequate to proclaim the Gospel by itself.Footnote ⁷³ It is even possible to see street preaching—as Kierkegaard understood it—as a “type” of maieutic communication. This is because something more is communicated than the mere spoken content of the words themselves: the very act conveys an existential truth that remains unspoken but nonetheless communicated in actuality. Indeed, Kierkegaard says: “To teach in actuality that the truth is ridiculed, etc., means to teach it as one ridiculed and scoffed at himself.”Footnote ⁷⁴ As with Socrates's students, such doubly ironical communication may only be perceptible to those with ears to hear.

It is evident that both the direct and indirect methods are vital and indispensable from one other. Not long before his untimely death, as Kierkegaard reflected on all he had accomplished, he declared that his task from beginning to end had always been “Socratic.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This does not mean he was ever non-theological in this Socratic task, but it does mean that in a very real sense Kierkegaard should always be considered a maieutic communicator, albeit variously manifested.Footnote ⁷⁶ The problem for the preacher is that one cannot be a good midwife and a good madman at the same time. To incorporate both methods inevitably dilutes the strength of each (“dilution” being one of those concepts Kierkegaard loathes most). To speak of the indirect “to a certain extent” and the direct “to a certain extent” would be to speak of “neither/nor,” not “both/and.” Kierkegaard does not present his own solution to this problem, he merely hands it over to us: that we must deal with both, and both truly. Kierkegaard has objective doctrinal reasons for holding to both methods and is reluctant to renege upon either of them. Incorporating both methods, though, need not be impossible in the sense of holding to their contingent contextual appropriateness. In other words, one need not say “yes” to both at the same time, but one might defiantly refuse to say “no” to both at all times. In this way, the indirect and the direct might have their appropriate place precisely when and where they become appropriate. Such dialectical awareness, notably, differs from outright rejections or outright syntheses of both.

It is noteworthy, in fact, that Kierkegaard justifies the most extreme forms of both methods because of his Christendom context. In the increasingly secular western context today, one might find Kierkegaard's Christendomian polemics on communication of little use within Christian theology. However, although we do not live in societal Christendom, Christendom lingers on as the incessant “heart condition” which afflicts all spheres of ecclesial life, wherever the content of the Gospel remains assumed and quickly loses its appropriate forms of expression and application in the life of the believer. Preachers face the relentless challenge of communicating the Gospel to clusters of congregants who struggle to see the significance of the sermon for their daily life, where the sermon no longer carries its necessarily invasive force as Christian proclamation of the Word of God. In such a context, mere direct communication cannot have the desired effect because it simply bounces off the hardened hearts of those who already feel they “know” the Gospel but remain unmoved. Similarly, many outside the Church—perhaps those walking the high streets on Sunday afternoons with bagfuls of superfluous shopping—already believe they “know” the basic message of Christianity and yet remain apathetic to its call when, in fact, they may have never truly heard (nor seen) the Gospel proclaimed.

Although such dialectical communicative awareness may seem like an enslavement to contingency, we have seen that it is not necessarily doctrineless in its conception. Forms of indirect communication are uniquely able to catch those who think they have heard it all before. This is not due to it being an effective “technique,” but due to its inseparable connection to the Gospel itself, which is always more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, indirect communication is not only contextually useful but theologically essential. But this cannot be said without noting that Kierkegaard does not allow indirect communication to reign without the necessary caveats that allow for the urgent and direct proclamation of the Gospel. It is clear that different aspects of the Gospel fuel Kierkegaard's different approaches to the direct and the indirect. For the indirect, as noted earlier, it is the paradox of the incarnation and the notion of faith that induces the need for maieutic communication (because faith in the paradox cannot be communicated as though it were mere information). However, this aspect of faith is also central to the understanding of direct communication, in which the sola fide in the Atonement must be accompanied by existential response, first from the preacher, and then from the hearer (thereby demonstrating that one truly has received this paradoxical forgiveness).

It is also clear that the indirect method is not entirely divorced from the direct. The purpose of the indirect, in fact, is to lead us to the direct—to an existential revelation of the direct message. Indeed, if the “midwife” is not accompanied by the “madman” (at least occasionally), there may be something fundamentally missing from Christian proclamation. Again, this claim is not aesthetic but distinctly theological, since the messiah did not remain a mystery indefinitely but became a revelation, calling his preachers as witnesses to that reality. It is for this reason that Kierkegaard considers the concept of “witnessing” to be “the form of communication which strikes the truest mean between direct and indirect communication.” Indeed, he adds: “Witnessing is direct communication, but nevertheless it does not make one's contemporaries the authority. While the witness's ‘communication’ addresses itself to the contemporaries, the ‘witness’ himself addresses God and makes him the authority.”Footnote ⁷⁷ For Kierkegaard, all Christian communication is grounded in who God is and who he has called the communicator to be as they communicate: a witness. To be such a witness today, for many preachers, might well mean rejecting street preaching as a real possibility. However, Kierkegaard's urgent call for such radical witness means not only that street preaching can never be off the table entirely (as most preachers would undoubtedly prefer) but that something similar must be enacted to communicate the required “recklessness” of the communicator who has been truly liberated by their message and seeks to have it proclaimed not only within the confines of a congregation but to the surrounding world. In duly Socratic style, Kierkegaard might well leave the specific application to the self-examination of the preacher, with the caveat that they remain alert to their tendency to avoid the cost of what an endeavor such as street preaching would mean for them personally. At the very least, Kierkegaard might say that one must be free to street-preach before one can truly choose not to street-preach. Only then can they be free to be the kind of witness that Christ has called them to be in and before the world.

In relating the direct to the indirect, it is important to note that Kierkegaard seems to think that each communicative method may only take us so far. Yet each, in its particular moment of employment, remains pure to its essence: either direct or indirect, even if these methods might be combined within the same act of proclamation (as in Nathan's parable to David). But if it is evident that both methods are necessary, how do we know when to use which? For Kierkegaard, this “dialectical knot” is something he himself tries to wrestle with, though he never quite succeeds in untying it (and perhaps never wanted to). The tension remains and seems to stare back at us. What is a preacher to do? There appear to be two Kierkegaards standing either side of us: the Kierkegaard on our left is ready to rap our knuckles for daring to preach directly the unpreachable paradox of the God-man; meanwhile the Kierkegaard on our right prepares to scold us for our cowardly reluctance to proclaim. The question for the preacher is: of which Kierkegaard are we most afraid? Which one haunts us most acutely, challenging us to change our ways, to fall in line, or perhaps more likely, to fall out-of-line? Kierkegaard might add, with Socrates—and, more pertinently, with Christ—that this decision may well depend upon where we are standing and to whom we are speaking.