George Pattison's Kierkegaard and the quest for unambiguous life shows how very much Kierkegaard belongs to his times and ours. He is a young romantic, wondering what to do with his life; a writer who praises the birds of the air and lilies of the field; a social critic who had a handle on ‘thoughtlessness’ long before Hannah Arendt placed this at the heart of ‘the banality of evil’; he inhabits what Benjamin described as a tendency to exaggeration and extremism consequent on the poet's social marginalisation in the era of high capitalism; he is a literary innovator whose mastery of the ‘carnivalesque’ makes it fitting to pair him (as Shestov does) with Dostoevsky. Pattison paints the thick texture of European culture from Kierkegaard's time through the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and finds his after effects in Heidegger, Jean Wahl, Lukacs and Beauvoir (among many others). Through multiple ‘case studies’, we see just how rich a figure Kierkegaard is for anyone concerned with major currents of European literary, theological, political and philosophical thought and culture of the twentieth century.

Those who have absorbed Pattison's oeuvre know that he can range from micro-analysis of a passage in Kierkegaard's Either/Or or a late Journal entry to an assessment of Kierkegaard's aesthetics, to a systematic presentation of Kierkegaard's philosophy of religion, to a coordination of Kierkegaardian themes with specific Copenhagen sites (the Deer Park, the family home, the cathedral, the market), rather than exclusively to texts or cultural discourse. The present work reaps the fruits of tilling Kierkegaardian fields from an amazingly varied range of angles.

We value studies that place original thinkers in their times, and include the widening ripples of their influence. The danger is that originals become epiphenomena of dominant cultural forces, or become lost as their after-effects gain prominence. Kierkegaard is not less important than his Hegelian surround, and not less important than his impact on Heidegger or Arendt. Although faultlessly attuned to context and after effect, Pattison never loses sight of the heartbeat that makes Kierkegaard an original or of the heartbeat that gives later thinkers their own originality. Beauvoir's account of ‘the ethics of ambiguity’ is not just a passing echo of Kierkegaard's search for unambiguous life, nor is Kierkegaard's search just a variation on post-Kantian philosophical trends. The cultural fare is extremely rich, yet Kierkegaard is neither swallowed in the maw of his times, nor forgotten as we meet later generations feasting at his table. One wants both to return to the Kierkegaardian originals – that discourse one cannot properly remember, that passage where Judge Wilhelm likens God to a prompter whispering lines to actors in the theatre – and to return to Lukacs, Beauvoir, Rilke or Arendt, just to renew their acquaintance.

I cannot resist mentioning a special chapter among these explorations in cultural and authorial hermeneutics. Even novice readers remember the confrontation between the stuffy Judge Wilhelm and the nameless aesthete in Either/Or. Many have wondered if the deck isn't stacked unfairly against the aesthete, and have suspected the judge of self-deception. Is he not the rather pompous prig who deserves a fall? In a stroke of genius Pattison extends this stand-off between the aesthetic and the ethical into the future by inventing an until now lost letter from the Judge – now dissipated, a drunk, abandoned by his wife and his colleagues, more or less homeless. The letter is addressed to the aesthete – now a paragon of success and civic responsibility who would not tarnish his wings by contact with the debauched and pathetic, humbled, less voluble advocate.

Pattison creates an infinitely varied yet focused montage. In Kierkegaard's kenotic Christology David Law confines his rich study to a single theological question: is Kierkegaard's Christology kenotic? He proposes that Kierkegaard provides an existential kenotic theology. The study tracks every allusion or explicit reference in the vast Kierkegaardian corpus, down to early class notes from his student days, that might illuminate his position on divine self-emptying or incarnation. Did Kierkegaard have a special position, or did he merely assimilate standard Lutheran views? Along the way, Law tracks the considerable secondary literature that enlists Kierkegaard as an ally in disputations regarding this or that facet of kenotic Christology.

Law is exhaustive in sifting and sorting through the texts. He pauses with The fragments, where Climacus delivers the parable of the king and the maiden. Think of the insurmountable obstacles that a king would face in attempting to appear as someone whom the maiden could love without that love being jeopardised – if he seems to be only a servant, why notice him? If he reveals his kingliness, she will approach him with fear rather than love. And so forth.

Kenotic theology focuses on metaphysical impasses to a non-paradoxical understanding of the Incarnation. In becoming human does God forfeit glory and power? If Christ is God, how can his suffering and humiliation be believable? Does kenosis stop upon Christ's re-entry into heaven? How can a sinless Christ have rapport with sinful humanity? Conundrums abound. If Kierkegaard is a ‘negative theologian’ (as Law argued in his earlier Kierkegaard book) such conundra are no more than impediments to practice. Theoretically, the dead ends of disputation might leave one lacking all confidence in the Christian path. But that would be foolish. An erudite philosopher may puzzle over how self-deception is possible. That should not prevent him from the humble existential work of fighting his acknowledged self-deceptions. A theoretician of mathematics may spend decades unable to domesticate paradoxes at the basis of arithmetic. This does not impair his confidence in solving practical problems of arithmetic.

At best theology leads the Christian to a willingness to follow Christ in discipleship. Because Law takes this to be Kierkegaard's theological impulse, he calls his an existential theology. The challenge is this: how can the believer humbly empty himself in service to others. Kenosis is not only a name for a puzzling and disruptive metaphysical event; it is also a name for a pedestrian (if infinitely demanding) ideal.