A moral hypochondriac

Surely God, if He existed, would find a major source of entertainment down the ages in the activities of theologians, reaching their climax perhaps in the 19th century, when they involved Him with German idealism, and then the descent from that to the present day, when the sheer naivete of anyone who thinks that God is ‘out there’ or actually exists, in some sense we can understand, provokes genial and condescending ridicule from the professionals. Central to the development of thought about Christianity is the work of the melancholy Dane Søren Kierkegaard, who in the course of his short life — he died, aged 42, in 1855 — wrote more books and notebooks than many of us succeed in reading in a longer lifetime.

Most of his books were issued under an assortment of bemusing pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, for instance. That means that for the non-professional reader it is dangerous to ascribe the views in them to Kierkegaard himself. That is likely to evoke the scorn of the many international scholars working in Copenhagen’s Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre — though if Kierkegaard made it to heaven he might finally be forced to laugh with his maker at the thought of such an institution.

That takes us straight to a central feature of his thought: how can you be a Christian in any serious way and not be a member of some organisation which bureaucratises Christ’s message and leads its members, especially its officials, to a denial of the heart of that message? Ignoring such questions as to how far and how long Christ expected his church to survive — the gospels suggest not long — Kierkegaard fails to confront the fundamental issue: isn’t any great civilisation or institution bound in the end to be strangled by the bureaucracy which it necessitates?

Instead, self-obsessed and with a uniquely advanced case of moral hypochondria, he analyses every last psychological itch and twitch he has, endowing it with enormous significance, fearing any close human contact because of the risk of one or another kind of spiritual compromise.