Book Review: Provocations

Title: Provocations 

Author: Soren Kierkegaard

Translator:  Charles F. Moore

Publisher: Plough

Date: 2014

ISBN: 978-0-87486-626-1 

Length: 448 pages

Quote: "Why is it that people prefer to be addressed in groups rather than individually?"

Soren Kierkegaard, the existentialist philosopher, wrote as a radical Christian. His beliefs about Christ and the Church were in some ways heretical, but Christians can't overlook the intensity of his belief in the individual's need for a spiritual life of "radical obedience." He didn't like the official church of Denmark, in which he thought it was too easy for men with no spiritual lives to use the Church as just another place to make good money. "Purity of heart is to will one thing," that is, to glorify and enjoy God, but clergymen were more likely to will other thigs like financial security and popularity. He used the analogy of a preacher accepting an allowance of alcoholic drinks as part of his wages for presiding over a Temperance Society. He said that a spiritual experience ought to drive a person back into service to other humans, which are the image of God Christians are meant to see. The person who "willed one thing" ought to practice "joyous obedience." Of God, not of a group of humans.

It would be this radical fath that interests the Bruderhof group in Kierkegaard. His understanding of Christianity as basically something that takes place in "existential solitude," between the one who prays and worships and the One Who is prayed to and worshipped, also appeals to me; but many Christians find it provoking. That's probably why this collection of his religious writing is called Provocations.

He was a provoking young man in any case. (Kierkegaard was always a young man; he died before age fifty.) Toward the end of his short life he said that everything he'd written had been written in the service of Christianity, but some of his early writings, quoted in Provocations, opposed Christianity to Christ and denounced Christianity (meaning, in those contexts, the state-sponsored church). People wondered whether he was a Christian at all. As a student he was known for quarrelling with classmates and teachers. He fell in love with women but didn't believe he could live with them. He was able to keep a "job"--as a writer--mostly because he had inherited money. Nineteenth century authors were expected to criticize in cutting terms, and Kierkegaard's first scornful mention in a satirical magazine was merely evidence of his acclaim as a writer; he not only took it personally but replied with an invitation to the satirists to "attack" him--which of course they did--and then became enraged by the "attacks." Very obviously his idea of love and service to others had no more concern for their emotional feelings than those of Jesus and St. Paul; but his biographers don't mention the sort of private generosity, for Kierkegaard, that they do for other crusty Christians such as C.S. Lewis. It is possible that his furious, prolific writing represents his only positive way of expressing Christian love.

He is best known in the United States for two Christian books, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, which apparently give some indication of the quality of his spiritual life. (He looked back on his life as one of suffering, around age forty. It must have been spiritual suffering since he had money, seemed healthy, sold all his writing, and even, in spite of everything, had friends.) His books weren't translated and published in English for seventy years after his death, and it's easy not to realize how many there were. He did little but write for twenty years. He wrote so fluently that lucid, controversial work flowed out of his writing almost as fast as if typewriters had been invented, which they hadn't. 

Kierkegaard was the writer who didn't want either his beliefs or his writings to be "understood too quickly." He refused, among other things, to fit an essay into an outline and sum up his remarks in a concluding paragraph. Previous translations of his work have turned them into readable, but not remarkable, English. 

This situation Moore seems to have set out to correct. If one wants to be as prolific as Lewis, or Mark Twain or G.K. Chesterton, this reviewer has been heard to grumble, one had better ave as unerring an ear for English prose as they had. Kierkegaard never wrote in English at all, but Moore has put considerable effort into making his English as readable and quotable as--if not Lewis's, at least Fulton Sheen's or Max Lucado's. Those who make the time to read these short passages aloud, savoring them, will not be disappointed. I can't say whether fidelity has been sacrificed to style, but I can say that Moore has given Kierkegaard an excellent prose style.

If we begin with an understanding of the kind of thing Kierkegaard said, and the kind of people it provokes in a merely painful way, I think the reader most likely not to appreciate Provocations is the one who (like a reviewer) wants to read a book as quickly as possible, without doing it too much injustice, and get on to the next. Kierkegaard did not want to write books that can be read that way; nor did he. Reading my e-coy in reviewerly haste, I admired Moore's wording but wished he'd presented the book in multiple volumes. Properly paginated, it prints out to 448 pages or even fewer, but on a Kindle it actually feels like the number of "locations" Kindle ives a book.

If you can take the time to savor these short pieces--short essays, and paragraphs cut from long and short writings--they can provide food for thought for years. 

My generation were attracted to the existentialist philosophers because those philosophers said things that seemed to encourage the sort of nihilistic slacker life many of us thought we wanted.. People can't "connect" or even fully communicate with one another. Spirituality is private; why should God want us to "gossip" about our relationship with God? Church meetings are merely organizational functions. So on our day of rest we can stay home, sleep late, and watch television. The Bible never says that part of a day of rest must not be used to make up for lost sleep but it does tell us that a day of rest is not merely a day for personal pleasure. Kierkegaard was an idealist; He did not personally give all of his wealth to the poor--which he might eaisly ahve done, living, as he did, before welfare states--but he did recognize that that was one of the things to which "absolute obedience" might lead. Existential solitude is not properly understood as an excuse for either laziness or selfishness. It has been abused as an excuse for those things, but  that was not what the existentialist philosophers reall intended.Actually reading Kierkegaard's writings, even the selection in this book, will correct that error. 

Provocations has certain shortcomings. It des not tell Christian introverts whose spirituality is solitary, for example, how to be less provoking when we want to help rather than provoke; that was not something Kierkegaard ever learned. It does, however, serve as a wake-up call to those who are either tempted to be "Churchians'  or uncertain how to be Christians without bieng "Churchians."