This is a little paper I gave a few months back. In the interests of keeping people back home etc., in touch with some of what I have been working on I have decided to put it up here. It’s still very rusty (as it was just an oral paper), and only in it’s very early stages. I don’t foresee my doing too much with it really. With all the time pressures of doctoral work, little projects like this seem to fade into the background, and when you finally do get a chance to come back inevitably you cringe to read your own writing, and decide it is best left in the dark recesses of the hard drive (or at least that is the case for me)! Anyway: Kierkegaard, prayer and the reforming of desire (or thereabouts!).
Introduction
The increasing commodification and commercialization of spiritualties and religious discourses in late-capitalist societies seems to have re-oriented the way the benefits of spirituality have been construed in rather crass material terms. The consistent interruption of space and time with advertisements, signs of material wealth, and simple aesthetic pleasure, offer us a form of the good life devoid of the transformation of our subjectivities, but rather a form of life grounded in simple gratification of desire. In many ways this environment is what Kierkegaard would identify as an enacted form of despair – ‘aesthetic existence’. The continual need for stimulation, aesthetic gratification and consumption, constitutes the relation of the subject to the transcendent – that aesthetic nihilism in which consumption and pleasure continually constitute our subjectivity. As soon as one ceases to consume – to get the new iPhone, to try the latest coffee machine, to have the latest fashion – one ceases to be a subject participating in the transcendent, which has, of course, been dissolved in the immediate.
These political and social spaces have little room for prayer, for the patient, agonizing and often disconcerting modes of prayer offered to the believer in the scriptural. Historical and ecclesiological witness. The aim of this paper is to enter into a conversation with Kierkegaard over the nature of prayerful contemplation and action. Kierkegaard’s sensitivity to the aesthetic form of existence, that grounded in a form of pure, immanent gratification, provides an interesting dialogue partner in considering the relation of the gratification of desire, and therefore our formulation of petition, to the form of our prayerful discourse. Kierkegaard’s Lutheran and anti-modern insistence upon the life lived as significant in the face of apparent failure, will allow us to consider the ways petition might be formed, not as request for situational change or simple material gratification, but, as that moment of self-abandonment in which divine presence is most really seen, that is in seeming absence.
Subjectivity and Suffering
This first section will explore the way prayer, formation and cruciform existence intersect around the Kierkegaardian consideration of the way the subject is freed from determination of the good. This will allow us to set the stage for a discussion of the way Kierkegaard’s Christology forms the ground of his theology of prayer.
Kierkegaard’s philosophical and theological concern throughout his work is the loss of a genuine sense of human subjectivity and particularity. His work stands largely in response to Hegel, by whom individual subjects were subsumed in the movement of absolute spirit, or gesit, in it’s road to actualisation. Kierkegaard resists this simple identification of divine action with immanent historical process, constantly defying the Hegelians with his emphasis upon the absolute difference of God, both metaphysically and epistemologically. Any identification of the divine with historical process as such would allow for a thinking of God, a knowledge of the divine being which rested not on the priority of faith, but rather on a simple observation of historical process, thus creating an idol.
The constitution of human subjectivity was then of paramount concern for Kierkegaard. Profoundly aware of the limitations of the knowing human subject, Kierkegaard is at pains to locate the truth of things not in an abstract system, comprehending the entirety of historical process, rather truth was located in subjectivity. The subject knew the truth insofar as the subject was given to become the truth by virtue of divine encounter and transformation. In this becoming the subject participates in, and cooperates with divine action. The subject is given to be differently, and so to act differently.
Central to this concern is the formation of subjectivity in the activity of prayer. It is in the moment of prayer that the subject finds him or herself naked before the disruptive grace of God. Kierkegaard prays, “God in heaven, let me really feel my nothingness, not in order to despair over it, but in order to feel the more powerfully the greatness of thy goodness.” All pretention to independent goodness is lost before the recognition of human inadequacy – the infinite qualitative distinction between God and humanity. This places the subject in a posture of pure-receptivity. The very formation and constitution of his/her subjectivity is contingent upon the divine self-gift. Prayer is a moment in which the subject is both given and given to the divine. In this moment of disruption, the subject is made nothing. Kierkegaard understands prayer as the abandonment of self, the kenosis of desire. So:
“The immediate person thinks and imagines that when he prays, the important thing, the thing he must concentrate upon, is that God should hear what he is praying for. And yet in the true and eternal sense it is just the reverse: the true relation in prayer is not when God hears what is prayed for, but when the person praying continues to pray until he is the one who hears, who hears what god wills. The immediate person, therefore, uses many words and, therefore, makes many demands in his prayer; the true man of prayer only attends.”
The praying person does not come before God with requests for fulfillment of selfish-desire. Rather, prayer is an abandonment of self in the face of the divine in order to see desire refigured by attendance to the divine voice. Not wanting to see the human and divine wills in opposition, Kierkegaard understands that the human is human insofar as the human submits to and obeys the divine will. The inevitable consequence of which is the embrace of a cruciform existence. So, Kierkegaard notes in his Journals:
“There was a time – it came so naturally, it was childlike – when I believed that God’s love also expressed itself by sending earthly “good gifts,” happiness, prosperity… Now it is otherwise. How did that happen? Quite simply, but little by little. Little by little, I noticed increasingly that all those whom God really loved, the examples, etc., had all had to suffer in this world. Furthermore, that it is the teaching of Christianity: to be loved by God and to love God is to suffer. But if that were so I dared not pray for good fortune and success because it were as though I were to beg at the same time: Will you not, O God, cease loving me and allow me to stop loving you… On the other hand, to pray directly for suffering appeared to me too exalted, and it also seemed to me that it might easily be presumptuous, and that God might grow angry at my perhaps wishing to defy him.
Again, we see that the refiguring of desire is the ceasing to determine for oneself what is good. Kierkegaard’s reticence in his consideration of petition is not due to God somehow holding back good things from the creature, but rather due to the theological reality that the creature cannot determine for him/herself what is good. So, it is ‘your kingdom come, your will be done.’ In this way prayer is an embrace of suffering, a crucifying of desire, of one’s own determination of the good. Kierkegaard insists that it is not “good things”, as we determine them, that are signs of divine favour, but rather, all things are given by God for the formation of our person. God is unchanging in his love and faithfulness, and so in that moment of suffering our person is formed by divine grace.
Kierkegaard notes again and again that to move closer to the divine is to move closer to suffering. As we saw in the quote above “to love God is to suffer”. It is illuminating here to draw some sense of continuity between Luther and Kierkegaard. Luther’s famous theologia crucis in many ways lies behind Kierkegaard’s consideration of prayer in that there is a common theological impulse. Luther’s famous statement reads:
“That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things that have actually happened.
He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.
A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the things what it actually is.”
As we have already seen, for Kierkegaard the temptation for the prayer is always to determine for oneself good and evil. This self-determination, however, is broken on the cross, where we see how things really are. For both Kierkegaard and Luther, to pray is to come to comprehend the God who is displayed to us “through suffering and the cross.” In this coming to see things anew is an embrace of a different way of being. The person is formed in coming to see that Christianity costs, that the way of the Christian is the via dolorosa – “the way is the truth, that is, that the truth is only in the becoming, in the process of appropriation.” So, in involving herself in prayer, the Christian is opened to the special treatment of suffering: “… the Christian’s good fortune is distinguished by suffering… this is so difficult to understand that for anyone else but the elect it must be something to despair over.”
The great irony of prayer for Kierkegaard is that it is only in complete kenotic self-abandonment that the self is really and truly actualized. Freedom is found, not in the satisfaction of desire, but the embrace of the way of suffering, of a sharing in Christ. It is this that we shall now turn to.
Vicarious Humanity
Having considered first, the way Kierkegaard understands prayer as a formation in personhood, not fulfillment of desire, and second, the way suffering and freedom from self determination shape how he construes the way of becoming human in prayer. I will now move to improvise on several strands within Kierkegaard’s thinking in order to provide something of an exposition of the particular way he is construing the relation between the human and the divine in prayer.
Kierkegaard’s consideration of the relation of God to humanity more broadly is grounded in his deep consideration of the incarnational embrace of flesh. It is in Christ’s embrace of both sides of the covenantal relation that our new humanity is found. There is a deep sense in which Christ’s humanity stands in our stead before the Father and so, without the incarnation, prayer will inevitably be without appropriate orientation. (It would be helpful here to examine the way Johannes Climacus expounds the relation of savior and teacher to disciple, but time doesn’t permit).
In considering what it means to pray in the name of Jesus, Kierkegaard writes:
“[it is] to pray in such a way that it is in conformity with the will of Jesus. I cannot pray in the name of Jesus and have my own will; the name of Jesus is… the significant factor; the fact that Jesus’ name comes at the beginning is not prayer in the name of Jesus; but it means to pray in such a way that I dare name Jesus in it… Jesus assumes the responsibility and all the consequences, he steps forward for us, steps into the place of the person praying.”
The surrendering of self-determination in prayer is then grounded in the representative humanity of Christ in whom we participate as the one who “steps into the place of the person praying.” This is the mode of both surrender of desire and it’s reorientation. As we participate in that divine discourse, the prayer of Christ to the Father, we become fully and truly human. The idolatries of our own will are relinquished as we are given to become human in the face of Christ. So, Kierkegaard prays,
“Lord! Make our heart Your temple in which You live. Grant that every impure thought, every earthly desire might be like the idol Dagon – each morning broken at the feet of the Ark of the Covenant. Teach us to master flesh and blood and let this mastery of ourselves be our bloody sacrifice in order that we might be able to say with the Apostle: “I die every day.””
Conclusion
As prayer transforms desire and therefore human agency, it functions as a kind of resistance to the established order. I opened with a brief consideration of the way selfhood has been constructed popularly in late capitalist societies. The cult of consumption, the seeming endlessness of want and desire that surround us everyday, is resisted in prayer. As a participation in the humanity of Christ, we are given to reorient our desire toward the good of God, not the self-determined good of the world. It is this political oddness that Kierkegaard himself embodied in his struggle with a church and nation that had identified divine action with historical process. Prayer, as the road to self-abandonment, is the way to a different mode of being human in the world.
“To be sacrificed is…as long as the world remains the world, a far greater achievement than to conquer; for the world is not so perfect that to be victorious in the world by adaptation to the world does not involve a dubious mixture of the world’s paltriness.
To be victorious in the world is like becoming something great in the world; ordinarily to become something great in the world is a dubious matter, because the world is not so excellent that its judgement of greatness unequivocally has great significance – except as unconscious sarcasm.”
