The Subjective Faith
I step inside the church, and am immediately treated to the glorious solemnity of vespers: profoundly meditative in its warm religiosity. I stand, engulfed in the laws of harmony, wallowing in the antitheses of the Orthodox chants. For a moment, writing is no longer privileged over orality. The chanting, the whispers, the voices cascading off the stone walls unify in a divine consonance, an unforced congruence. The church is packed with cartels of genuflecting women wearing languid brows, semi-circling in front of the altar. Almost symphonically, the despair is soon counterpointed with hope. The priest chants the doxology in a ritualized fashion, barely pausing for breath. In this house of enigma, schizophrenically both Christian and non-Western, part church, part picture gallery, the sense of wonder and estrangement is still alive.
Like a Scriabin symphonic poem, the icons imply another world. A world that triggers the sensibilities in a mysterious and intuitive manner, suspending the worshipper in some kind of hyperreal realm where thoughts can skid and scatter in a thousand directions. These were the moments that possessed me entirely. Scriabin believed spiritual liberation could be attained through the stimulation of these senses, and that ultimately we would be replaced by ‘nobler beings’. I was becoming increasingly convinced that God could in part be accessible through this kind of sensual stimulation and that a transcendental pathway could open up for me through such a subjective experience.
In his inimitable style, Kierkegaard writes in his Journals: “You must have lived out your life a bit to feel the need for Christianity”.[1] I knew exactly what he meant. I was worn down by the pursuit of pleasure, set adrift in a barren principality of whim. Trapped in immediate impulses, the aesthetic individual can only seek so many novel experiences before they wear thin and he starts to look for something more substantial. I realised that that the aesthetic life would end in isolation because it is not remotely concerned with other people’s needs. No longer satisfied with the immediate gratification of desires, I needed to be anchored to something. But the thing I wanted to be anchored to can’t really be explained – it is beyond words, essence and finite understanding. It is apophatic, Meister Eckhart’s enigmatic “God is why” – the ground and reason for being itself.
The Divine might be ineffable, but I had a sense that I wanted to achieve some kind of concrete salvation and that had to come about through my own measures. After vespers that evening, I returned to Kierkegaard who read the Bible as a “mirror of the word (of God)”.[2] You are meant to recognise yourself. When I read Kierkegaard’s Journals, I recognised myself and if you recognise yourself, you might be tempted to do something to change your life. His aesthetic-ethical-religious life schema resonated with me even if I felt like I might be leap-frogging his ‘ethical’ stage of existence. I thought an accountability to God would transcend in one go both aesthetic pleasure and ethical duty. That either/or decision was creeping ever closer: it was time to leave behind the world of supposed objective truths.
Would I let Christianity suspend the erotic in the way that Kierkegaard implied? Would Orthodox Christianity lead me to true selfhood? If it were to be so, I knew it would only come about through my own action and decision, not through the crowd which Kierkegaard was convinced stifles the inner voice. The decision to ‘take up your cross’ has to be a subjective one; it can’t be inherited or assumed. Reason alone cannot help us bridge the gap between finite human understanding and infinite divine reality. For that, we need subjective faith. Faith exists after all because we must believe without any rational uncertainty. If we could prove the existence of God objectively, then the need for faith would be removed. In matters of faith, we have to become therefore subjective because these questions cannot be addressed without personal commitment.
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard says that Christianity “wishes to intensify passion to the highest pitch, but passion is subjectivity and does not exist objectively”.[3] He believed that subjective faith is epistemological; it is about the how (not what is real) by which he meant ‘do you live as if God exists?’. The truth is in your passion and the manner in which you approach questions of faith. And, so I alone would have to make that either/or choice, and such a choice equated to a Kierkegaardian act of freedom. I wanted it to be a life choice, neither motivated by doctrine nor the herding mediocrity of millions of nominal Christians but the subjective truth that must be inwardly appropriated.
It was dialectical too – the importance of the individual choice in part arose in response to the twaddle being preached at the average Church of England parish where the price of becoming a Christian has been arguably knocked down. In contrast, Kierkegaard’s Christianity is the inwardness that leads to self-abnegation, not the teary arm-waving rock-concert-evangelism which for me amounted to a preposterous bungling of the Christian faith. Rightly in my view, Kierkegaard was wary of religious practices that betray his sense of orthopraxis and in particular those that smack of inauthenticity.
Kierkegaard’s thinking is in fact unwittingly aligned to the early Church Fathers – the bedrock of Orthodoxy. His Christianity is one of quiet discursive thoughts and images, and the interior prayer that hesychasm promotes. It is one that dispenses with the trivialisation of profound truths, providing a path to an authentic faith and not social conformity. He was driven by the belief that God’s authority must transcend social expectations. Underpinning the hesychasm that he inadvertently invoked is the notion that the living God is accessible to personal experience – another Kierkegaardian motif. You just have “to knock on the door with humility” as St. John Climacus said.[4]
In sympathy with St Gregory of Nyssa, Kierkegaard understood too the need for self-emptying (kenosis) as a path towards grace and authenticity – the notion that spiritual truths must be discovered through your own efforts even if that makes you vulnerable. This kenosis comes about surely through confession: in Orthodoxy, an address to God ‘witnessed’ by a priest. In existentialist fashion, Kierkegaard thought of the sins that are being confessed as a ‘misrelation to the Self’ and the confessant’s own authentic existence. Sin emerges when free choice is confronted with unlimited possibility. But, of course, it is this consciousness of sin that opens the path to an authentic faith.
I imagine Kierkegaard was in many respects a modern-day Job. He had the kind of authentic commitment to God where he bracketed out morality codes, external voices and objective reason. His interest was not conventional religiosity which in a Danish Lutheran context at least he held in disdain, and he believed there were few true Christians. Only through his inward authenticity and the needfor kenosis can we, he believed, experience the feeling of grace as divine energy – the sense of spiritual renewal that is frustratingly ephemeral, but that nonetheless can be transformational. I knew I had truly stepped into the Kierkegaardian shadow when after approaching for the first time and with a simplicity of heart the Orthodox chalice, I felt that “lightness of being”. For a fleeting moment, I was in covenant with God. I felt as noble as those blessed ones who had departed but stood around listening.
In pursuit of divine grace, I might have made the Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ from the aesthetic to the religious, but that does not mean that I left behind entirely the aesthetic. The Kierkegaardian ‘religious’ person does not discard the beauty of his previous aesthetic life. Instead, he integrates it into his new religious sphere. Orthodoxy is in fact a religion for aesthetes and that for me was no doubt part of the draw. As implausible as it may sound, we can in fact encounter theological principles through synaesthetic spillings and interminglings. As I became more familiar with the Russian Orthodox faith, I realised that its sonorous cosmologies showcase how all these acoustic and aesthetic sensibilities can be conducive to the sacred. But the sense of faith that might arise from such flashes of the sacred must be continually renewed to avoid stagnation – a process that Kierkegaard called “repetition”. This is part of the ongoing process of spiritual growth that we wrestle with, and forms perhaps the overriding architecture of human development. All these questions of subjective choice ultimately determine how we navigate the intersection between the finite and eternal reality. This is surely one of the greatest challenges that God has set us. And in making the decisions that stem from these questions with a subjective commitment, Kierkegaard would have believed that we create meaning hic et nunc.
[1] Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. 1978-1998. Edited by H. V. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[2] For Self-Examination. 2000. In The Essential Kierkegaard edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[3] Concluding Unscientific Postscript. 1944 [1846]. Translated from the Danish by David F. Swenson. Princeton University Press.
[4] The Ladder of Divine Ascent. 1982. Translated by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press.
I step inside the church, and am immediately treated to the glorious solemnity of vespers: profoundly meditative in its warm religiosity. I stand, engulfed in the laws of harmony, wallowing in the antitheses of the Orthodox chants. For a moment, writing is no longer privileged over orality. The chanting, the whispers, the voices cascading off the stone walls unify in a divine consonance, an unforced congruence. The church is packed with cartels of genuflecting women wearing languid brows, semi-circling in front of the altar. Almost symphonically, the despair is soon counterpointed with hope. The priest chants the doxology in a ritualized fashion, barely pausing for breath. In this house of enigma, schizophrenically both Christian and non-Western, part church, part picture gallery, the sense of wonder and estrangement is still alive.
Like a Scriabin symphonic poem, the icons imply another world. A world that triggers the sensibilities in a mysterious and intuitive manner, suspending the worshipper in some kind of hyperreal realm where thoughts can skid and scatter in a thousand directions. These were the moments that possessed me entirely. Scriabin believed spiritual liberation could be attained through the stimulation of these senses, and that ultimately we would be replaced by ‘nobler beings’. I was becoming increasingly convinced that God could in part be accessible through this kind of sensual stimulation and that a transcendental pathway could open up for me through such a subjective experience.
In his inimitable style, Kierkegaard writes in his Journals: “You must have lived out your life a bit to feel the need for Christianity”.[1] I knew exactly what he meant. I was worn down by the pursuit of pleasure, set adrift in a barren principality of whim. Trapped in immediate impulses, the aesthetic individual can only seek so many novel experiences before they wear thin and he starts to look for something more substantial. I realised that that the aesthetic life would end in isolation because it is not remotely concerned with other people’s needs. No longer satisfied with the immediate gratification of desires, I needed to be anchored to something. But the thing I wanted to be anchored to can’t really be explained – it is beyond words, essence and finite understanding. It is apophatic, Meister Eckhart’s enigmatic “God is why” – the ground and reason for being itself.
The Divine might be ineffable, but I had a sense that I wanted to achieve some kind of concrete salvation and that had to come about through my own measures. After vespers that evening, I returned to Kierkegaard who read the Bible as a “mirror of the word (of God)”.[2] You are meant to recognise yourself. When I read Kierkegaard’s Journals, I recognised myself and if you recognise yourself, you might be tempted to do something to change your life. His aesthetic-ethical-religious life schema resonated with me even if I felt like I might be leap-frogging his ‘ethical’ stage of existence. I thought an accountability to God would transcend in one go both aesthetic pleasure and ethical duty. That either/or decision was creeping ever closer: it was time to leave behind the world of supposed objective truths.
Would I let Christianity suspend the erotic in the way that Kierkegaard implied? Would Orthodox Christianity lead me to true selfhood? If it were to be so, I knew it would only come about through my own action and decision, not through the crowd which Kierkegaard was convinced stifles the inner voice. The decision to ‘take up your cross’ has to be a subjective one; it can’t be inherited or assumed. Reason alone cannot help us bridge the gap between finite human understanding and infinite divine reality. For that, we need subjective faith. Faith exists after all because we must believe without any rational uncertainty. If we could prove the existence of God objectively, then the need for faith would be removed. In matters of faith, we have to become therefore subjective because these questions cannot be addressed without personal commitment.
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard says that Christianity “wishes to intensify passion to the highest pitch, but passion is subjectivity and does not exist objectively”.[3] He believed that subjective faith is epistemological; it is about the how (not what is real) by which he meant ‘do you live as if God exists?’. The truth is in your passion and the manner in which you approach questions of faith. And, so I alone would have to make that either/or choice, and such a choice equated to a Kierkegaardian act of freedom. I wanted it to be a life choice, neither motivated by doctrine nor the herding mediocrity of millions of nominal Christians but the subjective truth that must be inwardly appropriated.
It was dialectical too – the importance of the individual choice in part arose in response to the twaddle being preached at the average Church of England parish where the price of becoming a Christian has been arguably knocked down. In contrast, Kierkegaard’s Christianity is the inwardness that leads to self-abnegation, not the teary arm-waving rock-concert-evangelism which for me amounted to a preposterous bungling of the Christian faith. Rightly in my view, Kierkegaard was wary of religious practices that betray his sense of orthopraxis and in particular those that smack of inauthenticity.
Kierkegaard’s thinking is in fact unwittingly aligned to the early Church Fathers – the bedrock of Orthodoxy. His Christianity is one of quiet discursive thoughts and images, and the interior prayer that hesychasm promotes. It is one that dispenses with the trivialisation of profound truths, providing a path to an authentic faith and not social conformity. He was driven by the belief that God’s authority must transcend social expectations. Underpinning the hesychasm that he inadvertently invoked is the notion that the living God is accessible to personal experience – another Kierkegaardian motif. You just have “to knock on the door with humility” as St. John Climacus said.[4]
In sympathy with St Gregory of Nyssa, Kierkegaard understood too the need for self-emptying (kenosis) as a path towards grace and authenticity – the notion that spiritual truths must be discovered through your own efforts even if that makes you vulnerable. This kenosis comes about surely through confession: in Orthodoxy, an address to God ‘witnessed’ by a priest. In existentialist fashion, Kierkegaard thought of the sins that are being confessed as a ‘misrelation to the Self’ and the confessant’s own authentic existence. Sin emerges when free choice is confronted with unlimited possibility. But, of course, it is this consciousness of sin that opens the path to an authentic faith.
I imagine Kierkegaard was in many respects a modern-day Job. He had the kind of authentic commitment to God where he bracketed out morality codes, external voices and objective reason. His interest was not conventional religiosity which in a Danish Lutheran context at least he held in disdain, and he believed there were few true Christians. Only through his inward authenticity and the needfor kenosis can we, he believed, experience the feeling of grace as divine energy – the sense of spiritual renewal that is frustratingly ephemeral, but that nonetheless can be transformational. I knew I had truly stepped into the Kierkegaardian shadow when after approaching for the first time and with a simplicity of heart the Orthodox chalice, I felt that “lightness of being”. For a fleeting moment, I was in covenant with God. I felt as noble as those blessed ones who had departed but stood around listening.
In pursuit of divine grace, I might have made the Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ from the aesthetic to the religious, but that does not mean that I left behind entirely the aesthetic. The Kierkegaardian ‘religious’ person does not discard the beauty of his previous aesthetic life. Instead, he integrates it into his new religious sphere. Orthodoxy is in fact a religion for aesthetes and that for me was no doubt part of the draw. As implausible as it may sound, we can in fact encounter theological principles through synaesthetic spillings and interminglings. As I became more familiar with the Russian Orthodox faith, I realised that its sonorous cosmologies showcase how all these acoustic and aesthetic sensibilities can be conducive to the sacred. But the sense of faith that might arise from such flashes of the sacred must be continually renewed to avoid stagnation – a process that Kierkegaard called “repetition”. This is part of the ongoing process of spiritual growth that we wrestle with, and forms perhaps the overriding architecture of human development. All these questions of subjective choice ultimately determine how we navigate the intersection between the finite and eternal reality. This is surely one of the greatest challenges that God has set us. And in making the decisions that stem from these questions with a subjective commitment, Kierkegaard would have believed that we create meaning hic et nunc.
[1] Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. 1978-1998. Edited by H. V. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[2] For Self-Examination. 2000. In The Essential Kierkegaard edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[3] Concluding Unscientific Postscript. 1944 [1846]. Translated from the Danish by David F. Swenson. Princeton University Press.
[4] The Ladder of Divine Ascent. 1982. Translated by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press.
