Kierkegaard is like The Exorcist. He makes Christianity
heroic.
I first came across Kierkegaard and The
Exorcist when I was an undergraduate. Fear and Trembling came out in Penguin
Classics and a friend, for some reason bought a copy and then lent it to me.
The Exorcist was still banned back then in the 70s/80s, but someone had come
across a copy and we watched it in a room full of students, from a distance
quite far away. The video cassette presented a quite atrocious copy of the film,
but it didn’t matter. Both of these
events, reading Fear and Trembling and watching The Exorcist had a lasting
importance for me.
I have to confess when I first read Fear
and Trembling, I was a bit embarrassed by the Christianity. I thought
Kierkegaard would be great if only he didn’t go on about God so much. At the
time I was quite a militant atheist. But something made me want to read
further. I realised that there was something here for me. Here was something
different that I had never come across before. I found most of the philosophers that we
studied extraordinarily dull. They were concerned with problems that were at
best abstract, at worst artificial. After I’d got over the initial thrill of
Descartes’ scepticism, the whole debate turned out to be sterile and lacking in
importance. Perhaps, this is looking at events from a future perspective. It’s
always difficult to reflect back on the version of yourself who lived some
years ago, without using the present perspective as the lens through which to
interpret. Anyway, I resolved to do my undergraduate dissertation on
Kierkegaard. We’d actually had a little course on his Philosophical Fragments,
which must have been unusual at a British university at that time. I took
that as my point of departure and set out to read the Concluding Unscientific
Postscript to those Fragments. These two works formed the basis of what I
wrote. I read very little secondary literature apart from the bare minimum to
play the game. As an alternative to reading dull books about my chosen author I
tried to come up with some of my own ideas simply by reflecting on the texts
that I was reading. It is necessary to choose not to respect great people too
much if someone is ever going to write anything original. You have to choose to
write your own ideas or else you will forever repeat those of others. I have
never been much of a scholar as it is fundamentally uninteresting.
After graduating I decided to study
Kierkegaard further and went to Cambridge for this purpose. Along the way I
learned Danish. I started with an evening class, once a week and worked my way
through a ‘teach yourself’ Danish book. I then set off to read one of
Kierkegaard's books in Danish and chose Repetition, because it was short and
because I liked it. It is not about repetition in the ordinary sense of the
word, but in a sense that is quite extraordinary. Repetition is to be for the
first time again. I looked up nearly
every word on the first page, but persevered and by the end could read
Kierkegaard reasonably well. I first went to Denmark that summer before going to Cambridge. There I began to speak and
to understand better, for Kierkegaard is really much better in Danish. Where
most philosophers write ugly prose, he wrote as well in Danish as anyone ever
has.
Over the next four years I read nearly all
of Kierkegaard, much of it in Danish, or at least I checked the text when it
seemed necessary. I frequently had to provide my own translations as at that
time, not everything had been translated and some had been translated poorly.
I also found rather that I had come to
believe. I can’t point to a moment when this happened, but occasionally I would
go to Kings College chapel. I rather liked their style,
performing every year a requiem mass for Henry VI who founded the college. They
had a debt to pay and repaid it. I’ve never been much of a church goer, but
somehow I found that I had a sort of faith. I find the only way to really understand
someone is to put myself in their shoes, so that the problems that they
describe become my problems. If the issue is not real to me, how can I really
think about it in an interesting way? Not everyone uses such a method, just as
not every actor using ‘the method’, but it was perhaps through treating the
study of Kierkegaard existentially and personally that I found one day that I
had leapt, without quite knowing when it had happened or how.
Kierkegaard had provided the answer to my
doubts with perhaps the only answer possible. Accept them. His discussion of
faith was perfect for a sceptic. If I thought that Christianity was absurd and
ridiculous, he agreed. But he showed the possibility of believing anyway. I
grasped that possibility through him. Moreover, he showed Christianity to be
brave. Here was an abyss. Here was the need to leap over that abyss. Here was
risk. Here was the need for courage. Here were heroes who were called ‘knights
of faith’. It was all just impossibly romantic. Reader, I swooned.
I had always associated Christianity with
wetness. An Archbishop spoke in a funny voice, all vacillation, and tremulous
modulation. The Christianity I had heard before was just left-wing politics
with a little bit of God added to the mix. If something was hard to believe,
like the Virgin birth, it could easily be watered down. If a part of the Bible
didn’t fit in with modern life, it could be dropped. It all seemed so weak and
I had wanted nothing to do with it.
But always in the back of my mind was The
Exorcist . Here once more was something a little more heroic. And I began to rethink it in Kierkegaardian
terms. Here was a priest, Father Karras, who was like a boxer. He trained as if
he was going to go 15 rounds with some middleweight. He was intelligent. But
this man was going to fight the Devil, literally the Devil. He, too, had to
make a leap of faith, for in the beginning he did not even believe in exorcism.
The idea of possession to his modern mind, trained in psychiatry, seemed
preposterous, something from the Middle Ages. So he, too, had scepticism.
With the arrival of the exorcist, Father
Merrin, we meet another sort of Christian heroism. This man believes in
possession and despite his physical weakness, his heart condition, despite the
fact that he knows the exorcism may kill him, he takes on the Devil.
Each priest fights in his own way and each
gives up his life, a martyr for his faith. Here, despite the film’s trappings
of horror, I began to realise was an attractive form of Christianity. Here were
heroes, not weaklings.
I think, it was for the same reason that
Kierkegaard emphasised going back to early Christianity. For at that time it
was not easy to be a Christian. There was constantly the risk of martyrdom. Witnessing
to the truth meant standing up to be counted. It meant proclaiming ideas that
were treated by contemporaries as either offensive or folly. This was no easy
life. It was the opposite of the comfortable, dull, bourgeois ‘Christian’ life
that he found in 19th century Copenhagen, which preached one thing on Sunday
and then ignored it for the rest of the week.
The vision of heroic Christianity
portrayed by Kierkegaard and The Exorcist is not the whole story. It is
certainly not the whole story in Kierkegaard. For his emphasis in the end is on
practical Christianity and living a Christian life. But the idea that
Christianity might require bravery of me, which is an important strand in
Kierkegaard’s thought, at least made the whole thing more attractive than the
Christianity that had always been presented to me up until that point. Here
were people I could admire. By emphasising the difficulties involved in
Christianity, Kierkegaard makes it something that is worth having. Moreover, by
presenting a vision of Christianity which is not watered down, which follows
the traditional view of Christianity literally, which takes the Bible
seriously, he doesn’t tame it and make it domesticated for the present age. His
idea is that if we find something in Christianity difficult, it is up to us to
change. I should not expect that Christianity should accommodate itself to my
difficulty. Rather I must change to fit in with Christianity. The same
goes for The Exorcist. The present age is sceptical about demonic possession,
but it is Father Karras who must change. The traditional view of Christianity
prevails. Demonic possession is another absurdity. How could anyone believe
such stupid superstitions? But Father Karras quite literally leaps and in the
end is a true knight of faith.
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