11-9-22,
SOREN KIERKEGAARD AND THE SOLITARY PATH

I have delayed for a long time tackling this piece about Soren Kierkegaard (SK) (1813-1855) and his little known work, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession. SK is a soaring presence in the world of theological philosophy and I have found him a formidable subject in my life as well as a subject for a short blog piece. This is why.

The story of how SK came into my life began decades ago when I was about 15 years old and a counselor at a summer camp in upstate Illinois, Pleasant Valley Farm, a branch of what was then named the Chicago City Missionary Society. I had gone to work there through a reference from one of my most loved teachers, Barb Williams, and her affiliation with it as a graduate of a theological seminary (McCormick Theological Seminary) in Chicago. I was way too young to embark on such a journey but as I look back now it was just an extension of a journey carved out before that and one that has continued all my life (including my experience in the Zen Buddhist chaplaincy program at Upaya). At that time in 1961 I was sick with some sort of respiratory illness and recuperating in the infirmary at the camp. I had borrowed SK's work from the camp library and read it while sick, not understanding much of the philosophical twists and turns but sure in my heart that this was a work that could impact my life. I held it as if it contained secrets about the spiritual life, this life being the one that I aspired to. I had no idea at the time just how complex that life could become as I aged and added all sorts of appendages to my life, like schooling and marriage and family and career. But I realized that the book could impact my life and so I stole it.

Now, at my age, I finally took that pilfered book (it seemed to belong to me in a strange alliance with the author) off the shelf and reread it with all the decades heaped up before it. At this stage of life I have begun to think of ways to simplify my life and that includes all aspects from the physical to the mental to the spiritual. But I found out that coming to a spiritual simplicity by way of SK and his powerful mind is a complex endeavor. Rather than offering our contemporary self-help bullet lists of things to do to unclutter a life, he made that process more difficult and even indicated that the “simplicity” he referred to involved some difficult and personally provocative work, a confrontation or goad on his part to the reader. I think it was this tone of the work that held me at bay for so long. I wanted to know the secrets of the spiritual life but I didn't want to do the hard work that would make that happen. SK was insistent in his intention to prepare me for my own confession. Here I am, then, confessing at the outset that I stole his book from a small library at a Christian summer camp.

There are many aspects of this work that apply to my life all along the way and he is one of many wisdom teachers who have opened their work to me. But he stands out as one who has lurked all these years in the background of my spiritual life, hectoring me silently just as others have done: William Blake, Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them. I see their works on the library shelf and know that they contain the teachings my soul could use, but some form of laziness or aversion to confrontation has kept me away from them.

From the beginning SK insists that to achieve the purity of heart he means is for the individual to distinguish oneself (he lived in a time when all humankind was “he/him”) from the herd and it was only in this way that one could attain knowledge of “the Good,” which I interpret him to mean God. For him, the herd, the collective, the mass was a spiritually false and superficial comfort zone. It was the individual that had a private and deep connection to God. It is this connection that is eternal and a vocation given at birth, a cognitive and spiritual DNA of sorts that is a set of building blocks continually rearranged throughout life as identity is shaped over time.

“With the double-minded one, it is thus clear that time and eternity cannot rule in the same man. He cannot, he will not, understand the Good's slowness; that out of mercy, the Good is slow, that out of love for free persons, it will not use force; that in its wisdom toward the frail ones, it shrinks from any deception. He cannot, he will not, humbly understand that the Good can get on without him. He is double-minded, he that with his enthusiasm could apparently become an apostle, but can quite readily become a Judas, who treacherously wishes to hasten the victory of the Good.”

“But this I do believe...that at each man's birth there comes into being an eternal vocation for him, expressly for him. To be true to himself in relation to this eternal vocation is the highest thing a man can practice....”

Willing one thing for the individual is contrasted with the “double-mindedness” of the herd which is defined by compromise, leverage, coercion, temporality, and the immediate circumstances. It is a contrast between temporality and eternity. SK points out that even though the journey to the Good is by way of the heart and soul and spiritually sheltered, it by no means involves escaping the details of the mundane life. For him, to will one thing is to continually suffer all things. In fact, the journey to purity of heart is by way of all things that we suffer in our lives. I love this about SK. His philosophy is not some ethereal and disconnected approach to escapism. It is securely set within the confines of our messy, conflicted, compromised, and broken lives. He tells the reader that the road is difficult and involves what he calls “confession” which I interpret to mean an acknowledgment of the mess of our temporal lives. But confession also implies atonement, making amends, finding emancipation within the suffering, and defining the path to simplicity, purity of heart, a life in God that eliminates all comparisons with all things temporal folded into one. It is this emphasis on the unitive state that makes SK a mystical figure for me. But, as with most of the mystics I am familiar with, the unitive state is achieved only by one's engagement with and participation in the grittiness of life's vicissitudes, by making choices to separate from the herd and to start the long walk up the mountain from the lowlands of temporal life to the peaks of atonement.

“The outward impossibility of ridding oneself of suffering does not hinder the inward possibility of being able really to emancipate oneself within suffering—of one's own free will accepting suffering....”

Atonement is a vocation and another choice that can lead to amends. And it is making amends in my life that has meant repayment in the way of service to others. When I think of confession, I think of how it is misconstrued to mean absolution, a washing away of sins or conflictions or mistakes. But confession is the beginning of a process that leads to atonement (reparation, restitution, repayment) and perhaps the harder part of finding ways to atone in the temporal world. It leads to action that presumably is support for the purity of heart that SK writes about. It is a path of simplicity in the way that devotion to God eliminates all the tangles of a complex temporal life. The path from confession to atoning action is a path requiring hard work, attention, and intentions based on choices made. The act of repairing, of harmonizing, is itself more than confession. Making amends is to have found the Good and to have actualized one's ability to love in a way that only devotion to God makes possible. It is at the heart of the mystical experience and the mystical way of life.

SK doesn't dwell much on the word “love” in this treatise but implies that this is, in the end, what merging with the Good is all about: the simplicity, the eternal, suffering all but willing only the one thing that makes for purity of heart. The route to this existential state is characterized by patience, perseverance, pausing, and prayer. SK says that one's temporal suffering is a marker, a reminder, that one is on the right path. He makes no promises of reaching the summit of the mountain around which the path winds. In fact, there may not be a single peak but multiple ones in a range of them attained one at a time with the work of a lifetime of trekking. But SK also does not withhold summiting as a part of the journey, even though there may be many summits along the way. It seems to be a process of willing and confession and atonement, perhaps on a daily basis. But he writes that he can't imagine any other way of practicing humility, keeping sorrow and remorse only with God. Broadcasting one's humility is definitely not humility. One's personal abasement and forgiveness is singular, private, and beyond comparison, as there are no comparisons in the unitive state, in eternity. We are on this path as one of continual transformation. When we suffer and lose sight of the path, that alone is the reminder that the path is only temporarily obscured and we are brought back to it by purity of heart.

“But what does it profit a man if he goes further and further and it must be said of him: he never stops going further; when it must be said of him: there was nothing that made him pause? For pausing is not a sluggish repose. Pausing is also movement. It is the inward movement of the heart. To pause is to deepen oneself in inwardness. But going further is to go straight in the direction of superficiality. By that way one does not come to will only one thing.”

Perhaps all these circumlocutions have muddied more than clarified SK's work. He is relentless about his views and hard-nosed about his beliefs but I see them as offerings to my own spiritual life in this temporal life, difficult as they may be to swallow or follow. Thinkers like SK also have worked on their own conflictions and compromises with this temporal life and so that makes their works that much more important for me. SK's ideas about how to think about the spiritual life makes real and practical the trek that can be arduous but fulfilling. How to think about something gives context to the details alive and active in one's life and can consolidate intent and action. I suppose it is SK's uncompromising views that have held me back for so long. As I have matured in my life, I have discovered that hard work is attached to everything meaningful for me. It is attached to education, financial security, defining identity, interpersonal relationships, building a family, facing mortality, and of course love. This last attachment is the hardest and I am still not very far along in understanding how complex it is, but I at least know that it is complicated and personal and integral to my path (not part of the herd mentality so prevalent in our temporal lives today) of what SK says is “purity of heart.”

This piece has several intentions behind it, not the least of which is to confess to the theft of the book long ago, to describe its insistent presence in my life, and to somehow make amends in the way of keeping SK's valuable thoughts in play in a world fraught and compromised and defined in many ways by herd instincts. To “will one thing” is for one individual to aspire to “purity of heart.” Do I will one thing? Do you?

So, at long last, I have come to some terms with SK and his book, averting from his bookshelf gaze no more. But I know that is not the end of his influence or the possibility of a future return to this treatise. That is the mark of an important educational experience that is a contribution to a lifelong journey, a journey to simplicity and purity.