SKC Project Seminar: Vanessa Rumble

(Boston College, USA)

"At opleve det at døe": Life, Death and Despair in The Sickness unto Death

When Anti-Climacus opens The Sickness unto Death with a reference to Christ’s raising of Lazarus from the dead, the reader does not experience the same abrupt descent into into Biblical hermeneutics that is faced by the reader of Fear and Trembling. Here, it is not a question of the near sacrifice of a child but rather of an adult’s reawakening. Indeed, Christ’s manifestation of salvific power over life and death seems very much of a piece with the overt theme of The Sickness unto Death, namely, the overcoming of despair through Christian faith in the forgiveness of sins. For this reason, the inclusion of the story of Lazarus in the Introduction awakens no specific concerns.

On closer inspection, however, the Introduction to The Sickness unto Death is puzzling for a number of reasons.  The reader faces a repeated opposition drawn between two opposing interpretations of death and of danger, the one interpretation referring to a perspective on life and death based on Christian presuppositions (“christelig forstaaet”) while the human perspective (“menneskelig talt”) is said to be simply distinct.  This split understanding suggests, to cut to the chase, a potential for despair at the heart of the very narrative that is to illustrate its overcoming. And indeed John 11, upon reflection, reveals itself to be a very tight interweaving of distress over earthly death and faith in its overcoming.

Following a line of thought suggested by these reflections, I wish (1) to develop a renewed consideration of how “the human” relates to “the Christian” in this text and, along the same lines, I wish (2) to question the accepted wisdom concerning the relation of The Concept of Anxiety, to The Sickness unto Death. The accepted wisdom is based on an understanding of The Concept of Anxiety as operating more or less on a humanistic framework (human failing amounts to a failure to affirm and embrace one’s freedom), in marked contrast to the specifically Christian framework of Part II of The Sickness unto Death. I wish to suggest, by contrast, that the central theological and philosophical concerns of the two works, as well as Kierkegaard’s techniques for communicating these concerns, are very much of a piece.