Despairing to Be Oneself

A Brief Devotional from Kierkegaard

Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash

Søren Kierkegaard is one of those writers I am ashamed to admit I haven’t spend much sustained time with. I’m trying to remedy that this summer by reading slowly through his The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard published the book in 1849 under the pseudonym, Anti-Climacus (climacus is Latin for “ladder” and the name attributed to one of the great spiritual masters, John Climacus), perhaps because the work is written from the perspective of one who has already scaled the ladder of divine ascent and is now in a position to give neophytes instruction in the faith. The title picks up on Jesus’ words concerning Lazarus in John 11:4, “This sickness is not unto death.” Kierkegaard argues that physical sickness is not in actuality a sickness unto death. There is a deeper sickness that truly results in death: spiritual despair. Through a series of carefully reiterative reflections, the book explores two fundamental types of human despair: in despair not wanting to be oneself (that is, a spirit) and in despair wanting to be oneself, only apart from faith in God, who is the only sure anchor of the human spirit.

There is much to say about this dense and rich book, and perhaps I’ll give a longer review once I complete it. But for now, I wanted to highlight a passage that speaks to first kind of despair: not wanting to be oneself, which Kierkegaard considers the despair of weakness. This weakness first shows up in terms of what he calls “immediacy”: living at the mercy of pressing, instinctual desires that rob us of our true spiritual dignity. It is despair over the merely “earthly,” which can never satisfy our deepest longings. Kierkegaard goes on to distinguish “the earthly (totality)” and “something earthly (the particular)”. In his words,

When with infinite passion the self despairs in imagination over something earthly, the infinite passion makes of this particular, this something, the earthly in toto [as a whole], that is to say, the totality concept is inherent in and belongs to the despairer. The earthly and temporal as such are precisely what flow out of each other into something, that is, into the particular. It is impossible actually to lose or be deprived of everything earthly, since the totality here is a category of thought. So the self first increases the actual loss infinitely, and then despairs over the earthly in toto. But once this distinction (between despairing over the earthly and despairing over something earthly) is to be applied essentially, an essential advance is also made in consciousness of the self. So this formula, to despair over the earthly, is a dialectical initial expression of the next form of despair [despair of the eternal] (p. 98).

Here’s the picture: We crave something earthly, perhaps something we wish to attain or something we do in fact attain but without true satisfaction. And we invest that earthly thing with an infinite value, such that when we can’t obtain it or when it fails to satisfy, we despair of the earthly altogether. But is not actually possible to lose the earthly entirely, since the earthly is a “category of thought,” that is, a construct that we have built in our minds without reference to the Ultimate. This kind of despair naturally leads to another manifestation of the despair of weakness: despair of the eternal. When the earthly (or something earthly) fails to deliver, we stand face to face with the depths of our despair: despair of faith in God, which amounts to despair over being ourself. Like Calvin, Kierkegaard sees knowledge of God and knowledge of the self as mutually reinforcing. Not wanting to humble ourselves before God in faith amounts to not wanting to be our true self.

That’s all pretty heady stuff. If we were to think about how to apply these observations to the rough and tumble of daily life, we might start by simply questioning our own desires. What earthly thing am I craving? Am I increasing its loss “infinitely,” such that I think I will lose everything if I can’t have it? How can I learn to keep the earthly in its proper perspective (without becoming world-denying)? How can I open my eyes to the many blessings that I already enjoy and how can I refer them all to God, in gratitude, as the Giver of all good gifts? How can I discover my true self—even today—by coming home to God? As Kierkegaard said in another place, “Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself.”