The ladder of thorns

About this book

This dissertation contends that the relationship between human suffering and divine love is an enduring and profound concern for Kierkegaard through the entirety of his literary production, and that he responds by articulating a narrative of human advancement in which sufferings serve to draw the willing individual providentially and maieutically toward the possibility and the life of faith. Kierkegaard constructs a "ladder" of sufferings, as it were, where each rung has its own thorns and where each thorn can serve to transform the individual along the way to authentic subjectivity in faith. Only one wounded on the thorns of the present rung may pass on to the next, and the suffering of these wounds leads to death--and to the "new being" of faith, the highest rung, where one stands and remains only by being wounded continually in "Christian suffering." Through suffering the false self is put to death; in suffering the true self lives truly in the world. The story of the self is a story of suffering from beginning to end. The dissertation moves in a broadly chronological manner through Kierkegaard's evolving treatment of the varieties of sufferings and the varieties of their uses through the love of God for the transformation of the spirit. What emerges is a novel way of reading Kierkegaard, his project and his place in the intellectual discourse of modernity. Understanding Kierkegaard as an interpreter of suffering brings clarity to his undervalued works as well as his most celebrated, and to his readings in premodern Christian sources as well as modern. By connecting Kierkegaard's early (largely pseudonymous) reflections of melancholy, depression, despair, and anxiety with his later writings on "religious suffering" and "Christian suffering," one can see the whole of Kierkegaard's corpus in the coherence of its fundamental concerns and the continuity of its treatment of the suffering self, suffering Christian and suffering Church. Moreover, this approach reveals the "attack upon Christendom" at the end of Kierkegaard's life not as a departure from sanity, but as the final unfolding of his critique of modern Christendom for neglecting the "price" of faith.