In the presence of God. He's growing older, Kierkegaard, though he is not so very old. Older – though, in a sense, he's already outlived himself. He began his authorship with full certainty that he was reaching his end. Wouldn't he die, like his siblings, at 34? 34: and in his 35th year? his 36th?
He had outlived himself and outlived his authorship, which culminated – peaked – in the 700 page Concluding Unscientific Postscript … his summa, his anti-summa, written, like so many of his works, under a pseudonym. Outliving himself, he began again, now making himself the deliberate target of a satirical review. He invited their jibes; welcomed them.
Wasn't he soon to write that blessedness consists in suffering mockery for a good cause? Well, he was mocked. He was – mostly in his own head – reviled. But wasn't he to write, in the last period of his authorship, that suffering was the sanctifying mark of God? Wasn't he to claim that the school of sufferings was a dying to and quiet lessons in dying to the world and worldliness?
After all, Christ himself was lowly – or his lowliness, the fact that he was a poor, suffering and finally powerless human being, was inextracable from his loftiness, that he claimed to be God and spoke and acted as though he were God.
The Christian suffers. He must suffer, if he is to be a witness to the truth. He must die away from the world, to forsake all to follow Christ. And in this sense, for Kierkegaard, more is asked of the Christian than of Abraham in the Old Testament, who was asked only to give up his son.
To foresake the world; to give it up – that is Christianity, and that is also the freedom of Christianity. For to suffer for the Gospel – to live, like the apostles, in poverty, lowliness and abasement; to be mocked, insulted and hated: this is to prepare the way for developing our inwardness, of becoming the individual God wants us to be.
For God, too, suffers when we do not. God suffers, says Kierkegaard, when he sees what his church has become, when he sees in Christendom only the emptying of the content of Christian language, liturgy and belief. 'There is truly a fellowship of suffering with God', Kierkegaard says, 'a pact of tears, which is intrinsically very beautiful'.
A pact of tears: then our suffering must be an analogue of God's, just as it is an analogue of Christ's. Then we must learn the poverty of our earthly riches. Then we must learn that to lose is to gain, and that to accept suffering might also be to invert its meaning, to regard it as our honour, as our pride.
The way of hardship is the only way to perfection. And the way of increasing hardship – for the further one goes, the more one understands one's shortcomings and sin, the more that grace is the gift we need, even as, at the same time, we know the joy that grace does come.
And so hardship and joy are one; so suffering harbours the possibility of freedom, and the exodus is also a way of coming to the kingdom. That's what Kierkegaard understood, as he came to the end. In his last writings, discovered, after his death, laid out for the printer on his desk, he calls the suffering of his life the work of God's love.
A pact of tears – but what a pact, what a covenant! Kierkegaard wept – and outlived his death sentence. He wept – and, after his first authorship, began his second. Now was the time for clarity. Now was a reckoning-time, the Christian versus Christendom. And so Kierkegaard went into his desert.
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