One Thing
A good friend of mine has found occasion to quote Kierkegaard
on almost every occasion. On account of
this friend, an utterly decent man, I filed an item in the back of my mind to
pick up something of Kierkegaard and meet him for myself. Of course I had two unspoken, but prominent,
impressions of Kierkegaard also in the back of my mind, and these date back
many years. The first brings a fear of
dense prose and compact ideas stretched into long threads of meandering
exploration. Such imagery came through a
certain tone of voice, a subtle turning of eye brows and lowing of posture, all
of which shaded the few, or fewer, words, something like, “whoa. Kierkegaard.”
But the second impression comes from similar nonverbal cues, of near-contempt
and even ridicule for a thing called “Existentialism,” a category I somehow knew
held claim on Kierkegaard. And so, by
means of these two impressions, both phantoms, years passed without my having
met him. And then my friend gave me a
copy of Purity of Heart is to Will One
Thing[i].
In it Kierkegaard expounds on purification of heart,
emanating from the following text of St. James:
“Draw
nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.
Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double
minded.” (Jam 4:8, KJV)
He unfolds his message in a symmetrical, almost sonata,
form.
I. Man and The Eternal – Willing One Thing: 2
chapters
II. The Barriers: 5 chapters
III. The Cost: 4 chapters
IV. Application: 3 chapters
V. Man and the Eternal - Conclusion
The first 2 chapters (I) set up the main thesis,
that “to will one thing” is both the achievement and the process of acquiring a
pure heart. A direct line links the text
given above to Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God.” By means of
this connection, his thesis is clear: Removing
double mindedness purifies the heart; only the pure in heart may see God. He adds to this logic the insight that the
essential divide between man and God is ontological: man’s nature is bound in time, where God’s is
eternal. The first chapter, therefore,
is called “Introduction: Man and the Eternal.”
The Eternal is one, the time-bound many; double mindedness, therefore,
keeps a man bound in time in a multitude of cares. For a man to see God he must set
his mind and actions upon the one, eternal, the Good, which emanates from the
nature of God, Himself. This is what
Kierkegaard means, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
The text of St. James speaks of purifying ones
heart, which Kierkegaard addresses in chapter 2: “Remorse, Repentance,
Confession: Eternity’s Emissaries to Man.”
This chapter is a beautiful work of poetic prose, painting an image of
remorse and repentance as strong but merciful attendants or sentinels along a
man’s walk through life. Remorse is an
agent of the Past by which a man, seeing the wrong of past action, feels guilt
and a desire for the wrong to be corrected.
Repentance, the complementary agent of the future, represents potential
for changed actions, and in Kierkegaard’s rendering Repentance is that urgent
prompt that moves a man, like Zacchaeus, to say in earnest, “Behold, Lord, the
half of my goods I give to the poor; and if have taken any thing from any man
by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.” (Luke 19:8, KJV) So the time-bound man has these ever present agents
beckoning him to look to eternity.
“The
indolent man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the
eternal in a man. … repentance and remorse know how to make use of time in fear
and trembling.” [p. 41]
And then Kierkegaard makes this most insightful and
wise observation:
“[The
repenting man] in this precipitate moment when labored thoughts and various
passions are acutely active … may so easily be mistaken about that which is
really to be repented.” [p.
43]
Consequently, a man, moved by the strong feelings
that follow remorse, needs help to avoid presumption, for example, presuming
himself to be at fault for the troubles suffered by others. Such help comes in the office of confession, which
in Kierkegaard’s usage is not a sacramental rite (the formal rite is not ruled out). The key is for the repentant
man to be still, to enter into silence so that he may take sober consideration
of his wrongs; it is a necessary preparation.
And then the repentant man must follow up actually confessing it to God,
and setting on the course of new action.
Thus, in these opening chapters Kierkegaard lays out
a template for the life of repentance for the purifying of one’s heart. The next twelve chapters expound on variations
of double mindedness, the very impurity from which the heart must be cleansed:
“…purify your hearts ye double minded.”
Here is just one example.
The habit of debunking good men by showing them to
have benefited from their good deeds has been common place. We have grown accustomed to it, so much so
that Kierkegaard’s chapter 6 might pass us by.
Its subtitle is “Egocentric Service of the Lord.” But Kierkegaard is not interested in finding
fault with, or undermining, others.
Rather he seeks to alert us to our own capacity for self deception. Here is the core of the idea:
“When… a
man desires that the Good shall be victorious, when he will not call the
outcome of the battle ‘victory,’ if he
wins, but only when the Good is victorious: can he then, in any sense, be
called and be double minded?” [p. 91]
C. S. Lewis, from The Four Loves, provides a useful sketch:
“Mrs.
Fidget very often said that she lived for her family. And it was not untrue. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew it…She did
all the washing; true, she did it badly, and they could have afforded to send
it out to a laundry, and they frequently begged her not to do it. But she did.[ii]”
Mrs. Fidget in reality is self-absorbed. Her pride drives her to achieve the image of
a martyr for her family, with the distorted belief that the unpleasantness attests
to her success. The hallmarks of her achievement? (1) Doing what she can’t do well; (2) Doing
what she doesn’t enjoy; (3) Enduring the resistance of others; (4) “Having” to
neglect her own needs. An increase in
each of these directly increases both her sense of achievement and the misery
of her family. And she cannot, in the
least, retreat from these actions: it is not a victory for Good, if she wins. This in turn ties back to the main point,
that what appears single minded is really double minded—split focus between the
temporal and the eternal.
Kierkegaard lays out all his observations with this kind
of piercing insight. And he approaches
it, so to speak, from the inside out, from Mrs. Fidget’s perspective. In manner similar to Augustine’s Confessions, Kierkegaard offers his
discussion in praise of the Eternal (God), through the lens of personal
experience, for the purpose of helping his readers to find remorse, repentance,
and confession.
Kierkegaard was not what I had expected—tangled
concepts of overly analyzed navel gazing.
That seems to be the view of Existentialists. Rather, I found him to be honest, clear, deeply
insightful of the human condition, and deeply devoted to searching out God’s
will. That devotion leads to his
recommendations on living single mindedly, particularly Chapter 14, subtitled “Occupation
and Vocation; Means and End.”
I’m pleased to have met him. Hopefully, you will want to meet him, too.
The outline below is the book’s table of contents,
but with formatting to clearly show the overarching logic.
Chapters
1-2: What is Willing One Thing
1. Introduction: Man and the Eternal
2. Remorse, Repentance, and Confession: Eternity’s Emissaries to Man
Chapters
3-7: Barriers to Willing One Thing
3. Variety and Great Moments are Not One Thing
4. The Reward Disease
5. Willing out of Fear of Punishment
6. Egocentric Service of the Lord
7. Commitment to a Certain Degree
Chapters
8-11: The Price of Willing One Thing
8. Commitment, Loyalty, Readiness to Suffer All
9. The Exposure of Evasions
10. An Examination of the Extreme Case of an Incurable Sufferer
11. The Sufferer’s Use of Cleverness to Expose Evasion
Chapters
12-14: What Then Must I Do?
12. The Listener’s Role in a Devotional Address
13. Live as an “Individual”
14. Occupation and Vocation; Means and End
Chapter
15: Conclusion
15. Conclusion: Man and the Eternal
[i] Soren
Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will
One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (HarperCollins paperback edition, 2008)
[ii] C.S.
Lewis, The Four Loves (New York, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1960), p. 49
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