Reading, Repentance and the Crucifixion of the Image

Abstract

In the course of the last two chapters I have attempted to show how drama and literature provide us with clearly defined paradigms of reading and interpretation which open up important dimensions of Kierkegaard’s many-levelled work as an author. In doing so they also disclose a tension which runs through virtually every line of the authorship: the tension between the aesthetic and the religious. Yet though they allude to — perhaps, on occasion, even speak explicitly about — the religious situation which Kierkegaard claims is the determining element in every human life, they do not themselves depict that situation directly. To be sure, the need for repentance is clearly broached in Kierkegaard’s ‘novels’, but this is only a preliminary to the religious point of view in the full sense. For, first, repentance is only an initial moment in religious existence. Although Kierkegaard does not regard repentance as something we do once-for-all in the emotional heat of a revival meeting but as an act which needs to be continuously repeated in the course of the Christian life, it is nonetheless essentially transitional only, and does not itself determine the final goal or content of faith. Secondly, the kind of literary reading of Kierkegaard which we have undertaken so far only illuminates one aspect of repentance; for such a reading can only show us the need for repentance as that is experienced within the context of aesthetic despair — whether that despair is figured in the defiant personality of the Seducer or in the angst-ridden nonentity of the Quidam. It cannot show us the other side, as it were, of repentance; that is, it does not show us how repentance is connected with the rest of the religious life.