Kierkegaard’s View on Marriage

Preface

The following is a comment made by a fellow WP blogger on one of my posts on Kierkegaard. Because it is very informative and interesting, I decided to turn it into a “guest post”, so that other readers can potentially learn from it. The author is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and did his doctoral thesis on Kierkegaard. So his opinion carries the weight of an expert. However, as he would say himself, to agree with someone just because he is a professor, is like laughing at someone’s joke just because he is the boss. We should evaluate ideas based on their own merits. Enjoy!

Kierkegaard’s View on Marriage

In response to your question about marriage: This was a fraught topic for Kierkegaard, as everyone who knows anything about his biography knows. It is also a topic he repeatedly uses to illustrate the different spheres of existence.

In the esthetic sphere, the ideal relationship is the one that is exciting and new. By definition, that cannot last. Essays such as “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic,” “Silhouettes,” “First Love” and especially “The Seducer’s Diary” in _Either/Or_ all depict erotic desire in different levels of reflection and self-awareness, but whether it is pure animal passion or cunning psychological manipulation, it cannot last because the esthetic is pure passion and passion ends. This is the essential futility of the esthetic life, which the ethical persona Judge William labels “despair.”

In the ethical life, the ethical individual starts with the erotic attraction of love and commits to preserving it over time. Marriage, as a public ceremony before God, places the erotic attraction of the two lovers into a communal and spiritual context. In _Either/Or_’s “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage,” Judge William argues that the permanence of marriage fulfills the promise of erotic love; lovers feel as if they are soul mates who belong together forever, while marriage says “you shall love one another until death,” making the longing of the lovers’ hearts into an eternal command. At that point, the marriage becomes a commitment, even a struggle to preserve erotic love over time, and to conquer time by the power of the ethical relationship.

The different views of marriage are such paradigms for Kierkegaard that he returns to them again in his _Stages on Life’s Way_, and in his _Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions” he uses a wedding to depict the essential ethical relationship as expressed in a religious context.

It is in the religious view of marriage that things get complicated for Kierkegaard studies. In _Repetition_ he depicts a young man who abandons his fiancée without an explanation because he feels that God has forbidden the marriage. In this he seems to be commenting on his own breakup with Regine. In that book, the young man never fully becomes religious, despite giving up his one true love for the sake of his relationship with God; instead, he merely becomes a spiritual poet. In _Fear and Trembling_, published the same day, he seems to be commenting less directly on his own broken engagement, using the idea of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. In both books, the focal character is a man who gives up an ethically and religiously sanctioned relationship to another person for the sake of a personal relationship with God who is making this unique demand on him, while at the same time expecting that God will not really demand the sacrifice be permanent, but also willing to accept if it is. This seems to be both a theological description of faith and a psychological expression of Kierkegaard’s own engagement. Like Abraham offering Isaac to God, Kierkegaard describes in his journals how he gives up his engagement, yet somehow hopes that God will intervene and make it possible for him to marry Regine the same way God returned Isaac to Abraham. But at another point in his journals, Kierkegaard writes that if he had really had faith, he would have stayed with Regine and allowed God to make him a fit husband while also being a Christian. He seems to have been personally confused his whole life over whether he was right to have believed that God had vetoed his marriage, or if that was his own “melancholy.”

What we can see in Kierkegaard’s earlier writings is that marriage is an ethical relationship first and foremost, that takes the passion of love and adds personal commitment as a duty, expressed communally. While the ethical marriage was always done in a church in his day, that alone doesn’t make it religious in the strictest sense. In the strictest sense, the religious takes precedence over the ethical, and one fulfills one’s ethical duties not merely because they are duties but because God has given them as gift and task. In theory, God can demand that a person not marry, and that person’s individual relationship to God will be completely valid; from the ethical standpoint, not marrying is a failure since the ethical is the universal and the universal ideal is marriage and family. But for most religious people, God does not demand an actual break from the ethical; they still live their ethical duties, but grounded in the relationship to God instead of to the universal. This is particularly discussed in _Postscript_’s discussion of resignation, suffering and guilt. Resignation gives up everything for God, like Abraham giving Isaac or Kierkegaard giving Regine. Suffering realizes that the religious life is not a one-and-done sacrifice, but that every moment of existence is surrendering all of one’s esthetic joys and ethical relationships to God and receiving them again from God’s hand. Guilt is realizing that even fulfilling all of these relationships is not enough because we can never do so perfectly and completely, so we always need God to forgive us, validate us and empower us to do it again.

In his later writings (the ones after the _Postscript_) Kierkegaard becomes increasingly strident in his religion, increasingly at odds with the mediocre and self-satisfied culture of Christendom and its religiosity. He begins to emphasize the Christian ideal as real imitation of Christ, including Christ’s suffering without human love or family for support, (“Who is my mother and brothers? Those who do the will of the Father!”). For the majority of us Christians who marry, Christian faith means first recognizing that marriage is not a duty or act of supererogation on our part, not something we should claim credit for; it’s a real gift, an indulgence from God that we can have it so good and still, by God’s grace alone, be accepted as Christians. It’s sort of a hyper-Lutheran position. For Luther, the Law drives us to seek grace through Christ. For Kierkegaard, particularly in his later writings, the life of Christ itself serves as that Law; first we must admit that we fail to do all that God requires, then we can ask forgiveness and grace, and receive it through Jesus Christ.

In that context, falling in love with Leslee was esthetic; committing to each other publicly in marriage was ethical, but (as _Stages on Life’s Way_ says) the ethical is a bridge to the religious and requires a religious foundation (here he also agrees with Kant). We rely on God to enable us to fulfill our marriage vows and to keep our love alive over the years, to revive us when we waver and grow bored or whatever, and to forgive us and help us forgive each other when we are less than perfect lovers for each other. What makes this “Christian” would depend, I guess, on whether you take the early (_Fragments_) or later (_Practice in Christianity_) Kierkegaard’s description. Christ is what breaks the power of sin and anxiety so we can be free to strive to do what we ought, to love without fear and bondage to self-defense; or, Christ is the reminder that this marriage, no matter how hard it seems, is actually much more beautiful and easy than we have any right to expect, so that we can receive it gratefully and also repentantly ask God’s mercy and indulgence so that we might be accepted as Christians despite not literally imitating the life of Christ.

At least, I think that’s his point.