Grundtvig og Søren Kirkegaard
Authors: Toftdahl Hellmut 
Published: September 2020

Grundtvig and Søren KierkegaardBy Hellmut ToftdahlHellmut Toftdahl admits at the beginning of his article, the subject of which is Grundtvig seen in the light of Kierkegaard that it could look like a misrepresentation to talk about one Grundtvig, since research has divided his production into various parts on the basis of various criteria. But he maintains that it is justified by his method, which is inspired by phenomenology. This method is to uncover the ego’s meeting with the world by stating the ontological conditions according to which the ego realizes its existence.With reference to Rollo May and Heidegger he says that phenomenology considers existence thus: man has been thrown into the world without life-lines, and with the knowledge that the only sure thing is death. In this meaningless existence man must establish himself as a meaning-creating existence and all his thoughts and production must be considered results of this process. The world does not exist as an objective fact. It is eternally renewed in a double implication between subject and object. The world is always the product of the activity of the individual - and particularly when it concerns an author or a philosopher, his work can be looked upon as an expression of his attitude to existence; his work is his way of “having” the world or experiencing the world.Phenomenology applied to Grundtvig’s works does not isolate the different aspects of his activities and is not interested in what Grundtvig thought in 1810, 1825 or 1832, because it does not concern itself so much with what a person thinks, as with the pre-conscious, unreflected plane of consciousness. Phenomenology tries to view Grundtvig as impartially as possible. It does not consider him an object for psychoanalysis or systematic science, because any systematic method presupposes a preconceived attitude in the scholar which firmly confines the meeting between him and Grundtvig within certain frameworks, and we are then presented with Grundtvig the historian, the theologian or the poet, but the Grundtvig who held these opinions about existence disappears completely behind the opinions themselves. It is Grundtvig the integral man, who formulated his theology, his poetry and his historical philosophy as answers to questions he asked himself, whom phenomenology is trying to reach, by taking up as open an attitude as possible and not isolating certain aspects of his activity. Phenomenology presupposes that behind the many ideas is an ego, which is not identical with these ideas, that the real arena for the battles of the individual is not found on the conscious plane, where the ideas are produced, but on the pre-conscious plane where the individual constitutes himself as an individual, with absurdity as a constant threat to his productiveness.The contrast between life and death is a common feature of Grundtvig’s philosophy. Life is very extensive in its various meanings. Like most of Grundtvig’s concepts, it is loaded with connotations. Not only does it signify biological life in contrast to biological death, but it also describes man as a fulfilled member of the fellowship of men. Life, light, joy and fulfilment are closely connected associations, all in contrast to death. Death, loneliness, darkness, powerlessness, despair and emptiness belong together. Death is apparent in all human cohabitation, being the destructive forces which result in the isolation of man from God and his neighbour. Today psychologists call it depression, modern philosophers alienation.To Grundtvig life is a battlefield where irreconcilable opponents, concretized in the image of God and the Devil, fight for supremacy. This dualism pervades the whole of Grundtvig’s philosophy, affecting his theology as well as his ethics; the concept of truth and falsehood is also included in the fundamental contrasts.Truth and falsehood are not primarily questions of right or wrong, but of to be or not to be. To be or to exist in truth simply means to exist as a whole human being. To exist in falsehood means to exist on untenable assumptions. Such a dualistic picture of the universe presupposes that some contrasts are absolute and irreconcilable - that there are contrasts that can be decided on with a clear yes or no.Within the Church the same principle is expressed in the renunciation and the confession of faith, through which the Christian renounces evil and accepts goodness. The principle of contradiction became, together with the “unique discovery” of the confession of faith and personal experience of sin, proof of the fundamental contrast between truth and falsehood. On the intellectual plane, this “ fundamental law of thought” means that man’s thoughts are tied and his spiritual thoughts would disintegrate if this law were not respected. One can say that Grundtvig sets a limit to free thinking by this very thought; he recognizes that there are thoughts which endanger the survival of the individual, and it is his conviction that the individual is able to keep the negative thoughts away by deliberately suppressing them. This conviction came to form the psychological basis of his Christianity, which combines human existence with a spark of divine truth.A typical Grundtvig quotation from a theological magazine (1825) illustrates this:“ I believe in a God who is living truth personified, for it is true that he will do everything possible in order to lead man to recognition of truth; and by creating the world he has at least undeniably proved that he can do more than we understand” .Grundtvig’s belief in God is thus closely connected with his need for different existential values. God guarantees the contrasts which are necessary in order that man can fulfill himself by choosing goodness. Through his conscience man has contact with God, and it is up to the individual whether or not he believes in the testimony of his conscience when he has to make a choice. Grundtvig thus makes the choice more or less voluntary, but it cannot be difficult for the individual to make a decision, when the opposite of conscience is stamped as lies and falsehood. By making conscience the evidence of truth, he has created a psychological basis for belief which cannot stand up to a dialectical analysis.Grundtvig’s faith has the character of a psychosomatic-conditioned means of escape from the responsibility of decision during what Kierkegaard would call: The Hazard of the Spirit. Grundtvig does not recognize that suspension of conscience which Kierkegaard in “Frygt og Bæven” has shown to be necessary for the thinking human being in exceptional cases. In his conception of conscience Grundtvig is an ethicist in Kierkegaard’s terminology. To Grundtvig man is not independent. On the contrary, selfwilledness will kill conscience together with everything else pertaining to the senses, leaving only a powerless shadow, what the German philosophers have called “practical sense” , said Grundtvig in 1825.Hellmut Toftdahl now looks at man’s role in the Church; the duty of the individual parishioner is reduced to going to church and being accepted in the congregation, in order to hear God’s word or what the minister postulates is really God’s word. The Gospel can have a life-giving effect, if the minister is in possession of the living word, which is the gift of the Holy Ghost. On the other hand, a congregation can also be at the mercy of a minister’s oratorical powers, which emerges clearly from the terms Grundtvig uses to describe the process to which man is subjected, when he accepts the word; terms such as “penetrate” , “merge” , “ kindle” . Submission to another person’s oratorical talents will be reassuring to those who need redemption of their ego. In the enchantment of the great visions, the existential problems are momentarily forgotten, but an independently thinking individual must be sceptical of the living word and react against its peculiar characteristic: the momentary enchantment. To sceptics the living word is a form of demagogy.Here Hellmut Toftdahl turns to Kierkegaard’s criticism of the living word and the mentality which this presupposes. Kierkegaard and Grundtvig knew each other personally. When Kierkegaard’s father was still alive, Grundtvig visited his home fairly frequently, and Kierkegaard’s brother became a faithful follower of Grundtvig. Their comments on each other were far from being unbiassed, and in his diaries Kierkegaard could be frankly impertinent. This of course was due to the fact that they only knew each other superficially, but at the same time it suggests that they were not altogether unaware of each other.Even before he had started writing seriously, Kierkegaard mentions Grundtvig if not with admiration then with a certain appreciation of him as a person. To a fellow student Kierkegaard freely admitted that Grundtvig was “a genius, yes, a genius, for a genius is somebody who discovers something, and that Grundtvig has certainly done.” Kierkegaard could admire the lonely young Grundtvig, fighting with belief and disbelief, but when he put forward his visions as great discoveries, Kierkegaard dismissed him as a “twaddler.” “At one time, says Kierkegaard, one could have this impression of Grundtvig: he looks as if he could become someone who truthfully aims at ONE goal. But since then he has become depraved by the evils of our time, which can be designated by the expression “both-and”, both one thing and another. To have a manse and a few thousand Rigsdaler - and then at the same time be a kind of apostle, that is a contradiction.” Kierkegaard was full of indignation because Grundtvig managed to combine idealistic work and a living.According to Kierkegaard, Grundtvig began already at the end of the 1830’s to move away from that form of sermon which bore witness to strong and healthy preaching. After what may have been his first visit to Vartov Church, Kierkegaard was anything but edified by Grundtvig’s preaching: “All his preaching is nothing but a constantly repeated exodus of the imagination; the legs cannot keep up, it is just a weekly evacuation“. His sermon lacked the personal demand and the courage that dares to attach importance to the ego.Yet Kierkegaard was not an opponent of the congregation as such – only when it became an audience. For him, the individual in the congregation exists actively as a quality, but he can also at any moment become greater than the congregation, namely when the others do not “live up to the Idea”. Kierkegaard did not attack Grundtvig for emphasizing the importance of fellowship within the congregation, but for changing God’s congregation into an audience by relaxing the demands on the individual, who might forget himself while listening to Grundtvig’s poetic and historical visions: “Any historical representation is, by comparison with the religious one, mere entertainment. The listener forgets himself in hearing about Luther and the sunrise and some “unique discovery” made in Copenhagen. But when it comes to religion, it is a negative thing to forget oneself and a positive thing to become personally engaged. Taking a keen look at the history of the world cannot replace a healthy look into oneself, unique discoveries, even of gunpowder, cannot make up for the lack of self-knowledge.“To Kierkegaard, the worst thing about the Church was that it gave its members a false sense of security; therefore he felt himself called to sound the alarm against such illusions and to undertake a radical revision of what it means to be a Christian. Kirkegaard stresses the importance of receiving Christ as the model that we do not resemble and as the Redeemer who is full of mercy if we humble ourselves. Christ-likeness cannot be attained in this life of struggle and affliction, but only in eternity, and therefore the idea of a congregation in this life is an impatient anticipation of eternity: the “ congregation” does not belong to time, but to eternity. Kierkegaard’s concept of “ the congregation“ thus seems eschatological, whereas Grundtvig’s congregation is Christ’s real, concrete connection with the world, a distinction that Henning Høirup has pointed out.Hellmut Toftdahl, however, does not think that Kierkegaard’s concept of the congregation is eschatological, his concept of eternity militating against such a view. Eternity to Kierkegaard is not related to time, but to an existence where time has been eliminated, succession abolished and distances replaced by the eventful present; eternity is a stationary NOW. That the congregation belongs to eternity means, then, that it comes into being where eternity is created in time, that is, where man becomes the individual who receives. It is, in other words, a congregation of individualists that Kierkegaard is talking about, not a crowd like the Grundtvigian circle of friends, who are members of a kind of association. Kierkegaard’s congregation is a group of people existing now, who have, by chance, at the same time and in the same place, turned towards their “ eternal Self” ; it is a happening, which in Kierkegaardian terms must be said to belong to eternity - eternity within time. Grundtvig’s congregation is admitted to Christ through a common arrangement between minister and congregation. Kierkegaard’s congregation seeks out Christ together, imitating His fervour. The difference lies in the inner activity and emotion of the individual member of the congregation.Grundtvig, like Kierkegaard, was aware of the danger inherent in theology influenced by orthodoxy: the danger of forgetting man while speculating on the right doctrines with regard to existence, of letting too much thinking hinder fulfillment of life. Through his many battles with himself, Grundtvig came to the conclusion that Christianity in its original form was narrow. He was against Lutheran orthodoxy and penitential Christianity, which regarded life on earth as an exile, a pilgrimage towards a better life hereafter. To Grundtvig, this form of Christianity takes the colour out of life and saps the strength of Christian absolution and redemption. Life on earth justifies itself, not just as a roundabout way of becoming a Christian, but as a prerequisite for the constant growth and development of the Christian life. Only if this life is lived to the full, can Christianity be found. “First a man, and then a Christian.”It was also Kierkegaard’s mission to save what is human, but he does it in a more differentiated way than Grundtvig, as a result of his philosophical schooling. He is above all against the philosophy, inspired by Hegel, that can be briefly characterized as: over-reflection and identification of thought with being. Kierkegaard does not talk in general terms about being a human being in one or other social context, like, for instance, Karl Marx. He is an ontologist and, therefore, speaks mostly of existentialism, about how to exist as an individual. He says that in order to explain how to live religiously, he has gone as far back as possible, namely to the question of living as a human being, because “ if one has forgotten what it is to live religiously, one will also have forgotten what it is to live as a human being.”Grundtvig wanted to save man from religious speculation by giving him something concrete, the words of the Sacraments and the living word in human fellowship as opposed to dead thinking. Kierkegaard wanted to save man from losing himself in speculative thinking. But Kierkegaard goes deeper than Grundtvig, because Grundtvig finds the solution in dogmatics, i.e. new speculative knowledge, whereas Kierkegaard penetrates the speculative systematization by means of this very systematization: logic applied with enormous energy. At the time of Grundtvig and Kierkegaard the age of the artisan and the craftsman was dying out, to be replaced by the age of the machine. The creators - and pillars - of this new society became the producers who, naturally, formed the community in accordance with their demands for maximum consumption.As a result, the bourgeoisie, the artists and the intellectuals were made homeless in this society which they had not helped to establish. Consequently, the large majority today enjoy the products of the Industrial Age, while the intellectuals are on the whole divided into two camps: a conservative group which cultivates absurdity and alienation and a revolutionary faction which recognizes absurdity and alienation, but still believes that it is possible to change society.Far-sighted philosophers in the 19th century were aware that these problems would arise in the society of the future, where the individual would be suppressed by a stronger collective force. The objective of Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche became: how to remain oneself in spite of the increasing threat of annihilation of the individual. Therefore these philosophers are “modern” in so far as the problems they discuss still concern people today. In an assessment of the relation between Kierkegaard and Grundtvig, it might be relevant to study the attitude of both to the welfare-problem called “ alienation.”The expression itself derives from Karl Marx who used it in a similar context, but Marx believed that the phenomenon would disappear in a Communist society, where man would rediscover his value as a creative individual. Marx equated human identity with creative development, but overlooked the fact that in his development man can come up against forces he cannot control, if he develops without being limited by some inner or outer authority.It is on this point that Kierkegaard becomes topical. He also sees man as the will to development, but irreligious existence leads to despair, “ sickness unto death” , because during his development man becomes more and more alien to himself, a living corpse without identity. When man has been forced into complete freedom of existence, the condition that is characterized by “ subjectivity is truth” , and he then despairs, then he meets God in the paradoxical realization that subjectivity as truth is falsehood. The meeting with God is inevitable, because it is a paradox to wish to become a whole, when one has recognized that one has nothing to hold on to, nothing objectively recognizable, and the paradox is in fact God. To Kierkegaard, knowledge of God is a consequence of self-knowledge, and the despair, the living death, the alienation is the void from which alone one can gain the self-knowledge that results in knowledge of God. Any attempt to find a short cut only leads to despair.The relation to God is then not a question of new speculative understanding. It is an ethical demand to man to rid himself of the indignation and feeling of absurdity, arising from a state of emergency. God, in Kierkegaard's theology, is the will to create instead of to despair, but this creation comes about by virtue of the absurd, because man in his despair has recognized his nothingness. Faith is thus no cure for this sickness unto death, but in the passion of faith one forms a self in spite of despair. The conflict between faith and despair creates tension, and the criterion of the true believer is whether or not he can endure this constant tension and not seek reassurance in objective knowledge or other people’s oratorical gifts. In specifically Christian religiousness, Christ is paradoxically a personification, in time, of God, that is, of the will and unique ability to become an intensely existing self. God is an ontological idea; this idea emerges personified in Christ, the paradox being that an idea can become flesh and blood. Christ becomes a model for the Christian who has no identity. By imagining himself contemporary with Christ, he tries to imitate Christ’s intensity of existence; there is no question of any objective reassurance: the objective historical details about Christ are of secondary importance to the Kierkegaardian Christian. That subjectivity becomes falsehood does not mean that objectivity becomes truth. Objectivity is not an alternative to subjectivity, it is the above-mentioned tension between faith and uncertainty.Any short cut to Christianity and thus to selfknowledge, without despair, is not possible according to Kierkegaard. Not even happiness is without despair, “ for deep, deep down, in the secret recesses of happiness lives apprehension which is despair.“On these points Kierkegaard scores heavily against Grundtvig. If despair and alienation are the necessary needle’s eye leading to intense Christianity, which in the Kierkegaardian conception means any intense existence whatever, then there is much to object to in Grundtvig’s theology as well as in his whole cultural programme.Grundtvig’s extensive visions have above all not been carefully enough thought out. He lifts up creation and man, rid of the strain of penance. His attempts at secularization and popular enlightenment must be seen as part of the aim to make people live a natural human existence. But, as Kierkegaard has pointed out, his secularization lacks judgement, for secularization as a spontaneous measure, taught as a unique discovery, is not proof against independent thinking: “All spontaneity in spite of illusory confidence and calm is apprehension.”Grundtvig’s living word can just as well be used as a means of leading man to inhumanity as to humanity, unless the person using it at the same time sharpens his audience’s critical sense - and then it is no longer the living word. Grundtvig did not have our experience of today of how the living word can be misused by ideologists, but that does not justify his constant urge to reassure his followers with regard to the critical reflection that Kierkegaard represented.Kierkegaard does not promise that it is possible to reach the land of the living, but he assumes that it will at least be possible to see the promised land in the distance - that land being the intensity of Christ; possible, however, only after several battles against the demons in the land of darkness. It was these battles that he described in his works and which eventually burnt him up.Grundtvig avoided the battle with the demons of darkness. At some point he talks about death as “ complete emptiness and powerlessness” but “what death really is I can as little try to explain as what Hell is, because in both cases it would be like measuring the bottomless, which one can only do by throwing oneself in, and it would be stupid to be persuaded to do that. I leave that venture to those who have lives to lose; I have only one to find, and that, I know, is not to be found in the bottomless abyss of death.”The Kierkegaardian disease is that of the demon, reserve, such as he describes it in “Begrebet Angest” , but it is a disease that results from information about existence and the introspection that is a consequence of this - a spontaneous human being is confronted with different ways of interpreting his existence, and has to choose his own himself. Behind Grundtvig’s ideas about popularization, which were reflected in the folk high school movement, was the desire to bring education to as many people as possible and thereby to sharpen their critical perception, which is the result of insight into the depths of the human soul. It therefore seems that the Grundtvigian cultural programme contains the germ of the Kierkegaardian problem: the despair of alienation in isolation. Grundtvig simply did not look deep enough into man or at least dared not tell what he saw. On this point Kierkegaard was ahead of his time; he anticipated the psychology of depth.Grundtvig’s importance lies in his representing the humanism that stresses the value of fellowship, but in an era like ours, which sharpens man’s reflective ability by attaching importance to intellectual education, the Grundtvigian edification must be supplemented by Kierkegard’s scepticism and greater power of definition, if the edification is to be credible and thus tenable.Each of them stressed his own side of the activity of human consciousness: the introvert and the extrovert, without either of them being able to combine the two sides in one and the same person. Hence the antagonism between them: maybe they themselves instinctively sensed that they were each other’s missing half.Today more and more people become just sufficiently educated to believe themselves “ emancipated” from the traditional forms of fellowship and authority, e.g. church, marriage; all that is lacking is that little extra education, which restores to these traditions their lost spontaneous value, the process Kierkegaard called “ the repeat” or “ the double movement of infinity” . Here Grundtvig still has a legitimate function.But if Grundtvigian humanism is to survive, it must realize that no fellowship today can be established at the expense of the desire for critical reflection; that the way to Grundtvig goes via Kierkegaard: KIERKEGAARD FIRST – THEN GRUNDTVIG.