December 21, 2023

Re: Kierkegaard on Christmas, or: What Does the Nativity of Jesus Have to Do with THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY?

Søren Kierkegaard has been associated with a number of concepts and movements over the years, from “the absurd” and “the leap of faith” to Romanticism and deconstruction. Indeed, the nicknames he has received reflect such weighty company: “The Fork” (due to his barbed polemics), “The Melancholy Dane,” and, weightiest of all, “The Father of Existentialism.” Even if we zero in on Kierkegaard’s interest in Christianity—an interest that, in works such as On My Work as an Author (Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed, 1851), he lodged at the heart of his literary production—we encounter a number of ponderous subjects. Kierkegaard is a thinker of imitatio Christi and a so-called “attacker” of conventional Christianity. Two of his greatest books bear the respective titles of Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven, 1843) and The Sickness unto Death (Sygdommen til Døden, 1849). I remember leading a class on the latter at a church in Charlottesville, Virginia years ago, and a friend refused to attend on account of the name alone!

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that we rarely associate Kierkegaard with the joyful season of Christmas—a period of time that, in a secular terms, runs from the end of November (or even earlier) to the first day of January. As the song by Edward Pola (1907-95) and George Wyle (1916-2003) famously puts it:

It's the most wonderful time of the year
With the kids jingle belling
And everyone telling you be of good cheer
It's the most wonderful time of the year

It's the hap-happiest season of all
With those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings
When friends come to call
It's the hap-happiest season of all

Is there any way to reconcile the “Melancholy Dane” with the “hap-happiest season of all”? Or is Kierkegaard’s ironic philosophy and Good Friday-tinged theology simply too stringent for Christmastide? I’m going to explore these questions in three ways: (i) by surveying references to Christmas in Kierkegaard’s published writings, (ii) by doing the same in his posthumously issued journals and papers, and (iii) by highlighting a few common ideas and themes from this batch of occasional remarks and observations.

As is often the case with Kierkegaard, the upshot will not be a systematic assessment of the import of Christmas. And yet, as is also generally true of the Dane’s thinking, there will be much to consider and to learn from. As will be seen, Kierkegaard’s experience of Christmas has a decidedly Dickensian ring. In A Christmas Carol (1843), which came out a mere two months after Fear and Trembling, Charles Dickens casts Ebenezer Scrooge as an arch critic of Christmas revelry: “I don't make merry myself at Christmas,” Scrooge gripes, “and I can't afford to make idle people merry.” At times, Kierkegaard verges on Scrooge-esque contempt for the holiday, particularly as it was celebrated in the halls of bourgeois Christianity. And yet, Kierkegaard refused to abandon Christmas altogether, slowly but surely coming to accept that it represents an appropriate dialectical counterpoint to the New Testament’s call to imitate Christ. If it is wrong to blithely glorify the “Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Infant Jesus, [who] don't even know a word yet, just a little infant, so cuddly, but still omnipotent” (more on that below!), then it is equally wrong to forget that God’s grace lies at the heart of Christianity. Imitation and gift are inseparably bound.

References to Christmas in Kierkegaard’s Published Writings

It should be said upfront that Kierkegaard does not mention Christmas often in his published writings. Moreover, a number of these references are indirect. For example, in March 1844, Kierkegaard published the upbuilding discourse “Patience in Expectancy” (Taalmod i Forventning), which is based on a pericope from the first Sunday after Christmas—namely, Luke 2:33-40. This is a striking passage on a number of levels, though, most notably, it has to do with the paradoxicalness of Jesus’ birth: the Christ child is at once an occasion for “thanks…unto the Lord” and a “sign which shall be spoken against” (Luke 2:34, 38).

Kierkegaard makes another allusion to Christmas in what may be his magnum opus, the labyrinthine Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler, 1846). Late in this book, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus takes up the topic of a “childhood faith” in Jesus Christ. Many Christians, particularly those who view themselves as “true believers,” recommend such a simple faith. As Climacus sees it, this approach is “often well intentioned,” but it cannot help but bracket out the suffering at the core of the Christian story:

When a child is told about Christianity…it appropriates all that is gentle, childlike, endearing, and heavenly. It lives together with the little Jesus-child, with the angels, and with the three kings; it sees the star in the dark night, journeys the long road, and now is in the stable, wonder upon wonder, and always sees the heavens open; with all the inwardness of the imagination he longs for these pictures. And now let us not forget the peppermints and all the other magnificent things that come out on that occasion.

For Climacus, it is understandable that people enjoy this sort of religiosity, for it accords with human desires. We want to recognize God. We want to be assured that God is strong and benevolent—and that his power is in service to our expectations. Understood in this way, the Christmas story is “not an actual concealment but an incognito easily seen through.” God takes flesh as a poor infant (“away in a manger”), but, in truth, “the kindly face is the direct recognizability.” For that reason, Christmas lapses all too easily into a pagan worldview: “The child-conception of Christ is essentially a fantasy-perception, and fantasy-perception’s idea is commensurability, and commensurability is essentially paganism.”

The temptation to slip into pagan romanticism is, it seems, a problem endemic to Christianity. In the second part of Either/Or (Enten—Eller, 1843), Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Judge William wryly observes that an “appealing blend of the erotic and the religious” crops in various forms of Christianity. Here, again, Christmas seems to concentrate and to expose this tendency. The Judge conjures up a scene of rousing pathos, in which a young maiden longs to find her beloved:

Imagine her on a Christmas Eve, she is alone in her room; midnight is already past, and nevertheless sleep…is elusive; she feels a sweet, pleasant restlessness; she opens the window halfway and alone with the stars gazes out in the infinite space. A little sigh lightens her heart; she closes the window. With an earnestness that is continually on the verge of roguishness she prays: “You wise men three, / Tonight let me see / Whose bread I shall bake / Whose bed I shall make / Whose name I shall carry / Whose bride I shall be.”¹ And then, hale and hearty, she jumps into bed. To be honest, it would be a disgrace for the three kings if they did not take care of her.

A lover is more significant than peppermints, but, according to this logic, both satisfy the same longing—that of earthly comfort, sealed and delivered by a benevolent deity. What better time to countenance this desire than Christmas, when worldly comfort is, quite literally, enwreathed in heavenly light?

These mentions of Christmas by no means amount to a detailed analysis, but they are nevertheless revealing. Kierkegaard indicates that cultural Christianity (what he elsewhere refers to as Christenheden or “Christendom”) deviates from the Christianity (Christendom) espoused in Scripture. This divergence is true of both “conservatives” and “liberals,” so to speak. The former champion a facile (and unbiblical) faith shorn of doubt and resistance; the latter transmute Christianity into secular indulgence. In this way, Kierkegaard implies that the real meaning of Christmas has been obscured by the manner in which it is celebrated—a point that becomes clearer in his journals and papers.

References to Christmas in Kierkegaard’s Unpublished Writings

Late on Christmas Night 1838–perhaps worn out by a typically long day of church services and family gatherings—Kierkegaard saw fit to jot down a few thoughts. It appears that he was not in good spirits. His father Michael, with whom he had a notoriously complex relationship, had died just the previous August. Michael’s was the latest (and last) of a string of deaths that afflicted the family during the 1830s. Kierkegaard’s sister Nicoline died in September 1832, his brother Niels in September 1833 (in Paterson, New Jersey, as it happens), his mother Anne in July 1834, his sister Petrea in December 1834, and then his father a few years later. With the exception of extended family, only Kierkegaard’s older brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard (1805-88) remained.

So, with midnight fast approaching (the journal entry is dated and timed), Kierkegaard was not pondering the joy of Christmas but the purpose of suffering. He chides himself for refusing to take comfort in the thought that God tempts no person (James 1:13); he confesses that even his prayers are “aggressive” (udæskende) towards God, since they demand that God change for his sake. At last Kierkegaard looks to the example of Lazarus of Bethany, whom Christ famously raised from the dead (John 11:4). Perhaps one day, Kierkegaard concludes, he will be able to exemplify the words of the Apostle Paul, who spoke of the resurrected body in terms of natural death and supernatural rebirth: “It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:42-44).

It would seem, then, that Good Friday and Easter Sunday remained in the forefront of Kierkegaard’s mind, even on Christmas Day. Other journal entries help explain why this was the case. In 1846, the same year that he published the Postscript, Kierkegaard complains that Christmas is a “real children’s festival,” which is marked by “spurious emotionality and sentimentality.” Kierkegaard concedes that there is an instinctual appeal to these qualities; the problem, however, is that Christians now treat them as an “abode” (Tilhold). In the margin, Kierkegaard jots down a note of clarification and, unwittingly, previews what his response to Pola and Wyle’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” might have been:

One can state the change in this way: instead of remaining conscious of being in conflict, Christianity makes itself comfortable, settles down comfortably and cozily in existence. When this is the case, Christmas becomes "the most beautiful holiday."

If read in a certain way, there is a Scrooge-like “Bah humbug!” in these passages. And yet, Kierkegaard insists he is making a historical point. Citing Das christliche Kirchenjahr (1843) by German theologian Friedrich Gustav Lisco (1791-1866), Kierkegaard contends “that the Christmas festival was first introduced in the Fourth Christian Century and that it did not occur at all to the earlier Christians to do this.” He repeats this claim in subsequent journal entries from 1847, 1848, 1849, and 1851! Clearly, then, it needled Kierkegaard that the ostensive highlight of the Christian year was a theological innovation, brimming with “pagan, sexual-psychical sentimentality.” Doubtless he would have found this clip from the 2006 sports comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby to be comically apropos, particularly in its intuitive association of the “Dear Lord baby Jesus” with the title character’s bounty of “Domino’s, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell” along with his “stone-cold fox” of a wife:

Indeed, as Kierkegaard explains in an 1848 journal entry, it is ironic that Christmas is now identified with “dancing around the Christmas tree” and the “urge to play games and eat fruitcake.” After all, inasmuch as Jesus “was born of a virgin,” the meaning of the Incarnation is not that true love lies in coming “to live in love of one’s offspring” but in the ever-deepening understanding of one’s participation in the divine life. As Kierkegaard puts it, “The Christ-child is related to the spiritual qualification of what it is to be a human being and consequently is not related to marriage, father, mother, child, but to every single individual human being qua spirit.”

For all of its dialectical wit and philosophical insight, Kierkegaard’s authorship occasionally flirts with a kind of gnostic dualism. He can become so critical of bourgeois conventionality that he appears to denigrate creation writ large. Clearly, Kierkegaard’s reflections on Christmas have an analogous ring: he derides “the peanut-brittle and the Christmas baby” while simultaneously calling for an inner detachment from earthly life. And yet, despite this temptation, Kierkegaard never disparages the celebration of Christmas per se. Moreover, his journals further suggest a desire to peel back the wrapping paper, as it were, and to find Christian meaning in a secularized holiday.

This approach is evident in a 1847 journal entry, in which Kierkegaard notes that Christmas Day (December 25) is immediately followed by Saint Stephen’s Day (December 26) in the liturgical calendar. On the surface, this is an odd juxtaposition. After all, whereas Christmas Day marks the arrival of the Christ child, Saint Stephen’s Day honors Christianity’s first martyr. Yet, Kierkegaard argues that the latter illuminates the meaning of the former. In the biblical accounts of Christ’s birth, it is the angels who announce “good tidings” to the “shepherds abiding in the field” (Luke 2:8-10). However, in the Acts of the Apostles, it is Stephen, one of the earliest Christian leaders, who has become a messenger (angelos) of the Gospel. As Kierkegaard observes, the biblical description of Stephen’s appearance before the Sanhedrin makes this point explicit: “And all that sat in the council, looking stedfastly on him, saw [Stephen’s] face as it had been the face of an angel” (Acts 6:15). With this in mind, Kierkegaard concludes that Christmas does not represent an endorsement of the secular order but, rather, a challenge to it: “The Kingdom of God is not of this world,” he notes.

A couple years later, on Christmas Day 1849,² Kierkegaard again negates the “hap-happiest” connotations of Christmas, but this time he tries to resolve them into a higher unity:

Today a Savior is born to you—and yet it was night when he was born. It is an eternal metaphor: night it must be—and it becomes day in the middle of the night when the Savior is born. Today—it is a declaration of eternal time, just as when God says: Today, and just like the books which come out "in that year." It is repeated from generation to generation, for every individual among those millions—and every time anyone in truth becomes a Christian it says: Today a Savior is born to you.

So, Christmas is good news. It is, after all, the “day” (Dag) that breaks “in the middle of the night” (midt i Natten). And yet, employing a multilayered interpretation of Scripture, Kierkegaard suggests that the holiday’s traditional association with “light”—as in the famous story of the Star of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:9-10)—should not be seen as a mere historical occurrence. Indeed, Christmas itself should not be seen as a mere historical occurrence. It has an allegorical-tropological-anagogical significance that transcends temporal life. In Kierkegaard’s language, Christmas is an “eternal image” (evigt Billede) that is also a “manifestation of eternal time” (evig Tids Angivelse). In other words, Christmas is not something that happened and is now remembered once a year in the manner of a secular holiday (say, the Fourth of July). No, Christmas is something that is happening and continues to happen, whenever the darkness of sin and suffering yields to the illuminative presence of the Savior. It is a reality “every time anyone in truth becomes a Christian.”

What’s remarkable about this observation is that it subtly militates against Kierkegaard’s preferred emphasis on imitatio Christi. Even more remarkable is that Kierkegaard himself acknowledges this point. After years of complaining that Christmas represents “Christendom’s little morsel (Smule) of Christianity,” Kierkegaard now concedes that Christmas has legitimate theological import. As he writes in an 1851 journal entry: “Why did the Savior of the world become a child? The strongest expression for our being saved entirely by grace, that we are able to do nothing, is the fact that the Savior is a child. Here there can be no talk at all about imitation.” It would be comical at best and disturbing at worst if one were to imitate the Christ child. No, the Christ child can only be a gift, to which one responds either with the “exceeding great joy” (Matthew 2:10) of the wise men or the false “worship” (Matthew 2:8) of King Herod. In a sense, the “little baby Jesus” (lille Jesus-Barn) is every bit as shocking and offensive as the itinerant rabbi and prophet he would turn out to be. But it’s different kind of offense—not that of “come and follow me” (Matthew 19:21) but that of a favor that could never be merited and a love that could never be reciprocated.

Does Kierkegaard, then, finally go over to the side of Christendom? Would he join in prayer with Ricky Bobby, who memorably proclaimed “I like the Christmas Jesus best”? Of course not. Ever the dialectician, concerned with the lazy dilution of philosophical and theological concepts, Kierkegaard concludes this 1851 endorsement of Christmas with a characteristic word of warning: “Nevertheless, we must above all be careful not to take this path and make Christianity into mythology.” So, for Kierkegaard, it is right and just to be grateful for Christmas and for God’s love of the world (John 3:16). Just don’t confuse the “magic of the season” for the joy of the magi.

1. Judge William is quoting from the Danish folk song “I Pray to You Three Wise Men” (Jeg beder jer hellige konger tre). Kierkegaard likely knew of this song from a four-volume compilation put together by the Danish librarian and folklorist Just Mathias Thiele (1795-1874).

2. Kierkegaard heads this entry “1^ste Juledag,” presumably referring to the first day of Christmas. This particular passage (NB14:105) is found in the notebook titled Journalen NB14, which contains entries from November 9, 1849 (NB14:1) to January 16, 1850 (NB14:150). So, at any rate, it would chronologically fall around the time of Christmas.