Fuller Seminary M.A. Theology – TH531: Kierkegaard – Fall 1985. This would be my last formal paper written as part of the masters in theology program that I was pursuing at Fuller Theological Seminary. I loved my courses with Dr. Colin Brown, this being the second one that I took from the professor. I would have loved to have continued in the degree program, but it was increasingly difficult for me figure out what it was that I wanted to accomplish, should I complete the masters degree and possibly a doctorate. I certainly had the thirst and creativity to continue my academic program in theology, but it was looking more like a very expensive hobby than something that might turn into a possible career. Also, somewhat ironically, given the subject of this final paper, an exploration of love, that my marriage was in the process of falling apart. So, I switched gears, dropped out of Fuller and submitted an application to get a second bachelors degree from Cal State Fullerton as an Anthropology major. I never do things the easy way, but I do love the adventure of the journey. Enjoy. 2024-05-15.
Kierkegaard: Transient Affection, Obligatory Love, the Christian Ideal, & Judge William’s “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage”
by Joseph B. Bustillos
A Paper Submitted to Dr. Colin Brown
of the School of Theology
of Fuller Theological Seminary
November 1985
Preface
Upon surveying the collection of Soren Kierkegaard’s works brought together by Robert Bretall I was struck by a certain passage found in Either/Or written by Judge William to the young Aesthete, Johanness:
There is also something upon which you will agree with me entirely, for how often and how surely have your mockery and your irony hit the mark when you were denouncing what you call “fortuitous love affairs” and the “bad infinity” of love when one is looking with his sweetheart out of the window, and that instant a young girl turns the corner into another street, and it occurs to him, “It is with her I am really in love,” but when he would follow her trace he is again unsettled, etc.1
Reading further, I thought that it would make for a interesting study to contrast three philosophies about love. They are the Transient Affections of Johannes (the Seducer), the Conjugal (Obligatory) Love of Judge William and finally what I perceived to be the Christian Ideal for love found in the New Testament. This, of course, was based upon a cursory reading of an excerpt of Judge William’s full argument- I plowed through the “Either” section, alternately finding myself entertained and overwhelmed with the author’s verbosity. By the time I reached the “Or” section it was quite apparent to me that my argument would be at best artificial and at face value irrelevant. Oh, it would be relevant to contemporary society (providing that this society has room for another diatribe on the worn out subject of Marriage vs. the Secularist-Humanist conspiracy), but then it would be an obvious case of reading into someone else’s work a pet viewpoint of my own. No, Johannes and the elder civil servant afforded me a different perspective on the subject. This perspective has to do with human nature, love and the twin tyrants Chronos and Boredom.
A Funeral
When I closed the first volume of Either/Or I sensed in my inner man the unwelcome thud of a body being tossed into an open grave. The attendants walked away silently and I found myself alone, having anticipated a wedding only to stumble upon a funeral. The silence and the light bit of rain that ran down my glasses echoed the emptiness that ate at me. I had spent close to two months dancing and playing cerebral voyeur with Johannes. I felt that we had the comradery that only thieves had. He was ever the melancholic but the glean in the corner of his eyes was a warning that you had better have your wits about you when socializing with this animal. Animal. Such lyrical music fell from the lips of this beast:
Music finds its way where the rays of the sun cannot penetrate. My room is dark and dismal, a high wall almost excludes the light of day. The sounds must come from a neighboring yard; it is a probably some wandering musician. What is the instrument? A flute?… What do I hear the minuet from Don Juan! Carry me then away once more, O tones so rich and powerful, to the company of the maidens, to the pleasures of the dance. The apothecary pounds his mortar, the kitchen maid scours her kettle, the groom curries the horse, and strikes the comb against the flagstone; these tones appeal to me alone, they beckon only me. 0! accept my thanks, whoever you are! my soul is so rich, so sound, so joy-intoxicated!2
So much the vampire. He was a man of unfathomed leisure, trusted servants and high born carriages. I used to love watching him weave his foreordained conversations, casting his verbal spell upon the young maidens and running circles around the frustrated lads with his rapier-wit. Always one step ahead of the rest. No one could play both sides of the game as well as he could. 0, it was but a game to him. A youth beyond his many years.
But he no longer found his challenge in staying ahead of the boys and men with slothful minds. It was now a different force that was to be reckon with. Although he often went through the seasonal paces that all the young men traced, the dances and the theater, it seemed as if he did not move at all. While others would join the circle and pair off and move along, he would return and smile and find a new feminine face to enlighten. Then others would fall in while some (leading a woman gently by the hand) would vanish into the night. But he would be back again, like the country boy with an empty plate in a smorgasbord.
I want to be done with the thoughts that echo through my head like the baying cats crying in the night. There was a certain hollowness to him, a certain way in which he was not really there. I had heard the rumors that were circulated concerning him. But one does not easily give in to mere rumors when hope has yet to test her wings. So in my idleness I began to observe him as he made his rounds, a concentric circle that orbited ever nearer to the lodgings of one Cordelia Wahl.3
Everything had been set to turn like clockwork. And even as it unfolded before my eyes I could not believe it. I was acquainted with his fascination for the play, The First Love.4 I was aware of the significance that it had for him; Or at least the significance that he had revealed to me. At another time he had shown me a letter that the good judge William had written to him. There was much discussion about illusions and romantic love and romantic love being only the first fruits, as it were, of Conjugal love and whether one could base the eternal (love) on the temporal (the sensuous).5 It was a perplexing matter to me. But he was well up to his elbows in a “project.” Between aunts and kitchen schools and keeping Edward on edge, I could see where his hands were more than full.6 Then there was the woman for whom all of this steam was being blown off, Cordelia.
Once he wedged his way, or rather I should say, suddenly appeared in her parlor the lever was thrown and the slow moving hour hand of his internal clock had been set in motion. Now it was time to sit and wait while the flower put forth her only blossom. And he waited.
As the hands inched across the face of his clock so the bindings and covering of the blossom slowly relaxed and stretched out until just a hint of bright color could be seen. And in this pageantry of potentiality I could hear an unending sigh lifted up in honor of what was to be lost as the breeze touched the leaves of the birches that were freshly turning green. It doesn’t really matter what happened next. What should have been Spring suddenly turned into Winter. What should have been the sounds of Wedding bells and young people laughing became the sounds of empty courtyards and a body unceremoniously landing on the bottom of a lime stained pit. If I could have found him I would have killed him.
The thing is that he said himself, “if you marry you’ll regret it and if you don’t marry you’ll regret it.”7
The Gap
One of the issues that I was not at first aware of was the cultural gap between Southern California in 1986 and Copenhagen in 1843. The ideology involving women is phenomenal:
I shall attempt to think of woman in terms of her category. Under what category must she be conceived? Under the category of being for another. But this must not be understood in the bad sense, if the woman who is for me is also for another. Here as always in abstract thinking, it is essential to refrain from every reference to experience; for otherwise, as in the present case, I should find, in the most curious manner, that experience is both for me and against me. . . . Woman is therefore being for another.8
Kierkegaard thought that the worst thing for a woman to do was to imitate a man, to surrender her femininity to do the things that a man does. He was a child of his generation (just as I am of mine). Both “A” (Johannes) and “B” (Judge William) see a natural distinction that is complete between men and women. My one comment regarding this is that if we lived in an ideal world where people could be trusted and where men loved and were fully devoted to their wives than women would not have to compete with men. But this is not the case. There are hints here and there behind the idea that God divided what was human in the beginning and made part woman and the other part man and without each other they are certainly less than complete.
The Summation
The vortex of Johannes is not just the seductive power of this individual but it is the fear of boredom. It is the tyrant that takes a young loving couple and changes them into combatants. The First Love that Judge William wrote about is fleeting, it is unreal. It vanishes and leaves the pair with Obligatory love, “love because …” The vortex of Johannes is the tyrant Chronos.
Johannes knew how to use time to pluck the fruit that he wanted and leave the pit for some other fool. Chronos is the unstoppable force that evaporates away the life in a relationship and leaves the couple to either despair or the Rotation Method. Even Judge William suggests a variation of the Rotation Method to enhance the relationship.9
The only thing that I know of that can combat the Vortex of Johannes is periodic renewal within the relationship. Unfortunately, given the “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mentality prevalent in America, periodic renewal has just as much chance to catch on as bobbing for french fries does. God help us.
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FOOTNOTES:- Robert Bretall. A Kierkegaard Anthology. (Princetons Princeton University Press, 1946). p. 86.[↩]
- Soren Kierkegaard. Either/Or. tr. David Swenson. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). volume I, pp. 40-41.[↩]
- Ibid p. 332[↩]
- Ibid. p- 231. The thing about “A’s” appraisal of the play is knowing whether this “A” is the same writer of the Diary of the Seducer, our Johannes. After casting the particulars and the universals about on their pointed little heads, the overwhelming illusionary nature of the concept of “First Love” makes Judge William’s treatment of it seem a little ill-founded. This is especially true when he writes that man can only love once (vol- 2, p- 61). For love to succeed there must be this devoted singleness (another oxymoronic concept) but to say that one can love only once… is to be living back in the 19th Century.[↩]
- If it is indeed impossible for the Eternal to be founded upon the Temporal than what is it about this phenomenon that both writers want to lay claim to it? Love is indeed vivifying the actualizing agent in life. But because, as we presently understand it, it is a human phenomenon it therefore falls victim to the same paradoxical dilemma that human religious experience falls to, the disharmony/non-communication between the composite elements that make us humans, the unspeakable.
I love it when Judge William accuses Johannes of living in an illusion and that shaming other people’s illusions is not the same as coming upon truth (vol. 2, p 80), Proving something to be false only proves the non-truth of the thing. Truth is another step beyond. But, at the same time the good judge never produces a living example (outside of himself) of what he is trying to prove. He falls back on the old ploy that if you don’t see it around you it’s because it’s not being properly executed by those involved in the production (Christians use that scheme all the time to prove the “Truthfulness” of Christianity “No, really, it works. Your brother-in-law that says he’s a Christian and was caught cheating on his wife, he just wasn’t doing it right). (vol. 2, p. 143).[↩]
- Ibid. vol. 1, p. 342. Poor Edward, My favorite line is: “Edward must go; he has reached the very end. At any moment I may expect him to go to her, and make a declaration of love.” (p. 361). Poor guy, didn’t even stand a chance.[↩]
- Ibid. vol. 1, p.37. I have obviously taken poetic license with the body falling to the bottom of a pit. Don’t worry folk, lovely Cordelia is not in there. I just felt that that image, like at the end of the play/movie Amadeus, best expressed my change in my feelings over the Seducer and the hopeless condition that he left her in. Emptiness. Hollowness. True to his aesthetic self, the one thing that he values was that poetic moment, that First Love, the blossoming of the Beloved. And once that was had, then the flower was not even good enough to be thrown in the trash can. He gives her notice. He steps back and watches all of the props that he has erected fall to the ground. All that appeared to be real was a mere facade, (vol. 1, pp. 420 & 433).[↩]
- Ibid. vol 1, p. 424.[↩]
- Ibid. vol 2, p. 109.[↩]
