Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism:

Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith
Abstract: In a now classic paper, Karen Carr argues that Kierkegaard is a
religious “anti-rationalist”: He holds that reason and religious truth exist in
necessary tension with one another. Carr maintains that this antagonism is not
a matter of the logical incoherence of Christianity, but rather the fact that
genuine submission to Christ precludes approaching him through
demonstration. In this essay, we argue that while Kierkegaard is in fact an
anti-rationalist, the literature has failed to appreciate the full strength of his
position. It is not just that reason and obedience are in tension; rather, Kierke-
gaard holds the stronger view that reason is actively offended by Christianity’s
primary claims. Not only is reason incapable of generating any positive evidence
for the truth of Christianity, more radically, it provides evidence against it. In
order to make this case, we offer a close reading of Practice in Christianity,
developing a typology of Kierkegaard’s account of Christ’s “offense.” Finally,
having motivated Kierkegaard’s strong anti-rationalism, we consider why, on
his account, anyone would want to be a Christian.

On July 1, 1959, the three Christs met for the first time. They had been summoned
to a sanitarium in Ypsilanti, Michigan to take part in a study that would soon
make its director, social psychologist Milton Rokeach, a household name.
Each of the men—Joseph, Clyde, and Leon—claimed to be the reincarnation of
Jesus Christ and thus, as the Christian tradition holds, God himself. Joseph
was in his late-fifties, bald and missing half his front teeth. He gave off an air
of “impishness,” an impression abetted by a mawkish grin and pants-pockets
overstuffed with magazines and tobacco.¹ Next was Clyde. At the time of the

 The following descriptions are taken from Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A
Psychological Study, New York: The New York Review of Books 2011, pp. 3 – 15. The later
suggestion that “Leon” may have been from Decatur, IL, is purely hypothetical, added to
accentuate the absurdity of the situation. We intend no offense to citizens of central Illinois.

Corresponding author: Ryan Kemp, Department of Philosophy, Wheaton College, 501

Blanchard Hall, Wheaton, IL, USA, e-mail: [email protected]
Frank Della Torre, George W. Truett Theological Seminary, 1100 S 3rd St, Waco, TX 76706,
USA, e-mail: [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1515/kierke-2022-0010
194 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

study, he had been in the hospital system for seventeen years. He spoke in a
“rumbling, resonant voice,” and, when provoked, denounced his counterparts
as being “probably Catholic.” Finally was Leon. Of the three, he “looked the
most like Christ.”² He also refused his given name, preferring the title “Dr.
Domino Dominorum et Rex Rexarum, Simplis Christianus Pueris Mentalis Doktor.”³
The group called him “Rex” for short.
Of the many reactions to the “Three Christs,”⁴ one response was, and
continues to be, conspicuously missing—faith. No one believed any of the
men. In fact, it seems this possibility (that one of them might actually be God)
was never seriously considered by Rokeach and his staff. Joseph, Carl, and
Leon were treated as schizophrenics with their claims to divinity counted as
among the most important evidence of their mental illness. After all, one
reasons, doesn’t claiming to be the All-Powerful Creator of the Universe qualify
as the height of delusion? You would have to be insane or cognitively impaired or
both to believe that some guy from Decatur was the Son of God.
Kierkegaard agrees, and he thinks it is important to see that belief in the
divinity of Jesus of Nazareth does not fare any better. In Practice in Christianity,
he writes, “That an individual human being is God, that is, claims to be God, is
indeed the offense ϰατ’ έξοχήν [in an eminent sense]. But what is the offense,
that which offends? That which conflicts with all (human) reason.”⁵ Kierkegaard
does not just claim that there can be no positive evidence that any particular
human being is God; more, he asserts that such a notion is directly opposed
to all possible rational standards—and that such an opposition is a precondition
for religious faith itself. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, Kierkegaard reminds his
readers again and again that he is “the sign of offense and the object of faith.”⁶
This “offensiveness” is partly a function of the kind of life Jesus lived—his
radical exercise of compassion, his challenge to earthly power—but, and more
importantly, it is intrinsic to any human claim to divinity. Whether the would-
be Christ is from Nazareth or Rome, ugly or beautiful, a rebel or political conser-
vative, his claim to be the “God-man”—one with God the Father, Creator of the
Universe—is absurd.
The precise extent to which Kierkegaard believes Christianity is offensive to
reason has been much debated. Some readers (call them the “irrationalist”

 This is Rokeach’s assessment. One wonders how he arrived at this conclusion.

 This broken Latin can be roughly translated, “Lord of Lords, and King of Kings, Simple
Christian Boy Psychiatrist.”
 This is the title of the 2017 film based on Rokeach’s work.
 SKS 12, 40 / PC, 26.
 SKS 12, 39 / PC, 24.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 195

camp)⁷ have argued that Kierkegaard gives absolute preference to “passionate

conviction,” such that wherever the latter is present so too is truth. On this
view, the belief that Jesus is the Christ is true to the extent that it is passionately
held. Other readers (the “supra-rationalist” camp),⁸ while acknowledging the
rational offense of Christianity for the prospective believer, argue that for Kierke-
gaard the strict antagonism between faith and reason is nullified post-
conversion. By the grace of God, the absurd is transformed into the reasonable;
the aspects of Christ that are offensive to the pagan are effectively dissolved with
the onset of grace. Finally, a third group of readers (the “anti-rationalists”)⁹ have
argued that, while Kierkegaard does not think truth is a mere matter of
passionate conviction, neither is it the case that Christian conversion mitigates
the offensiveness of Christ. Kierkegaard maintains that reason can play no
positive role in either the believer’s initial or continuing faith.¹⁰
The last interpretation is almost certainly correct. In a now classic paper,
Karen L. Carr makes a persuasive case against irrationalist and supra-rationalist

 For instance, Alasdair MacIntyre writes that, for Kierkegaard, “the criterion of both choice and
truth is intensity of feeling.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, “Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye,” in The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4, ed. by Paul Edwards, New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company 1967, pp. 336 – 340.
 For a clear example of this view see Timothy P. Jackson, “Kierkegaard’s Metatheology,” Faith
and Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 1, 1987, pp. 71– 85. Though Karen L. Carr identifies C. Stephen Evans as
someone who, by her lights, miscategorizes the pseudonym Johannes Climacus as a supra-
rationalist, Adam Buben has more recently (and convincingly) argued that Evans is a supra-
rationalist interpreter of Kierkegaard more generally. See Karen L. Carr, “The Offense of Reason
and the Passion of Faith: Kierkegaard and Anti-Rationalism,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 2,
1996, pp. 236 – 251; C. Stephen Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s
Philosophical Fragments, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1992, p. 108; Adam
Buben, “Neither Irrationalist Nor Apologist: Revisiting Faith and Reason in Kierkegaard,”
Philosophy Compass, vol. 8, no. 3, 2013, pp. 318 – 326. For a more recent expression of the
supra-rationalist view see Richard McCombs, The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2013.
 Carr provides the classic expression of the view in “The Offense of Reason and the Passion of
Faith.” For a more recent defense of the same position see Buben, “Neither Irrationalist Nor
Apologist.”
 Each of these views maintains that, for Kierkegaard, there is at least some important sense in
which faith is discontinuous with reason. There is, however, a fourth view (what one might call,
the “rationalist” position) that maintains Kierkegaard takes reason and faith to be non-problem-
atically related. For a recent elaboration of this position see Eleanor Helms, “On Climacus’s
‘Against Reason’ Thesis: A Challenge to Westphal,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 34, no. 4, 2017,
pp. 471– 488. For a convincing reply, see Merold Westphal, “Reply to Eleanor Helms on Faith
Versus Reason in Kierkegaard,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 35, no. 3, 2018, pp. 367– 372.
196 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

readings and for the anti-rationalist view.¹¹ In terms of her own positive case, she
draws largely from Practice in Christianity, a work almost universally regarded as
expressing Kierkegaard’s own position. (Though technically “authored” by the
pseudonym “Anti-Climacus,” Kierkegaard lists himself as the “editor” and
oversees the project of presenting Christianity in its “supreme ideality.” In
response to an anonymous invitation to clarify his own position in a less allusive
format, Kierkegaard was convinced that one could do no better than reread
Practice.)¹² Following A.C. Graham,¹³ Carr characterizes the anti-rationalist as
someone who “rejects the use of reason not as irrelevant or indifferent to
religious truth but as actively hostile to it in the life of the existing individual.”¹⁴
Assuming Carr correctly attributes this position to Kierkegaard, a few
concerns loom. Most pressingly, one worries that “anti-rationalist” is really
just a nice way of saying “misologist.” If Kierkegaard really thinks that reason
leads away from religious truth, then how can he also hold that the hostility
between faith and reason isn’t “due to any logically necessary contradiction”?¹⁵
Carr attempts to respond to the charge by suggesting that, for Kierkegaard, the
real culprit is not “reason per se,” but rather the “disobedient will which uses
reason in its attempt to justify itself.”¹⁶ In other words, “reason invariably
leads one away from religious truth” because it is inevitably an instrument of
personal control. Christ demands complete obedience, and this requires—
among other things—that the Christian surrender understanding.
The thesis of this paper is that while Carr is right in supposing that Kierke-
gaard is an anti-rationalist in the sense just explained, she ultimately underes-
timates the strength of Kierkegaard’s position. It is not just that reason and
obedience are in tension; Kierkegaard also holds the stronger view that reason
is actively offended by Christianity’s primary claims: Not only is reason
incapable of generating any positive evidence for the truth of Christianity,
more radically, it provides evidence against it. Even if reasoning to Jesus’ divinity

 In this essay, we take for granted the success of Carr’s case against both the irrationalist and
supra-rationalist interpretations. Thus, our task is not to rehash the evidence against these
views; if a reader is interested in this, she should begin with Carr, “The Offense of Reason
and the Passion of Faith.” Instead, we are concerned to argue that Kierkegaard holds a stronger
version of the anti-rationalist position than even Carr acknowledges.
 As well as Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Sickness unto Death. See SKS 14, 185 /
M, 50.
 A.C. Graham, Unreason Within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality, La Salle,
Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company 1992, p. 99.
 Carr, “The Offense of Reason and the Passion of Faith,” p. 237.
 Ibid., p. 248.
 Ibid.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 197

weren’t in tension with obedience, there would still be no possible line of

argumentation or evidential source that makes it even a fraction more likely
that the belief “Jesus is God” is true. Reason, in fact, assigns negative value
to such a belief.
The advantage of showing that Carr misconstrues Kierkegaard’s position (in
addition, that is, to the good of trying to get Kierkegaard right) is the possibility
of approaching a better answer to the question, “Why be Christian?”. While
Kierkegaard works to block the path to any and all “theoretical”¹⁷ arguments
to the truth of Christianity, he thinks that this work also illuminates the only
good “reason” to trust in Christ, namely, consciousness of one’s sin. When a
person is honest about the offensiveness of Christ, they must either reject him
or admit that their spiritual despair is pronounced enough to justify the risk.
In the idiom of Alcoholics Anonymous, accepting Christ requires a person to
first hit “rock bottom.”
In an attempt to establish Kierkegaard’s “strong” anti-rationalism, this essay
surveys Kierkegaard’s discussion of Christianity’s “offensiveness” as it is
developed in Practice in Christianity. We focus our attention here not just because
Practice is essential to Carr’s case, but also because of its reputation as a text
that reflects Kierkegaard’s considered view.¹⁸ One additional (and somewhat
collateral) benefit to this approach is the opportunity to fully develop Anti-
Climacus’s typology of offense.¹⁹ Though by no means the first to offer such
an account,²⁰ we look to examine the various facets of Kierkegaard’s concept
in more detail than past commentators.

 By this we just mean arguments that purport to make the truth of Christianity more probable.
These are contrasted with what we call “practical-existential” arguments that attempt to show
someone has non-epistemic reasons to adopt a position.
 While some of Kierkegaard’s early pseudonyms (for instance, Fear and Trembling’s Johannes
de silentio) are sometimes thought to express views that diverge from Kierkegaard’s, Anti-
Climacus is generally understood to be less a pseudonym than a pen name. Kierkegaard resists
listing himself as the author of the work, but not because its content doesn’t reflect his
considered position.
 On our view, Anti-Climacus’ brief discussion of “offense” in The Sickness unto Death plays
an importantly different function than the discussion in Practice and, therefore, needn’t be
addressed in this context. In Sickness, Kierkegaard introduces the concept of offense in order
to establish that rejection of Christ isn’t merely cognitive; it is open defiance—sin. A person
doesn’t merely doubt Christ, they openly flout his authority. In contrast, in Practice, Kierkegaard
is more concerned to establish the reasons why a person rejects Christ, reasons that relate to
either the absurdity of Jesus’ claims about himself, as well as the type of life he lives and
calls his followers to imitate.
 For substantial existing interpretations of “offense,” see Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, “The
Movements of Offense Toward, Away From, and Within Faith: ‘Blessed is he who is not offended
198 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

I The Offensive Christ

The immediate goal of this first section is to answer the question: Why does
Kierkegaard think Christianity is offensive? While we foresee this analysis
being valuable in itself, we undertake it here for the primary purpose of gaining
a better sense of Kierkegaard’s view of the relationship between faith and
reason. More specifically, we believe that a proper grasp of why Kierkegaard
takes Christ to be offensive must change how readers understand his anti-ration-
alism. Furthermore, once this modification is made, we can better appreciate
Kierkegaard’s real motivation for the ground clearing work he undertakes in
texts like Practice in Christianity.
While existing scholarship has provided insightful commentary on the
meaning of “offense” in Kierkegaard’s thought, it has tended merely to comment
on the categories of offense Kierkegaard explicitly develops in Practice in Christi-
anity. Our account, thus, stands to improve upon the existing literature in two
ways: First, we attempt to more clearly distinguish the various dimensions of
offense where others have, following Kierkegaard, organized it into two (or at
most three) forms. The typical schema differentiates the “preliminary” from
the “essential” offense, and sometimes adds a third that concerns being a
Christian (Kierkegaard himself places this last form in an Addendum). Second,
and more importantly, our exposition clarifies the meaning of the “essential
offense.” Recent interpreters have claimed that the essential offense (i. e., the
God-man) has to do with the incongruity between the loftiness of God and the
lowliness of Jesus’s specific human life.²¹ In other words, the qualitative contra-
diction that is the God-man occurs either from below, in as much as this man
elevates himself to the status of God, or from above, in as much as God
humiliates himself by becoming a “lowly, poor, suffering, and finally powerless
human being.”²² While the incongruity between loftiness and lowliness is

at me,’” in Practice in Christianity, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University
Press 2004 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 20), pp. 95 – 124; Sylvia Walsh, Living
Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence, University Park, Pennsylvania: The
Pennsylvania State University Press 2005; Sean Anthony Turchin, “Offense,” in Kierkegaard’s
Concepts, Tome V: Objectivity to Sacrifice, ed. by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and
Jon Stewart, Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company 2015 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources,
Reception and Resources, vol. 15), pp. 7– 14; Noreen Khawaja, “Religious Truth and Secular
Scandal: Kierkegaard’s Pathology of Offense,” Philosophy Today, vol. 59, no. 4, 2015, pp. 627– 647.
 Cf. Cappelørn, “The Movements of Offense Toward, Away From, and Within Faith”; Walsh,
Living Christianly; Turchin, “Offense”; Khawaja “Religious Truth and Secular Scandal.”
 SKS 12, 111 / PC, 102.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 199

certainly part of what makes the God-man offensive, we argue that the essential
offense is related more properly to the incongruity between God being not just a
lowly, poor, and powerless human being, but rather being any human
whatsoever. It is not just humiliation, suffering, etc. that are incongruous with
God; it is, rather, being human as such. By latching onto the loftiness/ lowliness
incongruity, previous interpreters obscure what is more fundamentally at stake
in the essential offense.
What follows, then, is an explication of the three primary senses in which
Christianity is offensive, combined with sustained reflections on the particular
features of these primary types: the offense of Jesus as (A) the God-man; (B) a
particular kind of human; and (C) the human prototype.

A Offense as the God-Man

The first and primary sense in which Christianity is offensive concerns what
Kierkegaard calls the “essential offense,” i. e., that a human being is (and/or
claims to be) God. Kierkegaard elaborates that the essential offense “is related
to the composite of God and man, or to the God-man.”²³ The very notion that
an individual human being could have the audacity to elevate himself to such
a transcendent rank—identifying himself with the divine—simply conflicts with
all human reason. The precise nature of this conflict has two dimensions: the
first concerns reason’s basic inability to comprehend the paradox that an
individual human being is God; the second concerns the fact that Christianity
regards even the attempt to demonstrate Jesus’ divinity as blasphemous.
Discussing the first of these, Kierkegaard invites his reader into a thought
experiment. Imagine yourself contemporary with this man Jesus of Nazareth:
“[l]et us talk about him quite frankly, just as his contemporaries talked about
him and as we talk about a contemporary, a person just like ourselves, whom
we see in passing on the street.”²⁴ Envision yourself accompanying Jesus as he
walks along the Sea of Galilee in the heat of the day (on a Tuesday afternoon,
say). You see him, plainly fatigued, take off his sandals and wade into the
shallow water to cool his feet from the blistering sand. Then, Jesus, standing
in the shallow water, suddenly turns towards you, looks you dead in the eyes,
and says—in a soft yet matter of fact tone—“I am the Christ; I am God.” Now,
assuming you are a reasonable person—someone who is not easily duped —

 SKS 12, 92 / PC, 81.

 SKS 12, 53 / PC, 40.
200 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

you would, naturally, expect some sort of evidence in support of such a mind-
boggling assertion. As a clever person, you set it down as a maxim always to
proportion belief to evidence.²⁵
And yet, you are unable to obey any such maxim in this instance. Strictly
speaking, it is a category mistake to demonstrate that a human being is God.
As Kierkegaard writes, “Can any more foolish contradiction be imagined than
this, to want to demonstrate…that an individual human being is God?”²⁶ If
you start from the assumption that someone is human—and, given the instruc-
tions of the above thought-experiment, Jesus’ humanity is palpable—then “it
can never in all eternity be shown that [such a person] is God.”²⁷ For, if we
begin with a premise that stipulates Jesus’s humanity, “we cannot, without
somewhere or other being guilty of a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος [shifting from
one genus to another], suddenly by way of a conclusion obtain the new quality,
God.”²⁸ Here, Kierkegaard seems to have something like the following line of
reasoning in mind:
(1) Jesus is human.
(2) If a human performs miracles, it is reasonable to believe he is God.
(3) Jesus performs miracles.
(4) It is reasonable to believe Jesus is God.

Kierkegaard thinks there simply cannot be any version of premise two—even one
that includes an infinite series of conjuncts (“If a man performs miracles and
claims to be God and rises from the dead and…”)—that is plausibly true. All
presumptive statements require an illicit category shift, moving from a finite
category (“man”) in the antecedent to an infinite one (“God”) in the consequent.
Kierkegaard illustrates this point with a story. If you happen to observe
footprints in the forest, it is evidently the case that some creature must have
walked this way not long ago. As you try to determine what type of animal it
was, you may at first mistakenly think it was a bird, but upon closer inspection
realize that the prints actually belong to some other forest-dwelling animal. Such
a thought process is perfectly sensible given that most animals, no matter the
species, leave footprints. We might say that the difference between various
types of animal footprints is of a finite and quantitative nature, i. e., that animals
will leave footprints of varying shapes and sizes, but footprints all the same.

 See, for instance, David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, New York:
Oxford University Press 1975, p. 110.
 SKS 12, 40 / PC, 26.
 SKS 12, 43 / PC, 29.
 SKS 12, 41– 2 / PC, 27.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 201

“But,” Kierkegaard adds, “can I, by close scrutiny and by following prints of this
sort, at some point reach the conclusion: ergo it is a spirit that has walked along
this way, a spirit—which leaves no print? So it is also with concluding from the
results of an—assumed—human existence that ergo it was God.”²⁹ Spirits are,
Kierkegaard assumes, by nature incorporeal; they are qualitatively different
from corporeal creatures and thus do not leave footprints—hence the absurdity
of drawing the conclusion, “ergo it is a spirit.” How much more absurd, then,
is the proposition, “this man is God”? For God is separated from what it is to
be human by an infinite and qualitative difference. The two natures are
incommensurable. Hence, reason is offended because it is incapable of compre-
hending the very concept of the God-man: “the contradiction between being God
and being an individual human being is the greatest possible, the infinitely
qualitative [uendelig qvalitative] contradiction.”³⁰
This is also why the God-man cannot be the object of a logical
demonstration: one cannot demonstrate the paradoxical. As Kierkegaard
notes, “to ‘demonstrate’ is, after all, to make something into the rational-actual
that it is. Can one, then, make that which conflicts with all reason into the
rational-actual? Certainly not, unless one wants to contradict oneself. One can
‘demonstrate’ only that it conflicts with reason.”³¹ Neither Jesus’ miracles, nor
his resurrection from the dead, nor his ascension are “demonstrations,”
according to Kierkegaard. Their purpose is not to prove that “all this is in
complete harmony with reason; on the contrary, they want to demonstrate
that it conflicts with reason and consequently is the object of faith.”³² In fact,
the miracle cannot demonstrate anything because “if you do not believe him
to be who he says he is, then you deny the miracle.”³³ This is why Kierkegaard
calls the God-man both “the paradox” and “the object of faith,” each title
implying the other. Gathering together the foregoing analysis, then, we discern
that the first dimension of the essential offense is as follows: (1) One is offended
because Jesus’ claim to be the God-man involves an infinitely qualitative contra-
diction. In an encounter with the God-man, reason—which cannot help but try
to know (i. e., comprehend and demonstrate) the object toward which it relates
—will necessarily be repulsed by Jesus Christ: the human being who is God.
The second dimension of the essential offense is related to the first. Kierke-
gaard claims that even if it were possible to prove that Jesus is God, “this whole

 SKS 12, 42 / PC, 28.

 SKS 12, 135 / PC, 131.
 SKS 12, 40 – 1 / PC, 26.
 SKS 12, 41 / PC, 26.
 SKS 12, 105 – 6 / PC, 97.
202 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

attempt is—blasphemy.”³⁴ Trying to prove the divinity of Jesus is blasphemous

because it eo ipso measures the God-man according to a human standard. If
we inspect Jesus’s life in search of results that are sufficient to justify the
conclusion, “ergo he was God,” then in so doing we regard him as a mere
human being, the results of whose life are more significant than his life as
such. When it comes to evaluating the excellence of a mere human being’s
life, it is perfectly in order to assume that the results of a person’s life are
relevant. But, as soon as we apply this assumption to the God-man, we commit
blasphemy against him.
It is nonsense when someone says, “Come and look, see this man, this man
who claims to be God; even more interesting, behold, wonder of wonders: he
speaks in parables!” Such a statement is nonsense because it utterly fails to
appreciate where the extraordinariness lies. As Kierkegaard explains, the fact
“that God has lived here on earth as an individual human being is infinitely
extraordinary….Try here to situate the extraordinariness in something else,
and one will readily perceive the foolishness.”³⁵ In other words, if one tries to
scour Jesus’ life in search of results that corroborate his divine status (even if
such corroborations are miracles), one simply disparages and mocks him by
finding the results of his life more important than the fact that God has lived
as a human being (i. e., the “in-itself extraordinary”). One judges his life by
means of a criterion of acceptability that, depending on whether Jesus meets
it, allows one to pronounce judgment over the God-man.
This is related to a point Kierkegaard makes in The Sickness unto Death when
he claims that it is “extraordinarily stupid…to defend Christianity” as if it were
“some poor, miserable thing that in the end has to be rescued by a champion.”
The would-be demonstrator of Jesus’ divinity unwittingly connives against the
very thing he is trying to defend by setting himself up as Jesus’ rescuer. “To
defend something is always to disparage it.”³⁶ Kierkegaard makes the same
point when he says that “The secret of all comprehending is that this compre-
hending is itself higher than any position it posits.”³⁷ Similarly, we might add,
demonstrating is higher than the position it demonstrates. Proofs for the divinity
of Jesus—be they from the extraordinary results of his life, his miracles, or
anything else—are nothing but usurpations of the God-man: the will’s disobe-
dient attempt to demonstrate that which God has willed to be indemonstrable.

 SKS 12, 43 / PC, 29 (emphasis in original).

 SKS 12, 45 / PC, 31.
 SKS 11, 200 / SUD, 87.
 Ibid.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 203

“Is it such great merit or is it not rather insolence,” Kierkegaard asks, “to want to
comprehend that which does not want to be comprehended?”³⁸ Thus, in
summary, we can put the second dimension of the essential offense as follows:
(2) One is offended because Christianity denounces the very attempt to
demonstrate the divinity of Jesus.

B Offense as a Particular Kind of Human

Next, we turn to analyze the way Jesus offends as a human being. In this
subsection, we bracket the essential offense and instead focus on the kind of
life he lived on earth. As is clear to anyone who pays the least attention to the
trajectory of Jesus’s life, there can be discerned a shocking “misrelation of
actuality” between the invitation he offered and the response of his contempo-
raries. Although Jesus’s invitation was indeed sufficiently inviting, he
nonetheless gained very few followers—and not a few enemies. In the end,
even his most intimate disciples deserted him. How, then, are we to explain
this “frightful inverted relation…that no one or almost no one accepted the
invitation, but that all, almost all…are in agreement about opposing the inviter,
putting him to death, yes, even putting a penalty upon letting oneself be helped
by him”³⁹? The three dimensions of the offense explored below, all of which
relate to Jesus as human, provide an answer to this question.
Firstly, when we regard Jesus not as the God-man but as a teacher of
godliness, we can readily see why he inevitably offended his contemporaries:
he simply refused to allow the established order to deify itself. Whereas the
established order insisted that it is above every individual, Jesus refused to
subordinate himself to its authority, and instead pointed toward the
transcendent God who cannot be identified with any immanent social order.
He made it clear that “fear and trembling signify that there is a God—something
every human being and every established order ought not to forget for a
moment.”⁴⁰ Jesus’ teaching that the individual human stands directly before
God (i. e., has a God-relationship) is precisely what ought to keep every
established order in suspense. Thus, the first dimension of the offense specific
to the manner in which Jesus lived is as follows: (3) One is offended because
Jesus challenges the established order. A second dimension of the offense

 SKS 11, 210 / SUD, 98.

 SKS 12, 69 / PC, 57.
 SKS 12, 98 / PC, 88.
204 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

concerns Jesus’ practice of caring for others with “divine compassion.” To

understand why Jesus’s divine compassion is so offensive, we must first grasp
how it is quite different—we might even say infinitely and qualitatively
different—from a merely human conception.
According to Kierkegaard, “human compassion is always merely to a certain
degree.”⁴¹ It is, admittedly, willing to descend to those who are beneath it—but
not too far, only to a reasonable depth. Indeed, the humanly compassionate
person, despite his sincere sympathy for the suffering person, is “not without
a certain degree of human self-assertion, the consequence of which would be
that neither would he be capable, even in his feelings of compassion, of reaching
down to all who are suffering.”⁴² Human compassion is forever conscious of its
own social status; it is too shrewd and calculating to put its reputation in
jeopardy for the sake of those who are of far lower rank. Kierkegaard illustrates,
“Sausage peddlers will consider that in being compassionate it is descending too
far down to go to paupers in the poorhouse and express equality with them; the
compassion of sausage peddlers is trapped in one consideration, consideration
for other sausage peddlers and then for saloon keepers.”⁴³ Human compassion,
in other words, remains invested in earthly distinctions, which precludes it from
binding itself in solidarity to those who are wholly other: “it must be
remembered that with regard to differences in life everyone wants to cling to
his own.”⁴⁴
By contrast, divine compassion is marked by “unlimited recklessness” in its
concern for each and every suffering person—no matter how wretched he or she
is. Unlike the person of natural compassion whose cautious disposition forbids
him from descending too low (certainly not to the poorhouse pauper), the
divinely compassionate person actively sheds whatever lofty status she has in
order to unite herself to the suffering person. Kierkegaard explains the resolute
earnestness of divine compassion in the following way:

Let someone make just a very small venture in divine compassion….Let someone who could
have better conditions in life, let him not, remaining in such a difference of conditions, give
much to the poor, philanthropically (that is, superiorly) visit the poor and sick and
miserable—no, let him completely give up his difference and in earnest seek the company
of, completely live with, the poor and lowly of the people, the workers, the manual laborers,
the cement mixers, etc.!⁴⁵

 SKS 12, 71 / PC, 59 (emphasis original).

 SKS 12, 70 / PC, 57.
 SKS 12, 71 / PC, 59.
 Ibid.
 Ibid.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 205

When we encounter such a person—one who is not in the least concerned about
herself or her own reputation; who is totally and unconditionally concerned only
for the suffering person; who could have been somebody great in the world but
willingly gave all of that up to sail along in the company of the “bricklayer and
brush-maker”—we see “a kind of madness over which we are not sure whether
we should laugh or cry.” It is relatively easy to imagine such a divinely compas-
sionate person, and perhaps in the imagination he appears quite worthy of
admiration. But to actually see such a person in the flesh, dwelling among the
outcasts of society day after day, is to inevitably conclude that he must be living
this way “because of his eccentricity and stubbornness and pride and vanity.”⁴⁶
Kierkegaard claims that Jesus’ divine compassion “alone would have been
sufficient for him to come to grief in the world.”⁴⁷ This is because the sort of
life Jesus lived is essentially a sacrifice. It is a sacrifice not only in the sense
that Jesus gave up his reputation, material possessions, and worldly aspirations
in order to be in communion with the lowly and heavy-laden, but also because
he was aware that his contemporaries, to whom he went out of compassion,
would utterly reject him. The world, Kierkegaard explains, is willing to give lip
service to the glorious virtues, but it insists on having them at a “cheap price
—to have as comfortably as possible the appearance of and the reputation for
practicing them.”⁴⁸ Hence, if this Jesus fellow were allowed to continually
embody his absolutely earnest compassion out in the open, it would ipso facto
make the world look bad. The world’s reputation for practicing the glorious
virtues would be shown for what it is: a façade. In an attempt to preserve its
appearance of virtue, then, the world concludes, “ergo this divine compassion
must go.” The threat must be eliminated. And so it was. As Kierkegaard
summarizes, “as soon as the true divine compassion appears in the world it is
unconditionally the sacrifice. It comes out of compassion for people, and it is
people who trample it down.”⁴⁹ Thus, we can characterize the second dimension
of the offense as follows: (4) One is offended because Jesus’ life manifests divine
compassion.
A third and final dimension of the offense that relates to Jesus’ humanity has
to do with what Kierkegaard calls “the inviter’s conception of the nature of
human misery,” which was “altogether different” from a human conception of
it.⁵⁰ If divine compassion for those who suffer led Jesus to embark upon his

 SKS 12, 70 / PC, 58.

 Ibid.
 SKS 12, 72 / PC, 60.
 Ibid.
 Ibid.
206 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

ministry, then what exactly did he do to alleviate their misery? As any reader of
the gospels easily discerns, Jesus brought with him neither money to lift up the
impoverished nor medication to cure the diseased. Had he brought those things,
his fate certainly would have turned out different: he would have been loved by
his contemporaries as a generous philanthropist or a world-class Doctor of
Medicine rather than rejected by all. For money and medicine are the currency
of human compassion, and they are what alleviate the pangs of a human
conception of misery.
Yet Jesus brings a different cure, one so unlike what human compassion
expects “that he really is an occasion for offense.”⁵¹ Jesus offers the lowly and
wretched neither money nor health; instead, he promises them the forgiveness
of sins. Kierkegaard makes clear why such a cure—if it can even be called that
—is so offensive: “Now let us be human. A human being is no spirit. And
when a human being is almost starving to death, then to say to him: I promise
you the gracious forgiveness of sins—this is outrageous. Really, it is also
laughable, but it is too serious for one to be able to laugh about it.”⁵² It is
ridiculous to invite all the wretched and sick to yourself by declaring that you
know the cure for all sickness, and then, when they all come from far and
wide with expectant hearts, tell them that you recognize only one sickness:
sin! It wreaks, Kierkegaard notes, of a scheme: “it is almost a kind of cunning
to come in the guise of compassion in order to talk about sin.”⁵³
We can thus draw two conclusions from the preceding analysis: (1) that
material poverty and physical disease constitute misery from a human
perspective—and, consequently, that their cure involves something like money,
better social standing, medication, etc. In other words, the human conception
of misery is concerned about one’s social-material-physical condition: whether
one is scorned or honored, whether one is recognized by one’s social group or
ostracized by it, whether one’s body hurts or is free of pain. And (2) that Jesus
identifies misery with sin—and, consequently, sin’s cure with forgiveness. The
latter conception of misery is concerned about the state of one’s soul: whether
it is in despair, whether it is closed in upon itself, whether it has acknowledged
its sin and turned to God for the forgiveness of sins. This dichotomy is precisely
why Jesus seems downright cruel when viewed from the human conception of
misery: He invites the poor and sick and suffering to himself, yet he does nothing
but promise the forgiveness of sins. Jesus offers them a cure they do not want for

 Ibid.
 SKS 12, 73 / PC, 61.
 Ibid.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 207

a disease they do not know they have. Yet going to him to learn about any other
type of healing, Kierkegaard observes, is as foolish “as breaking one’s leg and
going to a physician who specializes in diseases of the eyes.”⁵⁴ Therefore, the
third dimension of the offense concerning Jesus’ humanity is: (5) One is offended
because Jesus’ conception of misery as sin seems both callous and comical.

C Offense as the Prototype

Jesus, as the God-man and the lowly human being, claims to be the truth. Yet
now we must add that Jesus—as the prototype—wills to be the truth for us and
in us. As Kierkegaard writes,

This means that truth in the sense in which Christ is the truth is not a sum of statements,
not a definition etc., but a life. The being of truth is not the direct redoubling of being in
relation to thinking, which gives only thought-being…No, the being of truth is the
redoubling of truth within yourself, within me, within him, that your life, my life, his life
expresses the truth approximately in the striving for it, that your life, my life, his life is
approximately the being of the truth in the striving for it, just as the truth was in Christ
a life, for he was the truth.⁵⁵

In each of the ways that Jesus was human, then, his followers are likewise called
to be human—and to suffer the very same consequences that he suffered.
Indeed, “the follower is not above his master but is like him.”⁵⁶ We therefore
discern two further dimensions of the offense.
First, when Kierkegaard explains that Jesus, as an individual, comes into
collision with the established order (Offense #3), he observes that this dimension
of the offense is not unique to Jesus: “The offense under discussion here is one
of which anyone, for that matter, can be the object if he, the single individual,
seems to be unwilling to subject or subordinate himself to the established
order.”⁵⁷ The implication is that the follower of Jesus, in as much as she abides
by his strict teaching that the single individual and the God-relationship are
higher than the established order, will inevitably collide with her contemporaries
who have set themselves up as defenders of that order. In this respect, the
follower of Jesus is a gadfly, pricking—in word and deed—the consciences of

 SKS 12, 73 / PC, 61– 62.

 SKS 12, 202 / PC, 205.
 SKS 12, 114 / PC, 106.
 SKS 12, 94 / PC, 85.
208 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

her contemporaries, goading them to look upward toward God, to whom they
owe unconditional obedience.
Jesus’ follower, full of fear and trembling, refuses to let the God-relationship
be abolished; she continually bears in mind that “God is the examiner” of our
lives: “that at every moment a person is only being examined by God.”⁵⁸ She
regards all of earthly existence as a test, a time of trial. Thus she unequivocally
denounces the smug laziness that wants to settle down and fancy that the
established order has attained the highest and needs only to be preserved in
its present state of existence. Yes, the follower of Jesus is an individual: a
nuisance to the established order; deadly serious that “God is God” and we
are human; and willing to have a hard time in the world—to be scorned and
maligned and hated—for the sake of this teaching. Thus, we can conclude that
(6) One is offended because Jesus asks his followers to challenge the established
order.
The final dimension of the offense concerns what happens when Jesus’
divine compassion (Offense #4) and conception of human misery as sin (Offense
#5) take root in the life of his follower. When this occurs, the inevitable result in
the life of the individual follower is what Kierkegaard calls “[a]uthentic Christian
suffering.”⁵⁹ Such Christian suffering is infinitely different from the “whole
rigmarole of earthly adversities” to which all humans are subject. The latter
are, strictly speaking, unavoidable: all humans (pagan and Christian alike), at
one point or another suffer disease, physical pain, loss of loved ones, loss of
material possessions, loss of a job, etc. While these adversities are no walk in
the park, they are not distinctively Christian. Losing a loved one, losing all of
one’s material possessions, etc. does not make a person into an imitator of the
prototype.
What, then, constitutes Christian suffering for Kierkegaard? “What is
decisive in Christian suffering is voluntariness and the possibility of offense for
the one who suffers.”⁶⁰ Suffering in accordance with the paradigm of Jesus, in
other words, entails not simply losing everything, but rather willingly giving up
everything. “The difference,” Kierkegaard notes, “is infinite.”⁶¹ One scenario is
unpreventable (it happens to you); the other could have been avoided entirely
had you been unwilling to go through with it.
Thus Christian suffering invites the perplexing question, “Why do you want
to expose yourself to this and begin such a thing? After all you could leave it

 SKS 12, 183 / PC, 183.

 SKS 12, 116 / PC, 108.
 SKS 12, 117 / PC, 109 (emphasis original).
 Ibid.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 209

alone!” And that is precisely why this dimension of offense is “for the one who
suffers.” The follower of Jesus experiences “self-contradiction” because imitation
of the prototype necessarily brings along sufferings that could have easily been
avoided had the person simply chosen not to follow Jesus. It brings a person
“spiritual trials” that are “a whole scale deeper than the ordinary human
sufferings.”⁶² Thus (7) One is offended because Jesus asks his followers to suffer
spiritual trials that exceed ordinary human suffering.

II Implications for the Anti-Rationalism Debate

In the essay’s introduction, we explained that the anti-rationalist holds that
human reason is “actively hostile”⁶³ to religious truth. Now, as we hope the
above analysis of offense makes clear, we see that Kierkegaard describes two
distinct ways to arrive at this position. First, one might think that reasoning to
the truth of Jesus’s divinity precludes submission to his divine authority—it is
blasphemous. To quote again what Kierkegaard says in The Sickness unto
Death, “The secret of all comprehending is that this comprehending is itself
higher than any position it posits.”⁶⁴ Faith is not only distinct from the kind of
rational confidence made available through argumentation, it is also antithetical
to it.
A second path to anti-rationalism exists independently of concerns about
obedience. Someone might simply hold that reason, when properly employed,
weighs against the truth of Christianity. Not only is it impossible to construct
a sound argument—deductive or inductive—that supports the core claims of
Christianity, sound reasoning points in the opposite direction, towards their
falsehood. While someone might be excused for believing that some particular
man can walk on water, believing further that he is God—an infinitely and
qualitatively distinct being—ventures into the realm of offensiveness. The first
claim requires a person to think of the man as being rather different, perhaps
even essentially different, than the rest of us; the second requires a person to
think of the man as being infinitely and essentially different. In the latter
case, the difference isn’t simply an issue of merging two creaturely kinds, say
the improbability of a person being both human and a water-walking lizard;⁶⁵
it’s that the double nature in question, being both God and human, involves

 Ibid.
 Carr, “The Offense of Reason and the Passion of Faith,” p. 237.
 SKS 11, 209 / SUD, 97.
 For instance, the so-called Jesus Christ Lizard.
210 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

the coincidence of the creaturely and the divine—an infinite, qualitative

difference. Not only, supposes Kierkegaard, can there be no positive reason to
believe a particular person possesses such a dual nature, but also, more
crucially, the understanding finds offensive the very concept (i. e., the God-
man) for which evidence is supposed to be offered.
Having surveyed the account of offensiveness offered in Practice in Christi-
anity, it should be clear that Kierkegaard qualifies as an anti-rationalist in
both of the above senses. He thinks that human reason is actively hostile to
Christianity because it (i) undermines obedience to God and (ii) weighs against
the truth of Jesus’ divinity. If this is right, then Carr’s understanding of Kierke-
gaard’s anti-rationalism is not stated in strong enough terms. Here, again, is
the way she puts her more modest thesis:

Kierkegaard regards human reason not as irrelevant or indifferent to religious truth but as
actively hostile to it in the life of an existing individual. This hostility, however, is not due to
any logically necessary contradiction between reason and religious truth, but to the insidious
influence of the sinning will of the individual, a will which seeks to be master of itself and
thus disobedient to God.⁶⁶

We should consider what Carr means when she says that for Kierkegaard the
hostility is not due to any “logically necessary contradiction between reason
and religious truth” (emphasis added). If she means that Kierkegaard maintains
that the idea of Christ is in fact contradictory, then she might be right. However,
it is also clear that Kierkegaard regards the idea of the God-man as ineluctably
paradoxical; unlike, say, Zeno’s paradox, the idea that Jesus is fully human
and fully God necessarily remains a mystery “this side of eternity.”⁶⁷ This
means that human reason necessarily experiences the incarnation as contra-
dictory. This, as we have said, constitutes Christ’s “essential offense” and it
requires reason to fully abdicate its claim to authority. While other dimensions
of Christ’s offensiveness (e. g., his divine compassion) place pressure on
particular “rules” reason puts in place, the challenge of the incarnation is far
more radical. As illustration, think of the difference between a child, on the
one hand, breaking their parents’ rules and, on the other, peremptorily declaring
that the rules have no bearing on their conduct. The non-essential offenses are
like the former; they challenge some of reason’s rules. The essential offense is

 Carr, “The Offense of Reason and the Passion of Faith,” p. 237 (emphasis added).
 This is Sean Anthony Turchin’s turn of phrase. See his analysis of SKS 12, 40, 44– 5 / PC, 25,
30, in his “Paradox,” in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome V: Objectivity to Sacrifice, ed. by Steven M.
Emmanuel, William McDonald, and Jon Stewart, Burlington: Ashgate 2015 (Kierkegaard
Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15), pp. 43 – 48.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 211

akin to the latter; it rejects reason’s authority in toto. It looks to dethrone reason
by insisting that God cannot be judged by its standards. All this suggests that the
hostility between human reason and Christian truth is more than just an issue of,
as Carr puts it, “the insidious influence of the sinning will.” The hostility is also
epistemic—human beings are incapable of comprehending the incarnation. The
God-man is necessarily relegated (or, as Kierkegaard would insist, promoted) to
an object of trust.
Given this, it is now clear that the prevailing understanding of Kierkegaard’s
anti-rationalism must be modified. Kierkegaard is not just an anti-rationalist; he
is a strong anti-rationalist. He regards human reason not as irrelevant or
indifferent to religious truth but as actively hostile to it in the life of an existing
individual. This hostility is due both to the fact that reason weighs dramatically
against the truth of Jesus’ divinity and that attempts to demonstrate the truth of
Christianity preclude full obedience to God.
One apparent advantage of attributing Carr’s weaker position to Kierkegaard
is that it allows a reader to more readily defend him against the misology charge.
As Carr puts it, “Kierkegaard does not regard reason per se as the culprit
preventing us from having faith…rather, the guilty party is always our disobe-
dient will which uses reason in its attempt to justify itself.”⁶⁸ Since, as we
have argued, Kierkegaard in fact holds a much stronger view about the hostility
of reason, we now see that this response won’t do. Even if submission to Jesus’
authority permitted full demonstration of his divinity, this would be moot. Not
only can there be no such demonstration, reason moves in the opposite
direction; it is repulsed by the prospect of such a belief. Does this mean that
Kierkegaard is indeed saddled with the misology charge, that he harbors a
deep suspicion, even hatred, of reason? Yes and no. Yes, Kierkegaard thinks
that reason, properly employed, is at cross purposes with belief in the core
Christian truths. In this sense, he is indeed suspicious of reason’s usefulness
in the realm of what we might call Christianity’s ultimate claims. At the same
time, and this is a point Carr also makes, Kierkegaard is perfectly content to
employ reason (for instance, construct arguments, point out logical flaws, etc.)
in his endeavor to make the first point. In this limited sense, he affirms reason
as a valuable tool.
But what about the other concern Carr raises for Kierkegaard, the worry that
on the anti-rationalist interpretation the content of faith remains incomprehen-
sible to the Christian believer? If faith is an affront to reason, then why choose

 Carr, “The Offense of Reason and the Passion of Faith,” p. 237.

212 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

Christianity at all? In closing, we consider Kierkegaard’s answer to this all-

important question.

III Then Why Be Christian?

Taking himself to have foreclosed all argumentative and evidential routes to
Christianity, Kierkegaard is aware he is courting incredulity. He imagines the
reader wondering: “But if the essentially Christian is something so terrifying
and appalling, how in the world can anyone think of accepting Christianity?”⁶⁹
He responds as follows:

Very simply and, if you wish that also, very Lutheranly: only the consciousness of sin can
force one, if I dare to put it that way (from the other side grace is the force), into this horror.
And at that very same moment the essentially Christian transforms itself into and is sheer
leniency, grace, love, mercy. Considered in any other way Christianity is and must be a kind
of madness or the greatest horror. Admittance is only through the consciousness of sin; to
want to enter by any other road is high treason against Christianity.⁷⁰

It is important to see that Kierkegaard’s response—that Christianity begins only

with consciousness of sin—is not a mere afterthought. No, the chief end of his
meditation on offense is to prompt this realization. If it is true, as Kierkegaard
maintains, that “admittance” into Christianity is “only through consciousness
of sin,” then all false paths to Christianity must be blocked. Kierkegaard
imagines a reader who has previously approached Christ for the wrong reasons
now forced to either reject him or admit a need so deep she risks involvement.
The closer she draws to Jesus, the more repulsive he seems: His compassion
leads him to live alongside the destitute; he shares the filth and stench of true
poverty. Even his “gift,” that for which he calls all to him, is an insult: relief
from sin for those who hunger and thirst; a spiritual balm for the physically
diseased. The would-be-follower, desperate, presses closer. Christ receives her
only to send her on her way; the last offense, she must imitate his life; marked
by the lowliness of her master, she is called to a life of love and compassion that
is fated to be misunderstood and disdained.
So, then, why choose Christ? Kierkegaard insists the only proper response to
this question is because I’m in despair, and I don’t know where else to turn. The
prospective Christian’s reasons are necessarily practical-existential: all other

 SKS 12, 79 / PC, 67.

 SKS 12, 79 – 80 / PC, 67.
 Kierkegaard’s Strong Anti-Rationalism: Offense as a Propaedeutic to Faith 213

putative paths are non-starters that miss Christ just as surely as open rejection.
But, one might wonder, doesn’t the practical-existential path still render the
move to faith rational? For instance, it seems to be built on something like the
considerations that drew Pascal to the gambling table—a savvy bet concerning
the conditions that most readily promise personal happiness.⁷¹ Is Pascal’s
rational calculation really all that different from the route Kierkegaard
recommends?⁷²
In a memorable passage from his novel, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
offers this chilling reflection on the situation of the “psychotically depressed”
that may help us better understand the kind of choice Kierkegaard reserves for
the prospective Christian. Wallace writes:

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of
quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square.
And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible
agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person
will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about
people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still
just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window
just checking out the view; i. e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here
is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death
becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the
flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and
‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really.⁷³

As Wallace makes clear, the person trapped in the burning building certainly has
a reason to escape it—the pain and terror eventually become unbearable, and
relief of any sort is welcome. At the same time, this reason has a strange status.
First, it is opaque to anyone who hasn’t felt the terror caused by the flames—
“nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang

 We are assuming that something like Alan Hájek’s account of the wager is correct. See Hájek,
“Pascal’s Wager,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2018
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager) (02/24/2022).
 Buben explores this issue, arguing for a clear distinction between Pascalian and Kierke-
gaardian approaches. While Buben insists that Kierkegaard scorns the kind of rationalization
represented by Pascal’s wager, he also admits that for Kierkegaard “such mockery [of Pascal’s
method] does not imply a denial of the possibility of explaining why someone might make a
movement toward a life of faith” (Buben, “Neither Irrationalist Nor Apologist,” p. 324). In
what follows, we gesture at how this account might be filled out: How can a person be motivated
to turn to faith without becoming a mere wagerer?
 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest: A Novel, New York: Little, Brown and Company 1996,
p. 696.
214 Ryan Kemp and Frank Della Torre

on!’, can understand the jump.” Also, and quite importantly, any reason a
person might have to jump doesn’t pertain to the perceived goodness of the
situation they are jumping to: They don’t have a positive reason to jump as
much as a negative reason to escape.
Not only does Wallace’s case provide a vivid example of the situation Kierke-
gaard believes the spiritually depressed person is in, he helps us see the ways in
which her decision to choose Christ is and isn’t rational. The sinner is, Kierke-
gaard believes, trapped in a burning building, a state of excruciating despair.
While she has finally come to recognize the desperation of her plight, she is
in no position to appreciate the goodness of what she is leaping to. Unlike the
person who jumps from a burning building to a safe zone—a nearby building
or a safety net—the prospective Christian cannot see how Jesus’ invitation can
possibly help her. Intensifying the case, Kierkegaard might even say the
would-be convert is more like the person prepared to jump from one burning
building to a second—her leap is elicited not by any overwhelming confidence
that her new situation will be dramatically different, but rather the obscure
possibility that, against all expectation, it might buy her some relief—perhaps
a few precious moments away from her current terror.
Does, then, the would-be convert have a reason to abandon her current life?
Yes, her despair is unbearable. Does she have a reason to turn to Christ? No, not
in the same sense. She can’t confidently say, as Pascal’s wager seems to require,
that as long as Christ is in fact the Son of God, happiness awaits. This is where all
the other forms of Christ’s offense become relevant; the kind of consolation he
promises is apparently so different from the kind of happiness human beings
are naturally attracted to that there simply cannot be any easy way to compare
them. The “happiness” of Christ is, as St. Paul warns, foolishness to the Greek
and a stumbling block to the Jew.⁷⁴
But this sounds like madness—who would make such a choice? Here,
Kierkegaard can defer to Wallace: “You’d have to have personally been trapped
and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”⁷⁵

 See 1 Cor 1:23.

 Wallace, Infinite Jest, pp. 696 – 697.