Rel igious Crisis, Ethical Life, and Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christendom

Søren Kierkegaard has been frequently associated with fideism, that is, the affirmation of the priority of faith and religion over reason and even ethics in public life.1 One not atypical work can claim: “The greatest exponent of fideism in modern times was Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, Christianity is the denial of everything we rationally think.”2 Likewise, in his contribution on fideism in A Companion to Philosophy ofReligion, Terrence Penelhum identifies Kierkegaard with “evangelical fideism,” which he describes not so much as a distrust of reason as a trust in God that necessarily has the distrust of reason as its consequence.3 I propose in this paper that the standard interpretation ofKierkegaard as a “fideist” or “fundamentalist” is oversimplifying and in need of complication. Insofar as: (1 ) his writings do not only concern religious faith but more extensively ethical and aesthetic life and (2) he distinguished what is appropriately religious from what is appropriately secular, rejecting the reduction of the latter to the former. The fideist reading has had serious consequences for addressing Kierkegaard and his contemporary significance.4 Hegelian critics ofKierkegaard such as Fred Dallmayr contend that Kierkegaard desacrilizes the public realm of objective spirit (objektiver Geist) and thus “robs it of its ethical significance.”5