Agape and Personhood. David L. GoicoecheaЧитать онлайн книгу.
originated through Omnipotence can be independent.
That is why one human being cannot
make another person wholly free . . .
only Omnipotence can withdraw itself
at the same time it gives itself away, and
his relationship is the very independence of the receiver.
(Journals and Papers 2.1252)
The entirety of Kierkegaard’s existential thinking could
be interpreted as reflecting on this Omnipotence that
stands back in order to let the other be free.
In the last three chapters of his Works of Love Kierkegaard
explains the agapeic strategy for accomplishing reconciliation.[NL1-3]
(1) We need to love the other as more important than ourselves
that he or she might be graced to love others as more important.
(2) We need to recollect the dead in praying for them and in asking
them to pray for us that we might see a context that is big
enough in time and space to let this impossible task happen.
(3) We need to praise Love which is God that we might
praise all others as members of his Incarnate Body.
In humility Jesus taught us how God stands back to free others
and thus sacrifices his omnipotence for the potency of others.
In part two, chapter eight, of Works of Love: The Victory of
the Conciliatory Spirit in Love, Which Wins the One Overcome,
Kierkegaard poses the problem clearly when he writes:
Let us suppose that the prodigal son’s brother
had been willing to do everything for his brother-yet
one thing he could never have gotten into his head
that the prodigal should be more important. (338)
If the prodigal goes to the altar to thank God he will be
commanded by the Gospel to go to his elder brother and
to seek reconciliation in accord with Matt 5:23–24.
When the prodigal came home after squandering his money
his brother took offense at him and was resentful because his father
threw a party to welcome home the prodigal and did not seem
in the elder brother’s eyes to see him as important as the prodigal.
It was as if the father thought the prodigal to be more important.
So for the prodigal to properly love the elder brother he has to
not only forgive him but to go and be reconciled with him.
That might be no easy task for the prodigal would have to treat
the elder brother as more important and the elder brother would
have to think of the prodigal as more important if there is
to be true reconciliation according to the model of agape.
The point of Kierkegaard’s authorship is to show how the brother
can be brought to love the prodigal as more important than himself.
How will the elder brother stop taking offense and being resentful?
It is the task of the prodigal to be like Stephen for Paul.
He has to stand back in self denial to free his brother.
In resentment the brother may not want to become freed
from his taking offense that he might be reconciled.
So the prodigal has to have faith that it will happen
in his brother’s and in God’s good time and even if
it doesn’t happen in this life time the prodigal must not
despair, but he must pray always even for the blessed dead.
In the middle of his chapter on Praising Love Kierkegaard
gives a summary of how reconciliation can be achieved:
This is inwardly the condition or model
in which praising love must be done.
To carry it out has, of course,
its intrinsic reward, although in addition
by praising love in so far as one is able,
it also has the purpose to win people to it,
to make them properly aware of what
in a conciliatory spirit is granted
to every human being-that is, the highest.
The one who praises art and science still
shows dissention between the gifted and ungifted.
But the one who praises love reconciles all,
not in common poverty nor in a common
mediocrity, but in the community of the highest. (365)
For Kierkegaard the prodigal might remain an aesthete for whom
the beauty of the party immediately pleases “me”, but if so
he will come to the common poverty of me-centered prodigals.
Or the prodigal might become ethical and reflect upon “my self”
but in simply avoiding the dire consequences of prodigality
with gifted insight he might be just as mediocre as his brother.
The prodigal might go beyond the common poverty of the pre-
aesthetic me and the common mediocrity of the reflectively
ethical myself and become the “I” who is thankful to his father
and to God. But, this “me,” “myself” and “I” can become other
centered in a praising love that lets even aesthetic petition,
ethical repentance and religious gratitude become praising.
This is the seven step logic of reconciliation that is demanded
of the prodigal and which is the core of Kierkegaard’s philosophy.
We will now examine how Kierkegaard applied this logic
throughout his authorship in reconciling older brothers and Jesus.
Kierkegaard’s four noble truths
I We humans bring each other into the suffering
of boredom and fear and trembling
II through the sin of taking offence at God’s
existence in anxiety and despair
III from which we can be creatively freed by following
the God-man’s loving self-denial and self-sacrifice
IV along the nine-fold path of his conciliatory love that
recollects the dead in the praising love
of humankind’s highest affirmation by moving
(1) from the irony of Socratic skepticism
in which love is a matter of conscience
(2) to Abraham’s knight of