Kierkegaard On Freedom And The Scala Paradisi

Louis P. Pojman

"I am aware of freedom in my choice only when I
surrender myself to necessity and in surrendering to
forget it"

(Stages on Life's Way)

"The most wonderful gift that is given to humans is
choice, freedom. If you want to keep and preserve it,
there is only one way - in the very moment [that
you recognize your possession of it] unconditionally
to give it back to God and yourself along with it"

(Papers X 2 A 428).

In this essay I wish to outline Søren Kierkegaard's notion of freedom as it unfolds in his writings and plays a central role in his anthropology and the schema of salvation. One might say that freedom is the central concept in his philosophy of religion, and that it provides one with an ariadne thread with which to wind one's way through the myriads of tunnels and diversions of his works. All his other notions, e.g., anxiety, despair, subjectivity, and faith, are expressions of this notion. There is a question whether 'freedom' is really more than one notion in the melancholy Dane's work, but I shall assume Kierkegaard's own view on the matter
that the concept is one but has various forms or levels of meaning, of which some are more adequate than others.

The first thing to note about the concept is that it is not a simple concept in any of its phases. In fact, Kierkegaard treats all of his concepts as complex and dialectical, having significance only in opposition to another concept. Good only is understood in relationship to evil as its necessary other, love through indifference, salvation through despair and suffering. Freedom is always seen in tension with necessity, whether it be in the form of facticity, historical necessity, fate, divine grace, and/or guilt. While Kierkegaard, as a student, was deeply troubled with the problem of predestination (and with it fatalism), and concerned to show that it was a false doctrine, he was careful to steer away from Pelagianism and ended up embracing a modified, synergistic version of Augustinianism in which freedom is paradoxcially coupled with a notion of original sin and divine election.

There is a major opposition between Augustine and Pelagius. The first will crush all in order to raise it. The second refers itself to man as he is. The first system views Christianity in three stages: creation; the sin-fall and with it a condition of death and impotence; and a new creation, whereby man becomes placed in a position where he can choose and thereby, if he chooses - Christianity. The other system refers itself to man as he is (Christianity accommodated to the world). The importance of the theory of inspiration is seen from the first system. Here one sees the relation between the synergistic and the semi-pelagian conflict. It is the same question, only that the synergistic conflict has the Augustinian system's idea of a new creation as its presupposition (Papers I C 73, March 1843).

Secondly, Kierkegaard makes a distinction between freedom as free will (liberum arbitrium) and as liberation (libertas). The first category is identified with indifferentia aequiliberi (arbitrary or indifferent freedom), the freedom of Buridan's Ass who starves to death because he cannot decide between two equidistant bundles of hay. 2 Unconditioned freedom is a chimera, no where to be found in the world. There are always pressures, forces on the mind, emotional factors
weighting down the soul that produce tendencies to action. Indeed, Kierkegaard is hardly interested in freedom of outward action, of whether I have a choice to raise my arm or not.

Freedom is essentially an inward state which has to do with our loyalties, commitments, and beliefs. Freedom is not so much what we do, as the subjective how with which we do it. It is the good or bad will, the motive and intention. In the last analysis freedom as voluntary choice happens in the eternal "Now" which breaks into the normal course of determined action. It is a metabasis eis allo genos (something of an altogether other dimension from ordinary events), a mystery which signals divine grace and omnipotence. 4 In the last analysis, at its apex, freedom becomes liberation from guilt and restless autonomy. It is a surrender to its owner: "The most wonderful gift that is given to humans is choice, freedom. If you want to keep and preserve it, there is only one way - in the very moment [that you recognize your possession of it] unconditionally to give it back to God and yourself along with it" (Papers X 2 A 428).

Let us turn to Kierkegaard's notion of the fall and redemption and see how this description of freedom functions in his scala paradisi, his ascent to heaven. We may mark off Kierkegaard's eternal pilgrimage in nine stages, beginning with the human creation (every person) in "dreaming innocence" and ending with the summum bonum in supreme blessedness. Briefly, the stages are as follows:

1. Dreaming Innocence: each soul is in the same state as Adam and Eve before the Fall, except that now there are environmental pressures towards sin that there were not then.

2. The Advent of the Prohibition: goodness can only come to life with its dialectical opposite evil (SV IV, p. 185). But the possibility of illegitimate autonomy creates pressures that the unequipped soul can hardly withstand. This creates the vertigo of freedom in which the Fall becomes probable.

3. The Fall: freedom's first movement in which it yields to the pressures brought on by the possibility of autonomy. It "looks down" and "lets go" of the good. This is the first sin, though every other sin has essentially the same logic. Each person is Adam who sins for the first time, bringing sin into the world anew.

4. Slavery to Sin: this is the state of mind which results from the first free fall, a dispositional quality which makes every succeeding sin easier and more natural.

5. The Abyss of Despair: the dissatisfaction the soul experiences, caused by anxiety, that holy hypochondria, which reminds us that we were made for something better. There are various levels in this abyss, the very worst are those in which the disturbing voice of anxiety (the Spirit) is quieted, the Demonic, where the soul is locked-in within its own autonomy (lndesluttedhed).

6. The Ascent to the Good: here prevenient grace through anxiety for the good moves the soul towards the good and creates the possibility of faith (as a gift).

7. Freedom's Second Movement: the open and welcome response to prevenient grace and the possibility of faith, where the soul yields up its autonomy and gives itself back to God.

8. Slavery to God: a dispositional quality of total dependency on God corresponding to stage 4 (slavery or total dependency in sin), but the soul has been sick and must be gradually healed by divine medicine and reconditioning in a sick world. Hence, the suffering as a mark of salvation which is caused both by the healing process within and the opposition from without.

9. Eternal Blessedness: eternity in which the soul is united in love with God. The key stages are 3 and 7. They are described in some detail in The Concept of Anxiety and the Philosophical Fragments respectively (and to some degree in Sickness unto Death and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript). The former work is a brilliant reinterpretation of original sin, which makes each of us responsible for our own Fall. Every person finds himself guilty before God, which implies personal responsibility for a misrelationship. Anxiety is the symptom as well as the cause of the misrelationship. Anxiety is the psychological equivalent of a metaphysical state
of independence from the source of one's being.

In innocence, anxiety is present as a dream, adumbrating the sin-fall in the forms of premonitions and vague apprehensions. The sense of inner nothingness as well as the "prohibition" and "voice of judgment" cast their ghastly shadows onto the wall of our imagination somewhat as the shadows in Plato's cave. In this case, however, they both allure and repel, albeit, vaguely as in the faint remembrance of a dream after awakening. Then the time comes when the situation of which we have dreamed takes place. It is described as being on the edge of a cliff, overlooking an abyss. Something of the abyss' Nothingness calls us alluringly, and, in spite of our dread for what attracts, we look down. We are at once both extremely repelled and
deeply attracted by this Nothingness; and this increasing ambivalence of anxiety produces a state of dizziness in us, causing us to begin to faint. In the process of sinking, we grasp for something to hold onto, and it turns out to be finitude (any temporal object in place of eternity which had been our proper focus and which we ought to have grasped). Holding on to our object for balance, we faint for an instant (Øeblikket, the glance of an eye), and when we have regained our consciousness, we realize that we have chosen finitude and have been degraded by this poor choice.

One may compare Anxiety with dizziness. He, whose eye gazes down into the swallowing deep, becomes dizzy. But what is the cause of this? It is just as much the fault of his eye as the abyss, for what if he had not looked down? Thus anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which occurs because spirit will establish the synthesis, and freedom now stares down into its own possibility
and then grips finitude to hold onto. In this dizziness freedom faints. Psychology cannot come further than this and will not. In the same moment all is changed, and when freedom again rises, it sees that it is guilty. In between these two moments lies the leap which no science has explained or can explain. He who becomes guilty through anxiety, is as ambivalently [tvetydige] guilty as it is possible to be. Anxiety is a female weakness in which freedom swoons.

Psychologically, the sin-fall always occurs in impotence; but anxiety is also the most selfish, and no concrete expression of freedom is so selfish as the possibility of every concretion. This is again the overwhelming experience which determines the individual's ambivalent, sympathetic
and antipathetic relationship. There is in anxiety the selfish infinity of possibility which does not tempt like a choice, but disturbingly makes anxious with its sweet anxiety [Beaengstelse] (SV IV, p. 331 ; Lowry translation, p. 55).

This is the phenomenology of the original sin, whether it be ours or Adam's, but mutatis mutandis it is also a description of the process of every sin, which in a sense is a new fall. In dreaming innocence there was an inchoate sense of Nothingness disturbing the state of tranquility. This Nothingness is identified here as the abyss. The abyss as a metaphor is attached to every possible state of affairs, for qua possible (rather than actual) it is not known (through acquaintance), but simply vaguely adumbrated by a certain pre-understanding. For consciousness, the possible arises out of Nothing in the present moment and projects itself as future. It insinuates that the individual is capable of actualizing the possible. Possibility always brings with it a certain "prohibition" or inherent antithesis, as well as the intuition of judgment.

These heighten the intensity of the ambivalent emotions involved in the experience of anxiety. The whiffing vortex sensation which we experience at the heart of anxiety (as when we panic) seems to overwhelm the self so that it becomes too weak or giddy to see rightly or do what is in its best interest. The self is dizzy and "faints" or "swoons", and on awakening discovers that it is guilty. Although anxiety is the conditioning factor and the process of the Fall has a certain causal necessity, ultimately free will is responsible for the fall. "What is the cause of this? It is just as much the fault of his eye as the abyss, for what if he had not looked down? ''6 The implication is that, although the ego feels the repulsive attraction to gaze at possibility, he could have looked away if he had willed it strongly enough. In the Edifying Discourses there is a passage which may shed some light here. "When the navigator is out on the open seas, when all changes around him, the billows are born and then die; then he must not fix his gaze on them; for they change. He states up at the stars. ''7 That is, he holds on to infinitude instead of finitude, he chooses the eternal and unchangeable instead of the temporal and changeable. "Freedom now stares into its own possibility and then grips finitude to hold onto." It would seem that there are actually two acts of freedom here: (1) looking and (2) gripping. Is he guilty because he has stared or because he has gripped finitude? Is the leap the staring or the gripping? The implication may be that even after the ego in freedom looks down instead of upwards, it still has the possibility of gripping infinity. But we may interpret the passage as implying that once having looked, the grasping onto finitude follows necessarily. The matter may be left in doubt, for as Vigilius says, "Psychology cannot come farther than this and will not."

What is clear is that the leap of freedom has occurred. "In between these two moments lies the leap which no science has explained or can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety, is as ambivalently guilty as it is possible to be." One moment the individual is in innocence and feels the unrest of anxiety within, urging him to look. The next moment, after the faint, he arises and finds that he is guilty. Vigilius Haufniensis makes it clear that the cards are stacked against the poor dreamer (a suggestive description for innocence before the Fall), and that with every sin, sin becomes more normal, so that it becomes harder and harder to resist sin. Here we see an "ensnared freedom" indeed, a freedom that has a distinct predilection to swoon into the possibility of finitude. One may rightly question the justice of God in predisposing us in this way, for it seems that the overwhelming probability is that each of us will "freely" fall and continue to do so. But, if I understand Kierkegaard correctly (and he is never clear here), it may well be the
case that the Fall is paradoxically a good thing (felix culpa) without which the summum bonum cannot be attained - for to know the good entails knowing evil.

Kierkegaard never says this explicitly, but I leave it to you, my listener or reader, to suggest a better explanation.

The second movement of freedom, in which the metabasis eis allo genos happens in the upward direction, occurs once the dregs of guilt and sin have been experienced and anxiety, the holy homesickness, a sort of prevenient grace prepares the self for faith. The description is found in greatest detail in the Philosophical Fragments (especially chapter 4 and the Interlude). Here Johannes Climacus sets forth two philosophies of salvation, the Platonic way (represented by Philosophical Idealism) and the Revelational way (represented by Christianity). In the former
the truth is immanent within us, so that our freedom is sufficient to discover the truth that liberates. One needs no teacher to discover the truth within. The revelational way depicts us as an alien to truth, so that the truth must come to man, if it comes at all, as a gift, bestowed from without. In this way the teacher becomes a necessary condition for discovering the truth. He becomes a benefactor in that he freely gives what we would not otherwise be able to obtain, for he creates the possibility of faith. If man is void of truth and in untruth, there is no possibility for learning or receiving the truth in the present condition. So he must be given a new capacity, a receptacle for containing the truth within. This new organ is faith.

Faith is not the truth, nor is the capacity for faith a guarantee of possessing the truth. It is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for possessing the truth (or "containing" the truth). That is, knowledge of the truth in this revelational sense involves choice, a decision to live entirely according to this truth, a "looking upwards" and gripping the ladder to paradise. Here we have the working out of the synergism mentioned in the reference to Augustine on page 142 (above). Salvation is a cooperative venture between God and man. The capacity for divine truth, as well as a revelation of the truth, is given freely by God, but the individual must choose whether or not to accept it. Rejection is still possible. Grace does not force man against his will "If I do not have the condition...all my willing is of no avail; although as soon as the condition is given, the Socratic principle [the power to will] will again apply.

Nevertheless, there is a strong inclination to accept God. Faith, sensu eminenti, is not an act of the will, but a miracle of grace. As Frater Taciturnus says in Stages on Life's Way: My choice is not free. I am aware of freedom in my choice only when I surrender myself to necessity, and in surrendering to forget it... I cannot go to any man, for I am a prisoner, and misunderstanding, and...misunderstanding again are the iron bars before my window; and I do not elect to go to God, for I am compelled .... My situation is as if God had chosen me me, not I God. There is left to me not even the negative expression of being something of importance, namely, that it is I who come to Him. If I will not summit to bearing the smart of necessity, I am annihilated, or have no place to exist among men except in misunderstanding. If I bear the smart of necessity, then there will come about the transformation (Stages on Life's Way, pp. 3220. The passages are set in distinct dialectical tension, both election and voluntary choice being paradoxically required for salvation. Exactly how the will works here is left as much a mystery as it was in Vigilius' description of the Fall. In a classic journal entry the synergistic tension between grace and free will ("subjectivity") is set forth like this:

No one is saved by works [the humanly subjective] but by grace - and corresponding to that - by faith. Good! But can I then do nothing myself with regard to becoming a believer? Either one must now immediately answer unconditionally, NO; and thus we have the election-through-grace in a fatalistic sense, or one must make a little admission. The thing is that man isalways suspicious against the subjective, and since one establishes that we are saved by faith, one grasps immediately the suspicion, that here too much as been conceded. So one adds: but no one can give himself faith. It is a gift of God which I must pray for.

Good! But can I even pray [in my own power] or must we go further and say: No, to pray (especially for faith) is a gift of God, which no man can give himself; it must be given him? And what then: Then I must again be given the ability to pray correctly for it, that I must correctly pray for faith and so forth. There are many, many envelopings, but they must at one point or another be stopped by the subjective. That man makes the scale so great, so difficult, can be praiseworthy as majesty's expression for God's infinity; but however do not allow yourself to exclude the subjective; unless we want to have fatalism (Papers X 2 A 301, 1849).

The dialectic between God's grace and human freedom must "at one point or another be stopped by the subjective." Humans have a role to play in salvation which, although quantitatively it may seem miniscule in comparison to God's part, is still decisive in the final analysis.

But here we notice both a symmetrical and an asymmetrical relationship between the role of freedom in the Fall and in Salvation. Just as in the Fall freedom is depicted as a response to pressures in favor of a possibility, now the possibility of faith rather than of finitude and sin, but unlike in the Fall, the probabilities do not seem to be in favor of the freedom's leap. The question immediately arises, if the cards are stacked against humans in the Fall so that no one of God's creatures ever succeeds in avoiding sin, why aren't the cards of grace stacked in man's favor so that no human can avoid choosing faith?

It seems to me that Kierkegaard does not succeed in getting God off the hook with regard to evil, for given the strong inclination towards the Fall, which seems necessary for salvation, we should expect an equally strong tendency towards saving faith which constitutes the promise of the summum bonum. The asymmetry seems invidious to God's plan and calls for improvement. What is lacking, and what Kierkegaard's scala paradisi calls for, is something like a notion of purgatory wherein God's call continues to work on those ruined by the Fall, until the apocatastasis is reached and all are finally won back to his love. For in the end even as human freedom is too weak to resist in, so it is too wise to resist grace. The logical conclusion of Kierkegaard's schema of the divine comedy is universal salvation.

All's well that ends well.

____

Notes:

1. Cf. Kierkegaard'sPapers I A 4, 5, 7, 10, 19, 20, 43,295 and C 40.
2. "If sin has come in by an act of an abstract liberum arbitrium (which no more existed in
the beginning as later in the world, since it is a mere mental chimera), neither is there
anxiety."

Samlede Vaerker IV, p. 320 (Lowry translation of The Concept of Dread, p. 45). "The
abstract freedom of choice (liberum arbitrium) is a fantasy, as if a human being at every moment of his life stood continually in this abstract possibility, so that consequently he never moves from one spot, as if freedom were not also an historical condition - this has been pointed out by Augustine and many others. We may make this clear simply by the following example. Take a weight, even the most accurate gold weight - when it has been used only a week, it already has a history. The owner knows this history, e.g., that it tilts towards off-balance one way or the other, etc. This history continues with use. So it is with the will. It has a history, a continual progressive history. A person can fall so far that he eventually loses even his capacity to choose. With this, however, the history is not concluded, for, as Augustine correctly says, this condition is the punishment for sin - and is again sin" (Papers X 4 175, 1851).

"Usually freedom of will is presented as an extraordinary good. It is, but it is also
depends on how long it is going to last. Usually one makes the mistake of thinking that this itself is the good and that this freedom of choice lasts one's life time. But what Augustine says of true freedom (as opposed to freedom of choice) is very true and very much a part of experience - namely that a person has the most lively sense of freedom when with complete and decisive determination he impresses upon his deeds the inner necessity which excludes the thought of other possibilities. Then freedom of choice or the agony of will comes to an end" (X 4 A 177, 1851). Cf. also Papers X 2 A 428.

3.Cf. Either~Or II p. 232 and my The Logic ofSubfectivity, p. 103f.
4."The greatest good which can be done to anyone, greater than any end to which it can be created, is to make it free. In order to be able to do this omnipotence is necessary... If we correctly understand omnipotence, clearly it must have this quality of taking itself back in the very manifestation of its all-powerfulness, so that the result of this act of omnipotence will be an independent being. This is why one person cannot make another person free, because the one who has the power is imprisoned in it and consequently always has a false relation to him whom he wishes to free....Omnipotence alone can take itself back while giving, and this relationship is nothing else but the independence of the recipient" (Papers VII A 181).
5.Cf. The Concept of Dread, Chapters i and 2 for the best description of the first part of the schema and the Philosophical Fragments for a detailed description of the second part.
6.SV IV, p1331 (Lowry tr. p. 55).
7.SV III, p. 25.
8.Fragments, p. 77f.