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“By far the most profound thinker of the 19th century” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Kierkegaard’s great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe.” —John Updike, The New Yorker
Harper Perennial Modern Classics presents the rediscovered spiritual writings of Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Oxford theologian George Pattison. Called “the first modernist” by The Guardian and “the father of existentialism” by the New York Times, Kierkegaard left an indelible imprint on existential writers from Sartre and Camus to Kafka and Derrida. In works like Fear and Trembling, Sickness unto Death, and Either/Or, he by famously articulated that all meaning is rooted in subjective experience—but the devotional essays that Patterson reveals in Spiritual Writings will forever change our understanding of the great philosopher, uncovering the spiritual foundations beneath his secularist philosophy.
In Spiritual Writings, renowned Oxford theologian George Pattison presents previously neglected Christian writings that will forever alter our understanding of the great philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. In fact, Pattison argues that the “Kierkegaard” known to the history of modern ideas is, in an important sense, not Kierkegaard at all.
In philosophy and literature Kierkegaard is perceived as epitomizing existential angst whilst in theology he is seen as expounding a radical form of Christianity based on a paradoxical and absurd faith that demands hatred of the world and the rejection of all forms of communal religion. However, both pictures rely on highly debatable interpretations based on a relatively small selection of texts. Alongside the works for which he is best known and which do indeed deal with such concepts as melancholy, anxiety, “fear and trembling,” paradox, the absurd, and despair, Kierkegaard also wrote many religious works, usually in the form of addresses, which he called “upbuilding discourses.”Taken as a whole, these writings offer something very different from the popular view. As Spiritual Writings shows, they embody a spirituality grounded in a firm sense of human life as a good gift of God. Kierkegaard calls on us to love God and, in loving God, to love life—quite concretely, to love our own lives, even when they have become wretched or despairing. Although the translation is informed by the latest scholarship, it is intended to translate the texts in such a way as to maximize their accessibility to contemporary students and, where possible, to use current idioms and phrasing.
