Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea
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and keep acting out the way
we want to be in sacred reflection that cultivates holy living.
Mother was strongly motivated to live the most excellent way
she could imagine because her children would follow that way too.
Father Dougherty in the reflective standing back of his sacred
celibacy inspired her to focus on sacred communion and love.
II. Søren Kierkegaard
II.1 Reconciling the God-Man and Socrates
II.1.1 The Paradoxical Logic of Erotic Inspiration
On May 19, 1838, at 10:30 a.m., the Existential Movement
was born when Kierkegaard wrote in his journal:
There is such a thing as an indescribable joy
which grows through us as unaccountably
as the Apostles’ outburst is unexpected:
“Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice!:
Not a joy over this or that, but full jubilation,
“with hearts, and souls, and voices.”
I rejoice over my joy,
of, in, by, at, on, through, with my joy,
a heavenly refrain, which cuts short,
as it were, our ordinary song;
a joy which cools and refreshes like a breeze,
a gust of the trade wind which blows from
the Grove of mamre to the eternal mansions.1
Kierkegaard as a young student in his mid-twenties
suffered from a sort of genetic depression.
He moved out of his beloved father’s home
and became estranged from the melancholic old man.
He thought of himself as no longer religious.
He experimented with alcohol and prostitution.
He could not write his Master’s thesis.
He found that he had a secret thorn in the flesh.
But then he fell in love with Regina Olsen,
a beautiful young girl of fourteen.
With the above outburst of existential joy he
realized what had happened as he became reconciled
with his father, with his God and with himself.
His erotic love made of him a celibate religious genius
and his celibacy increased the passion of his eros.
Kierkegaard discovered the paradox of Socratic reconciliation.
II.1.2 The Logic of Socratic Irony
Kierkegaard’s father was a lonely, wretched shepherd boy
on Denmark’s Jutland heath where one day he cursed God.
Then as a teenage orphan he went to Copenhagen to live with
his uncle who employed him in his fine clothing store.
His father married, but his wife died and soon thereafter
his first child was born of the servant girl whom he married.
After a few years his father inherited the store and became wealthy.
Several other children were born and then came Søren who,
as a hunch-back cripple, became his father’s favorite.
The father and the little boy were always together and
Søren sat in on his father’s theology discussion group.
Then the father’s children began to die one after the other
and the father began to think he was cursed by God because
he had cursed God and committed adultery and he was
consumed in a guilt complex with which Søren identified.
At university Kierkegaard was caught up in boredom
and felt he was an ugly little critter who was unlovable.
But then when Regina really loved him he was astounded.
All of a sudden he realized that the reconciliation process
that Socrates describes in the Phaedrus was happening to him.
Socrates said that our body is like a chariot that is
pulled by a vulgar black horse and a noble white horse
and driven by the charioteer of our rational intellect.
When the black horse beholds a beautiful boy he wants sex.
He is so strong that the white horse and the charioteer are dragged
along into sexual activity and since exercise builds strength
the addiction increases and vulgar lust is all powerful.
But it can happen that the soul can fall in love with
the right beloved soul and then the white horse and
the charioteer will sublimate the energy of the black horse
in a reconciling, life changing enthusiasm of Divine Madness.
II.1.3 The Logic of Skeptical Irony
When Kierkegaard and Regina fell in love the indescribable joy
of his erotic inspiration took him totally beyond boredom
and awakened the genius of his creative illness with the energy
of that ancient Platonic love of the Symposium and the Phaedrus.
Kierkegaard now knew Socrates from within and with the energy
of the black horse he could now write his brilliant Master’s Thesis
on The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates.
Socrates was the master of irony because he became the wisest
man in Athens by knowing that he could know nothing.
He clearly saw that the Pre-Socratic philosophical physicists
only had theories when they claimed that all things came from
the one, or the two, or the few, or the many or the infinite.
He knew that they could never know the truth about the becoming
of all things and that allowed him to ironically move from
their proud, pretending, pompously ponderous prejudice
to a new humble, honest, hilariously humorous health.
Kierkegaard saw how true philosophical irony is more than
a literary trope which says one thing and means its opposite.
When the skeptic moves from knowing nothing to being wise
he is working with the logic of mixed opposites that became
for Kierkegaard the very logic of Christian agapeic reconciliation.
Søren saw that the aesthete’s inclusive opposites reconcile
in a common poverty that is always bored but never boring.
The ethical exclusivistic opposites do not reconcile in
a common mediocrity that is never bored but always boring.
Socrates went beyond either inclusive or exclusive opposites