Kierkegaard Against Comfort: The Brutal Demands of Faith In An Age Of Easy Belief
(ANALYSIS) Born in Copenhagen in May 1813, Soren Kierkegaard is the father of existentialism, though he would have found most of what passes for existentialism today truly absurd. The philosophy he inspired became associated with black turtlenecks, smoke-filled Parisian cafés and the fashionable romance of meaninglessness.
Kierkegaard’s actual argument ran in precisely the opposite direction. Existence without God was not liberating but suffocating.
He knew despair intimately. He grew up in a house heavy with melancholy and religious guilt, his father shattered his boyhood with blasphemy that Kierkegaard would later call an "earthquake.” The shaken son took that guilt and did something extraordinary with it. He turned it into philosophy.
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A practicing Christian, he attacked the Danish church for making faith too comfortable, too respectable, too socially frictionless. His central argument was as simple as it was devastating. Becoming a Christian, he insisted, is the hardest thing a human being can do. To some, that might sound ludicrous, but Kierkegaard had thought harder about the cost of faith than almost anyone before him.
What most people get wrong about the great Dane is that they remember the existential dread and forget the destination. They borrow his diagnosis and discard his cure. Yes, he described human existence as a sickness, but the sickness had a precise name. He called it despair, defining it with clinical calm as the failure to be oneself before God. It was a rupture. Not between self and society, but between self and source. Remove God, and the rupture has no origin, no cause and no repair.
He organized human life into three stages. The architecture rewards careful attention. The aesthetic stage is the life of pleasure, novelty, and distraction, pursued by people who would rather feel something than become someone. It is the life of Don Juan, of the seducer, of anyone who moves through life in a superficial, largely hedonistic blur.
The ethical stage is the life of duty and moral seriousness, lived by people who have exchanged primal feeling for obligation. They are, by any reasonable measure, good. But goodness, for Kierkegaard, was not enough. The ethical man has mastered himself without ever surrendering himself.
Both stages, for all their surface differences, share the same failure. They are self-enclosed. They orbit the self without ever cracking it open. The third stage, the religious stage, breaks that circuit entirely. Faith was not, for Kierkegaard, a supplement to an otherwise well-ordered life, but the only force capable of addressing what a well-ordered life cannot reach.
His most famous illustration of this was Abraham, the man God asked to kill his son. Kierkegaard read that story repeatedly until it became genuinely terrifying. Abraham could not explain himself to anyone. He could not make his obedience legible to the ethical world, because what God demanded violated every ethical category he possessed. He was asked to do the unthinkable and trust, against all evidence, that God would redeem it.
Kierkegaard called this the “teleological suspension of the ethical”, academic-sounding until you realize he meant something blazing and personal. There are moments when faithfulness to God requires a leap that reason cannot authorize, and society cannot validate.
Religious readers tend to understand this in a way secular ones miss entirely. Faith, in Kierkegaard's telling, is not irrational in the sense of being foolish. It is, in fact, beyond the reach of any system that begins and ends with human categories. His knight of faith, the person who has made the leap, looks completely ordinary from the outside.
There is no theatrical piety, no monastic withdrawal and no visible sign of the storm within. The knight of faith walks through the world eating, working, and loving, while holding everything in relation to the infinite. The tension never resolves. The contradiction never lifts. The faith continues anyway.
What made him a prophet his own church could not tolerate was his refusal to let comfortable Christianity stand unchallenged. Danish Christendom had perfected the art of making faith painless, a social credential more than a spiritual reality. Kierkegaard’s attack on the church was surgical, a careful opening up of something that looked healthy from the outside and wasn't.
His final years turned fierce, almost ungovernable in their intensity. He published pamphlets attacking the established church and its bishops. His writing was fierce, occasionally funny, and entirely without mercy. In October 1855, he collapsed on the street and died within weeks. He was forty-two, unmarried, and by his own sense of things, unfinished.
And perhaps that incompleteness is fitting. Because the thing he spent his life describing, the difficulty of being a true Christian, is itself never finished. It begins again every day.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.