Kierkegaard the Good Doctor

Few Protestant theologians keep my attention anymore. Excluding, of course, the great Anglicans Divines who mindfully left room for the saints next to the lot of us miserable sinners. Even in my most Evangelical days, I always abhorred Calvin’s coldness. His followers on the Continent and their Puritan brethren in England I found were always situating themselves against the brightest figures in an otherwise dark history. Luther seemed only slightly better, but ultimately inconsequential. My heritage, after all, was English, not German. As a strict antirevolutionary in politics, I came to harbor uneasiness about Luther’s break with Rome. But belonging to the Anglican church, which is reformed in a narrow sense, the ground I stand on is not suited for repeated thumping on this point.

In my library of mystics and prelates, however, there is one Protestant, indeed a Lutheran, whom I constantly return to: Soren Kierkegaard. Around five years ago I came into possession of his Journals. Upon reading the first entry, a musing on the failure of Calvinism to reconcile freedom and God’s nature, I knew I would enjoy getting to know this fellow. And we have become good friends after all. It was Kierkegaard, with entries on his tragic love for Regine Olsen, who helped get me through a terrible breakup of my own. The old curmudgeon in me has always felt a great affinity with the melancholy Dane.

But just as in an earlier stage of my life I turned to those earliest pages of his and bonded over the complexities of Calvin, so at a later stage I turned to the final entries of his life and bonded over the wholeness of Catholicism. In an entry in 1854, Kierkegaard stipulates that Luther confuses what it means to be the patient with what it means to be the doctor. “He has the patient’s passion for expressing and describing his suffering,” he says of the reformer. “But he has not got the doctor’s breadth of view.”

This is not to say Luther was wholly wrong. Kierkegaard knew that Luther dared to confront those who abused the authority of the Church, but still lamented that by breaking out of the monastery Luther effectively rejected the authority of the Church completely. Without Catholicism, “does not Lutheranism become meaningless?”

It is probably not accurate to hypothesize that Kierkegaard was midway through the Tiber when he left this life. To say he would have embraced a reformed Catholicism is likely nearer the truth. But Catholics, Reformed and Roman, can certainly agree with his charge to western Christianity: that it is our “first and foremost duty to return to the monastery from which Luther broke away.”