Søren Kierkegaard

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the heralds of modern existentialism. They pioneered a mood of rebellion and dissatisfaction, created a new definition of existence as choice, action and self-assertion, and made a study of the anguish and difficulty of life.

Kierkegaard and Girard consciously place their work in the context of the Christian tradition. For both thinkers, the biblical account of the Fall of Man takes on central significance, whereas Sartre rejects this framework.

A good place to start is the general definition of faith in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “Without risk, no faith. Faith is the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty.”8 This may seem like a difficult definition, but by unpacking Kierkegaard’s terminology we can see how it makes se

Søren Kierkegaard, who at the time was a little-known Danish theologian and philosopher, conceived of anxiety as the key to human existence: a sense of dread over our freedom to choose. It began, Kierkegaard said, when Adam struggled between Eve’s apple and God, and remains a factor in every choice that humans make.

The true test of religious faith does not take place when things are going well, but “when the world commences its drastic ordeal, when the storms of life crush youth’s exuberant expectancy, when existence, which seemed so affectionate and gentle, changes into a pitiless proprietor who demands everything back.”23 The task is to confront the worst p

Because of the objective uncertainty, faith is a necessary condition of experience. Neither the past nor the future can be known and have to be taken on faith. This temporal condition—what I call the necessary uncertainty of secular faith—binds faith to risk from the beginning. Given that your relation to the past and the future depends on faith, y