In the early 1940s, at the time when Soren Kierkegaard’s writings were becoming available in English, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr connected that Kierkegaard (1813-1855) had emerged as the most profound psychologist of the soul since St. Augustine (354-430). In an age that increasingly seeks to break free of cultural narrowness, Niebuhr”s remark should be reformulated to say that Kierkegaard is the most profound psychologist of the Western, or Western Christian, soul since Augustine. Kierkegaard would have no difficulty with this qualification, for he was neither culturally nor religiously naïve. His is a self-conscious analysis of the Western soul and the problems that arise Lutheran culture. His presuppositions may be culturally conditioned, and this may ultimately affect his diagnosis of spiritual malady. But, if conditioned by culture, they are not limited by time. Thus even if it is the romantic nineteenth century that Kierkegaard addresses, I suspect that Bishop Augustine, author of the Confessions, would recognize in Kierkegaard’s young aesthetes elements of the young Augustine himself, an intellectual romantic if there ever was one. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s nineteenth-century poets and spiritual patients have their counterparts today in the fashionable culture of sensitivity and self-actualization that constitute the new romanticism of California and, by extension, contemporary American culture. Kierkegaard knew nothing, of course, of sensitivity groups, self-fulfillment groups, and the like. But nineteenth-century Denmark and Germany had their cultural equivalents. Kierkegaard fully granted the alienations that such groups pointed to and agreed about the self-alienating quality of modern society. But, having himself experimented with the alternative life-views celebrated by such groups, he came up against their limits and came to regard proposed novel cures as worse than the disease - worse, since they did not cure the disease but had the effect of either distracting one from it or else rendering one spiritually suicidal.
Kierkegaard is thus an analyst and undisguised critic of modernity. At the same time, he is very much a man of his century, who accepts certain insights of his age but considers them not radical enough and suggests that the analysis of an earlier age - early Christianity - was much closer to the mark. Moreover, he is not fixated on the externals of early Christianity and allows the insights or early Christianity to be "translated" into the discourse of his age. Thus, for example, he conducted a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the meaning of original sin that broke free of the mythology of inherited guilt from a deed of Adam and Eve and in its place offered a deep deliberation on the meaning of our own incontestable fall. For Kierkegaard, sin is a real and unhappy fact. But it need not be spoken of in Roman legalistic terminology, nor must our God-relationship be described as a medieval balance sheet of debts and credits. “Sin” and “forgiveness” are terms that can even be discarded if necessary, but the process they point to takes place, he would hold, in the living, struggling spirit of every person, whether in the fourth century, the nineteenth, or the late twentieth.
What Kierkegaard criticizes in modernity is, on the one hand, the smug self-confidence of the scientific world-view that was still on the ascent in the nineteenth century (and did not begin to erode until most the mid-twentieth) and, on the other hand, the fanciful notion that moderns, by virtue of their increased knowledge and mastery of the planet, are somehow essentially different from the human species in ages past. The consequence of a fanciful notion of a new humanity was that
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