Kierkegaard on God as the face of the other

To continue with my emerging thoughts and ideas for the paper I wish to write on ethics using Kierkegaard and Irigaray (see second last post).

It suddenly occurred to me today why I wanted to write this paper and why I had somewhat unknowingly chosen to put together Kierkegaard and Irigaray as the two main theorists for the endeavour. First and foremost I feel the message that I am very drawn to emphasizing and reconceptualizing in light of a new integral awareness is the often neglected 2nd person relationship to God that Wilber discusses in "Integral Spirituality".  I so agree with Wilber’s insight that in our post-modern Western world, due to our growing emphasis on Buddhism and Science we have come to greatly overprivelage the 1st and 3rd person relationships to God often at the expense of ignoring the 2nd.

Wilber argues that there are two main reasons for this neglect of the 2nd person relationship to God, the first is unfortunately due to boomeritis. His main point is that as the doctrines of Buddhism came to the West we liked to emphasize the parts that tell us we are God, the great I-I (1st person) but tend to overlook the devotional aspect of Buddhist religion. The other big reason he argues is that in the west we have been attempting to emerge out from under an oppressively 2nd person, mythic interpretation of God as the great "daddy punisher". But in throwing out the mythic structure we also threw out the great 2nd person devotional aspect of our relationship of the Divine; the great ego-leveller, the humbling of the heart at the alter of God, the duty of selfless service that the Catholic nuns, like Saint Teresa of Avila, so beautifully described and embodied.

So we have tended to loose sight of this 2nd person relationship and focused both on 1st person, the great I-I, and also 3rd person, Spirit as the great unfolding of evolution, Gaia, the web of life. Both these perspectives, without an inclusion of the 2nd person relationship, Wilber argues is the hiding place for a lot of unseen arrogance because we never have to truly give ourselves over.

So this is where Kierkegaard so beautifully comes in. His Judeo-Christian background of course emphasizes the 2nd person relationship to God, but unlike the mythic followers, Kierkegaard takes that 2nd person relationship to its highest forms and mystical expressions. In my opinion, he rescues the 2nd person relationship to God from a purely mythical interpretation and reframes devotion and surrender that is not just passively subservient to the "daddy God" but rather completely requires that we each own  up to our own responsibility in this relationship.

Kierkegaard was very original in his emphasis on the existential and the need for each human being to individuate and find their own relationship to God outside of the dictates of society and institutionalized Christianity. In this way I believe he was taking Christianity and our ideas about love and duty out of the purely mythic and into the intense scrutiny of rationality and individual responsibility. He forces each of us to face up to our own responsibility to meet God as individuals and this takes a "momentary suspension of the ethical" as he described it. The need to unplug from the mythic interpretation of morality, at least momentarily, in order to ground in faith.

In my opinion Kierkegaard was one of the few truly nondual Christian philosophers because he saw two main paths that were part of the "Knight of Faith's journey", first was that of Infinite resignation, basically the resignation from all worldly things and duties, including ideas about morality. But this was not the end of the path for the Knight of Faith, for after this Infinite resignation had grounded the individual soul in the truth of the eternal, one had to make the most difficult leap of all and that was to receive the entire finite world back again, what Kierkegaard called "the absurd embrace". All the things, even those which had been greatly resisted in the first part of our journey, now had to be fully embraced.

It was through this process that Kierkegaard believed one came to find the eternal at the root of all things (beyond good and evil) and also how one came to really learn what it means to love God in the absolute sense. Loving God for Kierkegaard was never supposed to be the love for some abstract notion or otherworldly presence, loving God was loving others as God. Kierkegaard had this beautiful saying about how God constantly turns our love for him away from Himself and tells us that if we truly wish to love him than we will love others for Him.

It is in this awareness of realizing how loved we are, a love rooted in the truth of eternity, that we then finally grasp what Kierkegaard meant by our "infinite debt".  And it is the painfully ecstatic awareness of this "infinite debt" that we come to love others without calculation, limitation or condition. This is not a mere human love; it is our love for God, for eternity. But Kierkegaard's point was that eternity can only be loved through finitude. Thus we can only directly experience God through the face of the other and can only love God by loving others. This is the sense in which God turns away our love and forces us to give it to every face that we see rather than directing it towards Him. This is the joy, the humility and heartache of what the absurd embrace really entails.

Why I think Irigaray would be such a great contribution to this article is because of her emphasis on the other and her beautiful articulation of the mysterious space that exists in the We space. It is these two writer's emphasis on the Other that to me could really bring back a revitalized view on the 2nd person relationship to God and what it means in a post-modern and integral context. I think this devotional relationship is inherently tied to the feminine (and I don't equate the feminine to women), and thus would be an attempt to recover the higher reaches of feminine surrender, devotion, beauty and love. Feminism still has much to untangle itself from in being able to articulate and appreciate these higher levels of Agape and communion that express our 2nd person relationship to the Divine, and I think Kierkegaard just might be the theorist to bring this new level of depth to the feminist discussions.