Kierkegaard had his own formula for what it means to be a man. He put it forth in those superb pages wherein he describes what he calls “the knight of faith.”4 This figure is the man who lives in faith, who has given over the meaning of life to his Creator, and who lives centered on the energies of his Maker. He accepts whatever happens in this visible dimension without complaint, lives his life as a duty, faces his death without a qualm. No pettiness is so petty that it threatens his meanings; no task is too frightening to be beyond his courage. He is fully in the world on its terms and wholly beyond the world in his trust in the invisible dimension. It is very much the old Pietistic ideal that was lived by Kant’s parents. The great strength of such an ideal is that it allows one to be open, generous, courageous, to touch others’ lives and enrich them and open them in turn. As the knight of faith has no fear-of-life-and-death trip to lay onto others, he does not cause them to shrink back upon themselves, he does not coerce or manipulate them. The knight of faith, then, represents what we might call an ideal of mental health, the continuing openness of life out of the death throes of dread.
Put in these abstract terms the ideal of the knight of faith is surely one of the most beautiful and challenging ideals ever put forth by man. It is contained in most religions in one form or another, although no one, I think, has described it at length with such talent at Kierkegaard. Like all ideals it is a creative illusion, meant to lead men on, and leading men on is not the easiest thing. As Kierkegaard said, faith is the hardest thing; he placed himself between belief and faith, unable to make the jump. The jump doesn’t depend on man after all—there’s the rub: faith is a matter of grace. As Tillich later put it: religion is first an open hand to receive gifts (grace) and then a closed hand to give them. One cannot give the gifts of the knight of faith without first being dubbed a knight by some Higher Majesty. The point I am driving at is that if we take Kierkegaard’s life as a believing Christian and place it against Freud’s as an agnostic, there is no balance sheet to draw. Who is to tally up which one caused others to shrink up more or to expand more fully? For every shortcoming that we can point to in Freud, we can find a corresponding one in Kierkegaard. If Freud can be said to have erred on the side of the visible, then Kierkegaard can surely be said to have equally erred on the side of the invisible. He turned away from life partly from his fear of life, he embraced death more easily because he had failed in life; his own life was not a voluntary sacrifice undertaken in free will, but a pathetically driven sacrifice. He did not live in the categories in which he thought.
I am talking matter-of-factly about some of the surest giants in the history of humanity only to say that in the game of life and death no one stands taller than any other, unless it be a true saint, and only to conclude that sainthood itself is a matter of grace and not of human effort.
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(William) James, again, knew how difficult it was to live astride both worlds, the visible and the invisible. One tended to pull you away from the other. One of his favorite precepts, which he often repeated, was: “Son of man, stand upon your own feet so that I may speak with you.” If men lean too much on God they don’t accomplish what they have to in this world on their own powers. In order to do anything one must first be a man, apart from everything else. This throws the whole splendid ideal of sainthood into doubt because there are many ways of being a good man. Was Norman Bethune any less a saint than Vincent de Paul? That, I suppose, is another way of saying that in this world each organism lives to be consumed by its own energies; and those that are consumed with the most relentlessness, and burn with the brightest flame, seem to serve the purposes of nature best, so far as accomplishing anything on this planet is concerned. It is another way, too—with Rank—of talking about the priority of the “irrational” life force that uses organismic forms only to consume them.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
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