Who are we? Remembering and forgetting in the reparation of communal identity

Remembering and forgetting as inverse dialectic

In the second period of Kierkegaard’s literary activity he developed the theme of forgiveness across various writings. If we read with Sylvia Walsh, we can find two common methodological threads through these approaches. First, we find that forgiveness, as a theme within the ethical and ethical-religious, is treated indirectly. This communication does not primarily aim at directly conveying knowledge, but at indirectly conveying capability. It is a hallmark of the single individual who is not content with the general concepts of direct knowledge, but seeks the “double reflection” of a subjective thinker: existentially realizing or appropriating general concepts. Forgiveness is a great example of a theme that is to be communicated indirectly. Kierkegaard was not primarily concerned with directly conveying the forms forgiveness takes as some general actuality; rather, his aim was to elicit the capability for forgiveness in the reader. ¹

Second, Kierkegaard emphasized the importance of the inverse dialectic in understanding Christian existence. The inverse dialectic really has two parts: “[1] the positive is known and expressed through the negative, what appears to be negative may be indirectly positive (and vice versa), and [2] the positive and the negative, Christianly understood, are always the inverse of the natural, human, worldly, and pagan understandings of these terms.” ² The first part of this inverse dialectic is fairly straightforward: the positive can come to be known through the negative. However, the second part is equally important for my purposes because it emphasizes that the existential experience of the inverse dialectic reaches its apogee in Christian existence as we realize our infinite distance from the divine and the eternal. ³

Both of the key methodological features of the second authorship, indirect communication and inverse dialectic, also appear when we examine Kierkegaard’s development of forgiveness. His development of this theme commends its reader to two complementary moments of remembering and forgetting that form the positive and negative features of the inverse dialectic. On the one hand, we find him emphasizing the need for remembering Christ as a prototype. Forgiveness relies upon remembering the love of Christ that through an act of substitution brings the relief of forgiveness. Kierkegaard made this affirmation dialectically—always understanding the mimetic features of Christ as prototype in conjunction with the atoning work of Christ as redeemer. His atonement model appears to be a straightforward appropriation of vicarious satisfaction, but he emphasized how the atonement assuages our anxiety in the face of failing to succeed in implementing the imitation of Christ’s perfection. ⁴ Thus, his understanding of forgiveness was directly connected to this understanding of atonement and prototype. Especially in the face of bitter memories or crushed hopes, remembering Christ brings solace. ⁵

On the other hand, forgiveness requires that we forget the very consciousness of sin that brings us to realizing our need for forgiveness. This is because forgetting our sin is necessary if we are to fully take on the forgiveness offered to us by Christ. So while we constantly remember this forgiveness offered to us, the full acceptance of that forgiveness entails a forgetting or letting go of the sin that brought us to need that forgiveness. ⁶ The remembering of Christ becomes the means to our truly forgetting sin in the atoning process of forgiveness.

Thus, in Kierkegaard’s account we are called to remember without ceasing Christ as the prototype of love and bearer of our forgiveness; simultaneously, we are called to forget our entire past so that we are fully built up in this forgiving love. Now we can see an inverse dialectic with all its implications in the remembering and forgetting of forgiveness because the process of forgiveness is not a single event. It recurs as our acts, done and undone in thought, word, and deed, continue to not reflect the prototype. Again and again we must forget the ruling of sin over our past in remembering the love of Christ that is our forgiveness; in remembering this forgiveness the consciousness of sin that informs our past is erased and we are freed to emulate the love and forgiveness of Christ given to us. Yet, emulating this love entails a renewed confession and consciousness of our sin that deepens our awareness of our dependence on Christ’s love and forgiveness. There is a perpetual deepening of our consciousness of sin (even in forgetting) that inversely brings us ever nearer to the love of Christ and an ability to practice that love in our lives; this practice of the love of Christ itself serves as an indirect communication of Christ’s power as prototype and redeemer.

An upbuilding approach to the inverse dialectic

We are not Christ and the love that we become equipped to show to others cannot be the love of Christ itself since we continually fall short of this ideal. What the account of remembering and forgetting emphasizes for the single individual is the inverse dialectical quality of our relationship to God in Christian existence: a relation which is distinctive in terms of its infinite qualitative distance. Nonetheless, I would suggest that the love and forgiveness of Christ is not unrelated to the works of love we are called to demonstrate toward others. In essence, I claim that the inverse dialectic of forgiveness has to be indirectly communicated. As such, I suggest interpolating the inverse dialectic of remembering and forgetting in forgiveness with two related insights Kierkegaard develops concerning the upbuilding quality of love.

First, while it is God’s task to implant love into each individual, it is our task to presuppose love to be in the other. In fact, it would be unloving to believe we could implant love because such a tendency would require us to transform the other by control. Kierkegaard rejects such transformation by control, noting that “this is a suprahuman relationship, an inconceivable relationship between human beings; in this sense human love cannot build up. It is God, the Creator, who must implant love in each human being, he who himself is Love.” ⁷ In contrast to controlling the other, upbuilding love calls for the individual to control herself so as to be able to continually presuppose this love in the other. In short, the upbuilding of love in the beloved is an act of self-control or self-denial for the lover. ⁸

It is easier for us to presuppose this love in others where it is obviously present or its mutual reciprocity seems assured (i.e. the person we clearly see filled with love or who is near to us is an easier subject of presupposition than a grumpy curmudgeon worlds away). We are tempted, in these persons where we do not readily perceive love, “to pull out the splinter in order to build up love properly” ⁹ —to tear down the hindrance we perceive in the other in order that love is built up properly. But love does not tear down, love does not control the other, love builds up. To perfectly love forth toward the other we must overcome the tendency to tear down, we must control the self, and strive to perfectly presuppose love in the other. ¹⁰ For building up is similar to tearing down in that it will do something to the other, but the difference is that building up occurs by controlling ourselves and tearing down occurs when we control the other. ¹¹

This ability to presuppose love in the other is concomitant to the second point from Kierkegaard’s account that I want to emphasize: God stands as the middle term in any relationship of love. ¹² We must understand two critical presuppositions related to this point. First, Kierkegaard affirms that God is love, and as love must represent the highest standard by which all love is to be judged. Second, we are God’s creation and bear the image of God. ¹³ Bearing these two assumptions in mind, Kierkegaard’s affirmation, that God is the middle term in any relationship of love, highlights how in loving one actually loves God as the universal divine likeness that constitutes each of us. In loving the other we must love in such a way that we recognize how both of us (the lover and the beloved) belong to God through love. ¹⁴ As such God can never be removed from any relationship of love because God constitutes the love that can exist between persons. In sum, the foundation of the human individual is love because God is love and, classically described, we are in the image of God; in showing forth this love to another we highlight how we each belong to God who is love itself.

Some have accused Kierkegaard at this point of creating a relationship between persons that never allows us to actually love the other, but only to love them as a stepping stone to God, and at first glance Kierkegaard’s writing in Works of Love seems to do little to mitigate the claim. ¹⁵ The question underlying this line of criticism might be put as follows: How can love be upbuilding of and for the beloved while being circumscribed as its own object?

A critical facet of understanding what we do in presupposing love and how we understand God as the middle term in all love has to do with a theme that runs throughout Works of Love in various guises: the “like for like.” ¹⁶ Specifically, it can help us think through this thorny issue of how love is both for the beloved and circumscribed as its own end. While it would take us too far astray from our primary focus to rehearse the multiple permutations of this theme, I would highlight one point briefly. The idea of “like for like” entails that love is expressed in terms of an infinite debt on the part of both the lover and the beloved. ¹⁷ This infinite debt describes the immeasurable, but infinitely important, way in which love (or to intersperse our previous affirmation that God is the middle term, we might say God) accompanies actions both great and small between the lover and the beloved. As Kierkegaard puts it, this entails a “marvelous” like for like in which “There is a reciprocal relationship” that is “infinite from both sides.” ¹⁸ The immeasurable and infinite quality of love is experienced by both the lover and the beloved in actions showing forth love. Thus, there is a redoubling in love such that the outward act which presupposes love in the other retains what it presupposes; the deeper the presupposition of love in the other (Kierkegaard’s outward direction), the deeper one’s own subjectivity is rooted in God’s love (Kierkegaard’s inward direction). ¹⁹

The point I want to emphasize, with Kierkegaard, is that as soon as we dwell on this infinite quality of love in and of itself and lose sight of the particular expression that brings love to bear, love becomes finite and loses its distinctive expression of infinity. In this moment of dwelling only on the infinite, love ceases to be love. Thus, love is for the beloved; when we dwell on love to the exclusion of its particular instantiation we exclude the key element that makes love distinctive for Kierkegaard. We could summarize this point by borrowing a line from his conclusion to Works of Love: “what you do unto people, you do unto God.” ²⁰

Remembering and forgetting in communal identity

If remembering and forgetting are essential parts of the inverse dialectic that forms the religious ideal of Christ’s loving forgiveness for us as we stand before God, I believe remembering and forgetting also have a role to play in an ethic of forgiveness that guides our works of love for one another. By Kierkegaard’s account we are called to love each other through presupposing love as the ground of the other; that grounding love in the other—as in ourselves—stems from our consciousness of sin before God and the robust acceptance of forgiveness that comes with forgetting sin and remembering Christ’s love as a prototype for living forth the forgiveness we receive. ²¹

Within church congregations and communities this could be a theological and ethical axiom for the single individual to try and live through the bitter memories and crushed hopes that persist in the communal memory of that organization. At first glance, this may seem like an untenable supposition. So much of Kierkegaard’s own work places remembering and forgetting in the context of Christ as atoning prototype, can we really shift this from a register of atonement to an interpersonal register? Of course, we could simply say that this is a constructive theological departure from Kierkegaard’s own work, but it is connected to other themes he develops in two ways.

First, Kierkegaard was acutely aware that the existential reality of the single individual is highly social. To address the single individual is always to address how that individual is affective of and affected by her historical and social location. Take for instance the account of hereditary sin he offered: “the individual is simultaneously him/herself and the whole race in such a way that each participates in the other.” ²² To lay out this argument in detail is beyond the scope of my emphasis here, but suffice it to say that reading with Kierkegaard’s pseudonym in The Concept of Anxiety, hereditary sin comes about through the sin of each individual indicating a drastic qualitative change in the existence of the individual that is made quantitatively more probable through historical generations. ²³ Perhaps it would not be unfair to suggest that the relation of atonement might be thought of for the single individual in a similar way to the inheritance of sin: the qualitative change in existence brought about by the promise of atonement can only be enacted by Christ for the single individual, but this is made quantitatively more probable through contact with communities that intimately shape our ability to live toward the ideals of Christ as our prototype.

Second, I suggest that in the consciousness of sin we are called to forget sin and remember Christ’s love as our prototype, and in presupposing love in the other we are called to assume that such an inverse dialectic is at work in her as well. Part of truly accepting the forgiveness Christ offers would entail not only forgetting our own sin, but to forget the sin of the other in whom we presuppose love. In this way forgiveness is understood as a crucial act of upbuilding love mimetic to the work of Christ.

I believe we see Kierkegaard hint at something like this when he describes how forgiveness is used in love to hide sins.

The one who loves sees the sin he forgives, but he believes that forgiveness takes it away. This cannot be seen, whereas the sin can indeed be seen; on the other hand, if the sin did not exist to be seen, it could not be forgiven either. Just as one by faith believes the unseen into what is seen, so the one who loves by forgiveness believes away what is seen. Both are faith. Blessed is the believer, he believes what he cannot see; blessed is the one who loves, he believes away that which he indeed can see! ²⁴

In our forgiving of the other, the sin is put behind us and we do not erase it from existence. What I would emphasize though is that this “putting behind us” is no mere loss of recollection or opposite of remembering. As Kierkegaard wrote, “Forgetting in this highest sense is therefore not the opposite of recollecting but of hoping. To hope is in thinking to give being; to forget is in thinking to take away being from that which nevertheless exists, to blot it out.” ²⁷ What Kierkegaard emphasized is that in forgetting the sin of the other through forgiveness, we actually take away being from the existent sin. This is certainly of a qualitatively different variety from Christ’s atoning forgiveness, but here too we find forgiveness entails a forgetting that is made possible not as the opposite of remembering but as an act that is remembering’s dialectical inversion: a remembering of the consciousness of forgiveness (and a building up of that consciousness in the beloved) that enables the forgetting of sin.

What does this mean? As a test case for this approach, how might we imagine the development of this inverse dialectic within a congregation struggling with the reparation of communal memory and identity in the wake of various denominational votes concerning gay and lesbian ordination? I have three specific suggestions in this regard.

First, the formation of healthy communal identity can be aided by placing primary importance on indirect communication focused on forgiveness. If our speech and interaction with one another is guided by this Kierkegaard-inspired praxis, then our actions toward others should always strive to encourage forgiveness as a praxis in those around us. We should act toward others so as to be upbuilding of their ability to forgive. Just as Kierkegaard suggested we must presuppose love to be in the other, we ought to presuppose the praxis of forgiveness in the other as a crucial part of that love.

This step may seem so straightforward it is not worth mentioning. However, in the reparation of communal identity I believe this can be a particularly crucial, though underutilized, first step. It is important to acknowledge that there is a frightening risk for members of congregational communities in offering the trust of or hospitality toward the other that is required for building up love’s forgiveness and indirect communication. It is a deeply counter-cultural tendency. We can all too easily assume that the world is out to get us, cheat us out of what is rightfully ours, and fleece us; leaving us impoverished and unable to provide for those for whom we care most. My intention is not to evaluate this psychological tendency, but only to acknowledge that this relatively common attitude toward others in the world can easily bleed into the way we treat one another (or demonize one another) in congregational communities.

By making congregations focus on indirect communication we mitigate the factional tendency to change the other’s mind. No longer are statements like “If he just saw these Bible passages he would understand why homosexuality is a sin” or “If she just knew more gay people, then she would stop this bigoted use of Scripture” acceptable. If the focus of the community is directed toward indirect communication, my evaluation should be internal and I must commit myself to considering how my behaviors can build up the other as they are, presupposing her willingness to forgive. Liturgically, this focus can naturally fit into the confession and supplicatory prayer of a congregational community, and such a praxis may have real traction if it becomes a repeated theme at community gatherings. Simple additions can have real effects in making congregational members aware of how we fail to build up love; such as, “We confess that we have not trusted our friends in Christ, questioning their faithful intention to show God’s love to the world. In our distrust, we have failed to help them show Christ’s love in all they do.” Or, “Help us God to trust one another in our community. Help us find ways to strengthen one another through Christ’s compassion and empower us to foster that compassion in our neighbors.”

Second, how does remembering and forgetting factor into the way in which we can build up forgiveness in the other? We have already seen that the remembering Kierkegaard has in mind is a remembering of Christ as the prototype of atoning love. This remembering is something to be pursued in the midst of everything we undertake such that we are drawn to God. This being drawn toward God is a realization of God as eternal subjectivity or spirit, a realization that occurs through the deepening of our own subjectivity. What I would suggest is that upbuilding love constitutes an act coextensive to the remembering at work in forgiveness insofar as both deepen our sense of subjectivity that makes us the image of God as eternal subjectivity or spirit.

In short, the remembering that is a part of Kierkegaard’s inverse dialectic of forgiveness is not limited to that single individual contemplating herself. In the forgiveness between people that occurs as an act of upbuilding love, God standing as the middle term would be the remembrance of Christ’s atoning love for the beloved or forgiven person. The forgiveness would be an act of remembering Christ’s atoning work within and for the other. In turn if we pursue this remembering of Christ’s atoning work for the other in its fullness and truly accept this atonement, then the inverse dialectic would also suggest we must completely forget the sin for which atonement is needed. Moreover, the remembering and forgetting also deepens the sin-consciousness that drives us back to remembering the atoning work of Christ that stands as the middle term in our forgiveness of the other. We remember and forget not only in relation to Christ’s atoning forgiveness for ourselves, but also in Christ’s atoning forgiveness of our neighbors.

Third, and finally, Kierkegaard emphasized that the Christian expression of the positive and the negative in the inverse dialectic stands in opposition to the expectations of the positive and negative in their worldly application. Kierkegaard’s own examples with this reversal of expectation often correlated to his argument about faith’s possibility of offense. The possibility of offense stems from God being ultimate possibility. For God all things are possible and this violates the impossibility of our worldly sensibilities, causing faith to be offensive. ²⁸

With regard to the forgiveness between persons, I think the expectation to be overcome has to be the possibility for community across distinction. The worldly expectation may be to forgive, but there is an expectation that communities formulate identity around an essentialized commonality and unity that overcomes diversity. However, if we forgive the other with Christ’s atoning love as the middle term in our forgiveness, then we bring the radical possibility of God into the midst of our forgiven relationship with the other, who is understood in her radical distinction to me. We ground our relationship in God’s forgiveness in the midst of our particularities. This radical possibility in our midst opens us to being in communion with one another (and not just one other, but many others); we form a community in this encounter that is not based in either of our identities, but in a relational porousness—a desire stemming from forgiveness to form ever-closer relationship across those painful and embittering memories that have separated us. Those memories are not annulled, but they are put behind our backs such that their meaningful being is stripped away. Christ’s atoning love is the ultimate symbol of this openness to God’s radical possibility, which is the prototype and ground for my forgiveness of the other. However, even more than a mimetic prototype (as Kierkegaard emphasizes), this prototype is atoning and stands in on my behalf in the act of forgiveness as I am unable to maintain my relation with the other.