Guilt,Self-Awareness,and the Good Will in Kierkegaard’s Confessional Discourses

Introduction: The Needfulness of Guilt

The specific aim of this article is to focus on Kierkegaard’s confessional discourses and to examine his appreciation for the experience of guilt—the feeling of guilt and the acknowledgment of guilt—in a person’s efforts to act with a good will, or what he calls ‘purity of heart’. ¹ Kierkegaard appears to describe the feeling of guilt indiscriminately as guilt, regret, shame and remorse and so this analysis will treat these terms as convergent. We will briefly note, however, that his broad account of guilt does accommodate the distinction prevalent in the contemporary psychological literature between guilt as a negative emotional response to individual actions and shame as a ‘negative global self-assessment’. ² That is, Kierkegaard’s account of guilt entails an appreciation of the self-reflective emotions that the contemporary literature distinguishes as guilt and shame. ³ But this literature is generally skeptical that shame, at least, can have positive value in a person’s life, and so setting out to examine Kierkegaard’s appreciation of guilt might not seem like a good idea. Moreover, as Jennifer Herdt explains, guilt ‘is far from valorized in Western culture’ and has suffered a ‘demotion’ in popular attitudes since at least the 1960s. ⁴ In a culture that values ideals such as self-realization and personal authenticity over traditional moral norms, positive reinforcement over punishment in moral formation, with its anxieties about self-esteem and emotional well-being, it is not hard to imagine how the experience of guilt could be construed as anything but unhealthy and oppressive. ⁵

There is plenty of evidence, however, that guilt is still something we as a culture at least tacitly value. We take for granted that certain behaviors should engender guilt and we consider it a moral failure when they don’t. And likewise, we take for granted that people can be sorrowfully self-reflective and learn from their mistakes. Consider, for example, the recent collective disappointment directed toward those guilty of gross sexual misconduct; this disappointment has focused especially on the lack of self-awareness displayed both in the actions that should have engendered guilt in the first place and in the subsequent tepid acknowledgments or expressions of guilt about the actions. Sustained theoretical attention to guilt, then, might prove fruitful and timely. And it is this interplay between guilt and self-awareness that will be our focus here, since it is central in Kierkegaard’s account of purity of heart or the good will. What I will argue in this article is that, for Kierkegaard, without the subjective feeling of guilt and without a self-reflective endorsement of that feeling, a person cannot overcome a bad or divided will; a person who strives to have a good will is a person who is able rightly to acknowledge, appropriate or endorse his guilt. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s claim is not simply that this acknowledgment of guilt is a necessary precondition for a good will but that it is itself a quintessential action of a good will, an action that is, in his estimation, always needful.

Guilt as a Rescuing Attendant and Activity

The importance of a person’s experience of guilt is apparent early in ‘An Occasional Discourse’, where Kierkegaard makes several claims about the rescuing role of regret and shame as a person strays from the road of the good. Kierkegaard’s claim is that each of us is a pilgrim traveling on either the road of the good or the road of perdition. ⁶ To go astray from the good is always a danger but as an aid against this danger, ‘there is a solicitous guide, an expert, who makes one aware, who shouts to the wanderer so that he is on his guard. This guide is regret … he is a trustworthy and sincere friend. If the voice of this guide is never heard, then it is precisely because the way of perdition is being followed’. ⁷ This ‘sincere friend’ is so ‘strange a power’, Kierkegaard writes, ‘that there is nothing more terrible than to have escaped it entirely’, and so we must conclude that it is a tragic moral failure to ‘sneak away from regret’. ⁸ Kierkegaard describes shame in these same terms, calling it a ‘rescuing attendant through life’ that is more concerned for a person ‘than his best friend’, and that it ‘will help him better than all human sympathy’. And just as with regret, ‘woe to the person who breaks with’ shame, woe to the person who ignores its promptings. ⁹ In short, Kierkegaard describes regret and shame as voices or attendants that involuntarily come to a person as she makes missteps on the road of the good and that cry out in rescue for her to return.

The experience of guilt as an involuntary encounter with regret and shame is, therefore, a passive affair. But Kierkegaard does not construe guilt only in these passive terms. He insists of regret, for example, that it ‘must be an action with a collected mind’. ¹⁰ Actively to regret is to heed regret’s call and to make the step back to the good. ¹¹ The person who actively regrets, in this regard, makes use of the experience of guilt as a ‘safeguard’ for ‘the journey’. The ‘casual traveler’ is someone who goes about his life in a hasty and unreflective way and so he ‘does not get to know’ the road he is on in the same way as the person who regrets, ‘the traveler with his burden’. ¹² Kierkegaard concludes that the ‘one only striving’—the one who unreflectively goes about his life—‘does not get to know the road as well as the one who regrets’. ¹³ This person who actively regrets does so by ‘laboriously’ gathering ‘up the experience’. ¹⁴ The person who regrets, that is, collects himself, gathers up his experience of guilt, ¹⁵ ‘considers his life’, ¹⁶ and in this way fosters the ‘deep inwardness of concern’ that ‘vividly’ sets his guilt before him. ¹⁷

Guilt, ‘Purity of Heart’, and the God-Relation

The experience of guilt is therefore, according to Kierkegaard, like a compass that lets a person know when she has diverted from the road of the good and that she actively consults if she wants to remain on that road. What concerns Kierkegaard in particular about guilt and the good, as the central theme of ‘An Occasional Discourse’ indicates, is the way the experience of guilt helps a person to act with a good will, which he identifies as a unified will, or ‘purity of heart’. ¹⁸ To understand how Kierkegaard appreciates the experience of guilt, then, it is important first to have some clarity about what he means by the ‘purity of heart’ that guilt serves. The difficulty is that while Kierkegaard describes ‘purity of heart’ as ‘willing one thing’, ‘willing the good’, ‘willing the good in truth’, he does not explicitly define the ‘one thing’ or ‘the good’ a person is to will. Consequently, the ideal of ‘purity of heart’, and by extension the purpose of guilt, can seem somewhat elusive. Kierkegaard recognizes the potential obscurity: ‘To will only one thing—but is this not to become a lengthy discussion? If anyone is really to consider this matter, must he not first examine one by one every goal that a person can set for himself in life, designate one by one all the many things that a person can will?’ ¹⁹ He concludes that this discussion would never end; what ‘one thing’ a person ought to will might never be certain and so a person might never really know whether or not she acts with purity of heart or whether her experience of guilt is legitimate. ²⁰

Kierkegaard’s solution begins with his claim about the eternal that is within the human being. If there is something eternal, immortal about the human being, he explains, then that immortality ‘would have to have been present every moment of its life’. ²¹ Here Kierkegaard appeals to Solomon’s adage that ‘God has … put eternity into the heart of human beings’. ²² And if ‘there is something eternal in a human being’, Kierkegaard concludes, then ‘there is something that should always have its time, something that a person always should do, just as an Apostle declares that we should always thank God’. ²³ This last remark, as we will see, is not as incidental as it appears, since for Kierkegaard it is a person’s relationship to God that must always have its time. ²⁴ Kierkegaard’s focus with his appeal to the ‘eternal’ is on the relation between time and eternity and the implications of the fact that the human being is a temporal and eternal being. ²⁵ He is clear that between these two ‘the eternal is the dominant, which does not want to have its time but wants to make time its own and then permits the temporal also to have its time’. ²⁶ His point clearly is not to denigrate the temporal but to affirm it by placing it in its right relation to the eternal. What this means with regard to willing only ‘one thing’, willing ‘the good in truth’, is that in whatever a person does there is something immutable that is also to be done, ‘something that is not to have its time in the temporal sense’ but in the eternal sense. ²⁷ In all the many things a person does moment to moment, each person has the task of willing one thing and that is to will the eternal. ²⁸

To say a person wills one thing, wills the good in truth by willing the eternal is slightly vague philosophical language. What does it mean to will the eternal? Kierkegaard offers a pastorally and theologically explicit answer as he describes willing the eternal in terms of faith in God, by which he means drawing near to God. This is an obvious point considering that the foundational text for ‘An Occasional Discourse’ is James 4:8: ‘Keep near to God, then he will keep near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded’. ²⁹ The implication of the text is that drawing near to God is what purity of heart—willing the eternal, willing one thing, willing the good in truth—is about. It is as a person ‘grasps the eternal and holds it fast’, Kierkegaard insists, that he is ‘with the good’, that he ‘draws the eternal closer’, which is to say, that he keeps near to God. ³⁰ In this vein Kierkegaard consoles the person who thinks he cannot will the good by reminding him ‘you … are not without an intimate relationship … it is offered to you, the highest and the most high’. ³¹ The reminder is apt because the one who becomes ‘intimate with God … wills only one thing’. To become intimate with God, in other words, is to hold fast to God, to have faith, and so to ‘be and to remain with the good’. ³² The expression, ‘remain with the good’, appears several times in ‘An Occasional Discourse’ and it nicely conveys the idea of willing the good as holding fast to God or resting in God. ³³ Similarly, Kierkegaard refers to the person who wills the good as one who gives ‘himself over to the good’. ³⁴ To have purity of heart, to will the good in truth, to will the eternal, to will one thing can all be summarily described as faith, in the sense of drawing near to God, or giving oneself over to God. To have purity of heart that wills one thing is therefore about resting in God in and through one’s actions and, consequently, willing each discrete feature of one’s life as one responsible before God to be faithful. ³⁵

To will each discrete feature of one’s life as faithfulness or responsibility before God is not as heteronomous as it sounds, because, for Kierkegaard, faithfulness to God and faithfulness to oneself amount to the same thing. Willing the good has to do with a person’s relationship to God but, as such, also a person’s relationship to himself, because the good God requires of each individual has to do with who God has created each person distinctly to be. ‘What is a human being without you’ is the first sentence of ‘An Occasional Discourse’, indicating at the start that God is the human being’s highest good. ³⁶ But this means something very singular for each human being. Kierkegaard confesses:

this I do believe … that at every person’s birth there comes into existence an eternal purpose for that person, for that person in particular. Faithfulness to oneself with respect to this is the highest thing a person can do, and as that most profound poet has said, ‘Worse than self-love is self-contempt’. But in that case there is one guilt, one offense: unfaithfulness to oneself or a disowning of one’s own better nature. ³⁷

In this regard, Kierkegaard claims in Works of Love that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is about the individual, that God creates every individual from nothing to be a distinct individual for a distinct relation to God. ³⁸ Each person, from eternity’s point of view, is endowed with ‘an infinite weight’, which is to say that God has endowed each individual with singular significance in relation to God. God has made each person ‘heavy—as the single individual’. ³⁹ It is this ‘awareness of being a single individual’ in relation to God that is the most ‘basic consciousness in a human being because it is his eternal consciousness’. ⁴⁰ Consequently, ‘the earnest question’ for each person is the question ‘about what each person is according to his eternal destiny, about what he is conscious of being’ in his relation to God. ⁴¹ ‘This consciousness’, Kierkegaard concludes, ‘is the fundamental thing for willing one thing in truth’. ⁴²

A person’s experience of guilt, to summarize where we are at this point, calls a person back to the good—the good will, purity of heart—and what this means, in particular, is that it calls a person back to the task of living each moment with the awareness that she is a single individual in relation to God. ⁴³ Kierkegaard straightforwardly insists that a person cannot hold fast to God, cannot act in the consciousness of being a single individual and at the same time be a bad, duplicitous or unholy moral agent: ‘The decision of the good is the decisive one, and a person cannot deceitfully … keep close to God with the tongue while his heart is far away. No, since God is Spirit and Truth, one can in truth keep close to him only by willing to be holy as he is holy, by purity of heart’. ⁴⁴ Kierkegaard’s counsel is that in everything a person does she is to rest transparently in the power that established her. In other words, a person’s consciousness of being a single individual in relation to God should permeate her life; to ask about it is to ask if

in every relationship in which you relate yourself outwardly you are aware that you are also relating yourself to yourself as a single individual, that even in the relationships we human beings so beautifully call the most intimate you recollect that you have an even more intimate relationship, the relationship in which you as a single individual relate yourself to yourself before God. ⁴⁵

Kierkegaard’s point is not to place the God-relationship and every other relationship in competition. The highest good, God, he claims, is ‘not defined by its relation to other goods’, as if it were one good among others. ⁴⁶ But Kierkegaard does seem to be telling a person to do two things, the practical thing to be done and the resting transparently in God as a single individual. That would be to assume, however, that those are in fact two things. Again, ‘the eternal … wants to make time its own’. As Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love, ‘the one and only earnestness is to relate yourself to God’, and it is in that relation that a person relates properly to everything and everyone else. ⁴⁷ Resting transparently before God is therefore an essential ingredient in doing something as it ought to be done, whatever that thing might be. A person wholeheartedly wills whatever it is she is willing only in the awareness of herself before God as a single individual. ⁴⁸

Every person is a single individual in relation to God whether he or she likes it or not, but Kierkegaard claims that to live with the awareness of being a single individual before God is a choice a person must make. ⁴⁹ Every person has the duty to question himself about whether or not he has lived as a single individual. What Kierkegaard means is that in order to be a single individual a person must live ‘in such a way that he has hours and periods in which he collects his mind so that his life can attain the transparency that is a condition for being able to submit the question to himself and answer it’. ⁵⁰ Kierkegaard concedes that it is difficult for a person to be honest with himself in this way. Nonetheless, living transparently before God is essential to what it means to be a human being, and so every person must choose to take ‘the time … to understand himself’ as a single individual before God. ⁵¹ The task is to find stillness, to bring oneself before God, ⁵² and in that encounter to become aware of oneself as a single individual in relation to God. And crucially, these distinct moments of stillness, these deliberate quiet retreats, should not be divorced from the rest of a person’s life. A person should not ‘become aware of himself as a single individual’ and then ‘otherwise live without this awareness’. ⁵³ Rather, this consciousness should pervade his ‘everyday use’. ⁵⁴ This stillness is to be preserved as a person ventures forth into everyday life. ⁵⁵ So a person finds stillness in deliberate, solitary, quiet moments, and then ultimately this stillness becomes something like a disposition in a person, something a person always brings along with him. ⁵⁶

Guilt as Antidote for ‘Double-Mindedness’, for Hiding from the God in the ‘Crowd’

In other words, according to Kierkegaard, while we all live our lives coram deo, the pure of heart are those who choose to live their lives coram deo, who choose to live transparently before their ultimate source of accountability in whatever they do. But this is very hard to sustain. And we would much prefer, Kierkegaard observes, simply to avoid stillness and to keep the awareness of being a single individual before God contained to isolated moments of life, to keep it from pervading the whole of it. To act with this consciousness might be ‘the one thing needful’, but ‘it is much easier’, he writes, ‘to look to the right and to the left than to look into oneself, much easier to haggle and bargain just as it is much easier to underbid than to be silent’. ⁵⁷ To live in the consciousness of one’s eternal responsibility is to live one’s life at the highest stakes. As Kierkegaard explains, the fact that God gives to each person an ‘infinite weight’ and sees each person apart from the crowd is at once a person’s ‘highest blessedness’ and ‘highest earnestness’, ‘blissful comfort’ and ‘dreadful responsibility’. ⁵⁸ It is of course a comfort to live one’s life with the trust that it takes place before the watchful care of a loving God; but this also means that as a moral actor one’s life takes place—in each and every moment—before the watchful eye of the one who sees the heart. ⁵⁹ Kierkegaard’s claim is that we would rather lower this bar. He writes that ‘everyone experiences that it is more difficult to stand directly before the person of distinction … than to move in the crowd; to stand alone and silent directly before the sharp expert is more difficult than to speak in a common harmony of equals’. ⁶⁰ It is that much more difficult, then, to submit oneself to ‘being alone before the Holy One and being silent’, and to allow this silence to permeate one’s life and inform every action. ⁶¹ Consequently we are highly prone to hide from God, ‘to avoid God’s inspection of oneself as a single individual, avoid hearing God’s voice as a single individual, as Adam once did, when his bad conscience fooled him into thinking that he could hide among the trees’. ⁶²

It is this hiding from God, therefore, that is the essence of what Kierkegaard calls a person’s double-mindedness, divided will, or division with himself. It is also essential to what Kierkegaard means by ‘the crowd’. For the sake of space, we will have to gloss what Kierkegaard means here by ‘the crowd’, but suffice to say it signifies the ‘the demand of the times’ according to which a person fools himself into believing that by following what is customary he does the good, he holds fast to God. ⁶³ The person hiding in the crowd tells his child, for instance, ‘nowadays to seek first the world and its practices is the same as it was in the old days, to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness^{’ 64} But Kierkegaard is almost certain that to hold fast to God in all things, to live in the consciousness of being a single individual in relation to God, will put a person at odds with ‘the world and its practices’. ⁶⁵ To act in this way is therefore for a person to act in self-deception, to think he wills the good or wills one thing, when in fact he wills something else. ⁶⁶ The person who hides in the crowd, like Adam hiding among the trees, hides from himself precisely as he hides from God, because he is hiding from the reality of his being before God as a single individual. ⁶⁷ To say Adam’s ‘bad conscience fooled him’ is to say Adam fooled himself. Such a person constantly screens his actions and checks for the crowd’s approval, and avoids his sense of himself as singularly responsible before God.

The double-minded person is hiding in the crowd and what this means for Kierkegaard’s account of guilt is that it is in the crowd that guilt finds a person. It is precisely because a person is hiding in the crowd, that is, that a person should experience guilt, since this location indicates the abdication of her responsibility before God. And what this suggests is that the double-minded person is not entirely self-deceived or entirely ignorant about being double-minded, about the fact that she is hiding. A person who filters herself into the crowd has chosen to do so. Hiding is an act and, however subtle or tacit that act might be, the double-minded person knows, at some point and to some degree, that she is double-minded. Kierkegaard makes this point especially clear in several other works during this period where the language of Adam hiding in the trees reappears:

The truth of the matter is this: All of us human beings … are like a drunk man who is not completely drunk so that he has lost his consciousness—no, he is definitely conscious that he is a little drunk and for that very reason is careful to conceal it … if possible, from himself … We have a suspicion of ourselves; we gradually become conscious that we are not really sober. But then sagacity and sensibleness and level-headedness come to our aid and with their help we obtain something to sustain us—the finite … But if the unconditioned unconditionally were to catch sight of us—yet we avoid this glance, and that is why we conceal ourselves … in the same way as Adam hid among the trees. ⁶⁸

This is to say that like Adam hiding among the trees the person in the crowd has in her ‘innermost being a secret anxiety about and wariness of the truth, a fear of getting to know too much’. ⁶⁹ A person hiding in the crowd therefore has an inextirpable awareness about herself that is deeper than the crowd’s life and she also knows, however faintly, that life in the crowd constitutes an evasion of this awareness. ⁷⁰

In other words, the person hiding in the crowd must live with guilt, with the pain of regret, shame and remorse gnawing at him. But if a person’s experience of guilt arises involuntarily as he strays from God and his awareness of himself as a single individual before God, it is also the case that integral to this flight from God is also a flight from guilt itself. Guilt wants to draw a person out of hiding but that person’s aim is to escape its call. ⁷¹ When a person’s conscience pricks him with ‘the sanctity of shame’ that comes with avoiding God and avoiding his responsibility before God, ⁷² the great temptation that person feels is to let the roar of the crowd overwhelm the conscience. ⁷³ If regret serves a person as a ‘rescuing attendant’, ⁷⁴ then for a person to heed regret’s call and not avoid it would indicate a person’s admission that he indeed has something to regret, that his guilty feelings are on the mark because he has defaulted on his responsibility as a single individual. In other words, regret and shame as subjective feelings of guilt mean to bring a person before the objective reality of his guilt. And like a person who does not want to admit that certain symptoms might indicate a serious illness, the guilty person does not want to listen to the gnawing voices that direct him to his guilt.

But like a person whose only recourse to wellness is to acknowledge the symptoms of illness, the double-minded, irresponsible person can only begin to move toward responsibility, toward living as a single individual with purity of heart, by first listening to her guilt and coming to grips with it. The task is to resist the temptation to filter oneself into the crowd and instead to endure the disclosure of guilt, to ‘appropriate’ the guilt, ⁷⁵ or self-consciously to ‘increase the acknowledgment of guilt’. ⁷⁶ The passive experience of guilt should prompt a person to step out of the crowd, find stillness before God where she can then endorse her guilt, which is what Kierkegaard means in the repetition of his exhortation that a person must ‘become guilty’ or ‘become a sinner’ if she is to seek God. ⁷⁷ ‘An Occasional Discourse’ guides the reader through an array of questions to help her evaluate the quality of her life as a single individual, but if the reader is taking the questions seriously, Kierkegaard insists these questions can only ‘sound like indictments’. ⁷⁸ What, then, is the reader to do? If she wants to be who God has made her to be, if as a single individual she wants to ‘become a single individual with [her] responsibility before God’, then she must first ‘separately … endure this rigorous judgment of singularity’. ⁷⁹ When guilt arises in a person, then, the task it presents is not to run from it but to face it, to seek it, to follow it down from the pain it inflicts to its ‘sacred source’ in that person’s singularity before God. ⁸⁰

Guilt and the Particular Offense and the ‘Coherence of Sin’

Kierkegaard is clear that this active appropriation or endorsement of guilt should always have a particular focus. When a person accuses herself before God and acknowledges her guilt, the focus should be on the particular offense and not on guilt in some broad or general sense. ⁸¹ In this regard, Kierkegaard’s account of the experience of guilt aligns with contemporary psychological accounts of guilt as a negative, self-reflexive emotion directed toward specific actions. ⁸² The point in the contemporary literature, as in Kierkegaard’s discourses, is that the experience of guilt ‘reflects our sense of responsibility for the quality of our own agency’ in a specific circumstance in relation to others. ⁸³ Kierkegaard insists that the experience of guilt arises not from a view of the moral status of the whole person, about the self in her totality, but about the particular offense against a person’s singular responsibility before God. The ‘art of sorrowing over … sins’ must always begin with the ‘particular sin’. ⁸⁴ To sorrow over sin is to sorrow over the particular sin that is ‘precisely and definitely apprehended, meticulously as an impartial judge draws it up’. ⁸⁵ What Kierkegaard recommends, then, is that when a person feels guilty that she ‘strive in all honesty to become more transparent’ to herself in her particular actions, to understand what precisely precipitated this pain. ⁸⁶

The difficulty, though, is that even the person whose inward striving for honesty is exemplary, ‘even that person, and perhaps he most of all’, Kierkegaard argues, ‘will always have an outstanding account that he is not confident of being able to settle’. Even that person ‘always remains somewhat hazy to himself’. ⁸⁷ If a person is honest with himself, there will always be some particular guilt to endorse. ⁸⁸ And so while Kierkegaard’s exhortation is to focus on the particular action, he explains that from the particular guilt we can infer what he calls the ‘coherence’ of sin. ⁸⁹ What he seems to mean by ‘coherence’ is that by striving to be honest about the particular sin, a person can begin to understand how his moral agency is fundamentally or radically compromised. ⁹⁰ In other words, without the precision of a contemporary psychologist, Kierkegaard nonetheless makes the distinction between the experience of guilt with respect to the particular action, and the experience of guilt as a kind of ‘negative global self-assessment’, or, shame as distinct from guilt in the contemporary literature. ⁹¹ Kierkegaard’s aim is to encourage the single individual who acknowledges his guilt to understand that double-mindedness cuts across the whole of his life, that his life is marked by a ‘pattern’ of double-mindedness. ⁹² His point is that when a person feels guilt directing him to something in particular that he must actively acknowledge, he should not, upon that acknowledgment, draw the conclusion that his account is square or his heart is pure or that he is now, with this little obstacle behind him, living as the single individual he thinks he is meant to be, or that to do so from now on will be smooth sailing. ⁹³ This would be to ignore the reality that, ‘daily, day by day something intervenes’—double-mindedness—that keeps a person from the purity of heart that would will one thing. ⁹⁴ And so, Kierkegaard cautions, the particular offense a person acknowledges is indicative of something more fundamental.

The movement is from an acknowledgment about the particular sin to the discovery of sin’s coherence, or to oneself as a sinner, and this discovery, while ‘a hard course’, is nonetheless ‘the beneficial one’. ⁹⁵ Why, in Kierkegaard’s account, is this dour self-assessment beneficial? The contemporary literature on guilt and shame might suggest skepticism toward Kierkegaard at this point. Psychologists such as Christian Miller and June Tangney claim that the experience of guilt in particular circumstances can be helpful in a person’s cultivation of prosocial behavior, ⁹⁶ but the experience of shame as an adverse assessment of the global self can lead to a depressive and ‘egocentric’ ⁹⁷ ‘self-rumination’, ⁹⁸ and thereby to an antisocial ‘withdrawal’. ⁹⁹ Kierkegaard is aware that the kind of self-examination he exhorts his reader to undertake might prompt an unhealthy ‘self-rumination’. But he explicitly counsels the reader against this: ‘you are not to withdraw and sit brooding over your eternal accounting’, he writes. ¹⁰⁰ A person is not to wallow in self-loathing or despair. Evidently Kierkegaard thinks a person can entertain a negative assessment of the global self without wallowing in self-loathing or despair, without an egocentric self-rumination.

As an example of Kierkegaard’s recommended, proper way to assess the global self, we might consider the sober alcoholic who introduces himself at Alcoholics Anonymous, saying, ‘Hi, I am so and so and I am an alcoholic’. He is not berating himself or confessing a regrettable bad action but making a wise and admirable self-aware admission about himself in a global sense. Lacking such wisdom is the person whose one drink again and again turns into thirteen but who nevertheless says, ‘no, no, it’s no problem; I won’t let it happen again’. This person is obviously deceiving himself, however vaguely he might be aware that there is a deeper problem with which to contend. Kierkegaard’s claim is that if a person assumes that the irresponsible action that rightly made him feel guilty is, in the course of his life, simply a willy-nilly, random, one-off episode, then he is, like the unreflective alcoholic, deceiving himself. If a person does not draw the conclusion after feeling guilty and acknowledging the particular guilt that there is a deeper problem, then he is all the more likely to continue down the wrong road, repeating the regrettable actions. Whereas, like the sober alcoholic whose self-awareness steels his resolve against the next drink, the person who ‘becomes a sinner’—the person whose self-esteem is characterized by the acknowledgment of sin’s coherence—that person is steeled against double-mindedness. Kierkegaard argues that this critical scrutiny of the global self that guilt fosters helps a person ‘stand firm in willing one thing, in willing the good in truth’. ¹⁰¹ Likewise, he claims that the person who is ‘ashamed before himself’, and not merely ashamed before others, is the one who is ‘strengthened thereby in willing one thing’. ¹⁰² For Kierkegaard, then, the passive experience of guilt, the acknowledgment of particular guilt, and the broader self-awareness that should follow from this acknowledgment all help to draw a person back to the good will, back to purity of heart, in short, back to God. ¹⁰³ Spiritually understood, then, the experience of guilt, in both the particular and the global sense, does not lead a person to a depressive, self-enclosed withdrawal, but back to his highest good in his singular relation with God.

The Appropriation or Acknowledgment of Guilt as ‘Purity of Heart’

With this understanding of the experience of guilt as drawing a person back to God, Kierkegaard describes the experience of guilt as an essential precondition for the purity of heart that wills one thing. When a person strays from purity of heart, that is, guilt draws her back. But the task, of course, is to stay there. And Kierkegaard is clear that guilt is important in this task as well; it is not only a precondition. In this regard, Kierkegaard describes the active appropriation of guilt as itself the act of a pure heart. Recall that to act with purity of heart in willing one thing ultimately means for Kierkegaard that in whatever a person does she acts transparently before God, she acts in the awareness that she is a single individual before God, that she dares to think of whatever it is she is doing ‘together with the responsibility of eternity’. ¹⁰⁴ This resting transparently before God in whatever a person does is, Kierkegaard insists, ‘the one thing needful’; ¹⁰⁵ it is the casting off of double-mindedness, and the source of unity with oneself, since the relation to God is at the heart of what it means to be a single individual. In this same sense Kierkegaard describes regret as a time of ‘preparation’ in which one reckons with one’s guilt, a time of preparation that is itself ‘a concern of inwardness that is already in harmony with what must be done’. ¹⁰⁶ To regret is ‘no indolent postponement’, ¹⁰⁷ Kierkegaard argues, but already a divestment of ‘multiplicity’, a ‘repose of contemplation in unity with oneself’. ¹⁰⁸ Fostering this inwardness of regret wherein ‘guilt must stand vividly before a person’ is, of course, not exactly pleasant, ¹⁰⁹ but Kierkegaard is clear that submitting to this scrutiny is ‘the one thing needful’. ¹¹⁰ In other words, when a person allows her guilt to stand vividly before her, when she gathers herself in this accounting and appropriates the guilt, when, that is, a person allows the experience of guilt to prompt the appropriation of guilt, then she acts with a pure heart, she wills one thing, she remains with God. ¹¹¹

In fact, according to Kierkegaard, the greater the sense of guilt the purer the heart: ‘the purest of heart is precisely the one most willing to comprehend his own guilt most deeply’. ¹¹² Kierkegaard’s logic here is that if a person is to become a single individual who wills one thing, then she must step out of the crowd and into God’s presence. But this step forward simultaneously is an acknowledgment of guilt. And so becoming aware of God, acknowledging God’s presence, becoming a single individual, and becoming guilty are coterminous. ¹¹³ But what this means is that the closer a person comes to God, the clearer God’s presence is to a person, and the more a person strives to live her life as a single individual coram deo, the more a person acknowledges the extent to which her life is embroiled in double-mindedness. A person’s ‘diminishing self-esteem’, Kierkegaard writes, ‘is a sign that the sorrower is the seeker who is beginning to become aware of God … the less a person thinks of himself … with regards to … guilt … the more manifest God becomes’. ¹¹⁴ The point is that the more a person acknowledges God’s presence, and the more she acknowledges her correlative status as a single individual with eternal responsibility before God, the more she also becomes aware of her failure to live as she ought to live. The more aware a person is of God’s presence and God’s claim on her, that is, the more she will also become aware of just how rarely she actually rests in God. And so, Kierkegaard writes, the ‘magnitude’ of a person’s ‘God-relation’ is measurable by the depth of a person’s awareness of her guilt. The ‘most devout person sighs out of deepest distress’. ¹¹⁵ In short, the deeper a person’s distress over her guilt, the purer her heart.

It is a bit odd to say that something that is pure can become purer or, what would be the same in this case, that a unified will might become more unified. By equating progress in purity of heart with a deepening acknowledgement of guilt, Kierkegaard means to emphasize the enduring significance of guilt in the life of those who strive for purity of heart. Hiding from God, Kierkegaard suggests, is not something we ever fully stop doing, and regret is therefore one of those actions that must always have its time. ¹¹⁶ If a person wants to live as a single individual, that is, then the art of sorrowing over herself, the exercise of her ‘godly grief’, ¹¹⁷ the appropriation of her guilt, should not be an accidental feature of her life but a constituent one. ¹¹⁸ The single individual is precisely the person who, prompted by the experience of guilt, is most willing continually to acknowledge the reality of the gap between who she is and who God summons her to be. ¹¹⁹ Kierkegaard’s claim is that in this acknowledgement, a person, perhaps paradoxically, does not find herself falling short of being a single individual. Rather, it is the person who collects herself and comprehends her guilt who ‘wins the eternal’. In such sorrow over self, a person is ‘confirmed in the consciousness that he is a single individual’ and that he wills one thing in truth. ¹²⁰ To collect oneself in guilt is not just preparation for purity of heart, for willing one thing; it is itself already to do what must be done; to acknowledge guilt is already to will one thing.

Guilt, then, not only calls a person back when he strays from his highest good, his God-relation; it is also essential to living in harmony with or according to his highest good, since in the willingness to endorse his guilt—in the willingness to ‘become guilty’—a person acts as a single individual, rests in his relation to God, and ‘wins the eternal’. This might seem morose, but Kierkegaard’s view is not exceptional in this regard. After all, the writer of 1 John exhorts his Christian audience to remember, ‘[i]f we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us’. ¹²¹ And it is in a late Pauline epistle that the Apostle Paul (or the Pauline persona) describes himself as the ‘greatest of sinners’. ¹²² The fact of the lateness of this claim by an apostolic voice underscores the Christian witness, at least, to the ineradicable quality of a person’s experience of guilt in this life. But the point of that witness—and this is certainly Kierkegaard’s point in saying that the person who appropriates his guilt ‘wins the eternal’—is that guilt does not have the last word. Kierkegaard’s account of guilt aligns with the range of Christian traditions that, according to Jennifer Herdt, ‘affirm both that humans have failed globally to meet the moral standard and thus that shame is appropriate, and that we are nevertheless accepted and loved by God and so freed to pursue the restoration of relationships with one another’. ¹²³ Herdt’s conclusion about those traditions is applicable to Kierkegaard’s account as well: ‘Shame is not eradicated, suppressed, or denied, but is set within a broader context of global affirmation and acceptance’. ¹²⁴

But Kierkegaard counsels great caution at this point. The language of God’s grace, love and forgiveness is conspicuously absent from the confessional discourses. ¹²⁵ He writes at the very end of the discourse ‘On the Occasion of a Confession’,

Here the discourse ends—in the confession of sin. But can it really be an end? Is joy not to be victorious now; is sin to walk only with sorrow; is the soul to sit oppressed but is the harp of joy not to be tuned? You perhaps are accustomed to hearing much more; you probably know much more yourself—so look for the shortcoming in the discourse and the speaker. If you are actually further along, then do not let yourself be delayed, but if not, then consider that one is dreadfully deceived if one is deceived by much knowledge. ¹²⁶

What else could Kierkegaard mean except that he knows his reader expects now, at the end, to hear words of comfort, pardon, assurance, grace, forgiveness. He, perhaps, gives his reader the benefit of the doubt and assumes that she may very well have really come to grips with her guilt and has made a good confession. And if so, ‘do not let yourself be delayed’, accept the grace God offers. But be careful, he warns. We are highly prone to self-deception, to hide from our responsibility, and the language of grace can be a powerful tool with which we let ourselves off the hook, avoid really inspecting ourselves, avoid the earnest fact that we live our lives at every moment before the one who sees our hearts. Guilt should not be the last word, but it is, Kierkegaard insists, still an essential word a person must strive to hear ‘daily, day after day’. ¹²⁷ Without it, a person fails to reckon with what God requires of her, with who she is in her singular relation to God, and what it means for her, therefore, to act with purity of heart. Consequently, without guilt, such a person fails to understand why grace would really be necessary for her in particular in the first place.