A Seductive Trap
Kierkegaard on Despairing Over One’s Sin
Nothing has caused more damage in my life than my compulsive need to despair over my own sins. Growing up like I did, it was not only not bad, it was life’s essential art.
How could this be?
A Core Distinction
The reason this kind of damage persists is both corruption and misunderstanding.
In his book “The Sickness Unto Death” Kierkegaard deconstructs the trap:
Too often it has been overlooked that the opposite of sin is not virtue, not by any manner of means. This is in part a pagan view which is content with a merely human measure and properly does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith, as is affirmed in Rom. 14:23, “whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” And for the whole of Christianity it is one of the most decisive definitions that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.
If the opposite of sin is faith, then all sin; rightly conceived, is Despair. Kierkegaard goes to great lengths to map this but I’m going to attempt to summarize.
Kierkegaard sees sin as far more common than mere wrongful acts. In fact he sees it not only as an action but as a state.
Crabs In A Bucket
A simple way to picture this might be, the “crabs in a bucket” phenomenon. If you hang around people who have given up, people who’ve come to resent hope, they will resent you and any implication you make towards a better future. In this way, their sin is both their destructive words, and the state their entire life exists in.
For Kierkegaard all sin falls roughly into two categories:
Despair at willing not to be oneself (Cowardice) & Despair at willing to be oneself (Spite)
To will not to be oneself is to shrink from the adventure and danger of your existence. It’s to distract or abdicate. To be too good to fail; by which I mean, too weak to try. This state of faithlessness is itself sin, that is; despair.
To will to be oneself is the despair of spite. It is to respond to one’s limitations in defiance. From rationality and will, from the core of our spirit, to resist God’s supremacy. To exist outside of submission, outside of mercy.
Despair Over Sin
“Sin is despair, the potentiation of this is the new sin of despairing over one’s sin.”
If wrongful acts are sin as an action, Despair over one’s sin is sin as a worldview.
Despairing over one’s sin is the expression for the fact that sin has become or would become consistent in itself. It will have nothing to do with the good, will not be weak enough to harken once in a while to another sort of talk. No, it will hear only itself, have to do only with itself, shut itself in with itself, yea, enclose itself within one enclosure more and by despair over its sin, secure itself against every assault of the good or every aspiration after it. It is conscious of having cut the bridge behind it and so of being inaccessible to the good as the good is to it, so that though in a weak moment it were to will the good, this would nevertheless be impossible. Sin itself is detachment from the good, but despair over sin is a second detachment.
”I can never forgive myself for it,” he says. And all this is supposed to be the expression for how much good there dwells within him, what a deep nature he is. This despair is far from being a characteristic of the good, rather it is a more intensive characterization of sin, the intensity of which is a deeper sinking into sin. The fact is that during the time he victoriously withstood temptation he was in his own eyes better than he actually was, he was proud of himself. It is now in the interest of pride that the past should be something entirely left behind. But in the relapse the past suddenly becomes again entirely present. This reminder his pride cannot endure, and hence the deep distress etc. But the direction of this distress is evidently away from God, manifesting a hidden self-love and pride — instead of humbly beginning by thanking God humbly for helping him so long to withstand temptation, acknowledging before God and before himself that this after all is much more than he had deserved, and so humbling himself under the remembrance of what he had been.