'Lightness' in Dante and Kierkegaard

By Johannes' frustration with intellectualism in a response to German Idealism, Kierkegaard positions himself at the existential turning point of the western philosophical tradition. When compared to Dante, the metaphysical nature of this turning point comes into greater focus: what the rationalist and enlightenment tradition inherited from the transcendental stability of the consciousness, Kierkegaard exposes as misled. Not only is our existential experience of consciousness one of instability, but if the cosmological center is in fact personal, and we are in relation to it, then a fundamental instability is revealed in the very rational nature of existence itself. Only once we observe this instability (i.e. qua "absurdity"), and take the leap of faith, do we then become light by placing ourselves in absolute relation to the absolute. Although Dante may take a higher view of the Intellect than Kierkegaard both approach the same mysterion of God, but from different angles.

This is not to say however, that Dante does not see beyond the limits of the purely contemplative ascent. Instead Dante and Kierkegaard reveal two sides of the same coin. As Moevs concludes about Dante's project:

Philosophical-theological inquiry, fused as one with the moral journey and with poetic experience, dissolves conceptual illusion, the distortions in understanding that impede awakening; beauty, the substance of poetry itself (sweetness, harmony, music), suspends the mind from concepts, judgment, and fear to mediate an intimation of the infinite in the particular, to deliver the awakening shock of the transcendent, to focus the human thirst for freedom and being.¹⁹

Especially because of Moevs particularly Kierkegaardian language, Johannes could find little disagreement with this sentiment. By both casting aside the deterministic (arguably gnostic) potentialities of rationalism the pilgrim and the knight both seek a suspension in a stable yet unstable—and as such personal —center of the universe which catalyzes the continuity of the infinite with the finite and vice versa as shown by the existential experience of the faith-full. That the sacrifice and resignation of the will to God is rewarded by the deepest quenching of "the human thirst for freedom and being," is, by all means, an absurdity beyond understanding.

These congruent tropes revolve around divergent glosses of the same paradoxical nature of a personal being in which we are grounded: the personal dimension of a theological center implies an intelligible stability because of its relationship to rationality; but, it also reveals an instability by which the personal dimension of that center is in constant redefinition because of the inter-subjectivity fundamental to the reality of a personal dimension. Both recover lightness only once it is lost in the ungraspable "glory" and "absurdity" of God respectively. In both cases however, this aporia also governs the way in which the will is given back, as gift, to the individual only once it has resigned it-self to the Other.

As shown, it is possible to read Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling as an attempt to reassert the same lightness seen in Dante's medieval theo-poetics during a time when notions of the Intellect and rationalism are collapsing. Through this trope of lightness the reader discovers a central univocity between Dante and Kierkegaard despite bifurcating somewhat on the nature of the ethical and rational as governing forces which bring one into relationship with God. They move with "lightness" in the finite realm of choice and desire, but for different reasons—Dante's pilgrim is no longer weighed down to stasis by carnal desire, while the knight of faith is freed from the static relation of the individual to the idealist "universal." Both Dante's pilgrim and Johannes' knight of faith gain their will and self freedom back in the freedom originally sought by paradoxical nature of the surrender of the will to the personal, eternal center of all being—suspended, in lightness among the finite, like stars.