Abstract

Soren Kierkegaard has a positive, more appreciative view of the aesthetic life than his well-known acerbic critique of Schlegel's Romantic lifestyle. This positive aesthetic lifestyle is Christian poetic living---a life of "allowing oneself to be poetically composed." ;In the Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard introduces Christian poetic living by contrasting it with Schlegel's poetics. He claims that the Christian way of "living poetically" is more poetic than Schlegel's aesthetic lifestyle because it actually produces a life that is "art-full." Schlegel's imaginative activity can not accomplish anything truly artful, says Kierkegaard, because it fails to draw upon a genuinely divine and creative source, and because it disregards actual, temporal existence. By contrast, the Christian's relation to a divine, transcendent, and creative power allows this individual to participate "artistically" and "earnestly" in the actual poetic formation of ideal human being. By the grace of this transcendent Creator, God, the Christian is able to envision life in time as a potential work of divine art and to "cooperate" willingly in the completion of "God's good work." ;Kierkegaard develops this conception of Christian poetic living in a striking way in his late Christian literature. In discourses from the late 1840s, Kierkegaard explains the Christian's "artistic cooperation with God" by addressing the initial relationship between God the Creator and the human being---the creatio ex nihilo. When, out of love, God makes the individual a free human being and then calls this person to become a faithful lover, the Creator calls the individual to Participate "artistically" and "earnestly" in an ongoing process of divine creation. Being God's faithful lover is the imaginative vision of ideal of human being sketched in the Concept of Irony and the individual's free, creative, and passionate response to this vision is the meaning of "artistically" and "earnestly" "assisting God" in one's own creation. ;Kierkegaard allows his Christian pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, to elaborate this concept of the poetic, Christian life in Training in Christianity . In his portrait of an "earnest" young man, Anti-Climacus demonstrates that the wondrous vision of the God-man is precisely the divine, creative power that calls and that repeatedly inspires the youth to participate passionately in his own creation in time. Imbuing his imagination with the beauty of divine love, Christ moves this young man out into the world, where he helps this divine icon to "sculpt" his life in its image. ;Thus, from the Concept of Irony to Anti-Climacus' Training in Christianity, a Kierkegaard demonstrates his concern for and appreciation of a genuinely artistic lifestyle---Christian manner of "living poetically."