The Sickness Unto Death

The Sickness unto Death, first published in 1849, is a work of philosophical theology written under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus and edited by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The book argues that despair is the fundamental sickness of the human self and that only faith in God can cure it, drawing on Christian doctrine, Greek philosophy, and psychological observation.

Anti-Climacus opens by comparing his mode of presentation to a physician speaking at a sickbed: however technical the analysis, the reader must remember that a sick person is being attended to. He distinguishes Christian heroism, which involves venturing wholly to become oneself as an individual before God, from the impersonal heroism of abstract philosophical speculation. Throughout the book, despair is interpreted strictly as a sickness, not as a cure, though the relationship is dialectical: In Christian thought, the cure for spiritual death is itself a kind of dying to the world.

The Introduction frames the work through the biblical story of Lazarus. Christ declares that Lazarus's sickness "is not unto death" (7), yet Lazarus does die. Anti-Climacus argues that what makes the sickness "not unto death" is not Lazarus's resurrection but Christ's very existence as "the resurrection and the life" (7), which renders physical death a minor event within eternal life. Humanly speaking, death is the last of all; Christianly understood, death is a passing into life. Neither physical death nor any earthly suffering qualifies as the sickness unto death. That sickness, Anti-Climacus announces, is despair, a condition the natural man does not even know exists.

Part One develops this claim systematically. Anti-Climacus defines the self as spirit: not merely a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and necessity, but a relation that relates itself to itself within that synthesis. Because the self is derived, established by another power (God), two basic forms of despair arise: in despair not to will to be oneself, and in despair to will to be oneself. All despair can be traced to the second form, because any attempt to overcome despair without relating to the power that established the self only deepens the misrelation. The formula for the absence of despair, which is also the definition of faith, recurs throughout: "in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it" (14).

The capacity to despair, Anti-Climacus argues, is both humanity's highest distinction and its greatest peril. Unlike physical illness, whose origin recedes into the past, every moment of despair is an act of the present tense, perpetually renewed because the eternal in the self cannot be consumed. The sickness unto death is not a sickness that ends in death but one whose torment is precisely the inability to die. Despair becomes a self-consuming that cannot accomplish what it wills, generating an ever-rising fever. What appears to be despair over something external, such as failed ambition or lost love, is always despair over oneself.

Against the common view that despair is rare, Anti-Climacus insists it is universal. Not being conscious of being in despair is itself a form of despair, and a particularly dangerous one. He then maps the forms of despair according to the constituents of the self. Infinitude's despair occurs when feeling, knowing, or willing becomes "fantastic," swept into abstraction without returning to concrete finitude. Finitude's despair is the opposite: the self conforms to others, becoming a copy and losing its distinctiveness. Possibility's despair is the self running away in possibility until nothing becomes actual. Necessity's despair is the loss of possibility, which Anti-Climacus analyzes through two types: the determinist, whose god is necessity and who therefore cannot pray, and the philistine-bourgeois mentality, a spiritless condition wrapped in routine that imprisons possibility in the trivial. Against both, he insists that "with God everything is possible" (38) and that faith means believing this when human possibility has been exhausted.

Turning to despair defined by consciousness, Anti-Climacus traces an ascending scale. The lowest form is ignorance of being in despair: the person lives in sensate categories, inhabiting, as it were, the basement of a house whose upper floors stand vacant. Above this is despair in weakness, where the person of pure immediacy despairs when misfortune strikes but does not understand what despair truly is. With some reflection, a deeper variation appears: the person recognizes that despair involves his own condition yet lacks the will to confront it, turning outward into active life while remaining in despair. A still deeper form is despair of the eternal, in which the person entrenches himself in what Anti-Climacus calls Indesluttethed, or inclosing reserve, a state of secretive, self-enclosed despair shared with no one. The highest form in Part One is defiance: the self misuses the eternal within itself to fashion a self of its own design, severing itself from the power that established it. In the most extreme case, the demonic self clings to its torment as proof that existence is unjust, like an error in an author's text that becomes conscious and refuses to be erased.

Part Two raises the analysis by defining sin as despair before God. The self gains infinite reality by being conscious of existing before God, and the greater the conception of God, the more self there is. Anti-Climacus examines the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance and finds it insufficient: Socrates located the problem in knowing, but Christianity locates it in willing. No human being can declare what sin is alone; a revelation from God is required. Against speculative philosophy, which treats sin as a negation, Anti-Climacus insists that sin is a position, a positive reality that can only be believed. The Atonement compounds the paradox: Christianity first establishes sin so firmly that the understanding cannot comprehend it, then eliminates it so completely through forgiveness that the understanding cannot comprehend that either.

Anti-Climacus identifies successive intensifications of sin. The continuance of sin, the ongoing state of remaining in sin, is itself a deeper sin than any particular transgression. Despairing over one's sin is a further intensification in which the person closes himself against repentance and grace. Despairing of the forgiveness of sins is deeper still, constituting offense against Christ. The highest intensification is declaring Christianity to be untruth, which Anti-Climacus calls sin against the Holy Spirit. This is the positive form of offense: not merely retreating from Christianity but attacking it, denying Christ either by making him a mere fiction or by reducing him to a merely human figure. Anti-Climacus distinguishes three forms of offense in ascending order: leaving the question of Christ undecided, which is itself offense because it denies Christ's claim on every person; living in suffering because one cannot ignore Christ yet cannot believe; and the outright declaration that Christianity is untrue.

The work closes by reaffirming the contrast that structures the entire argument: The opposite of sin is not virtue but faith. The formula for the state in which there is no despair at all, "in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it" (131), is the definition of faith.