The Laughter of the Theologian

I came a cross a great article on the First Things websight by David Bentley Hart. For those of you unfamiliar with Hart, he is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, a first rate thinker, but, most of all, the man is simply a wonderful writer. In this article, entitled "The Laughter of - Philosophers," Hart chastizes some Philosophers, as he believes their work reveals them to be intolerably boring. All of this in the article is set in contrast to the humor one finds in Kierkegaard (though Hart is actually pretty critical of Kierkegaard too), and in a very obscure contemporary of Kant, Johann Hamann. The article has some great stuff throughout such as this brief account of some of Kierkegaarde's specific humor: "This is not, certainly, to deny the comic brilliance of many of the passages gathered here. There is, for instance, a genuinely hilarious reflection on how embarrassing it is that there is so marked an absence of the Chinese in the Hegelian system, while not a single German assistant professor is excluded. And there is a wonderful passage where Kierkegaard likens the prospect of being excommunicated from the Danish church to the discovery that, though he is in Copenhagen, he is being given a thrashing in the distant town of Aarhus." But what struck me most was actuall the beginning of the article:



"My favorite “whimsical” anecdote about a philosopher goes like this: Arthur Schopenhauer once threw an old lady down a flight of stairs. (Note how the first line immediately seizes one’s attention.) He claimed it was an accident, of course, but I for one prefer to believe that it was nothing of the sort, and that in fact he took the defenseless crone by her wizened weasand and—with full malice aforethought—flung her over the balustrade to the landing below, uttering a curse as he did so (it more nearly accords with my general impression of the man). Not that he acted without cause; he was never given to caprice. The old lady was a cleaning woman who had made too great a clamor outside his rooms, a transgression than which (as anyone familiar with his essay on noise should know) nothing could have vexed him more; and it was only when his rebukes were met by intolerable impudence that he resorted to force. Curiously, however, the magistrate failed to see the justice in his actions, and sentenced him to pay the woman a monthly pension for the rest of her natural life, which somewhat straitened his finances. When she was finally considerate enough to die, and Schopenhauer saw the notice in the morning obituary, his only reaction was to reach for his pen and write in the margin: “Anus obit, onus abit” (the old woman dies, the debt departs).

The reason this grim little tale so amuses me (quite apart from the magnificent pun, which one hopes was purely extemporaneous), is that the lives of philosophers are so often oppressively, obtundently dreary that any diverting story—even one as macabre as the ordeal of Schopenhauer’s poor old Putzfrau—comes to the scholar as a cherished respite. And, for the most part, the works of philosophers mirror the shapes of their lives. The sublime spiritual sterility of the texts of Kant’s philosophical maturity, for instance, could scarcely provide a more perspicuous glimpse into the personality of perhaps the single most boring man ever to darken a wigmaker’s doorway. The leaden, caliginous bombast of Hegel’s prose was a pure emanation of his grindingly pompous soul. The turgidity of Derrida’s attempts at playfulness were little more than clinical specimens of his insufferable self-infatuation. As a general rule, to put it simply, if one wanders into one’s library in search of mirth, good fellowship, or wit, one does well not to seek out the company of the philosophers.

There are exceptions, however, and none more notable than Søren Kierkegaard. In some sense, indeed, Kierkegaard’s life could be written as a kind of dark comedy; despite his premature death, and a great number of sadnesses that afflicted him along the way, there was something enchantingly absurd about his character, a certain benign perversity that often prompted him to make himself willfully ridiculous, and a peculiarly touching element of the ludicrous that clung to him all the way to his early grave. Few philosophers’ lives can boast comic (or, for that matter, tragic) material comparable to Kierkegaard’s aborted engagement to Regine Olsen, the bizarrely exaggerated symbolic significance he attached to it, his firm expectation of death before the age of thirty-four on account of some unnamed sin of his father’s, his intentional provocation of a feud with the satirical review The Corsair, or his splenetic quarrels with the Danish Lutheran church (and so on).

And he had wit. It is said that once, for instance, as he came to a stream spanned by a bridge so narrow that two men could not cross it abreast, nor pass one another upon it, a truculent bourgeois arrived at the bridge’s other end and—recognizing Kierkegaard—promptly announced that he would not stand aside for an infamous buffoon. “Ah, yes,” replied Kierkegaard, unperturbed, stepping back with a ceremonious sweep of his arm, “I, however, shall.” And, of all the diverting tales that can be told about Kierkegaard, none is really any more terrible than that: if he was ever cruel, it was principally to himself, and he managed to live out his brief but prolific philosophical career without once (if you can credit it) feeling the need to heave an elderly charwoman into a stairwell. Moreover, happily, he was possessed not only of wit, but of literary genius; and for this reason he is one of that blessed and select company of modern philosophers whose writings can be read purely for the pleasure they afford....

What I gleaned from these pages [Thomas Oden's The Humor of Kierkegaard], in part, is that for Kierkegaard the roots of the comic lie in the inherent contradictoriness of human nature: soul and body, freedom and necessity, the angelic and the bestial, eternity and temporality, and so on. Moreover, I learned how profound a difference Kierkegaard saw between genuine humor and mere irony. That is to say, irony can certainly recognize that the incongruities that throng human experience typically frustrate the quest for truth; but, having seen as much, irony is then impotent to do anything more than unveil failure and vanquish pretense. Humor, on the other hand, is born from an altogether higher recognition: that tragic contradiction is not absolute, that finitude is not only pain and folly, and that the absurdity of our human contradictions can even be a cause for joy. Humor is able to receive finitude as a gift, conscious of the suffering intrinsic to human existence, but capable of transcending despair through jest. And this is why the power of humor is most intense in the “religious” sphere: Christianity, seeing all things from the perspective of the Incarnation (that most unexpected of peripeties), is the “most comic” vision of things: it encompasses the greatest contradictions and tragedies of all, but does so in such a way as to take the suffering of existence into the unanticipated absurdity of our redemption. Which yields the—to my mind—gratifying conclusion that, to be both a “lover of wisdom” and an accomplished humorist, one must almost certainly be a Christian; or, rather, that only a Christian philosophy can be truly “comic.”

Hart believes, however, that in the end Kierkegaard is inconsistant. Here, he turns to lauding the genius of Hamann:

This is not to diminish Kierkegaard’s accomplishments, but only to recognize Hamann’s genius. And it is worth noting that Kierkegaard’s theory of comedy—at least as Oden has explicated it—is far easier to reconcile with Hamann’s writings than with Kierkegaard’s. The special logic of this theory, after all, is that the Christian philosopher—having surmounted the “aesthetic,” “ethical,” and even in a sense “religious” stages of human existence—is uniquely able to enact a return, back to the things of earth, back to finitude, back to the aesthetic; having found the highest rationality of being in God’s kenosis—His self-outpouring—in the Incarnation, the Christian philosopher is reconciled to the particularity of flesh and form, recognizes all of creation as a purely gratuitous gift of a God of infinite love, and is able to rejoice in the levity of a world created and redeemed purely out of God’s “pleasure.”

Of no philosopher could this be truer than Hamann. He was a man of the deepest, most fervent and adoring piety, and yet of an almost Nietzschean irreverence (“My unrefined imagination has never been able to conceive a Creative Spirit without genitalia”); he was practically a Christian mystic, and yet he delighted in the world of the senses, especially in the joys of sexual love (his repeated and most disdainful accusation against the apostles of Enlightenment was that they were spiritual eunuchs piping their dreary abstractions in shrill falsetto voices). This was so (however scandalous it might occasionally seem) because in the Christian evangel he had encountered a God whose creatures are the work of delight, who is pleased to reveal his majesty in total abasement, and who is Himself always “the Poet in the beginning of days.” For Hamann, the return to finitude was unreserved and utterly charitable; everything he wrote or did was touched with a spirit of festivity; his humor contained no lingering residue of fatalism, irony, or rancor.

Of Kierkegaard, this is not true. For him, until the end, the return to finitude was a return only to the singular and terrible enigma of the incarnate God in time. There is always a tragic, “dialectical,” even Gnostic tension in his thought: the Incarnation remains a “paradox” rather than a delightful “surprise,” an invasion of worldly time that time cannot comprehend, and that thus forbids any real reconciliation with the world. For Hamann, by contrast, the kenosis of God illuminates and transfigures everything, grace transfuses all of nature, culture, and cult, and so his humor has a wealth, an overwhelming hilarity, and a truly Christian mirthfulness that Kierkegaard’s does not. Where Kierkegaard was most inclined to become severe and saturnine, Hamann was most reckless in his rejoicing. Hamann would have looked, certainly, with a more tender regard upon the absurdity of a “Christian whorehouse”; the idea would probably have moved him more to reflect upon the prodigality of divine love than to indulge in caustic complaint.



--David Bentley Hart. "The Laughter of the - Philosophers" in First Things, January 2005


An actual analysis of theological humor is always so lacking among Christians (though, defensively, it should be noted how difficult a rigorous analysis of humor would be). I'm tired (though of course, in consistance with this post, also deeply amused) of "Christian humor," consisting in nothing but "sanitized," jokes that seem to pathologically avoid understanding humor as, very often, a (not so) simple expression of a sophisticated view of the world. The opening appeals of any "Christian joke," to the mass of the Church maintains the very difficult task of rendering absurd the remainders of a meticulous sanitation. Though obviously there is a serious attempt to avoid the impiety of speaking of what "the wicked do in the darkness," there is nonetheless a strong feeling that, for example, the Kantian moral imperative of deontological ethics has driven our sense of "duty" to the "good for its own sake," against our delight in the absurdity of the excess of the Good. Grace and Love, as Jean-Luc Marion note, are that which do not "have to be," and so comes only as the excess of a gift not necessarily given. Though I don't have time here, I think that some headway can be made (and this is, to a small extent, the direction David Hart himself takes it in the wonderful The Doors of The Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami) in creating Theodicy of humor.

This would be a difficult (and in its own right, absurd) task, but I think that humor (as it is here defined) has the potential to not undermine the seriousness of the machinations, alienations, and abberations of the all too numerous horrors in the world, while nonetheless creating a Christian "heuristic" (I dare not say "answer") to view these things. If it works, we wouldn't have to deal as often with the cold and often pedantic syllogisms that attempt to rectify theologically, the nihilism so many sense in the world. Moreover, I think that humor, in its playful excesses, viewed from the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection has huge implications for ecumenicism and worship (we could all to turn, one to the other, with a slight upturn at the corners of our mouth the only evidence of the repression of a full blown smile, while taking the bread and the cup and say "God saved you even though your Protestant," or "Roman Catholic," or "Pentacostal"!).

How much greater could our worship be if we weren't simply attempting in the confines of our finitude to present gratitude for an infinite presence of Grace, for too often even well intentioned worship turns into the bland--rather than the erotic!--economy of exchange, the causal and casual duty of the market in response to the abeyance of sin. But what if understanding the doxology as boysterous laughter at the overcoming of our demise and the reconciliation to God when we were but sinners is taken as the key? The play of the imagination, it seems, comes precisely in the infinite "displacement," between the morose and often caustic vestiges of our finitude, and the onrushing of the futurity and hope of God which does not lessen the pain of the present and past, but precisely renders them absurd. Worship is the laughter of this joke. It is the space in the words "Father forgive them, they know not what they do"; the opening in the onrushing of the Spirit that fills us with life but looks like drunkenness to the world (e.g. Acts 2) and as such, humor is precisely the space within the Trinitarian life, in which distance is always overcome by the structure of perichorisis, and in which the vagaries of the "past" are always approached by the newness and fulness of non-necessary life.