I’m a philosopher by training and a specialist in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard by inclination. I discovered Kierkegaard as an undergraduate and became a Christian after reading Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Crumbs. Philosophers tend to be hostile to religion, and Kierkegaard tends to be hostile to organized religion, so the spiritual life of Christian philosopher can be somewhat lonely. I’ve yet to find a church in which I feel at home, so one of the ways I seek spiritual sustenance is through listening to edifying works on long drives. I discovered a set of audio CDs on eBay with the promising title The Hope of the Gospel, by someone I had never heard of named George MacDonald.

I bought the CDs and popped them into my car’s CD player the very next time I was faced with a long drive.

I was immediately mesmerized. Not since I had first discovered Kierkegaard had I encountered such profound spiritual insights expressed in such beautiful and moving language. I felt like Dorothy from the old “Wizard of Oz” movie when she steps out of the black-and-white interior of her Kansas cottage into the the brilliantly colorful land of Oz!

How could I not have known about this man, I asked myself? How is it possible that I had never heard of him? I’d been studying Kierkegaard, and Christian thought more generally, for more than forty years. I’d been attending the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, a meeting at which literally thousands of papers on every conceivable aspect of religious thought are presented for nearly as long, and yet I had never even heard the name George MacDonald, let alone had any exposure to the substance of his thought.

I continued listening to The Hope of the Gospel, and was delighted to discover, when I finished that work, that wonderful audio recordings by David Baldwin of MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons were available on YouTube, so I began to listen to them as well. I had been struck, when I first began listening to The Hope of the Gospel, by similarities between MacDonald’s thought and Kierkegaard’s. Again, and again I recognized in MacDonald ideas I had run across in Kierkegaard. I decided I needed to begin keeping track of these similarities, so I bought ebook versions of all of MacDonald’s works.

Why, I asked myself was there no scholarship comparing these two thinkers? I made some casual inquiries among my acquaintances in the field of Kierkegaard scholarship, and no one had ever even heard of MacDonald, let alone noticed an affinity between his thought and Kierkegaard’s.

I immediately decided I must do what I could to rectify the relative neglect of MacDonald by scholars of religion. The place to start, it seemed to me was in the community of Kierkegaard scholars. I have a blog, Piety on Kierkegaard, where I publish material on Kierkegaard. I knew Kierkegaard scholars would be drawn to MacDonald if they only knew he existed, so I decided to begin publishing posts on the similarities between these to thinkers.

The first similarity I noticed was between Kierkegaard’s and MacDonald’s views on the nature of genuine community. Kierkegaard famously disparages what he refers to as “the crowd” and its “leveling” tendencies, but that does not mean he had a negative view of all collectivities. In the stillness of God’s house, writes Kierkegaard in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, “[t]here is no fellowship—each one is by himself; there is no call for united effort—each one is called to individual responsibility” (p. 10). And yet, he continues later in the same work, “in the stillness, what beautiful harmony with everyone! Oh, in this solitude, what beautiful fellowship with everyone!” (p. 38).

It may appear that Kierkegaard is contradicting himself here, but I don’t think he is. I think what he means is that in the stillness before God, there is no “fellowship” in the sense that there is no escaping into the crowd, no hiding behind others, no opportunity for leveling reassurances that after all, it is unreasonable to expect moral perfection. 

“God wants each individual,”writes Kierkegaard in Works of Love, for the sake of certainty and of equality and of responsibility, to learn for himself the Law’s requirement. When this is the case, there is durability in existence, because God has a firm hold on it. There is no vortex, because each individual begins, not with ‘the others’ and therefore not with evasions and excuses, but begins with the God-relationship and therefore stands firm (p. 118).

Kierkegaard describes God throughout Works of Love as the “middle term” in any genuinely loving relationship, whether that relationship is one of what philosophers refer to as “preferential love” or neighbor love. But when God is the middle term, then genuine community is possible. 

Compare this with MacDonald’s assertion in “Miracles of Our Lord,” that “[a]lthough I say, every man stands alone in God, I yet say two or many can meet in God as they cannot meet save in God; nay, that only in God can two or many truly meet; only as they recognize their oneness with God can they become one with each other” (The Complete Works of George MacDonald, p. 13,394)

What MacDonald is describing is precisely the “beautiful fellowship” with others that a genuine God relationship not only makes possible according to Kierkegaard, but actually necessary.

“Christianity,” according to Kierkegaard, “turns our attention completely away from the external, turns it inward, and makes every one of your relationships to other people into a God-relationship (Works of Love, p. 376). “God just repeats everything you say and do to other people,” explains Kierkegaard, again in Works of Love. “He repeats it with the magnification of infinity. God repeats the words of grace or of judgment that you say about another; he says the same thing word for word about you” (pp. 384-385). 

But this unity of the divine and the human as exemplified in the neighbor is not merely for purposes of judgment.

“Love is a need, the deepest need, in the person in whom there is love for the neighbor,” writes Kierkegaard, “he does not need people just to have someone to love, but he needs to love people. Yet there is no pride or haughtiness in this wealth, because God is the middle term, and eternity’s shall binds and guides this great need so that it does not go astray and turn into pride. But there are no limits to the objects, because the neighbor is all human beings, unconditionally every human being” (Works of Love, p. 67). All communities are for the divine sake of individual life,” writes MacDonald,

for the sake of the love and truth that is in each heart, and is not cumulative—cannot be in two as one result. But all that is precious in the individual heart depends for existence on the relation the individual bears to other individuals: alone—how can he love? alone—where is his truth? It is for and by the individuals that the individual lives. A community is the true development of individual relations. Its very possibility lies in the conscience of its men and women. No setting right can be done in the mass. There are no masses save in corruption. Vital organizations result alone from individualities and consequent necessities, which fitting the one into the other, and working for each other, make combination not only possible but unavoidable. Then the truth which has informed in the community reacts on the individual to perfect his individuality. In a word, the man, in virtue of standing alone in God, stands with his fellows, and receives from them divine influences without which he cannot be made perfect ( The Complete Works of George MacDonald, p. 13,393).

Kierkegaard could not have said it better himself!

It isn’t only their views on the nature of genuine community that are so similar. I stumbled across a reference in the second volume of MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons that is remarkably similar to Kierkegaard. The sermon in question is entitled “The Word of Jesus on Prayer.” “Convince me,” protests MacDonald’s imaginary interlocutor, “that prayer is heard, and I shall know. Why should the question admit of doubt? Why should it require to be reasoned about? We know that the wind blows: why should we not know that God answers prayer?’ 

MacDonald replies, “What if God does not care to have you know it at second hand?”

Kierkegaard scholars will immediately recognize not merely the expression, “at second hand,” but also the precise sense in which MacDonald uses it here, as identical to Kierkegaard’s use of it in Philosophical Crumbs and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  

My first thought was that this philosophical-theological use of the expression “at second hand” might actually have a biblical origin. I did a word search on both the King James Version and the Revised Version (to which MacDonald makes frequent reference in his writings) of the Bible, but could not find it in either version. That doesn’t preclude, of course, that both Kierkegaard and MacDonald got the expression from some third source independently of each other, so if any reader knows of such a source, I would be very much in your debt if you would share it with me. 

These are not the only similarities between Kierkegaard’s and MacDonald’s thought that I have found. I’m devouring everything MacDonald wrote, at least all the theological writings. Theological writings were not all he wrote, however. Kierkegaard and MadDonald have more in common than the substance of their theologies. Kierkegaard, as is widely known, loved fairy tales. MacDonald loved them as well. In fact, he actually wrote fairy tales, along with other kinds of fantasy and more traditional fiction. I have no doubt, however, that all MacDonald works are nourishing for the spirit, so I look forward to reading them all!