Spiritual Writings: A New Translation and Selection by Soren Kierkegaard edited and translated by George Pattison [AZW3, MOBI, EPUB]

“By far the most profound thinker of the 19th century” —Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Kierkegaard’s great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

Harper Perennial Modern Classics presents the rediscovered spiritual writings of Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Oxford theologian George Pattison. Called “the first modernist” by The Guardian and “the father of existentialism” by the New York Times, Kierkegaard left an indelible imprint on existential writers from Sartre and Camus to Kafka and Derrida. In works like Fear and Trembling, Sickness unto Death, and Either/Or, he by famously articulated that all meaning is rooted in subjective experience—but the devotional essays that Patterson reveals in Spiritual Writings will forever change our understanding of the great philosopher, uncovering the spiritual foundations beneath his secularist philosophy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Fascinating and perplexing in equal measure, these exegeses on gospel and biblical sayings display a side of the great 19th-century philosopher Kierkegaard (1813–1855) that is considerably less familiar to modern readers than his status as a protoexistentialist. Editor Pattison (The Philosophy of Kierkegaard) offers 16 texts organized loosely around three themes--"Gift," "Creation," and "Love"--that show the philosopher at his most passionate and poetic, but also, a surprise in light of his radical theology, at his closest to the views of religious orthodoxy. Throughout, the author focuses on short pieces of scripture, interrogating their meaning psychologically. This allows for examination of a variety of everyday experiences from a Christian perspective, particularly doubt, difference, desire, anxiety, and silence. While the editor provides a useful introduction, his thematic style of selection and organization makes for a large degree of repetition. Despite such occasional tedium, Kierkegaard's lyricism, insight, and passionate insistence on the enduring value of scripture are frequently a wonder to behold. (Nov.)