The Authority of the Lily and the Bird in Kierkegaard's Lily Discourses

Abstract

This dissertation presents a systematic reading of the four discourses Kierkegaard wrote on Matthew 6:24-34, which I am calling the Lily Discourses (“What We Learn from the Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” (1847); “The Cares of the Pagans” (1848); “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” (1849); “Christ as Archi-Image” (1851)). Matthew instructs the reader to “consider the lilies,” and in reading this passage Kierkegaard presents the lilies as authoritative, rather than merely “figural” or “metaphoric”. The aim of this dissertation is to describe what Kierkegaard means by the authority of the lily and the bird. Since Kierkegaard engages with and in “figural” language in his pseudonymous as well as his signed texts, what he says about the lily and the bird in these four Discourses is significant for all of Kierkegaard’s work. In the first and the third Discourses Kierkegaard writes lyrically of the beauty of nature, but concludes with a brutal picture of nature’s death and decay. It is not nature, this dissertation argues, but the trace nature leaves in language, that Kierkegaard is investigating. Kierkegaard ends the first Discourse by invoking the positing power of language: he says, “Let the lily wither”. As if in response to the death at the end of the first Discourse, the second is written in praise “on the day all goes black.” If the first two Discourses describe the authority of the lily and the bird in terms of the performative – of positing and praise – the third Discourse describes this authority in terms of receptivity. The lily and the bird are obedient, Kierkegaard says there. He develops an account of obedience that is, on the one hand, required for reading the lily and the bird (for granting authority), and on the other, is the lesson taught by the lily and the bird. In the fourth Discourse Kierkegaard presents the archi-image (Forbillede, previously translated in English as “pattern” or “prototype”) and what corresponds to it: “imitation.” Only when we imitate, rather than ape mimetically or endlessly interpret, can the image (Billede) that we are responding to be the archi-image (Forbillede). The lily and the bird, the dissertation argues, have the authority of the archi-image only if we can read them in a certain way, that is, if our reading is non-mimetic imitation. For Kierkegaard imitation is an act, made by an individual person at a concrete time and place in history; it therefore commits the reader, in her full responsibility (including “social” or “political”) in the risk of reading. The dissertation has four chapters, each devoted to one of Kierkegaard’s Lily Discourses. Accordingly, Chapter One describes Kierkegaard’s account of the authority of the lily and the bird as positing, Chapter Two as praise, Chapter Three as obedience and Chapter Four as imitation.