Author: a fool

All alone with Jesus

hell is other people

Shortly before the end of [No Exit], one of the three strangers puts into words that toward which the whole play is turning from its beginning when he says that: “There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people.”

“Hell is other people” means thus that it is hell and unbearable to exist subject to, awaiting, controlled by, and turned toward the Other’s approval, judgements, and opinions.

“Hell is other people” describes an existence existing at the mercy of the Other, the Other’s judgements, and the Other’s accusing gaze. It is hell, tormenting, and unbearable to be unable to escape the Other’s look that objectifies and, in its objectifying, tortures.

Explaining Sartre’s “Hell Is Other People”

sermons

Kierkegaard writes scores of paragraphs critical of pastors under whose watch the church itself is disintegrating. He points out the following problems:

  • Pastors’ lives do not reflect their sermons.
  • Pastors do not really mean what they preach, so that preaching “jams the lock on imitation” (FSE 261).
  • Pastors preach watered-down drivel, and thus they are dishonest about the gospel—its claims and its demands on human life.
  • The pastorate is a professional job no different from any other in law, business, medicine and so on. The implications are that some are drawn to the “trade” for secular reasons and thus some pastors have gotten themselves in the wrong business.
  • In their sermons pastors promote the view that doctrine matters more than the imitation of Christ; faith is intellectualized.
  • Pastors do not understand the world in which they live (i.e., non-Christian forms of existence), nor do they care to, and thus their message is largely irrelevant.
  • Pastors offend, but for the wrong sorts of reasons.
Tietjen, Mark A.. Kierkegaard: A Christian Missionary to Christians

The one thing I would add is that “pastors preach for their own benefit.”

… as a punishment for criminals

In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages there was an awareness of this longing for solitude and a respect for what it means; whereas in the constant sociality of our day we shrink from solitude to the point (what a capital epigram!) that no use for it is known other than as a punishment for criminals. But since it is a crime in our day to have spirit, it is indeed quite in order to classify such people, lovers of solitude, with criminals.

Sickness Unto Death

All for Jesus

Whatever the rhythm of prayer may be, by day and by night, solitaries must never lose sight of the fact of Jesus as Saviour; it is he, and only he, who draws us to the Father and who has promised us the ministry of the Spirit. We must never lose sight of the Incarnation and all that flows from it; that is the uniqueness and completeness of the Christian way.

Solitude and Communion: Papers on the Hermit Life, 108