11

The Child and Kierkegaard's "One Who Loves": The Agapic Flip Side o f Peter Pan

Eric Ziolkowski

W hile Kierkegaard scholars routinely discuss the crucial bear­ing of his unusual childhood, and especially his early relationship with his father, upon his later developm ent as a thinker and w riter,1 surprisingly little attention is devoted to the significance of the child as a type in his published works, both pseudonym ous and nonpseudonym ous, as well as in his journals. The im port of this subject is hinted at in the brief note to the eight entries on childhood and children, dating from 1837 to 1849, com piled in the H ong edition of the Journals: "In connection with his illum ination of the various steps in the developm ent of the individual, Kierke­gaard considers the period of childhood in some detail. Through his own experience in childhood he knew how im portant this por­tion of life is for a person's later developm ent" (JP, 1:509).

That Kierkegaard was, in the H ongs' words, "a keen observer of children" (JP, 1, p. 510), is already apparent in a journal entry of 1837 w here, reacting to a recent essay by Poul M. M øller on telling stories to children,2 he elaborates thoughts of his own about childhood and about the sort of storytelling he deem s appropriate for children (JP, 1:265). In an entry twelve years later on Galatians

1In the standard biographies such discussions often involve declarations to the effect that "if ever the child was father of the man, it was in this instance" (Walter Lowrie, A Short Life o f Kierkegaard [Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965] 54); or that his childhood relationship with his father, "above all, made him the man he later became; the shadow of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard was cast across the whole path of his life" (Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973] 33).

2"O m at fortaelle Børn Eventyr" (1836-1837), in Poul M. Møller, Efterladte Skrifter, 3 vols. (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1839-1843) 3:322-25.

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4:1-7, Kierkegaard invokes the child to illustrate the G od-relation­ship. After observing our progression from first being "slaves under the law ," to then becom ing "children ," then finally "children w ho cry Abba, Father, and co-heirs of C hrist," he concludes that

there is an increasing openness in relation to God. But it is not like the relationship between adults and children, in which the openness comes after the child has grown up; here it is the reverse—one does not begin as a child but as a slave, and the openness increases as one becomes more and more a child. (JP, 1:272)

Singled out by the Hongs as representative of the m any allu­sions to the child that are found in K ierkegaard's w ritings, these two journal entries would furnish helpful starting points for a deeper investigation of the use of children by him and his pseudo­nyms. A lthough differently nuanced insights into children are arrived at in each of his w orks, my ultim ate aim in w hat follows will be to exam ine the specific use of the child figure in Works o f Love, w hose appearance in 1847 fell betw een the years of the two entries above. As w e shall see, the perspective conveyed by Works o f Love toward childhood, like those expressed in Kierkegaard's other writings, displays a distinctive dialectical oscillation betw een positive and negative attitudes, thus befitting the m aieutic aim peculiar to his entire corpus.

H ow ever, as the conception of childhood as a stage sui generis in a hum an being's life appears to be a relatively recent develop­m ent in W estern intellectual and cultural history, the extensive usage of the child as a type throughout Kierkegaard's oeuvre crystallizes w hat was in his time still a relatively new, developing Christian tendency of perceiving children as creatures endowed w ith a psychology distinct from that of adults, and hence with m inds that will respond differently from adult m inds to the central doctrines and im ages of Christian faith. For this reason, before we exam ine the em ploym ent of the child as a type in Works o f Love, it will be beneficial first, briefly, to consider the general history of reflection on the child in the Christian W est, concentrating on the views of Jesus, St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Rousseau as chief points of reference; and then, again briefly, to locate Kierkegaard and his pseudonym s in their relationship to that history.

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Bipolar Western Views o f Childhood

Today, notw ithstanding the not-so-rare news stories of terrible crim es com m itted by children, such as the 1993 abduction and slaying of tw o-year-old Jam es Bulger by a pair of ten-year-old boys in Liverpool, England, or the m ore recent proliferation of fatal shootings in Am erican high schools by students sixteen years old and younger, the conventional notion of childhood still approxi­m ates the one sum m ed up by the entry on "C h ild " in The Herder Dictionary o f Sym bols:

A sym bol of spontaneity and innocence, qualities alluded to in the N ew Testam ent ("Except ye be converted and becom e as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." Matt. 18:3).3

This declaration by Christ (cf. M ark 10:15; Luke 18:17), together with his teaching that the kingdom of heaven "belongs" to "su ch " as children (Matt. 19:14; M ark 10:14; Luke 18:16), might seem to dissociate them from A dam 's guilt and to defy A ristotle's idea of the child as an "im perfect" being whose "excellence is not relative to him self alone, but to the perfect man and to his teacher."4 To be sure, while he praises children for their hum bleness, Jesus him self never characterizes them as perfect or innocent; if he privileges them in the order of salvation, he does not explicitly do so because of any inherent spiritual qualities or dispositions.5 Yet these facts have mattered little, as Jesus has often been mistaken as the source of the clichéd Rom antic notion of children as little innocents.

Directly related to the popular m isunderstanding of Jesus' exaltation of children is the com m on assumption that the tradition­al Christian view of them has always been identical with his view. In actuality, although Jesus' association of children w ith hum ility

3The Herder Dictionary o f Symbols: Symbols from Art, Archaeology, Mythology, Literature, and Religion (Wilmette IL: Chiron Publications, 1986) 37.

4Aristotle, Politics, trans B. Jowett, 2.1260a.31-33, in The Complete Works o f Aristotle, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) 2:2000.

5As noted by S. Légasse, Jésus et l'enfant: "Enfants," "petits" et "simples" dans la tradition synoptique (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1969) 340.

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and salvation is supported by 1 Peter 2:2 ("Like new born babes, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you m ay grow up to salvation"), his positive assessm ent of them finds stiff opposition elsew here in the New Testam ent, particularly in the famous analogy invoked by St. Paul to illustrate his own religious conversion: "W hen I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I becam e a m an, I gave up childish w ays" (1 Cor. 13:11). For Paul, abandoning "childish w ays" connotes recognizing that knowledge and the capacity to convey it prophetically or in tongues are faulty, and hence are less valuable gifts than faith, hope, and love. Seem ing to assume the A ristotelian notion of the child as an im perfect being whose "excellence" is relative to the perfect man, he has already subm it­ted that "w hen the perfect comes, the im perfect will pass aw ay" (1 Cor. 13:10). H ere "the perfect" means spiritual m aturity, or becom ing "a m an," while "the im perfect" m eans spiritual infancy, or "child ish w ays." Paul is essentially urging his readers to grow up, and to stop thinking like little children (see 1 Cor. 14:20).

Paul's prom otion of the spiritual superiority of adulthood over childhood corresponds to his figural understanding of the first m an, Adam, through whose transgression hum ankind inherited sin, condem nation, and death, as the "ty p e" of Christ, the second Adam who acquits, justifies, and restores hum ankind to life (Rom. 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15:22, 45-49). O f all stages of life, infancy and childhood would seem the ones most closely linked to original sin, as every infant born is an heir of A dam 's fallenness and can only hope to be redeem ed by converting later in life to faith in Christ, as Paul him self was converted on the road to Damascus.

If the view s expressed by Jesus and Paul established two main, opposed poles of opinion betw een w hich subsequent Christian attitudes tow ard children could develop, it was Paul's perspective, not Jesus', that conditioned Christian thinking about children for well over the next m illennium and a half. However, not Paul, but Augustine was chiefly responsible for this legacy. It is in Augus­tine's writings, m ost notably the opening books of his Confessions, that the im plicit Pauline linkage of infancy and childhood with A dam ic sin first achieves full and explicit expression. An astute ponderer of babies, he believed that the earliest evidence of sin is detectable in their behavior, and consequently that all unbaptized

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children, even if born of the faithful, perish (pereunt).6 H aving seen that an infant, even w hen fully fed, would becom e angry and jealous at seeing another infant at its m other's breast, he concluded that " it is not the mind of infants that is 'innocent,' but the weakness of its infantile m em bers."7 In other words, infants would sin if only they could physically do so.

A ugustine's rejection of the notion of infantile "innocence" carried over to his view of older children, whom he saw as existing within the fallen condition bequeathed by Adam ,8 much as Paul had recalled having lived as a lawless child (Rom. 7:9). In associating children w ith Adam ic guilt rather than the heavenly hum ility that Jesus ascribed to them, Augustine could only strain to square the latter view with the m em ory of his own peccadillos as a boy: lying, theft, cheating, and indulgence in frivolity. Addressing God he asked:

Is this boyish innocence [in n ocen tia p u er ilis]? It is not, Lord. It is not. . . . For these are the sam e things, the very sam e things, which, as we depart from teachers and m asters, from nuts and balls and pet birds, proceeding to kings, gold, estates, and slaves, continue on as m ore years pass in succession, just as greater punishm ents succeed the ferule. Therefore, our King, it was [only] a sym bol of hum ility which you praised in the [dim inu­tive] stature of childhood, saying: To such belongs the kingdom of heaven.9

Thus precluding any literalistic interpretation of Jesus' ex­pressed favoritism for children, the Augustinian view of the child as innately sinful predom inated throughout the M iddle Ages in the Christian West. Consequently, as suggested by m edieval art, children were valued mainly as adults-to-be. The rare pictures in which they appear tend to portray them as dim inutive men; according to Philippe Ariès, this absence of lifelike representations

6E.g., Augustine, Sermon 294.19.18, delivered at Carthage, in Patrologia cursus completus. Series latina, 221 vols., ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1844-1866) 38:1347.

7Augustine, Confessions 1.7.11; my translation. All references to this work are to Sancti Aureli Augustini Confessionum, libri tredecim, ed. Pius Knòll, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 33.

8E.g., Augustine, Confessions 1.9.14; City o f God 22.22.34.9Augustine, Confessions 1.19.30; my translation.

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of children show s that "there was no place for childhood in the m edieval w o rld ."10 Only during the thirteenth century did actual child m orphology begin to be depicted in art, w hich anticipated w hat A ries chronicles as the gradual "d iscovery" of childhood as a period of life separate and distinct from adulthood, and the m odern idea of childish innocence. This idea, by Aries' account, em erged in the m oral and pedagogical literature of the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth century, and was exem pli­fied by the frequency with w hich painters and engravers of that period portrayed the Gospel scene of Jesus' blessing of the children, a scene w hich hitherto had been rarely portrayed.11

An irony w hich Aries does not adequately account for is that these developm ents follow ed the age of the Protestant reform ers, w hose dom inant theologies had reem phasized the doctrine of original sin and hence the notion that children are inherently depraved. H eightening this irony, the tendency of thought away from the m edieval negativism toward children culm inated only a couple of centuries after the Reform ation in Rousseau's treatise on education, Ém ile (1762), w hich opens with the assertion: "E very­thing is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of m an ."12

Here we arrive at an attitude toward children that is the very antithesis of the centuries-old Augustinian w ariness toward them. For Rousseau, not only is nothing wrong with childhood; on the contrary, children are m eant by Nature "to be children before being men. . . . Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling w hich are proper to it. N othing is less sensible than to want to substitute ours for th eirs."13 His position on the educative value of punishing children is thus the opposite of Augustine's. The

10Philippe Ariès, Centuries o f Childhood: A Social History o f Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962) 33.

11See ibid., 100-27. On the rarity of medieval depictions of Jesus' blessing of the children, and the frequency of late-sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century portrayals of that scene, see Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, 8 vols, ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum with Günter Bandmann et al. (Rome: Herder, 1968-1976) 2:513-14, s.v. "Kindersegnung Jesu."

12Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or, On Education, trans., intro., and notes by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979) 37.

13Ibid., 90.

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latter, citing the paternal advice of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 30:12, could suggest that the harsh corporal punishm ents em ployed in Rom an schools w ere necessary for counteracting children's natural inclination toward sloth, indolence, and other vices, and were but a natural consequence of the perverted, fallen nature with which every child is endow ed at b irth .14 Rousseau, in contrast, contends that because the child 's actions are devoid of morality, "he can do nothing w hich is m orally bad and w hich m erits either punishm ent or reprim and ."15

It is to Rousseau, Aries notes, that the modern association of childhood with prim itivism and irrationalism may be traced, although Hegel, as noted by another scholar, is right to observe that Jesus anteceded Rousseau in exalting the child as norm .16 The later hallow ing of childhood by Rom antic poets and theorists, most notably Blake, W ordsw orth, and Coleridge in England, and Schiller and N ovalis in Germ any, is well documented. Anticipated by Jesus and Rousseau, as well as by the seventeenth-century English religious poets Thom as Traherne and Henry Vaughan, who saw the child as view ing the world through prelapsarian eyes, the Rom antics equated childhood with A dam 's condition in Eden and exalted the child 's "freshness of sensation" (Coleridge) as a norm for adult artistic experience.17

This brings us to Kierkegaard, w hose birth in 1813 coincided with the m ajor period of Germ an Romanticism , the so-called Jüngere Rom antik or H ochromantik which encompassed the years of the N apoleonic w ars (1805-ca. 1815). As a student for eleven years at the U niversity of Copenhagen, he would be initially allured but eventually disenchanted by the literature, aesthetics, and philoso­phy of that m ovem ent. Reflecting the conflicting but lasting im pacts of both his youthful im m ersion in Rom anticism , and his

14Augustine, City o f God 22.22.34.15Rousseau, Émile, 92.16See Ariès, Centuries o f Childhood, 119; M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism:

Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973) 382.

17See, e.g., Peter Coveney, The Image o f Childhood: The Individual and Society: A Study o f the Theme in English Literature, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967) esp. 37-90; Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, esp. 377-483.

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earlier, austerely pietistic upbringing by his father, K ierkegaard's w ritings convey attitudes toward the child that fluctuate rem ark­ably betw een Pauline, Augustinian wariness, and the favoritism expressed by Jesus, Rousseau, as well as the Romantics.

“A Sinner without the Consciousness o f Sin"

In a journal entry of February 1836, m idway through his career as a university student, Kierkegaard wrote: "The irony of life m ust of necessity be m ost intrinsic to childhood, to the age of im agina­tion; . . . this is why it is present in the rom antic school" (JP, 2:1669; repr. in C I, 425). This com m ent seems innocuous enough; the association drawn betw een childhood and the Romantic school does not imply anything unfavorable about either the child or Rom anticism , both of w hich are in turn associated with the im agination, that hum an capacity the Romantics extolled above all others. If neither of these associations was original, w hat is note­worthy about this entry is that it shows him already contem plating childhood as a distinct stage of life. His reflections on childhood thereafter would not alw ays prove so neutral.

In his aforecited journal entry of the next year, Kierkegaard asks, "what significance does childhood really have? Is it a stage with significance only because it conditions, in a way, the follow ­ing stages— or does it have independent value?" (JP, 1:265). Both these positions strike him as laughably flawed. Adherents to the first position essentially kill time, as though all would be well " if children could be shut up in the dark and force-fed on an acceler­ated schedule like chickens" (JP, 1:265). Adherents to the second position com e to regard childhood as "fundam entally the highest level attainable by hum an beings," beyond w hich everything is "progressive degeneration" (JP, 1:265). Both views are m isleading because both "m ust presuppose the em ptiness of childhood" (JP, 1:265).

W hile not constituting criticism s of childhood per se, these observations call attention to the conceptual pitfalls of regarding childhood in either of two w rong ways. Although he never defines childhood here, he does distinguish it by stressing that storytelling, instruction, and upbringing should be conducted in a special Socratic m ode "to allow the child to bring forth the life within him in

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all stillness" (JP, 1:265). By the same token, as Kierkegaard else­where m ade clear during the sam e year this entry was written, if stories told to children m ust be conveyed only in a certain way, then it is also im perative for stories about childhood to offer a faithful portrayal of the child 's mind. In his scathing 1838 review of Hans Christian A ndersen's Kun en Spillemand (1837, Only a Fiddler), a novel w hose first six chapters portray its protagonist's childhood, Kierkegaard contends that the author there fails to depict "a com pletely childlike consciousness":

Instead, it often becom es either childishness, undigested rem inis­cences from a specific, concrete period of childhood, or, w hat we particularly have in view here, one speaks as an adult about the im pression made by life and then adds at appropriate intervals that one m ust rem em ber childhood, the great creative pow er of childhood im agination. (EPW , 86)

As these com m ents reveal, a significant change has occurred in Kierkegaard's thinking since he called childhood "the age of im agination" in his aforecited 1836 journal entry. There, he used that phrase earnestly in associating childhood with Romanticism . Here, with undisguised sarcasm he draws the phrase "childhood im agination" directly from the pages of Kun en Spillemand to deride what he views as A ndersen's unsuccessful attem pt to depict a fictional child through a clichéd, adult, rom anticized notion of childhood.18

This change of attitude toward childhood as "the age of im agination," and hence toward the association of childhood with Rom anticism , would com e to a head four years later in a passage toward the end of K ierkegaard's dissertation (1841) on Socratic and Rom antic irony. M aking reference to a criticism leveled by H einrich H eine specifically against the poet and dram atist Ludwig Tieck, but also, by extension, against the w hole school of Romantic

18Julia Watkin supplies the following two examples from H. C. Andersen, Kun en Spillemand, 3 vols. (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1837) 1:15, 18: "But for childhood imagination a wealth lay in it"; "Childhood imagination needs only to scratch in the ground with a stick in order to create a castle with halls and corridors" (EPW, 256n.117; W atkin's trans.).

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poets and w riters,19 Kierkegaard sums up his own disenchantm ent with that school by likening what he now sees as the Rom antics' som nam bulistic detachm ent from reality to the m entality of an infant:

The world is rejuvenated, but as Heine so wittily rem arked, it w as rejuvenated by rom anticism to such a degree that it becam e a baby again. The tragedy of rom anticism is that w hat it seizes upon is not actuality. Poetry aw akens; the pow erful longings, the m ysterious intim ations, the inspiring feelings awaken; nature aw akens; the enchanted princess aw akens— the rom anticist falls asleep. (C I, 304)

As anticipated by this passage, the attitude toward childhood that will tend to underlie references to the infant in Kierkegaard's subsequent w ritings, both published and unpublished, pseudony­m ous and nonpseudonym ous, is one utterly divorced from the Rom antic idealization of children. Having mused as early as 1837 that "[c]hildhood is the paradigm atic part of life; adulthood its syntax" (JP, 1:266), he realized that anything "paradigm atic" m ust share the essence of w hatever it is the paradigm for, and therefore that the child cannot be dissociated from the sinfulness of the adult hum an condition. Accordingly, while sarcastically stating his preference "to talk with children, for one may still dare to hope they may becom e rational beings," the aesthete "A " of Either/Or notes— no less sarcastically— that when a baby is asked what it wants, it babbles da-da , an utterance which in Danish also connotes "spanking": "A nd with such observations life begins, and yet we deny hereditary sin" (EO, 1:19; see 606n.8; cf. JP, 5:5184; repr. EO, 1:467). The ethicist Judge W illiam , though referring only once ex­plicitly to "hereditary sin" (EO, 2:190), stresses: "[T]hat a child is born in sin is the m ost profound expression of its highest worth, that it is precisely a transfiguration of hum an life that everything related to it is assigned to the category of sin" (92). And Johannes Clim acus sim ilarly affirm s that Christianity rejects "the sentim ental view of the child 's innocence"; as the idea of hum ankind as fallen

19The Romantic School, bk. 1, trans. Helen Mustard, in Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 1985) 18.

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assum es the notion of "the child as sinner," Christianity "cannot provide the period of childhood with any advantage" (CUP, 1:592). The child, its consciousness qualified as "im m ediate" and hence in­determ inate and excluding doubt (see JC, 167), can therefore be de­fined as "a sinner w ithout the consciousness of sin" (CUP, 1:592).

We m ight pause here to locate this insight in relation to Augustine and Rousseau, our two nonbiblical reference points in W estern thinking regarding the child. W hile Rousseau and the Rom antics w ould easily concur that the child by nature is "w ithout the consciousness of sin ," the idea of the child as "a sinner" is anti­thetical to their view. On the other hand, the w hole idea of the child as "a sinner w ithout the consciousness of sin" seem s borne out by a com m ent that surfaces during one of Augustine's painful listings of his own boyhood flaws and m isdeeds: "For I did not see the whirlpool of filthiness into which I had plunged from [the sight of] your eyes [non enim uidebam uoraginem turpitudinis, in quam proiectus eram ab oculis tuis] ."20 H owever, if A ugustine can recall his own life as a puerile "sinner without the consciousness of sin ," it is his obsession with recollecting his own various types of boyhood transgressions and distinguishing them as sym ptom s of sin that distinguishes his view of childhood from those of Kier­kegaard, Clim acus, and K ierkegaard's other pseudonyms.

Perhaps reflecting in part his experience of having been regularly m ocked by boys in the streets during the period of the Corsair A ffair,21 passing allusions to naughty children do crop up in K ierkegaard's w ritings (e.g., WL, 203-204). Nonetheless, he and his pseudonym s depict the sinfulness of children no less than the sinfulness of adults as "som ething quite other than a series of transgressions; it is a spiritual attitude that is at the same time psychological and m etaphysical."22 H ereditary sin is certainly discussed in his writings, particularly The Concept o f Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death; yet Kierkegaard and his pseudonym s display nothing approaching the Augustinian preoccupation with

20Augustine, Confessions 1.19.30; my translation.21See JP, 5:5887 (repr. in COR, 212); 5:5894 (repr. in COR, 217); 5:5937; 5:5998

(repr. in COR, 220); 6:6160 (repr. in COR, 227).22Henri Rondet, Original Sin: The Patristic and Theological Background, trans.

Cajetan Finegan (Staten Island NY: Alba House, 1972) 206.

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it.23 For Vigilius H aufniensis, w hat is anticipatory (if not yet explic­itly sym ptom atic) of sin in the child is "[t]he anxiety that is posited in innocence" (CA, 42), while the closest that Anti-Clim acus comes to associating children with original sin is in finding them m arked by the sam e "im perfection" as the unchristian "natural m an," nam ely, "not to recognize the horrifying, and then, im plicit in this, to shrink from w hat is not horrifying" (SUD, 8). In identifying sin with the despair w hich adults feel in the face of the eternal, Anti- Clim acus observes that "on ly bad temper, not despair, is associated with children," since we can only assume "th at the eternal is present in the child κατὰ δύναμιν [potentially]" (SUD, 49n .).

Located som ew here betw een the opposed attitudes of Augus­tine and Rousseau, Clim acus's view of childhood, like Kierke­gaard's own, shows no sign of having been directly influenced by either of those two thinkers.24 The closest precursor to Kierke­gaard 's am bivalent perspective on children, I believe, is the poet- philosopher W illiam Blake. Although a celebrant of childhood's innocence, Blake was also, like Kierkegaard, a sober acknow ledger of how that innocence is inevitably tempered by experience; hence the child as a type figures prom inently in both his Songs o f Innocence (1789) and Songs o f Experience (1794), which, when published together, bore the subtitle: "Shew ing the Two Contrary States of the H um an Sou l."25 Anticipating Kierkegaard's notion of

23See Johannes Hohlenberg, Sören Kierkegaard, trans. T. H. Croxall (New York: Pantheon, 1954) 131; cited by Rondet, Original Sin, 206.

24Kierkegaard expressed mixed reactions to Augustine and Rousseau. Although his examination of the stages of existence was presumably influenced by Augustine's notion that "m an" must develop through "three stages" (JP, 1:29), he saw Augustine as having "done incalculable harm " by "confus[ing] the concept of faith" (JP, 1:180). And while he could consider a statement by the vicar in book 4 of Emile "splendid" (JP, 3:3824), he viewed Rousseau himself as "totally ignorant of Christianity," particularly with regard to the matter of suffering (JP, 3:3827), and therefore ranked him among "m uddleheads" (JP, 6:6794). (Cf. the Hongs' comments on Kierkegaard's journal entries on these two figures [JP, 1, p. 504; 3, pp. 924-25].) Nowhere, however, does Kierkegaard comment specifically on either Augustine's or Rousseau's attitude toward the child.

25A s Northrop Frye points out, "real children are not symbols of innocence: the Songs o f Innocence would be intolerably sentimental if they were. One finds a great deal more than innocence in any child: there is the childish as well as the childlike; the jealousy and vanity that all humans naturally have" (Fearful Symme­

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childhood as "th e paradigm atic part of life," Blake saw it— in Alfred K azin 's w ords— "as the nucleus of the w hole hum an story ."26 For exam ple, "The Little Boy Lost," the eighth poem of Songs o f Innocence, expresses an intense form of childish anxiety through the sam e image of lostness that H aufniensis em ploys to characterize innocence "brought to its utterm ost": "Innocence is not guilty, yet there is anxiety as though it were lost" (CA, 45).27

Yet Kierkegaard knew nothing of Blake. The two chief sources of influence upon K ierkegaard's attitude toward the child are clearly Jesus and Paul, neither of w hose own assessm ents of children he entirely or straightforw ardly accepted.

True to the irrepressibly dialectical tendency of his thinking, Kierkegaard was keenly aware of the opposition we noted earlier betw een Jesus and Paul's views of childhood, both of which views are invoked in serm ons of 1844, and later in Anti-Clim acus's Practice in Christianity.28 In 1849, the year before Practice appeared, Kierkegaard suggested in his journal that the way som eone assesses his or her childhood in the light of the Christic and Pauline view s will provide a key to that person's personality. After quoting 1 Corinthians 13:11 he wrote: "O ne could speak on the theme: what judgm ent do you make on your childhood and your youth? Do you judge that it was foolishness and fancies?"— in accordance with the Pauline passage. "O r do you judge that you were at that time closest to the M ost H igh?"— in consistency with C hrist's claim about heaven belonging to "su ch " as children. "Just tell me how you judge your childhood and your youth, and I will tell you who you are" (JP, 1:271).

Although K ierkegaard's notion that one's "openness" in rela­tion to God "increases as one becom es more and more a child"

try: A Study o f William Blake [Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947] 235).26Alfred Kazin, introduction to his edition of The Portable Blake (New York:

Viking, 1946; repr. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1986) 39.27This particular analogy between Blake and Haufniensis is drawn by Lorraine

Clark, Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre o f Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­versity Press, 1991) 57.

28See EUD, 240 (on Matt. 18:3), 399 (on 1 Cor. 13.11); PC, 191 (on Matt. 18:3), 198 (for an apparent allusion to 1 Cor. 13.12, the verse that immediately follows the Pauline verse in question).

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accords with Jesus' idea of heaven's belonging to "su ch " as children, and although he had once enunciated a w arning conso­nant with the one issued by Jesus about the fate that awaits corrupters of children (Matt. 18:6; cf. JP, 1:91; repr. in CA, 169), he apparently held little sym pathy for the conventional reading of Jesus' consecration of children. Anticipating several critiques which Kierkegaard will elaborate in 1854 of the literal interpretation of M atthew 19:13-15 and Luke 18:15-17 (see JP, 1:370; 1:548; 1:549), Clim acus observes that a "ch ild ish ," "sentim ental" understanding of Jesus' blessing of children makes Christianity ridiculous. For if it were literally true that the child will face none of the difficulties that an adult m ust face to enter heaven, then it would seem "best to die as a ch ild" (CUP, 1:593).

Despite the lack here of any explicit citation of 1 Corinthians 13:11, we can hardly miss Clim acus's im plicit affirm ation of the truth behind Paul's testim ony to the need for giving up "childish w ays" and becom ing "a m an." However, this verse itself can be m isleading; as Kierkegaard elsewhere urges in reference to it, "let us never forget that even the more mature person always retains som e of the child 's lack of judgm ent" (EUD, 399). Likewise Clim acus asserted earlier that "it is a m ediocre existence when the adult cuts away all com m unication with childhood" (CUP, 348). This view squares with two other crucial ideas articulated by Kier­kegaard and his pseudonym s, ideas that might seem upon first consideration to suggest that Christianity involves a kind of recovery of childhood innocence and sim plicity. One of these ideas, w hich has an unacknow ledged Rousseauistic resonance, is that from G od's perspective the definitive, most desirable quality of the single individual is "prim itiv ity ." As explained by the Hongs, this term for Kierkegaard "does not have the slightly disparaging ring of the undeveloped that it has in m odern D anish"; rather, it is used in his various w ritings to denote the human being's "original and uncorrupted capacity to receive an im pression w ithout being influenced by 'the others' . . . or by current v iew s."29

29JP, 3, p. 887. For Kierkegaard's own discussions of this notion in entries dat­ing from the years 1849-1854, see JP, 3, pp. 3558-61. A number of allusions to "prim itivity" in the pseudonymous writings are cited by the Hongs, JP, 3:887-88.

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The notion of prim itivity is clearly related to the other idea, w hich is first developed by Johannes de Silentio in his reaction to the H egelian valuation of the outer (das Äussere) or externalization (die Entäusserung), as sym bolized by the adult, over the inner (das Innere), as sym bolized by the child. The paradox of faith, according to Silentio, is that it elevates interiority above exteriority. H owever, as he further suggests, this does not mean that faith brings about a return to a childlike state. For just as the single individual's "prim itiv ity" m ust finally not be equated with the condition of childhood, so this higher interiority is one "that is not identical, please note, w ith the first but is a new interiority" (FT, 69). Phrased otherw ise, "Faith is not the first im m ediacy," that is, the aesthetic im m ediacy of the child, "but a later im m ediacy" (FT, 82)— a conclusion reiterated not only by Kierkegaard in a journal entry of 1848 (JP, 2:1123) but by Frater Taciturnus (SLW , 399) and Johannes Clim acus (CUP, 1:347, 347n.).

Ultim ately, regardless how much Clim acus's implicit agreement with 1 Corinthians 13:11 m ust be qualified by notions of prim i­tivity and of faith as a second im m ediacy, Paul's talk of giving up "childish w ays" and becom ing "a m an" itself begs the question. As the rest of his verse indicates, the mature, true Christian is som e­one who is no longer a child, and who, like the converted Paul, no longer speaks, thinks, or reasons "like a child." Yet the whole passage in which this verse occurs revolves around the theme of love, w hich Paul sets above faith and hope as a spiritual gift (1 Cor. 13.4-13). So what is the relation of the child to Christian love?

On Septem ber 29, 1847, nineteen months after the publication of the book in w hich Clim acus made his observations above, Works o f Love appeared under Kierkegaard's own name. In this book, as we m ight suspect from its title, answers are provided to the question just posed, and we shall find proof that the same thing m ight be said of Kierkegaard that has been said of Blake: "H is faith in the creative richness of love has the same source as his feeling for the secret richness of childhood."30

30Kazin, introduction to The Portable Blake, 39.

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The Child's Significance in Works of Love

References to the child abound in Works o f Love, particularly in the second of the book's two series of discourses. Yet from the first of these references on, the views reflected display the same pendu­lum -like oscillation w hich we have observed elsewhere in Kierke­gaard betw een the opposed attitudes expressed by Christ and Paul toward children. The initial allusions occur toward the end of the second discourse of the first series, where the child is associated with "the sim plest person" and "the w isest" insofar as all three types exist "a t the distance of a quiet hour of life's confusion," and understand "w ith alm ost equal ease, what every person should do ," nam ely, to love one's neighbor (WL, 78, 79). Just as the associ­ation with sim plicity calls to mind Jesus' em phasis on children's hum ility, so the association with wisdom contradicts Paul's view of the child as spiritually and epistem ologically imperfect.

H owever, lest we be deceived that Kierkegaard has forsaken his own dialectical perspective on the matter, he presently closes this discourse by m aking a pointedly Pauline allusion to "child ish­ness" as representing the very lowest of the ascending stages of m aturation through which a person must progress in order to becom e fully receptive to the divine im perative, " you shall." H arking back to the ironic hom ology implied by Either/Or's "A " betw een the infant's utterance of da-da and the spankings which children provoke as a result of hereditary sin (EO, 1:19), Kierke­gaard perceives the inherent self-centeredness of children as a condition which any individual m ust outgrow in order to enter into a relationship of obeisance to the eternal:

It is a m ark of childishness to say: M e w ants, m e— m e; a m ark of adolescence to say: I— and I— and I; the sign of m aturity and the devotion of the eternal is to will to understand that this I has no significance unless it becom es the you to w hom eternity inces­santly speaks and says: You shall, you shall, you shall. (W L, 90)

This last passage does not exhaust Kierkegaard's usage of the child in the first series of discourses in Works o f Love. H aving in­voked the child as typifying in and of itself a pair of positive virtues (sim plicity, wisdom) as well as a pair of venial flaws (self- centeredness, im m aturity), he also refers to the child as a sym bol

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of, or an analogue to, specific aspects of adult hum an existence. Early in the third discourse, to illustrate the ease with w hich a person will backslide from a prom ise to fulfill the law, he likens such a prom ise to a changeling. At the m om ent of birth,

w hen the m other's joy is greatest because her suffering is over,. . . then com e, so thinks superstition, the hostile pow ers and place a changeling in place o f the child. In the great but therefore also dangerous m om ent of beginning, w hen one is supposed to begin, the hostile pow ers com e and slip in a changeling prom ise and prevent one from m aking the actual beginning. (W L, 95)

N otew orthy here is not only the focus on the relationship of m other to child (a relationship which receives closer scrutiny in the second series of discourses) but the appeal to "superstition" regarding this matter. N ear the end of this discourse, whether w ittingly or not, Kierkegaard likew ise introduces with regard to the hum an "sp irit" an analogy that recalls the stock usage of the child figure in m edieval art as a sym bolic representation of the hum an soul.31 That "a child m ust learn to spell before it can learn to read" is likened to the fact that a person's spiritual advancem ent m ust begin not at "the great m om ent of the resolution, the intention, the prom ise," but rather, in "stru ggl[in g ] with oneself in self-denial" (W L, 133).

The use of the child to sym bolize aspects of adult existence reaches its first point of culm ination in the fifth and final discourse of the book's first series, where a simile is established betw een a certain disposition of w ell-raised children and a certain hallm ark of Christian love. Even when away from home and am ong strangers, according to Kierkegaard, the well-raised child will behave as it has been brought up, because it "never forgets that the judgm ent is at hom e, w here the parents do the judging" (WL,189). Likewise it is God who cultivates a person's Christian love. Yet just as a child is earnestly brought up not in order to rem ain at hom e with parents but in order to go out into the world, so God cultivates a person's Christian love so as "to send love out into the w orld" (W L, 190). Like the well-raised child am ong strangers, such love "never for a m om ent forgets where it is to be judged" (WL,

3lOn this symbol see, e.g., Ariès, Centuries o f Childhood, 36, 124.

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190). A sim ilar idea is further evoked to distinguish the Christian from the surrounding world, and thereby to explain G od's invisibility and inaudibility in the world.

W hen a strictly brought-up child is together with naughty or less well behaved children and is unw illing to join them in their m isbehavior, w hich they them selves, for the m ost part, do not regard as m isbehavior— the naughty children know of no other explanation for this than that the child m ust be a queer and daft child. They do not see that . . . the strictly brought-up child, w herever it is, is continually accom panied by its parents' criterion for w hat it m ay and m ay not do. (W L, 203)

This scenario furnishes a m etaphor for the difference betw een the Christian and the world. As long as the parents (=G od) of the well-raised child (=the Christian) rem ain invisible, this child 's naughty peers (=the world) will m istakenly assume that it sim ply does not like their kind of fun and is "queer and daft," or that it likes their fun but is afraid to join in. Like the world in its own bafflem ent at the Christian who does not share its passions and desires, the naughty children "think well of their m isbehavior, and therefore they w ant [the strictly brought-up child] to join them and be a plucky boy— just like the others" (WL, 204).

In draw ing to a close the first series of discourses in Works o f Love, this use of the child to explain the distinctness of the C hristian 's G od-relationship prepares for the use of the child in the second series, w hich will likew ise end with a reference to "the well-disciplined child ," whose "unforgettable im pression of rigorousness" is com plem ented by the "unforgettable fear and trem bling" experienced by "the person who relates him self to G od's love" in an earnest m anner (WL, 385-86). In the second series, not only does the child continue to be associated with "sim plicity" (WL, 346) and m entioned as a sym bol of spiritual qualities, but increasingly the child 's relationship with parents, and especially with the mother, will be analyzed as a m etaphor for the agapic relationship betw een the Christian and God.

One reason why Kierkegaard can so readily appeal to the child as a m etaphor for certain spiritual qualities is that, as w e noted earlier, he, like Blake, does not allow the distinct aspects of childhood to obscure the child 's "paradigm atic" nature. This point becom es all the more clear in the third discourse of the second

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series, where he considers the association of the child with hope. The child and the youth are easily associated with hope, as they them selves are both "still a possibility" (W L, 250), and as the child, the antithesis of the dead person, "th riv e[s] and grow[s] toward the future" (W L, 350). N onetheless, Kierkegaard scoffs at the conventional tendency to call the initial period of a person's life "th e age of hope or of possibility" (WL, 251). Hope is oriented toward the possibility of good, w hose own possibility is dependent upon the eternal, w hich extends over a person's entire life, not just over a single age. To illustrate how anyone who fails to see that "the w hole of one's life should be the time of hope" m ust be in despair, Kierkegaard again draw s upon his own insight into child psychology. To assist a child with a very large task, he observes, one does not present the task all at once; to do so would cause the child to despair. Instead,

O ne assigns a sm all part at a time, but alw ays enough so that the child at no point stops as if it w ere finished, but not so m uch that the child cannot m anage it. This is the pious fraud in upbringing; it actually suppresses som ething. If the child is deceived, this is because the instructor is a hum an being who cannot vouch for the next m om ent. (W L, 252)

Here, in stressing a pedagogic method that allows the child to fulfill tasks on its own, Kierkegaard's advice reflects his own m aieutic strategy as author. However, in functioning as m idw ife in the Socratic sense, the ideal educator in his view also does som ething in relation to children that is analogous to w hat God does in relation to hum an beings. The ideal educator, in bringing up m any children at once, "takes the individual child 's eyes away from him — that is, in everything he m akes the child look at h im " (W L, 377). The same thing is done by God: through his glance into every hum an being's conscience, God requires each person to look back at him, and thereby governs the entire world and brings up innum erable hum an beings. "B u t," like the adult who m istakes his or her worldly dealings for actuality, but is led by God to grasp that these are only being em ployed for his or her upbringing, "the child who is being brought up readily im agines that his relation­ship to his com rades, the little world that they form, is actuality, w hereas the educator teaches him with his glance that all this is being used to bring up the ch ild" (WL, 377). Through this analogy,

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it is as if Kierkegaard were retelling Plato 's myth of the cave, inserting God as the educator who frees the prisoners and enables them to discern the unreality of the shadows w hich they m istook for real.

The child 's earliest upbringing is a task assigned by nature not to an "ed ucator" but to the child 's parents, and initially to the m other in particular. Unlike Augustine, who practically deified his m other in his Confessions to reveal the role of providential agent which he believed she had played in his childhood, youth, and early adulthood,32 Kierkegaard fam ously m akes no m ention ever of his own mother. Nonetheless, he shares with his ancient predecessor a fixation with the image of the m other breast-feeding her infant as a m etaphor for the dem onstration of G od's love for the hum an being. Just as Augustine could suggest that he him self in adulthood was like an infant being suckled by God (sugens lac tuum), or that converted sinners are those who cast themselves upon G od's breast (in sinu tuo), or that G od's W ord was made flesh in order that G od's wisdom might suckle our infancy (ut infantiae nostrae lactesceret sapientia tua),33 so Kierkegaard finds G od's encom passing love reflected in the "upbuilding sight" of a mother lovingly holding a sleeping baby at her breast (WL, 214).

Still, as forew arned by the "Exordium " of Fear and Trembling, where Johannes de Silentio contem plates the deception and concealm ent through which, and the sorrow with which, the m other must ultim ately wean the child from her breast (FT, 11-14; cf. JP, 5:5640; repr. W L, 398; see also FT, 246), Kierkegaard is well aware of more painful im plications of the breast-feeding image. Consistent with his am bivalence toward the child, which will lead him still in the book's "C onclusion" to lam ent the ease with which G od 's love is sentim entalized and softened into "a fabulous and childish conception" (WL, 376), Kierkegaard never succum bs to conventional, sentim ental assum ptions about the spectacle of the m other with child. For him, the mom ent the m other's love ceases to be visible in her expression, the sight of her with her child

32See Eric J . Ziolkowski, "St. Augustine: Monica's Boy, Antitype of Aeneas," in Journal o f Literature and Theology 9 (1995): 1-23.

33Augustine, Confessions 4.1.1; 5.2.2; 7.18.24.

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ceases to be edifying (see W L, 214). Likewise he confides in his journal his suspicion that "m aternal love as such is sim ply self-love raised to a higher pow er," though it is still "a beautiful figure" (JP, 3:2425; repr. W L, 483). Accordingly, in the first discourse of the second series in Works o f Love, when deliberating upon Paul's claim that "love builds up" (1 Cor. 8:1), he clarifies what is m eant by the saying that the m other tolerates "a ll her child 's naughtiness" (WL, 221). The saying m eans not that such a mother forbearingly endures evil but that "as a m other she is continually rem em bering that this is a child and thus is continually presupposing that the child still loves her and that this will surely show itself" (WL, 221). In other words, presupposed by the mother is the econom ic logic which underlies another proverb cited m uch earlier, nam ely, "that children are in love's debt to their parents because they have loved them first, so that the children's love is only a part-paym ent on the debt or a repaym ent" (WL, 176).

This factor of "repaym ent" m akes possible the cynical distinc­tion which Kierkegaard draws betw een "the two greatest w orks" of love, giving a hum an being life and recollecting one who has died: unlike the latter work, the form er involves repayment. W ere it not for this factor, he speculates, there would be m any fathers and m others "w hose love would grow cold" (WL, 349). Indeed, were the otherw ise helpless infant incapable of crying and thus of "extort[ing]" works of love from its parents, num erous parents would probably "forget the child" (WL, 351, 352).

Conveyed in the ninth and penultim ate discourse of the second series, these cynical speculations about a frequent contingency of parental love m erely present the opposite side of the picture which this series' second discourse painted of the child who tries to deceive the parents. Once again evoking the analogy betw een the parent-child and God-hum an relationships, Kierkegaard there asserted that it is just as im possible for a child to deceive its parents as for an adult hum an to deceive God, and that both the child and the adult in such cases deceive themselves, since the parent and God are superior to them, and "true superiority can never be deceived if it rem ains faithful to itself" (WL, 236).

In the fifth discourse of the book's second series, that is, about halfw ay betw een the second and ninth discourses with their dis­cussions of self-deceptive children and parents w hose love for their

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children "w ould grow cold ," w e encounter the m ost poignantly positive image of the child in the entire book, an im age that would reinforce C lim acus's notion of the child as a creature "w ithout the consciousness of sin" while doing nothing to support the accom pa­nying idea of the child as "a sinner." In discoursing upon the phrase "love covers a m ultitude of sins," from 1 Peter 4:8, Kierke­gaard relates this text to 1 Corinthians 14:20, suggesting that the life of the person who loves expresses the Pauline com m and to be a babe in evil (see W L, 285). The world, he observes, reveres know ledge of evil as w isdom , though wisdom is knowledge of the good. On the assum ption that "the one who loves" neither has nor wants know ledge of evil, Kierkegaard asserts that "in this regard he is and rem ains, he wants to be and wants to remain, a child" (WL, 285). Having m ade this assertion, which rem arkably defies Paul's testim ony about the need to give up "childish w ays" to becom e "a m an," Kierkegaard introduces a thought experim ent involving a child— an experim ent com parable to the one elaborated elsewhere by A nti-Clim acus to im agine how a child m ight react when first shown a picture of, and told about, the Crucifixion (see PC, 174-78; cf. JP, 1:270; W A, 55).34 "Pu t a child in a den of thieves," Kierkegaard now tells us,

(but the child m ust not rem ain there so long that it is corrupted itself); that is, let it rem ain there only for a very brief time. Then let it com e hom e and tell everything it has experienced. You will note that the child, who is a good observer and has an excellent m em ory (as does every child), will tell everything in the greatest detail, yet in such a way that in a certain sense the most im por­tant is om itted. (WL, 285)

W hat is m issing from the child 's story, Kierkegaard points out to us, is som ething the child never discovered: the evil. Yet, as he further insists, the child 's account of w hat it saw and heard is com ­pletely accurate. W hat the child lacks, and what "so often makes a child 's story the m ost profound mockery of the adults," is "know ledge of evil" (W L, 286). The child knows nothing of evil,

34For discussion see Eric J. Ziolkowski, "A Picture Not Worth a Thousand Words: Kierkegaard, Christ, and the Child," in Religious Studies and Theology 17 /2 (January 1999).

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nor even feels any inclination to desire knowledge of evil, and it is in this respect that "the one who loves is like the child" (WL,286). That "the one who loves" will fail to discover the "m ultitude of sins" of w hich the author of 1 Peter spoke reminds Kierkegaard of a child 's game, as when we play that we do not see the child standing right before us, or the child plays that it does not see us: "The childlikeness, then, is that, as in a game, the one who loves with his eyes open cannot see what is taking place right in front of him; the solem nity is that it is the evil that he cannot see" (WL,287).

W ith this analogy, the pendulum of Kierkegaardian attitude toward children swings closer than in any other place in his w ritings to Jesus' injunction to the disciples that they should "becom e like children." Yet even here, in Kierkegaard's hypotheti­cal experim ent with the child who is to be placed in a thieves' den, there is a dialectical im plication that subtly reminds us of how tenuous the child 's ascribed "innocence" must be. Just as Jesus followed up his own injunction with the warning about the awful drowning that awaits "w hoever causes one of these little ones . . . to sin" (Matt. 18:6), so the success of Kierkegaard's experim ent in establishing the analogy betw een the child and "the one who loves" depends on the parenthetical qualification that the child m ust not rem ain am ong the thieves "so long that it is corrupted itself."

This qualification, together with Kierkegaard's portrait of "the one who loves," may m ark the distance betw een the author of Works o f Love and readers today in their perceptions of children.

Conclusion

A lthough there is am ple docum entation of what Leslie Fiedler called "the profanation of the child" in twentieth century litera­ture,35 one need think only of Peter Pan, the character created by J. M. Barrie during the early decades of the century, and Richard

35See Leslie Fiedler, "The Eye of Innocence," The Collected Essays o f Leslie Fiedler, 2 vols. (New York: Stein and Day, 1971) 502-11. For more recent cogita­tions on the same phenomenon see, e.g., Joyce Carol Oates, "Killer Kids," The New York Review (11 November 1997): 16-20.

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H ughes's 1929 novel The Innocent Voyage, later republished under the title A High Wind in Jamaica, to gauge two crucial differences betw een us and Kierkegaard in our attitude toward the child. Barrie, whose depiction of children as "gay and innocent and heartless"36 aptly sum s up the sentim ental Victorian view of children, bequeathed to W estern culture what has becom e one of our m ost popular m yths of childhood, the story of "the boy who would not grow u p ."37 This epithet m ay seem suggestively close to K ierkegaard's description of "the one who loves" as som eone who "is and rem ains," "w ants to be and wants to rem ain a child ." Yet the pagan personality, not to m ention the pagan name, of Barrie's hero is a far cry from Kierkegaard's ideal Christian— as is also the com m on "syndrom e" of arrested social developm ent am ong contem porary adult males that has been named after Peter Pan.38 Indeed, though they both rem ain not grown up in certain senses, Peter Pan and Kierkegaard's "one who loves" would seem to be ethically and religiously opposed flip sides of each other.

As for K ierkegaard's im agining what a child would or would not observe "in a den of thieves," A High Wind in Jamaica attests to our own century's loss of even a pretended restraint about trying to preserve any false sense of the child as an uncorrupted type. W hereas Kierkegaard wanted his im aginary child rem oved from am ongst the thieves before it was "corrupted itself," H ughes's novel, w hose publication is said to have delivered the death blow to the Victorian cult of childhood, tells of a group of children captured by pirates, am ong whom one, a ten-year-old girl, becom es a rem orseless killer. In subsequent novels such as W illiam G olding's Lord o f the Flies and W illiam M arch's The Bad Seed, both of which appeared in 1954, it does not take the com pany of pirates to prom pt equally w icked behavior among children.

36T h e closing phrase of the novel Peter and Wendy (1911), in J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Peter and Wendy, ed. Peter Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 226.

37The subtitle of the play Peter Pan (premiere 1904), in The Plays o f J . M. Barrie (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929) 1-94.

38See Dan Kiley, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1983).

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From the vantage of our own prodigious, m illennial conscious­ness of sin and evil, w e can only speculate over the fear and trem bling with w hich Kierkegaard m ight have pondered the conse­quences of not rem oving the child from am ong the thieves— before it was too late.