Suffering in the Present-Eternal: Kierkegaardian Absurd Faith, Despair, and the Dark Night of the Soul

Level of Education of Students Involved

Undergraduate

Faculty Sponsor

Amanda Brobst-Renaud

College

College of Arts & Sciences (CAS)

Discipline(s)

Theology

ORCID Identifier(s)

0009-0008-5451-8207

Presentation Type

Oral Presentation

Symposium Date

Spring 3-27-2026

Abstract

This paper examines the meaning of suffering in relation to faith through a dialogue between Søren Kierkegaard’s accounts of despair and absurd faith and St. John of the Cross’s doctrine of the Dark Night of the Soul. Drawing on The Sickness Unto Death and Fear and Trembling, it argues that Kierkegaard’s conception of the self as a synthesis grounded in God provides a metaphysical and existential framework for interpreting the Dark Night as a divinely initiated process of purification. In both thinkers, suffering is not merely a psychological burden but the site in which the self is stripped of finite supports and brought into a direct, paradoxical relation to God. The paper further develops the notion of “present-eternal” faith, contending that faith is enacted in the immediacy of suffering rather than deferred to an eschatological future. By reading Kierkegaard alongside St. John, the paper shows how despair and divine absence function not as negations of faith but as conditions of its transformation, culminating in a mode of trust that persists precisely in darkness.

Biographical Information about Author(s)

I have been interested in faith and suffering all my life. After reading Kierkegaard I wondered how his thought would work within the framework of suffering and how that relates to the mystic tradition within Christianity.

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