Sickness Unto Death Notes, Introduction

Kierkegaard uses the raising of Lazarus to explain the difference Christianity makes in the life of man. In the raising of Lazarus, Christ showed that death is not the ultimate evil it appears to be, "the last thing of all." But Christianity not only takes the sting out of death; it introduces a new evil even more fearful than death, and in light of which death is relativized. This evil is the "sickness unto death."

The general concept of evil is that evil is the deprivation of the good. Death is the evil of the deprivation of the good of life. By revealing a new good - eternal life in Christ that transcends mortality - Christianity necessarily reveals a new evil, the deprivation of the good of eternal life or, in other words, eternal death. The Christian must work out his salvation in fear and trembling because the stakes have gotten higher for him than they are for the "natural man" (i.e. the man for whom mortal death is the ultimate evil and an end.) The natural man can opt out of the game of existence through death; if he has suffered too much or been shamed or dishonored, he can destroy himself through suicide like a Roman consul or Japanese samurai. There is no opting out of existence in Christianity; the question of whether he will exist is no longer one asked of man. The only question he is asked is the nature of his existence. In this respect, Kierkegaard tells us, the relationship of the Christian to the natural man is like that of an adult to a child.

Christianity introduces a peculiar mode of existence, the possibility of which was previously unknown: The state of eternal death. In Christianity, just as a man can be eternally alive yet mortally dead, so can he be eternally dead yet mortally alive. This latter state is the "sickness unto death", in which death is not the result of the sickness, but is the sickness. The horror figures of vampires and zombies are vulgar interpretations of the state of living death, and are therefore at bottom Christian figures (which is why the horror genre always has a latent relationship to Christianity, and loses its potency when the Christian element is expunged.) The sophisticated understanding of the state of living death is the sickness unto death, to be explored by Kierkegaard in this book.