ABSTRACT
Kierkegaard is often supposed to have had little interest in the world of non-human nature. But in this article I show, by considering the 1849 discourses, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, that Kierkegaard in fact has a conception of Nature as a theophany—a revelation of God—that is comparable to views of Nature in Romanticism. I discuss his account of the virtues of ‘active receptivity’—silence and obedience—and how we may learn them from Nature; I also discuss his view of natural law as Nature’s ‘obedience’ to God. The Lily discourses culminate with an evocation of the joy that is presence to oneself through presence to God, and I argue that this is the positive counterpart of the despair that, according to The Sickness unto Death (published in the same year), is the failure to be oneself through failing to relate properly to God. I also argue that Nature does not, for Kierkegaard, play a merely instrumental role in developing our relation to God, as if it were a sort of ultimately dispensable teaching aid, but rather that our continuing appreciation of Nature remains an important aspect of our continuing relationship to God.
