ABSTRACT
St. Cyprian of Carthage and Søren Kierkegaard both saw themselves as providing for the Christianity of their respective cultural contexts something that was sorely needed. Curiously, their solutions were similar, since both found themselves, in crucial ways, insisting on the rigorous nature of the Christian life.2 However, the cultural predicaments in which they wrote were quite different. To put the matter altogether too bluntly, for Cyprian, the rigor of the Christian life needed to be insisted upon because Christianity was being persecuted. For Kierkegaard, however, the rigor of the Christian life needed to be insisted upon because Christianity was not being persecuted. The paradox can be mitigated somewhat by the realization that Kierkegaard often looks backward to
pre-Constantinian Christianity and the martyrdom that often took place within it with a kind of longing.3 For instance, Kierkegaard writes:
What the age needs is not a genius-it surely has had geniuses enough-but a martyr, one who in order to teach men to obey would himself become obedient unto death, one whom men put to death; but, see, just because of that they would lose, for simply by killing him, by being victorious in this way, they would become afraid for themselves. This is the awakening which the age needs.4
