ABSTRACT
George Pattison's Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious was developed from his doctoral dissertation and first appeared in 1992 in the "Studies in Literature and Religion" series. Pattison deftly covers the vast distances within the Kierkegaardian corpus in order to disclose "the tension between the aesthetic and the religious—a tension which runs throughout virtually every line of the authorship." Pattison insightfully treats of both the pseudonymous and the signed writings, from the less commonly discussed "Lectures on Communication" and The Book on Adler to the discourses written for the Friday service of communion. Thus Pattison's work is both timely and perhaps timeless as hermeneutical questions of reading and rhetoric are central to his work. Pattison aptly explains how the relationship between direct and indirect communication is much more intimate than is usually perceived. Pattison wants to argue that the realm of aesthetics, language, and context will have to be sacrificed so that a real presence of meaning can be communicated.
