The “Cambridge Companion” series has, at best, a mixed reputation. Several of the volumes in this series may legitimately be duds. But not this one! This is a fantastic collection of essays, exploring a variety of existential and theological topics, including:
Kierkegaard’s assertion that comedy — in which we see “the individual portrayed in the capriciousness of his isolated and arbitrary individual existence” — is a higher art than tragedy — in which the tragic hero is seen “as both suffering his fate and responsible for it” — (and in which Kierkegaard problematizes the boundary between the two forms by imagining a modern Antigone in which only Antigone knows the truth of Oedipus’s guilt)
Kierkegaard’s piercing exploration of irony, in which verbal irony is seen as a deficient or attenuated mode of irony simpliciter — I.e. irony as a way of life, with Socrates serving as the examplar par excellence
Kierkegaard’s famous, and famously intricate, concept of anxiety, and its relationship to the impossible synthesis of the finite and the infinite in the self project
Kierkegaard’s dizzying varieties of despair, its relationship to our addiction to the world, and its defining characteristic as the abrogation of the self project
The notion of the letting go of the utilitarian self in the authentic appropriation of the self project (and the quietest sense of self-death in Kiekegaard’s Christian understanding of this project)
Hats off to the authors and editors!