ARTICLE Kierkegaard on the (un)happiness of faith R. S. Kemp and Michael Mullaney Department of Philosophy, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, USA ABSTRACT Hegel famously accuses Christianity of ‘unhappy consciousness’: it has a normative goal – union with the divine – that it cannot, in principle, satisfy. Kierkegaard was intimately aware of this criticism and, unlike some of Hegel’s other accusations, takes it seriously. In this paper my co-author and I investigate the way in which Kierkegaard addresses this issue in two texts published in 1843: Fear and Trembling and ‘The Expectancy of Faith’. We are especially interested in how the two texts describe faith’s relationship to finitude: for instance, whether the person of faith is permitted to expect that God will bless her in particular and concrete ways. My co-author and I offer competing interpretations. I argue that there is a deep tension in the way faith is described in the two texts; my co-author argues that there is consonance. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 31 May 2017; Revised 17 June, 28 August and 1 November 2017; Accepted 2 November 2017 KEYWORDS Kierkegaard; faith; Fear and Trembling; happiness; hope Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road presents a powerful portrait of faith. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, a man and his young son fight to survive in con- ditions of brutality. In the midst of this bleak struggle, the boy continuously questions their integrity: ‘Are we still the good guys?’ he asks, after his father tells him that he ‘will kill anyone who touches [him]’ (77). What makes this concern so gripping is the collision of two competing senses: on the one hand, that goodness doesn’t exist in their world; and, on the other, that faith in the reality of goodness is constitutive of their world (88–9, 57). The reader comes to appreciate that the father and son’s commitment to ‘goodness’ is no less vital than their next meal. While there is much about this depiction of faith that is compelling, some aspects seem worrisome on closer inspection. For instance, what epistemic 1 difference is there between the father and son’s faith and the faith of someone whose way of life is grounded in racist beliefs? While McCarthy’s characters anchor their practices in an unwavering belief in goodness, the racist grounds his practices in an unwavering belief in the inferiority of © 2017 BSHP CONTACT R. S. Kemp ryan.s.kemp@gmail.com 1 I fully grant that there are other differences, for instance, moral. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, 2018 VOL. 26, NO. 3, 475–497 https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2017.1401525