Felix peccabilitas: Fallibility and Christian heroism in the hamartiology of Soren Kierkegaard

This dissertation strives to highlight and make sense of Kierkegaard's claim that the capacity to sin provides an essential component of dynamic Christian faith. The possibility of sin, according to Kierkegaard, provides the "determinate negative" against which Christian faith is formed. As such, the possibility of sin is "fortunate" or even "blessed." The dissertation extracts and develops Kierkegaard's theme of the goodness of sin's possibility---or what I call "felix peccabilitas "---by comparing it to the "felix culpa" or "fortunate Fall" theme of the Latin Exsultet, of Byron and other Romantics, and of Hegel's philosophical Idealism. These versions of the fortunate Fall provide markers according to which one fruitfully traces Kierkegaard's hamartiology (understanding of sin). Kierkegaard conceives the goodness of human fragility, or of the passive aptitude to sin, over and against Hegel's felix culpa. He indicates the goodness of human fallibility, or of the active capacity to sin, through and against Romanticism's felix culpa. Finally, he witnesses to the goodness of "peccability", or of the possibility of taking offense at Christ, by implicitly "repeating," in modern key, the song of the Easter Exsultet.;By extracting and developing the concept of felix peccabilitas from Kierkegaard's works, this dissertation joins him in giving "Christian definition" to human capacities. Kierkegaard's complex dialectic between human fragility and Christ as "the sign of offense" both correlates human capacity with divine gift and radically recontextualizes the former in light of the latter. This dissertation thereby traces the qualitative accentuation given to the human when Kierkegaard imagines it coram Christi. With Christ and Christianity, Kierkegaard believes, comes the human at fullest register: capable of despairing as a hopeless demoniac, capable also of courage and joy.