Spirituality Studies 3 Peter Šajda Prof. Peter Šajda, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Trnava University, Slovakia. His research focuses on anthropological, ethical, religious, and socio-political issues. He collaborates with the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen, where he serves as an editor of the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook and the Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. He has authored several monographs and edited the anthologies Affectivity, Agency and Intersubjectivity (L’Harmattan 2012), Kierkegaard in Context (Mercer University Press 2019), and Modern and Postmodern Crises of Symbolic Structures: Essays in Philosophical Anthropology (Brill 2021). His email contact is peter.sajda@truni.sk. orcid.org Received March 19, 2026 Revised April 9, 2026 Accepted April 10, 2026 Keywords Baroque spirituality, existential philosophy, Abraham a Sancta Clara, Søren Kierkegaard, awareness of God’s presence Peter Šajda The present paper examines Søren Kierkegaard’s reception of the Baroque spiritual writer Abraham a Sancta Clara. At the center of this study is Abraham a Sancta Clara’s work Grammatica Religiosa, from which Kierkegaard drew significant inspiration, particularly in the second half of the 1840s. This work directly influenced the spiritual doctrine he developed in his major work on Christian ethics, Works of Love. Kierkegaard relied especially on Abraham a Sancta Clara in his treatment of the virtue of awareness of God’s presence and the vice of judging others—both of which are central to the conclusion of Works of Love. He integrated these impulses from Abraham into a new spiritual doctrine. Finally, the paper suggests how the practical spirituality cultivated by both authors may contribute to the development of spiritual practices relevant today. Existential Philosophy Meets Baroque Spirituality: Kierkegaard’s Reception of Abraham a Sancta Clara ←← Portrait of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) by N. C. Kierkegaard, 1840, pencil drawing. From the collection of The Royal Library, Denmark.
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