Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

Did you keep the apostolic words holy? Did you treasure them in a pure and beautiful heart and refuse to be ransomed for any price or any wily bribe on the part of prudence, from the deep pain of having to confess again and again that you never loved as you were loved? That you were faithless when God was faithful; that you were lukewarm when he was ardent; that he sent good gifts that you perverted to your own detriment; that he inquired about you but that you would not answer; that he called to you but you would not listen; that he spoke cordially to you but you ignored it; that he spoke earnestly to you but you misunderstood it; that he fulfilled your wish and for thanks you brought new wishes; that he fulfilled your wish but you had made the wrong wish and were quick to anger? p. 44

Suppose that someone wanted to communicate the following conviction: truth is inwardness; objectively there is no truth, but the approximation of the truth. Suppose he had enough zeal and enthusiasm to get it said, because when people heard it they would be saved. Suppose he proclaimed this truth to all people. … The main point was to become understood, and the inwardness of the understanding would indeed be that the single individual would understand this by himself. Now he has even gone so far as to obtain barkers, and a barker of inwardness is a creature worth seeing. Actually to communicate such a conviction would require art and self-control; enough self-control to comprehend inwardly that the God-relationship of the individual human being is the main point, the meddling busyness of a third person is a lack of inwardness.

... anxiety is a reflection, and in this respect is essentially different than sorrow. Anxiety is the organ by which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it. Anxiety is the energy of the movement by which sorrow bores its way into one’s heart. But the movement is not swift like the thrust of a dart, it is successive; it is not once for all, but it is constantly continuing. As a passionate, erotic glance desires its object, so anxiety looks upon sorrow to desire it. As the quiet, incorruptible glance of love is preoccupied with the beloved object, so anxiety occupies itself with sorrow. But anxiety has another element in it which makes it cling even more strongly to its object, for it both loves it and fears it. Anxiety has a two-fold function. Partly it is the detective instinct which constantly touches, and by means of this probing, discovers sorrow, as it goes round about the sorrow. Or anxiety is sudden, posits the whole sorrow in the present moment, yet so that this present moment instantly dissolves in succession. Anxiety is in this sense a truly tragic category, and the old saying: quem deus vult perdere, primum dementat, (whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes insane) in truth rightly applies here. That anxiety is determined by reflection is shown by our use of words; for I always say: to be anxious about something, by which I separate the anxiety from that about which I am anxious, and I can never use anxiety in an objective sense; whereas, on the contrary, when I say “my sorrow,” it can just as well express that which I sorrow over, as my sorrow over it. In addition, anxiety always involves a reflection upon time, for I cannot be anxious about the present, but only about the future; but the past and the future, so resisting one another that the present vanishes, are reflective determinations.

since life is uncertain, there is something one desires to preserve, desires to safeguard for oneself. […] It could not be something temporal, inasmuch as for life’s sake it probably would be desirable to preserve it, but how would one wish to preserve it for death’s sake, since it is precisely that which one abandons in death, which without envy and without preference would make everyone equal, equally poor, equally powerless, equally miserable, the one who possessed a world and the one who had nothing not love, the one who left behind a claim upon a world and the one who was in debt for a world, the one whom thousands obeyed and the one whom no one knew except death, the one whose loveliness was the object of people’s admiration and the poor wretch who sought only a grave in order to hide from people. It would have to be something eternal, then, that the discourse was about or, more accurately, what it could truly be about, and, in a single word, what else could that be but a person’s soul?

Has God ever made a covenant with a person regarding the external? p. 330

So it happens at times that a person believes that he has a world-view, but that there is yet one particular phenomenon that is of such a nature that it baffles the understanding, and that he explains differently and attempts to ignore in order not to harbor the thought that this phenomenon might overthrow the whole view, or that his reflection does not possess enough courage and resolution to penetrate the phenomenon with his world-view.

When one generation has finished its service, completed its work, fought through its struggle, Job has accompanied it; when the new generation with its incalculable ranks, each individual in his place, stands ready to begin the pilgrimage, Job is there again, takes his place, which is the outpost of humanity. If the generation sees nothing but happy days in prosperous times, then Job faithfully accompanies it; but if the single individual experiences the terrors in thought, is anguished over the thought of what horror and distress life can have in store, over the thought that no one knows when the hour of despair may strike for him, then his troubled thought seeks out Job, rests in him, is calmed by him, for Job faithfully accompanies him and comforts him, not, to be sure, as if he had suffered once and for all what would never be suffered again, but comforts as someone who witnesses that the horror has been suffered, the horror has been experienced, the battle of despair has been fought to the glory of God, for his own rescue, for the benefit and joy of others. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, p. 110

Since the importance of Holy Scripture is to be an interpreter of the divine to mankind, since its claim is to want to teach the believer everything from the beginning, it follows of itself that its language has shaped the discourse of the God-fearing about the divine, that its words and expressions resound again and again in the holy places, in every more solemn discourse about the divine, whether the speaker seeks to interpret the scriptural text by letting the text speak for itself or is using the scriptural expression in all its brevity as the clear and complete interpretation of the much he has said. But also in everyday and secular speech we sometimes hear a scriptural expression that has wandered from the sacred out into the world … One such biblical expression frequently encountered where least expected and at times put to a most inappropriate use is the phrase just read: the thorn in the flesh.

When a person grows older he often scrutinizes his thoughts and retards himself.

Ordinarily we speak only of a married man’s unfaithfulness, but what is just as bad is a married man’s lack of faith. Faith is all that is required, and faith compensated for everything. Just let understanding and sagacity and sophistication reckon, figure out, and describe how a married man ought to be: there is only one attribute that makes him loveable, and that is faith, absolute faith in marriage. Just let experience in life try to define exactly what is required of a married man’s faithfulness; there is only one faithfulness, one honesty that is truly loveable and hides everything in itself, and that is the honesty toward God and his wife and his married estate in refusing to deny the miracle.

Even Plato assumes that the genuinely perfect condition of man means no sex distinction (and how strange this is for people like Feuerbach who are so occupied with affirming sex-differentiation, regarding which they would do best to appeal to paganism). He assumes that originally there was only the masculine (and when there is no thought of femininity, sex-distinction is undifferentiated), but through degeneration and corruption the feminine appeared. He assumes that base and cowardly men became women in death, but he still gives them hope of being elevated again to masculinity. He thinks that in the perfect life the masculine, as originally, will be the only sex, that is, that sex-distinction is a matter of indifference. So it is in Plato, and this, the idea of the state notwithstanding, was the culmination of his philosophy. How much more so, then, the Christian view. Journals VA 14

Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

The expectancy of an eternal salvation will reconcile everyone with his neighbor, with his friend, and with his enemy in an understanding of the essential.

Not until the moment when there awakens in his soul a concern about what meaning the world has for him and he for the world, about what meaning everything within him by which he himself belongs to the world has for him and he therein for the world-only then does the inner being announce its presence in this concern. This concern is not calmed by a more detailed or a more comprehensive knowledge; it craves another kind of knowledge, a knowledge that does not remain as knowledge for a single moment but is transformed into an action the moment it is possessed, since otherwise it is not possessed. This concern also craves an explanation, a witness, but of another kind. p. 86

To external observation, many may well be the most glorious creation, but all his glory is still only in the external and for the external: does not the eye aim its arrow outward every time passion and desire tighten the bowstring, does not the hand grasp outward, is not his arm stretched out, and is not his ingenuity all-conquering!

Let us praise what is truly praiseworthy, the glory of human nature; let us give thanks that it was granted also to us to be human beings; […]does not even a mentally handicapped person frequently demonstrate how strong a human being is, and yet we do not praise the mentally handicapped, even though he puts many to shame.

The world has generally no understanding of what is truly horrifying. The despair that not only does not cause any inconvenience in life, but makes life convenient and comfortable, is naturally enough in no way regarded as despair. That this is the worldly view is evident, among all things, from nearly all the proverbs, which are nothing but rules of prudence.

'But Job! The moment the Lord took everything away, he did not say, “The Lord took away,” but first of all he said “The Lord gave'. … Job’s soul was not squeezed into silent subjection to the sorrow, but that his heart first expanded in thankfulness, that the first thing the loss of everything did was to make him thankful to the Lord that he had given him all the blessings that he now took away from him. … His thankfulness no doubt was not the same as in those days that already seemed so far away, when he received every good and every perfect gift from God’s hand with thankfulness. But his thankfulness was nevertheless honest, just as honest as the idea of God’s goodness that was now so vivid in his soul. p. 115-116

Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other. As soon as the actuality of freedom and of spirit is posited, anxiety is canceled. But what then does the nothing of anxiety signify more particularly in paganism. This is fate. Fate is a relation to spirit as external. It is the relation between spirit and something else that is not spirit and to which fate nevertheless stands in a spiritual relation. Fate may also signify exactly the opposite, because it is the unity of necessity and accidental. … A necessity that is not conscious of itself is eo ipso the accidental in relation to the next moment. Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

If naked dialectical deliberation shows that there is no approximation, that wanting to quantify oneself into faith along this path is a misunderstanding, a delusion, that wanting to concern oneself with such deliberations is a temptation for the believer, a temptation that he, keeping himself in the passion of faith, must resist with all his strength, lest it end with his succeeding in changing faith into something else, into another kind of certainty, in substituting probabilities and guarantees, which were rejected when he, himself beginning, made the qualitative transition of the leap from unbeliever to believer-if this is so, then everyone who, not entirely unfamiliar with learned scientificity and not bereft of willingness to learn, has understood it this way must also have felt his hard-pressed position when he in admiration learned to think meanly of his own insignificance in the face of those distinguished by learning and acumen and deserved renown, so that, seeking the fault in himself, he time and again returned to them, and when in despondency he had to admit that he himself was in the right. Dialectical intrepidity is not easily acquired, and the feeling of one’s abandonment (although one believes oneself to be in the right), admiration’s taking leave of those reliable teachers, is its distinctive mark.