Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

Every upbuilding view of life first finds its resting place or first becomes upbuilding, by and in the divine equality that opens the soul to the perfect, and blinds the sensate eye to the difference, the divine equality. p. 143

Not only do we call someone a teacher of humankind who by a special stroke of fortune discovered some truth or fathomed it by unflagging toil and thoroughgoing persistence and then left his attainment as learning that subsequent generations strive to understand and in this understanding to appropriate to themselves; but we also call someone – perhaps in an even stricter sense – a teacher of humankind who had no teaching to hand over to others but left mankind only himself as a prototype, his life as a guide for everyone, his name as security for many, his work as an encouragement for those who are being tried. Such a teacher and guide of humankind is Job, whose significance by no means consists in what he said but in what he did. He did indeed leave a statement that by its brevity and beauty has become a proverb preserved from generation to generation, and no one has presumptuously added anything to it or taken anything from it; but the statement itself is not the guide, and Job’s significance consists not in his having said it but in his having acted upon it. p. 109

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?

When the understanding stands still, it behooves one to have the courage and the heart to believe the wondrous and, continually strengthened by this vision, to return to actuality and not just sit still and want to fathom it.

One understands only in proportion to becoming himself that which he understands.

We sometimes speak of learning to know God from the history of past ages; we take out the chronicles and read and read. Well, that may be all right, but how much time it takes, and how dubious the outcome frequently is, how close at hand the misunderstanding that lies in the sensate person’s marveling over what is ingenious! But someone who is conscious that he is capable of nothing at all has every day and every moment the desired and irrefragable opportunity to experience that God lives. If he does not experience it often enough, he knows very well why that is. It is precisely because his understanding is faulty and he believes himself capable of something.

The Moral: As soon as it has come to the point that the crowd is to judge what is truth, it will not be long before decisions are made with fists.

Now just as the historical gives occasion for the contemporary to become a disciple, but only it must be noted through receiving the condition from the God himself, since otherwise we speak Socratically, so the testimony of contemporaries gives occasion for each successor to become a disciple, but only it must be noted through receiving the condition from the God himself. Philosophical Fragments, Swenson, p. 75

The esthete says: Without work life finally becomes boring. “One’s work nevertheless ought not to be work in the strict sense but should be able to be continually defined as pleasure. A person discovers some aristocratic talent in himself that distinguishes him from the crowd. He does not develop this recklessly, because then he would soon be bored with it, but with all the esthetic earnestness possible. Life then has a new meaning for him, since he has his work, a work that nevertheless is really his pleasure. In his independence, he shelters it so that it can develop in all its luxuriance, undismayed by life. He does not, however, make this talent into a plank on which one manages to squeeze through life but into wings on which one soars over the world; he does not make it into a drudging hack but into a parade horse.” But our hero has no such aristocratic talent; his is like most people. The esthete knows no other way out for him than that “he has to resign himself to falling into the crowd’s hackneyed category of a person who works. Do not lose heart, this too, has its meaning, is decent and respectable; become a handy industrious fellow, a useful member of society. I already look forward to seeing you, for the more varied life is, the more interesting for the observer. That is why I and all esthetes abhor a national costume, for it would be so tiresome to see everyone going around dressed alike. Let every individual take up his occupation in life that way; the more beautiful it will be for me and my kind, who make a profession of observing life.” I hope that our hero will be somewhat impatient over such treatment and be indignant at the insolence of such a classification of people. Furthermore, independence played a role in this esthete’s consideration also, and independent he certainly is not. ** Either/Or Part II p. 290

Is reason then alone baptized, are the passions pagans? (Edward Young)

Kierkegaard, Soren (1813-1855), the greatest philosophical writer that Scandinavia has produced was born at Copenhagen, May 5, 1813, and was the seventh child of a respectable Jutland hosier. He was a very serious and precocious boy, weak in health, morbid in character. Of his mother, singularly enough, he has said no word in his copious autobiographical remains, although he was in his twenty-second year when she died; she had been his father’s servant. Kierkegaard became a student at the university of Copenhagen, and took up theology as a profession, but never became a priest. He lived in great retirement, deeply oppressed with melancholy and physical suffering, and was at first very little known to his contemporaries. In 1838 he published his first volume, Papers of a Still Living Man, a very poor attempt to characterize Hans Andersen. Two years later he took his degree, with a treatise On Irony, which contains the germs of his later speculations. In 1840 he engaged himself to a young lady, and shortly after broke off the engagement, an extraordinary step for which he has given many extraordinary reasons. It was not until 1842 that he began the composition of his greatest work, Enten-Eller (“Either-Or”), on which his reputation mainly rests; this appeared in 1843, and was immediately followed by a rapid succession of philosophical works, which formed at once an epoch in the history of Danish literature. From 1849 to 1854, however, he was silent as an author. In the last-mentioned year he published a polemical tract against Bishop Martensen, and the short remainder of his life was spent in a feverish agitation against the theology and practice of the state church. But his health, which had always been miserable, was growing worse and worse. In October 1855 he took up his abode in one of the chief hospitals of Copenhagen where he died, on the 11th of November, at the age of forty-two. His life has been written with great skill and brilliance by Dr Georg Brandes (1877). Kierkegaard published about thirty distinct books during his life-time, and left at his death about an equal amount of MS.; a competent analysis of these multifarious labours is given in Brande’s admirable biography.

I am indeed the one who continually says that between the simple person’s and the wise person’s knowledge of the simple there is only the ludicrous little difference-that the simple person knows it, and the wise person knows that he knows it or knows that he does not know it. But nevertheless something else does follow: Would it not be best to hold back a little on world history if this is how it stands with one’s knowledge of the simple? … This is the way I have tried to understand myself, and even if the understanding is slight and its yield poor, I have in compensation resolved to act with all my passion on the basis of what I have understood. Perhaps, when all is said and done, it is a more healthful diet to understand little but possess this with passion’s unlimited soundness in the setting of the infinite that to know much and to possess nothing because I myself have fantastically become a fantastical-subjective-objective something. I have considered it demeaning if I were to be more ashamed before human beings and their judgment than before the god and his judgment, cowardly in ignobly to inquire more about what shame before human beings might tempt me to do than what shame before the god would bid. And who are those people, anyway, the ones I am supposed to fear-a few geniuses, perhaps, some literary critics, and whoever is seen on the highways and by-ways? Or were there no human beings alive before 1845? Or what are those people compared with the god; what is the refreshment of their busy clangor compared with the deliciousness of that solitary wellspring that is in every human being, that wellspring in which the god resides, that wellspring in the profound silence when all is quiet! And compared with eternity, what else than a brief moment is the hour and a half of time I have to live with human beings? Will they perhaps pursue me in all eternity? … God’s judgment is the final one, is the only one; his co-knowledge is inescapable since it is woven into the weaves through the faintest movement of my consciousness, its most secret association with itself. His presence is an eternal contemporaneity-and I should have dared to be ashamed of him!

Seeing marriages every day makes one rarely perceive the greatness in marriage, especially since everything is done to belittle it.

The thought of heaven’s salvation dare not become a matter of indifference to a person. How would salvation become a matter of indifference to him for whom the discourse need not venture out to the outermost boundary of thoughtlessness, but whose soul is well educated to hear the serious words of earnestness “that God is not mocked” (Galatians 6:7), whose soul is prepared by considering what presumably would completely overwhelm the confused, “that no one can serve two masters, since he must hate the one and love the other” (Matthew 6:24), whose soul is fully awakened from sleep to understand what presumably would hurl the sleepwalker into the abyss, “that love of the world is hatred of God!” (James 4.4) has the spiritual sense to be disgusted at the thought that heaven’s salvation, despite it gloriousness, could be nonsense, has the maturity of understanding to grasp that heaven’s salvation can no more be taken by force than it can be redeemed like a fine in a game of forfeits. Such a person has the time to consider the one thing needful, the heart to wish for heaven’s salvation, the earnestness to reject the flirting of light-minded ideas, the fear and trembling in his soul to be terrified at the thought of breaking with heaven or of taking it in vain.

People know everything, and in order not to stop with that, they know also that they are not to do the least of what they know, because with the aid of external knowledge they are in seventh heaven, and if one must begin to do it, one will become a poor, wretched existing individual who stumbles again and again and progresses very slowly from year to year.

What we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world.

Is Anna not patient in expectancy? Anyone who wants to harvest before he sows or as soon as he has sown, anyone who wants to be victorious without struggling, anyone who wants something but does not want the means is a fool in people’s eyes. Everyone believes that the expectant person needs some patience, and only the person who wants to cast away all patience, he alone is called impatient and childish in his impatience. Some patience! If a person were to go out into the world with this wisdom, he would find scarcely a single impatient person without some patience.

A man who for a long time has gone around hiding a secret becomes mentally deranged. At this point one would imagine that his secret would have to come out, but despite his derangement his soul still sticks to its hideout, and those around him become even more convinced that the false story he told to deceive them is the truth. He is healed of his insanity, knows everything that has gone on, and thereby perceives that nothing has been betrayed. Was this gratifying to him or not; he might wish to have disposed of his secret in his madness; it seems as if there were a fate which forced him to remain in his secret and would not let him go away from it. Or was it for the best, was there a guardian spirit who helped him keep his secret.

Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. ... it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it's good to be here.

In the New Testament sense, to be a Christian is, in an upward sense, as different from being a man as, in a downward sense, to be a man is different from being a beast. A Christian in the sense of the New Testament, although he stands suffering in the midst of life’s reality, has yet become completely a stranger to this life; in the words of the Scripture and also of the Collects (which still are read-O bloody satire!-by the sort of priests we now have, and in the ears of the sort of Christians that now live) he is a stranger and a pilgrim-just think, for example of the late Bishop Mynster intoning, “We are strangers and pilgrims in this world”! A Christian in the New Testament sense is literally a stranger and a pilgrim, he feels himself a stranger, and everyone involuntarily feels that this man is a stranger to him.