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A person should not, if life is to have deeper meaning, become accustomed to understanding everything in general, should not be in a hurry to understand everything, but should patiently follow the pointer that continually points to himself. And even though in every other sense it is just a figurative expression to say that we see the finger of God in life, a person who is concerned about himself understands it quite literally, because all deeper and more inward self-knowledge sees the finger of God that points to him. To miss one letter confuses the whole world, and yet this confusion is nothing compared with the confusion that occurs when a person, in understanding life in its totality and the history of the human race, skips over one human being-himself-since the individual human being is, after all, not like a single letter, in itself a meaningless part of the word, but is the whole world. And yet this happens very frequently, and therefore very little is learned from life.
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p. 75-276

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

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If a person whose life has been tried in some crucial difficulty has a friend and sometime later he is unable to retain the past clearly, if anxiety creates confusion, and if accusing thoughts assail him with all their might as he works his way back, then he may go to his friend and say, “My soul is sick so that nothing will become clear to me, but I confided everything to you; you remember it, so please explain the past to me again.” But if a person has no friend, he presumably goes to God if under other circumstances he has confided something to him, if in the hour of decision he called God as witness when no one understood him. And the one who went to his friend perhaps was not understood at times, perhaps was filled with self-loathing, which is even more oppressive, upon discovering that the one to whom he had confided his troubles had not understood him at all, even though he had listened, had not sensed what was making him anxious, but had only an inquisitive interest in his unusual encounter with life. But this would never happen with God; who would dare to venture to think this of God, even if he is cowardly enough to prefer to forget God-until he stands face-to-face with the judge, who passes judgment on him but not on the one who truly has God as a witness, because where God is the judge, there is indeed no judge if God is the witness. It by no means follows that a person’s life becomes easy because he learns to know God in this way. On the contrary, it can become very hard; it may become more difficult than the contemptible easiness of sensate human life, but in this difficulty life also acquires ever deeper and deeper meaning.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

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!

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

The biblical understanding of the human person is holistic. It makes no distinction between body and soul. The human person is not a soul living in a body, but an animated body, so perfectly integrated that the person in his totality can express himself/herself and be apprehended in any part. “It is the body rooted in the cosmos and related to other human beings, which gives the person his or her identity.”

 

Kurien Kunnumpuram

 

I am well aware that as a human being I am very far from being a paradigm; if anything, I am a sample human being. With a fair degree of accuracy, I give the temperature of every mood and passion, and when I am generating my own inwardness, I understand these words: homo sum, nil humani a me alienum puto [I am a human being, I hold that nothing human is alien to me]. But humanly no one can model himself on me, and historically I am even less a prototype for any human being. If anything, I am someone who could be needed in a crisis, as a guinea pig that life uses to feel its way. A person half as reflective as I would be able to be of significance for many people, but precisely because I am altogether reflective I have none at all. As soon as I am outside my religious understanding, I feel as an insect with which children are playing must feel, because life seems to have dealt with me so unmercifully; as soon as I am inside my religious understanding, I understand that precisely this has absolute meaning for me. Hence, that which in one case is a dreadful jest is in another sense the most profound earnestness. Earnestness is basically not something simple, a simplex, but is a compositum [compound], for true earnestness is the unity of jest and earnestness.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

When a person turns and faces himself in order to understand himself, he steps, as it were, in the way of that first self, halts that which was turned outward in hankering for and seeking after the surrounding world that is its object, and summons it back from the external. In order to prompt the first self to this withdrawal, the deeper self lets the surrounding world remain what it is-remain dubious. This is indeed the way it is; the world around us is inconstant and can be changed into the opposite at any moment, and there is not one person who can force this change by his own might or by the conjuration of his wish. The deeper self now shapes the deceitful flexibility of the surrounding world in such a way that it is no longer attractive to the first self. Then the first self either must proceed to kill the deeper self, to render it forgotten, whereby the whole matter is given up; or it must admit that the deeper self is right, because to want to predicate constancy of something that continually changes is indeed a contradiction, and as soon as one confesses that it changes, it can of course, change in that same moment. However much that first self shrinks from this, there is no wordsmith so ingenious or no thought-twister so wily that he can invalidate the deeper self’s eternal claim. There is only one way out, and that is to silence the deeper self by letting the roar of inconstancy drown it out.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard