“The Sickness Unto Death” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong)

In this book, an accompaniment to “The Concept of Anxiety”, Kierkegaard is trying to define despair and sin Christianly, against psychological, ethical, pagan, Socratic, and speculative-philosophical accounts. The book is by Kierkegaard, but published under the pseudonym, Anti-Climacus. The book’s central claim is that despair is not merely unhappiness or psychological distress, but a sickness in the self’s relation to itself and to the power that established it. “The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian’s superiority over the natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian’s blessedness…. Consequently, to be able to despair is an infinite advantage, and yet to be in despair is not only the worst misfortune and misery—no, it is ruination…. Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself. It is always the present tense…. In every actual moment of despair the person in despair bears all the past as a present in possibility. The reason for this is that to despair is a qualification of spirit and relates to the eternal in man…. Every moment he is in despair he is bringing his despair upon himself. For despair is not attributable to the misrelation but to the relation that relates itself to itself…. This concept, the sickness unto death, must, however, be understood in a particular way. Literally it means a sickness of which the end and the result are death…. In that sense, despair cannot be called the sickness unto death. Christianly understood, death itself is a passing into life. Thus, from a Christian point of view, no earthly, physical sickness is the sickness unto death…. If there is to be any question of a sickness unto death in the strictest sense, it must be a sickness of which the end is death and death is the end. This is precisely what despair is…. To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.”

Kierkegaard then radicalizes despair: it is not limited to the miserable or obviously broken person, but includes every form of life that avoids becoming conscious of itself as spirit before God. Even aesthetic brilliance, ethical achievement, or absorption into state, nation, or universality can still be despair if the self does not transparently rest in God. “Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something—every such existence, whatever it achieves, be it most amazing, whatever it explains, be it the whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically—every such existence is nevertheless despair. That is what the ancient Church Fathers meant when they said that the virtues of the pagans were glittering vices: they meant that the heart of paganism was despair, that paganism was not conscious before God as spirit.”

One lower form of despair is immediacy, where the person has not yet become inward enough to possess a self in any serious sense. Such a person identifies the self with external conditions and imagines salvation as becoming someone else, as if changing the self were like changing clothes. “Immediacy actually has no self, it does not know itself; thus it cannot recognize itself and therefore generally ends in fantasy. When immediacy despairs, it does not even have enough self to wish or dream that it had become that which it has not become. The man of immediacy helps himself in another way: he wishes to be someone else…. Imagine a self (and next to God there is nothing as eternal as a self), and then imagine that it suddenly occurs to a self that it might become someone other—than itself. And yet one in despair this way, whose sole desire is this most lunatic of lunatic metamorphoses, is infatuated with the illusion that this change can be accomplished as easily as one changes clothes. The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities.”

Kierkegaard’s more intense form of despair is defiance: not despairingly wanting to get rid of oneself, but despairingly willing to be oneself apart from God. This is more spiritually developed and therefore more dangerous; it is close to faith because it uses the eternal, but it misuses the eternal by refusing surrender, consolation, and the possibility that “for God everything is possible.” He continues, “First comes despair over the earthly or over something earthly, then despair of the eternal, over oneself. Then comes defiance, which is really despair through the aid of the eternal, the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself. But just because it is despair through the aid of the eternal, in a certain sense it is very close to the truth; and just because it lies very close to the truth, it is infinitely far away. The despair that is the thoroughfare to faith comes also through the aid of the eternal; through the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself…. In order in despair to will to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an infinite self. This infinite self, however, is really only the most abstract form, the most abstract possibility of the self…. The form of despair that despairs over the earthly or something earthly was understood basically to be—and it also manifests itself as being—despair of the eternal, that is, an unwillingness to be comforted by and healed by the eternal, an overestimation of the things of this world to the extent that the eternal can be no consolation. But this is also a form of the despair, to be unwilling to hope in the possibility that an earthly need, a temporal cross, can come to an end. The despairing person who in despair wills to be himself is unwilling to do that. He has convinced himself that this thorn in the flesh* gnaws so deeply that he cannot abstract himself from it (whether this is actually the case or his passion makes it so to him*), and therefore he might as well accept it forever, so to speak. He is offended by it, or, more correctly, he takes it as an occasion to be offended at all existence…. Hope in the possibility of help, especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible.”

Kierkegaard’s account of sin turns on the difference between ignorance and will. Socrates can explain wrongdoing as a failure of understanding, but Christianity goes further: sin is not merely failing to know the good, but willing against the good, even when one understands it. “Socrates would say: If this happens, it just shows that a person such as this still has not understood what is right. This means that the Greek mind does not have the courage to declare that a person knowingly does wrong, knows what is right and does the wrong; so it manages by saying: If a person does what is wrong, he has not understood what is right…. Absolutely right. And no human being can come further than that; no man of himself and by himself can declare what sin is, precisely because he is in sin…. That is why Christianity begins in another way: man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right…. Socrates actually gives no explanation at all of the distinction: not being able to understand and not willing to understand…. Socrates explains that he who does not do what is right has not understood it, either; but Christianity goes a little further back and says that it is because he is unwilling to understand it, and this again because he does not will what is right. And in the next place it teaches that a person does what is wrong (essentially defiance) even though he understands what is right, or he refrains from doing what is right even though he understands it; in short, the Christian teaching about sin is nothing but offensiveness toward man, charge upon charge, it is the suit that the divine as the prosecutor ventures to bring against man…. To comprehend is the range of man’s relation to the human, but to believe is man’s relation to the divine…. Therefore, interpreted Christianly, sin has its roots in willing, not in knowing, and this corruption of willing affects the individual’s consciousness…. Sin is—after being taught by a revelation from God what sin is—before God in despair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself.”

Because sin concerns the self before God, Kierkegaard denies that it can be mastered by speculative comprehension. Christianity requires faith, not because it is intellectually lazy, but because faith preserves the qualitative gulf between God and man that speculative thought is always tempted to smooth over. “I steadfastly hold to the Christian teaching that sin is a position—yet not as if it could be comprehended, but as a paradox that must be believed…. Whether one will believe or not must be left to faith…. So let others admire and praise him who pretends to be able to comprehend Christianity. I consider it an outright ethical task, perhaps requiring not a little self-denial in these very speculative times, when all “the others” are busy comprehending, to admit that one is neither able nor obliged to comprehend it…. Let us never forget that Socrates’ ignorance was a kind of fear and worship of God, that his ignorance was the Greek version of the Jewish saying: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…. Christianity teaches that everything essentially Christian depends solely upon faith; therefore it wants to be precisely a Socratic, God-fearing ignorance, which by means of ignorance guards faith against speculation, keeping watch so that the gulf of qualitative difference between God and man may be maintained as it is in the paradox and faith.”

Furthermore, Kierkegaard describes an even deeper intensification: despairing over one’s sin. Here the sinner does not merely sin, but encloses himself within sin, treating repentance and grace as impossible, meaningless, or even hostile. "Sin is despair; the intensification is the new sin of despairing over one’s sin…. We are not talking about particular sins here; the state of sin is the sin, and this is intensified in a new consciousness…. To despair over one’s sin indicates that sin has become or wants to be internally consistent. It wants nothing to do with the good…. It insists on listening only to itself, on having dealings only with itself; it closes itself up within itself, indeed, locks itself inside one more inclosure, and protects itself against every attack or pursuit by the good by despairing over sin. It is aware of having burned the bridge behind it and of thereby being inaccessible to the good and of the good being inaccessible to it, so that if in a weak moment it should itself will the good, that would still be impossible. Sin itself is severance from the good, but despair over sin is the second severance. This, of course, squeezes the uttermost demonic powers out of sin, gives it the profane toughness or perverseness that must consistently regard everything called repentance and grace not only as empty and meaningless but also as its enemy.”

Finally, Kierkegaard opposes the ethical and Christian category of the single individual to speculative abstraction. Sin may be universal, but it is never merely a universal idea; it becomes actual only in the individual sinner, standing before God. “The ethical does not abstract from actuality but immerses itself in actuality and operates mainly with the help of that speculatively disregarded and scorned category: individuality. Sin is a qualification of the single individual; it is irresponsibility and new sin to pretend as if it were nothing to be an individual sinner—when one himself is this individual sinner…. The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I…. The dialectic of sin is diametrically contrary to that of speculation. Christianity begins here—with the teaching about sin, and thereby with the single individual…. Sin, however common it is to all, does not gather men together in a common idea, into an association, into a partnership (“no more than the multitude of the dead out in the cemetery form some kind of society”); instead, it splits men up into single individuals and holds each individual fast as a sinner…. If “the single individual” is to feel in kinship with God (and this is what Christianity teaches), then he also senses the full weight of it in fear and trembling, and he must discover—as if it were not an ancient discovery—the possibility of offense…. Being a human being is not like being an animal, for which the specimen is always less than the species. Man is distinguished from other animal species not only by the superiorities that are generally mentioned but is also qualitatively distinguished by the fact that the individual, the single individual, is more than the species. This qualification is in turn dialectical and signifies that the single individual is a sinner, but then again that it is a perfection to be the single individual.”

“The Concept of Anxiety” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Reidar Thomte)

Kierkegaard’s subject is not anxiety in the ordinary clinical sense, but anxiety as the peculiar mood of freedom confronting possibility. He begins from original sin and innocence, but quickly turns the discussion into a psychology of spirit: innocence is not moral purity already conscious of itself, but ignorance, and anxiety first appears as the unsettling presence of possibility before anything definite has been chosen. “The strongest, indeed, the most positive expression the Protestant Church uses for the presence of hereditary sin in man is precisely that he is born with concupiscentia…. All men begotten in a natural way are born with sin, i.e., without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence.… Innocence is ignorance…. In this state there is peace and repose, but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety…. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety…. The concept of anxiety is almost never treated in psychology. Therefore, I must point out that it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility…. Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy. One easily sees, I think, that this is a psychological determination in a sense entirely different from the concupiscentia [inordinate desire] of which we spoke…. The anxiety that is posited in innocence is in the first place no guilt, and in the second place it is no troublesome burden, no suffering that cannot be brought into harmony with the blessedness of innocence…. This anxiety belongs so essentially to the child that he cannot do without it. Though it causes him anxiety, it captivates him by its pleasing anxiousness [Beængstelse]. In all cultures where the childlike is preserved as the dreaming of the spirit, this anxiety is found. The more profound the anxiety, the more profound the culture.”

For Kierkegaard, anxiety is the atmosphere around the qualitative leap into sin. Psychology can describe the dizziness of freedom before the leap, but it cannot explain the leap itself; once freedom has fallen, guilt appears retrospectively as if everything has changed. “Anxiety means two things: the anxiety in which the individual posits sin by the qualitative leap, and the anxiety that entered in and enters in with sin, and that also, accordingly, enters quantitatively into the world every time and individual posits sin…. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become…. In anxiety there is the selfish infinity of possibility, which does not tempt like a choice but ensnaringly disquiets [ængster] with its sweet anxiousness [Beængstelse]…. In each subsequent individual, anxiety is more reflective. This may be expressed by saying that the nothing that is the object of anxiety becomes, as it were, more and more a something.”

Kierkegaard then ties anxiety to time. The “moment” is not merely an instant in sequence, but the point at which eternity touches temporality; this matters because Adam’s fall is not simply a past event but a structure repeated in every subsequent individual. “Christianity, that which made all things new, is the fullness of time, but the fullness of time is the moment as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past.” One of Kierkegaard’s central balancing acts is to preserve both inheritance and individual responsibility: every person begins “like Adam,” yet every person also sins only through his own qualitative leap. “Let us now consider Adam and also remember that every subsequent individual begins in the very same way, within the quantitative difference that is the consequence of the relationship of generation and the historical relationship. Thus the moment is there for Adam as well as for every subsequent individual…. The relation of freedom to guilt is anxiety, because freedom and guilt are still only possibilities.”

In Kierkegaard, unfreedom is not merely the absence of possibility; it is often a distorted relation to possibility, freedom, inwardness, and spirit. Superstition and unbelief are unfree because they evade or falsify the individual’s relation to freedom. “Both superstition and unbelief are forms of unfreedom. In superstition, objectivity is conceded to be a power—like that of Medusa’s head—which can petrify subjectivity, and unfreedom does not will that the spell be broken. Mockery is the highest and apparently the freest expression of unbelief. However, what mockery lacks is precisely certitude, and therefore it mocks. Yet how many a mocker’s existence, if only we could look into it, would recall the anxiety in which the demonic calls out: τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί [What have I to do with you]?”

For Kierkegaard, inwardness is a bellwether concept. The question is not whether one can produce an abstract proof of God, but whether the thought of God’s existence is allowed to become inwardly present for the individual’s freedom.“The thought of God’s existence [Tilværelse], when it is posited as such for the individual’s freedom, has an omnipresence that for the prudent individuality has something embarrassing about it, even though he does not wish to do anything evil. To live in a beautiful and intimate companionship with this conception truly requires inwardness, and it is a much greater feat than that of being a model husband. How depressed such an individuality may feel when he hears a naive and simple man talk about the existence of God. The demonstration of the existence of God is something with which one learnedly and metaphysically occupies oneself only on occasion, but the thought of God forces itself upon a man on every occasion. What is it that such an individuality lacks? Inwardness.”

As the book develops, the demonic appears as anxious evasion: the refusal to face eternity, freedom, guilt, and possibility directly. But Kierkegaard’s final twist is that anxiety is not merely a danger; rightly undergone, it becomes educative, because it strips away finite evasions and teaches the individual the weight of possibility. “Men are not willing to think eternity earnestly but are anxious about it, and anxiety can contrive a hundred evasions. And this is precisely the demonic…. I will say that this is an adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate…. The more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man—yet not in the sense usually understood, in which anxiety is about something external, about something outside a person, but in the sense that he himself produces the anxiety…. Only in this sense can the words be understood when it is said of Christ that he was anxious unto death…. Anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness…. Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude…. In possibility all things are equally possible, and whoever has truly been brought up by possibility has grasped the terrible as well as the joyful…. When he has thoroughly learned that every anxiety about which he was anxious came upon him in the next moment—he will give actuality another explanation, he will praise actuality, and even when it rests heavily upon him, he will remember that it nevertheless is far, far lighter than possibility was…. In order that an individual may thus be educated absolutely and infinitely by the possibility, he must be honest toward possibility and have faith…. When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will discover all the finitudes, but it will idealize them in the form of infinity and in anxiety overwhelm the individual until he again overcomes them.”

Finally, Kierkegaard affirms the role of faith and reiterates its role in the concept of the infinite. Faith is the qualitative leap that comes when the self, having been brought through possibility to the absolute, rests in the absolute. Faith is anticipating eternity in time — and what anxiety has done is empty the self of every finite anchor so that this resting becomes possible. Anxiety becomes saving only through faith: it educates the self in possibility, reveals guilt more radically than any external court could, and brings the individual to rest not in self-management but in providence and atonement. Anxiety is therefore ambiguous: it is neither guilt itself nor mere innocence, neither fear of a definite object nor freedom already actualized, but the trembling middle state in which possibility presses upon spirit. “With the help of faith, anxiety brings up the individuality to rest in providence. So it is also in relation to guilt, which is the second thing anxiety discovers. Whoever learns to know his guilt only from the finite is lost in the finite, and finitely the question of whether a man is guilty cannot be determined except in an external, juridical, and most imperfect sense…. From finitude one can learn much, but not how to be anxious, except in a very mediocre and depraved sense. On the other hand, whoever has truly learned how to be anxious will dance when the anxieties of finitude strike up the music and when the apprentices of finitude lose their minds and courage…. Therefore he who in relation to guilt is educated by anxiety will rest only in the Atonement.”

“The Moment and Late Writings” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong)

This is basically Kierkegaard just bashing the established Lutheran state church of Denmark for a few hundred pages. The impetus for this harangue is a eulogy for Bishop Mynster by his successor, Bishop Martensen. Specifically, at issue is the classifying Mynster as a Christian truth-witness. Kierkegaard begins, “In the New Testament, Christ calls the apostles and followers witnesses, requires of them that they shall witness for him. Let us now see what is to be understood by that. They are men who in renunciation of everything, in poverty, in lowliness, then, ready for any suffering, are to go out into a world that with all its might and main expresses the contrast to what it is to be a Christian. This is what Christ calls witnessing, being a witness…. Now I ask, is there the slightest similarity between these pastors, deans, and bishops and what Christ calls witnesses?… They may be called teachers, public officials, professors, councilors—in short, anything one wishes, but not truth-witnesses…. If the clergy understand their interests, they will not hesitate to ask the bishop to discontinue this language usage, which, to put it mildly, makes the whole profession ludicrous.”

Kierkegaard is offended that, in Christendom, there reside so many people that are Christians in name only, rather than in true belief. He strictly blames the pastors, as a profession, for this state of affairs. “Nothing is more dangerous for true Christianity, nothing is more against its nature, than getting people light-mindedly to assume the name “Christians,” to teach them to have a low opinion of being a Christian, as if it were something that is so very easy. And “the pastor” has a pecuniary interest in having it rest there, so that by assuming the name “Christians” people do not come to know what Christianity in truth is…. Christ and the New Testament understand something very specific by having faith; to have faith is to venture out as decisively as possible for a human being, breaking with everything, with what a human being naturally loves, breaking, in order to save his life, with that in which he naturally has his life. But to those who have faith, to them is also promised assistance against all dangers…. But in “Christendom” we play at having faith, play at being Christians. As far removed as possible from any break with what the natural human being loves, we remain at home in the living room, in the routines of finiteness—and then we go and blather to each other.”

Kierkegaard earnestly wants to convert Christendom to the true Christianity of the New Testament. To the citizen of Denmark who is struggling to balance the demands of this world and the next, he urges, “Eternally he will not regret heeding my words, but it is quite possible that he could regret it temporally. He himself is then to consider whether it is the eternal he wants or the temporal. I, who am called Either/Or, cannot serve anyone with: both-and.” Kierkegaard concludes, “All religion in which there is any truth, certainly Christianity, aims at a person’s total transformation and wants, through renunciation and self-denial, to wrest away from him all that, precisely that, to which he immediately clings, in which he immediately has his life…. To become a Christian in the New Testament sense is designed to work the individual loose (as the dentist speaks of working the gum loose) from the context to which he clings in immediate passion, and which clings in immediate passion to him…. This kind of Christianity was never to the human being’s liking.”

“Works of Love” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

Kierkegaard, from the very start, sets out what this book will be all about, “They are Christian deliberations, therefore not about love but about works of love.” He begins by explaining why the love of God is different from worldly love, “But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be to your own harm, indeed, harmful to his cause; for God’s wisdom is beyond all comparison to yours, and God’s governance has no obligation of responsibility in relation to your sagacity. All you have to do is obey in love.”

Kierkegaard relates how being bound by love eternally is actually the truest form of freedom that a human has, “But the love that has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty and loves because it shall love—that love is independent and has the law for its existence in the relation of love itself to the eternal…. Alas, we often think that freedom exists and it is law that binds freedom. Yet it is just the opposite; without law, freedom does not exist at all, and it is law that gives freedom…. If when another person says, “I cannot love you any longer,” one proudly answers, “Then I can also stop loving you”—is this independence? Alas, it is dependence, because whether he will continue to love or not depends upon whether the other will love. But the person who answers, “In that case I shall still continue to love you”—that person’s love is made eternally free in blessed independence. He does not say it proudly—dependent upon his pride—no, he says it humbly, humbling himself under eternity’s shall, and for that very reason he is independent.”

In fact, love only becomes true love when it becomes an eternal duty. “The love that has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty is not exempted from misfortune, but it is saved from despair, in fortune and misfortune equally saved from despair…. See, passion inflames, worldly sagacity cools, but neither this heat nor this cold nor the combination of this heat and this cold is the pure air of the eternal…. But this “You shall love” removes all the unhealthiness and preserves the healthiness for eternity. So it is everywhere, this shall of eternity is the saving, the purifying, the ennobling element.” True love always requires an element of self-denial. “Wherever the essentially Christian is, there is also self-denial, which is Christianity’s essential form…. Self-denial is the very transformation by which a person becomes sober in the sense of eternity.” Universal love is also in constant danger of being replaced by particular loves, “But erotic love and friendship are the very peak of self-esteem, the I intoxicated in the other I. The more securely one I and another I join to become one I, the more this united I selfishly cuts itself from everyone else. At the peak of erotic love and friendship, the two actually do become one self, one I.”

True Christian love can only be recognized in the form of the love of one’s neighbor. One must love all of humanity equally and only in this way love God. But that also means loving your enemy just as you would love yourself, “The neighbor is the utterly unrecognizable dissimilarity between persons or is the eternal equality before God—the enemy, too, has this equality…. Shut your eyes and remember the commandment that you shall love; then you love—your enemy—no, then you love the neighbor, because you do not see that he is your enemy. In other words, when you shut your eyes, you do not see dissimilarities of earthly life…. The kinship is secured by each individual’s equal kinship with and relationship to God in Christ; because the Christian doctrine addresses itself equally to each individual…. Just as little as the Christian lives or can live without his body, so little can he live without the dissimilarity of earthly life that belongs to every human being in particular by birth, by position, by circumstances, by education etc.—none of us is pure humanity…. This must continue as long as temporality continues and must continue to tempt every human being who comes into the world, inasmuch as by being Christian he does not become exempt from dissimilarity, but by overcoming the temptation of dissimilarity he becomes a Christian. In so-called Christendom, therefore, the difference of earthly life still continually tempts—alas, perhaps it even more than tempts, so that one person is haughty and another defiantly envies. Both ways are in fact rebellion, are rebellion against the essentially Christian…. Christianity and worldliness will never come to a mutual understanding.”

Care for one’s station in the world is the enemy of Christian ethics. The temporal and eternity can never be reconciled. “Christianly the world’s opposition stands in an essential relationship to the inwardness of Christianity…. Christianity cannot keep anything other than what it has promised from the beginning: the world’s ingratitude, opposition, and derision, and continually to a higher degree the more earnest a Christian one becomes…. Therefore if anyone can demonstrate that the world or Christendom has now become essentially good, as if it were eternity, then I will also demonstrate that Christian self-denial has been made impossible and Christianity abolished, just as it will be abolished in eternity, where it will cease to be militant.”

Love is the only act that fulfills Christian law, “The relation of love to the Law is here like the relation of faith to understanding. The understanding counts and counts, calculates and calculates, but it never arrives at the certainty that faith possesses.” Love of your neighbor is the only debt in the temporal world worth owing,  “If possible, owe no one anything, no courtesy, no service, no sympathy in joy or in sorrow, no leniency in judging, no help in life, no advice in danger, no sacrifice, not even the hardest—no, in all this owe no one anything. But along with all this still remain in the debt that you certainly have not wished and before God have certainly not been able to pay off, the debt to love one another!”

The nature of true love is its immeasurability. It is immeasurable both for the lover and for the one loved. “In everything done for you by the one who loves, in the least little triviality as well as in the greatest sacrifice, there is always love along with it; and thereby the smallest service, which in the case of the hired servant you would scarcely find worth taking into account, becomes immeasurable…. The object of love confesses in love that with the least little thing the lover does infinitely more than all the others do with the greatest sacrifices; and the lover confesses to himself that in making every possible sacrifice he is doing infinitely less than he perceives the debt to be.”

In order to love one’s neighbor properly, there is the necessity of granting belief freely and giving to all the benefit of the doubt. “The person who loves believes all things. With the blessed joy of amazement, he will someday see that he was right; and if he made a mistake by believing too much of the good—to believe the good is in itself a blessing.” It is similar with hope. “That is why the person who hopes can never be deceived, because to hope is to expect the possibility of the good, but the possibility of the good is the eternal…. The loving one hopes all things. No indolence of habit, no pettiness of mind, no hairsplitting of sagacity, no quantities of experience, no slackness of years, no bitterness of evil passions corrupt for him his hope or counterfeit the possibility for him; every morning, yes, every moment, he renews his hope and refreshes possibility, while love abides and he in it…. Love hopes to the limit, yes, to the “last day,” for not until then is hope over.”

Kierkegaard circles back to the temptations of the worldly, “Acting sagaciously is, actually, a halfway approach, whereby one undeniably gets further ahead in the world, wins the world’s goods and advantages and the world’s honor, because, in the eternal sense, the world and world’s advantages are half-measures. But neither the eternal nor Holy Scripture has taught anyone to aspire to get ahead or furthest ahead in the world; on the contrary, it warns against getting too far ahead in the world in order, if possible, to keep oneself unstained by the defilement of the world…. If the hope is not fulfilled it perhaps will become apparent in one’s bitterness and despair how firmly one was attached to that for which it was a shame to hope.” The lust for money holds particular scorn for Kierkegaard, “From the eternal point of view money is less than nothing…. Think of eternity in whatever way you want to; only admit that many of the temporal things you have seen in temporality you wished to find again in eternity, that you wished to see trees and the flowers and the stars again, to hear the singing of birds and the murmuring of the brook again—but could it ever occur to you that there would be money in eternity? No, then the kingdom of heaven itself would again become a land of misery…. Of all the things you have seen, there is nothing of which you can be so sure that it will never enter heaven as—money.”

In fact, the rich and the poor can practice mercy alike. “Eternity understands only mercifulness; therefore if you want to learn to understand mercifulness, you must learn it from eternity. But if you are to have an understanding of the eternal, there must be stillness around you while you concentrate your attention completely on inwardness…. Mercifulness does not arouse amazement. What indeed is there to be amazed at if even the poorest wretch, and he best of all, can practice mercifulness? Mercifulness, if you in truth perceive it, does not arouse amazement; it stirs you, just because it is inwardness, it makes the deepest inward impression upon you.”

Kierkegaard concludes, “In the Christian sense, a person ultimately and essentially has only God to deal with in everything, although he still must remain in the world and in the earthly circumstances assigned to him…. The adult also readily imagines that his dealings with the world are actuality, but God brings him to understand that all this is only being used for his upbringing…. Thus God is the educator; his love is the greatest leniency and the greatest rigorousness…. But everything in you that is of flesh and blood and is timorousness and attachment to things of this earth must despair, so that you cannot acquire external certainty, a certainty once and for all, and in the easiest manner. See, this is the struggle of faith in which you can have occasion to be tried and tested every day.”

In the end, what happens on earth is irrelevant compared to eternity and God’s eternal love. Forgiveness of others is the necessary path to the forgiveness of yourself. “Christianity’s view is: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness you give is the forgiveness you receive, not the reverse…. God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you.” Kierkegaard returns once again to the unknowability of God’s love, “How rigorous this Christian like for like is! The Jewish, the worldly, the bustling like for like is: as others do unto you, by all means take care that you also do likewise unto them. But the Christian like for like is: God will do unto you exactly as you do unto others. In the Christian sense, you have nothing at all to do with what others do unto you—it does not concern you; it is a curiosity, an impertinence, a lack of good sense on your part to meddle in things that are absolutely no more your concern than if you were not present. You have to do only with what you do onto others, or how you take what others do unto you. The direction is inward; essentially you have to do only with yourself before God…. The Christian like for like belongs to this world of inwardness…. In the Christian sense, to love people is to love God, and to love God is to love people.”

“Johannes Climacus” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Edna Hong and Howard Hong)

This is basically an attack against Hegel and his foundations of modern philosophy by Kierkegaard, again writing as Johannes Climacus in this eponymous work. Kierkegaard’s theme is doubt, “De omnibus dubitandum est [Everything must be doubted]…. This thesis became for [Climacus’] life what in other respects a name frequently is in a person’s history—everything can be said in all brevity by mentioning this name…. This thesis became a task for his thinking.” Kierkegaard appears to be wrestling with philosophy itself. “Just as one could have an intimation of a necessity in the past, was it not conceivable that one could have an intimation of a necessity in the future. Philosophy, however, wanted to do something even more difficult: it wanted to permeate everything with the thought of eternity and necessity, wanted to do this in the present moment, which would mean slaying the present with the thought of eternity and yet preserving its fresh life…. Perhaps a particular philosopher had doubted for all just as Christ suffered for all, and is one now only supposed to believe it and not doubt for oneself?” Surely not. Kierkegaard continues with his tale of Climacus’ intellectual journeying. “In an old saga, he had read a story about a knight who received from a troll a rare sword that, in addition to its other qualities, also craved blood the instant it was drawn…. It seemed to Johannes that he must have the same experience with that thesis: when one person said it to another, it became in the latter’s hand a sword that was obliged to slay the former, however painful it was for the latter to reward his benefactor in that way…. The very first person who had primitively discovered that one must begin with doubt had not been in that predicament…. But the single individual who is to learn this from another would fall into the predicament, and if his teacher is not quick enough, he is obliged to become a sacrifice to his teaching.”

“Philosophical Fragments” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Edna Hong and Howard Hong)

In this essay, Kierkegaard writes under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, comparing Socratic and Christian notions of truth, faith, the historical, and the eternal. He asks, “Can the truth be learned? With this question we shall begin. It was a Socratic question or became that by way of the Socratic question whether virtue can be taught—for virtue in turn was defined as insight.” Kierkegaard continues by stating Socrates’ notion of the individual and how its subjectivity relates to the objective world. “In the Socratic view, every human being is himself the midpoint, and the whole world focuses only on him because his self-knowledge is God-knowledge. Moreover, this is how Socrates understood himself, and in his view this is how every human being must understand himself, and by virtue of that understanding he must understand his relation to the single individual, always with equal humility and with equal pride.” Socrates was opposed to notions of individuality espoused by the Skeptics and by arch-subjectivists, “If the Socratic theory of recollection and of every human being as universal man is not maintained, then Sextus Empiricus stands there ready to make the transition implied in “to learn” not merely difficult but impossible, and Protagoras begins where he left off, with everything as the measure of man, in the sense that he is the measure for others, but by no means in the Socratic sense that the single individual is for himself the measure, no more and no less.”

Kierkegaard next compares the Socratic method to the teachings of Christ. “Between one human being and another the Socratic relationship is indeed the highest, the truest…. The presence of the god in human form—indeed, in the lowly form of a servant—is precisely the teaching.” Where Christianity steps beyond the Socratic is in the leap of faith. “Faith is not a knowledge, for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, which excludes the temporal and the historical as inconsequential, or it is purely historical knowledge, and no knowledge can have as its object this absurdity that the eternal is the historical…. The follower, however, is in faith related to that teacher in such a way that he is eternally occupied with his historical existence…. Then the object of faith becomes not the teaching but the teacher, for the essence of the Socratic is that the learner, because he himself is the truth and has the condition, can thrust the teacher away…. Faith, then, must cling firmly to the teacher. But in order for the teacher to be able to give the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in turn the object of faith and is the paradox, the moment…. The contradiction is that he receives the condition in the moment, and, since it is a condition for the understanding of eternal truth, it is eo ipso the eternal condition…. Faith is not an act of will…. But then is faith just as paradoxical as the paradox? Quite so…. Faith itself is a wonder, and everything that is true of the paradox is also true of faith…. The wonder that the eternal condition is given in time.”

Kierkegaard concludes, “Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical—indeed, precisely by means of the historical—has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness, has wanted to interest him otherwise than merely historically, has wanted to base his happiness on his relation to something historical. No philosophy (for it is only for thought), no mythology (for it is only for the imagination), no historical knowledge (for it is for memory) has ever had this idea—of which in this connection one can say with multiple meanings that it did not arise from any human heart…. If in discussing the relation between Christianity and philosophy we begin by narrating what was said earlier, how shall we ever, not finish, but ever manage to begin, for history just keeps on growing.”

“The Concept of Irony” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

This 1841 work by Kierkegaard was the dissertation for his college degree. It deals with the irony espoused by Socrates, as he was portrayed by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes. Kierkegaard begins by defining the ironic questioning style ubiquitous with Socrates. “One can ask with the intention of receiving an answer containing the desired fullness, and hence the more one asks, the deeper and more significant becomes the answer; or one can ask without any interest in the answer except to suck out the apparent content by means of the question and thereby to leave an emptiness behind. The first method presupposes, of course, that there is a plenitude; the second that there is an emptiness. The first is the speculative method; the second the ironic. Socrates in particular practiced the latter method…. Socrates’ questioning was essentially aimed at the knowing subject for the purpose of showing that when all was said and done they knew nothing whatever.” Kierkegaard is careful to separate, as best he can, the views of Socrates from those of the author who puts words into his mouth. “Just as Socrates’ philosophy began with the presupposition that he knew nothing, so it ended with the presupposition that human beings know nothing at all; Platonic philosophy began in the immediate unity of thought and being and stayed there. The direction that manifested itself in idealism as reflection upon reflection manifested itself in Socrates’ questioning. To ask questions—that is, the abstract relation between the subjective and the objective—ultimately became the primary issue for him.”

Kierkegaard furthers dissects Plato’s dialogues involving Socrates by analyzing the interplay of irony and the dialectic. “That irony and dialectic are the two great forces in Plato everyone will surely admit, but that there is a double kind of irony and a double kind of dialectic cannot be denied, either. There is an irony that is only a stimulus for thought, that quickens it when it becomes drowsy, disciplines it when it becomes dissolute. There is an irony that is itself the activator and in turn is itself the terminus striven for. There is a dialectic that in perpetual movement continually sees to it that the question does not become entrapped in an incidental understanding, that is never weary and is always prepared to set the issue afloat if it runs aground—in short, that always knows how to keep the issue in suspension and precisely therein and thereby wants to resolve it. There is a dialectic that, in proceeding from the most abstract ideas, wants to let these display themselves in more concrete qualifications, a dialectic that wants to construct actuality with the idea.” Kierkegaard continues on with the purpose of irony. “Because irony cuts the bonds that restrain speculation, helps to shove off from the purely empirical sandbanks and to venture out upon the ocean, this is a negatively liberating activity. Irony is in no sense a partner in the expedition. But insofar as the speculating individual feels liberated and an abundance spreads out before his observing eyes, he may readily believe that he also owes all this to irony and his gratitude may wish to owe it everything…. Thus a personality is a necessary point of departure in the positions of both irony and subjective thinking; the activity of this personality becomes liberating in both of these positions, but the position of irony is negative, whereas that of reasoning is positive.” 

Kierkegaard returns to the role of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues. “If Plato’s view of Socrates were to be expressed in a few words, it could be said that he provides him with the idea. Where the empirical ends, Socrates begins; his function is to lead speculation out of finite qualifications, to lose sight of finitude and steer out upon Oceanus where ideal striving and ideal infinity recognize no alien considerations but are themselves their infinite goal. Thus, just as lower sense perception turns pale before this higher knowledge—indeed, becomes a delusion, a deception by comparison—just so every consideration of a finite goal becomes a disparagement, a profanation of the holy. In short, Socrates has gained ideality, has conquered those vast regions that hitherto were a terra incognita [unknown land]. For this reason, he disdains the useful, is indifferent to the established [Bestaaaende], is an out-and-out enemy of the mediocrity that in empiricism is the highest, an object of pious worship, but for speculation a troll changeling.” 

Kierkegaard makes the convincing case that Socrates’ views were indeed antithetical to the polis. “The negative relation of the daimonian to Socrates… had the express effect of making him relate negatively to actuality or, in the Greek sense, to the state…. It was a polemical relation to the state religion to substitute a silence in which a warning voice was audible only on occasion, a voice that (and this is about the most fundamental polemic) never had a thing to do with the substantial interests of political life, never said a word about them, but only dealt with Socrates’ and at most his friends’ completely private and particular affairs—to substitute this for the Greek life permeated, even in the most insignificant manifestations, by a god-consciousness, to substitute a silence for this divine eloquence echoed in everything.” Hegel comments on this birth of human agency, “In the ‘divine sign’ of Socrates we see the will which formerly had simply transferred itself beyond itself now beginning to apply itself to itself and so to recognize its own inward nature. This is the beginning of a self-knowing and so of a genuine freedom.” Kierkegaard continues, “Socrates’ position, then, is that of subjectivity, of inwardness, which reflects upon itself and in its relation to itself detaches and volatilizes the established [Bestaaaende] in the flood of thought that surges over it and carries it away while it itself recedes again into thought. Replacing the grace to be ashamed, which powerfully but mysteriously kept the individual tied to the lead string of the state, there now came the decisiveness and self-assurance of subjectivity.”

Another aspect of Socrates’ philosophy that Kierkegaard focusses on is the supremacy of ignorance. Socrates “gave up the study of nature for the study of man. To say, therefore, that Socrates did not accept the gods accepted by the state does not mean that he was an atheist. On the contrary, Socrates’ nonacceptance of the national gods was essential to his whole position, which he himself theoretically characterized as ignorance…. His accusers really ought to have charged him precisely with this ignorance, since particularly in the Greek state and to a certain extent in every state there is indeed an ignorance that must be regarded as a crime…. In the philosophic sense… he was ignorant. He was ignorant of the ground of all being, the eternal, the divine—that is, he knew that it was, but he did not know what it was.” Here Kierkegaard turns back to the newly emerging concepts of subjectivity and individuality. “When subjectivity by means of its negative power has broken the spell in which human life lay in the form of substantiality, when it has emancipated man from his relation to God just as it freed him from his relation to the state, then the first form in which this manifests itself is ignorance…. This ignorance is in turn quite consistently called human wisdom, because here man has come into his own right.”

Socrates freed himself from the bounds of Greek society through irony. “The ironic freedom he enjoyed because no relationship was strong enough to bind him and he continually felt himself free above it, the enjoyment of being sufficient unto himself, to which he abandoned himself—all this suggests something aristocratic…. True freedom, of course, consists in giving oneself to enjoyment and yet preserving one’s soul unscathed.” The preeminent form of freedom was moral freedom. “Here the moral individual is the negatively free individual. He is free because he is not bound by another, but he is negatively free precisely because he is not limited in another. When the individual by being in his other is in his own, then for the first time he is in truth (i.e., positively) free, affirmatively free. Therefore, moral freedom is arbitrariness; it is possibility of good and evil.” Hegel comments, “The conscience as formal subjectivity is simply to be on the verge of slipping into evil.” Kierkegaard continues, “Socrates brought this about, but not in the sense of the Sophists, who taught the individual to constrict himself in his own particular interests; he brought the individual to this by universalizing subjectivity, and to that extent he is the founder of morality…. The individual should no longer act out of fear of the law but with a conscious knowledge of why he acted.”

Going back to Socrates’ trial, Kierkegaard repeats why Socrates was anathema to the Athenian polis. “The whole substantial life of Greek culture had lost its validity for him, which means that to him the established actuality was unactual, not in this or that particular aspect but in its totality as such; that with regard to this invalid actuality he let the established order of things appear to remain established and thereby brought about its downfall; that in the process Socrates became lighter and lighter, more and more negatively free.” Kierkegaard concludes by bringing it back to irony. “It cannot really be said that the ironist places himself outside and above morality and ethics, but he lives far too abstractly, far too metaphysically and esthetically to reach the concretion of the moral and the ethical. For him, life is drama, and what absorbs him is the ingenious complication of this drama. He himself is a spectator, even when he is the one acting.”

“Practice in Christianity” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

In the invocation with which Kierkegaard begins this book, he starts by defining his conception of faith, “But as long as there is a believer, this person, in order to have become that, must have been and as a believer must be just as contemporary with Christ’s presence as his contemporaries were. This contemporaneity is the condition of faith, and, more sharply defined, it is faith.” He continues, ““History,” says faith, “has nothing at all to do with Jesus Christ; with regard to him we have only sacred history…. He is the paradox that history can never digest or convert into an ordinary syllogism. He is the same in his abasement as in his loftiness—but the eighteen hundred years, or if it came to be eighteen thousand years, has nothing at all to do with it…. That in his abasement he was God, that he will come again in glory—this goes not a little beyond the understanding of history…. But that God has lived here on earth as an individual human being is infinitely extraordinary. Even if it had no results whatever, it makes no difference; it remains just as extraordinary, infinitely extraordinary, infinitely more extraordinary than all the results…. Only God can attach that much importance to himself, so that the fact that he has lived is infinitely more important than all the results that are registered in history.” Kierkegaard opposes faith and knowledge, “Jesus Christ is the object of faith; one must either believe in him or be offended; for to “know” simply means that it is not about him. Thus history can indeed richly communicate knowledge, but knowledge annihilates Jesus Christ.”

Kierkegaard describes the difference between Christianity and Christendom. He begins with compassion as a daily practice, “To make oneself quite literally one with the most wretched (and this, this alone is divine compassion) this is “too much” for people, something they can shed a few emotional tears over during a quiet Sunday hour and involuntarily burst out laughing over when they see it in actuality. The point is that it is too lofty for them to bear seeing in its daily use; it must be at a distance for them to be able to bear it. People are not so familiar with loftiness that they really dare to believe in it.” By Kierkegaard’s time, Christendom is ubiquitous, but being an actual Christian is still a rarity, “To be a Christian has become a nothing, a silly game, something that everyone is as a matter of course, something one slips into more easily than one slips into the most trifling accomplishment. Truly it is high time for the requirements of ideality to be heard…. Only the consciousness of sin can force one, if I dare to put it that way (from the other side grace is the force), into this horror. And at the very same moment the essentially Christian transforms itself into and is sheer leniency, grace, love, mercy. Considered in any other way Christianity is and must be a kind of madness or the greatest horror. Admittance is only through the consciousness of sin; to want to enter by any other road is high treason against Christianity…. It is brazen to want to fraternize with God and Christ. Only the consciousness of sin is absolute respect.”

The proper Christian reveals himself inwardly. This is contrasted in Christendom, in which religion has become a part of the established order and religion is not content with personal belief. “By making devoutness and piety inwardness, Christ prodded this whole structure of qualifications and relativities, this direct recognizability of piety by honor and esteem, power and influence, this objectivity…. It is always that way when the established order has gone so far as to deify itself…. The relationship with God is abolished; custom, ordinances, and the like are deified.” Christ is not his teachings, for then he would just be a dead wise man. Christ is about his being as a God-man, which makes him one of a kind. As a God-man, he could not communicate directly with humanity. He is paradox. It is not his teachings, but his being that is all of Christianity, “Direct communication is an impossibility for the God-man, for inasmuch as he is the sign of contradiction he cannot communicate himself directly; to be a sign is already a term based on reflection, to say nothing of being the sign of contradiction…. It is eighteen hundred years since Christ lived; then he is forgotten—only his teaching lasts—yes, that is, Christianity has been abolished.”

Kierkegaard next writes about the higher life of the individual Christian, “If a human life is not to be lived altogether unworthily like that of the animal, which never lifts up its head; if it is not to be trifled away, emptily occupied with what, as long as it lasts, is vanity and when it is over is nothing, or busily occupied with what does indeed make a noise at the moment but has no echo in eternity; if a human life is not to be loafed away in inactivity or wasted away in busy activity—then there must be something higher that draws it.” Kierkegaard makes the case that contemporary Christendom has become soft in its power. The original Christian faith was militant and that is how it must remain. “What Christ said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” was not said in a special sense about the connection with that age; it is eternally valid…. As soon as Christ’s kingdom makes a compromise with this world and becomes a kingdom of this world, Christianity is abolished. But if Christianity is in the truth, it is certainly a kingdom in this world, but not of this world, that is, it is militant.”

Finally, Kierkegaard turns back to inwardness and his personal choices for living as a Christian in this world, “I chose the only escape that was left in Christendom: to seem to be the most frivolous person of all, to “become a fool in the world,” in order if it all possible in this earnest world to protect what I concealed in my innermost being, a little bit of earnestness, and in order that this inwardness could acquire the peace of inclosing reserve in which to grow in stillness…. I was concealing something else in my innermost being, but it was the best that I was hiding; I have never, never deceived by way of making myself out to be better than I was—through this life in the human throng, I learned with frightful veracity to understand that rigorousness is the only thing that can help.”

“Stages of Life” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

This book is divided into four parts, each with their own fictitious author, each complete with their own backstory and persona, in the style common to Kierkegaard. The first section is titled “In Vino Veritas” and it is an account of a decadent banquet held in an exotic locale, in the depths of the woods, outside of Copenhagen. It is attended only by a small group of men, who have all pledged to get drunk and give soliloquies on the nature of love. “For anyone who has once understood what recollection is has been captured for all eternity and is captured in it; and anyone who possesses one recollection is richer than if he possessed the whole world.”

The first to speak is an unnamed young bachelor. “I have renounced all erotic love, for my thought is everything to me. If love is the most blissful desire, then I renounce the desire without wishing either to offend or to envy anyone; if love conditions the highest benefaction, then I reject the occasion for it, but my thought is saved. Not that I am without an eye for beauty, not that my heart is unmoved when I read the poets’ songs, not that my soul is without sadness when I indulge in that beautiful representation of love, but I refuse to be unfaithful to my thought, and what would be the use of it, because for me there is no bliss where I have not saved my thought…. I do, of course, perceive that if anything may be sacred, then it is love, that if faithlessness is debased anywhere, it is in love, that if any deceit is abominable, it is in love. But my soul is pure; I have never looked at any woman to desire her.” Johannes, known to readers of “Either/Or” as the seducer, responds thus, “For what else is woman but a dream, and yet the highest reality…. With man the essential is the essential and thus always the same; with woman the accidental is the essential and in this way an inexhaustible heterogeneity. Brief is her glory, but the pain is also quickly forgotten, and when the same glory is offered to me again, it is as if I had not even felt the pain.”

The second section was written by the devoted Judge, again from “Either/Or”, titled “Some Reflections on Marriage in Answer to Objections.” He opines, “A married man who is that with his whole life and soul is certainly the one who has ventured and ventured most of all. He ventures out of infatuation’s hiding place with the beloved one…. He does not know what would happen, but this he does know—he can lose everything; and this he does know—he cannot evade a single thing, for the resolution holds firmly there where his love imprisons him but also holds him undaunted there where falling in love laments.” He goes on to expound on his conception of the internal versus the external. “From a purely external point of view, there certainly are hundreds and hundreds more who have risked more than a married man, risked kingdoms and countries, millions and millions of millions have lost thrones and principalities, fortunes and prosperity, and yet the married man risks more. For the person who loves risks more than all these things, and the person who loves in as many ways as it is possible for a man to love risks most of all.” He concludes on the love of the married man versus the lust of the poetic lover, “A married man risks every day, and every day the sword of duty hangs over his head, and the journal is kept up as long as the marriage keeps on, and the ledger of responsibility is never closed, and the responsibility is even more inspiring than the most glorious epic poet who must testify for the hero. Well, it is true that he does not take the risk for nothing—no, like for like, he risks everything for everything, and if because of its responsibility marriage is an epic, then because of its happiness it certainly is also an idyll…. Marriage is the fullness of time.”

By far the longest section of Kierkegaard’s book is ““Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?””, in which a gentleman, who has broken off his engagement to the sweetheart he still desperately loves, debates within his diary the consequences of his actions. (One should, of course, keep in mind Kierkegaard’s actual personal history when reading this section, particularly.) The diary entries alternate between his reflections during the day, which look back on his thoughts in the immediacy of his decision to separate, and those written at midnight, which reflect back through time on the separation with the benefit of months of hindsight. He begins with sorrow, “To want to proceed jointly along this path will produce again that dreadful misrelation that I already feared in that two-month period: that we would jointly sorrow over an unhappy love affair. It cannot be. What similarity is there between her sorrow and mine, what solidarity is there between guilt and innocence, what kinship is there between repentance and an esthetic sorrow over life, when that which awakens repentance is that which awakens her sorrow? I can sorrow in my way; if she must sorrow, she must also do it on her own account.”

Writing in his dairy by the light of day, the gentleman immerses himself in the moments just before the affair was broken off. “Happy with me she will never be—no, never! It is possible that she can make herself believe it, but I do not understand it, and that, too, certainly belongs to her happiness. And if we are united, it will eventually come to the point where she will someday sense with terror what I ought to have prevented…. What to me is the vital force of my spiritual existence—equality in the essentially human—she destroys. She does not care at all about the infinite passion of this freedom; she has erected an illusion, and she is satisfied with that. I, too, believe that one can love, can sacrifice everything for one’s love, but whether I am going to see good days or am going to risk my life, the deepest breathing [Aandedraet] of my spirit-existence [Aands-Existents] I cannot do without, I cannot sacrifice, because that is a contradiction, since without it I indeed am not. And she feels no need for this breathing.”

At heart, the difference in the two lovers is their conceptions of the meanings of the finite and the infinite. “One may die, one may become unhappy, but one can still preserve meaning in one’s life and faithfulness to the idea. Now that is at an end. And who is to blame for that? Someone else would perhaps say: It is she, to whose apron strings you still are tied. But I would not say that, for I usually refrain from such nonsense, that someone else is to blame when I do something wrong. I prefer to say that I myself am at fault. The fault is mine, is my weakness, and the difficulty is that my understanding guarantees me that it can be beneficial to her in the finite sense, whereas my sympathy would rather love her in the infinite sense. This relationship has humbled me.”

The gentleman describes an internal faith, well beyond public professions. “A skipper can go on swearing all day without giving it a thought, and in the same way an enthusiast can be solemn all day long without a complete or sound idea in his soul. That Gothic king refused to be baptized when he learned that he would not be together with his forefathers. The natives in America feared heaven more than hell and wished to remain pagans lest they be together with the orthodox Spaniards in heaven.” Faith and prayer must be about more than wishing and hopeful dreams. “Although I have the most inspired conception of God’s love, I also have the conception that he is not an old fussbudget who sits in heaven and humors us, but that in time and temporality one must be prepared to suffer everything…. The person who wills religiously must have receptivity precisely for the terrible; he must open himself to it and needs only to take care that he does not stop halfway, but that it leads him unto the security of the infinite.”

The gentleman knows that by breaking off the engagement he looks horrible to the outside world and, most of all, to his beloved. That is not his concern. “Even if I fall where no one dreams that a field of honor can be, even if I am buried in the graveyard of the dishonorable, if there nevertheless is one individual who, passing by my grave perhaps thinking other thoughts, suddenly stops and delivers this funeral oration to me, “How did this person come to lie here? Can one then lie without disgrace among the dishonored—and he certainly lies here with honor”—then I ask no more.”

Kierkegaard is a master of embedded fictions within fictions. In the coda to this book, he writes a “Letter to the Reader”, which is a fictional account of the writing of ““Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?””, where he reveals that the diary entries are fictional, but were written by the person of Frater Taciturnus, another fictional character himself. Taciturnus writes of the gentleman in his story, “His affront was not breaking the engagement but, with such a life-view, to want to fall in love.” Taciturnus then debates the merits of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious frameworks for going through life. “The ethical cannot regard the esthetic in any other way than to regard a direct union with it as a misalliance…. The ethical only asks about guilt or not guilty, is itself man enough to be a match for men, has no need for anything external and visible, to say nothing of something as ambiguously dialectical as fate and chance or the tangibility of some verdict document. The ethical is proud and declares: When I have judged then nothing more is needed…. The religious then plays the same role as the esthetic, but as the superior; it spaces out the limitless speed of the ethical, and development takes place. But the scene is the internal…. The principle of the spirit is that the external and the visible (the world’s gloriousness or its miserableness for the existing person, a result in the external or the lack of it for the one acting) exist to try faith, consequently not to deceive but in order that the spirit can be tested by placing it in the realm of the indifferent and taking itself back again…. Indifferent towards the externals, which the esthetic needs in the result, the religious disdains anything like that and proclaims, jointly and individually, that the person who believes he has finished (that is, fancies that he has, for such things cannot be believed because faith is expressly the infinite)—has lost…. What is expressed here about the lack of a result in the religious, I can also say in this way: the negative is higher than the positive…. For the finite being, and that, after all, is what human beings are as long as they live temporally, the negative infinity is the higher, and the positive is a dubious reassurance. Spiritual existence, especially the religious, is not easy; the believer continually lies out on the deep, has 70,000 fathoms of water beneath him. However long he lies out there, this still does not mean that he will gradually end up lying and relaxing onshore. He can become more calm, more experienced, find confidence that loves jest and a cheerful temperament—but until the very last he lies out on 70,000 fathoms of water.”

Taciturnus concludes the exposition of his thoughts on his fictional gentleman by dealing with the act of repentance. “A person’s highest inward action is to repent. But to repent is not a positive movement outwards or off to, but a negative movement inwards, not a doing but by oneself letting something happen to oneself…. Just as Jehovah in the Old Testament visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the latest generations, so repentance goes backward, continually presupposing the object of investigation. In repentance there is the impulse of the motion, and therefore everything is reversed…. The infinite annihilating power of this repentance is best seen in the sympathetically dialectical character that it also has.”