"Selections From the Writings of Kierkegaard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kierkegaard Soren)

relation to the divinity necessarily can be certain only to
Abraham's self, his action is altogether incomprehensible to others.
Reason recoils before the absolute paradox of the individual who
chooses to rise superior to the general law.

The rise into the religious sphere is always likely to be the
outcome of some severe inner conflict engendering infinite
passion. In the splendidly written Gjentagelse "Repetition" we are
shown ad oculos an abortive transition into the religious sphere,
with a corresponding relapse into the Сsthetic sphere.
Kierkegaard's own love-story is again drawn upon: the "Young
Person" ardently loves the woman; but discovers to his
consternation that she is in reality but a burden to him since,
instead of having an actual, living relation to her, he merely
"remembers" her when she is present. In the ensuing collision of
motives his Сsthetically cool friend Constantin Constantius
advises him to act as one unworthy of her as did Kierkegaard and
to forget her. But instead of following this advice, and lacking a
deeper religious background, he flees the town and subsequently
transmutes his trials into poetry that is, relapses into the Сsthetic
sphere: rather than, like Job, whom he apostrophises passionately,
"receiving all again" (having all "repeated") in a higher sphere.
This idea of the resumption of a lower stage into a higher one is
one of Kierkegaard's most original and fertile thoughts. It is
illustrated here with an amazing wealth of instances.

So far, it had been a question of religious feeling in general how it
may arise, and what its nature is. In the pivotal work Philosophiske
Smuler "Philosophic Trifles" note the irony Kierkegaard throws
the searching rays of his penetrating intellect on the grand problem
of revealed religion: can one's eternal salvation be based on an
historical event? This is the great stumbling block to the
understanding.

Hegel's philosophic optimism maintained that the difficulties of
Christianity had been completely "reconciled" or "mediated" in the
supposedly higher synthesis of philosophy, by which process
religion had been reduced to terms which might be grasped by the
intellect. Kierkegaard, fully voicing the claim both of the intellect
and of religion, erects the barrier of the paradox, impassable
except by the act of faith. As will be seen, this is Tertullian's Credo
quia absurdum.

In the briefest possible outline his argument is as follows: Socrates
had taught that in reality every one had the truth in him and needed
but to be reminded of it by the teacher who thus is necessary only
in helping the disciple to discover it himself. That is the indirect
communication of the truth. But now suppose that the truth is not
innate in man, suppose he has merely the ability to grasp it when
presented to him. And suppose the teacher to be of absolute,