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

infinite importance the Godhead himself, directly communicating
with man, revealing the truth in the shape of man; in fact, as the
lowliest of men, yet insisting on implicit belief in Him! This,
according to Kierkegaard, constitutes the paradox of faith par
excellence. But this paradox, he shows, existed for the generation
contemporaneous with Christ in the same manner as it does for
those living now. To think that faith was an easier matter for those
who saw the Lord and walked in His blessed company is but a
sentimental, and fatal, delusion. On the other hand, to found one's
faith on the glorious results, now evident, of Christ's appearance in
the world is sheer thoughtlessness and blasphemy. With
ineluctable cogency it follows that "there can be no disciple at
second hand." Now, as well as "1800 years ago," whether in
Heathendom or in Christendom, faith is born of the same
conditions: the resolute acceptance by the individual of the
absolute paradox.

In previous works Kierkegaard had already intimated that what
furnished man the impetus to rise into the highest sphere and to
assail passionately and incessantly the barrier of the paradox, or
else caused him to lapse into "demonic despair," was the
consciousness of sin. In the book Begrebet Angest "The Concept
of Sin," he now attempts with an infinite and laborious subtlety to
explain the nature of sin. Its origin is found in the "sympathetic
antipathy" of Dread that force which at one and the same time
attracts and repels from the suspected danger of a fall and is
present even in the state of innocence, in children. It finally results
in a kind of "dizziness" which is fatal. Yet, so Kierkegaard
contends, the "fall" of man is, in every single instance, due to a
definite act of the will, a "leap" which seems a patent
contradiction.

To the modern reader, this is the least palatable of Kierkegaard's
works, conceived as it is with a sovereign and almost medieval
disregard of the predisposing undeniable factors of environment
and heredity (which, to be sure, poorly fit his notion of the
absolute responsibility of the individual). Its sombreness is
redeemed, to a certain degree, by a series of marvellous
observations, drawn from history and literature, on the various
phases and manifestations of Dread in human life.

On the same day as the book just discussed there appeared, as a
"counter-irritant," the hilariously exuberant Forord "Forewords," a
collection of some eight playful but vicious attacks, in the form of
prefaces, on various foolish manifestations of Hegelianism in
Denmark. They are aimed chiefly at the high-priest of the
"system," the poet Johan Ludvig Heiberg who, as the arbiter
elegantiarum of the times had presumed to review, with a plentiful
lack of insight, Kierkegaard's activity. But some of the most telling
shots are fired at a number of the individualist Kierkegaard's pet