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

the conflagration will follow."

In appraising Kierkegaard's life and works it will be found true, as
HФffding says, that he can mean much even to those who do not
subscribe to the beliefs so unquestioningly entertained by him.
And however much they may regret that he poured his noble wine
into the old bottles, they cannot fail to recognize the yeoman's
service he did, totii for sincere Christians in compelling them to
rehearse inwardly what ever tends to become a matter of form:
what it means to be a Christian; and for others, in deepening their
sense of individual responsibility. In fact, every one who has once
come under his influence and has wrestled with this mighty spirit
will bear away some blessing. In its time when, as in our own, the
crowd, society, the millions, the nation, had depressed the
individual to an insignificant atom and what is worse, in the
individual's own estimation; when shallow altruistic, socializing
effort thought naively that the millenium was at hand, he drove the
truth home that, on the contrary, the individual is the measure of
all things; that we do not live en masse; that both the terrible
responsibility and the great satisfactions of life inhere in the
individual. Again, more forcibly than any one else in modern
times, certainly more cogently than Pascal, he demonstrated that
the possibility of proof in religion is an illusion; that doubt cannot
be combatted by reason, that it ever will be credo quia impossibile.
In religion, he showed the utter incompatibility of the Сsthetic and
the religious life; and in Christianity, he re-stated and repointed the
principle of ideal perfection by his unremitting insistence on
contemporaneousness with Christ. It is another matter whether by
so doing Kierkegaard was about to pull the pillars from underneath
the great edifice of Christianity which housed both him and his
enemies: seeing that he himself finally doubted whether it had ever
existed apart from the Founder and, possibly, the Apostles.

Kierkegaard is not easy reading. One's first impression of
crabbedness, whimsicality, abstruseness will, however, soon give
way to admiration of the marvellous instrument of precision
language has become in his hands. To be sure, he did not write for
people who are in a hurry, nor for dullards. His closely reasoned
paragraphs and, at times huge, though rhetorically faultless,
periods require concentrated attention, his involutions and
repetitions, handled with such incomparable virtuosity, demand an
everlasting readiness of comprehension on the part of the reader.
On the other hand his philosophic work is delightfully "Socratic,"
unconventional, and altogether "un-textbooklike." Kierkegaard
himself wished that his devotional works should be read aloud.
And, from a purely Сsthetic point of view, it ought to be a delight
for any orator to practice on the wonderful periods of e.g., "The
Preparation," or of, say, the parable of the coach-horses in "Acts of
the Apostles." They alone would be sufficient to place Kierkegaard
in the front rank of prose writers of the nineteenth century where,