Kierkegaard: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling · As Kierkegaard portrays the aesthetic level in the first volume of Either/Or, we come to see that the ultimate for the person who lives

Contemporary Theology I:

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 08 of 24ST503

Kierkegaard: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling

Contemporary Theology I:Hegel to Death of God Theologies

In our last lecture, we were looking at Kierkegaard and in particular we were talking about his concept of the three stages of life or lifestyle. We not only talked about that, but I began to illustrate that in his work Stages on Life’s Way. And I had just introduced his book Either/Or. I gave you a general description of that. And in this lecture, I want to turn and more specifically look at some of the things that he says and then move on to his work Fear and Trembling. But before we get to that, why don’t we bow for a moment of prayer.

Father, again we are so thankful that You are our God and that we know You. We thank You for all of Your blessings to us. We pray again that as we study that You would give us insight into the principles that are being presented. May we see how they are helpful in our own Christian walk, and may we also see the ways in which we can use this material in ministering to other people. We just ask all of these things in Christ’s name. Amen.

Well last time I talked at the very end about Either/Or. And I mentioned to you that there are two volumes to this work. The first volume deals with the aesthetic level of existence. And let me give you a general description of the message of volume one and then look for just a few moments at certain things that we find in that volume. In general, volume one of Either/Or gives a portrayal of sophisticated hedonism. In fact, it is so sophisticated that at some points, the highest pleasure is seen as reflection on one’s own experience of pleasure. Now that’s really getting into the outer echelons of hedonism. Aesthetic existence is seen then, in this particular portion of this work, as an endless possibility but never a fulfillment. In other words, there are always new experiences to encounter that will bring you pleasure. But none of them entirely fulfills the person who’s living at the aesthetic level of life. If they really fulfilled him, he might not look for more of them. But that’s not the way life is at this level. You always want to experience something more. Now the refined aesthete is

John S. Feinberg, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Biblical and

Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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portrayed as someone who has some moral awareness, but he just hasn’t made any moral commitments. He’s indifferent to duty. He’s not really defiant of it. The aesthete is portrayed as someone who makes choices, but the choices are not choices about good or evil. Instead, he chooses between one pleasure and another. And he thinks about whether he should decide to choose about something that’s really significant or not. But he never actually chooses between good and evil.

As Kierkegaard portrays the aesthetic level in the first volume of Either/Or, we come to see that the ultimate for the person who lives at the level of the aesthetic is despair. It’s despair of ever becoming a true self. And not only is the ultimate for this person the realization that there’s despair, but there’s actually commitment to that despair. This happens when the person living at this level of existence recognizes that he’s not going to create a true self if he continues to live at this level. But he deliberately chooses not to move to the next level. You see at this point, you understand that life at this level will be filled with despair, but you’re making a decision to commit yourself to living that kind of lifestyle. This kind of choice is an honest commitment to despair. That is, at least you realize that you’re going to commit yourself to despair. It’s not something that is heaped upon you unknowingly. You know what you’re doing. And you choose it. Now of course, one can always leap to the next level of existence if you want, but you don’t have to do that. You can continue to live this kind of mindless existence.

Well that’s a general description of what you find in volume one of Either/Or. There are various sections to it, and there’s no way that we could possibly look at each section of that. But I’d like to at least focus on one portion of volume one. And it’s the section that’s entitled “The Rotation Method.” And one of the reasons that I point to this is that I think it’s just an awful lot of fun. The rotation method is Kierkegaard’s answer or the answer really of A, this refined aesthete. It’s the answer on how you wind up getting the most out of the pleasures that are available for you to experience. Now there’s a character who appears in this particular portion known as Kremalis. And his very first comment actually sets the stage for this section. And what Kremalis says is that when you get too much of something, whatever it is, you get bored. And Kremalis says that eventually one gets too much of everything whatever the pleasure may be. Well, he begins his thoughts with a principle. I’m going to be reading from Either/Or as I find portions of it in a book entitled A Kierkegaard Anthology.



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And that book is edited by Robert Bretall. Now in that particular edition, we find that the section entitled “The Rotation Method” begins on page 21. And here’s how it begins,

Starting from a principle is affirmed by people of experience to be a very reasonable procedure. I am willing to humor them, and so begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. This principle possesses the quality of being in the highest degree repellant an essential requirement in the case of negative principles which are in the last analysis the principles of all motion. It is not merely repellant but infinitely forbidding. And whoever has this principle back of him cannot but receive an infinite impetus forward to help him make new discoveries.

Well now as you listen to that, you might have thought what in the world is going on with this? This sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. It sounds like it’s awfully boring itself. Well there’s a certain method to Kierkegaard’s madness here if we can put it that way. He says in the section that he’s going to begin with a principle. Now that’s the sort of thing that a Hegelian would do. But here it’s not beginning with a principle so as to build a system but to make a very simple point. And the point that Kremalis makes is that all men are boring. Now since that’s his point, he decides to use a typical strategy, namely, begin with a principle and then elaborate it. He wants to use a typical strategy which in itself is boring to make this simple point that all men are boring. As I read through what he was saying there just the first part of it, it probably sounded to you very, very boring. And that of course is a case where the style of what’s written also makes the point of what the author’s trying to say. Well as you proceed through this section, the problem is explained. And the problem here is that if you live a life at the level of pleasure only, there’re always new pleasures to seek out no matter what you like. If you really like music for example, if you do nothing but listen to music and if you listen to the exact same kind of music, you’re eventually going to get bored. You’re gonna want something new. And that’s true with any sort of pleasure that you might think about.

As we see the different kinds of things that can bore us and the need to go to something new, we’re even told that there are two types of boring people. There are, on the one hand those who bore



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other people, and then there are those who bore themselves. So you can see that the real problem here is to try to figure out a way out of boredom. Well, some people like to say that idleness is the root of evil. But in this section, what we’re told is that idleness is not the root of evil. Boredom is the root of all evil. And the answer to that boredom is not work, because even work can be boring as well. So something has to be done to break this boredom. On page 25 and following in the Bretall volume, you begin to get the answer. And the answer is the rotation method. Now what does this mean?

Well essentially what we’re told here is that the typical way for someone to solve their boredom is to move from one thing to another. In other words, completely change things. The rotation method is a method which allows you to do maybe the same thing you’ve always been doing but perhaps do it differently. One night you can have chicken in one fashion. Another night if you want to have chicken again, you can cook it a slightly different way; you can serve a different side vegetable. Another night if you want to have chicken again you can do it a third way. Slightly rotate things each night, and when you do this you begin to see that the possibilities for changing things are really almost limitless if not limitless. And actually if you proceed this way with the various pleasures of life, you can find that you can break up the boredom of life by simply rotating or changing things. As you might think here, the idea of the rotation method is taken from what the farmer does. How does the farmer get the most out of his field? Well he does it by rotating his crops. One year in a given field he plants one crop. The next year he plants a different one. It’s the same field each year, and he’s farming it but he gets the most out of it by changing things.

Well, a couple of keys to the rotation method are to avoid hope and also to cultivate the proper kind of remembering and forgetting. Let me read a portion from this section on “The Rotation Method” that talks about this, and I think you’ll see what we mean. This is found on page 26 and 27 in the Bretall volume. What we read says the following:

The more resourceful in changing the mode of cultivation one can be the better. But every particular change will always come under the general categories of remembering and forgetting. Life in its entirety moves in these two currents, and hence it is essential to have them under control. It is impossible to live artistically before one has



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made up one’s mind to abandon hope. For hope precludes self-limitation. It is a very beautiful sight to see a man put out to sea with the fair wind of hope. And one may even use the opportunity to be taken in tow. But one should never permit hope to be taken aboard one’s own ship, least of all as a pilot. For hope is a faithless shipmaster. Hope was one of the dubious gifts of Prometheus. Instead of giving men the foreknowledge of the immortals, he gave them hope.

So hope leads ultimately to the feeling that maybe something significant is going to happen and that will lead you to significant choices possibly. Well at this level of existence, you don’t want any significant choices. What about remembering and forgetting? The next paragraph says,

To forget all men wish to forget. And when something unpleasant happens, they always say ‘Oh that one might forget.’ But forgetting is an art that must be practiced beforehand. The ability to forget is conditioned upon the method of remembering. But this again depends on the mode of experiencing. Whoever plunges into his experiences with the momentum of hope will remember so that he cannot forget nil admirari (which is Latin for “to wonder at nothing”) is therefore the real philosophy. No moment must be permitted a greater significance than that it can be forgotten when convenient. Each moment ought, however, to have so much significance that it can be recollected at will.

You would recollect it sometime later so you could get more of the juiciness of that moment out of it. You could get a further pleasure. But on the other hand, when you get tired of it, it’s nice to be able to forget it appropriately; and then maybe you can come back to it later. Well you get the idea of what is being said in this section.

Likewise, it’s not only that you need to avoid hope if things are gonna work in the rotation method and you’ve got to cultivate the proper kind of remembering and forgetting, but you also have to avoid binding relationships like friendship and marriage. Now of course you can still involve yourself in social contacts



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and in erotic experiences, but you don’t want to make any long-lasting commitments. In addition we’re told that business should be avoided. But on the other hand, you shouldn’t be totally inactive either. If you’re totally inactive, that can be boring as well. The key in all of this is to have experiences that are intense experiences. The key is not how many experiences you have. The key is how intense each individual experience is. Get the most out of everything that you possibly can.

Now you may say what in the world is Kierkegaard trying to do? Well he’s trying to, in this section as he does in the whole of that first volume, portray the aesthetic life at its very best, someone who has really gotten this down to a science and knows how to get every ounce of enjoyment out of every experience. And he hopes that when you reflect on that, you’ll see that this is the best that one can do. But hopefully you’ll come to the conclusion that this isn’t good enough.

Well the section ends on page 32 and 33 in the Bretall volume with a comment here about the accidental. Let me just read this to you and make a comment or two about it. The arbitrariness in one’s self (and of course the rotation method is basically that one needs to be arbitrary, do something different, that will break up the boredom). “The arbitrariness in one’s self corresponds to the accidental in the external world. One should therefore always have an eye open for the accidental. Always be expeditus if anything should offer. The so-called social pleasures for which we prepare a week or two in advance amount to so little.” You see there’s not enough arbitrariness and accidental things that can show up there, so that if you do too much planning, that’s gonna also be boring. “On the other hand, even the most insignificant thing may accidentally offer rich material for amusement. It is impossible here to go into detail, for no theory can adequately embrace the concrete.” This, of course, is a slap at Hegel who thought that theory could embrace the concrete. And the more theory you had the more entities that it incorporated, the more concrete the thing was that you were thinking about. Well to finish off this portion the text then says, “Even the most completely developed theory is poverty-stricken compared with the fullness which the man of genius easily discovers in his ubiquity.”

Well as you look at that, we are basically told here that we ought to be arbitrary. We ought to look for something new and something different. But I think there’s something even more here as I suggested when I was reading through that section. I see



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a slam here against the Hegelian idea of necessity. I see a slam here against the idea as well that the fully-developed theory is the most concrete. Instead, what this portion of “The Rotation Method” is saying is that the individual experience, perhaps the experience that happens just accidentally not by any kind of necessity, that individual experience is the most concrete. That’s what’s the most real not some system that someone spins out, that has all sorts of theories and shows you how all the ideas fit together.

Well, what’s the overall point of this section entitled “The Rotation Method”? Well the point is to show how to get the most out of the aesthetic level of experience. And it shows that one can be very, very clever in doing that and avoid boredom in the process. And yet what Kierkegaard hopes that we all will see is that even if this is aestheticism at its very best, hopefully we will see that if this is what life is all about, this kind of life is really bankrupt. No choices of any great significance are made at all. Such a non-thinking kind of approach to life can indeed lead to boredom. And if that happens, the best that you can possibly do is simply rearrange things so that you can get more out of each experience by rotating things. But of course, that kind of lifestyle we’re all supposed to see is bankrupt. That’s not being an authentic self. We ought to want something more. Well as I said, there are a number of other sections in volume one, but we can’t cover all of them. I just want to give you a taste of what this is like.

Let me turn to volume two of Either/Or and make some general comments about it and then quote a few passages from that part of Either/Or so you can see what Kierkegaard says here. Now as we suggested in our previous lecture, volume two focuses primarily on the ethical level of existence. And it urges moral responsibility and a choosing to live at the ethical level of existence. A meaningful life, we are shown, is impossible unless one is morally responsible for what he or she does. The ethical life is a life that is to be ruled from within not from without. In the aesthetic level of existence, we’re ruled from things and by things that are external to us, that appeal to our senses. At the ethical level of existence on the other hand, we should be ruled by ethical norms. And those norms should be very firmly within us as we reflect upon our duties, as we reflect upon the decisions that we need to make.

Well now the ethical life itself means that one accepts one’s responsibility under the rubric of the sovereignty of God. In Either/Or it really does begin to sound as though the religious level is also



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included in living at the ethical level at some points. What we’re going to see is that in a work like Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard more clearly distinguishes between life lived at the ethical level and life lived at the religious level. But in Either/Or, there tends to be a blending of the two levels together. Self-realization, we’re shown in Either/Or, isn’t merely self-creation, but it is also integration of the eternal into the temporal. So Kierkegaard here is saying that you really can’t find self-realization unless you do it by putting God, who is the eternal, into your temporality. Well an awful lot of this volume deals with the need to accept moral responsibility and the need to choose.

As Kierkegaard in Either/Or lays out the distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical levels, he’s not saying that the aesthetic life is an evil life. But he is saying that it’s one that avoids ethical decisions. It’s indifferent to the ethical. It’s not really rebellious against it. And the problem of living in the aesthetic sphere of life is that one delays one’s duties. What I mean by that is that one doesn’t make decisions about what one should do in terms of important issues. But instead, one simply sits and considers the options. And you confront a key decision in life and rather than choosing something, you sit and you think about all your options. And in the process of thinking about all the options, you find that life moves on. It passes you by. And if you handle every important decision that way, you find that at some point in your life you’ll look back over your life and you’ll see that you really haven’t lived at all. Because every time when you confronted an important decision, you simply sat and thought about it and thought about it and never made a decision.

Now when you move from the aesthetic to the ethical level, you don’t destroy the beauty that you found in the aesthetic realm. Instead you add to it duty. But this duty incorporates and it enriches the beauty that was already there. An example that of course is used in this work is marriage. Marriage is an institution where love’s beauty is enhanced by the duties of marriage. Well at one point in volume two, Kierkegaard has the classic statement. And that statement says that the ethical is not the choice of good or evil but the choice of good and evil. In other words, one is willing to put himself into the sphere where moral choices are made. You’ve, at the aesthetic level, been avoiding those kinds of choices, but now by choosing good and evil you make a decision to start living at the ethical level. Although, according to this portion of the work, once you make the decision to live at the ethical level inevitably according to Kierkegaard, though not



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automatically, you will wind up choosing the good. The claim is also made in the second volume that it’s not so much important as to what you choose as it is important how you go about choosing. Do you choose passionately and in faith, or do you sort of choose disinterestedly and without much passion? If you do choose passionately, then we’re told that you invariably and eventually will choose the right thing.

Choice then is crucial in order to develop one’s self identity. And the only way to really develop your own identity is to start making choices. Now that may sound a bit strange, but think about our experience with teenagers who are living in our home. They begin to rebel against their parents. They make choices that we would say are really wrong choices. But as a matter of fact, they feel that it’s necessary to make some sort of choice in order to develop their own personal identity as distinct from their parents. Now what Kierkegaard is saying is that in a similar way in order to really be a person, to have a personal identity, you need to start choosing. And of course in his opinion, to ultimately develop your true self you must deny yourself by choosing God.

Well in spite of all the positive things that one can say about the ethical sphere of life, it also ends in despair. And the despair arises because the ethical level of existence defines what duty is, but it doesn’t offer you any help in obeying your duty. And of course that itself causes despair. Despair also arises because within ethics there are conflicts of duty. And the duties don’t tell you how to resolve those conflicts. And of course that creates a great deal of tension and a great deal of despair. It’s only in a religious transcending of the ethical in a paradoxical leap of faith that you come to a resolution of the tensions that are aroused in you by these ethical and moral conflicts. In other words, the only way to really get beyond this is not to stay at the ethical level but rather than trying to figure out which of the two ethical duties you ought to obey you simply say I’m going to obey directly God who is the Lawgiver. And I’m not going to worry about whether these laws conflict and how I should resolve that conflict. It’s only in making that leap that you’re actually able to transcend the problem and the despair of these moral conflicts.

Well at best then, ethical life is going to end in despair. And hopefully it will lead one to repentance. But repentance here is negative in Kierkegaard’s thinking. It doesn’t save you. It just shows you that you’ve really come to the end of yourself. And that realization hopefully will lead you to make a leap of faith to



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the next level which does in fact save you. Well that’s a general description of volume two of Either/Or. Let me, if I may, just cite a few passages from Kierkegaard. Again I’m going to be citing from the Bretall volume to show you some of these key ideas. The passages I’m going to cite for you and quote come from the section in volume two that’s entitled “Equilibrium.” And it’s in this section that the emphasis on choice in order to constitute the person rings very loud and very clear. You find throughout this the constant theme that one must choose and one most choose rightly.

In one section of this, and that is here in Bretall from pages 98 through 102, he shows the folly of the person who claims that “either/or” is his motto. In other words, he talks a good talk. He seems to say that he thinks choosing is important. But then he doesn’t really take it seriously. And the point here is that you’ve got to do more than talk about making choices. You actually have to choose them. Then on page 102 in Bretall and on to page 103, he has a section where he talks about choice being crucial for constituting the personality. And he also distinguishes between deliberating about making a choice, thinking about it, and actually making the choice. Let me read these sections for you.

The choice itself is decisive for the content of the personality. Through the choice, the personality immerses itself in the thing chosen. And when it does not choose, it withers away in consumption. For an instant, it may seem as if the thing with regard to which a choice was made lay outside of the chooser that he stands in no relationship to it, that he can preserve a state of indifference over against it. This is the instance of deliberation. But this, like the platonic instant has no existence least of all in the abstract sense in which you would hold it fast. And the longer one stares at it, the less it exists. That which has to be chosen stands in the deepest relationship to the chooser. And when it is a question of a choice involving a life problem, the individual must naturally be living in the meantime. Hence, it comes about that the longer he postpones the choice, the easier it is for him to alter its character notwithstanding that he is constantly deliberating and deliberating and believes that thereby he is holding the alternatives distinctly apart. When life’s “either/or” is regarded in this way, one is not easily tempted to jest with it.



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Well he then moves on to talk further about choosing and that if you begin to make significant choices, eventually you’re going to wind up choosing things that are good. I turn here to page 106 in Bretall and pick it up at this point. “What is it then that I distinguish in my either/or? Is it good and evil? No, I would only bring you up to the point where the choice between the evil and the good acquires significance for you.” You see the person who’s lived at the aesthetic level has never really had to make choices where good and evil are really significant for him. The choices he makes are between one thing and another, but they’re really morally indifferent. Now what Kierkegaard is saying is I want you just to come to the point where a choice between good and evil really has significance for you. “Everything hinges upon this,” he says.

As soon as one can get a man to stand at the crossways in such a position that there is no recourse but to choose, he will choose the right. Hence, if it should chance that while you are in the course of reading this somewhat lengthy dissertation, you were to feel that the instant for choice had come, then throw the rest of this away. Never concern yourself about it. You have lost nothing. But choose and you shall see what validity there is in this act. Yea no young girl can be so happy in the choice of her heart as is a man who knows how to choose. So then one either has to live aesthetically or one has to live ethically.

The last paragraph on page 107 which comes very close to the end of the section that Bretall has anthologized has this very, very famous statement about not choosing good or evil but choosing good and evil. And let me just read this to you. “My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil. It denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil or excludes them.” You either choose he’s saying then to live at the aesthetic level where you don’t really choose between good and evil, or you choose to live at the ethical level where you do choose between good and evil. Now he says this is the first decision that you make. Once you’ve made the decision to leap to the ethical, then you’ll have to be concerned about whether you choose good or evil. But first of all you make the choice to choose good and evil. What you can see then from Either/Or is the emphasis on moving out of the aesthetic level of existence into the ethical level of existence. Now when we turn from Either/Or to Kierkegaard’s Fear



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and Trembling, we find the emphasis on moving from the ethical level of existence to the religious level of existence.

Now Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling was published in 1843. And I don’t know whether you’ve ever had occasion to read it before, but if you haven’t you’re in for a real treat. This is Abraham offering up Isaac as you’ve probably never read it and never contemplated it before. Let me just say some words by way of background, and then we’ll begin to look at some of the main ideas of this important work. Now the surface content in this work is the story of Abraham offering up Isaac on Mount Moriah. But Kierkegaard really uses this incident in Scripture as his prime example of the relation of the ethical to the religious stages of life. His point here is not that when you live at the religious level you destroy the ethical level. In fact, more often than not one’s obligations to God, which define the religious level, will coincide with your ethical obligations. Kierkegaard’s point is that sometimes your obligation to the ethical law will contradict what God asks you to do. And in those cases, the individual has to choose the moral law giver rather than the moral law. This is simply part of what it means to live at the level of the religious rather than to live at the level of only the ethical. However, even when God requires exactly what the ethical law tells you to do, you still can live at the religious level. It’s just that the reason that you obey the ethical law is not that it’s the law and it’s your duty, the reason that you obey it now is because God has told you that this is what you’re supposed to do.

The other main component of what it means to live at the religious level is to live life in faith. But of course we have to understand what Kierkegaard means by faith. And what he means by faith is not what an awful lot of Christians in his day meant by faith. Certainly it wasn’t what the Hegelians and those who were following after a Hegelianized form of Christianity took faith to mean. For the Hegelians, faith was a stage in one’s system of thought. But one always had to try to go beyond faith to something that was higher. You had to cancel it and yet preserve it in some new synthesis, some new phase of experience that was higher. For Kierkegaard on the other hand, real faith as he understood it was the highest that one could possibly get. There isn’t any going beyond faith. The most that you can ever do is to attain to faith. And the fact of the matter is Kierkegaard believed that most people never came to real faith as Scripture and Christianity presented it. Those who do understand that living in faith is the highest to attain to and those who actually attain to faith are those who make out of



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themselves the most authentic self. So a major theme in this book then is to describe what true faith is.

Well from what I’ve said already about this work, it should be clear that in this work there’s a whole lot of rejecting of Hegelianism. And surely that was part of Kierkegaard’s purpose in writing this work. But in this work in general, especially in the first parts of it, Kierkegaard also wants to compare the difference between what he calls the knight of resignation who is also the tragic hero and the moral hero. He wants to compare that person with the knight of faith. The tragic hero attaches himself to the universal, to the ethical norm; whereas the knight of faith is someone who goes his lone and solitary way and attaches himself directly to God. Now before leaving these introductory comments, I must also add that in the background of this book is Kierkegaard’s experience with Regine Olsen. In order to serve a higher principle, namely protecting Regine, he had to give her up just as Abraham was ready to give up Isaac in order to serve God. But judged against the concepts of this book as we’re going to see, Kierkegaard would have to be considered a knight of resignation, a moral hero, rather than in fact a knight of faith. Now at some points we’ll see that the things that he did fit more the description of the knight of faith. But in certain respects, the description also fits the moral hero, the tragic hero as he describes him.

Now the pseudonym under which this work is written is Johannes de Silentio, John the Silent. And in regard to that, it seems that this pseudonymous author is not to be identified with Kierkegaard himself because Johannes repeatedly says that he admires the hero of faith but he’s not that person himself. On the other hand Kierkegaard, especially in his relationship with Regine, probably saw himself as the knight of faith. Well again it’s impossible for me to look through all sections of this book with you. But let me see if I can highlight some things in it that lay out what it means to have faith and lay out what it means to be a knight of faith and live at the religious level.

Let me first of all point to several things that we find in a section that is entitled “Panegyric Upon Abraham.” Now I’m going to be citing from the edition of Fear and Trembling that is published by Princeton University Press. This particular edition was published and printed back in 1970. And it not only includes Fear and Trembling, but it includes his other work The Sickness Unto Death. Now on page 31 of this edition where we have the “Panegyric Upon Abraham,” there is a discussion of what true greatness is.



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And there is the assertion that Abraham really had it. But we also begin to see at that point what Kierkegaard is going to mean by faith. Let me just read a section for you.

No, not one shall be forgotten who was great in the world. But each was great in his own way, and each in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved. For he who loved himself became great by himself. And he who loved other men became great by his selfless devotion. But he who loved God became greater than all. Everyone shall be remembered, but each became great in proportion to his expectation. One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greater than all.

That begins to give you an idea of what is going to be involved in exercising faith and why Abraham is viewed as someone who is such a beautiful example of having faith. Well on the bottom of page 32 and the top of page 33 we get a further idea of what faith is. But also in what we see here, we see a description which fits Kierkegaard’s own thinking about his relationship to Regine. Let me just read again.

What is it to be God’s elect? It is to be denied in youth the wishes of youth so as with great pains to get them fulfilled in old age. But Abraham believed and held fast the expectation. If Abraham had wavered, he would have given it up. If he had said to God, ‘Then perhaps it is not after all Thy will that it should come to pass, so I will give up the wish, it was my only wish. It was my bliss. My soul is sincere. I hide no secret malice because Thou didst deny it to me.’ If Abraham had said all of this, he would not have been forgotten. He would have saved many by his example. Yet he would not be the father of faith.

And then this is the key sentence. “For it is great to give up one’s wish, but it is greater to hold it fast after having given it up. It is great to grasp the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up.” That indeed, I would

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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Kierkegaard: Either/Or, Fear and TremblingLesson 08 of 24

suggest to you, is his thinking about what he did in regard to his relationship with Regine. Well in my next lecture, we’ll see more of what Kierkegaard means by faith. And we’ll also come to the three main questions he raises in the book.

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Kierkegaard: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling · As Kierkegaard portrays the aesthetic level in the first volume of Either/Or, we come to see that the ultimate for the person who lives