Page:Selections from the writings of Kierkegaard.djvu/28

 "Repetition" we are shown ad oculos an abortive transition into the religious sphere, with a corresponding relapse into the aesthetic 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 æsthetically 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 æsthetic 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.