If there were not eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair? If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond uniting mankind, if one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds on the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim, if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for it prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches – how empty and devoid of comfort life would be! But for that reason, it is not so, and as God created man and woman, so too he shaped the hero and the poet or speech-maker.
No! No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved. For he who loved himself became great in himself, and he who loved others became great through his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all. They shall all be remembered, but everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. One became great through expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greater than all. They shall all be remembered, but everyone was great in proportion to the magnitude of what he strove with. There was one who relied upon himself and gained everything, and one who, secure in his strength, sacrificed everything; but greater than all was the one who believed God.
5 comments:
Yep, Kierkegaard is that rarity of rarities - an eloquent philosopher. Of course, you know where he's going to take this - watch his conception of God's nature - that's the really interesting and arguable point by which this passage leads to curious conclusions.
FANTASTIC!!! Gave me shivers. Anything I say is anticlimactic.
SDG,
Zach Ivins
www.zachivins.com
I hope you have a good time with CFC.
Magically,
Zach Ivins
Where did Kierkegaard go wrong? He is credited by Francis Schaeffer as being the predecessor to Secular and Religious existentialism, the first one to move below the line of despair, as Schaeffer puts it, leading us to opptimism as being irrational and rationality = pessimism.
He was not there with the writing of the passage quoted, but it did occur.
In his book Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard talked about love defying reason. He commented, that more than it required Abraham the courage to go to Mount Moriah (future Temple Mount in Jerusalem) where that terrible human sacrifice of his son was to take place, where his life of reason and spiritual enlightenment was to grind to a mocking halt, it took him more courage to go back to life, to a life of defeated reason, to a life of a man who almost went mad but sadly didn’t.
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