Summary: Philosophical Fragments (page 3)

But above all, the Christian model rests on an entirely different conception of time, centred on the notion of the instant.

We know that this concept occupies an important place in Kierkegaard's thought. Recall that in his final years he gathered the pamphlets he wrote against the Church under this title: The Moment.

As we have seen, there is no instant in Socratic thought, since it dissolves into eternity. The moment at which I discover the truth matters little, because it pre-existed within me from all eternity.

In the Christian model, by contrast, the instant at which the disciple learns the truth—that is to say, the moment of conversion—acquires essential importance. Why?

Certainly because it is a moment of decisive import […] The break has been made, and the man can no longer retrace his steps. Thus, in the Instant, man becomes conscious of the second birth.¹

But there is a far more fundamental reason. For Kierkegaard, something singular takes place at that moment: The eternal did not exist beforehand, having come into being in that instant. This is a paradox: the eternal would seem to exist… from all eternity. Yet at conversion, this extraordinary phenomenon occurs: eternity becomes present.

In the Christian model, then, the instant appears as the point of encounter between the present and the eternal—as the moment when the eternal becomes present, comes into being. This is precisely what draws Kierkegaard to the notion:

And now, let us speak of the instant. The one in question is of a particular nature. Certainly it is brief and temporal, as every instant is—passing like it, and already past in the next instant; and yet it is decisive and full of eternity.

He even gives it a special name: let us call it the fulness of time.

Our homogeneous conception of time—one might call it rationalist—tends to deny the essential character of the instant: what one can do at a given moment, one can do at the next, we tell ourselves. The instants that make up time are equal, and their succession uniform.

Yet Kierkegaard defends the idea of a privileged, essential instant. He illustrates it with several examples, including this one: a knight arrives before two armies facing one another, and both sides want to enlist him at a king's ransom. He throws in his lot with one of them; it loses; he is taken prisoner; and he then offers his services to the victor, at the same rate. The victor, naturally, refuses: what had value a moment earlier has none now.

The instant is thus shown to be of essential importance; and this allows us, by analogy, to understand why it is so within the Christian conception.

So we have two models, one Greek, the other Christian—or, if you like, two civilisations—whose opposition Kierkegaard sums up as follows:

Whereas all the pathos of Greek thought is concentrated on recollection, that of our hypothesis is concentrated on the instant.

Now, what could move God to appear and reveal his truth, as teacher, to the disciple?

In a formula reminiscent of Aristotle, Kierkegaard maintains that the only possible driving force is love: the teacher's love for the disciple, God's love for man.

Yet a problem immediately arises: there is no love without a certain kind of equality. For only love makes the different equal, and outside equality or unity there is no understanding; and without complete understanding the teacher is not God.

But there is, of course, no equality between man and God. As we have seen, the disciple is in untruth [sin], and indeed is there by his own fault—and yet he is the object of God's love, who wishes to become his teacher, and whose concern is to restore equality.

It therefore seems that the relationship between man and his Creator can only be an unhappy love, given this constitutive inequality: If it cannot succeed, love will be unhappy, and the teaching empty of meaning, because teacher and disciple will have been unable to understand one another.

Kierkegaard illustrates this arresting idea with a concrete example. Suppose a king falls in love with a girl of the people and marries her. He will be anxious to raise her to his level, so that she may feel herself—and become—a queen; he cannot treat her as a peasant girl, for that would not be love but a form of contempt. The king will therefore want only to put aside the memory of this original inequality—that is, his quality as king, and the nothingness she had been.

The question therefore arises: between God and the believer, teacher and disciple, how can one find a solution, a point of unity where the understanding of love truly prevails?

God could choose to raise the disciple up by appearing in all his glory. But that is not the right way to proceed, since the king seeks not his own glorification but that of the girl.

On the contrary, God must lower himself to the level of the disciple: that is why he appears in the humblest form, that of a servant born in a stable, in the person of Christ. This is not a mere borrowed garment: it is his true form; for this is love's unfathomable depth, this earnest will—without a trace of mockery—to be the equal of the beloved.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Kierkegaard: A Close Reading