Summary: Philosophical Fragments (page 4)

Jesus Christ thus embodies the very possibility of divine love: Here then is God on earth, equal to the lowest of the low by the omnipotence of his love.¹

But recall that the form of a servant was not a borrowed form; and that is why God must suffer everything, undergo everything, endure everything: hunger in the wilderness, thirst in torment, abandonment in death.

A new problem now arises. Love, as we have seen, requires the reciprocal understanding of the two lovers. But can man understand what God is? Does he even understand himself? Here we encounter a formidable difficulty, to which Kierkegaard devotes the third chapter, entitled 'the Absolute Paradox'.

Even if we grant that man can understand himself (which amounts to treating as solved a problem that occupied the whole of Greek philosophy, namely the Socratic 'know thyself'), the remaining difficulty is: what is God?

His transcendence surpasses human intelligence and eludes it. Hence Kierkegaard calls him 'the Unknown':

But what, then, is this Unknown against which the understanding collides in its paradoxical passion, and which even disturbs a man's knowledge of himself? It is the Unknown. Yet at least it is nothing human, for man stands on familiar ground; nor is it anything else familiar to men. Let us therefore call this Unknown: God.

Man will seek to understand God, to know the unknowable; this is a kind of paradox which should not be rejected, but embraced as such, as Kierkegaard underlines in this splendid formula:

One must not think ill of the paradox, this passion of thought; thinkers who lack it are like lovers without passion—that is, poor partners.

It is natural that the understanding should seek to grasp what escapes it, since the climax of every passion is always to will its own destruction; and it is likewise the supreme passion of the understanding to seek the collision that leads to its own ruin.

This is why the supreme paradox of thought is to want to discover something that it itself cannot think.

Here, then, is the paradox of man's understanding of God stated plainly: If God differs absolutely from man, then man differs absolutely from God—but how is the understanding to conceive him? We seem to touch here upon a paradox; or again: how could the [understanding] understand the absolute different?

If God differs absolutely from man, we can at least know that God is untouched by what characterises man as such—sin: But this absolute difference between God cannot then lie in what man owes to God […] but in what he owes to himself, or indeed to his own guilt. In what, then, does the difference consist, if not in sin, since the difference—the absolute difference—is something man himself must be guilty of?

But this negative knowledge (of what God is not) gives us no idea of what he is. Above all, it deepens the paradox: how is the equality required for love between man and God possible, despite the absolute difference that separates them?

The paradox therefore resists the understanding. Two paths then open before us.

The first is to harden this opposition, refuse to accept this tragic conflict, and try to resolve it—to be offended by this limit to our understanding: If the paradox and the understanding collide […] the relationship will be unhappy, and this unhappy love of the understanding we might define more precisely by the term offence. For all offence, in its deepest ground, is a suffering […] and the offended person […] is always a sufferer.

But we can imagine another relation between understanding and paradox: a 'happy encounter'. The understanding can welcome the paradox without trying to resolve it, and accept its own limits. This is what is called 'faith':

How, then, does the disciple come into contact with this paradox? For we do not say that he must understand it, but only become aware that he is here confronted with the paradox. How this comes about we have already shown: it is through a happy collision of the understanding and the paradox in the instant, when the understanding cancels itself and the paradox gives itself up—and the third in whom this occurs […], this happy passion to which we shall now give a name […] We shall call it faith.

One last link remains to be forged between paradox and instant: Once the instant is posited, we have the paradox; for, in its most abbreviated form, the paradox may be called the instant; it is the instant that makes the disciple the non-truth; the man who knew himself is lost in perplexity about himself and […] becomes conscious of sin, etc.; once we posit the instant, everything follows of itself.

This is why offence, in its essence, is a false understanding of the instant, since one is, in fact, offended by the paradox, which in turn is the instant.

Offence, paradox, instant, sin, and faith thus define the Christian conception of the relation of master to disciple, of God to man. If we attach no significance to them, we fall back into the Socratic, Greek conception of the teaching of truth: The instant is the paradox without which, instead of going further, one returns to Socrates.

Thus what was lacking in Socrates (and, beyond him, in Greek thought) was the consciousness of sin, which he was just as incapable of teaching to another as any other was of teaching it to him, and which only God could make known to him—and this pointed towards an altogether different model.

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