Summary: Philosophical Fragments (page 5)

This new model did not emerge through the spread of a new philosophy, a new doctrine, but through the coming of God himself: Here, then, is God appearing as teacher who teaches […] he has taken the form of a servant […] If God had not come himself, everything would have remained Socratic; we should have had no instant, and we should have been deprived of paradox.¹

Indeed, the presence of God, far from being a chance encounter with his doctrine, is an essential feature of it; for the presence of God in human form, even in the humility of the servant, is precisely the doctrine. Or again: The object of faith will no longer be the doctrine but the teacher.

Kierkegaard delights in describing these privileged moments in the history of humanity: Here, then, is God walking about in the city where he has appeared […]; his only necessity in life is to preach his doctrine, which serves him in place of eating and drinking; to teach men is his work, and to attend to the disciples is his rest from that work […] Wherever the teacher appears, the crowd gathers around him—curious to see, curious to hear, eager to be able to tell others that they have seen and heard him.

The content of his teaching, the Good News, is the irruption of the eternal into the present—namely, the Instant:

For the disciple, the news of the day […] is the eternal, the eternity that begins. The news of the day begins eternity.

This is precisely the phenomenon we have already analysed: the irruption of the eternal into the present, by virtue of which faith goes beyond mere historical knowledge. In one sense, the life and death of Jesus Christ are a historical fact, belonging to History. But the eternity that this fact carries within it transcends that status: it becomes something else, something that demands to be thought. This fact of history will not have for him merely a simple historical interest, but will determine his eternal happiness.

This is why faith cannot be reduced to history. Suppose someone knows the history of Jesus perfectly, and is therefore one of his 'contemporaries', following him constantly, and so on. Would that contemporary be the disciple? Not at all. For the role of historical witness is […] difficult enough for the contemporary disciple; but the misfortune is that knowing a historical circumstance, and even knowing them all with the certainty of an eyewitness, in no way makes a witness into a disciple […]—since this knowledge signifies for him nothing other than history.

Imagine a man who absorbs all the teaching of his master, yet remains indifferent to it. Is he therefore a disciple of that master? Not at all: This life of the teacher would have been only a historical event, a contingent knowledge […] a matter of memory.

We must therefore grasp that so long as eternity and history remain external to one another, history is only an occasion.

The Instant brings about their paradoxical synthesis, and this paradox is precisely the object of faith. Kierkegaard captures it in this formula: […] that happy passion which we call faith, and whose object is the paradox, the sole reconciler precisely of the contradictions, being the eternalising of history and the historicising of eternity.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard had already taken care to defend faith against the pretensions of Hegelian philosophy, and against those of ethics, by showing that it constitutes an irreducible sphere. Here, he continues that work by distinguishing faith from history, and, beyond that, from knowledge:

Faith is not a kind of knowledge; for every kind of knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, which excludes the temporal and history as indifferent, or else is pure historical knowledge; but what kind of knowledge could have as its object this absurdity of identifying eternity with history?

He illustrates this with an example: If I acknowledge Spinoza's doctrine, I do not concern myself, at the moment when I come to know it, with Spinoza, but with his doctrine; whereas at other times I concern myself with him historically. The relation, by contrast, of the disciple to the teacher in question is that of a believer: that is, he is eternally concerned with the historical existence of this teacher.

Nor is faith an act of the will, because the disciple does not possess the condition within himself (it is a gift of God). Now, if I do not possess it […] all my willing is, in the end, of no use. Ultimately, in the Christian model, how, then, does the man who wants to learn become a believer or disciple? Through the dismissal of the intellect, and through the gift of the condition [which he receives] in the Instant.

So defined, faith makes it possible to resolve a classic theological problem.

We can distinguish two kinds of disciples: the disciple who lived at the time of Christ, the 'contemporary' disciple, and the disciple who lives at a later time, what Kierkegaard calls the 'second-hand disciple'.

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