To break a rule - a Christian meditation

Following divine rules implies that there may be other rules to ignore

To some extent, following a rule means not breaking a rule. While this seems like an unsatisfactory statement prima facie, it does carry a lot of weight in regards to what it means to exist as a Christ - especially when we understand which rules we don’t break and the implied problem that comes in recognizing that there are rules that not only will be broken, but possibly ought to be broken. This is the human condition for the believer: following God’s laws sets the “contours” of our lives, gives us freedom from moral panic, and gives us assurances in times of trouble. But in following the divine law, distinctly “not of this world”, there is a chance - a rather unavoidable, difficult-to-navigate chance - that there are rules to break.

The Insanity of the Divine Command Ethicist

Ethics is firmly rooted in both historical and contemporary theology and philosophy. This is fairly uncontroversial - although people are less likely to turn to theologians and philosophers for guidance on the physical structure of the universe, the nature of the brain, or the mechanics of an economy these days, but most people, if searching for an expert in moral matters and ethical elucidations, would probably feel more comfortable turning to experts in Aristotle, Kant, Mill, and the like than those who are practiced with a telescope, a scalpel, or an Excel spreadsheet. That’s not to say that people necessarily accept what our secular and Christian ethicists are saying, of course¹, but it does mean that there is at least one niche left for those who think musing, reflecting, and deliberating over problems strictly beyond the purview of scientific enquiry still has a place in the world. But that then puts us in an awkward position: how does one actually approach ethics from a Christian perspective, especially in the context of breaking rules?

“Breaking rules” seems to be the opposite of what ethics is all about - stretching back to Kant (but implied far earlier than that), the “universalizability” of normative ethical principles is a generally considered a solid basis for moral reasoning²: if murder is wrong, it is wrong for everyone. Laid out most iconically in the categorical imperative, Kant’s approach to morality might be boiled down to “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. Sometimes, this formulation is overgeneralized to the idea that anything which can become a universal law ought to be done as opposed to mere permissibility, as if Kant was “forcing us” into taking certain decisions - obviously, we shouldn’t concern ourselves too much with incorrect readings, however.

But our problem comes around again: we are interested in what it means to break a rule, not to follow one.

Abraham - the notorious anti-humanist

If there is a Kierkegaardian text that people, in there otherwise ignorant state regarding works that came from his hand, have come across, it is Fear and Trembling. Notoriously controversial, it has appealed and infuriated as many as have read it. Often described with the phrase “the leap of faith” (a phrase that is remarkably, considering the frequency with which it is used to describe the short book, completely absent from the text itself), it describes the infamous, perilous story of Abraham ascending Moriah in order to sacrifice Isaac, his only son through his wife Sarah. The “anger points” are numerous, with the accusations of irrationalism, fideism, and amoralism coming thick and fast from a variety of commentators (both positively and negatively), but the specific phrase that has caused so much notoriety is one specific phrase: “the teleological suspension of the ethical”³.

Let us sent the groundwork correctly first: “the ethical”, in this case, does not mean “ethics” as in a sense of right or wrong. This is referring distinctly to “the ethical” qua Kierkegaardian “sphere” - as illustrated in S. K.’s previous novel-cum-treatise, Eiher/Or⁴, “the ethical” refers to a person who has made “the choice to choose [themself]”⁵ and appropriate the difference between good and evil into their own lives. This is the subjective appropriation of moral laws or rules, the individual accepting that xyz moral laws are important for them to live out, moral laws are necessary in order to make a commitment to life. This choice, a personally-held, empowered choice to hold to xyz and to reject not-xyz, is key for overcoming the “jellyfish” lifestyle of “A”, the aesthete in volume I of Either/Or: as possibly the first philosophical commentary on “the fear of missing out”, “A” is a character who is terrified of missing out on what life can offer him, as best exemplified in one of his most widely quoted and possibly as widely misunderstood aphorisms:

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”⁶

The either/or choice fills the aesthete with anxiety - if I choose to marry, I might regret the chance to be a bachelor; if I choose not to marry, I might regret the security and enduring love of a faithful wife. In “A”’s pseudo-hedonist mindset (although any appeal to hedonism would be too simplistic to describe our wanton aesthete, so terrified of “boredom” and “idleness” that needs “the real rotation of crops, in changing the method of cultivation and type of grain”⁷), in doing x, I cannot do not-x; the opportunity cost is unbearable, especially in the context that I have no obvious reason to choose one over the other - even the very question: to be or not to be! He is the liberal subject par excellence, terrified that his life at some point will not deliver him something to consume. But we are forced to and, as such, we must, comes Judge Wilhelm like a blistering scold from the deep, make a commitment - a “leap”, a choice which is a combination of both the rational and the passional that breaks through the inaction of the present.

Obviously, it is not quite that simple. Kierkegaard’s voluminous output was voluminous for a reason - he had a lot to say and said it in a very verbose way. But, it sets the stage for our great teleological suspender, Abraham in Fear and Trembling. Having lived his life in such a way to be an earnest but flawed servant of the Lord, Abraham finds himself in a moral quandary:

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.⁸

Taking a quick aside to mock his reader⁹, de silentio (our pseudonymous would-be hero and actual fool) notes that this piece of scripture should presumably cause a far greater concern for both preacher and preached-to than it actually does: what if someone takes this message to heart and cheerfully reports that he spent last Sunday afternoon sacrificing his son to God? Is this what the Word demands? Is this what faith requires?

In the moment, Abraham realizes that he has a choice: to hold to the ethical in its uncertainty or the “leap” to the ethical-religious, following the Lord’s word. Because, as alluded to in the passage above, Abraham did not simply receive the command “kill your son”; instead, Abraham has remembered the covenant¹⁰ and knows the command is truly “you must sacrifice Isaac in order to receive Isaac”. We are confronted with the absurd - a seemingly nonsensical demand is forced upon, it collides with us, and forces us to recalibrate the way we view the world. For Abraham, what once seemed like a reasonable and straightforward ethical approach to the world in his duty to his family and God has been brought into sharp contradiction: “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” This is a conundrum for most people, but Abraham remembers the context: the Lord has promised that He will make a Father of Many Nations of Abraham, so any commandment will be consistent with that. In a sense, we see that what de silentio is outlining here is not the compatibility or cruelty of divine commands, but rather the limited nature of human logic - Abraham can’t construct a tight syllogism which will sagaciously prove to himself, to his wife, to his servants, and so on why sacrificing Isaac will lead him to receive Isaac (even now, writing it out after years of reading both the Biblical and Kierkegaardian account, this still doesn’t make sense to me), but he does know that he can trust the Lord. In a sense, divine commands which taken on the appearance of “horrible commands” are only as such due to the limited knowledge of the human subject; as Westphal would point out, Abraham is presented with a kind of blik¹¹ but not one without a truth-value, but rather one where the truth-value is beyond us. In our finitude, the absurd forces us to admit that there are some things beyond us: the ethical-religious holds us to trust God, even when He brings us to apparently break a rule, even when He brings us to apparently break His rules.

In this way, “the ethical cannot just be an ethical striving!”¹² - it requires more, it requires a reorientation, a mood, a worldview, and a way of life. Above and beyond any coherent system of human organized ethical system, there is God’s law. But that leads us to another problem: how precisely do we know that we are acting in accordance with the Law if it is necessarily beyond our understanding? Can we ever justify such a skeptical outlook?

The statelessness of exception

Now, we take a turn towards one of Kierkegaard’s more controversial interpreters; an aesthete, but a formidably dangerous one. Carl Schmitt, Right Hegelian political and legal theorist and ardent (albeit unorthodox and ultimately excommunicated) Catholic thinker, has maintained a significant reputation in political and legal philosophy as an anti-liberal critic. The specific nature of his illiberalism, however, almost demands an apology prior to any mention of him: he was a Nazi. As opposed to writing out a hagiography for Schmitt (it would be false), I would like to simply appropriate them when relevant and then explain how his insights - as valuable additions to “post-Kierkegaardian thought” - deviated from the Melancholic Dane’s own thoughts. A more extensive treatment of Schmitt’s thought would need to be assessed separately.

The key overlap between Schmitt and S. K. is in their understanding of “the teleological suspension of the ethical”, or, rather, what Schmitt called “the state of exception”¹³. For any given collective, there will be times when a decision must be made, there is an either/or choice which can’t be avoided; and for every moment that a decision isn’t made, that could lead to a distinct problem. Referring to the Enlightenment as the “neutralizer of humanity”¹⁴ and turning his attention to the Weimar Republic - the liberal state par excellence, so utterly “levelled” in the Kierkegaardian sense - he saw that the liberal state places restrictions on the leader and forces inaction in state responses. This, in turn, leads to a variety of problems - especially in the “friend/enemy”¹⁵ dialectic of international relations.

Now, if you blinked, you may have missed it: what precisely is the Kierkegaardian influence here? Well, it comes in “decisionism” (a term more often used in derision these days¹⁶). When an individual or a society reaches a state of “inaction”, where movement becomes impossible and a change is needed, the choice is what sets reality back in motion. In the moment, the individual can make a choice to do xyz which breaks the deadlock. In essence, this is at least a part of the message from S. K.’s Repetition and Fear and Trembling: when the “coercion of reality” lies upon the individual, a choice is the only thing that can break the deadlock and release the individual back into motion. When the Young Man fears that his commitment to his fiancé would hold him back, he must “leap” in order to keep faith¹⁷; when Abraham is caught between his duty to his family and his duty to God, he must '“leap” in order to keep faith¹⁸.

Unsurprisingly, a Kierkegaardian analysis of Schmitt’s work leads to a rather harsh assessment: Schmitt’s focus on “the political”¹⁹ leads him directly into the “aesthetic” sphere - as Brata Das points out, Schmitt’s adherence to analogia entis commits him to viewing the Catholic church not only as the body of Christ, but the authoritative body of God’s own commands on earth²⁰. Just as God’s existence rips through the essence of human life, the analogia, says Schmitt, allows the Catholic church to be justified in breaking the deadlock of modernity and breaking through into new modes of thinking, new opportunities for human movement. But, this foundation and genuine lack of transcendence (what is a movement from the aesthetic to the aesthetic? - a movement in the despair of creation) leads us to conclude that Schmitt’s pseudo-Kierkegaardian approach is really nothing quite like S. K.’s own thought²¹.

Although he would later distance himself from Kierkegaard’s work²², Karl Barth may have made this distinction the clearest of all: by “ascending” to the ethical, the change is “invisible”; the religious itself is noted as being necessarily “invisible” contra the visibility of the world²³. To snap back to S. K., take a look at his treatment of the Good Samaritan in the discourse “The Hardship is the Road”:

The story [of the Good Samaritan] tells of at least three, in fact five, people who walked "along the same road," whereas, spiritually speaking, we have to say that each one walked his own road-the highway, alas, makes no difference; it is the spiritual that makes the difference and distinguishes the road… when you walk the road as the Samaritan did, you are walking the road of mercy, because the road between Jericho and Jerusalem has no advantage with regard to practicing mercy. It all happened on "the same road," and yet it was at one time the road of lawfulness, the second time the road of unlawfulness, the third time the road of light-mindedness, the fourth time the road of callousness, the fifth time the road of mercy. There were five travelers who according to the Gospel walked "along the same road," and yet each one walked his own road.²⁴

Due to the aesthetic demands for an observable display of power, Schmitt has only understood Kierkegaard in part. But his concretization of “the choice” into decisionism does a lot of work in helping us understand what it means to break a rule - even if only that now we know how we ought not to break a rule.

A quiet rebellion of the Spirit

And now we arrive at the genuine insanity of divine command ethics (DCE). The most important part of a genuine theory of DCE is that it requires Christians to become functional nihilists and high skeptics about the reality of apparent moral truths - whatever secular reason we can provide for holding to moral realism, we must be prepared to dismiss it in the event of a “state of exception”. In an age defined by nihilism, we might even be forced to admit that this is a necessary to adopt: how can we know the good when the good seems to be dealt with so skeptically? To explain what it means to adopt this “quiet rebellion”, I will use two further Kierkegaardian terms:

The Absolute Relation to the Relative and the Relative Relation to the Absolute

Human society is relative - across space and time, this seems to be more of a fact than a stunning philosophical observation. “Things are quite different in different places” doesn’t quite have the ring of an interesting observation, yet it is one that I’m sticking to in order to launch this critique. Note the phrase here:

i) the absolute relation: this is what the subject is doing; in any particular era or place, the individual is most likely to be feel themselves relating either to the prevalent culture of their surroundings, or, at least, attempting to modify it in some way or other. This is essential to liberalism and especially those who would adopt a “Whiggish” understanding of history: if liberalism’s supposed relativist approach to cultural values (and there is a lot to say on that matter) are truly relativist, then there can be no “lines in the sand” drawn on particular moral principles. There is a necessary relativism across time which will be termed “progress”. On what grounds morality is actually progressing seems to be some kind of esoteric secret²⁵, but there is still an insistence - an assertion, rather - that what is true today is correct and what was true yesterday was false and we didn’t know it. The liberal finds themself floating freely in the flow of time and absolutely related to it.

ii) the relative: as touched on above, the relative is the changes that naturally occur in human societies - separated either temporally or spatially - that indicate that something has changed. While cultural values change across time, the question is raised how, precisely, do we ground ourselves for making moral decisions? As is the often raised against those who choose to defend relativism, how do we know that we aren’t simply a part of “the Crowd”, swayed by prevalent popular opinion? Is there no other ground for moral decision?

As you may have noticed in the second half of this phrase, the only relation to “the absolute”, i.e., divine law, is relative, accidental, and pleasant surprise. But that leads to the other possibility…

The Absolute Relation to the Absolute and the Relative Relation to the Relative

In the inverse of the above (and repeated throughout S. K.’s work), we find the absolute relation to the absolute: but what can this mean? Understanding “the absolute” to mean the divine command, then how on earth can anyone yoke themselves to the necessarily-beyond-comprehension? It seems that S. K. has set us up to fail - he has made Christianity into an impossibility, God into a mystical “thing-in-itself” that we still yet somehow know and talk about. Which is certainly the main thread in Buber’s critique of Kierkegaard.²⁶

But, of course, the semi-popular and fully-false perception of S. K. as a fideist isn’t quite as accurate as some popular dismissive figures would have it. As pointed out by Piety²⁷, the Kierkegaardian method involves very complex, rigorous forms of reason that require us to approach to very idea of reason in a new way. Most notably emerging in the “Christian epistemology” of Philosophical Fragments²⁸, Kierkegaard had to reinvent reasonable tools in order to explain the delivery of the gift of faith - and this reinvention led to something resembling proto-postmodern thought, as opposed to a genuine irrational “leap of faith”²⁹ into the murky nothingness of fideism. Especially notable, as most experts now are ready to draw in an instant on the emergence of an erroneous accusation, is the unpublished Book on Adler, where S. K.’s skeptical method and genuine unease with claims of “fantastic revelation” are front-and-centre in a work which preempted the “lost to history” figure of Adolph Peter Adler’s rejection of his own fantastic rejection of Hegelianism on the apparent recommendation of Christ Himself. Although the largely sympathetic account does contain a few barbed comments at Adler³⁰, the necessity of anarchist action becomes extremely clear in the context of genuine revelation:

"If, then, everything is in proper order in this matter of a person's having been called by a revelation, but he had a superior reflection as a ministering factor, he would then understand that the ethical accompaniment to this call and having a revelation corresponds ethically to an enormous responsibility in all directions, not only inwardly (that he himself was sure, understood himself in the fact that this extraordinary thing had happened to him, this we take for granted) but outwardly in relation to the established order..."³¹

This notion of “against the established order” is key to understanding what the absolute relation to the absolute actually is: when divine commands are genuinely understood (either by an apostle or by the trusting surrender of the non-apostle), the words can never be reconciled with what is “official”³². Instead, the absolute relation to the absolute sits “against” or “across” the relative, i.e., human society, at all points and cannot be reconciled with it. God reaches out to humanity and, with a “no!”³³, cuts through everything that is official, everything that is human, everything that is fallen. As the infinite is completely beyond human reason, the task becomes turning away from the apparently “sagacious” explanations of human thought - necessarily relative to every other human thought, distinguished only by sounding clever at this point in time - and placing trust, commitment, determination to the Anti-Climican battle cry to the imitatio Christi: "Whether it now is a help or a torment, I will one thing only, I will belong to Christ, I will be a Christian!"³⁴ When all other reason fails, there is still always the opportunity to surrender oneself to Christ, follow in his footsteps, and accept that a genuine divine command would involve us choosing the necessary over the contingent; the explosively divine over the sagaciously human. Kierkegaard didn’t hand us a case to say “we are far too stupid to ever understand this” and expect us to enjoy this denigrated state; he wrote that our finite selves are limited in our understanding and we will be held back by the “ligaments” of relativity and contingency if we attempt to reconcile divine commands with human society. The ethical-religious requires a break, like a broken neck in our “turned-aroundness”³⁵.

When absolutely related to the absolute, when we have handed ourselves to God and see what He wishes us to see, the only response is rebellion - not “bomb-chucking”, not bourgeois activist protests, not quietist countercultural movements in reinvented (and presumably renamed) phalansteries, but a simple “no!” that stands against human reason. Just like Christ’s infinite negation of His contemporary Palestine, just like Paul’s sea-venturing adventures that lead with the negation of his revelation, the Christian’s natural, quiet rebellion is in the “no!” that booms from the deep: “Whether it now is a help or a torment, I will one thing only, I will belong to Christ, I will be a Christian!”³⁶

The Contextualist Christian

Hopefully this has set the groundwork for what a Christian sees about the world that is different from the non-Christian. Although MacIntyre was correct to say that Kierkegaard in his later work forces us into a dualism of “Christian” or “non-Christian”, as if these were the only two paths to take, I believe this was an intentional position adopted by Kierkegaard. In a sense, the accusation of dualism may be something that the Kierkegaardian simply has to “bite the bullet” on: if there is a God and He revealed Himself in the actions and life of His son, Jesus Christ, then there is only one correct option - but this option is incredibly diverse, life-affirming, passionate, hopeful, loving, and necessarily stands against humanity.

To return to our opening question: what does it mean to break a rule? It is to recognize the temporal nature of human reality, it is to reject “sagacious” temporality in order to follow the divine. Although S. K.’s notorious and natural rebellion is something that will make the toes of many a Christian curl, render them slightly uncomfortable in the face of the groundlessness of faith, it is a seemingly unavoidable fact: if we are finite and relative to God, then we should expect to be wrong about His infinite and unchanging command to humanity; we should expect to find His Word offensive to our sense of reason³⁷, expect that our most brilliant minds will always fall short of the mark, our most pious actors will always fall short of the mark - because it is not by reason nor works that we are saved; it is by the grace of God by faith alone. To break a rule is to decide that we will trust God’s commands to the best of our ability and, when the rule is broken, we will see what He has commanded of us³⁸.

Amen.

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1. Ethics does seem to be the most “reckoned” subject in the world. Since the entry requirements for moral discussion are effectively “do you have a concept of what people ought to do?” (even if there are certain approaches which deny the binary reality of good and evil - replacing these concepts with the obviously different couplets of bourgeois and proletarian, master morality and slave morality, “pleasing” and “not pleasing”, etc. and expecting us not to chuckle at the vast chasm they’ve vaulted in changing the name of a thing and expecting the thing-in-itself to have changed as well), there is a great deal of “reckoned” approaches to ethics. This is a good thing, of course - it is never a bad thing to reflect on how we live our lives and if we should change. It does, however, mean that the waters in which the ethicist tries to swim are necessarily muddied.

2. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 30, I. Kant

3. This problem emerges on page 55 in “Problema I”: Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?

4. Published just short of eight months prior, in a year which would see S. K. publish six different books: Either/Or, Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843), Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Three Upbuilding Discourses (1843), Four Upbuilding Discourses (1843)

5. Either/Or, vol. II, p. 169, Judge Wilhelm, ed. V. Emerita

6. Either/Or, vol. I, p. 53-54, “A”, ed. V. Emerita

7. Ibid., p. 232

8. Genesis 22:1-2

9. My best advise for would-be Kierkegaard readers is to accept prior to picking up the book that the Dane has already taken the time to tease you for not already “being in on the joke”.

10. "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations.” (Genesis 17:4)

11. "Kierkegaard and the Logic of Insanity", M. Westphal, from Religious Studies, vol. 7, issue 3, p. 207

12. Kierkegaard’s Christian Psychology, location 1761 [Kindle edition], S. C. Evans

13. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereign, p. 5, C. Schmitt

14. Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology, p. 27, J. P. McCormick

15. The Concept of the Political, C. Schmitt

16. For example, see "Kierkegaard and the Critique of Political Theology", A. Rudd, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 23, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan; "Searching for a Secular God: a Prolegomena to a Political Theory of Love", J. Aroosi, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 83, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan; "Commanded Love and Moral Autonomy: The Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate", by M. Westphal, from Kierkegaard Yearbook, 1998, p. 20, ed. N. J. Cappelørn, H. Deuser, C. S. Evans, A. Hannay, and B. H. Kirmmse

17. Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, p. 136, C. Constantius

18. Fear and Trembling: a Dialectical Lyric, p. 64 J. de Silentio (S. Kierkegaard)

19. A phrase riddled with its own confusion, controversy, and possible meaninglessness - what exactly the political does mean and possibly what it ought to mean is still a hotly debated matter.

20. The Political Theology of Kierkegaard, p. 13-14, S. Brata Das

21. The Political Theology of Kierkegaard, p. 94, S. Brata Das

22. Although, in a roundabout way, Barth’s later work certainly bears the marks of Kierkegaardian influence far more than he would have thought. Due to problems with the German translations of S. K.’s work, it is likely that the Kierkegaard he rejected was, indeed, a mirage - a creation of translators set on “Germanicizing” the pietist tone from the North. Although there is enough in Barth’s work to insist that he certainly wouldn’t have been an ardent Kierkegaardian even if he had got access to faithful translations, it may not be controversial to imply that Barth was far more Kierkegaardian than he imagined.

23. The Epistle to the Romans, 2nd edition, p. 60, K. Barth

24. “The Gospel of Sufferings”, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, p. 290, S. Kierkegaard

25. Outlined extensively by both Kierkegaard and Ellul, two bone-crunching critics of the shallowness of conceptual “progress” in liberal thought.

26. "Martin Buber: "No-One Can so Refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard Himself", P. Šajda, from Kierkegaard and Existentialism, p. 49, edited by J. Stewart

27. “…Kierkegaard prided himself on the rigor of his thought (see, for example, Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks [hereafter: KJN] vol. 7, pp. 182-183), and most specialists know that Kierkegaard was a very rigorous and systematic thinker (see, for example, the preface to C. Stephen Evans’ Passionate Reason, as well as the first chapter of Alastair Hannay’s Kierkegaard in Routledge’s Arguments of the Philosophers series).”

28. Especially chapters IV and “Interlude”, p. 55-88

29. A phrase never used in Kierkegaard’s writing! Not once, not ever! As noted well in "Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy", P. Mehl, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 4, edited by J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd

30. Such as "One takes an author like that [a “premise-author”, who merely stands against the age, as opposed to an apostle who stands against human reason], on whose head, just as on matches, a phosphorescent substance has been placed: a proposal for a project, a suggestion; one takes him by the legs and strikes him on a newspaper, and then there are three or four columns. And premises without conclusions actually have a striking resemblance to phosphorescence-both go off in a puff." The Religious Confusion of the Present Age Illustrated by Magister Adler as a Phenomenon: A Mimical Monograph, p. 10, P. Minor, edited by S. Kierkegaard

31. The Religious Confusion of the Present Age Illustrated by Magister Adler as a Phenomenon: A Mimical Monograph, p. 31, P. Minor, edited by S. Kierkegaard

32. "The taking of an oath, or, the official / the personal", from The Instant, no. 5, July 27th 1855, from Attack upon "Christendom", p. 170-171, S. Kierkegaard

33. Interestingly, this Kierkegaardian negation became inverted in the work of Barth, who saw God not as slicing through humanity with a “no!, but rather reaching in and affirming us with a “yes!” when we hold fast to him - "Karl Barth: The Dialectic of Attraction and Repulsion", Lee C. Barrett, from Kierkegaard's Influence on Theology - Tome I: German Protestant Theology, p. 24-25

34. Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 117, Anti-Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard

35. Although Buber phrases this in such a way as to be a critique, I believe this may be one of the better explanations of the Kierkegaardian “leap” around; just like the movement from the aesthetic to the ethical requires a “choice to choose oneself” and a revolution in how the individual understands themself, the movement into faith is like a broken neck that sets the individual on a new path again; this time, verifying what had come before in faith - "Martin Buber: "No-One Can so Refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard Himself", P. Šajda, from Kierkegaard and Existentialism, p. 49, edited by J. Stewart

36. Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 117, Anti-Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard

37. Is this a surprise? He told us this Himself: “And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.” (Matthew 11:6)

38. "Kierkegaard's Metatheology", T. P. Jackson, from Faith and Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 81