Kierkegaard on Purity of Heart and Being Lulled to Sleep

Now there are men who find it edifying that the demand to will one thing be asserted in all its sublimity, in all its severity, so that it may press its claim in the innermost fastness of the soul.  Others find it edifying that a wretched compromise should be made between God, the claim, and the language used.  There are men who find it edifying if only someone will challenge them.  But there are also the sleepy souls who regard it as not only pleasing, but even edifying, to be lulled to sleep.”

I am only too often one of the latter sleepy souls.  The older I get the more I love the idea and practice of sleep, where perchance I may dream, as the Bard said, and there may be something unexpected and edifying and even life changing; and my goodness, my life does need some changing.

Kierkegaard on patience

If the coercion of necessity presses down on a soul that does not have and does not want to have the resiliency of freedom, the soul does indeed become oppressed, but it does not become patient; patience is the counter-pressure of resiliency whereby the person who is constrained makes himself free in his constraint.–Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits:  “Purity of Heart is to Will One thing”

dialectical uncertainty of the religious

`Thus, too, there is backsliding in the religious discourse when a man says for example: “After many errors I finally learned to keep close to God, and since that time He has not left me in the lurch; my business flourishes, my projects have success, I am now happily married, and my children are well and strong, etc.” The religious man has here again fallen back into the aesthetic dialectic, for even if it pleases him to say that he thanks God for all these blessings, the question is how he thanks Him, whether he does it directly, or whether he first executes the movement of incertitude which is the mark of the God-relationship. Just as little as a man has the right in the midst of misfortune to say to God directly that it is misfortune, since he has to suspend his understanding in the movement of incertitude, so little dare he directly take all these things as evidence of the God-relationship. The direct relationship is an aesthetic one, and indicates that he is not in his thanksgiving related to God, but to his own ideas of fortune and misfortune. For if a human being cannot know with certainty whether a misfortune is an evil (the uncertainty inherent in the God-relationship as the form for always giving thanks to God), then he cannot know with certainty whether his good fortune is a good. The God-relationship has only one testimony, the God-relationship itself, everything else is ambiguous; religiously it holds true for every human being, even if he lived to ever so advanced an age, that in relation to the dialectic of external goods, we are born yesterday and know nothing. Thus the great actor Sydelmann (as I see from his biography by Rotschel) on the evening of his triumph in the Opera House, where he was crowned with a laurel wreath amid applause lasting several minutes, when he came home, passionately gave thanks to God. With the same passion with which he gave thanks he would have rebelled against God if he had been hissed off the stage. Had he given thanks religiously, and hence given thanks to God, the Berlin public and the laurel wreath and the applause lasting several minutes would have become ambiguous in the dialectical uncertainty of the religious.

recollection-memory

It was about ten o’clock in the evening of one of the last days of July when the participators assembled for that banquet. I have forgotten the day of the month and even the year; such things are the concern of memory, not of recollection. The only thing that properly concerns recollection is mood and what pertains to mood; and just as a generous wine gains by passing over the line because the watery particles evaporate, so too does recollection gain by losing the watery particles of memory — yet by this the recollection no more becomes a mere fancy than does the generous wine.”