Soren Kierkegaard has been an inspiration for me over the years. For the most part conservative evangelicalism has made him out to be a monster, making him the one that believed in the utter subjectivity of truth, which is a far perversion of what he was truly saying.
I draw from his life and his thoughts drinking deep the rich wine of what he lived and said, a one seeking to live for God in an age of religious form and spiritual deadness. He was called of God to be an iconoclast. God asked him to give himself wholeheartedly to change a nation, to tear down and build up, a man that doggedly knew his place in the big picture of God's plan. This quote if taken in the humility and secretly it was written in shows the foresight and depth of Faith that burned in his cheats.
What the age needs is not a genius - it has had geniuses enough, but a martyr, who in order to teach men to obey would himself be obedient unto death. What the age needs is awakening. And therefore someday, not only my writings but my whole life, all the intriguing mystery of the machine will be studied and studied. I never forget how God helps me and it is therefore my last wish that everything may be to his honour.(1)
I owe him much fro example my Philosophy of education, where the information, the people learning, the way they learn, and the means and methods to best get it in them are all considered as categories for serious reflection.
To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc. No, to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and the way he understands it. (2)
I love his writing. His writing style is odd/ innovative for he wrote clearly but would intentionally lack clarity, writing so that transformation happens in the reading. Sometimes answers are left dangling so the reader must seek them out. This is so to make on strong in mind and not made week minded by all the answer being feed to them.
It is in his journals that I find a man common to me. He is One that walks in my thoughts. At so many points, I identify with him. Friends have joked that in heaven, Kierkegaard, Jeremiah and I will be practically inseparable. I always qualify there joke with "just for the first 1200 years or yea but there will be a forth with us, Jesus!" May these quotes be a blessing to you as it is to me? I have added titles to them to clarify as best I can his point. (3)
I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.
On seeking the praise of men March 1836
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
On redemption being more wonderful and beautiful than creation 1838-07-07
Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. ... it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it's good to be here.
On Regine Olsen, 1839-02-02
Note - seriously I cant read that without tearing up a little.. Why? Because, Regine Olson was his first and only love they were engaged and to marry when SK realized that it would mean a life of suffering and misery for her and he could not bare the thought. So to save her the embarrassment of breaking the engagement he became in the eyes on men a slothful, arrogant, lush of a gentleman. He publicly showed a character that was much below his real self, to becoming a man not worthy of her so she could break it off with him and retain her dignity and social honor. His love was such that he would take on dishonor to protect her honor. Hope you can see why I admire him.
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
on The perfection of God and the purification of desires 1841
To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.
On reason leading to worship and reason leading to pride 1841
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
On worldview as the culmination of human experience and Scriptural hope 1843
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.
On the deep pain of hope 1847
It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.
On the right limits of reason & stop the rationalization of sin 1847
The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.
On the way to influence generations 1848
Job endured everything — until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.
On bad council (after personally getting some) 1849
The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.
On Power and process of being griped by a truth. 1854
Note- It speaks of the mysterious lure of truth, that moves the mind to seek understanding and before you know it, when you think “I have it, as to control it” – God truth is bigger than you so to have it that is when believed wholeheartedly it in reality has you for by it you see the world anew. Truth truly believed changes one worldview on an intuitive level ..
Truth changes the way you see the world, the way to live, IT has YOU.
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(1) A Selection from the Journals of Kierkegaard (1938) by Alexander Dru, (20 November 1847)
(2) Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1848)
(3) Translations used include those from: A Selection from the Journals of Kierkegaard (1938) by Alexander Dru, and Søren Kierkegaard : Papers and Journals (1996) by Alastair Hannay
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