Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  The break itself he must feel as a fatality and a horror, for the suffering in it is that he is halted and is not like an adventurer romantically renouncing the concrete content of life. He has actually comprehended and comprehends its full substance, even though he guilelessly became a bankrupt whom life itself ruined. On the other hand, he must look upon the afterpains of the break as punitive suffering, for although his understanding despairs of discovering the guilt, since he is indeed actually in love, actually belongs wholeheartedly to his married life, even if the pain of tearing himself away is just as great, indeed, greater, than is the pain of shattering for the beloved, nevertheless the intense feeling of despair must still find its joy in making honorable amends to God, in signing the same charter as the happy one does—that the way of providence is sheer wisdom and justice.

  He must comprehend the break in such a way that he who had found security in life (for the most loving upbringing is to be formed by a wife’s humble submission, and the most rejuvenating instruction is to bring up his children, and the best refuge is behind the sacred walls of marriage) is now hurled out into new, into the most horrible peril. In other words, even if it is definite that he cannot do otherwise, in making this step he has ventured out into the trackless infinite space where the sword of Damocles149 hangs over his head if he looks up toward heaven, where the snare of unknown temptations clutches at his feet if he looks toward the ground, where no human help reaches out, where not even the most daring pilot willing to sacrifice his life ventures out because here there is more to lose than life, where no sympathy reaches out for him, indeed, not even the tenderest sympathy can spy him, for he has ventured out into the void from which mankind shrinks. He is a rebel against the earthly, and he has made an enemy of the sensate, which in well-disposed harmony with the spiritual is a supporting staff, just as time is; therefore the sensate has become for him a serpent, and time has become the moment of the bad conscience. It is believed to be so easy to be victorious over the sensate; well, so it is, if [VI 171] one does not incite it by wanting to annihilate it. One does not speak of such things to lovers, for their love keeps them ignorant of the dangers that only the rebel discovers; love does not know why marriage was instituted, but an earnest discourse, nevertheless, knows that it was instituted: ob adjutorium, ob propagationem, ob evitandam fornicationem [for assistance, for propagation, for the avoidance of illicit sex],150 and experiences in monasteries could add terrible footnotes to this text. Here is the proper psychological source of the catastrophe of Faust, who precisely by willing to become sheer spirit finally succumbs to the wild revolt of sensuality. Woe to the one who is solitary in this way! He is abandoned by all existence; yet he is not without company, because at every moment an anxious recollection, in which all the passion of sympathy burns and consumes, conjures up for him pictures of the misery of the shattered ones and at any minute the sudden151 can come over him with its terror.

  He must comprehend that no one can understand him and must have the composure to reconcile himself to the fact that human language has only curses for him, and for his sufferings the human heart has only the feeling that he suffers as guilty. And yet he must not harden his own heart against it, for at the same time he does he is unjustified. He must feel the torturing of misunderstanding just as the ascetic constantly felt the prick of the hair shirt he wore next to his bare body—and thus he has attired himself in misunderstanding, which is just as dreadful a costume to be in as the one Hercules received from Omphale and the one in which he was burned.152

  To repeat the most essential points, he must not feel himself above the universal, but lower; he must à tout prix [at all costs] want to remain within it, for he is actually in love and, what is more, is a married man; he must want to remain within it for his own sake and must want it for the sake of them for whom he is willing to sacrifice his life, whereas instead he now sees their misery as if he were someone whose hands and feet have been cut off and whose tongue has been torn from his mouth—that is, without a single means of communication. He must feel himself to be the most wretched of men, the scum of humanity,153 must feel it doubly precisely because he knows, not in abstracto but in concreto, what the beautiful is. Then he sinks down, desperate in all his wretchedness, when that single word, that final, that ultimate word, so ultimate that it is not within human language, is not forthcoming, [VI 172] when the testimony is not with him, when he cannot tear open the sealed dispatch that is only to be opened out there and that contains the orders from God. This is the start of becoming an exception, if there is such a one at all; if all this is not a given, he is without justification.

  Whether out of this wretchedness—which surely is the deepest, the most agonizing, in which the pain does not cease except in order that repentance can swing its whip over him, where all human suffering is personally present to torment, in which the suffering does not let up any more than a city stops being besieged because the guard is changed or because the new guard is from another enemy detachment, and they relieve each other thus: if one’s own pain takes a nap, the pain of sympathy stays awake; if the pain of sympathy takes a nap, one’s own pain stays awake, and at any moment repentance making its rounds can come to see whether the guard is awake—whether out of this wretchedness, I repeat, a sense of being blessed can develop, whether in this dreadful nothingness there can be any divine meaning, what faith it must take to believe that God could intervene [gribe ind] in life this way, that is, in such a way that it manifests itself as such to the one suffering and acting, for if God actually is the one who intervenes, then he has well provided for the rescue of the annihilated ones, except that at the critical moment the one apprehended [den Grebne], the one selected, cannot know about it—all this is beyond my comprehension. I do not know whether there is a justified exception, and if there is such a person, he does not know it either, not even at the moment he droops, for if he has the slightest intimation of it, he is unjustified.

  154It has not been my wish to become involved with what brings a person to despair in such a way as to want to trick spirit out of the divine and not to receive it in the way it has pleased the divine to apportion it, or how a person could become the object of a divine partiality that, jealous of itself, uses as its first expression the terrible spiritual trial of envy—I have merely wished to delineate the psychological presuppositions. See here a candidate for the monastery who does not dare indulge in the concession of the Middle Ages but, alien to the contemporary consciousness, buys the highest priced suffering at the highest price. My description is similar to ready-made clothing; it is the hair shirt of sufferings that the exception must wear—I do not believe that anyone out of mistaken pleasure would take a fancy to this costume.

  I am not cruel. Oh, if one is as happy as a husband can be, if one loves life so highly, loves it so highly during the repeated taking of oaths that the one oath is more precious to [VI 173] one than the other because in this love of life one clings firmly to her whom I still embrace with the victorious resolution of the happy first love, to one’s wife, for whose sake one must leave father and mother,155 clings firmly to what compensates for the loss, what beautifies and rejuvenates my married life, my darlings, whose joy, whose cheerfulness, whose innocent minds, whose progress in the good make plain and simple daily bread an inestimable overabundance, make giving thanks for my livelihood and my intercession just as important in my eyes as a king’s for his country—then one is too happy to be cruel. But when one sits on the commission of inquiry one is undaunted by everything that will make the road of justice crooked, by everything that will lead truth astray. I do not go around trying to find someone to wear this hair shirt; on the contrary, I cry out to the rash person, if he will listen, that he should not venture on these paths—anyone who ventures on his own initiative is lost. But to me it is a new demonstration of the gloriousness of life that it is enclosed in such a way that no one is tempted to want to venture outside, is so constituted that the mere thought of
the terror must be enough to crush all foolish and frivolous and inflated and fallacious and neurotic talk about wanting to be an exception; for even if all my requirements are met, I still do not know whether there is a justified exception. Indeed, I shall add this as the worst of terrors, that the very person who wants to be an exception never finds out in this life whether he is. So, then—with the loss of everything, with torment beyond all bounds, not to be able to buy oneself a certainty!

  What I do know definitely, however—something that shrewdness no more than mockery, no more than the terror of these deliberations, can wrench away from me—is the happiness of my marriage, or, more correctly, my conviction of the happiness of marriage. The terror is now far removed, I am no longer sitting on the commission of inquiry but in my study, and just as a thunderstorm makes the landscape smile again, so my soul is again in high spirits for writing about marriage, with which I will in a certain sense never be finished. In other words, marriage is no more something that can be explained at once than a married man is a hothead. I have been performing a painful task, now I have come home, and I am with her whom all the powers of life have united to authorize me to have lawfully as my own, her who shortens the dark days for me and adds an eternity to our happy understanding, [VI 174] her who subtracts from my sufferings and shares my cares and increases my joys. Look, she just went by my door; I understand why—she is waiting for me but does not come in lest she disturb. Just one minute, my beloved, just one moment—my soul is so rich, I am so eloquent at this moment that I want to write it down on paper, a eulogy on you, my lovely better half, and thus convince the whole world of the validity of marriage. 156And yet in due time, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in a week, I shall throw you away, you wretched pen157—my choice is made, and I follow the beckoning and the invitation. Let a wretched author sit trembling when a thought presents itself in a lucky moment, shivering lest someone disturb him—I am afraid of nothing, but I also know what is better than the most felicitous idea in a man’s mind and better than the most felicitous expression on paper of the most felicitous idea and what is infinitely more precious than any secret a poor author can have with his pen.158

  1“GUILTY?”/“NOT GUILTY?”

  A STORY OF SUFFERING

  AN IMAGINARY PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION

  by

  FRATER TACITURNUS

  NOTICE: OWNER SOUGHT2 [VI 177]

  Every child knows that Søborg Castle3 is a ruin that lies in north Sjælland about two miles from the coast near a little town of the same name. Although the castle has long since been destroyed, it still survives in folk memory and will survive inasmuch as it has a rich historical and historically poetic past to draw upon. In a certain sense, this is true also of Søborg Lake belonging to the castle. Originally it was about nine miles in circumference and had a depth of several fathoms to draw upon and therefore has not yet disappeared and will probably claim its existence as a lake for some time even though the mainland tricks it out of one transitional boundary after another and thus squeezes it together more and more.

  It was in Helsingør last summer that I met an elderly friend, a naturalist, who had traveled the coast north from Copenhagen in order to make observations of marine plants. His plan was then to visit the region around S0borg, which he supposed might provide a rich yield. He invited me to come along, and I accepted the invitation.

  The lake is not easy to approach, for it is surrounded by a rather wide stretch of quagmire. Here the boundary dispute between the lake and the land goes on night and day. There is something melancholy about this battle, of which, however, no trace of destruction gives any indication, for what the earth gradually wins from the lake is transformed into a smiling and exceedingly fertile meadow. Ah, but the poor lake that is disappearing in this way! No one has any pity on it, no one feels for it, because neither the pastor, whose land borders one side of it, nor the peasants farming on the other side have anything [VI 178] against gaining one piece of meadow after the other. The poor lake is abandoned both on the one side and on the other.

  What gives the lake an even more inclosed [indesluttet] look is that the quagmire is thickly overgrown with reeds; indeed, there is nothing like it in Denmark, at least so says my friend the naturalist. Only in one place has a little waterway been opened up; here there is a flat-bottomed boat, in which we two, he on behalf of science and I on behalf of friendship and curiosity, poled ourselves out. With effort we brought the boat out, for the channel has hardly a foot of water. The reed growth, however, is as dense and thick as a forest, probably eight feet high. Concealed by it, one seems as if eternally lost to the world, forgotten in the stillness broken only by our struggling with the boat or when a bittern, that secret voice in the solitude, repeats its cry three times, and then repeats it again. Strange bird, why do you wail and lament this way—after all, you indeed wish only to remain in solitude!

  Finally we made our way beyond the reeds, and the lake lay before us, clear as a mirror, sparkling in the afternoon light. Everything was so still; silence rested over the lake. If, while we were poling through the growth of reeds, I felt as if I were in the lush fecundity in India, now it seemed as if I lay out on the calm sea. I became almost anxious; to be so infinitely far from people, to be in a nutshell out on an ocean! Now there was a flustered clamoring, a blended screaming of all sorts of birds, and then, when the sound suddenly ceased, stillness again, almost to the point of anxiety, and the ear grasped in vain for a support in the infinite.

  My naturalist friend took out the implement with which he uprooted marine plants, cast it out, and began his work. Meanwhile, in the other end of the boat I sat in reverie, absorbed in the scenery. He had already brought up some plants and was busying himself with the find when I asked if I might borrow his instrument. I resumed my former place and cast out. With a muffled sound it sank into the deep. Perhaps it was because I was inexperienced, but it seemed to me that when I wanted to pull it up something held back so much that I was almost afraid of being the weaker one. I pulled, and a bubble rose from the depths. It lingered a moment, and broke, and then success. Deep down I had a strange feeling; yet I had no idea at all of the nature of my discovery. Now that I think about it, now that I know everything, now I understand [VI 179] it. I understand that it was a sigh from below, a sigh de profundis [out of the depths],4 a sigh because I wrested from the lake its deposit, a sigh from the inclosed lake, a sigh from an inclosed soul from which I wrested its secret. If I had had any intimation of this two minutes earlier, I would not have dared to pull.

  The naturalist sat totally absorbed in his work, asking just once if I had found anything, a question that did not seem to expect a reply since he quite appropriately did not regard my fishing as being on behalf of science. Well, I had not found what he was searching for, either, but something totally different. And so each of us sat in his end of the boat, each one occupied with his find, he for the sake of science, and I for the sake of friendship and curiosity.

  Wrapped in oilcloth provided with many seals lay a box made of palisander wood. The box was locked, and when I forced it open the key was inside: inclosing reserve [Indesluttedhed]5 is always turned inward in that way. Inside the box was a very carefully and neatly handwritten manuscript on very fine letter paper. There was an orderliness, a meticulousness about the whole thing and yet a solemnity as if it had been done in the sight of God. To think that by my meddling I had brought disorder into the archives of heavenly justice! But now it is too late, and I beg the forgiveness of heaven and the unknown person. Undeniably the hiding place was well chosen, and Søborg Lake is more reliable than the most solemn vow—absolute silence is promised—for it never once makes this vow. Strangely enough, however different happiness and unhappiness are, at times they agree in wishing for one thing: silence. We commend a lottery operator who distributes the lucky prizes if he withholds the name of the lucky person, lest the good fortune become an affliction to him; but as a matter of fact the unlucky fel
low who gambled away all his assets also wants his name withheld.

  There were also a few pieces of jewelry in the box, some even of considerable value, ornaments and precious stones—alas, precious stones, the owner probably would say, precious, dearly purchased, although he did indeed receive permission to keep them. It is this valuable find I feel duty-bound to advertise. There was a plain gold ring with an engraved date, a necklace consisting of a diamond cross fastened to a light blue silk ribbon. The rest was partly of no value whatsoever—a fragment of a poster advertising a comedy, 6a page torn from the New Testament, each one in a neat vellum envelope, [VI 180] a withered rose7 in a little box with silver overlay, and other similar articles that only to the owner can have a value equal to that of diamonds of two carats.