Suffering
- Soren Kierkegaard -
Nothing is
more certain. Coming close to God brings catastrophe. Everyone whose life does not bring relative catastrophe has never even once turned as a single individual to God; it is just as impossible as it is to touch the conductors of a generator without getting a shock.
All striving of a more noble character always meets with opposition. If you hold only to God, the attack and contempt and the storm of opposition will help you discover things you otherwise would never discover; they will add new strings to your lyre. Every person is like an instrument which no doubt can be disturbed and damaged by the world s wretchedness but if you hold on to God, it can help you to an ever new melody.
Being a Christian is,without a doubt, neither more nor less than being a martyr. Every Christian, that is, every true Christian, is a martyr. The point is this becoming a Christian is an examination given by God. In every age it must continually be equally difficult to become Christian.
To be an alien, to be in exile, is the mark of Christian suffering.
Voluntary suffering provides the double collision which is the mark of everything essentially Christian: to become hated, cursed, detested, to have to suffer. No one ever thinks of persecuting someone because he is in poverty against his will, but no one is as hated as the one who voluntarily renounces that in which people naturally centre their lives.
There is an almost mad self-contradiction in Christianity s requirement. It sets a task and exclaims: In the same degree as you succeed in faith, you will come to suffer more and more.
If you desire, humanly speaking, pleasant and happy days, then never get seriously involved with Christ.
God s education consists in leading one to being able to do freely what at first one had to be compelled to do.
Voluntary suffering is suspect at three points. First, I must use my strength to compel myself to go forth into the suffering. Second, I must use my strength to bear it. And third, I must put up with the advice of relatives and sympathizers who insist that I go too far. Such is the way of Christian suffering.
Act just once in such a manner that your action expresses that you fear God alone you will in some measure or another, instantly cause a scandal.
The pathway of tribulation remains just as long and just as dark right to the end the pathway that gradually becomes lighter must be a different one. Neither do we know when the change will come nor precisely whether we have reached it or how much nearer we have come (for such things cannot be determined in the dark). But we do believe that the change will come and then with the blessedness of eternity.
When a child in a dark room is waiting for the door to be opened and all the anticipated joy to be restored, at the last second before the door is opened it is still just as dark as at first. The child still does not know how much longer he has to wait. But one thing is sure, the second the door opens the glory will be revealed.
Just as in a large shipment of herring the outermost layer gets crushed and ruined, just as the outermost fruit gets bruised and damaged by the crate, so in every generation there are a few who stand farthest out and suffer from the crate, who alone guard those who are in the middle.
As long as there are many springs from which to draw water, anxiety about possible water failure does not arise. But when there is only one source! And so it is when Christ has become a person s one and only spring that spiritual trials begin. Spiritual trial is the expression of a concentration upon Christ as the only source. This is why most people have no spiritual trials.
It is much easier to suffer on account of one s sin than to suffer because one relates himself to God.
Whoever does not wish to sink in the wretchedness of the finite is constrained in the most profound sense to struggle with the infinite.
The difference between temptation and spiritual trial is that the temptation to sin is in accord with inclination, the "temptation" of spiritual trial is contrary to inclination. Therefore the opposite tactic must be employed. The person tempted by sin does well to shun the danger, but in relation to spiritual trial this is the very danger, for every time he thinks he is saving himself by shunning the danger, the danger becomes greater the next time.
The fleshly person is wise to flee from the sight of sin or the enticement. But for the one not so tempted but who is ridden with anxiety about coming in contact with it (he is under spiritual trial) it is not so wise to shun the sight or the enticement; for spiritual trial wants nothing else than to paralyze him by striking terror into his life and enslaving him in anxiety.
It is a very special spiritual trial when a person in the strictest sense sins against his will, plagued by the anxiety of sin, when he has, for example, sinful thoughts which he would rather flee, does everything to avoid, but they still come. It is a special kind of spiritual trial to believe that this is something he must submit to, that Christ will come to console him as he bears this cross, plagued as he is by a thorn in the flesh. This kind of spiritual trial is very painful and excruciating. It is an educational torture that is intended to break all self-centered willfulness.
To suffer rightly is to have a secret with God!
You do not dare for the sake of suffering, but you dare in order not to betray the truth.
It takes moral courage to grieve; it takes spiritual courage to rejoice.
Christianity requires
simply that we love others with our whole heart; it is not the fault of Christianity that this is rewarded with persecution.
Adversities do not make a person weak, they reveal what strength he has.
He who himself does not wish to suffer cannot love him who has.
The intensity of suffering is greatest when you have the power to free yourself from it. I must use my energy to force myself out into the suffering and then use it to endure the suffering.
The use of force is in league with injustice. Perpetuating injustice and in hasty impatience to want to protect oneself through force against injustice are essentially the same thing. At best there is an entirely accidental difference the suffering party only lacks an opportunity to commit injustice.
Sorrow is like
an arrow in the breast the more vigorously the deer runs in order to run away from it, the more firmly the arrow becomes embedded in it.
What Christianity calls self-renunciation involves precisely a double-danger. The purely human conception of self-renunciation is this: give up your selfish desires, longings, and plans and then you will become appreciated and honoured and loved as a righteous person. The Christian conception of self-renunciation, however, is to give up your selfish desires and longings, give up your arbitrary plans and purposes and then submit to being treated as a criminal, scorned and ridiculed for this very reason. Christian self-renunciation knows in advance that this will happen and chooses it freely. It does not let the Christian get by at half-price.
Nothing should be promised the young that Christianity cannot deliver, and Christianity cannot deliver something different from what it has promised from the very first: the ingratitude of the world, opposition, mockery, and always to a higher degree the more dedicated a Christian becomes. This is the final difficulty in being a Christian, and when you recommend Christianity there should be silence least of all about this.
This is the paradox of Christianity namely, that a kingdom which is not of this world still wants to have a visible place, yet without becoming a kingdom of this world. This is why Christian collisions are produced.
See to it that you take your life s examination, obediently submitting to the final test, to be sacrificed. Don t worry about the ill treatment that will be meted out to you by your contemporaries. No, see to it that you take your examination. If you take it, this is eternally and infinitely decisive. Maybe it will then happen, maybe not, that an individual in the next generation can be inspired by your life to be willing to take his life s examination. There will happen to him what happened to you, and perhaps in thinking of you he will find some encouragement.
There was a time
when one could almost be afraid to call himself a disciple of Christ, because it meant so much. Now one can do it with complete ease, because it means nothing at all.
Christianity is also a revolt, that is, as soon as it is set forth in all its truth people will revolt against it.
What is a witness?
A witness is a person who directly demonstrates the truth of what he proclaims directly, yes, in part by its being truth in him and blessedness, in part by volunteering his life and saying: Now, see if you can force me to deny this truth.Let this propensity to preach that there is joy in suffering insult be met with insults, and then we will see what becomes of the speaker. The essentially Christian makes witnesses, and so good night to eloquence.
A witness to the truth is a person who in poverty witnesses to the truth. For him there is never promotion, except in an inverse sense, downward, step by step.
I wonder if a person handing another person an extremely sharp, polished, two-edged instrument would hand it over with the air, gestures, and expression of one delivering a bouquet of flowers? Would not this be madness? What does one do, then? Convinced of the excellence of the dangerous instrument, one recommends it unreservedly, to be sure, but in such a way that in a certain sense one warns against it. So it is with Christianity.
No doubt there is an infinite difference between a tyrant and a martyr; yet they have one thing in common: the power to constrain. The tyrant constrains by force; the martyr, unconditionally obedient to God, constrains by suffering. The tyrant dies, and his rule is over; the martyr dies, and his rule begins.
When the world shuts itself against a witness, heaven opens for him.
The preacher says: It is good to be here in God s house. Would that we could remain here, but we must go out again into the confusion of life! Lies and nonsense! The most difficult thing of all would be to remain day after day inside of God s house.
Learn first how to be alone, and you will doubtless also learn the true worship of God, which is to think highly of God and humbly of yourself.
Only when a person suffers and wills to learn from what he suffers does he come to know something about himself and about his relationship to God. This is the sign that he is being educated for eternity. Through suffering a person can come to know a great deal about the world how deceitful and treacherous it is but all this knowledge is not the schooling of suffering. No, just as we speak of a child being weaned from his mother s breast, so also, in the most profound sense, a person must be weaned by suffering, weaned from the things of this world, from loving it and from being embittered by it, in order to learn for eternity. For this reason, the school of suffering consists in a dying to a dying to the world and to yourself.
This is the key to finding rest in your suffering. There is only one way in which rest is to be found: to let God rule in everything. Whatever else you might come to learn only pertains to how God has willed to rule. But as soon as unrest begins, the cause for it is due to your unwillingness to obey, your unwillingness to surrender yourself to God.
When there is suffering, but also obedience in suffering, then you are being educated for eternity. Then there will be no impatient hankering in your soul, no restlessness, neither of sin nor of sorrow. If you will but let it, suffering is the guardian angel who keeps you from slipping out into the fragmentariness of the world; the fragmentariness that seeks to rip apart the soul. And for this reason, suffering keeps you in school this dangerous schooling so that you may be properly educated for eternity.
Christ unabashedly speaks of what would await his disciples when they witnessed to him in the world. "This I have told you so that you will not be offended. They will exclude you from the synagogues; yes, the time will come when whoever kills you will think he is offering God a service" (Jn. 16:1; Mt. 16:23). The possibility of offense consists in being persecuted, ridiculed, cast out from society, misunderstood, and finally put to death and in such a way that those who do it think they are doing God, or the cause of righteousness, a service. It is to this suffering Christ speaks and promises heaven s reward.
Whether you experience adversities in life, whether things perhaps go downhill for you, though you as a Christian will most assuredly bear these sufferings patiently, unlike many others in the world, however patiently you bear them, this suffering is not yet akin to Christ s suffering. To suffer Christianly is not to endure the inescapable but to suffer evil at the hands of people because you voluntarily will and endeavor to do only the good: to willingly suffer on account of the Word and for the sake of righteousness. This is how Christ suffered. This alone is Christian suffering.
Anxiety for the next day is commonly associated with anxiety for subsistence. This is a very superficial view. The next day it is the grappling-hook by which the prodigious hulk of anxiety gets a hold of the individual s light craft. If it succeeds, he is under the domination of that power. The next day is the first link of the chain that fetters a person to that superfluous anxiety that is of the evil one. The next day it is strange indeed, for ordinarily when one is sentenced for life the sentence reads, "for life," but he who sentences himself to anxiety "for the next day," sentences himself for life.
It is dangerous business to arrive in eternity with possibilities that you have prevented from becoming actualities. Possibility is a hint from God. A person must follow it. The possibility for the highest is in every soul; you must follow it. If God does not want it, then let him hinder it. You must not hinder it yourself. Trusting in God, I have ventured, but I have failed there is peace and rest and God s confidence in that. I have not ventured it is an utterly unhappy thought, a torment for all eternity.
To sin against God is to punish yourself.
On the Subject of Despair . . . .
Just as there isn t a single
human being that enjoys perfect health, so there is not a single human being who does not despair at least a little. There is not a single human being whose innermost being is free of uneasiness, unquiet, discordance, or anxiety in the face of something unknown, something he doesn t even dare strike up acquaintance with. Everyone, in one way or another, is plagued with an anxiety about a possibility in life or about himself. We go about with a sickness not unlike an illness of the body, which a physician has diagnosed a sickness of the spirit that only now and then, in glimpses, reveals itself and with what is for him an inexplicable anxiety.Despair differs from what we usually call sickness, because it is a sickness of the spirit. If for instance, a physician determines that so and so is in good health, and then later that person becomes ill, this doesn t mean that the physician was wrong. He may well have been right about his having been well at the time. Once despair makes itself known, however, it becomes apparent that the person was already in despair. Unlike a fever, which comes and goes, when someone falls into despair, it is immediately evident that he was already in despair. This is because despair is a characteristic of the spirit. It is related to the eternal, and therefore has something of the eternal in its dynamic.
We must not assume, therefore, that despair is something rare. On the contrary, it is quite general. And we cannot assume that just because someone doesn t think or feel he is in despair, he is not in despair. Nor should we think that only the person who says he is in despair is so. On the contrary, he who says without pretense that he despairs is, in actual fact, a little nearer, a step nearer to being cured than all those who do not regard themselves as being in despair. Yet we must concede that the normal situation is this: that most people live without being properly conscious of being spirit, and for this reason all the so-called security and contentment with life are actually forms of despair.
Ah! So much is spoken about human need and misery and how to overcome it. So much is spoken about wasting our lives. But the only wasted life is the life of him who has so lived it, deceived by life s pleasures or its sorrows, that he never became decisively, eternally, conscious of himself as spirit, as a self. Or, if I may put it another way, he has never become aware and gained in the deepest sense the impression that there is a God and that "he", himself, is answerable to and exists before this God, and that this God can only be met by way of despair. Alas! so many live their lives in denial, decapitated from eternity. So many are not aware of their true destiny, defrauding themselves of this most blessed of all realities.
Imagine a house consisting of a basement and a ground floor, designed in such a way that there is, or is meant to be, a difference of social class between the occupants of each floor. Imagine if we were to compare being a human being with such a house. The sorry and ludicrous fact with most people is that they prefer to live in the basement. Every human being is the synthesis of spirit and body, the infinite and finite, freedom and necessity, destined for spirit. This is the building, but we prefer living in the basement, that is, in the categories of the senses and in the abstractions of thought. We not only prefer living in the basement, we love it so much that we are indignant if anyone suggests we occupy the fine suite lying vacant above. After all we are living in our
own house!Yes, so many prefer to live in the basement, along life s surface. You can see amazing examples of this, which illustrate it on a stupendous scale. Take a thinker who erects a huge building, a system of thought, one that encompasses the whole of life and world history. Turn your attention to his personal life and you will discover to your astonishment, like among so many others, the appalling and ludicrous fact that he himself does not live in this huge, high-vaulted palace, but in a shack next door. If you took it upon yourself to draw attention to this deception, to this contradiction, he would be insulted. As long as he can complete the system with the help of his error being in error is not what he is afraid of. What sickness!
Or, take the industrious person who busily secures his life with this and that creature comfort but in a moment of illness or physical loss or adversity falls to pieces. If you took it upon yourself to ask, "What are you so busy for? What difference is all this activity if at a moment s notice you fall ill or fall dead?" you would surely be cursed. As long as this person can keep busy without thinking too much about life s meaning living in deception is the least of his fears.
All this is only to say that just because one is ignorant of his state as being one of despair, he
is in despair all the same, and even more so. Beneath ignorance lies despair spiritlessness whether his state is one of total extinction, a merely vegetative life, or a life full of energy the secret of which is nevertheless despair. When the spell of illusion is broken, when life begins to quake, then it is immediately apparent that despair was lying beneath all the time. No wonder people prefer to live in the basement.
The human being
is essentially spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is to be a self. But what is the self? In short, the self is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. The self is the conscious unity of these factors, which relates to itself, whose task is to become itself. This, of course, can only be done in relationship to God, who holds the synthesis together.When is despair completely eradicated? It occurs when the self, in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, is grounded nakedly in the power that established it. In other words, when it is related openly to and dependently on God. To transcend despair is neither to become finite nor to become infinite but to become an individual in their synthesis, which God alone holds together.
In so far as the self does not become itself in this way, it is not itself. And not to be oneself, as God created you, is despair.
Finitude s Despair:
Despair comes in different guises. To lack infinitude is a despairing confinement. It consists in ascribing infinite value to the trivial and temporal. Here the self is lost by being altogether reduced to the finite. Finitude s despair allows itself to be, so to speak, cheated of its self by "the others." By seeing the multitude of people and things around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise in the ways of the world, a person forgets himself, forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like all the others, to become a repetition, a number along with the crowd.
Now this form of despair goes virtually unnoticed in the world. Precisely by losing oneself in this way, a person gains all that is required for a flawless performance in everyday life, yes, for making a great success out of life. One is ground as smooth as a pebble. Far from anyone thinking of such a person as being in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be. He is praised by others; honored, esteemed, and occupied with all the goals of temporal life.
Yes, what we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world. They use their abilities, amass wealth, carry out enterprises, make prudent calculations, and the like, and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not authentic selves. They are copies. In a spiritual sense they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything, no self for God, however self-consumed they are otherwise.
The Despair of Weakness:
The despair of weakness is the despair of not wanting to be oneself. This kind of despair amounts to a passivity of the self. Its frame of reference is the pleasant and the unpleasant; its concepts are good fortune, misfortune, and fate. What is immediate is all that matters. The determining factor is what happens or does not happen to oneself.
To despair is to lose the eternal, but of this loss the one who despairs in weakness says nothing, it doesn t even occur to him. He is too preoccupied with securing his earthly existence against unnecessary deprivation. To lose the earthly, however, is not in itself to despair, yet that is precisely what this person speaks of and calls despair. What he says is in a sense true, only not in the way he understands it. He is turned around and what he says must be understood backwards. In other words, he stands there pointing to something that is not despair (e.g. a loss of some kind), explaining that he is in despair, and yes, sure enough, the despair is going on behind him but unawares. Therefore, if everything suddenly changes, once his external circumstances change and his wishes are fulfilled, then happiness returns to him, he begins life afresh. When help comes from outside, happiness is restored to him, and he begins where he left off. Yet he neither was nor becomes a self. He is a cipher and simply carries on living merely on the level of what is immediate and of what is happening around him.
This form of despair consists of not wanting to be a self, really. Actually, it consists of wanting desperately to be someone else. Such a self refuses to take responsibility. Life is but a game of chance. Hence, in the moment of despair, when no help comes, such a person wants desperately to become someone else. And yet a despairer of this kind, whose only wish is this craziest of all crazy transformations to be someone else is in love with the fancy that the change can be made as easily as one puts on another coat. Or to put it differently, he only knows himself by his coat. He simply doesn t know himself. He knows what it is to have a self only in externals. There could hardly be a more absurd confusion, for a self differs precisely, no, infinitely, from those externals.
And what if such a person was able to become somebody else, could put on a new self? There is the story of a peasant who had come barefoot to town but who made enough money to buy himself a pair of stockings and shoes and still have enough left over to get himself drunk. On his way home in his drunken state he lay down in the middle of the road and fell asleep. A carriage came along, and the coachman shouted to him to move aside or else he would drive over his legs. The drunken peasant woke up, looked down at his legs and, not recognizing them because of the stockings and shoes, said: "Go ahead, they aren t my legs." So it is with the immediate person who despairs in weakness of being a true self. It is impossible to draw a picture of him that is not comic.
The Despair of Defiance:
Unlike the despair of weakness, the despair of defiance is the despair of wanting in desperation to be oneself. Here despair is conscious of itself as an activity. The self s identity comes not from "outside" but directly from the self. It is rooted in the consciousness of an infinitude, of being related to the infinite, and it is this self the despairer wants to be. In other words, such a self severs itself from any relationship to the power that has established it. It wants desperately to rule over itself, create itself, make this self what it wants it to be, and determine what it will have and what it will not have. The one who lives in defiance does not truly put on a self, nor does he see his task in his given self. No, by virtue of his own "infinitude" he constructs his own self by himself and for himself.
The defiant self recognizes no power other than its own. It is content with taking notice only of itself, which it does by means of bestowing infinite interest and significance on all its enterprises. In the process of its wish to be its own master, however, it works its way into the exact opposite; it really becomes no self, and thus despairs. As it acts, there is nothing eternally firm on which it stands. Yes, the defiant self is its own master, absolutely (as one says) its own master, and yet exactly this is despair.
Upon closer examination it is easy to see that this absolute ruler is a king without a country. He really rules over nothing. His position, his kingdom, his sovereignty, is subject to the dictates of rebellion at any moment. This is because such a self is forever building castles in the air, and just when it seems on the point of having the building finished, at a whim it can and often does dissolve the whole thing into nothing.
When confronted with earthly need, a temporal cross, a thorn in the flesh that grows too deep to be removed, the defiant self is offended. It uses the suffering as an excuse to take offense at all existence. Such a person wants to be himself in spite of suffering, but not in "spite of it" in the sense of being without it. No, he now wants to spite or defy all existence and be himself
with it, taking it along in steely resignation with him, almost flying in the face of his agony. Does he have hope in the possibility of help? No! Does he recognize that for God everything is possible? No! Will he ask help of any other? No! That for the entire world he will not do. If it came to that, he would rather be himself with all the torments of hell than ask for help.Ah! Indeed, there is much, even prolonged and agonizing suffering that the defiant self fundamentally prefers so long as it retains the right to be itself. Ah, demonic madness! Such a self wants to be itself in hatred towards existence, to be itself according to its
own misery. It does not even want so much as to sever itself defiantly from the power that established it but in sheer spite to push itself on that power, importune it, hold on to it out of malice.In rebelling against existence, the defiant self will hear nothing about the comfort eternity offers. This comfort would be to his undoing, an objection to the whole of his existence. It is, to describe it figuratively, as if a writer were to make a slip of the pen and the error became conscious of itself as such and then wanted to rebel against the author. Out of hatred for him, the error forbids the author to correct it and in manic defiance says to him: "No, I will not be changed, I will stand as a witness against you, a witness to the fact that you are a second-rate author." Yes, this is the despair of defiance, and what despair it is!