(Voice of one crying in the wilderness)

Instead of a preface

Kirgegard and Dostoevsky[1] 

I

Of course, you do not expect me to exhaust the complex and difficult subject of the work of Kirgegard and Dostoevsky in the course of the one hour that is at my disposal. I will therefore limit my task: I will speak only about how Dostoevsky and Kiergegard understood original sin, or, for they are one and the same thing, about speculative and revealed truth. But it must be said in advance that in such a short time it is unlikely that it will be possible to find out with the desired completeness even what they thought and told us about the fall of man. At best, it will be possible to outline, and then schematically, why original sin riveted the attention of these two most remarkable thinkers of the nineteenth century. By the way, in Nietzsche, who, according to the usual ideas, was so far from biblical themes, the problem of the Fall is the axis or pivot of all his philosophical problems. His main, main theme is Socrates, in whom he sees a decadent, i.e. fallen man par excellence. Moreover, he sees the fall of Socrates in what history – and especially the history of philosophy – has always found and we have been taught to find his greatest merit; in his boundless trust in reason and knowledge obtained by reason. When you read Nietzsche's reflections on Socrates, you involuntarily recall the biblical story of the forbidden tree and the tempter's seductive words: "You will be knowledgeable." Even more than Nietzsche, and even more insistently, Kiergegaard tells us about Socrates. And this is all the more striking because, for Kiergegard, Socrates is the most remarkable phenomenon in the history of mankind before the appearance on the horizon of Europe of that mysterious book which is called the Book, i.e., the Bible.

The Fall has disturbed human thought from the most remote times. All people felt that all was not well in the world, and even very unhappy: "Something is unclean in the kingdom of Denmark," in the words of Shakespeare, and they made great and strenuous efforts to find out where this trouble came from. And it must be said at once that Greek philosophy, as well as the philosophy of other peoples, not excluding the peoples of the Far East, gave an answer to the question posed in this way directly opposite to that which we find in the narrative of the Book of Genesis. One of the first great Greek philosophers, Anaximander, says in a passage that has survived after him: "From whence came the birth of individual beings, from there, of necessity, comes destruction to them. At the appointed time they are punished and receive retribution from one another for their impiety." This idea of Anaximander runs through the whole of ancient philosophy: the appearance of individual things, mainly, of course, living beings, and chiefly men, is regarded as impious daring, the just retribution for which is death and their destruction. The idea of γένεσις and φθορά (birth and destruction) is the starting point of ancient philosophy (which, I repeat, stood inexorably before the founders of the religions and philosophies of the Far East). The natural thought of man, at all times and among all peoples, weak-willedly, as if bewitched, stopped before the fatal necessity that brought into the world the terrible law of death, inseparably linked with the birth of man, and of annihilation, which awaits everything that has appeared and appears. In the very existence of man, thought discovered something undue, vice, illness, sin, and, accordingly, wisdom demanded the overcoming at the root of that sin, i.e., the renunciation of being, which, as having a beginning, is condemned to an inevitable end. Greek catharsis, purification, has its source in the conviction that the immediate data of consciousness, which testify to the inevitable destruction of all that is born, reveal to us a pre-worldly, eternal, unchangeable, and forever insurmountable truth. Actual, present being (οντως ον) is not to be sought with us and not for us, but where the power of the law of birth and destruction ends, i.e., where there is no and is no birth, and therefore there is no and no annihilation. This is where speculative philosophy came from. The law of the inevitable destruction of all that arises and is created, which has been revealed to the intellect, seems to us to be eternally inherent in existence itself: Greek philosophy is as unshakably convinced of this as the wisdom of the Hindus, and we, who are separated from the Greeks and Hindus for thousands of years, are just as incapable of escaping from the grip of this self-evident truth as those who first discovered and showed it to us.

Only the Book of Books is a mysterious exception in this respect.

It tells exactly the opposite of what people saw with their clever eyesight. Everything was created, we read at the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, by the Creator, everything had a beginning, but this is not only not considered as a condition of inferiority, insufficiency, depravity and sinfulness of existence, but, on the contrary, this is the pledge of everything that can be good in the universe; in other words, God's creative act is the source, and the only one, of all good. In the evening of each day of creation, the Lord, looking back at the created, said: "Good is green," and on the last day, having examined all that He had created, God saw that all good was good. Both the world and people (whom God blessed) were created by the Creator, and precisely because they were created by Him, were perfect and had no flaws: there was no evil in the world created by God, and there was no sin from which evil began. Evil and sin came afterward. From where? And Scripture gives a definite answer to this question. God planted in the Garden of Eden, among other trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And he said to the first man, "You may eat the fruit of all the trees, but do not touch the fruit of the tree of knowledge, for in the day that you touch it, you will die." But the tempter – in the Bible he is called a serpent, who was more cunning than all the beasts created by God – said: "No, you will not die, <... > but your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing." Man succumbed to temptation, ate of the forbidden fruit, his eyes were opened, and he became knowledgeable. What did he discover? What did he learn? What was revealed to him was what was revealed to the Greek philosophers and Hindu sages: the Divine "good" did not justify itself – not all good is in the created world, in the created world – and precisely because it is created – there cannot but be evil, moreover, much evil and intolerable evil. This is evidenced with indisputable evidence by everything that surrounds us – the immediate data of consciousness; and the one who looks at the world with "open eyes", the one who "knows", cannot judge it otherwise. From the moment when man became "knowing," in other words, sin entered the world together with "knowledge," and after sin evil. So according to the Bible.

f. from the fruit of the forbidden tree. Hegel, one of the most remarkable philosophers of the last century, who absorbed (and in this his meaning and significance) all European thought during the twenty-five centuries of its existence, asserts without any hesitation: the serpent did not deceive man, the fruit of the tree of knowledge became the source of philosophy for all future times. And it must be said at once: historically Hegel is right. The fruit of the tree of knowledge has indeed become the source of philosophy, the source of thought for all future times. Philosophers, and not only pagan ones, alien to the Holy Scriptures. But also the Jewish and Christian philosophers, who recognized the Scriptures as a divinely inspired book, all wanted to be knowledgeable and did not agree to renounce the fruit of the forbidden tree. For Clement of Alexandria (beginning of the third century), Greek philosophy is the second Old Testament. He also argued that if gnosis (i.e., knowledge) could be separated from eternal salvation, and if it were given a choice, he would not choose eternal salvation, but gnosis. All medieval philosophy went in the same direction. Even mystics were no exception in this respect. An unknown author of the famous "Theologia Deutsch"[4] claimed that Adam could have eaten even twenty apples, there would have been no trouble. Sin did not come from the fruit of the tree of knowledge: nothing bad can come from knowledge. Where did the author of Theologia Deutsch get this confidence that evil could not come from knowledge? He does not pose this question: it obviously does not occur to him that the truth can be sought and found in the Scriptures. Truth must be sought only in one's own reason, and only that which reason recognizes as truth is truth. The serpent did not deceive man.

Kiergegaard, like Dostoevsky, both born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (only Kiergegaard, who died at the age of 44 and was ten years older than Dostoevsky, had already finished his literary career when Dostoevsky was just beginning to write) and who lived in the epoch when Hegel was the ruler of thought in Europe, could not, of course, but feel themselves entirely at the mercy of Hegel's philosophy. It is true that Dostoevsky must have never read a single line of Hegel – in contrast to Kirgegard, who knew Hegel perfectly well – but Dostoevsky, even at the time when he belonged to Belinsky's circle, had sufficiently assimilated the basic tenets of Hegel's philosophy. Dostoevsky possessed an extraordinary sense of philosophical ideas, and it was enough for him what Belinsky's friends brought from Germany to give himself a clear account of the problems posed and solved by Hegel's philosophy. But even not only Dostoevsky, but also Belinsky himself, a "half-educated student" and, of course, in the sense of philosophical perspicacity, stood far behind Dostoevsky, correctly felt and not only felt, but also found the right words to express everything that was unacceptable to him in the teaching of Hegel and which later turned out to be equally unacceptable to Dostoevsky. Let me remind you of an excerpt from Belinsky's famous letter: "If I were to climb to the top rung of the ladder of development, I would ask you to give me an account of all the victims of living conditions and history, of all the victims of chance, superstition, the inquisition of Philip II, and so on. and so on: otherwise I throw myself upside down from the top step. I do not want happiness for nothing, if I am not calm about each of my brothers by blood..."[5] Needless to say, if Hegel had a chance to read these lines of Belinsky's, he would only shrug his shoulders contemptuously and call Belinsky a barbarian, a savage, an ignoramus: it is obvious that he has not tasted of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and therefore does not even suspect that there is an immutable law by virtue of which everything that has a beginning, i.e., the very people for whom he so passionately intercedes, must have an end, and, consequently, there is no one at all and no need to turn to with demands for an account of beings who, as finite beings, are not subject to any protection or protection. Not only are the first victims of chance not subject to protection and protection, but even such as Socrates, Giordano Bruno, and many others, great, greatest men, righteous sages, all are mercilessly ground by the wheel of the historical process, and notice it as little as if they were inanimate objects. The philosophy of the spirit is the philosophy of the spirit precisely because it is able to rise above all that is finite and transitory. And, on the other hand, everything finite and transitory will partake of the philosophy of the spirit only when it ceases to care about its insignificant and therefore unwarranted interests. Hegel would have said so, and he would have referred to that chapter of his History of Philosophy in which it is explained that Socrates was supposed to be poisoned in this way, and that there was no harm in it: an old Greek had died—was it worth making a fuss about such a trifle? Everything that is real is reasonable, i.e. it cannot and should not be other than what it is. Whoever does not comprehend this is not a philosopher, it is not given to him by intelligent sight to penetrate into the essence of things. Moreover, to whom this has not been revealed, he has no right to consider himself – everything according to Hegel – a religious person. For religion, every religion, and especially absolute religion – as Hegel calls Christianity – reveals to people in images, i.e., less perfectly, the same thing that the thinking spirit itself sees in the essence of being. "The true content of the Christian faith is therefore justified by philosophy, and not by history" (i.e., by what is narrated in the Holy Scriptures), he says in his Philosophy of Religion. This means that Scripture is acceptable only in so far as the thinking spirit recognizes it as corresponding to the truths which it itself obtains, or, as Hegel expresses it, draws from itself. Everything else must be rejected. We already know that the thinking spirit of Hegel drew out of itself, that, contrary to the Scriptures, the serpent did not deceive man, and that the fruit of the forbidden tree brought us the best thing that can be in life – knowledge. In the same way, the thinking spirit rejects, as impossible, the miracles of which the Scriptures relate. How deeply Hegel despised the Scriptures can be seen from the following words: "Whether the guests at the wedding in Cana of Galilee got more or less wine is quite indifferent, and it is also pure accident that someone has a paralyzed arm healed: millions of people walk around with paralyzed hands and with other limbs crippled, and no one heals them. And in the Old Testament it is reported that when leaving Egypt, red signs were made on the doors of Jewish houses so that the angel of the Lord could identify them. Such faith has no meaning for the spirit. Voltaire's most venomous ridicule is directed against such a belief. He says that it would be better if God taught the Jews the immortality of the soul, instead of teaching them how to discharge their natural needs (aller à la selle). Latrines thus become the content of faith." Hegel's "Philosophy of Spirit" treats Scripture with ridicule and contempt and accepts only that from the Bible that can be "justified" before rational consciousness. Hegel did not need "revealed" truth, or rather, he does not accept it, or, if you like, he considers as revealed truth what his own spirit reveals to him. Some Protestant theologians guessed this even without Hegel: in order not to embarrass themselves and others with the mysterious mystery of biblical revelation, they declared all truths to be revealed. In Greek, truth is άλήθεια; by deriving this word from the verb ά-λανθάνω (to reveal), theologians were freed from the burdensome duty of recognizing the privileged position of the truths of Scripture: every truth, precisely because it is true, reveals something that was previously hidden. Biblical truth, in this sense, is no exception and has no advantage over other truths. It can be acceptable to us only when and to the extent that it can be justified before our reason, seen by our "open eyes." Needless to say, on such a condition it will be necessary to renounce three-fourths of what is narrated in the Scriptures, and what remains to be interpreted in such a way that the same reason will not find anything offensive to itself in it. For Hegel (as for medieval philosophers) the greatest authority is Aristotle. His Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences ends with a long excerpt (originally, in Greek) from Aristotle's metaphysics on the subject ή θεωτία τò αριστον καί τò ηδιστον, which means: "Contemplation is the best and the most blessed," and in the same encyclopaedia, at the beginning of the third part, in the paragraphs heading the Philosophy of Spirit, he writes: "Aristotle's books on the soul are even now the best and only work of a speculative nature on this subject. The essential goal of the philosophy of spirit can only be to introduce the idea of the concept into the knowledge of the spirit and thus open access to the books of Aristotle." It is not for nothing that Dante called Aristotle il maestro di coloro, chi sanno (teacher of those who know). Whoever wants to "know" must follow Aristotle. And to see in his works – "On the Soul", and in "Metaphysics", and in "Ethics" not only the second Old, as Clement of Alexandria said, but also the second New Testament: to see in it the Bible. He is the only teacher of those who want to know, who knows. Inspired by the same Aristotle, Hegel in his Philosophy of Religion solemnly proclaims: "The basic idea (of Christianity) is the unity of the divine and human natures: God became man." Or, in another place, in the chapter on the "kingdom of the spirit": "The individual must be imbued with the truth of the primary unity of the divine and human natures, and this truth he comprehends in faith in Christ. God is no longer otherworldly for him." This is all that "absolute religion" brought to Hegel. He happily quotes the words of Maester Eckegaard (from his sermons) and the same words of Angelus Silesius:[6] "If there were no God, there would be no me, if there were no me, there would be no God." In this way, the content of absolute religion is interpreted and raised to the level to which the thought of Aristotle or the biblical serpent rose when he promised our forefather that "knowledge" would make him equal to God. And not for a moment does it occur to him that in this lies a terrible, fatal fall, that "knowledge" does not equate man with God, but tears him away from God, placing him at the disposal of the dead and deadening "truth." The "miracles" of Scripture, i.e., the omnipotence of God, we remember, were rejected by him with contempt, because, as he explains in another place: "It is impossible to demand of men that they should believe in things in which they cannot believe at a certain stage of education: such faith is faith in a content which is finite and accidental, i.e., is not true: for true faith has no accidental content." Accordingly, "a miracle is a violence against the natural connection of phenomena and therefore is a violence against the spirit."

II

I had to dwell a little on Hegel's speculative philosophy, in view of the fact that both Dostoevsky and Kiergegard, the former, without realizing it, the latter quite consciously, saw their vital task in the struggle and overcoming of the system of ideas which Hegelian philosophy, as the result of the development of European thought, embodied in itself. For Hegel, the rupture of the natural connection of phenomena, which signifies the power of the Creator over the world and his omnipotence, is an intolerable and most terrible thought: for him it is "violence against the spirit." He ridicules the biblical narratives – they all belong to "history", they speak only of the "finite", which a person who wants to live in spirit and truth must shake off himself. This he calls the "reconciliation" of religion and reason, thus religion receives its justification through philosophy, which sees in the variety of religious constructions the "necessary truth" and in it, in this necessary truth, discovers the "eternal idea." There is no doubt that reason is thus fully satisfied. But what is left of religion, which has thus justified itself before reason? It is also certain that by reducing the content of "absolute religion" to the unity of the divine and human natures, Hegel, and everyone who followed him, became "knowing," as the tempter promised Adam when he tempted him with the fruit of the forbidden tree, i.e., he discovered in the Creator the same nature that was revealed to him in his own being. But do we then go to religion in order to acquire knowledge? Belinsky sought an "account" for all the victims of chance, the Inquisition, etc. But is knowledge concerned with such a report? Can knowledge give such an account? On the contrary, he who knows, and especially knows the truth about the unity of the nature of God and man, knows for certain that Belinsky demands the impossible; to demand the impossible is to reveal feeble-mindedness, as Aristotle said: where the realm of the impossible begins, human ambitions must cease, there, to use Hegel's language, all the interests of the spirit end.

And so Kirgegard, who had been brought up on Hegel, who himself in his youth had revered him, when confronted with the reality which Hegel, in the name of the interests of the spirit, called upon people to shake off themselves, suddenly felt that in the philosophy of the great teacher there was concealed a treacherous, fatal lie and a terrible temptation. He recognized in it the "eritis scientes" of the biblical serpent: a call to exchange the fearless faith in a free, living Creator for obedience to all reigning, unchanging, but indifferent to all truths. From the universally glorified, famous thinker, from the great scientist he went, and did not go, but rushed, as to his only savior, to the "private thinker," to the Biblical Job. And from Job he went to Abraham, not to Aristotle, the teacher of those who know, but to the one who is called the Father of faith in the Scriptures. For the sake of Abraham, he leaves even Socrates himself. Socrates was also knowledgeable: the pagan god, through γνωθι σεαυτόν (know thyself), revealed to him the truth about the unity of human and divine nature five centuries before the Bible reached Europe. Socrates knew that not everything is possible for God, as well as for man, that the possible and impossible are determined not by God, but by eternal laws, to which God is as subject as man is. That is why God has no power over history, i.e. over reality. "It is impossible to make what once was not possible in the realm of the sensible world, it can only be done spiritually, internally," says Hegel, and this truth was revealed to him, of course, not in the Scriptures, where it is repeated so many times and so persistently that nothing is impossible for God, and where even man is promised power over everything that exists in the world – "if you have faith as a mustard seed, <… > nothing will be impossible for you." But the philosophy of the spirit does not hear these words, does not want to hear them. They outrage it: a miracle, we remember, is violence against the spirit. But the source of all that is "miraculous" is faith, and a faith that dares not to seek justification from reason, which nowhere seeks justification, which calls everything that exists in the world to its judgment. Faith is above knowledge, beyond knowledge. When Abraham went to the promised land, the Apostle explains, he walked without knowing where he was going. He didn't need knowledge, he lived with the promise: where he would come, and because he came, there would be the promised land. For the philosophy of the spirit, such faith does not exist. For the philosophy of the spirit, faith is only imperfect knowledge, it is knowledge on credit, which will prove true only if it achieves the recognition of reason. With reason and with rational truths, no one has the right to argue and is not able to fight. Rational truths are eternal truths: they must be unconditionally accepted and assimilated. Hegel's "all that is real is reasonable" is thus a free translation of Spinoza's – non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere (not to laugh, not to cry, not to curse, but to understand). Both creation and the Creator bow equally before eternal truths. Speculative philosophy will never give up this proposition and defends it with all its might. Gnosis is knowledge, understanding is dearer to her than eternal salvation, moreover, she finds eternal salvation in gnosis. That is why Spinoza proclaimed with such intransigence: do not weep, do not curse, but understand. And here, as in Hegel's "rational reality," Kiergegard felt, here he discovered the meaning of that mysterious connection between knowledge and fall, so inaccessible to us, which is established in the narrative of the Book of Genesis. St. After all, the Scriptures did not reject or forbid knowledge in the proper sense of the word. On the contrary, the Scriptures say that man was called to give names to all things. But this is exactly what man did not want, did not want to be content with giving names to things created by the Creator. This was excellently expressed by Kant in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. "Experience," he says, "shows us what exists, but it does not tell us that what exists must necessarily exist as it does (as it exists, and not otherwise). Therefore, experience does not give us true universality, and reason, greedily striving for this kind of knowledge, is rather irritated than satisfied with experience." Reason greedily strives to give man over to the power of necessity, and the free act of creation, which is described in the Scriptures, not only does not satisfy him, but irritates, disturbs, and frightens him. He prefers to surrender himself to the power of necessity, with its eternal universal and immutable principles, than to entrust himself to his Creator. So it was with our forefather, who was seduced or bewitched by the words of the tempter, and so it continues to be with us, with the greatest representatives of human thought. Aristotle twenty centuries ago, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel in modern times are unrestrainedly striving to surrender themselves and humanity to the power of necessity. And they do not even suspect that this is the greatest fall – in gnosis they see not death, but the salvation of the soul.

Kirgegaard also studied with the ancients and in his youth was a passionate admirer of Hegel. And only when, by the will of fate, he felt completely in the grip of the necessity for which his mind so greedily strove, did he understand the depth and stunning meaning of the biblical account of the fall of man. Faith, which determined the relation of creation to the Creator and signified unlimited freedom and unlimited possibilities, we exchanged for knowledge, for slavish dependence on dead and deadening eternal principles. Is it possible to invent a more terrible and more fatal fall? And then Kirgegard felt that the beginning of philosophy was not surprise, as the Greeks taught, but despair: de profundis ad te, Domine, clamavi. [7] And that in the "private thinker" Job one can find something that did not occur to the famous philosopher and famous professor. In contrast to Spinoza and those who, before and after Spinoza, sought in philosophy "understanding" (intelligere) and made human reason the judge of the Creator Himself, Job teaches us by his example that in order to comprehend the truth, one must not drive away from oneself and not forbid oneself "lugere et detestari"[8] but proceed from them. Knowledge, i.e., the readiness to accept as truth what seems self-evident, i.e., what is seen by the eyes that have "opened" in us after the fall (Spinoza calls this oculi mentis, in Hegel, "spiritual" vision), inevitably leads man to destruction. "The righteous shall live by faith," says the Prophet, and the Apostle repeats these words after him. "Everything that is not of faith is sin" – only with these words can we protect ourselves from the temptation "you will know", which deceived the first man and in whose power we are all. Rejected by the speculative philosophy of "lugere et detestari", weeping and crying, Job restores their primordial rights: the right to act as judges when the investigation of where the truth and where the lie begins. "Human cowardice cannot endure what madness and death tell us," and people turn away from the horrors of life and are content with the "consolations" prepared by the philosophy of the spirit. "But Job," Kierlegard continues, "proved the breadth of his worldview by the steadfastness which he opposed to the subterfuges and insidious attacks of ethics" (i.e., the philosophy of spirit: Job's friends told him the same thing that Hegel later proclaimed in his Philosophy of Spirit). finally, the last: "Blessed is Job. Everything he had was returned to him. And this is called repetition. When does the recurrence occur? You can't say this in human language: when every conceivable certainty and probability for a person speaks of the impossible." And in his diary he writes: "Only horror that has reached despair develops in a person his higher powers." For Kierlegard and for his philosophy, which, in contrast to speculative or speculative philosophy, he calls existential philosophy, i.e., a philosophy that brings man not "understanding" but life ("the righteous shall live by faith"), Job's cries are not only cries, i.e., meaningless, useless, annoying cries for everyone, but for him a new dimension of truth opens up in these cries, he senses in them an active force. from which, as from the trumpets of Jericho, the fortress walls must fall. This is the main motive of existential philosophy. Kiergegaard knows as well as anyone that for speculative philosophy existential philosophy is the greatest absurdity. But this does not stop him, on the contrary, it inspires him. In the "objectivity" of speculative philosophy, he sees its main vice. "People have become," he writes, "too objective to find eternal bliss: eternal bliss consists in passionate, endless interest." And such infinite interest is the beginning of faith. "If I renounce everything (as is required by speculative philosophy, which through the dialectic of the finite liberates the human spirit), this is not yet faith," Kirgegaard writes about Abraham's sacrifice, "this is only submission. I do this movement on my own. And if I don't do it, it's only out of cowardice and weakness. But in believing I renounce nothing. On the contrary, through faith I gain everything: if anyone has faith as big as a mustard seed, he can move mountains. It takes purely human courage to renounce the finite for the sake of the eternal. But paradoxical and humble courage is needed to possess everything finite by virtue of the Absurd. This is the courage of faith. Faith did not take away from Abraham his Isaac. Through faith he received it." One could cite as many more quotations from Kirgegard as you like, in which the same idea is expressed. "A knight of faith," he declares, "is a real lucky man, who owns everything finite." Kiergegaard sees perfectly well that such statements are a challenge to everything that natural human thinking tells us. For this reason he seeks protection not from reason with its universal and necessary judgments, to which Kant so greedily strove, but from the Absurd, i.e., from faith, which reason qualifies as the Absurd. He knows from his own experience that "to believe against reason is martyrdom." But only such faith, a faith that does not seek and cannot find justification in reason, is, according to Kirgegard, the faith of the Holy Spirit. Hagiographa. It alone gives hope to man to overcome the necessity which has entered the world through reason and has come to dominate it. When Hegel transforms the truth of Scripture, the revealed truth, into a metaphysical truth, when, instead of saying that God took the form of man, or that man was created in the image and likeness of God, he declares that "the fundamental idea of absolute religion is the unity of the divine and human natures," he kills faith. The meaning of Hegel's words is the same as that of Spinoza's words Deus ex solis suæ naturæ legibus et nemine coactus agit: God acts only according to the laws of his nature and is not compelled by anyone. And the content of absolute religion is again reduced to Spinoza's proposition: res nullo alio modo vel ordine a Deo produci potuerunt quam productæ sunt – things could not have been created by God in any other way and in no other order than they were created. Speculative philosophy cannot exist without the idea of Necessity: it needs it like air to man, as a fish needs water. That is why the truths of experience irritate the mind so much. They talk about the divine fiat[10] and do not give real, i.e., coercive, tedious knowledge. But for Kiergegard, coercive knowledge is the abomination of desolation, it is the source of original sin, through eritis scientes the tempter brought about the fall of the first man. Accordingly, for Kiergegaard, "the concept opposite to sin is not virtue, but freedom" and also "the opposite concept to sin is faith." Faith, only faith, frees a person from sin; Faith, only faith, can wrest a man from the power of the necessary truths that have taken possession of his consciousness after he has tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree. And only faith gives a person the courage and strength to look into the eyes of death and madness and not to bow weakly before them. "Imagine," writes Kiergegaard, "a man who, with all the tension of his frightened fantasy, imagined something unheard-of terrible, so terrible that it is absolutely impossible to endure it. And suddenly this terrible thing met on his way, became his reality. According to human understanding, his death is inevitable... But for God, everything is possible. This is the struggle of faith: the mad struggle for possibility. For only opportunity opens the way to salvation... In the final analysis, one thing remains: for God, everything is possible. And only then does the road to faith open. One believes only when a person can no longer discover any possibility. God means that everything is possible, and that everything is possible means God. And only the one whose being is so shaken that he becomes a spirit and comprehends that everything is possible, only he has approached God." This is what Kirgegard writes in his books, and he repeats the same constantly in his diary.