I ended the last chapter with the words of Kierkegaard, which should never be forgotten when reading his works, if one wishes to penetrate into the essence of his philosophy: "Only despairing terror awakens in man his higher being." That is why the book of Job, the most human, in Kierkegaard's opinion, of all the Bible, attracted him so irresistibly. That is why he made a decision unheard of in its audacity and incongruous for us to oppose Job the thinker to Hegel and the Greek symposion. Job, too, only when the horrors and misfortunes that had befallen him surpassed all imagination did he dare to defy all our indisputable truths. This is how Kierkegaard tells about it in his "Repetition". "The greatness of Job is not manifested when he says: God gave. God took it. He said so at first, but then he did not repeat it." "The greatness of Job lies in the fact that the pathos of his freedom cannot be discharged by flattering promises and promises." "Job proves the breadth of his worldview by the steadfastness that he opposes to the insidious tricks and approaches of ethics." Everything that Kierkegaard says about Job can also be said about him. And here is the conclusion in which Kierkegaard declares: "Job is blessed. Everything he had was returned to him, and even doubly. And this is called repetition... When does it come? When did it come for Job? "When every conceivable certainty and probability for a person speaks of impossibility." And this repetition, according to Kierkegaard's deep conviction, "is destined to play an important role in the new philosophy, the new philosophy will teach that – all life is repetition." A new philosophy, i.e., existential philosophy. This philosophy begins when every possibility and probability conceivable for man speaks of complete hopelessness, i.e., of the end, and when speculative philosophy falls silent. For Hegel, for the participants in the Greek symposion, there is nothing to do here – there is nothing to begin or continue. They do not want and do not dare to resist the instructions and dictates of reason. They are completely dominated by the conviction that reason, and reason alone, is given to determine the boundaries of the possible and the impossible. They do not even dare to ask themselves where this unshakable confidence in the omnipotence of reason came from. This seems to them to be tantamount to a readiness to put absurdity and nonsense in the place of reason. Can I decide to take such a step? Can a person sacrifice his reason? To forget the warning of the divine Plato that the greatest misfortune that can befall a man is if he becomes a misologos, that is, a hater of reason? But is it a matter of sacrifice? It turns out that Plato did not foresee everything. Reason is definitely needed, we really need it. In the ordinary conditions of our existence, it helps us to cope with difficulties and even with very great difficulties encountered on our life path. But it happens that reason brings the greatest misfortunes to a person, that from a benefactor and liberator he turns into a jailer and executioner. To renounce it does not mean to sacrifice anything. There can be only one question: how to throw off this hated power? And even more: a person completely ceases to ask, as if he feels that in the very questions there is a concession to the immeasurable claims of the truths revealed to us by reason. Job does not ask: he cries, weeps, curses (did not Pascal mean Job when he said: je n'approuve que ceux qui cherchent en gémissant?), in a word, he rages, and the edifying speeches of his friends who have come to console him cause fits of rage in him. He sees in them only the expression of human indifference and human cowardice, which cannot bear the sight of the horrors that have befallen him and cover up their betrayal with lofty words of morality and wisdom. Reason "dispassionately" bears witness to the end of all possibilities, ethics, which always follows on the heels of reason, comes with its pathetic exhortations and edifying speeches that man is obliged to obediently and meekly bear his lot, no matter how terrible it may be. Kierkegaard, like Job, has only one answer to this: it is necessary to kill, to destroy the abominable monster that has usurped the right in the name of reason to pass judgment on a living person and in the name of morality to demand from him that he consider the sentences pronounced forever inviolable and holy. "Oh, my unforgettable benefactor," writes Kierkegaard, "long-suffering Job, can I come to you except to betray you or to shed feigned tears over you? I did not have your riches, I did not have seven sons and three daughters... But he who has a little can lose everything, and he can lose everything, who loses his beloved, and he finds himself covered with abscesses and scabs, who has lost his honor and his pride, and with this the strength and meaning of life."

From these involuntary cursory remarks and from the brief excerpts from the Repetition quoted, one can partially guess what a huge and important task the unknown Danish master of theology set himself during his lifetime. From the famous philosopher Hegel, from the famous sages of ancient and modern times, he went to the private thinker Job, from learned treatises to the Holy Scriptures. Scriptures. Pascal's chercher en gémissant is contrasted as a method of searching for truth with the methods used by the best representatives of philosophical thought up to now. "Job's cries" are not, as we have all been taught to think, only cries, i.e., aimless, meaningless, unnecessary for anyone, and annoying cries for everyone. For Kierkegaard, a new dimension of thinking opens up in these cries, he senses in them a real force, from which, like from the trumpets of Jericho, the fortress walls must fall. This is the main motif of existential philosophy. Kierkegaard knows as well as anyone that for speculative philosophy, as well as for common sense, existential philosophy is the greatest absurdity. But this does not stop, it inspires him. A new dimension opens up in thinking, as it were. On Job's scales, human sorrow turns out to be heavier than the sand of the sea, and the groans of the perishing refute the evidence. When every conceivable certainty and probability speaks of impossibility, then a new, no longer rational, but insane struggle begins about the possibility of the impossible. This struggle is what Kierkegaard calls existential philosophy, a philosophy that seeks truth not from Reason with its limited possibilities, but from the boundless Absurd.

From Job, the path of Kierkegaard leads to the one who is called the father of faith in the Scriptures – to Abraham and his terrible sacrifice. The entire book "Fear and Trembling" – the very title of which is taken from the 2nd Psalm – is dedicated to Abraham. Already with Job it was difficult, very difficult: what an effort it cost Kierkegaard his determination to oppose Job's tears and curses to Hegel's calm and sober thinking! But more was required of Abraham, much more than of Job. Job's troubles were sent by an external force, Abraham himself raised a knife over his son. People flee from Job, and even ethics, feeling powerless to help him, imperceptibly distances itself from him. People should not flee from Abraham, but take up arms against him: Abraham is the greatest criminal, but at the same time the most unfortunate of men: he loses his son, the hope and support of old age, and at the same time, like Kierkegaard, his honor and pride.

Who is this mysterious Abraham, and what is this mysterious book, in which the work of Abraham is not branded with a shameful name, as it should have been, but exalted and glorified for the instruction and edification of posterity? Kierkegaard fearlessly declares: "Abraham, by his action, transcends the boundaries of ethics. His telos (the Greek word for purpose) lies higher, beyond the ethical. Looking back at this goal, he puts aside the ethical." How could Abraham have dared, how dare anyone dare to put aside the ethical? "When I think of Abraham," writes Kierkegaard, "I seem to be utterly annihilated. Every moment I see what an unheard-of paradox constitutes the content of Abraham's life, every moment something pushes me away from him, and my thought, with all its tension, cannot penetrate into the paradox." And then he adds: "I can ponder and understand the hero, but my thought cannot penetrate into Abraham. As soon as I try to climb to its height, I now fall, because what is revealed to me is a paradox. But I do not belittle the importance of faith for this reason, on the contrary: for me, faith is the highest thing that is given to man, and I consider it dishonest that philosophy puts something else in the place of faith." And, finally: "I looked into the eyes of the terrible and was not afraid, I did not tremble. But I know that even if I resist courageously the terrible, my courage is not the courage of faith, but is nothing in comparison with the latter. I cannot carry out the movement of faith: I cannot close my eyes and throw myself into the abyss of the Absurd without looking back."

Accordingly, he directs all his forces against our ethics and what we call objective truth. "If the ethical is the highest," he writes, "then Abraham is lost." On the other hand: "superstition ascribes to objectivity the power of the head of Medusa, which turns subjectivity into stone." In the objectivity of speculative philosophy, he sees its main flaw. "Men," he writes, "have become too objective to attain eternal bliss: eternal bliss consists in passionate, infinite, personal interest. And this is abandoned in order to become objective: objectivity robs the soul of both its passion and its infinite self-interest. And such infinite interest is the beginning of faith." "If I renounce everything (as is required by speculative philosophy, which, by revealing the finiteness and transience of everything that life gives us, imagines in this way to liberate the human spirit)," Kierkegaard writes about Abraham's sacrifice, "this is not yet faith, it is only submission. I do this movement on my own. And if I do not do this, it is only out of cowardice or weakness. But in believing, I do not renounce anything. On the contrary, through faith I gain everything: if anyone has faith as a mustard seed, he can move mountains. It takes purely human courage to renounce the finite for the sake of the eternal. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage of faith 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 quotations from Kierkegaard 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." Kierkegaard sees perfectly well that these kinds of statements are a challenge to everything that our natural thinking tells us. For this reason he seeks protection not from reason with its universal and necessary judgments, to which speculative philosophy so passionately strives, but from the Absurd, i.e., from faith, which our reason qualifies as Absurdity. He knows from his own experience that "to believe against reason is martyrdom." But only such a faith that does not seek and cannot find justification in reason is, according to Kierkegaard, the faith of the Holy Spirit. Hagiographa. It only gives man hope to overcome that cruel necessity which has entered the world through reason and has come to dominate it. When Hegel transforms the truth of Scripture, the truth of Revelation, 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 human and divine nature," he kills faith. The meaning of these Hegelian words is the same as the meaning of Spinoza's words: "God acts only according to the laws of nature and is not forced by anyone." And the content of human absolute religion is again reduced to Spinoza's proposition: 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, as Kant put it, irritate our mind so much. They talk about a free, divine fiât and do not give real, i.e., tedious, coercive knowledge. But for Kierkegaard, coercive knowledge is the abomination of desolation, it is the source of original sin – through his "ye shall be as gods knowing," the tempter led to the fall of man.

IV

We talked about the faith of Abraham. Abraham decided on a deed that shocked the human imagination: he raised the knife over his only son, over his hope, over the joy of old age. Of course, enormous forces are needed for this: it is not for nothing that Kierkegaard himself said that Abraham set aside the ethical. Abraham believed. What did he believe in? "Even at that moment," writes Kierkegaard, "when the knife flashed in his hands, Abraham believed that God would not demand Isaac from him. Let's move on. Let's say he really killed Isaac, Abraham believed. He did not believe that somewhere in the other world he would find bliss (as ethics based on our reason teaches). No, here in this world," Kierkegaard emphasizes, "he will still be happy. God can give him another Isaac. God can bring a slain son back to life. Abraham believed in the power of the Absurd: human calculation for him had long since ended." And in order to dispel any doubts as to how he understood Abraham's faith and the meaning of his action, he added his own work to the biblical narrative. Of course, he does not do this directly and openly. People don't talk about such things openly, much less Kierkegaard: that's why he invented his indirect statements. On occasion, among other things, he will say: "What Isaac is to a man, everyone decides for himself and for himself," but the meaning and concrete meaning of these words can only be unraveled by listening to the story he invented about a poor young man who fell in love with the king's daughter. It is quite obvious to everyone that the young man will not see the princess as his own ears. Ordinary common sense, as well as the highest human wisdom (after all, there is no fundamental difference between common sense and wisdom), equally advise him to give up the dream of the impossible and achieve the possible: the widow of a rich brewer is the most suitable match for him. But the young man, as if something had stung him, forgets both common sense and the divine Plato, and suddenly, just like Abraham, throws himself into the arms of the Absurd. Reason has refused to give him the king's daughter, whom it intended not for him, but for the king's son, and the young man turns away from reason and tries his luck with the Absurd. He knows perfectly well that in everyday life there reigns the deepest certainty that he will never get the king's daughter. "For," writes Kierkegaard, "reason is right: in our valley of sorrow, where it is lord and master, this was and will remain an impossibility." He also knows that the wisdom bestowed by the gods on men recommends in such cases a calm resignation to the inevitable as the only way out of the situation. And he even goes through this submission, in the sense that he gives himself an account of reality with all the clarity of which the human soul is capable. Others, Kierkegaard explains, will perhaps find it more tempting to kill in himself the desire to possess the king's daughter, to break off, so to speak, the edge of sorrow. And yet, he declares, "it is wonderful to possess a king's daughter, and the knight of obedience, if he denies it, is a liar," and his love was not true love. Kierkegaard contrasts the knight of obedience with the knight of faith. "Through faith," this knight says to himself, "through faith you will receive a king's daughter." And once again he repeats: "Still, how wonderful it is to receive a royal daughter." The knight of faith is the only happy one: he dominates the finite, while the knight of obedience is only a stranger and a stranger here. But then he admits: "And yet I am not capable of this daring (movement). When I try to do it, my head is spinning, and I hasten to take refuge in the sorrow of submission. I can swim, but I'm too heavy for this mystical soaring." And in his diaries we read: "If I had faith, Regina Olsen would have remained mine."

For Kierkegaard, "the concept opposite to sin is not virtue, but freedom," and at the same time "the concept opposite to sin is faith." Faith, faith alone, frees a person from sin. Faith, faith alone, can wrest a man from the power of the necessary truths which 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 directly into the eyes of madness and death and not to bow weakly before them. "Imagine," writes Kierkegaard, "a man who, with all the tension of his frightened imagination, imagined something unheard-of terrible, so terrible that it is absolutely impossible to endure it. And suddenly it really came his way, became his reality. According to human understanding, his death is inevitable... But for God, all things are possible. This is the struggle of faith: a mad struggle about possibility. For only opportunity opens the way to salvation. In the final analysis, one thing remains: for God, all things are 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." And in Kierkegaard's diary of 1848 we read a remarkable entry: "For God, everything is possible: this thought is my slogan in the deepest sense of the word, and has acquired for me a significance greater than I myself could ever have thought. Not for a moment will I allow myself to boldly imagine that since I see no way out, there is no way out for God. For to mix one's miserable fantasy and everything else of this kind with the possibilities that God has at one's disposal is pride and despair." You see how far Kierkegaard is from the idea of faith that most people have. Faith is not trust in what our parents, elders, and mentors instill in us, faith is a tremendous force born in the depths of the human spirit, ready and capable of fighting, even when everything tells us that the struggle is doomed to failure in advance. Kierkegaard is certainly inspired by the gospel promise: if you have faith as a mustard seed... Nothing will be impossible for you. And he, remembering the words of the prophets and apostles that human wisdom is foolishness before the Lord, decides on the great and final struggle – the struggle with human reason, since reason wants to be the sole and final source of truth. That is why, as I have already said, he turned away from Hegel and Greek philosophy and went for the truth to the ignorant Job and the ignorant Abraham. And with each new book, he attacks the mind more passionately and unrestrainedly. Referring to the Epistle to Romans. (XIV, 23) he writes: "Everything that is not of faith is sin. This is one of the basic principles of Christianity: the concept opposite to sin is not virtue, but faith." Kierkegaard tirelessly repeats this, just as he repeats that in order to acquire faith, one must renounce reason. In his last works, he expresses himself as follows: "Faith is the opposite of reason, faith lives on the other side of death." But what is the faith of the Scriptures? Kierkegaard's answer: "Faith means just that: to lose reason in order to gain God." Even earlier, in connection with Abraham and his sacrifice, Kierkegaard wrote: "What an incredible paradox faith is! Paradox can turn murder into a holy, God-pleasing deed. Paradox returns Abraham his Isaac. A paradox that (ordinary) thinking cannot master, for faith begins precisely where (ordinary) thinking ends." Why does it end? Because for ordinary thinking, the realm of the impossible begins here: it is impossible for sonicide to be pleasing to God, it is impossible for anyone (even God Himself) to bring the murdered Isaac back to life. But Kierkegaard thinks differently about all this. "The absence of possibility," he writes, "means that either everything has become necessary or that everything has become commonplace. Ordinariness, triviality does not know what possibility is. Ordinariness admits only a probability in which only crumbs of possibility have been preserved, but that all this (i.e., the improbable and possible) is possible, does not even occur to it and does not think about God. An ordinary person (whether he will be a tavern keeper or a minister) is devoid of imagination and lives in the sphere of limited banal experience: how it happens in general, what is possible at all, what has always been... Everyday life imagined that she had seized the opportunity or put her in a madhouse." Moreover, by everyday life one should not at all understand the brewer and the philosophy of the brewer: everyday life wherever man still relies on his own strength, on his reason (Hegel and Aristotle, with their undoubted genius, do not go beyond the boundaries of the ordinary), and ends only where despair begins, where reason shows with its obviousness that man is facing the impossible, that everything is over for him forever, that any further struggle is senseless, i.e., where and when a person experiences his complete impotence. Kierkegaard, like no one else, had to drink to the bottom of the bitterness that the consciousness of his powerlessness brings to man. When he says that some terrible power has taken away his honor and his pride, he means his own powerlessness. A powerlessness that led to the fact that when he touched the woman he loved, she turned into a shadow. Impotence, which led to the fact that everything real turned into a shadow for him. How did it happen? What is this terrible power, the power that is given to so empty the human soul? In his diary, he writes – and not once, but several times: "If I had faith, I would not have left Regina Olsen." This is no longer an indirect statement, like those that he made on behalf of the heroes of his stories – it is already a direct testimony of a person about himself. Kierkegaard experienced lack of faith as powerlessness, and powerlessness as lack of faith. And in this terrible experience I learned something that most people do not even suspect: the absence of faith is an expression of man's powerlessness, and man's powerlessness is expressed by the absence of faith. This explains his words that "the opposite concept of sin is not virtue, but faith." Virtue, as we have already heard from him, is held together by man's own strength: the knight of obedience himself obtains what he needs, and having obtained it, he finds peace of mind and repose. But is a person freed in this way? Everything that is not of faith is sin, Kierkegaard recalls the mysterious words of the Apostle.

Is it possible, Kierkegaard asks, to go further than Socrates? Many hundreds of years after Socrates, the famous Stoic Epictetus, faithful to the spirit of his incomparable teacher, wrote that the beginning of philosophy is the consciousness of powerlessness in the face of Necessity. For Epictetus, as for Socrates, this consciousness is at the same time the end of philosophy, or, more precisely, philosophical thought, is entirely determined by man's conviction of his absolute powerlessness before the necessity reigning in the world.

Socratic virtue does not save a person from sin. A virtuous person is a knight of obedience. He experienced all the shame and horror that comes with powerlessness, and he stopped there. It is impossible to move further. Why did he stop? Where did these nowhere come from? These, Kierkegaard replies, have been brought to man by his reason, the source of all our knowledge and all our morality.

This is the paradox, this is the Absurdity, which was hidden from Socrates, but which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures. Scripture – in the narrative of the Book of Genesis about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the fall of the first man.

V

The Fall, to which Kierkegaard devotes one of his most remarkable books, What Is Fear?, has troubled human thought from the most remote times. All people felt that not everything was well in the world, and even very unfavorable, and they made great and strenuous efforts to find out where this trouble came from. And it must be said 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 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, death also comes to them. At the appointed time they are punished and receive retribution from each other for their wickedness." This idea of Anaximander runs through the whole of ancient philosophy: the appearance of individual things, mainly, of course, living beings, and chiefly human beings, is regarded as a criminal, impious daring, the just retribution for which is death and destruction. The idea that birth inevitably entails destruction is the starting point of ancient and all European philosophy, which, I repeat, stood inexorably before the founders of religions and philosophy of the Far East. The natural thought of man at all times and among all peoples has 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 everything that has appeared and appears. In the very existence of man, reason discovered something undue – vice, disease, sin, and, accordingly, wisdom demanded the overcoming at the root of this sin, i.e. the renunciation of being, which, as having a beginning, is condemned by the eternal law to an inevitable end. Greek catharsis, i.e., moral purification, has its source in the conviction that the immediate data of consciousness, which testify to the inevitable death of all that is born, reveal to us a universal, eternal, unchangeable, and forever insurmountable truth. Real, real existence is to be sought not 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 there is no annihilation. This is where speculative philosophy came from. The law of the inevitable destruction of all that arises and is created seems to us to be eternally inherent in all being: Greek philosophy was as unshakably convinced of this as the wisdom of the Hindus, and we, who are separated from the Greeks and Hindus by 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, i.e., the Bible, 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 for the inferiority, insufficiency, depravity and sinfulness of existence, but this is the guarantee of everything that can be good in the universe. In other words, the creative act of God is the source, and the only one, of all good. On the evening of each day of creation, the Lord, looking back at what He had created, said: "Good is green," and on the last day, looking around at all that He created, God saw that all good was good. Both the world and people (whom God blessed), created by the Creator and precisely because they were created by Him, were perfect and had no flaws: there was no evil in the created world, 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 them you will die." But the tempter—the Bible calls him a serpent that was more cunning than all the beasts God created—said, "No, you will not die, but your eyes will be opened, and you will be as the gods who know." 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 zelo" did not justify itself, in the created world not all the good in the created world – and precisely because it is created – there cannot but be evil, and, moreover, much evil and intolerable evil. Our mind and everything that surrounds us – the "immediate data of consciousness" – testifies to this with indisputable evidence; 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 knowledgeable, in other words, together with knowledge and through knowledge, sin entered the world, and after sin evil and all the horrors of our life. So according to the Bible. For us, the people of the 20th century, the question is the same as it was for the ancients: where does sin come from, where do all the horrors of life come from? Is there a vice in being itself, which, as created, as having a beginning, must inevitably be burdened with imperfections that doom it to death in the future, in "knowledge," in open eyes, in "intelligent vision," i.e., from the fruit of the forbidden tree? Hegel, who absorbed all European thought during the 25 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: historically Hegel is right. The fruit of the tree of knowledge has indeed become the source of philosophy, the source of thinking for all future times. Philosophers, not only pagan philosophers, but Jewish and Christian philosophers, who relied on the Bible and considered the Bible to be a divinely inspired book, all wanted to be knowledgeable and would never agree to renounce the fruit of the forbidden tree. Sin did not come from the fruit of the tree of knowledge: nothing bad can come from knowledge. Where did people get such confidence that evil could not come from knowledge? No one raises such a question. It does not occur to anyone 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. It was not the serpent, but God who deceived man.