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.

Kierkegaard lived in an era when Hegel was the ruler of thought in Europe. And he, of course, could not but feel himself completely in the power of Hegel's philosophy. Hegel, repeating what philosophy had taught for twenty-five centuries, proclaimed that everything that is real is reasonable, in other words, that all the horrors of reality must be accepted and approved by man. But when Kierkegaard, by the will of fate, had to face and experience these horrors, he understood the depth and stunning meaning of the biblical narrative about the fall of the first man. Faith, which determined the relationship of creation to the Creator and signified unlimited freedom and unlimited possibilities, people exchanged for knowledge, for slavish dependence on dead and deadening eternal principles. Knowledge has not led man to freedom, as speculative philosophy proclaims, knowledge has enslaved us, given us over to the flow and plunder of eternal truths. But how did this happen? How could an innocent person be tempted by the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and believe the tempter who promised him that by eating of the forbidden fruit he would be "equal to God"? In his book What Is Fear?, Kierkegaard, approaching the question of the fall of an innocent man, writes: "In the state of innocence there is peace and tranquility, but at the same time there is something else: not confusion, not a struggle, for there is nothing to fight for. But what is it? –Nothing. What effect does Nothing have? "It awakens fear. This is the secret of innocence, that it is at the same time fear." What is this fear of Nothingness? And here Kierkegaard's experiment, breaking through all the prohibitions imposed on our thought by reason and morality, reveals amazing things: "This fear," he says, "can be compared to dizziness. Whoever is forced to look into the abyss that has opened before him is dizzy. And the fear (of an innocent person) is the dizziness of freedom... This dizziness makes freedom fall to the ground. Beyond this, psychology can say nothing. But at that moment everything changes, and when freedom rises again, she sees that she is to blame... Fear is the swoon of freedom. Psychologically speaking, the Fall always occurs in a faint." With intense concentration, Kierkegaard is absorbed in the consideration of the Nothing that is opening up to him and the connection of Nothing with fear. "If we ask," he writes elsewhere in the same book, "what is the object of fear, the answer is the same: Nothing. Fear and Nothing always go hand in hand. But as soon as the reality of freedom and spirit comes into its own, Fear disappears. What, in fact, is Nothing in the land of the Gentiles? It is Fate. Fate is the unity of Necessity and Chance. This is expressed in the fact that fate appears blind; he who goes forward blindly advances as necessarily as he advances accidentally. A necessity that is not conscious of itself is an accident in relation to the immediate moment. Fate is the Nothingness of Fear." The most brilliant man, Kierkegaard further explains, is unable to overcome the idea of Doom on his own. On the contrary, he says: "Genius discovers destiny everywhere, and the deeper it is... It is precisely in this that the natural power of genius is manifested, that he discovers fate, but this is also his impotence." And he concludes his reflections with these provocative words: "Such a genius existence, in spite of its brilliance, beauty and great historical significance, is a sin. It takes courage to understand this, and whoever has not learned the art of satisfying the hunger of a yearning soul will hardly understand it. And yet it is so."

Kierkegaard varies in every way the ideas expressed in the passages now quoted, which culminate in his assertion that the fear of Nothing leads to a fainting of freedom, that a man who has lost his freedom is weakened and in his impotence accepts Fate as an omnipotent necessity, and is all the more convinced of this the more penetrating his mind and the more powerful his gift. Kierkegaard fully accepts the biblical story of the fall of the first man. A genius, a supreme genius, whom everyone worships and whom everyone considers the benefactor of the human race, who awaits immortal glory in posterity, precisely because he is a genius, because he trusts entirely to his reason, because he penetrates with his keen and watchful eye into the last depths of existence, is a great sinner, a sinner par excellence. Socrates, at the moment when he discovered universal and necessary truths in the world, which are to this day the condition for the possibility of objective knowledge, Socrates again repeated the crime of Adam. He tasted of the fruits of knowledge, and the empty Nothingness turned into a Necessity for him, which, like the head of Medusa, turns anyone who looks at it into stone. And he does not even suspect the significance of what he is doing, just as our forefather did not suspect when he received from the hands of Eve such tempting-looking fruits. In the words uttered by the tempter, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil," there was concealed the seemingly irresistible force of Nothing, which paralyzed the hitherto free will of man. Kierkegaard also formulates it in these words: "With God, all things are possible. To say God is to say that everything is possible. For a fatalist, everything is Necessary. Necessity is his God: this means that there is no God." Kierkegaard rejected the Greek idea of the power of Necessity brought into the world by reason. This is the meaning of his words: "In order to find God, one must renounce reason." He also rejected the Greek idea that the ethical is supreme, as well as their belief that freedom is the possibility of choosing between good and evil. Such freedom is the freedom of fallen man – it is slavery. True freedom is a possibility. The possibility of salvation is where our reason says that all possibilities are over. And only faith, faith alone, gives a person the strength and courage to face madness and death. Speculative philosophy submits to the inevitable, existential philosophy overcomes it, for existential philosophy it is necessary to turn into a feeble Nothing. In this conviction lies the source of Kierkegaard's teaching. For if no one has power over necessity, as the Greeks understood it, then God has power over sin, committed by man. "God sent His only son into the world," Luther teaches, "laid all sins on him, saying: You are Peter, the one who denied, you are Paul, the rapist and blasphemer, you are David, the adulterer, you are the sinner who ate the apple in Paradise." Reason cannot comprehend this, our ethics is indignant at this. But God is above ethics and above our reason. He takes upon himself our sins and destroys the horrors of life.

Quotations and references to Kiergegard's works are given from the following German editions:

Sören Kierkegaard. Gesammelte Werke. Hrsg. von H. Gottsched und Chr. Schrempf. Jena: E. Diederichs Verlag:

Bd. III. Furcht und Zittern / Wiederholung (2. Aufl.) 1909.

Bd. IV. Stadien auf dem Lebensweg. I914.

Bd. V. Der Begriff der Angst. 1912.