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.

Bd. VI/VII. Philosophische Brocken / Abschliessende unwissenschaftliche Nachachrift. 1910.

Bd. VIII. Die Krankheit zum Tode. 1911.

Bd. IX. Einübung im Christentum. 1912.

Bd. XI. Zur Selbstprufung der Gegenwart empfohlen. 1922.

Bd. XII. Der Augenblick (2. Aufl.) 1909.

Sören Kierkegaard. Die Tagebücher. Ausgwählt und übers. von Th. Наеcker. Bd. I – II. Innsbruck: Brenner Verlag, 1923.