One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and Is Victorious—in That God Is Victorious
397ONE WHO PRAYS ARIGHT STRUGGLES
[V 149] IN PRAYER AND IS VICTORIOUS—IN THAT
GOD IS VICTORIOUS 398
Who would engage in a struggle if he did not have the hope of being victorious, but who would not joyfully engage in a struggle if he was sure of victory? So, my listener, stir up the contender, call him forth to battle and make the conditions of the struggle so favorable that the expectancy of victory becomes a certainty. Tell him that he is the stronger. But see, the victory is still uncertain as long as it is not won! Tell him that the mighty ones are his friends, prepared to help. But see, despite that, the victory is still not yet won! Tell him that the opponent is so weak that the struggle is just for the sake of show. But see, the most certain victory is still doubtful as long as it is not won! So, then, is the victory never certain as long as it is not yet won? So, then, does the contender always go into the struggle with a certain doubt? Not at all! There is a condition of the struggle that removes every doubt, consequently a condition of the struggle that makes the contender truly joyful and intrepid, and this is the condition: if he loses, then he is victorious. Would thought, no matter how long it pondered, be able to think out a greater certainty of victory than this—that the loss is a victory!
If a man were to call the people together and say, “I am, to be sure, inviting you to a struggle, but the victory is certain,” what a crowd would turn out to take part in the struggle or, rather, to join in the victory. If he added, “The victory is so certain that a loss is a victory and to be overcome is to become the victor,” what envy would be awakened, since only one individual would be given the opportunity! If, in order to calm and pacify the tempers of the many, he said, “Everyone can take part; no one is shut out,” how expectantly and in [V 150] what high spirits the whole host would gather around him. But if the one speaking were to be a little more explicit and to the questions of the combat-eager about “the place, the battleground, and the provocative situation” were to answer, “The battleground is in the inner being of everyone, and therefore it is best that everyone go to his own home, so that the battle can begin,” probably only one individual, scarcely the multitude, would follow his advice to part company, but they would look at him with different eyes, would stand there like a curious mob to whom a fool by his speech gives something to laugh about. Furthermore, if in reply to the question “What is the nature of the struggle?” he answered, “Praying,” no further evidence against him would be necessary,399 since praying is indeed the very opposite of struggling; praying is a cowardly and fainthearted business, left to women and children, but struggling is to a man’s liking. If in reply to the question “What is the nature of the victory?” he answered, “Realization that one has lost,” then probably even those less inclined to laughter would not refrain from smiling and from listening with a smile to what the speaker added: that it was correct to use the word “loss,” that this was not a figurative expression but simply and plainly designated what human language and the human mind understand by a loss and a defeat, that on the other hand “to be victorious” had to be understood in a high and noble and, to that extent, figurative sense. Then when the multitude was tired of laughing, its spokesman would probably end the whole episode with the presumptuous and not unwitty remark that he held the very opposite view and for his part would rather be the victor in the literal sense and lose in the figurative sense.
My listener, is not this discourse a picture of what happens in life? A random word collects a crowd; the easily bought victory makes them enthusiastic, but the more profound explanation puts them off, and if the price is what it must be in relation to the highest, then mockery gives the signal for retreat and gives the retreat the appearance of a glorious victory. Does not mockery always gain the highest at a bargain price! And yet how despicable to want to think that the price of the highest and the most sacred, just like the price of temporal things, should be determined by an accident, by the scarcity or the abundance of the commodity in the country. On the other hand, how upbuilding it is to consider that this is not the case and that someone who fancies that he has bought the highest at a low price is simply mistaken, since the price is always the same. How sure and cheerful and resolute the soul becomes in the thought that no price is too high when that which one is buying is the highest. It is probably true, as people [V 151] say, that gold also can be bought at too high a price, but the highest cannot be bought at too high a price. If one has bought at too high a price, then one has not bought the highest!
Therefore, it is beautiful and uplifting to meet in the gospel narrative400 or in life a man who does not bargain in the marketplace, where the most sagacious, reckoning the conditions, today buys at a high price what the most foolish, aided by an accident, buys cheaply tomorrow—no, a resolute man who has understood what the highest is but is also willing to pay everything to buy it. It is salutary and refreshing to see him standing there, quiet and earnest, with the incorruptible beauty of his eternally conceived resolution: he has collected everything he possesses, he has added to this every earthly desire, everything that could be called a person’s claim on life, and he puts it aside—he bids. If you see him tomorrow—unchanged, he repeats the bid unchanged. If the world employs all its cunning and all its flattery and all its terror—he nevertheless holds to his bid, if only he might succeed in buying the highest. But this high-minded resolution, which is a consequence not so much of long deliberation as of the deepest impulse of earnestness, is indeed also necessary if a person is to buy the highest. The sensate person will not understand what the highest is, will not understand what the good fight401 is, what it is to be victorious and to lose, will not, because, praise God, the poorest and simplest child who received the most meager education in the charity school—he knows it very well. Yes, it would be a uniquely great and exceptional person who in his adulthood accomplished merely half of what he knew in his childhood, of what in his boyhood he knew how to develop in an essay. But the sensate person’s self-love is too narrow-minded to want to be grasped by the highest; it is useless for anyone to think of making the highest comprehensible to him by means of fine words, to think of tricking him into it by a pious fraud or of playing him into its hands by a loving ruse: in his hands it becomes perverted; in his hands it becomes the opposite. It is true and always will be true that virtue is the highest sagacity. It is also certain that the sensate person is eager to be sagacious and aspires to sagacity, but even if someone, in order to win him, were to expound this, he still would never win him to virtue; if that is to happen, the [V 152] sensate person’s conception of sagacity would first have to be completely altered. It is true that a conciliatory spirit is the hardest revenge; it is true, as an old wise man has said, that the worst punishment for insults is to forget them.402 But what confusion there would be, what atrocious presumptuousness, if a vengeful person were to hide like a wolf403 in the garments of a conciliatory spirit, or would he thereby come a step closer to the beautiful virtue of a conciliatory spirit? Without fail, the good has its reward, but if the “reward-hungry” sensate person wanted to do the good for that reason, would he ever put it into practice? Incontestably, it is always the surest thing in life to do one’s duty, but can it really be the surest thing to do when duty sometimes gives orders to sacrifice life? No, the soul must make a resolution in renunciation of all calculating, all sagacity and probability; it must will the good because it is the good, and then it will certainly perceive that it has its reward; it must continue in duty because it is duty, and then it will thereby really feel the security; it must will to be reconciled with its opponent404 out of the unreckoning impulse of the heart, and then the good fight of reconciliation will also win for him the affection of the vanquished.
The same holds true for the understanding of what is to be the theme of this discourse—how one who struggles aright in prayer is victorious by losing. If a person is unwilling to make a decisive resolution, if he wants to cheat God of the heart’s daring venture in which a person ventures way out and loses sight of all shrewdness and probability, indeed, takes leave of his senses or at least of all his worldly mode of thinking, if instead of beginning with one step he almost craftily seeks to find out something, to have the infinite certainty changed into a finite certainty, then this discourse will not be able to benefit him. There is an upside-downness that wants to reap before it sows; there is a cowardliness that wants to have certainty before it begins; there is a hypersensitivity so copious in words that it continually shrinks from acting; but what would it avail a person if, double-minded and fork-tongued, he wanted to dupe God, trap him in probability, but refused to understand the improbable, that one must lose everything in order to gain everything,405 and understand it so honestly that, in the most crucial moment, when his soul is already shuddering at the risk, he does not again leap to his own aid with the explanation that he has not yet fully made a resolution but merely wanted to feel his way. Therefore, all discussion of struggling with God in prayer, of the actual loss (since if the pain of annihilation is not actually suffered, then the sufferer is not yet out upon the deep,406 and his scream is not the scream of danger [V 153] but in the face of danger) and the figurative victory cannot have the purpose of persuading anyone or of converting the situation into a task for secular appraisal and changing God’s gift of grace to the venturer into temporal small change for the timorous. It really would not help a person (even if the one speaking were capable of it) if the speaker, by his oratorical artistry, led him to jump into a half hour’s resolution, by the ardor of conviction started a fire in him so that he would blaze in a momentary good intention without being able, however, to sustain a resolution or to nourish an intention as soon as the speaker stopped talking. Even if an angel spoke with the tongue of an angel407 in order to describe the beneficial effect of prayer, it would not help the sensate person, because he neither understands nor cares about that for which prayer is beneficial. Of what use would it be, then, if the sensate person was pleased to hear the word “beneficial” and the angel used it, when the two of them, at odds in everything, would not even agree on the use of this word.
Yet the discourse may well have its significance, but to ruminate on this is again precarious and doubtful; therefore, it is best to regard the discourse as a daring venture. In other words, if one person makes comprehensible to another something that is to his advantage in the temporal sense and the latter acts accordingly, then the former may be said to have brought it about. If, however, a person tries to make comprehensible to another his eternal well-being, this does not help straightway in the same manner, inasmuch as the second still has not grasped the eternal on the basis of what the first said. If, however, he makes the eternal resolution and in it grasps the eternal, then he owes no one anything, not the speaker either. To be specific, no human being can give an eternal resolution to another or take it from him; one human being cannot be indebted to another.408 If someone objects that then one might just as well be silent if there is no probability of winning others, he thereby has merely shown that although his life very likely thrived and prospered in probability and every one of his undertakings in the service of probability went forward, he has never really ventured and consequently has never had or given himself the opportunity to consider that probability is an illusion, but to venture the truth is what gives human life and the human situation pith and meaning, to venture is the fountainhead of inspiration, whereas probability is the sworn enemy of enthusiasm, the mirage whereby the sensate person drags out time and keeps the eternal away, whereby he cheats God, himself, and his generation: cheats God of the honor, [V 154] himself of liberating annihilation, and his generation of the equality of conditions.
Therefore, the discourse will seek to comprehend what is upbuilding in the thought that: One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and Is Victorious—in That God Is Victorious.409
To struggle in prayer—what a contradiction! Would one expression be strong enough to hold together two such opposite thoughts! In every struggle the weapon of combat is designated in advance; therefore, if prayer is designated as the weapon of combat here, then the struggle seems impossible, since prayer, after all, is not a weapon of war but on the contrary the quiet pursuit of peace; prayer is the weapon not of one who attacks another or of one who defends himself but of one who yields. If, as is routine in any struggle, the distance between the contenders is determined in advance, then the struggle again seems impossible, because when there is no praying, God is in heaven and man is on earth, and consequently the distance is too great; but when there is praying, they are indeed too close to each other, then there is no in-between that can be marked out as the battleground. In other words, if a person yields himself completely in prayer, he does not struggle, but if he does not yield himself at all, then he is not praying, even if he were to stay down on his knees praying day and night. It is the same here as with a person who is maintaining a connection with a distant friend. If he does not see to it that the letter is addressed properly, it will not be delivered and the connection will not be made, no matter how many letters he writes; similarly, let the one who prays see to it that the form of the prayer is proper, a yielding of himself in the inner being, because otherwise he is not praying to God; and let the one who prays be scrupulously attentive to this, since no deception is possible here in relation to the searcher of hearts. Whereas kings and princes flee to rural solitude in order to escape the hordes of ill-timed or unreasonable supplicants, God in heaven is better safeguarded, although he is still always the nearest one to every human being; better safeguarded, since every prayer that does not have the right form, which is in the inner being, does not reach his ear at all, although he is near enough to hear the softest sigh, does not pertain to him, since it is not a prayer to him. And even if such a prayer pushes itself to the front, even if it resounds loudly out in the world, there is no living creature who knows to whom these words pertain, to say nothing of an angel’s having the idea of bringing it before God410—if you can imagine such a thing, my listener, since the angel promptly sees from the form that it is not directed to God. This, you see, is why it seems so impossible that prayer can become a weapon against God, because only the proper prayer reaches him; the improper prayer he does not even hear, and it is even less possible [V 155] that someone praying in this way would be able to attack or wound him or wrong him. A person can wrong another human being with his prayer, and prayer in this manner is a terrible weapon between man and man, perhaps the most pernicious. The strong man is warned not to misuse his power against the weak, but the weak man is also warned not to misuse the power of prayer against the strong. It may well be that a tyrant who misused his power, a deceiver who misused his shrewdness, never perpetrated as atrocious a wrong as the one who cowardly and slyly prayed in the wrong place, prayed in order to advance his will, 411flung himself into the weakness of prayer, into imploring misery, in order to shatter another person. But this is not the case in the relationship to God; in his blessedness, he is spared the most forgivable and the basest misuse of prayers, of screams and tears.
But then what is the condition in which the struggle of prayer may be said to take place? Who is the praying one who struggles with God in prayer and therefore simultaneously preserves a relationship of deep and inward devotion to God because he prays but is also so separate from God that they are able to struggle? If we consider the child, presumably everyone is inclined to praise its simple and devout prayer, since the child is poor in spirit and therefore sees God,412 and its prayer never engages in struggle with him. This is the basis of the child’s happiness, but in a later consideration this is also the basis of an ambiguity in the child’s devotion to God. The child, if for the most part it is brought up in the admonition of the Lord, prays to God about the good, thanks God for the good. About what good and for what good? About the good according to the child’s conception. When the child receives a toy at Christmas time, it thanks God, as it is encouraged to do, and it would have to be a peculiar child who in that season of the year would not be thoroughly convinced of God’s goodness, if the parents’ circumstances generally support their predisposition toward God and toward the child. So it is with all the good about which the child prays and for which it gives thanks.
On the other hand, the child does not ascribe the painful, the sad, or the unpleasant (and actually the child mind distinguishes almost exclusively between the pleasant and the unpleasant) to God. No wonder, then, that the child thinks God is goodness itself! The unpleasant is explained in another way, probably most often by means of the idea of evil people or a bad man who only makes mischief. If the child sees its mother distressed, it never thinks of tracing the distress back to God as the cause, or that there might be an ambiguity of distress and accordingly that the distress might come from God for the very purpose of drawing the person to God. The child, however, immediately thinks of evil people. If the child loses [V 156] its father in death and sees the mother’s pain, it actually has no conception of what death can be; the child is far removed, even though it becomes aware, because of the seriousness, of the shadow of sorrow that spreads over the whole environment. But the child also receives new clothes and at times is so delighted with them that the mother herself, even if in tears, cannot help smiling at it, and by this the child’s view of death is again confused. Now if the mother, despite her sorrow, does not forget her solicitude for the child and explains to it that the father is in heaven with God, then the child is quickly reconciled with God and, as always, is a blessing here also, because the explanation, which in the beginning was perhaps only an invention of mother love intended for the child, little by little, quietly and secretly, satisfies the mother and becomes an explanation for the sorrowing widow.
The child leaps over the difficulty: death. The father was here on earth, and it was very good, for his father love was completely in accord with the child’s conception; now the father is in heaven and is comfortable with God. But the child really does not give any thought to how the change came about; in any case, it will scarcely occur to the child to attribute the death to God. Therefore, we should always be a little cautious in the frequent eulogizing of the piety of the child mind. What is laudable, something everyone must desire, must seek to preserve until death, is the child’s inwardness, since to the child God is truly living and present every time it thinks of him. In another sense, however, the child’s conception of God is really not very godly.
The difficulty begins as soon as the contrasting ideas must be thought together, as when the sorrowing wife must ascribe her loss and distress to God, must find another explanation than the one the mother had readily available for the child. The difficulty first appears at a later age, when on the one hand the conceptions of the joyful, the desirable, good, and evil are clearly developed, and on the other hand the conception that ultimately everything must be ascribed to God if there is to be a God and a godly view of life. If the childlike sensibility comes back again unclarified, we call it childishness and are not satisfied with inwardness, because this is required to be related to a larger maturity. 413Who, indeed, would praise the piety of the adult who did not have a more earnest conception of life than to know how to distinguish between the pleasant and the unpleasant and a more holy conception of God than to dare thoughtlessly to saddle, as it were, God with the same understanding, in which they were agreed that God gave and he thanked? Such a wretch would certainly never [V 157] reach the point of struggling in prayer, since if everything went according to his wish, he would give thanks for it, and if it went contrary to his wish, he would stop praying, because he would altogether lack the true inwardness of the thought that it must be understood as God wants it to be understood, that everything must be ascribed to him. But this inwardness cannot immediately penetrate the outward, which is in tune with the sensate person’s ideas and conceptions, and thereby the struggle is made impossible, because to learn to know God is even more difficult than to know a human being, and if one knows God only through externals, one cannot easily be halted by a disappointment, inasmuch as God is solely spirit. If a person gives up the inwardness of that thought, he no longer reaches the point of struggling in prayer. His struggle becomes something entirely different, for which we dare not promise such a glorious outcome, no matter whether he goes so far as to want to defy God, indeed, to the extreme defiance of wanting to deny God and thereby almost annihilate him, or is so childish as to want to put God in a predicament so that God will have regrets afterward when it is too late. Just as there has never been anyone who has not assumed the existence of a god, but there certainly have been some who have not wanted to let this thought have any power over them, so in a less direct way others demonstrate that they cannot do without God if for no other reason than to be able to become self-important and significant by means of the idea that God cannot manage without them, just like a pampered and spoiled child who wants to do without his father and yet cannot do without the thought that nourishes his own vanity—that it is bound to hurt his father.
How numerous the strugglers are, how varied the struggle in which the one who prays tries himself with God (since someone who tries himself against God does not struggle in prayer), how varied the means of prayer, the special nature of the prayer, with which the struggler seeks to overcome God! The struggler is indeed so inclined; it is his intention that the struggle be fruitful, that it end with a glorious result, and if anyone were to say to him, in order to calm him down, that God is the unchanging, that God not only lives far off in heaven but is even further away from every human being in his changelessness, 414this kind of talk would certainly upset the struggler. Just as the worst thing that can be said of a person is that he is an inhuman brute, so it is the worst and the most revolting blasphemy to say of God that he is inhuman, no matter if it is supposed to be very fashionable or bold to talk that way. No, the God to whom he prays is human, has the heart to feel humanly, the ear to hear a human being’s [V 158] complaint; and even though he does not fulfill every wish, he still lives close to us and is moved by the struggler’s cry, by his humble request, by his wretchedness when he sits abandoned and as if in prison, by his speedy joy over the fulfillment when in hope he anticipates it. Indeed, this God is moved by the struggler’s lament when he is perishing in despondency, by his shout when he is sinking in the maelstrom of change, by the thanksgiving he promises for all time; he is moved, if not earlier, then by the final sigh when, humanly speaking, it already seems to be too late.
So there is a struggle. One person contends in prayer for his share of the good things that fail to come, another for the honor that beckons, another for the happiness he wants to create for his beloved, another for the happiness that will flourish for him at his beloved’s side. One person contends in prayer against the horror of the past from which he is fleeing, another against the terror of the future into which he is staring, another with the secret horror that resides in solitude, another with the danger everyone sees. One person contends for the fulfillment of the wish, another against the fulfilled wish, since it was precipitous. One person strains every nerve even though he keeps on praying; another is expecting everything from the prayer even though he keeps on working; one ponders the relation of the fulfillment to the work; another ponders the misrelation. Alas, even though there is peace in the land, health and abundance, alas, even when the sun smiles bright and warm, there is still so much struggle. Alas, even when the overarching night sky is silent and starlit and the fields are at rest, there is still so much struggle!
But what is the issue in the struggle? That God is goodness? Not at all. That God is love? Not at all. No, it is a matter of making oneself clear to God, of truly explaining to him what is beneficial for the one who is praying, of truly impressing it upon his mind, of truly gaining his consent to the wish. And the struggle is well intentioned toward God, because it is about truly being able to be happy in God, truly being able to give him thanks, truly being able to witness to his honor, truly being able to be assured that all fatherliness lives in heaven, truly being able to love him—as people do indeed say when they designate the ultimate, to love as much as one loves God. And the struggler is open toward God, because he dares to testify to himself that he is not a child, does not fragment his soul so that he wishes for one thing this minute and something else the next, so that when the fulfillment arrives he has thoughtlessly forgotten the wish—no, there is only the one. He dares to testify to himself that he is straining all his understanding to become sufficiently foresighted to spy the remotest hint of the fulfillment, that he is straining every thought to [V 159] conjure forth from the most insignificant event anything it could be hiding, that he welcomes with thanksgiving any hint and invites it to stay. Nor is his prayer some deceitful strategy, his last resort, since he does like to pray and does not want to stop praying. If he catches himself becoming lukewarm415 and falling away from God, he is not slow to repent and is quick to struggle again in prayer.
This is the struggle. Is it not so, my listener, or was it not this way? The person who falls away and gives up praying—of him and his struggle we do not speak. But now the outcome! But who is it who asks? Is it an inquisitive man who would also like to hear this story? We have no reply for him. If it is a man who has been tested, then he himself knows it better than the speaker, and we shall indeed be glad to receive his guidance. But let the struggler ask, because the person who struggles is indeed the first to ask about the outcome. Perhaps he would prefer that there would be an experience that would guarantee that circumstances are such that prayer is a kind of payment God requires, but for this price the one who prays eventually does obtain what he desires. Do you suppose that this experience would be able to help him; do you suppose that the experience has helped anyone at all except the one who himself had it and consequently was not helped by it? Perhaps he would wish that there would be mention of a marvelous fulfillment of the wish, that it happened as it once did long ago that the wedding guests received the unexpected abundance of good wine, and the blind his sight, and the paralytic his health, and the dead man his life, and the mother her child again, and that unhappy fugitive among the graves regained his participation in the community of men.416 Do you suppose that it would benefit him, as he construed it, if nevertheless the addition were made that this does not happen anymore? Happy indeed is anyone to whom this happened; blessed indeed is anyone who can rejoice over it, over those glorious days, even though he knows that they are past! But what about the outcome of the struggle, you ask, and this question is not casually tossed out. It is simultaneously afraid and eager to hear the explanation. To look forward to an explanation is still always a comfort, and hope dares to promise itself everything from the explanation as long as it has not been heard. Therefore one is afraid to have heard it, but the explanation is, after all, a comfort, and this is why one is eager to hear it. The outcome has already been mentioned: one who prays struggles in prayer; we have seen him struggle; he is victorious. This, then, is the outcome, but he is victorious in that God is victorious and in this way he becomes one who prays aright.
My listener, have you never talked with a person who although much wiser was nevertheless favorably disposed toward you, indeed, more or at least more soundly (and [V 160] consequently more) concerned about your welfare than you yourself? If you have not, then consider what could happen to you or to me, as I now present it. You see, in the beginning we were completely at odds. What the wise one said seemed very strange to me, yet I had confidence in him that he would not misuse his superiority but would allow himself to be persuaded and would himself help me to eliminate the misunderstanding. So we talked together and exchanged many a word in the struggle of discussion. Presumably the wise one must have maintained his outlook, for he remained calm, whereas I, without really noticing how and without feeling ashamed of it, became almost violent, because it was so important to me that the wise one should share my view that I did not dare to adhere to it except in agreement with him—but did dare to attack him in order to move him to agreement. Indeed, was it not bound to make me violent; after all, it was self-contradictory to want to win the wise one over to my view in a crafty way by means of my skill (as if I were the stronger) and then be really convinced of the correctness of my view only in the confidence that it was the view of the wise one, since he was indeed the stronger—I continually had this faith in him—and to me agreement with him was crucial. Finally, after fitfully wandering around, as it were, in the conversation for a long time and after having both attempted and suffered much, I was suddenly so clear about what I wanted to say that I very briefly and with unaccountable force set forth my view, assured that it was bound to convince him. And see, the wise one agreed with me and gave me his approval. But since he was favorably disposed toward me and believed that I could bear the explanation, he shook his finger at me and said: Your present view is just what I said from the beginning, when you could not and would not understand me.
417Then, of course, modesty awakened in my soul, and I was ashamed of my earlier conduct, but nevertheless it did not take away from me the bold confidence to rejoice over the truth now understood, even though I was far from having vanquished the wise one, since only I myself had become convinced and strengthened by the struggle. How amazing! But it was indeed fortunate that I did not take another road, did not lose my temper, did not discontinue the struggle, did not abuse the wise one as if he were my enemy because he would not yield to me, did not raise a hue and cry about his self-love because he would not indulge me but on the contrary loved me better than I myself understood. And modesty again saved me from doing what I otherwise would have done if I had discontinued the struggle and later discerned the truth myself: that I would have continued to regard the wise one as my enemy, although what I now discerned was just what he had [V 161] said; that I would even have wanted to insult him by defiantly suggesting that I had now understood the truth without him and in spite of him, although he simply wanted to help me to discern the truth by myself and although he was the only one who could have prevented me from doing this by agreeing with me, whereby he would have ransomed [løskjøbt] himself from my insults and bought [kjøbt] my thanks.
This is how it is with the struggler if he does not give up the inwardness that is the condition for really being able to say of him that he is struggling in prayer. Do not say, my listener, that this is a pious fancy; do not appeal to experience, that it does not go this way in life. Indeed, that is unimportant if it nevertheless can go this way and you are coercing me, in order to agree with you, only to say that it probably does go otherwise in life, namely, because it does happen that people become lukewarm and cold and indifferent, so that they perceive neither the former nor the latter, and forgetful, so that when they have come to the end they no longer remember how it was in the beginning, and crafty and fraudulent and brash, so that they accuse God of not helping them and flout God, saying that they can help themselves, of which the former is an eternal lie, and the latter, if there is to be any truth in it at all, no one can have learned except from God. But for the person who does not give up his inwardness, does not in his struggling struggle himself out of the relation to God but struggles his way closer to God, it happens as was explained, in that the prayer’s inwardness in God becomes the most important to him 418and not a means for the attainment of an end. Or should praying for something belong so essentially to prayer that the prayer becomes more inward the more one has to pray for or the more copious one is in words? Should not a person who prays, indeed, one who prays aright, be one who says: Lord, my God, I really have nothing at all for which to pray to you; even if you would promise to grant my every wish, I really cannot think of anything—except that I may remain with you, as near as possible in this time of separation in which you and I are living, and entirely with you in all eternity? And insofar as the one who prays turns his gaze toward heaven, would that one, then, be one who prays, or one who prays aright, whose restless eyes continually bring him some comfort for a particular sorrow, some fulfillment of a particular wish—and not rather the one whose calm eyes seek only God? And it must come to this if the inwardness is not given up but is kept unchanged and is guarded as a sacred fire within a person, because the wish, the earthly craving, the worldly concern is the temporal and ordinarily dies before the person [V 162] dies even if he does not grasp the eternal—how then would it hold out with the eternal! Then the wish becomes less and less ardent, and finally its time is over; then the worm of craving dies419 little by little, and craving becomes extinct; then the vigilance of concern falls asleep little by little, never to awaken again, but the time of inwardness is never over.
420Who, then, has been victorious? It is God, from whom the one praying could not extort fulfillment by his prayers. But the one praying is indeed also victorious. Or is it victory to be acknowledged in the right although one is in the wrong, to obtain the fulfillment of an earthly wish 421as if it were the highest, a demonstration that one had prayed to God and prayed aright, a demonstration that God is love and that the one who prays has an understanding with him, when, on the contrary, the one who prays has become a lifelong debtor to the one whom he himself has made into an idol by his prayer and by his thanks.
What, then, is the victory? In what is the condition of the victors different from that of the strugglers? 422Has God become changed? An answer in the affirmative seems to be a dark saying, and yet it is so, he has become changed, for now it has indeed become manifest that God is unchanging. But this changelessness is not that chilling indifference, that devastating loftiness, that ambiguous distance, which the callous understanding lauded. No, on the contrary, this changelessness is intimate and warm and everywhere present; it is a changelessness in being concerned for a person, and therefore it does not admit of being changed by the scream of the one who prays as if everything were all over now, by his cowardliness when he finds it most convenient not to be able to help himself, by his false contrition [Sønderknuselse], of which he promptly repents [fortryde] as soon as the momentary alarm of the danger is past.
423Has the one who prays become changed? Yes, this is not hard to see, because he has become one who prays aright, and he who prays aright is always victorious, since it is one and the same. In an imperfect way, he was already sure of this, because while he had sufficient inwardness to pray, he was also assured that the wish would be fulfilled if he prayed aright, prayed aright with regard to the wish—this is how he understood it. Now he is changed, but this is still true—indeed, now it has become true that when he prays aright he is victorious. That he prayed was beneficial for him from the very beginning, however imperfect his prayer; it helped him, namely, to concentrate his soul on one wish. Unfortunately, a person usually desires far too many things, lets his soul flutter with every breeze. But he who prays knows how to make distinctions; little by little he gives up that which according to his earthly conception is less important, since he does not really [V 163] dare to come before God with it, and because he does not wish to forfeit the goodness of God by always importuning for this and that, but on the contrary wants to give all the more emphasis to the request for his one and only wish. Then before God he concentrates his soul on the one wish, and this already has something ennobling about it, is preparation for giving up everything, because only he can give up everything who had but one single wish. In this way he is prepared to be strengthened in the struggle with God and to be victorious, because he who prays aright struggles in prayer and is victorious in that God is victorious.
On the battlefield, it so happens that if the first line of combatants has been victorious, then the second is not led into battle at all but merely shares in the triumph. In the world of the spirit, it is not this way. If a person has not done his utmost to win a victory, then the victory admittedly means a victory, but it also means that he will soon be led into a new struggle in order to be victorious by losing. 424How many strugglers there are now; how hidden and private the struggle in a person’s inner being frequently is, since the visible betrays nothing. 425He who prays asks for nothing in the external world, his wish does not center on anything earthly, his mind is not occupied, is not concerned with many things—no, he sits there quietly with his loss, but still he is not idle, for he is ruminating, and still he is not passive, for he is pondering an explanation. Consequently, the struggle has become even more inward. He is not intent upon explaining his wish to God, making himself clear to God in his prayer—far from it: he has given up his wish, he is bearing his loss, he is reconciling himself to the pain, and yet he is a long way from the explanation; his struggle in prayer is for God to explain himself to him. And he dares to testify to himself that he is not a child who thinks that the explanation is there for the asking, or a young girl who wants to dream up an explanation—no, he is working. When life is noisy during the day, his thought works at drowning out the noise; when everything is still at night, his thought is working in order to find the explanation. Indeed, even in the moment of weakness, when ordinarily no one is able to work, his thought still works—it works on holidays as well as on workdays, and the day of celebration has not yet arrived. What has happened must, of course, be for the best, the loss and the pain must be efficacious in quite another way than the fulfillment of the one and only wish or of all wishes. Efficacious—yes, that is the name of the bridge he wants to throw from his pain across to his blessedness, but alas, the bridge is continually being cut off! Efficacious—yes, that is the name of the ferryman whose friendship he wants to buy, but alas, he is silent! 426Efficacious—yes, that is the name of the twilight in which he wants to meet God, but alas, the summons does not come! Efficacious—yes, that is the name [V 164]of the initiation he covets, that he might be initiated into the understanding that with God is the secret of the sufferings!
Or is this the explanation, that God denies him the understanding and requires only faith and consequently wants only the understanding with him that is in the realm of the ununderstandable? Indeed, this is faith, and let us not mock God and human beings and those who have been tried and the heroes and the language and the successors and those who are troubled and ourselves by wanting to make it into something else. Faith reads the understanding only as in a dark saying;427 humanly speaking, it does not have the explanation, only in a certain deranged sense, so that, humanly speaking, it is the most foolish business arrangement ever made in the world. But this is the way it is supposed to be, and God in heaven is still unembarrassed; he is not selling out, whatever human beings do. And he is indeed unchanging, as the understanding says in order to mock the troubled one who cries out to God; but see, its mockery recoils on itself, because God truly is unchanged. He has not become a friend of cowardliness and softness; he has not become so debilitated over the years that he cannot distinguish between mine and thine and everything runs together before him; he is himself still the first inventor of language and the only one who holds the blessing in his hands; he is unchanged, even though he would not be able to satisfy the demands of the times! So it is with faith—humanly speaking, it is the most foolish and, humanly speaking, the most difficult business arrangement.
428And when is the Comforter coming? “When I have gone away from you,”429 Christ answered the sorrowful disciples he had trained as shop apprentices to make the good business arrangement. And what was he to them? He was all that they possessed; for them he was their sole, priceless possession; with them he was the daily bread of joy; to them he was the expectancy of blessedness. No rich man became so poor by losing everything, and no lover became so poor by losing the beloved, and no one full of expectancy became so poor as the disciples. Yet Christ had to go away, “and this is beneficial for you.”430 You see, this is faith’s explanation—do you suppose that the disciples, humanly speaking, understood it or could understand it? So the Comforter is coming. When? Indeed, when this has happened. But is he coming right away—because this, of course, is what we are asking about by asking when. But was it right away for the disciples, was it right away for Abraham—when it took seventy years for the comfort to come?431 Blessed be the man who knows how to sing for the [V 165] one who grieves, who knows how to support the one whose knees have deteriorated and who totters as he walks, to lead someone who stared himself blind because he saw nothing but hopeless wretchedness around him. 432But let us renounce all the loose talk that wants to shorten time for the sorrowing one but has not itself learned from sorrows what it is to count, all the loose talk that has the form of comfort but not its power, all the verbosity that sounds eloquent to the ear but has the repulsiveness of falsehood in the eater’s mouth! No, the Comforter does not come immediately, and the only thing a person dares to tell himself and others is that he is coming, as surely as God lives he is coming.
Then the Comforter comes with the explanation; then he makes everything new,433 strips the sufferer of his mourning apparel and gives him a new heart and an assured spirit.434 It may, however, take time. If the struggler—even though he thought that he had lost everything—had deceived himself, if his soul in one regard or another maintained a worldly well-being with the aid of human probability, then there is still time. Then misjudgment can have time to vex him who lost everything; then ingratitude can have time and courage to be obstinate and to defy him who, misguided by the scream that indicated great danger, ventured into the danger and himself stayed there where the one who had screamed imagined himself to be; then mockery can have time to wound by demanding human demonstration from him who has only his sufferings as a demonstration that God is love; then shame has opportunity to seek the company of hurt. How many new pains may still be reserved for him who believed that he had lost everything, how privately and hiddenly they may strike him. But it all helps the explanation!
In this way, the struggle goes on for an explanation, and prayer is the means by which the explanation will correspond to the way he prays about it. One person struggles with all his might against the explanation that would make himself guilty—no, it was all the dispensation of providence, all from God in order to test, to purify, to try the lover. Another struggles in order that the explanation may explain his guilt to him, so that the passion of freedom will not seem an illusion, but that the chasmic separation of guilt may make the blessedness of reconciliation all the more inward. One person asks that the explanation will unite him to the race and that the explanation will lie in the fate common to all, which is meaningful for the whole; another that the explanation will consider him outside the relation to others in order to select him for solitary pain, but also for solitary election. 435So the struggle goes; the struggler contends with God in prayer, or he struggles with himself and in his prayer calls on God for help against himself. 436But if the struggler still does not give up his inwardness and consequently [V 166] stop praying, if he loves God greatly,437 if he longs for God humbly as one longs for someone without whom one is nothing, fervently as one longs for someone by whom one becomes everything; if he deals honestly with his debt of thanksgiving and adoration to God, which constantly increases because as yet he cannot give thanks aright, cannot understand aright; if he deals with it as a good entrusted to him for better times—then, then he is struggling in prayer. And whatever happens in the meantime, which is concealed even from the angels, and whenever the hour comes that no one knows except God,438 and even though he must buy new oil for the lamp439 of expectancy more than once, it nevertheless remains certain that anyone who buys from God will never be deceived by having his purchase later prove to be of lesser worth. Even though a person accidentally bought a trifle at too high a price, if we may speak this way, nevertheless, if he bought it from God and the expensive purchase was made in integrity before God and in trust in the Lord,440 then he has not bought too dearly, he will not regret the purchase, because what he bought was no trifle—the payment and God vouch for that. If a person cared so much for what the sagacious promptly and the majority the next day would label a trifle that in the loss of it he would have lost everything and in this pain renounced the world and everything that belongs to the world,441 he will not repent of the purchase when he also sees its insignificance, if his silent pain otherwise brought him into relationship with God, because to scream, to become temporarily important to oneself and to others, is certainly not buying from God; it is only an unfruitful manifestation of the vain nature of the sensual and the sensate. He will not regret the purchase only if he truly did give up everything, and this can be the truth, since otherwise no one could have given up everything except someone who in the opinion of worldly appraisers has lost everything, but to lose everything and to give up everything do not mean one and the same. But someone who even on the occasion of a trifle bought God’s confidence and friendship will truly not regret it; on the contrary, he will eternally give thanks to God that he was the kind of child who cared so much for a trifle, the kind of child who simply could not grasp that it was a trifle.
But what about the outcome! 442My listener, imagine a child sitting and drawing with a pencil, drawing whatever occurs to [V 167] a child, whatever a child recklessly and disconnectedly dashes off; but behind the child stands an invisible artist who guides his hand so that the drawing that is about to become disordered submits to the law of beauty, so that the line that is about to go astray is called back within the boundary of beauty—imagine the child’s amazement! Or imagine that a child puts his drawing aside in the evening, but while he sleeps a friendly hand finishes the jumbled and poorly begun sketch—imagine the child’s wonder when he sees his drawing again the next morning! So also with a person; let us never forget that even the more mature person always retains some of the child’s lack of judgment, especially if the prayer is to assist the explanation, not as the essential but as a means. The young man is busy considering what he wants to be in the world, whom of the great and outstanding he wants to emulate. The more earnest one has put away childish things;443 he is not concerned with the external world this way; he only wants to develop himself. Therefore, he sits down and draws. Is he not one who draws, he who struggles in prayer with God for an explanation? Will not the explanation draw a boundary line between him and God so that face-to-face with God he begins to resemble himself? Ah, but now comes the difference, because the child has to be helped by the addition of something, but more and more is taken away from the struggler. The external world and every claim on life were taken away from him; now he is struggling for an explanation, but he is not even struggling his way to that. Finally it seems to him that he is reduced to nothing at all. Now the moment has come. 444Whom should the struggler desire to resemble other than God? 445But if he himself is something or wants to be something, this something is sufficient to hinder the resemblance. Only when he himself becomes nothing, only then can God illuminate him so that he resembles God. However great he is, he cannot manifest God’s likeness; God can imprint himself in him only when he himself has become nothing. When the ocean is exerting all its power, that is precisely the time when it cannot reflect the image of heaven, and even the slightest motion blurs the image; but when it becomes still and deep, then the image of heaven sinks into its nothingness.
Who, then, was victorious? It was God, because he did not give the explanation requested by the one who prayed, and he did not give it as the struggling one requested it. But the one struggling was also victorious. Or was it not a victory that instead of receiving an explanation [Forklaring] from God he was transfigured [forklaret] in God, and his transfiguration [Forklarelse] is this: to reflect the image of God.
[V 168] What, then, is the victory; in what is the condition of the victors different from that of the strugglers? 446Has God become changed? An answer in the affirmative seems to be a hard saying, and yet it is so; at least the one who prays understands him differently and demands no explanation. Has the one who prays become changed? Yes, because he understands himself differently, and yet he does not stop being one who prays, since he gives thanks always. 447But the one who always gives thanks prays aright, and the one who always gives thanks must also have been victorious continually; otherwise why should he give thanks! 448And would this giving of thanks ever cease? Certainly not; there is always reason to thank God, and every human being is in debt to him, and eternally in debt. Alas, the debt someone incurs at the gambling table, by throwing dice, in a game of cards, is called a debt of honor; I suppose that because it is meaningless in itself we have to give it an impressive name and then hurry to be rid of it. The debt to God is not a debt of honor like that, but it is, nevertheless, an honor to be in debt to God. It is an honor not to owe fortune anything, but to owe God everything; not to owe fate anything, but to owe providence everything; not to owe caprice anything, but to owe a fatherliness everything. —In this way, he who prays aright struggles in prayer and is victorious in that God is victorious.
We have spoken about struggle. 449Struggle is usually not joyful; when one person is victorious, the other is crushed—alas, it sometimes happens that both the victor and the one overcome have lost. But this struggle is marvelous, well worth being tested in, eternally worth praising, since here they both are more blessedly victorious than when the lover’s argument is transfigured into increased love. 450Are you saying, my listener, that this discourse is not easy (one who is being tested may find it poor and bland compared with the sufferings)—the struggle itself is not easy either. If someone wants to beguile himself by anticipating the quiet outcome of the struggle, its happy understanding, then this is not the fault of the discourse. The victory is still a victory only in a certain high and noble and therefore metaphorical sense, but the pain is literal. When the hour of victory is coming, we do not know, but this we do know—the struggle is a life-and-death struggle.