CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 4
‘What did Abraham achieve?’: S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 106.
Abraham’s faith seemed impossible: see Fear and Trembling, p. 13: ‘No one who was great in the world will be forgotten, but each became great in proportion to his expectation. One became great by expecting the impossible, another by expecting the eternal, but the one who expected the impossible became greater than all.’
‘a guiding star’: ibid. p. 18.
‘The important thing is to be able to have faith in God with respect to lesser things’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE–KK, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 168: JJ 124 (1843).
‘He headed home cheerfully, with trust in God’: ibid, pp. 121–2: HH8 (1840).
he receives this gift secretly, in silence: Kierkegaard returned to this account of an incognito person of faith, contrasted with the person who withdraws to a monastery, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846): see S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosphical Crumbs, ed. and trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge University Press, 2009), e.g. pp. 344–5, 396–8, 413, 419–20.
‘I examine his figure from head to foot’: Fear and Trembling, p. 32
‘worldly wisdom’, not ‘genuinely religious consolation’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE–KK, p. 153: JJ 82 (1843).
‘Is it not also true here that the one whom God blesses he curses in the same breath?’: Fear and Trembling, p. 57.
‘The first thing the religious does is close its door and speak in secret’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE–KK, p. 158: JJ 96 (1843).
‘Inwardness is incommensurable with outwardness’: ibid, p. 158: JJ 96 (1843).
‘I sit and listen to the sounds in my inner being’: ibid, pp. 159–60: JJ 103 (1843).
‘After my death, no one will find in my papers’: ibid, p. 157: JJ 95 (1843).
‘so many a marriage conceals little histories’: ibid, p. 165: JJ 115 (17 May 1843).
‘On Easter Sunday at evensong’: ibid, p. 161: JJ 107 (April 1843).
‘sailed to Greenland, to North America, to China, to Brazil’: as a child, Kierkegaard heard stories about Danish missionaries in Greenland; in 1841 he wrote to Emil Boesen, who was suffering from his love for a woman, ‘Get into your kayak (surely you know those Greenland boats), put on your swimming suit, and be off with you to the ocean of the world. But that is certainly no idyll. If you cannot forget her, cannot write poetry about her, all right then, set all sails’ (S. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 103). Poul Møller, Kierkegaard’s favourite philosophy teacher at the University of Copenhagen, sailed to China after a romantic disappointment. Peter Wilhelm Lund, the brother of Kierkegaard’s two brothers-in-law, went to Brazil to study meteorology, biology and zoology: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 1: Journals AA–DD, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 319.
‘descend into dark waters’: Letters and Documents, p. 93 – letter to Emil Boesen from Berlin, 16 November 1841.
‘Everything churns inside me’: ibid, p. 122 – letter to Emil Boesen from Berlin, 16 January 1842.