IV. Sin’s Anxiety or Anxiety as the Outcome of Sin in the Single Individual

IV. Sin’s Anxiety or Anxiety as the Outcome of Sin in the Single Individual

With the qualitative leap sin came into the world, and that is how it continues to come into it. You might think that once the leap was posited, anxiety was canceled, seeing that anxiety is defined as freedom’s self-disclosure before itself in possibility. The qualitative leap is after all actuality, and possibility thus surely nullified along with anxiety. That, however, is not how it is. On the one hand, actuality is not a factor on its own; and on the other, the actuality posited is an unwarranted actuality. So anxiety enters into a relation again with what is posited, as well as with the future. But now the object of anxiety is something definite, its nothing an actual something, because the distinction between good and evil^* is posited in concreto, and the anxiety has therefore lost its dialectical ambiguity. This is true of Adam as of every later individual; for, through the qualitative leap, they are completely alike.

When sin is posited in the single individual through the qualitative leap, the difference between good and evil is then posited. We have nowhere committed the folly of holding that man must sin: we have, on the contrary, always protested against all merely thought-experimental knowledge. We have said what we again repeat, that sin presupposes itself just like freedom, and allows of no explanation through some antecedent, any more than does freedom. To maintain that freedom begins as a liberum arbitrium (which is found nowhere, cf. Leibniz), which can choose good just as well as evil, is to render any explanation fundamentally impossible. To speak of good and evil as the object of freedom is to finitize both freedom and the concepts of good and evil. Freedom is infinite and arises out of nothing. Wanting to say that man sins by necessity is therefore to construe the circle of the leap as a straight line. That to many such a procedure seems highly plausible is because to many thoughtlessness is the most natural thing of all, and to the fact that in all ages the number of those is legion who value the way of thinking that through all centuries has vainly been labeled λόγοϛ ἀργόϛ [lazy reasoning] (Chrysippus), ignava rati (Cicero), sophisma pigrum, la raison paresseuse (Leibniz).

Psychology now has anxiety as its object once again, but it must be cautious. The individual’s life history proceeds in a movement from state to state. Every state is posited by a leap. As sin came into the world, so does it continue to come unless halted. Yet every such repetition is not a simple consequence but a new leap. Preceding every such leap there goes a state as the closest psychological approximation. This state is the object of psychology. In every state possibility is present, and to that extent anxiety. Such is the case after sin is posited, for only in the good is there a unity of state and transition.

(a) Although the posited sin is an annulled possibility, it is also an actuality that lacks justification. That being so, anxiety is able to relate to it. As an unjustified actuality, it is again to be negated. That work anxiety is ready to undertake. Here is the playground for anxiety’s artful sophistry. While sin’s actuality holds one hand of freedom in its icy right hand, just like the Commandant, the left hand gesticulates with illusion and deception and will-o’-the-wisp eloquence.^*

(b) The posited sin is additionally consistent in itself, even if it is a consistency alien to freedom. This consistency announces itself, and anxiety’s relation is to this consistency’s future, which is a new state’s possibility. No matter how deep the individual has sunk, it can sink still deeper, and this “can” is the object of anxiety. The more anxiety relaxes at this point, the more it signifies that sin’s consistency has entered the individual in succum et sanguinem [in flesh and blood], and that sin has obtained native rights in individuality.

Sin here naturally means something concrete; one never sins on the whole or in general. Even the sin^† of wanting to return to before sin’s actuality is not a sin on the whole, and there never was such a sin. Anyone with some knowledge of human beings recognizes very well the way in which sophistry constantly pounds away at only one particular point while the point is constantly changed. Anxiety wants the actuality of sin removed, not entirely but to a certain degree, or more exactly it wants to a certain degree to have the actuality of sin continue but, be it noted, only to a certain degree. Therefore it is not even against a little flirting with quantitative attributes, yes, the more developed anxiety, the further it dares to pursue this flirtation. But as soon as the jest and diversion of quantitative attributes come to the brink of catching the individual in the qualitative leap, which lies in wait like the larva of the ant lion in the funnel formed in the loose sand, anxiety circumspectly withdraws. It then has a little point that must be saved and is without sin and the next instant another point. Consciousness of sin drafted profoundly and seriously in the diction of repentance is a great rarity. However, for my own as well as thought’s and the neighbor’s sake, I shall take good care not to put it as Schelling would probably have done. He speaks somewhere in the same breath of a genius for action and a musical, etc., genius. It is sometimes possible in this way, without knowing it, to annihilate everything with a single word of explanation. Unless every person participates essentially in the absolute, it is all over. In the religious sphere, genius must therefore not be spoken of as a special gift bestowed upon only a few, for here the gift is that of willing, and whoever does not will should at least be shown the respect of not being pitied.

Sin, ethically speaking, is no state. The state is always, on the contrary, the last psychological approximation to the next state. Anxiety is now always present as the possibility of the new state. In the first state described under (a), anxiety is more noticeable, whereas in (b) it vanishes ever more from sight. But anxiety is still outside such an individual, and from the standpoint of spirit it is greater than any other anxiety. In (a), the anxiety is about the actuality of sin, out of which it sophistically produces the possibility, whereas looked at ethically it is sinning. The movement of anxiety is here the opposite of that of the anxiety of innocence, where, psychologically speaking, out of the possibility of sin it produces the actuality, whereas viewed ethically sin arises through the qualitative leap. In (b), anxiety is about the further possibility of sin. If anxiety decreases here, we explain it at this point through the triumph of the consistency of sin.

(c) The posited sin is an unjustified actuality; it is actuality, and posited by the individual as actuality in repentance, but repentance does not become the individual’s freedom. In relation to sin, repentance is reduced to a possibility; in other words, repentance cannot cancel sin, it can only sorrow over it. Sin continues in its consistency, repentance follows it step by step, but always a moment too late. It forces itself to look at the horror, but like that mad Lear (O du zertrümmert Meisterstück der Schöpfung! [Oh thou ruined masterpiece of nature!]) it has lost the reins of government and retained only the power to grieve. Anxiety here is at its highest pitch. Repentance has lost its mind, and anxiety is potentiated to repentance. Sin’s consistency goes onward, it drags the individual along like a woman dragged by the hair by an executioner while she screams in despair. Anxiety is ahead, it comes upon the consistency of sin before its arrival, as one can feel in one’s bones that a storm is approaching. It comes closer; the individual trembles like a horse moaning as it halts at the place where it had once taken fright. Sin conquers. Anxiety throws itself despairingly into the arms of repentance. Repentance risks everything. It grasps sin’s consistency as the pain of punishment, perdition as the consistency of sin. It is lost, its judgment has been pronounced, its condemnation certain, and the extra sentence for aggravated injury is that the individual be dragged through life to the place of execution. In other words, repentance has become deranged.

Life provides occasion to observe what is suggested here. Such a state is seldom found in altogether corrupt natures, generally only among the more profound. For it takes considerable primitivity as well as a manic persistence of will not to fall under (a) or (b). No dialectic is capable of defeating the sophism that a deranged repentance manages at every moment to come up with. A repentance like that has a contriteness that in the dialectic and expression of passion is far more powerful than true repentance. (In another sense it is of course more impotent, yet, no doubt as anyone who has observed such a case has noticed, it is remarkable what persuasive talent and what eloquence such a repentance possesses for disarming all objections and convincing all who come close, only to despair of itself again when this, its diversion, is over.) Trying to stop this horror with words and phrases is wasted effort, and whoever contemplates doing so can always be sure that his sermonizing will be like the babble of children compared with the elemental eloquence at the service of such a one. The phenomenon can appear in connection as much with the human’s sensuous side (addiction to drink, to opium, or to debauchery, etc.) as with the more elevated (pride, vanity, wrath, hatred, defiance, subtlety, envy, etc.). The individual may repent of its wrath, and the profounder the individual, the profounder the repentance. But repentance cannot make the individual free. There the individual is mistaken. The occasion arrives, anxiety has already discovered it, every thought quivers, anxiety sucks the blood from the powers of repentance and shakes its head. It is as if wrath had already triumphed, the individual has already an uneasy feeling of the prostration of freedom that is reserved for the next moment. The moment comes. Wrath triumphs.

Whatever sin’s consistency, the fact that the phenomenon appears on a respectable scale is always the sign of a deeper nature. That it is seen fairly seldom in life, that is to say, that one has to be an observer to see it more often, is because it can be concealed and also often expelled insofar as one or another precautionary measure is used to abort this, the embryo of the highest life. You need only seek the advice of Tom, Dick, and Harry to become as most people are, and you will always be able to secure the judgment of a few respectable people that this is just what you are. The best proved way to escape spiritual trial is to become spiritless and the sooner the better. Everything, if only taken care of in time, takes care of itself. And as for spiritual trial, one can explain that there is no such thing, or that it can at most be considered a piquant poetical fiction. In days of old, the road to perfection was narrow and solitary, the journey down it always disturbed by aberrations, exposure to sin’s predatory attacks, and pursuit by the arrow of the past, which is as perilous as that of the Scythian hordes. Now one travels to perfection in good company on the railroad and has arrived before one knows it.

All that can truly disarm the sophism of repentance is faith, courage to believe that the state itself is a new sin, courage without anxiety to renounce anxiety, something of which only faith is capable; not that it therefore annihilates anxiety, but, eternally young itself, it extricates itself from anxiety’s moment of death. Only faith is capable of doing this, for only in faith is the synthesis eternally and in every instant possible.

It is not difficult to see that everything presented here belongs to psychology. Ethically, everything depends on getting the individual rightly positioned in relation to sin. Once there, the individual stands repentant in its sin. Looked at in terms of the idea, the individual has that very instant fallen into the hands of dogmatics. Repentance is the highest ethical contradiction, partly because by demanding ideality it has to content itself with accepting repentance, partly because repentance is dialectically ambiguous regarding what it is to cancel, an ambiguity that dogmatics cancels only in the Atonement, in which the category of hereditary sin becomes clear. Moreover repentance delays action, and action is precisely what ethics demands. Finally, repentance must become an object to itself, seeing that the moment of repentance becomes a deficit of action. It was therefore an authentically ethical exclamation, full of energy and courage, when the elder Fichte said there was no time to repent. In saying it, however, he did not bring repentance to its dialectical extreme, where, posited, it will nullify itself through new repentance, and where it then collapses.

What has been expounded in this section, as everywhere in this work, is what psychologically can be called freedom’s psychological attitudes toward sin, or sin’s psychological, approximating states. These do not presume to explain sin ethically.

Today one rarely hears talk of the demonic. The single narratives^* about it in the New Testament are usually put aside. Insofar as they seek to explain them, theologians usually get lost in observations on one or another unnatural sin, among which are also found examples of the bestial having so far gained the upper hand in a person as to declare itself in inarticulate animal noises, a bestial expression, and a brutish glance, whether it means that the animality has acquired a pronounced form in the person (the physiognomic expression—Lavater) or is seen just in glimpses like a disappearing express messenger, suggesting what dwells within, in the same way as in an instant shorter than the shortest instant the glance or gesture of the insane parodies, ridicules, and jeers at, the rational, self-possessed and clever man together with whom he stands and talks. What theologians say in this respect may be quite true, but it all depends on what the point is. The way in which the phenomenon is usually described makes it clear that what they are talking about is the bondage of sin, the state that I know no better way of describing than by recalling a game in which two persons are concealed under one cloak as though there were only one, and the one speaks while the other gesticulates in a way that is quite arbitrary in relation to what is said. For this is how the beast has taken on human form and now constantly jeers at him with his gesticulations and byplay. But the bondage of sin is not yet the demonic. Once sin is posited, and the individual continues in sin, there are two formations, one of which is described in the foregoing section. Unless one attends to this, the demonic cannot be identified. The individual is in sin, and his anxiety is about the evil. This formation, when seen from a higher standpoint, is in the good, for that is why it is anxiety about the evil. The other formation is the demonic. The individual is in the evil and is anxious about the good. The bondage of sin^* is an unfree relation to the evil, but the demonic is an unfree relation to the good.

The demonic therefore first comes clearly in sight only when it is touched by the good, which now comes to its boundary from outside. This is why it is noticeable that the demonic in the New Testament first appears with Christ’s arrival, and, whether the demon is a legion (cf. Matthew 8:27–34;^† Mark 5:1–20; Luke 8:26–39) or is dumb (cf. Luke 11:14), the phenomenon is the same, namely, anxiety about the good, for anxiety can just as well express itself in muteness as with a scream. The good, of course, signifies the restoration of freedom, redemption, salvation, or whatever one wants to call it.

In earlier times there has often been talk of the demonic. There is no point here in making or having made studies that would put one in a position to recite from or cite learned and abstruse books. It is easy to sketch the different views that are possible and have been topical at various times. This can be important, because the difference in these views can show the way toward a definition of the concept.

The demonic can be viewed from an aesthetic-metaphysical point of view. The phenomenon will then come under the heading of misfortune, fate, etc., and be viewed as analogous to congenital mental disorder, etc. This is to approach the phenomenon sympathetically, but just as wishing is the most paltry of all solo performances, so too, in the way the word is usually taken, is being sympathetic the most paltry of all social virtuosities and aptitudes. Far from standing the sufferer in good stead, sympathy is sooner just a way of protecting one’s own egotism. Not daring in a deeper sense to think about such things, one saves oneself through sympathy. It is only when the sympathetic person relates in his compassion to the sufferer in a way that he understands, in the strictest sense, that it is his own case that is in question, only when he knows how to identify himself with the sufferer in a way that, in struggling for an explanation, he is struggling for himself, renouncing all thoughtlessness, soft-heartedness, and cowardice, it is only then that the sympathy acquires meaning, and perhaps only makes sense when the sympathizer differs from the sufferer in suffering under a higher form. When sympathy relates in this way to the demonic, it will not be a matter of some few words of comfort or a pittance or a shrug of the shoulder; for someone who groans has something to groan about. If the demonic is a fate, then it can happen to anyone. There is no denying this, even if in our cowardly age everything possible is done by way of diversions and the brass band of loud enterprises to keep lonely thoughts at bay, just as in the American forests wild beasts are kept off with torches, shouting, and the beating of cymbals. This is why today people learn so little about the highest spiritual trials but all the more about those cringing conflicts between man and man, and between man and woman, that a refined society- and soirée-life brings with it. If true human sympathy is to have suffering as its guarantor and surety, then it must first become clear about to what extent it is fate and to what extent guilt. And this distinction must be drawn up with the troubled but also energetic passion of freedom, so that a person dares hold fast to it though the whole world collapses, though it might seem that, through his own firmness, he brought about irreparable harm.

The demonic has been viewed in ethically condemnatory terms. The frightful severity with which it has been pursued, identified, and punished is well known. In our time we shudder at these accounts, and we become sentimental and emotional at the thought that in our enlightened age we do not act in that way. That may well be so, but is sentimental sympathy all that more praiseworthy? Here it is not for me to judge or condemn that behavior, only to observe it. The very fact that ethically it was so severe shows that its sympathy was of a better quality. Identifying itself in thought with the phenomenon, it had no further explanation than that the phenomenon was guilt. It was therefore convinced that when all is said and done, the demoniac, according to his better possibility, should wish for all the cruelty and severity to be employed against him.^* Was it not, to take an example from a similar sphere, Augustine who recommended punishment, even the death penalty, for heretics? Was that because he lacked sympathy? Or was it not rather that his behavior differed from that of our own time because his sympathy had not made him cowardly, so that of himself he would have said: God grant that if it should come to that with me, there would be a Church that did not abandon me but would use all its power. In our day, however, people are, as Socrates somewhere says, afraid of letting themselves be cut and cauterized by the physician in order to be healed.

The demonic has been viewed in terms of medical treatment. And, it goes without saying, mit pulver und mit pillen [with powder and with pills] and then with enemas! The pharmacist and the doctor now got together. The patient was isolated so as not to put fear into others. In our brave time we dare not tell a patient he is about to die, we dare not call the pastor in case the patient should die of fright, and we dare not tell the patient that just recently someone died from the same illness. The patient was isolated, sympathy made inquiries after him, the physician promised to issue a report as soon as possible and a statistical survey so as to determine the average. And when you have an average, all is explained. The medical-treatment view regards the phenomenon as purely physical and somatic, and as physicians often do, in specie [in particular] in one of Hoffmann’s short stories, he takes a pinch of snuff and says: It is a critical case.

That three so differing views are possible shows the ambiguity of the phenomenon and indicates that it belongs in a way to all spheres: the somatic, the psychic, and the spiritual [pneumatisk]. This suggests that the demonic has a much larger compass than is commonly assumed, which can be explained by the fact that the human being is a synthesis of psyche and soma sustained by spirit, and a disorder in one therefore manifests itself in the others. But when one is first aware of the broad scope of the demonic, it will perhaps become clear that many even of those who wish to deal with this phenomenon come themselves under its category, and that there are traces of it in every person as surely as every person is a sinner.

But because the demonic has in the course of time meant all manner of things, and has come in the end to mean anything you please, the best course is to define it a little. For this, attention should be paid to the place we have already assigned it. In innocence there can be no question of the demonic. On the other hand, all fantasies of entering into a pact with evil, etc., in which a person becomes totally evil, must be abandoned. It was from this that the contradiction in that strict behavior of earlier times arose. The assumption [of total evil] was made and yet one still wanted to punish. The punishment itself was not just self-defense, it was also intended to save (either through a milder punishment for the one involved or by way of capital punishment for others). But then if there could be talk of salvation, the individual was not entirely in the grip of evil, while if the individual were entirely in the grip of evil, then punishment would be a contradiction. If the question should arise here as to how far the demonic is a problem for psychology, I would have to reply, the demonic is a state. Out of this state, the particular sinful act can constantly break forth. But the state is a possibility, although again, of course, in relation to innocence it is an actuality posited through the qualitative leap.

The demonic is anxiety about the good. In innocence, freedom was not posited as freedom; its possibility in the individual was anxiety. In the demonic the relation is reversed. Freedom is posited as unfreedom, because freedom is lost. Here again freedom’s possibility is anxiety. The difference is absolute, because freedom’s possibility appears here in relation to unfreedom, which is the very opposite of innocence, that being an attribute directed toward freedom.

The demonic is unfreedom that wants to close itself off. This is and remains, however, an impossibility; it retains always a relation, and even when this appears to have altogether disappeared, it is still there and anxiety immediately manifests itself in the instant of contact (see what is said above of the accounts in the New Testament).

The demonic is the reserved and the involuntarily disclosed. The two definitions indicate the same thing, as also they should, because the reserved is precisely the mute, and if the latter has to express itself, it must do so against its will, seeing that the freedom that lies in unfreedom’s ground, by entering into communication with freedom from the outside, revolts and now betrays unfreedom in a way that means that it is the individual that betrays itself against its will in anxiety. Being reserved must therefore be taken in a very distinct sense, for as commonly used, the term may signify the greatest freedom. Brutus, Henry V of England as Prince of Wales, etc., were confirmed in the isolation of their reserve in this sense until such time as it became evident that their reserve was a pact with the good. A reserve of this kind was therefore identical with an expansiveness, and never was there a reserved individuality more beautiful and noble in its expansiveness than one whose isolation is in the womb of a great idea. For freedom is precisely the expansive. As against this, what I mean here is that reserve κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν [in an eminent sense] can be used about unfreedom. Usually a more metaphysical expression is used for evil, that it is denial. Its ethical expression, when the effect is observed in the individual, is precisely this reserve. The demonic does not reserve something to itself but reserves itself, and the profundity of human existence [Tilværelse] rests precisely in this, that unfreedom takes itself captive. Freedom is always in communication (even taking the religious meaning of the word into consideration does no harm); unfreedom withdraws ever more in its reserve and will not communicate. This can be seen in all spheres. It appears in the hypochondriac, the fantast; it appears in the greatest passions when in a profound misunderstanding these bring on the silent treatment.^* When freedom now touches reserve, it becomes anxious. Of a person there is in common speech a very suggestive saying: “He won’t come out with it.” Reserve is precisely muteness. Language, the word, is precisely what saves, saves from the empty abstraction of reserve. Let x signify the demonic, the relation of freedom to it something outside; the law for the disclosure of the demonic is that it “comes out with it” against its will. For language implies communication. Therefore a demoniac in the New Testament says to Christ, when he approaches: τί ἔμοὶ και σοὶ [What have I to do with you], and goes on to suggest that Christ has come to destroy him (anxiety about the good).^† Or a demoniac implores Christ to go another way. (When anxiety is about evil, see §1, the individual then resorts to salvation.)

Life is rich in examples of this in every possible sphere and to all possible degrees. A hardened criminal will not confess (here the demonic lies in his not wanting to communicate with the good by suffering the punishment). There is a procedure, perhaps not so often employed, that can be applied in such cases. It is silence and the power of the eye. If an interrogator has the physical endurance and spiritual elasticity to keep going without moving a muscle for as much as sixteen hours, he will succeed and the confession will burst out involuntarily. No person with a bad conscience can endure silence. Placed in solitary confinement he becomes apathetic, but this silence in the presence of the judge, with the clerks waiting to inscribe everything in the protocol, is itself the most acute and searching question, the most frightful torture and yet permitted although not at all as easy to accomplish as might be supposed. The only thing that can get reserve to speak is either a higher demon (for every devil has his day) or the good that can keep absolutely silent. And should any ingenious attempt be made to embarrass this examination-by-silence, it is the interrogator himself who will be brought to shame, and in the end it will be he that becomes afraid of himself and has to break the silence. In the face of a subordinate demon and subordinate human natures, whose consciousness of God is not well developed, reserve triumphs unconditionally, because the former cannot hold out and the latter are in all innocence accustomed to live from hand to mouth and with their hearts on the tips of their tongues. It is incredible what power the reserved can wield over such people, how these beg at last and plead for just a word to break the silence; but it is also shocking to tread the weak underfoot in this manner. One might think that such things occur only among princes and Jesuits, and that to get a clear idea of this one must think of Domitian, Cromwell, Alba, or a general of the Jesuit order, whose names have become almost common nouns for this. Not at all. It occurs far more frequently. However, one should be cautious in judging the phenomenon, for although as a phenomenon it is the same, the reason for it may be quite the opposite; an individuality who exercises reserve’s despotism and torture might himself wish to speak, and might himself wait for a higher demon who could bring the revelation forth. However, a tormenting reserve may also relate selfishly to its reserve. On this subject I could write a whole book, even though I have not been, as is the custom and the established convention among the observers of our day, in Paris and London, as if one could acquire in this way such great learning other than chatter and the wisdom of traveling salesmen. If only one pays attention to oneself, one has as an observer enough with five men, five women, and ten children for the discovery of all possible states of the human soul. What I would have to say might also be of some importance especially for everyone who deals with children or has any relation to them. It is infinitely important that the child be lifted up through a presentation of exalted reserve and rescued from the misunderstood kind. Externally, it is easy to see when the moment arrives when one dares to let the child go alone; in a spiritual respect it is not so easy. In a spiritual respect, the exercise is very difficult and one cannot escape taking it upon oneself by employing a nursemaid or buying a walking chair. The art is to be constantly present and yet not present, so that the child is allowed to develop itself, while at the same time keeping a clear overview. The art is, to the very highest degree and on the greatest possible scale, to leave the child to itself and to express this apparent abandonment in a way that one keeps up with everything without being noticed. Time for this can well be found, even if you are a royal functionary, if only one will. Everything can be done if one will. And the father or the educator who has done everything else for the one to whom care is entrusted but has not prevented the child from becoming reserved has always incurred a great liability.

The demonic is the reserved, the demonic is anxiety about the good. Let the reserve be x and its content x, be it the most terrible and the most trivial, the most awful thing whose presence in life not many may dream of, but also the trifles to which no one pays attention.^* What then does the good mean as x? It means disclosure.^† Disclosure may in turn mean the highest (redemption in an eminent sense) as well as the least significant (an accidental remark). This must not distract us, for the category remains the same, the phenomena having this in common, that they are demonic even if the difference is otherwise dizzying. Disclosure here is the good, for disclosure is the first expression of salvation. That is why we have an old saying that if only one dare say the word, the sorcerer’s spell is broken, and that is why the somnambulist wakes up when one mentions his name.

The collisions of reserve regarding disclosure can again be infinitely varied, with innumerable nuances, because the exuberant growth of the spiritual life is not inferior to that of nature, and the varieties of the spiritual states are more innumerable than those of the flowers. Reserve may wish for disclosure, wish that this be brought about from the outside, that it might happen to it. (This is a misunderstanding, for it is a womanly relation to the freedom posited in disclosure, and to the freedom that posits disclosure; unfreedom may still therefore remain even if the reserved person’s state is one of greater happiness.) Reserve may will disclosure to a degree but still retain a little residue of itself in order to begin the reserve all over again. (This is the case with subordinate spirits, who can do nothing en gros [wholesale].) It can will disclosure but incognito. (This is reserve’s subtle contradiction, examples of which are found in the lives of poets.) Disclosure may already have triumphed, but in the same instant reserve risks the last attempt and is ingenious enough to transform the disclosure itself into a mystification, and reserve has triumphed.^*

However I dare not continue further, for how could I ever finish giving names even algebraically, let alone were I to give descriptions, were I to break reserve’s silence and let its monologues become audible, for the monologue is precisely its speech, and that is why in describing a reserved person we say that he talks to himself. So here I shall try only to give “allem einen Sinn, aber keine Zunge [all an understanding but no tongue],” as the reserved Hamlet admonishes his two friends.

I shall however hint at a collision in which the contradiction is as terrible as reserve itself. What the reserved person in his reserve conceals can be so terrible that he dare not utter it, not even to himself, because it is as though in the very utterance he committed a new sin, or as if it tempted him again. For this phenomenon to occur, the individual must be a rare mixture of purity and impurity. That is why it is most likely to occur when, having done something horrific, the individual has lost self-control. Someone in a drunken state may similarly have done what he only dimly recalls, yet know that it was so wild that he can scarcely recognize himself. The same may also occur with someone who was once insane and retains a memory of the former state. What decides whether the phenomenon is demonic is the individual’s attitude toward disclosure, whether the individual will interpenetrate that fact with freedom, accept it in freedom. Once he will not do this, the phenomenon is demonic. This must be kept clearly in mind, for even the person who will do it is essentially demonic. He has, that is to say, two wills, one subordinate, impotent, that wills revelation and a stronger that wills reserve, but the fact that this will is the stronger indicates that essentially he is demonic.

Reserve is involuntary disclosure. The weaker the individuality in its primitivity, or the more the elasticity of freedom is eaten away in the service of reserve, the more likely it is that the secret will finally break out. The slightest touch, a passing glance, etc., is enough for that horrific or—depending on the content of the reserve—comic ventriloquism to make its start. The ventriloquism itself may be plainly declarative or indirect, as when some insane person betrays his insanity by pointing to another person and says: I can’t stand him, he must be mad. The disclosure may declare itself in words, as when the unhappy man ends by thrusting his hidden secret upon everyone. It may declare itself in facial expression, a glance, because there are looks in which a person involuntarily reveals what is hidden. There is an accusing glance that reveals what one is almost afraid to understand, a contrite, imploring glance that hardly encourages curiosity to peer into the involuntary telegraphy. As for reserve’s content, all of this may in turn be quite comic, as when ridiculous things, frivolities, vanities, puerilities, expressions of petty envy, small medical obsessions, etc., reveal themselves in this way in involuntary anxiety.

The demonic is the sudden. The sudden is a new expression of reserve from another side. The demonic is defined as reserve when its content is reflected upon; reflection in terms of time defines it as the sudden. Reserve was the effect of the self-relation of denial in the individuality. Reserve shuts itself off ever more from communication. But communication is in turn the expression of continuity, and the negation of continuity is the sudden. One would think that reserve had an exceptional continuity; yet the very opposite is the case, although when compared with the vapid, soft-hearted dissipation of oneself that is constantly merging with the impression, it does have some appearance of continuity. Reserve’s continuity can best be compared with the dizziness a spinning top can be imagined having when constantly revolving on its own tip. Where the reserve does not drive the individuality into total insanity, which is a sorrowful perpetuum mobile of sameness, the individuality will still keep up a certain continuity with the rest of human life. To this continuity, the pseudo-continuity of the reserve will make itself known precisely as the sudden. In one instant it is there, in the next it is gone, and no sooner is it gone than it is there again, whole and complete. It cannot be incorporated or worked into any continuity, but whatever expresses itself in this way is precisely the sudden.

If the demonic were something somatic, it would never be the sudden. When the fever or insanity, etc., keeps recurring, one does eventually come upon a law, and this law nullifies the sudden to a certain degree. But the sudden knows no law. It does not belong among natural phenomena; it is a psychic phenomenon, is unfreedom’s utterance.

The sudden is, like the demonic, anxiety about the good. The good signifies continuity, since salvation’s first expression is continuity. Thus, while the life of an individuality goes on in some degree of continuity with the rest of life, reserve maintains itself in the person as a continuity’s abracadabra that communicates only with itself and therefore is always as the sudden.

Regarding reserve’s content, the sudden may signify the terrible, but the effect of the sudden on the observer can also be comical. In this respect, every individuality has a little of this sudden, just as every individuality has something of a fixed idea.

I shall not pursue this further but, just to uphold my category I will recall to mind the fact that the sudden is always founded in anxiety about the good, because there is something that freedom will not permeate. Among the formations that lie in anxiety about evil, it will be weakness that corresponds to the sudden.

If one wants to clarify in some other way how the demonic is the sudden, then the question of how the demonic can best be presented may be considered in a purely aesthetical way. In a presentation of Mephistopheles, it is perfectly all right to give him some lines if, instead of being grasped in his character, he is to be used as an effective force in the dramatic action. But then Mephistopheles will not be really represented himself but dissolved into an evil, witty, intriguing mind. This however is a dispersion, whereas a folk legend has already seen it rightly. It tells that the devil sat for 3,000 years speculating on how to destroy man. He found out at last how. The emphasis here is on the 3,000 years, and the idea this elicits is precisely that of the demoniac’s brooding reserve. If one wants not to disperse Mephistopheles in the way suggested, another form of representation may be chosen. Here it will appear that Mephistopheles is essentially mime.^* Words of the most appalling kind sounding from the abyss of evil would be unable to produce an effect like that of the suddenness of the leap that lies in the scope of mime. Even if the words were terrible, even though it were a Shakespeare, a Byron, or a Shelley who broke the silence, the word always retains its redeeming power, because all despair and all the horror of evil expressed in one word are not as awful as silence. Mimic can express the sudden yet without the miming itself therefore being the sudden. The ballet master Bournonville deserves great credit in this respect for his representation of Mephistopheles. The horror that seizes one upon seeing Mephistopheles leap in through the window and remain stationary in the posture of the leap! This start, given by the leap, reminiscent of the bird of prey and the leap of the wild beast, doubly terrifying because it usually explodes from a quite stationary position, has an infinite effect. For this reason Mephistopheles must walk about as little as possible, for walking is itself a kind of transition to the leap, containing a hinted possibility of the leap. Mephistopheles’s first appearance in the ballet Faust is therefore not a coup de théatre [cheap effect] but a very profound thought. The words and the speaking, no matter how short when regarded in abstracto, have always a certain continuity simply through being heard in time. But the sudden is a complete abstraction from continuity, from the past and from the future. So it is with Mephistopheles. We have yet to see him, and then there he stands, large as life, all of a piece, and the swiftness cannot be described more graphically than by saying that he stands there in a leap. If the leap goes over into a walk the effect is weakened. Represented in this way, Mephistopheles’s entrance has the effect of the demonic that comes more suddenly than a thief in the night,^* for the thief’s approach is thought of as being stealthy. But Mephistopheles reveals his essence as well, which as the demonic is precisely the sudden. The demonic is thus the sudden in the forward movement, and this too is how it arises in the human being, this is how the human being itself is insofar as it is demonic, whether the demonic has possessed him wholly or there is only an infinitesimally small part of it in him. The demonic is always thus, and it is thus that unfreedom becomes anxious, and thus that its anxiety moves. Hence the tendency of the demonic toward mime, not in the sense of the beautiful but in the sense of the sudden, the abrupt, something that life often gives occasion to observe.

The demonic is the contentless, the tedious.

Having, in connection with the sudden, called attention to the aesthetic problem of how to represent the demonic, I shall now, in order to throw light on what has been said, take up the same question once more. As soon as you put words into the demoniac’s mouth and want to have him portrayed, the artist whose task it is to solve a problem of this kind will be clear about the categories. He knows that the demonic is essentially mimical: the sudden, however, is beyond his reach since it interferes with the lines. So he won’t cheat, as if to blurt out the words, etc., would produce something like the true effect. So he correctly chooses the very opposite, the boring. The continuity answering to the sudden is what might be called extinction. Boredom, extinction, is a continuity in nothingness. The number in that legend can now be understood in a rather different way. The 3,000 years are not stressed to highlight the sudden; instead, the enormous span of time evokes the notion of the dreadful emptiness and vacuity of evil. Freedom is calm in continuity. Its opposite is the sudden, but also the calm that comes to mind when we see someone who looks as though long since dead and buried. An artist who grasps this will also see that, in discovering how to represent the demonic, he has found at the same time a way to express the comic. The comic effect can be produced in exactly the same way; for when all ethical attributes of evil are excluded, and only metaphysical attributes of emptiness are used, the result is the trivial, which easily lends itself to educing a comic effect.^*

The contentless, the boring, signify again the reserved. The reserved was a term that in connection with the sudden reflected on the essence. In now bringing in the contentless and the boring as an additional term, this reflects upon the essence and the reserved on the form corresponding to the essence. This completes the whole conceptual definition, since the form of contentlessness is precisely reserve. One must always bear in mind that, in my terminology, one cannot be reserved in God or in the good, since this kind of reservation signifies the greatest expansion. The more definitely conscience is developed in a person, then the more expanded he is, even though he otherwise closes himself off from the whole world.

If I were now to call to mind the terminologies of the most recent philosophy, I might say that the demonic is the negative and is nothing, just as the elf maid, who is hollow from behind. However I prefer not to do this, because this terminology has become so obliging and pliable, in and through the company it keeps, that it can mean anything you please. The negative, if I were to use that word, would signify the form of nothing, just as the contentless corresponds to reserve. But the negative suffers the flaw of being more outwardly oriented, defining the relation to something else which is negated, while, as a term, the reserved defines the state itself.

If one wants to take the negative in that way, I have no objection to its use as a designation of the demonic, provided that the negative can otherwise put out of its head all the vagaries that the most recent philosophy has put into it. The negative has become by degrees a vaudeville figure, and that word always makes me smile, just as a person smiles when in real life or, for example, in the songs of Bellman, he comes across one of those amusing characters who was first a trumpeter, later a minor customhouse officer, then an innkeeper, and then again a mailman. Irony has contrived in this way to be explained as the negative. First to hit on this explanation was Hegel, who oddly enough was himself no great judge of irony. That it was Socrates who first introduced irony into the world and gave the child a name, that his irony was precisely the reserve which began with his shutting himself off from others, shutting himself in with himself, so as to be expanded in the divine, and who also began by shutting his door and making fools of those outside in order to talk in secret,^* this no one troubles themselves with. In the event of some or other accidental phenomenon someone brings up the word, and so it is irony. Then come the copycats who, in spite of their overview of world history, which unfortunately lacks all contemplation, know as much about the concepts as that noble youth knew about raisins, who, when asked in the test for his grocer’s license where raisins come from, replied: We get ours from the professor on Tvergaden [Cross Street].

We return now to the definition of the demonic as anxiety about the good. If, on the one hand, unfreedom could close itself off completely and hypostatize itself but did not, on the other hand, constantly will to do so^† (in this lies the contradiction that unfreedom wills something when in fact it has lost its will), the demonic would not be anxious about the good. Therefore anxiety manifests itself most clearly in the moment of contact. Whether the demonic in the single individuality signifies the terrible, or whether the demonic is present only like a spot on the sun, or like the little white dot in the corn on one’s foot, the totality of the demonic and the partly demonic have the same property, and the tiniest little part of the demonic is anxiety about the good in just the same sense as that which is totally enveloped by it. The bondage of sin is of course also unfreedom, but as explained above, its direction is another and its anxiety is about evil. Unless one insists on this, nothing can be explained. Unfreedom, the demonic, is therefore a state. That is how psychology considers it. Ethics on the other hand sees how, out of this state, the new sin constantly emerges, for only the good is the unity of state and movement.

Freedom may be lost, however, in different ways, with a corresponding difference in the demonic. This difference I shall now consider under the following headings: freedom lost somatopsychically, freedom lost spiritually [pneumatisk]. The reader must be already familiar from the foregoing with the fact that I take the concept of the demonic in a wide sense, though not, be it noted, more widely than the concept itself reaches. There is little point in making the demonic into a spook one first shudders at but afterward ignores just because many centuries have gone since it was found in the world. This assumption is a great stupidity; for it has perhaps never been as widespread as in our times, only that nowadays it manifests itself particularly in the intellectual spheres.

It is not my intention here to flaunt a high-flown philosophical discussion on the relation between soul and body, in what sense the soul itself produces its body (whether understood in the Greek or the German way), or in what sense the soul itself by an act of corporization, to recall an expression of Schelling’s, posits its body. None of that is needed here; for my own purposes I can express myself as best I can by saying that the body is the soul’s organ, and thus in turn that of spirit. Once this ministering relationship ceases, once the body revolts, and once freedom conspires with the body against itself, unfreedom is present as the demonic. Should anyone not yet have a clear grasp of the difference between what I have expounded in this section and what was developed in the former, I state it here again. Once freedom itself goes over to the side of the rebels, the anxiety of revolution will indeed be present, but as anxiety about the good, not anxiety about the evil.

It will easily be seen what multiplicity of innumerable nuances the demonic includes in this sphere, some of which are so imperceptible that they appear only to microscopic observation, and some so dialectical that one must employ one’s category with great flexibility in order to see that the nuances belong under it. A hypersensibility and a hyperirritability, neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria, etc., all of these are or could be nuances of it. This makes it so difficult to talk about these things in abstracto, since the talk itself becomes algebraic. But more than this I cannot do here.

The furthest extreme in this sphere is, and what is commonly called, bestial perdition. In this state, the demonic manifests itself by way of saying, as that demoniac in the New Testament did with regard to salvation: τί ἔμοὶ και σοὶ [What have I to do with you]? Therefore it shuns every contact, whether this actually threatens by wanting to help it to freedom or even just comes in contact quite by accident. That too is enough, for anxiety is extraordinarily swift. It is therefore quite common to hear a line from a demoniac of this kind that contains all the horror of this state: Leave me alone in my wretchedness; or to hear one such say in referring to some particular moment of time in his past life: I could presumably have been saved then—the most dreadful reply imaginable. Neither punishment nor thunderous tirades will make him anxious but, on the contrary, every word that places itself in relation to the freedom that has been scuttled in unfreedom. There is also another way in which anxiety expresses itself in this phenomenon: Among such demoniacs one finds a solidarity in which they cling to one another so inseparably and anxiously that no friendship has an inwardness to compare with it. The French physician Duchatelet provides examples of it in his work. And this sociability of anxiety will manifest itself everywhere in this sphere. The sociability contains by itself an assurance that the demonic is present, for to any degree in which the analogous state that expresses the bondage of sin is to be found, the sociability will not be manifest, because then the anxiety is about the evil.

I do not wish to pursue this further. Here the main thing for me is simply to have my schema in order.

(a) General remarks. This form of the demonic is very widespread and we meet here the most diverse phenomena. The demonic is naturally not a question of the variety of the intellectual content but of the relation of freedom to the given content,^* and to the possible content regarding intellectuality, seeing that the demonic can express itself as a laziness that postpones thinking, as curiosity that never becomes more than that, as dishonest self-deception, as effeminate weakness that constantly turns to others, or as superior negligence, as mindless busyness, etc.

Looked at intellectually, the content of freedom is truth, and truth makes man free.^† But that is exactly why truth works for freedom in a way in which it constantly produces truth. I am not, of course, thinking here of the brilliant thought of the most recent philosophy, which maintains that thought’s necessity is also its freedom, and which therefore, when speaking of the freedom of thought, speaks only of the immanent movement of eternal thought. Such brilliance can serve only to confuse and pervert communication between people. What I am speaking about, on the contrary, is very plain and simple, namely, that truth for the particular individual is truth only insofar as the individual itself produces it in action. If truth is for the individual in any other way, or is prevented from being thus by the individual itself, we have a phenomenon of the demonic. Truth has always had many loud-voiced advocates, but the question is whether a person will in the deepest sense acknowledge the truth, will allow it to permeate his whole being, will accept all its consequences, and not, in an emergency, have a loophole for himself and a Judas kiss for the consequence.^*

There has been enough talk recently about truth; it is high time now to vindicate certitude and inwardness, not in the abstract sense in which Fichte uses the word, but in an altogether concrete way.

Certitude and inwardness, which can only be reached by and exist in action, decide whether or not the individual is demonic. One only keeps hold of the category and everything gives way, and it becomes clear that, for example, arbitrariness, unbelief, mockery of religion, etc., do not, as is commonly believed, lack content but lack certitude, in exactly the same sense as superstition, servility, and sanctimoniousness. The negative phenomena lack certitude precisely because they are in anxiety about the content.

I have no desire to speak in big words about the age as a whole, but anyone who has observed the present generation could hardly deny that its incongruousness, and the reason for its anxiety and unrest, is this, namely, that in one direction truth increases in scope, in quantity, partly also in abstract clarity, while in the opposite direction certitude is in constant decline. What extraordinary metaphysical and logical efforts have been put into producing a new, an exhaustive, and an absolutely correct and summative proof of the immortality of the soul; and strangely enough, while this happens, certitude declines. The thought of immortality possesses a power, a pith in its consequences, a responsibility in its acceptance, which may perhaps transform the whole of life in a way that brings fear. And so one saves and soothes one’s soul by straining one’s mind to produce a new proof. What is such a proof but a “good work” in a purely Catholic sense? Every such individuality (to stay with the example) who knows how to produce evidence of the soul’s immortality, but is not himself convinced, will always be anxious about every phenomenon whose effect on him is to force him to a further understanding of what it means to say that a person is immortal. It will disturb him. It will make an unpleasant impression on him when a perfectly simple person talks quite simply of immortality.

In the opposite direction there may be a lack of inwardness. An adherent of the most rigid orthodoxy may be demonic. He knows it all. He bows his head before the holy.^* For him the truth is the aggregate of ceremonies. He talks of meeting before the throne of God^† and knows how many times one is to bow. He knows everything, but like someone who can prove a mathematical proposition using the letters ABC, though not when they are DEF. So he becomes anxious whenever he hears something that is not the same to the letter. And yet, how much he resembles a modern speculator who has made out a new proof for the immortality of the soul and then, in peril of his life, was unable to produce the proof because he did not have his notebooks with him. And what is it that both of them lack? It is certitude.

Superstition and unbelief are both forms of unfreedom. In superstition, objectivity is conceded a power—like that of Medusa’s head—to petrify subjectivity and unfreedom will not have the spell broken. The highest, seemingly freest, expression of unbelief is mockery. But the very thing that mockery lacks is certitude, and that is why it mocks. Yet how many a mocker’s existence, if only we could look into it, would bring to mind the anxiety in which the demonic calls out: τὶ ἔμοί και σοὶ [What have I to do with you]? It is therefore a matter of curiosity that perhaps few are as vain and touchy about the moment’s applause as the mocker.

With what zealous industry, with what sacrifice of time, diligence, and writing materials the speculators in our time have worked at producing a complete proof of God’s existence [Tilværelse]. Yet as much as the excellence of the proof increases, certitude seems correspondingly to decline. The thought of God’s existence has, when posited as such for the individual’s freedom, an omnipresence that for the prudish has, though they may have no thought of doing anything evil, something embarrassing about it. And it truly requires inwardness to live in a beautiful and intimate companionship with this conception, a much greater feat than that of being a model husband. How unpleasantly affected such an individuality may be on hearing this quite simpleminded and plain talk of there being a God; demonstrating God’s existence is something with which one occupies oneself only occasionally, learnedly and metaphysically. But the thought of God will obtrude on every occasion. What is it that such an individuality lacks? Inwardness.

Inwardness may also be lacking in the opposite direction. The so-called holy are often the objects of the world’s ridicule. They themselves explain this by saying that the world is evil. But that is not entirely true. If such a “holy” one is in an unfree relation to his holiness, that is, if he lacks inwardness, then he is, from a purely aesthetic point of view, simply comical. The world is in a way justified in laughing at him. If a bowlegged man wants to act as a dancing master but is unable to execute a single step, then he is comical. Similarly in the religious sphere. One may hear such a holy person as it were counting the beats to himself, just like someone who cannot dance but nevertheless knows enough to beat time though never lucky enough to get in step. Thus the “holy” one knows that the religious is absolutely commensurable, that it is not something belonging only to certain occasions and moments but something one can always have with one. But when he is on the point of making it commensurable, he is not free, and one notices that he is softly beating time to himself and that, in spite of everything, he puts a step wrong and makes a mess of his heavenward glance and folded hands, etc. That is why such an individuality is anxious to such a degree about everyone who is not trained in this way that, to give himself strength, he has to seize upon these grand observations about the world hating the pious.^*

Certitude and inwardness, then, are indeed subjectivity, but not in an entirely abstract sense. It is altogether the misfortune of the newest knowledge that everything has become so terribly grand. Abstract subjectivity is just as uncertain and lacks inwardness to the same degree as abstract objectivity. This cannot be seen when one speaks about it in abstracto, and it will be correct to say that abstract subjectivity lacks content. When spoken about in concreto it is clearly evident, for what the individuality that wants to make itself into an abstraction lacks is exactly inwardness, just like the individuality that makes itself into a mere master of ceremonies.

(b) Schema for the exclusion or absence of inwardness. The absence of inwardness is always attributed in reflection, and every form will therefore be a double form. Since people are accustomed to talking altogether abstractly about spirit’s properties, perhaps they tend less to see this. Immediacy is usually posited in opposition to the reflection (inwardness), and then to the synthesis (or substantiality, subjectivity, identity, in whatever this identity is then said to consist: reason, idea, spirit). But in the sphere of actuality this is not how it is. There, immediacy is also the immediacy of inwardness. The absence of inwardness lies for this reason first of all in the reflection.

Every form of the absence of inwardness is therefore either activity-passivity or passivity-activity, and whether the one or the other, it rests in the self-reflection. The form itself runs through a considerable series of nuances according to the degree to which inwardness becomes more concrete. There is an old saying that understanding and to understand are two things, and so they are. Inwardness is an understanding, but in concreto it is a matter of how to understand this understanding. To understand a speech is one thing, understanding what is being pointed out to you is something else; to understand what you yourself are saying is one thing, understanding yourself in the saying is another. The more concrete the content of consciousness, the more concrete becomes the understanding, and as soon as it is absent to consciousness we have a case of unfreedom that wants to shut itself off from freedom. Thus, if we take a more concrete religious consciousness, which for that reason contains at the same time a historical factor, the understanding must stand in relation to this factor. We have an example here of the two analogous forms of the demonic in this respect. When a man of rigid orthodoxy applies all his diligence and learning to proving that every word in the New Testament derives from the respective apostle, inwardness will disappear little by little, and he comes in the end to understand something quite other than what he wanted to understand. When a freethinker applies all his acumen to proving that the New Testament was not written until the second century, it is precisely inwardness he is afraid of, and for that reason he has to have the New Testament put in the same class with other books.^* The most concrete content that consciousness can have is consciousness of itself, of the individual itself, not pure self-consciousness, but the self-consciousness that is so concrete that no author, not even one with the richest vocabulary, has ever been able to describe a single such self-consciousness, although every single human being is such a one. This self-consciousness is not contemplation, since anyone believing this finds that he has not understood himself on seeing that he is at the same time coming into being [i Vorden] and so cannot be something concluded for contemplation. This self-consciousness is therefore action, and this action in turn inwardness, and whenever inwardness does not correspond to this consciousness, there is a form of the demonic just as soon as the absence of inwardness expresses itself as anxiety about its acquisition.

If the absence of inwardness were brought about mechanically, all consideration of it would then be wasted effort. But neither is this the case, for in every appearance of the absence of inwardness there is an activity, even though this begins through a passivity. The phenomena that begin with activity are more conspicuous and one therefore grasps them more easily, forgetting then that in this activity a passivity again appears and never taking into account this contrasting phenomenon when talking about the demonic.

I shall now go through a few examples to indicate the correctness of the schema.

Unbelief–Superstition. These correspond to each other in every way; they both lack inwardness, but unbelief is passive through an activity, and superstition is active through a passivity. The one is, in a sense, the more masculine formation, the other the more feminine; the content of both is self-reflection. Essentially they are entirely identical. Unbelief and superstition are both anxiety about faith, but unbelief begins in the activity of unfreedom and superstition in the passivity of unfreedom. Usually it is only the passivity of superstition that is observed, and therefore it appears as less distinctive or more excusable, depending upon whether aesthetic-ethical or ethical categories are applied. There is a weakness in superstition that is engaging, but there must always be enough activity in it to keep its passivity going. Superstition is unbelieving about itself, unbelief is superstitious about itself. The content of both is self-reflection. The laziness, cowardice, and pusillanimity of superstition find it better to remain in self-reflection than to give it up. The defiance, pride, and arrogance of unbelief find it more daring to remain in self-reflection than to give it up. The most refined form of such self-reflection is always the one that becomes interesting to itself by wishing itself out of this state while remaining self-contentedly within it.

Hypocrisy–Offense. These correspond to each other. Hypocrisy begins through an activity, offense through a passivity. Generally, offense is judged more mildly, but if the individual remains in it there must be just enough activity for it to sustain the suffering of offense and not want to give it up. There is a receptivity in offense (for a tree or a stone is not offended) that is also taken into account in the nullifying of the offense. The passivity of offense finds it more pleasurable, on the other hand, just to sit and continue letting the consequence of the offense mount up as it were at compound interest. Hypocrisy is therefore offense at itself and offense hypocrisy toward itself. Both lack inwardness and dare not come to themselves. The reason why hypocrisy ends by being hypocritical toward itself is that the hypocrite is offended at himself or is an offense to himself. The reason why all offense, unless removed, ends in hypocrisy toward others is that the offended person, through the deep-seated activity by which he remains in offense, has turned that receptivity into something else and must therefore now be hypocritical toward others. It has also been the case in life that an offended individuality finally used this offense as a fig leaf^* to cover what might otherwise have required hypocritical attire.

Pride–Cowardice. Pride begins through an activity, cowardice through a passivity; in all other respects they are identical, because in cowardice there is just enough activity to maintain anxiety about the good. Pride is a deep-seated cowardice, for it is cowardly enough not to be willing to understand what pride truly is. Once this understanding is forced upon it, it is cowardly, disintegrates with a bang and bursts like a bubble. Cowardice is a deep-seated pride, for it is cowardly enough not to be willing to understand even the misunderstood pride’s demands, and shows its pride precisely by hanging back in this way, as well as by bringing into account the fact of never having suffered a defeat, and is therefore proud of pride’s negative expression, namely, that it has never suffered any loss. The case has also occurred in life of a very proud individuality being cowardly to the point of never risking anything, cowardly enough to be as insignificant as possible, precisely in order to save its own pride. If an active-proud and a passive-proud individuality are brought together, precisely in the moment when the former fell there would be an opportunity to be convinced of how proud the cowardly one really was.^*

(c) What are certitude and inwardness? Giving a definition of inwardness is no doubt hard. But for the time being I shall say that it is earnestness. This is a word that everyone understands, but strangely enough, few words have been less frequently subject to discussion. When Macbeth murdered the king, he exclaimed:

Von jetzt giebt es nicht Ernstes mehr im Leben:

Alles ist Tand, gestorben Ruhm und Gnade!

Der Lebenswein ist ausgeschenkt.

[From this instant / There’s nothing serious in mortality; / All is but toys; renown and grace is dead: / The wine of life is drawn.]

Certainly Macbeth was a murderer. The words in his mouth were therefore a dreadful and shocking truth. Yet every individual who has lost inwardness can also say: “der Lebenswein ist ausgeschenkt,” and also for that matter, “jetzt giebt es nichts Ernstes mehr im Leben, Alles ist Tand,” for inwardness is just that fountain that gushes up to eternal life,^* and what issues from this fountain is precisely earnestness. When the preacher says in Ecclesiastes that “all is vanity,”^† earnestness is exactly what he has in mind. When, on the other hand, after earnestness is lost, it is said that all is vanity, then this is but an active-passive expression for the same (the defiance of melancholy), or a passive-active expression (the defiance of frivolity and witticism), and then there is either occasion to weep or to laugh,^‡ but earnestness is lost.

So far as I know, there is no single definition of earnestness. It would please me if there were none, not because I love the fluency and confluence of modern thinking that has abolished the definition, but because with regard to existential concepts it always betrays greater discretion to abstain from definitions, seeing that one is hardly inclined to grasp in the form of definition the essential in what must be understood in another way, what one has oneself understood in another way, has loved in an entirely different way, and which easily becomes in the form of a definition something alien, something else. Anyone who truly loves can hardly find joy and satisfaction, not to mention further growth, in being preoccupied with a definition of what love properly is. Whoever lives in daily, and yet solemn, communion with the thought that there is a God, could hardly wish himself to pervert this, or see it perverted, by patching together his own definition of what God is. So too with earnestness, which is so earnest a matter that even a definition of it is a frivolity. This is not something I say as though my thinking were obscure, or because I am afraid that one or another superwise speculator—who is as bullheaded in developing concepts as the mathematician is in the proof, and who says about everything what a certain mathematician said: So what does this prove?—should be suspicious of me, as though I didn’t really know what I was talking about. To my mind, what I say here proves much better than any conceptual development that I know in all earnestness what is being discussed.

Though inclined not to give a definition of earnestness, or to talk about it in the jest of abstraction, I shall nevertheless present some remarks by way of orientation. In Rosenkranz’s Psychologie^* there is a definition of Gemyt [disposition, or temperament]. He says on page 322 that disposition is the unity of feeling and self-consciousness. Before that he superbly explains “daß das Gefühl zum Selbstbewußtsein sich aufschließe, und umgekehrt, daß der Inhalt des Selbstbewußtseins von dem Subjekt als der seinige gefühlt wird. Erst diese Einheit kann man Gemüth nennen. Denn fehlt die Klarheit der Erkenntniß, das Wissen vom Gefühl, so existirt nur der Drang des Naturgeistes, der Turgor der Unmittelbarkeit. Fehlt aber das Gefühl, so existirt nur ein abstrakter Begriff, der nicht die letzte Innigkeit des geistigen Daseins erreicht hat, der nicht mit dem Selbst des Geistes Eines geworden ist [that the feeling unfolds itself to self-consciousness, and vice versa, that the content of the self-consciousness is felt by the subject as his own. It is only this unity that can be called disposition. If the clarity of cognition is lacking, knowledge of the feeling, there exists only the urge of the spirit of nature, the turgidity of immediacy. On the other hand, if feeling is lacking, all that remains is the abstract concept that has not reached the last inwardness of the spiritual existence, that has not become one with the self of the spirit]” (cf. pp. 320, 321). If one now follows his definition of “feeling” again in the reverse direction, as the spirit’s unmittelbare Einheit seiner Seelenhaftigkeit und seines Bewußtseins [immediate unity of its sentience and its consciousness] (p. 242), and recalls that in the definition of Seelenhaftigkeit [sentience] account has been taken of the unity with the immediate character of nature, then by taking all of this together one has a conception of a concrete personality.

Earnestness and disposition correspond to each other in such a way that earnestness is a higher and the deepest expression of what it is to be a disposition. The disposition is an immediate property, while earnestness is on the contrary the disposition’s acquired primitivity, its preserved primitivity in the responsibility of freedom, its affirmed primitivity in the enjoyment of blessedness. The primitivity of disposition in its historical development indicates precisely the eternal in earnestness, for which reason earnestness can never become habit. Rosenkranz deals with habit only in the “Phenomenology,” not in the “Pneumatology.” However, habit belongs there too, and habit arises as soon as the eternal drops out of the repetition. When the primitivity in earnestness is acquired and kept, there is succession and repetition, but as soon as primitivity is lacking in the repetition, there is habit. The earnest man is earnest precisely through the primitivity with which he returns in repetition. It is said that a living and inward feeling preserves this primitivity, but the inwardness of the feeling is a fire that may cool once earnestness no longer tends it, and on the other hand, the inwardness of feeling is uncertain in its mood, that is, at one time it is more inward than at another. I take an example so as to make everything as concrete as possible. Every Sunday a clergyman must recite the prescribed common prayer, and every Sunday he baptizes several children. Let him now be enthusiastic, etc. The fire goes out, he wants to stir and move people, etc., but more at one time and less at another. Earnestness alone is capable of returning to the same thing regularly every Sunday with the same primitivity.^*

But this same thing to which earnestness is to return with the same earnestness can only be earnestness itself; otherwise it becomes pedantry. Earnestness, in this sense, means the personality itself, and only an earnest personality is an actual personality, and only an earnest personality can do something in earnest, for to do anything in earnest requires, first and foremost, knowledge of what the object of earnestness is.

In life one talks not infrequently of earnestness. Someone becomes earnest about the national debt, another about the categories, and a third about a performance at the theater, etc. Irony discovers that this happens and has enough to occupy itself with here, since anyone who becomes earnest at the wrong place is eo ipso comical, even though an equally comically travestied contemporary age and its opinion may be exceedingly earnest about it. There is, therefore, no measuring rod more accurate for determining what, in its deepest core, an individuality is capable of than what one learns through the individual’s own garrulity or by tricking this secret out of him: What is it that made him earnest in life? For although one may very well be born with disposition, one is not born with earnestness. The phrase “What has made him earnest in life?” must of course be understood in a pregnant sense, as that from which the individuality in the deepest sense dates his earnestness. For having become truly earnest about that which is the object of earnestness, one may very well treat various things earnestly if one will, but the question is whether one first became earnest about the object of earnestness. This object is something every human being has, because it is himself, and anyone who has not become earnest about this but about something else, something great and noisy, that person, despite all his earnestness, is a joker, and even if he can deceive irony for a time, he will deo volente [God willing] still become comical, for irony is jealous of earnestness. He who, on the other hand, has become earnest at the right place will prove his soundness of mind precisely by being able to treat everything else just as sentimentally as jokingly, even if the spines of those serious-looking fools run cold when they see him joke about what made them so frightfully earnest. But when it comes to earnestness, he will know not to tolerate any joke, for if he forgets this he may share the fate of Albert Magnus when he arrogantly boasted of his speculation before the deity:^* he suddenly became stupid. Or that of Bellerophon, who sat calmly on his Pegasus in the service of the idea, but fell off when he wanted to misuse Pegasus by riding the horse to a rendezvous with a mortal woman.

Inwardness, certitude, is earnestness. This looks a little paltry. If I had at least said: It is subjectivity, the pure subjectivity, the übergreifende [encompassing] subjectivity; then I would have said something, something that would no doubt have made many earnest. But earnestness is something I can also express in another way. As soon as inwardness is lacking, the spirit is finitized. Inwardness is therefore eternity or the constituent of the eternal in the human being.

To study the demonic properly one need only observe how the eternal is construed in the individuality and one will be immediately informed. In this respect, the modern age offers a broad field for observation. The eternal is discussed often enough in our time; it is accepted and rejected, and (considering the way in which this is done) the first shows lack of inwardness just as much as the second. But anyone who has not understood the eternal correctly, understood it altogether concretely, lacks inwardness and earnestness.^*

I do not wish to go to any great length here but will indicate some points.

(a) One denies the eternal in man. That same moment the Lebenswein is ausgeschenkt [the wine of life is drawn] and every such individuality is demonic. If the eternal is posited, the present becomes something other than what one wants. This prompts fear and one is then in anxiety about the good. A person can go on denying the eternal as long as he will, but in doing so he will not do away with the eternal altogether. And even if one will admit the eternal to some degree, and in a certain sense, one fears that other sense and that higher degree. Yet however much one denies it, one will not be entirely rid of it. The eternal is feared far too much in our time, even when it is recognized in the abstract and in what, for the eternal, are flattering terms. While the various governments live nowadays in fear of restless troublemakers, only all too many individualities live in fear of a restless troublemaker that is nevertheless true calm—for eternity. Then one preaches the moment, and just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so is eternity best destroyed by sheer moments. But why are people in so terrible a hurry? If there is no eternity, the moment is just as long as if there were. But anxiety about the eternal makes the moment into an abstraction.—What is more, this denial of the eternal can express itself directly or indirectly in a great variety of ways, as mockery, as a prosaic intoxication with common sense, as busyness, as enthusiasm for the temporal, etc.

(b) The eternal is construed altogether abstractly. Like the blue mountains, the eternal is the boundary of the temporal, but he who lives energetically in temporality never reaches the boundary. The single individual who spies out beyond is a frontier guard who stands outside time.

(c) Eternity is bent into time for the imagination. Construed in this way, eternity produces an enchanting effect. It does not know whether it is dream or actuality; the eternal peeps wistfully, dreamily, roguishly into the moment, as the beams from the moon glimmer in an illuminated forest, or a hall. Thought of the eternal becomes a fanciful busying, and the mood is always the same: Am I dreaming, or is it eternity that dreams about me?

Or it is construed purely for the imagination, unmixed with this coquettish duplicity. This construal has found definite expression in the maxim: Art is an anticipation of eternal life. For poetry and art are reconciliation only for the imagination, and may well have the Sinnigkeit [thoughtfulness] of intuition, but by no means the Innigkeit [inwardness] of earnestness. The eternal is elaborated in the gold-leaf tinsel of the imagination and then yearned for. Apocalyptically, one beholds eternity, plays at being Dante, while Dante, no matter how much he conceded to visions of imagination, did not suspend the effect of ethical judgment.

(d) Eternity is construed metaphysically. One keeps on saying Ich - Ich [I—I] until one becomes that most ridiculous thing of all: the pure I, the eternal self-consciousness. One keeps on talking at such length about immortality that, in the end, one becomes not immortal, but immortality. Despite all this, the discovery is suddenly made that immortality has been brought into the system, and people are then intent on finding a place for it in a supplement. In consideration of this ludicrousness, what Poul Møller said is true, that immortality must be present everywhere. But if that is so, then the temporal itself becomes something quite other than what one wants. Or eternity is metaphysically construed in such a way that the temporal becomes comically preserved in it. From a purely aesthetic-metaphysical point of view, the temporal is comical because it is a contradiction, and the comical always rests in that category. If eternity is conceived purely metaphysically, and one wants for some reason or other to include the temporal in it, then indeed it becomes quite comical that an eternal spirit retains the memory of several times having been in financial difficulties, etc. Yet all of this effort expended on upholding eternity is wasted and a false alarm, for no human being becomes immortal, or convinced of his immortality, in a purely metaphysical way. But if he becomes convinced of it in quite another way, the comic will not force itself upon him. Even though Christianity teaches that a person must render an account for every idle word that he has spoken,^* and we understand this simply as a general recollection, of which unmistakable symptoms can occasionally appear already in this life, and even if no sharper light can be thrown on the teaching of Christianity than by the contrast offered by the Greek construal, that the immortals first drank of Lethe in order to forget, it still by no means follows that recollection must become directly or indirectly comical—directly by recollecting ridiculous things, or indirectly by transforming ridiculous occasions into essential decisions. Precisely because the accounting and the judgment are essential, this essentiality will have the effect of a Lethe on whatever is inessential, while it is also certain that many things will prove essential that one never believed would be so. In life’s drolleries, its accidental circumstances, its odd nooks and crannies, the soul has not been essentially present. Hence all this vanishes except for that soul who was in this essentially, but for him it will hardly acquire comical significance. If one has reflected thoroughly upon the comical, studying it in practice, keeping one’s category constantly clear, it will readily be understood that the comical belongs of all things to the temporal, for that is where the contradiction is found. One cannot stop it, metaphysically and aesthetically, and prevent it from finally swallowing whole the temporal, which will happen to someone developed enough to use the comic but not mature enough to distinguish inter et inter [between one and the other]. In eternity, on the other hand, all contradiction is canceled, the temporal is permeated by and preserved in the eternal, but in it there is no trace of the comical.

But eternity is not what people think earnestly about; they are anxious about it, and anxiety can hit on a hundred evasions. Yet this is precisely the demonic.

* “What is the good?” is a question that comes ever closer to our time, since it is crucial in the question of the relationship among church, state, and morality. One must be cautious in giving an answer. Up to now the good has in an odd way been given preference because the trilogy of the beautiful, the good, and the true has been interpreted and presented in the sphere of the true (in knowledge). The good doesn’t lend itself to definition. It is freedom. The difference between good and evil comes to light only for and in freedom, and this difference is never in abstracto but only in concreto. Therefore, for those unseasoned in the Socratic method it is disturbing that he [Socrates] instantly brings this seemingly infinite abstraction, the good, down to what is most concrete. The method is entirely correct, except that he was mistaken (according to Greek thought he acted correctly) in interpreting good in its external aspect (the useful, the finitely teleological). Although the distinction between good and evil is freedom’s, it is not so in abstracto. This misunderstanding arises because freedom is made into something else, into an object of thought. But freedom is never in abstracto. If freedom is given a moment to choose between good and evil, a moment when freedom itself is neither the one nor the other, then in that very moment freedom is not freedom but a meaningless reflection that the thought experiment serves only to confuse. If (sic venia verbo [pardon the expression]) freedom remains in the good, then it knows nothing at all of evil. In this sense one may say of God (don’t blame me if anyone should misunderstand this) that he knows nothing of evil. By this I do not at all mean that evil is purely the negative, das Aufzuhebende [what is to be annulled] but on the contrary, that the fact that God knows nothing of evil, that he neither can nor will know anything about it, is the absolute punishment for evil. The preposition ἀπο [away] is used in this sense in the New Testament to signify removal from God or God’s, if I dare so put it, ignoring of evil. If God is conceived finitely, it is indeed convenient for evil that God ignores it, but because God is the infinite, his ignoring it is its living annihilation. For the evil cannot dispense with God, even just to be the evil. I shall quote here a passage from Scripture, 2 Thess. 1:9, where it is said of those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel: οἵτινεϛ δίκην τίσουσιν, ὄλεθρον αἰώνιον, ἀπὸ προσώπου του κυρίου, και ἀπὸ τῆϛ δόξηϛ τῆς ἰσχύοϛ αὐτοὐ [These will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, separated from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might].

* In view of the form of this investigation I can give only a quite brief summary and little more than algebraic hint as to the particular state. This is not the place for a proper description.

† This is said ethically, for ethics does not see the state but sees how the state is, in the same instant, a new sin.

* [Cf. Matthew 8:28–34, 9:32–34, 12:22–32, 17:14–18; Mark 1:23–28; John 10:20–21]

* [Cf. John 8:34]

† [Properly Matthew 8:28–34]

* The person who is not so ethically developed as to feel comfort and relief, even when he suffers the most, if another had the courage to say to him, “This is not fate, it is guilt,” and said it sincerely and earnestly, is not ethically developed in a big sense, because the ethical individuality fears nothing as much as fate and some aesthetic jangle which, under the cloak of compassion, would trick him out of the gem that is freedom.

* It has already been said, and is said here again, that the demonic has a scope quite other than is generally believed. The preceding section indicated the formations pointing in the other direction. Here follows the second series of formations, and the distinction can be carried through in the way I have presented it. If something better can be offered, one should choose that but at least exercise caution in this area, otherwise everything runs together.

† [Mark 5:6–7; Mark 1:23–24]

* Being able to use one’s category is a conditio sine qua non [indispensable condition] if observation is to have any deeper meaning. When the phenomenon is present to some degree, most people will take note of it but be unable to explain it because they lack the category; and if they did have it, they would have a key to open up any trace of the phenomenon wherever it occurs, for the phenomena within the category obey it as the spirits of the ring obey the ring [Aladdin, A Thousand and One Nights].

† I have purposely used the word “disclosure.” Here I might also have called the good “transparency.” If I thought that the word “disclosure,” and the development of its relation to the demonic, might be misunderstood as though always having to do with something external, a palpably transparent confessional but which in being external was of no help, I would certainly have chosen another word.

* It is easy to see that reserve eo ipso means lying, or if you will, untruth. But untruth is precisely unfreedom, which is anxious about disclosure. That is why the devil is called the father of lies [John 8:44]. That there is a big difference between lie and untruth, between lie and lie, and between untruth and untruth, I have indeed always admitted, but the category is the same.

* The author of Either/Or has pointed out that Don Giovanni is essentially musical. In just the same sense Mephistopheles is essentially mimical. The art of mime has gone the way of music. It is supposed that everything could become mimic and everything become music. We have a ballet called Faust. Had its composer really understood what it means to conceive Mephistopheles mimically, it would never have occurred to him to make a ballet of [Goethe’s] Faust.

* [1 Thessalonians 5:2]

* The reason why [the Danish actor] little Winsløv’s impersonation of Klister in [Heiberg’s vaudeville] The Inseparables was so profound was that he had correctly understood the comical as the boring. The fact that a love affair, which when it is true has the nature of continuity, is exactly the opposite, namely, an infinite emptiness (not because Klister is an evil man, faithless, etc., since on the contrary he is sincerely in love, but because in his love affair he is a supernumerary volunteer, just as he is in the customhouse) has great comic effect when the accent is placed on the boring. Klister’s position itself in the customhouse could only be comic in an unfair way, because, good heavens, how could Klister help it that there is no promotion? But in relation to his love, there he is indeed his own master.

* [Matthew 6:6]

† This must be constantly upheld despite the illusion of the demonic, and that of language usage, which in describing this state uses expressions that lead one almost to forget that unfreedom is a phenomenon of freedom and so cannot be explained by means of naturalistic categories. Even when unfreedom says, in the strongest possible terms, that it does not will itself, it is untrue and there is always a will in it that is stronger than the wish. This state can be extremely deceptive, for one can drive a person to despair by holding back and keeping the category pure in the face of his sophisms. One should not be afraid of this, but neither should youthful thought experimenters try themselves in these spheres.

* In the New Testament there is the expression σοϕία δαιμόνιώδηϛ [demonic wisdom] (James 3: 15). As it is described there, the category does not become clear. However, if one takes note of the passage in 2:19, καὶ τἁ δαιμόνια πιοτεύουσι καὶ φρίσσουσι [Even the demons believe and shudder], one sees in precisely the demonic knowledge the relation of unfreedom to the given knowledge.

† [John 8:32]

* [Matthew 26:47–50; Luke 22:47–48]

* [Genesis 24:26]

† [Hebrews 4:16; “throne of grace”]

* [Cf. John 17:14]

* In the religious spheres the demonic may even, moreover, bear an illusory resemblance to spiritual trial. What it is can never be decided in abstracto. Thus a pious and believing Christian may become anxious about going to Communion. This is a spiritual trial, which means that whether it is in fact that will appear in his relation to anxiety. A demonic nature, on the other hand, may have come so far, his religious consciousness become so concrete, that the inwardness about which he is anxious, and which in his anxiety he seeks to escape, is the purely personal understanding of the sacramental understanding. He is willing to go along with the latter only up to a certain point; then he breaks off and wants to relate to it only as one who knows, to be in one or another way something more than the empirical, historically defined, finite individuality that he is. One who is in the religious spiritual trial therefore wants to continue on to what it is that the spiritual trial holds him off from; while the demonic person, according to his stronger will (the will of unfreedom), wants to get away from it, while a weaker will in him wants to continue on. One must insist on this, otherwise the demonic comes to be conceived so abstractly as never to have occurred, as if the will of unfreedom were constituted as such, and the will of freedom were not always present, however weak, in the self-contradiction. Anyone wanting material on the religious spiritual trial will find it in abundance in [Johann Joseph von] Görres’s Mysticism. I must frankly admit, however, that I have never had the courage to read the work properly from cover to cover; there is such an anxiety in it. But this much I can see, that Görres [1776–1848] does not always distinguish between the demonic and the spiritual trial. The work should therefore be used with care.

* [Cf. Genesis 3:7]

* In his treatise De affectionibus [On the Passions] Descartes [Renatus Cartesius (1596–1650), the French rationalist philosopher] calls attention to the fact that to every passion there corresponds another passion, and that only with wonder is this not the case. The detailed exposition is rather weak, but his making an exception of wonder has roused interest, because as is well known, according to Plato’s and Aristotle’s concept, precisely this constitutes the passion of philosophy and the passion with which all philosophizing began. Moreover, corresponding to wonder [admiratio; Kierkegaard here implies a slightly different sense of admiratio] we have envy, and no doubt recent philosophy would also speak of doubt. In just this lies the fundamental mistake of recent philosophy, that it wants to begin with the negative instead of with the positive, which is always the first, in quite the same sense as affirmatio is placed first in the declaration omnis affirmatio est negatio [every affirmation is a negation]. The question of whether the positive or the negative comes first is exceedingly important, and really the only modern philosopher who has declared himself for the positive is [Johann Friedrich] Herbart [1776–1841].

* [John 4:14]

† [Ecclesiastes 1:2]

‡ [Ecclesiastes 3:4]

* It gives me pleasure to assume that my reader has read as much as I. This assumption is very economical for the reader as well as for the writer. So I assume that my reader is familiar with the book to which I have referred. If not, then I urge him to familiarize himself with it, for it is really competent, and if the author, who otherwise distinguishes himself by his common sense and his humane interest in human life, had been able to renounce his superstitious enthusiasm for an empty schema, he might have avoided being occasionally ridiculous. What he says in the presentation sections is for the most part very good. The only thing not always understandable is the grandiose schema and how the altogether concrete presentation can answer to it. (As an example, I refer to pp. 209–11. Das Selbst—und das Selbst: 1. Der Tod; 2. Der Gegensatz von Herrschaft und Knechtschaft.)

* It was in this sense that Constantin Constantius (in Repetition) said, “Repetition is the earnestnessness of existence” [Tilværelse], p. 6 [Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, trans. Piety, p. 4] and that the earnestness of life is not to be like a royal riding-master, even if such a man every time he mounted his horse, did so with all possible earnestness.

* Cf. Marbach, Geschichte der Philosophie, pt. 2, p. 302, note: Albertus repente ex asino factus philosophus et ex philosopho asinus [Albert was suddenly transformed from an ass into a philosopher and from a philosopher into an ass]. Cf. Tennemann, VIII, pt. 2, p. 485, note. There is an even more distinctive account of another scholastic, Simon Tornacensis, who thought that God must be obliged to him for having proved the Trinity; for if he wanted, then profecto si malignando et adversando vellem, fortioribus argumentis scirem illam infirmare et deprimendo improbare [if I wanted out of spite and enmity to do so, I could weaken it (the proof) with stronger arguments, and disprove it by reducing them]. As reward for his pains, the good man was turned into a fool who had to spend two years learning the alphabet. See Tennemann, Geschichte der Philosophie, VIII, B, p. 314, note. Be this as it may, and whether he actually said this or even uttered what has been ascribed to him—the famous blasphemy of the Middle Ages about the three great deceivers [Moses, Christ, and Muhammed]—certainly what he lacked was not strenuous earnestness in dialectics and speculation but, rather, an understanding of himself. There are no doubt enough analogies to this story to be found, and in our day speculation has assumed such authority that it has well nigh attempted to make God feel uncertain of himself, like a monarch who anxiously waits to learn whether the general assembly will make him an absolute or a constitutional monarch.

* It was no doubt in this sense that Constantin Constantius said of the eternal that it is the true repetition [Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, trans. Piety, p. 75].

* [Matthew 12:36]

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