As architecture stands in relation to existential mass so something stands in relation to being. What is that something?
How far out must one seek objectively for the search to become subjective?
Existential mass is the medium of architecture. Being is likewise a medium. And Life. Might life be the medium whereby matter transforms into spirit.
If space/time is curved wouldn’t one arrive where one began if journeying on a “straight” way through the cosmos? Being able to see forever wouldn’t one’s gaze end up being at the back of one’s head?
Isn’t it an illusion that anything is truly beyond, above, objective to the self. Doesn’t objectivity ultimately become subjectivity?
Onward!
In the Orient one finds statuary of meditating people usually with their eyes closed or half closed. Obviously they are not focused on the exterior world but on what is within. We learn that these poses are to illustrate the seeking of self realization of the individuals so composed by attainment of Nirvana, Samadhi, some form of the Truth. In the western world seekers of truth typically do not assume such attitudes. They rather seek the truth of things objectively, outside, so to speak, of the searcher, usually by measurement of some sort. Subjective attitudes are not the norm. God, the absolute ultimate reality is considered to be in his heaven which is above man in the sphere of perfection which perspective is shown by church steeples which always point their spires in the direction the ecclesiastics agree upon, a sign that this is the way learners, seekers of spiritual truth should follow. Soren Kierkegaard was an exception to this. He claimed that the truth is subjective not objective. He thought that, miraculously, God was in time as an existing individual. That being the meaning of the incarnation of the Christ. Significantly he further writes that truth is “that which is tending toward unity or completeness, rather than as something formed or complete in itself.”
My aim here is to discus and amplify this idea of subjective reality. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard writes that the individual begins the search for truth from the standpoint of actually being in truth. If God is in time then it follows that any self realization begins therein, with the individual existing human being starting from the truth itself. It further follows that it is a false assumption that one does not already have the truth. So, one seeks the truth from the standpoint of the truth. Therefore one does not find the truth for one can’t find what one already has. What really happens is one realizes the truth, realizes God which necessarily is always already there waiting, so to speak, to be discovered through self realization or actualization. The truth hides in plain sight and if we didn’t already possess it it could never be realized. So, inwardness is the direction of seeking the ultimate reality. Notwithstanding Kierkegaard says the “eternal is in itself in its attributes” and that the object and the subject are the same. Is in itself in its attributes. That is to say phenomenal reality actually is the substratum when viewed from the standpoint of the ultimate reality, or, at least, they aren’t unrelated. For, there is only one reality here and the only way to see God is to see the attributes, which, while they are not the same, neither are they different. The absolute informs the phenomenal, that is, and the phenomenal reveals, bit by bit, the absolute. This is an eternal process. Or, as Plato put it, “Beauty is in the object, and it is in beauty that we see through the factual reflection of reality into Being itself.” The eternal is in itself in its attributes.
I want here to state my personal aversion for writing with such familiarity of “God”. More on this later. Let it here suffice that I am uncomfortable so freely using this name, word, presuming, as it does, a relationship that is antithetical to the supposed aims of the subject of this writing.
Of the Kierkegaard writings I have I prefer Robert Bretall’s anthology published by Random House. For me the study of Kierkegaard is something I go back to from time to time. It’s an enriching study and putting it aside actually helps my understanding. I will never complete this task.
Kierkegaard’s life was just over forty years, 1813 – 1855. He is considered the father of Existentialism and was known largely by his hostility to speculative philosophy especially in the person of Hegel.
Speculative philosophy, like science, depends on what is measurable, what is outside the existing individual, what is objective and reached in dialectical stages. Kierkegaard’s great insight was that the truth is actually subjective and he bases this on what he calls the paradox of God being in time in the person of Jesus, the Christ.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The aesthetic, one’s feelings, as well as philosophical speculation, by Kierkegaard’s metrics, are obstacles to becoming a Christian. Kierkegaard thought that the enjoyment, immediacy of the aesthetic should be dethroned, not abolished, however. The aesthetical, the ethical, the religious are three great allies, he writes. And that in which all human life is unified is passion and faith is Passion. He thought that love, based on sensuous beauty, gained the imprimatur of the eternal which means that the eternal is known in the immediacy of the temporal. This is an important aspect of his thought. Beauty in life is to be lived, not seen, heard about, read about. It is real only through the living by an existing human being. The whole thrust of his writing is, he says, what it means to become a Christian.
It’s commonsensical but make note that Kierkegaard thought life could be explained only after it has been lived and in this regard he notes that “Christ only began to interpret the Scriptures and show how they applied to him – after his resurrection.” Quoting Aristotle who thought philosophy begins with wonder, “not as in our day with doubt” he takes an appreciated jibe at Descartes’s doctrine of Cartesian doubt (Ego cogito, ergo sum – I think therefore I am. This according to Descartes being the one undoubtable quanta of his being.) Kierkegaard likewise admits most live a life of calculated enjoyment (as aesthetes) instead of a life of self realization through moral decision.
Kierkegaard is about twenty five when he makes these observations and the crown of this early work is his consideration of the meaning of Christ as God in time of which he thinks this is a profound paradox – and, importantly, if one is to believe this hypostatic union of an eternal God and temporal man one must have bequeathed to him a condition, a faculty, a device, which is a new organ of seeing, understanding, and that condition is faith, which recall he says is passion. Faith must be exercised in which regard man must overcome his error ridden guilt, his sin. God thus becomes a teacher from whom man learns of his erring which tracelessly vanishes – nothing changes apparently – yet all is nevertheless new as said man is born again through redemptive conversion. This understanding, I think is closer to love than knowledge. and should rightly be characterized as love of truth. “Consciousness of sin is the conditio sine qua non of Christianity.” Also, “despair is the anatomy of melancholy”, he writes. “Man is spirit” but not yet a self. Man is not what he is in principle, rather, the polar opposite. Thus despair, which is more commonly known as sin. The task of true Christianity is to lift man out of this disunity and by joining with God make of him a true self thereby saving him from a “Sickness Unto Death.”
Man is spirit, is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal. There is the temporal self and the eternal self. Failing to understand this is a corruption which manifests as despair, a death instinct. “Every individual…despairingly unconscious of having a self and an eternal self has willed to tear his self away [from the eternal]. This is sin and its opposite is…faith”
Our own self is the self of the entire universe and the “torment of despair is precisely this: not to be able to die.” It is such profound hopelessness that even the last hope, death, is not available. Suffering and sorrow – despair – can be so overpowering “that death has become one’s hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.” When one would become nothing, cannot endure to be oneself then all is lost. Yet Kierkegaard writes that “If there were nothing eternal in a man, he could not despair.” Kierkegaard notes here that which Socrates reminds us, the “immortality of the soul [we know] from the fact that the sickness of the soul (sin) does not consume it as sickness of the body consumes the body.”
Conferring on man eternality is demanding of him infinite obeisance. “And thus it is eternity must act, because to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to man, but at the same time it is eternity’s demand upon him.” And. Despair which turns to hatred for existence has become daemonic; it wills to be itself. But “The despair which is the passageway to faith is also by the aid of the eternal: by the aid of the eternal the self has courage to lose itself in order to gain itself…He went forth in sooth, the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man, and that way He went in search of sinners.”
On sorrow. Writing, of course, about the ancient Hebrews he says “There once lived a people who had a profound understanding of the divine; this people thought no man could see God and live. – Who grasps this contradiction of sorrow: not to reveal oneself is the death of love, to reveal oneself is the death of the beloved! …They do not even dream that there is sorrow in heaven as well as joy, the deep grief of having to deny the learner what he longs for with all his heart, of having to deny him precisely because he is the beloved.” God. Yahweh! If I give man what he longs for with his entire being he will die, my glory is so great*. This terrible conundrum is addressed by God making himself into the likeness of man, a humble man, a carpenter, a servant. I have this to add: God has the power to self manifest. The phenomenal world is his handiwork. Does this mean man is (potentially) God? Is that what we are to believe? Miraculous. If so, then his character – if he can be said to have character, attributes – is more anthropomorphic than not – isn’t that the implication of so glibly using his “name”? Rather he is more like man than man is like him. Perhaps, too, he is anthropogenic. Is God a creation of man as man is a creation of God? What is the truth of this? Where is the illusion? Where is the real? From the Mandukya Upanishad (Guadapada and Sankara) Advaita: (Brahman or Atman) God, being beyond time, space and causality, is ever incomprehensible through any empirical means. It is the eternal subject having no object through which one can comprehend it.
Our speculation is a kind of measure coming as it must out of our temporal being. Any such measure results in an illusion, I think, for the eternal is not subject to the temporal. Our speculation is reduced, if one is to be honest, to child’s play. We presume to define the infinite. Now, that’s arrogance to be avoided. We do not know. Our understanding is small. Really, we cannot in ourselves fully understand.
The mystery is to be lived, not known, and is wrapped up in the quote of Lessing by Kierkegaard that God stands before us his hands outstretched. In his right hand he holds the ultimate truth. In his left the unending search for the ultimate truth. We must choose. Lessing chooses the left hand. We may glibly talk of God but this is to be taken charitably as a learning device for the unending search to which we have dedicated ourselves and is perhaps to be taken as a small recognition that the Real being process, process of becoming, then a ceaseless search is the only authentic choice available. But. Take note. The becoming, too, some say is illusory.
Walter Lowrie, Doctor of Divinity. whose life long study of Kierkegaard’s works writes in my anthology that the so called stages on life’s way of Kierkegaard are best considered as realms or spheres of existence and they are the Aesthetic, the realm of pleasure, of perdition, the Ethical, realm of action and victory, and the Religious, realm of suffering. These merge into one another and the Religious realm retains a bit of its precursors.
Hegel, of whom Kierkegaard was at times very critical thought in part that pure being “accompanies everything but is never observable itself.” This, by the way, bears a striking resemblance to the thought of ancient Oriental sages such as Guadapada and Sankara. Kierkegaard said if Hegel had added a foot note to the end of his work stating that all of it was a thought experiment he would have thought him a most intelligent philosopher. The thrust of Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel was that he didn’t conduct his life in accordance with his philosophy, and that he was a speculative thinker and held that the ultimate reality is objective. Kierkegaard promoted the opposing view that the truth is subjective and the individual is an existing spirit in reality and that all understanding comes after this fact. He writes that man searches for the truth from within the truth. So how he relates to his efforts are of prime importance more than what the thought actually is. “If a man knowing no better, worships an idol, but does it with absolute sincerity and the whole “passion” of his being, he is nearer the truth than the enlightened individual who has a correct knowledge of God, but …remains unmoved by it.” He thought the systematic thinker was simultaneously “…outside of existence and yet in existence, who is in his eternity forever complete, and yet includes all existence within himself – it is God.” The systematic thinker has an eternal aspect on account of God having entered into time as the true subject. Elsewhere he writes: “He (God) clothed himself in the visible world as in a garment. He changes it as one who shifts a garment, himself unchanged. Thus in the world of sensible things….In each moment every actuality is a possibility.”
Wrapped up in the idea of subjectivity one finds the idea he calls resignation which is acceptance of one’s true, actual self as subjective. To be as you are one must relinquish the urge to be more than what one is, this being characteristic of the sensuous urge. One lives in falsehood who seeks to be what is beyond one’s subjective self. Passion has no objective existence and Kierkegaard’s Christianity wishes to intensify passion to its highest pitch through infinite resignation, surrender to our personal actuality. The true subject. Infinite resignation is a total , a complete effacement of the self, a withdrawal of oneself from notice. Faith is the highest passion of human subjectivity but the tendency of objectivism is to make everyone an observer while the subjective man participates. There is no objective truth. Whomsoever God elects by his love, “He begins by reducing to nothing.” Thus we are brought up against the extreme limit, the pure springs of passion; and simultaneously thrust into faith! Thus Kierkegaard asserted the primacy of passion, not in the vulgar sense of aroused emotions, but as the primary ontological substance from which our world is built (William Poteat). Such a man renounces the world where he needs nevertheless to live but this living is informed with an infinite resignation. Such a man constantly leaps into the infinite but faultlessly and with complete abandon and confidence drops back into the finite where nothing about him noticeably changes (Denis DeRougemont). This infinite resignation is total surrender to God. Thus the doors of perception are cleansed and everything appears as it truly is – infinite (William Blake).
So faith is born of the intrusion of eternity upon temporality (Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik).
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of man (Proverbs 25:2). Wherever, however one seeks the true, the real, it’s never to be owned. It’s God’s – in his right hand. Kierkegaard: Correct understanding has it that we are closer to such understanding when its realized that we seek what we already have, we would be what we already are. Yet, to be in a state of mediation is to be finished, while to exist is to become but never to actually be finished, complete. Our passion to be in a relation with God involves a dialectical contradiction, Kierkegaard writes, turning our passion into despair. But the category of despair gives rise to, is indeed necessary for the emergence of faith. That is, one realizes the impossibility of being in a relationship with God thus entering into all that remains possible, the category of faith. And this comports with the teaching of great sages the world over. One must surrender to God forsaking knowledge, forsaking all, giving over to love of God. Understanding that it is out of the realm of possibility to know God actually gives rise to what is possible and that is love of God, devotion, faith.
Searching, seeking truth, the eternal, God, implies one is in truth from the beginning. An effort must be made, but how? Which how is subjective and thus infinite striving ensues, renewed repeatedly from the decisive passion of the infinite which is faith, belief. Speculative philosophy might think it grasps God objectively but is thereby bereft of faith. Faith involves risk. God can’t be grasped objectively which results in uncertainty. Speculative philosophy forgets the essential significance because of existence, that the knower is an existing individual who given over to striving embraces risk taking. Furthermore, if I think I grasp God objectively I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. It is the misfortune of speculative philosophy to again and again have forgotten that the knower is an existing individual.
Speculative philosophy holds that truth is objective, not to be realized inwardly, subjectively. That the Christianity of Kierkegaard’s time acceded to this view is perhaps best illustrated by the architecture of cathedrals since the earliest times of the Christian era. These edifices always have a steeple which always, of course, pointed up. Up and away from the imperfect realm here below to the pristine perfection of God’s heaven. This is a statement in stone and masonry that the objective is quite removed from the lowly existing individuals and, to such thinkers, subjectivity is the road to perdition. It also is, I think, a kind of self loathing to consider our earthly home is not itself floating in the heavens, in the so thought of perfect realms. But, I think heaven is not a place whereas the ancients, especially a profoundly influential Aristotle, for instance, considered heaven the realm of the stars, the unmovable stars thought of as exemplifying a kind of perfection because, well because they didn’t move. That made for a good point of reference one understands, a place or condition around which all else stands in stark contrast. So, the perfect above, the corrupt imperfect below. I wonder whether Kierkegaard would believe this. It should be pointed out Kierkegaard did not claim to be a Christian though he spent his life studying Christianity. He said he was always coming to be a Christian. Note this writer tends to view Kierkegaard’s view of a properly modified faith a kind of surrender to God and his work in that regard a kind of worship, love of God.
In existential philosophy much is made of the absurd especially by authors such as Albert Camus. Kierkegaard introduces the idea of the absurd, writing “The absurd is – that the eternal truth has come into being in time, that God has come into being, has been born…precisely like any other individual human being.” Citing Socrates’ shunning of the objective search for God paganisticly in nature and human history “where the quantitative siren song enchants the mind and deceives the existing individual.” This quantitative siren song quote is better applied to science nowadays. Some worship their stomach. Some worship measurement, quantitative analysis. They both live in the cellar.
A true God relationship is possible only when a breach is brought about annulling the paganisticly immediate relationship to God, Kierkegaard writes. God is elusive, he says, and attributes his invisibility to his omnipresence. “His visibility would annul his omnipresence…Nature is the work of God. And yet God is not there; but within the individual man there is a potentiality (man is potentially spirit) which is awakened in inwardness to become God-relationship, and then it becomes possible to see God everywhere.” My words: The ultimate reality is not revealed in the manifest, the relative, as such, yet the manifest, the relative, serves to awaken the process of self realization meaning “God” is not present but neither is “He” absent from sensible phenomena. This bears some similarity to contributions of Oriental sages. Kierkegaard writes the mystery of such revelation is the only way in which it is known. The potentiality of self realization actualizes. It is by faith one yields to an understanding forever beyond one’s quantifying grasp.
The reverence of the early Hebrew people, the early Israelis, and some Christians, too, cannot be overemphasized. I’ve written of this at other times but never tire of its reiteration. YHWH – Yod He Vau He transliterated into the Latin as Yahweh, but the original name of the divine creative spirit was unpronounceable, having no vowels and, by the way, is written right to left. Nevertheless it was pronounced in ancient times by the high priest, but only in a whisper, and only during their celebration of jubilee. This in recognition that this supreme being can’t be named, is improperly limited by a name. A noun is a person, place, or thing. Convenient that “he” is treated in that way so that we can have a handle on “him”. That is “his” making into something like man. Understand, this is not like man and, mysteriously, neither is this unlike man. The substratum for all manifestation reserves into itself its true nature and this in order to actualize as said substratum. Whatever is named is construed as in a sense owned. The eternal is not up for ownership, only participation. However man will have his comforts, his illusion, even arrogating to himself ownership of the divine creative spirit. While impossible, what comfort it gives is permitted and does at least put one in the neighborhood of the divine.
Study of Kierkegaard is challenging. My effort is admittedly somewhat cursory. Truly it is a task for dedicated scholars who have a deep grasp of Socrates, Plato, the 18th century philosophers especially Hegel. One needs to be thoroughly informed as to the history of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Jewish tradition, Christianity, of course, and much more. This writer comes up short on all of these when compared to a true scholar. So, my caveat. What one sees here is something more than a “man in the street” offering but something less than a scholarly offering. I don’t mean to apologize for any shortcomings and offer this for what it is which is a study by an interested individual – existing individual – in the work which aims boldly at – yet misses – the understanding of life’s meaning and purpose, at least getting into the neighborhood of those whose genius I am perhaps at least smart enough to recognize.
Those followers of Kierkegaard in later times are many. I’ve written about my study under Professor William Poteat of Duke University when he visited the University of Texas. From him I learned that Hebrew davar, word or action of God in space/time was merged in Christianity with the Greek logos, meaning reasonable, logical, word. Poteat taught, and this based on Kierkegaard’s work, that the Real is exhausted, that is, expressed completely in the process of creation. The Greek Arche’, beginning, original stuff of the universe, compares to logos and Hebrew dibur, to speak, is the root word of davar. Poteat taught that every davar expresses a dibur, a spoken message which is to say that every physical object or phenomenon, in addition to its physical reality, conveys a spiritual comment on existence. This, having some relation to Advaita philosophy, details somewhat the way the ultimate reality reveals its true nature and helps make sense of my statement that God is not as such revealed in the manifest but neither is He not so revealed.
Prof. Poteat made a lot of the implications of media and its use by various activities, for instance, the medium of architecture is matter, or as he put it, existential mass, and is the most concrete medium. The medium of music can represent the most abstract idea conceivable, namely, the spirit of sensuality, Don Juanism. Kierkegaard writes of being itself as a media. Poteat did not discuss this, however. Neither did Kierkegaard except this brief mention. But, of what would existence be the media? Life? Self realization? Perhaps life itself might be rightly thought of as media; the medium whereby matter transmigrates into spirit. These are interesting considerations I suppose and bring to mind something my revered teacher, G.V. Desani put forth, that “Time and Space are things, some of the tools he made, home made tools in his pocket. When we try to impose our limitations (our limitations of understanding, and our limited space and time) upon God, we are playing childish games, playing at being God.” So a proclamation: I do not know anything of myself. Compared to the truly great I am playing childish games. I make no claim to special knowledge or understanding and am the paltriest tool of that greater being who might have in his mere pocket space and time itself. Enough!
Some personal observations.
God is neither subject nor object and he can be approached, as Kierkegaard notes, only by approximation. As you approach him the probability that you have found what you seek increases – becomes more probable by the accuracy of your measurement, albeit measurement of the admittedly immeasurable. However, inwardness and outwardness I’m inclined to think both involve approximation and measurement of some some kind or another. To even speak or, yes, think of something is a kind of measurement. Also take note that when Kierkegaard says that God doesn’t think, he creates and he doesn’t exist, he’s eternal; the creating and the eternality I’m considering, are both, however subtle, limiting factors. In other words they are parameters that define/limit that to which they are intended to pertain. Which is to say they are just a more subtle way of characterizing God, the eternal, which by definition can not be said to have qualifying characteristics. These belong in the realm of the manifest. So, to say something creates or that something is eternal you must first posit it as being, as an object, a thing in being which is contradictory and paradoxical because that which is eternal can have no being and Kierkegaard says that himself. Furthermore let’s consider – Kierkegaard never says this – but the use of language, words, to establish or elucidate what language or words can not is a task of the wise. (One must go to the other side of the world to find such statements, which I think this is attributable to the Buddhist philosopher, sage, Nagarjuna.) However let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s likely trying to do what he privately or secretly knows within himself to be impossible though he never explicitly states this. So God doesn’t think, he creates. God doesn’t exist, he’s eternal. That’s a grain of salt with which everything here should be taken. That is to say that one knows it isn’t literally true what is stated there however one also knows at the same time what is intended to be expressed which because of the limitations inherent in language is impossible to state explicitly. Words, at best, point to a direction. So we should judge Kierkegaard by his intention rather than his actual words. That’s fair. We do not need to waste effort splitting hairs.
God does not think, he creates, God does not exist, he is eternal. Man does think and exist. One might consider this makes of man a decent partner to God. Thus subjectivity is truth and reality, by divine providence. Man is what God can’t be being ironically limited by his infinitude. Thus God confers on man universality, the eternal, and man returns with/by conferring on God temporality, particularity, the finite. This is the sharing between divinity and the secular, the sacred and the profane. God needs man, in order to be finite. Man needs God in order to be infinite.
The upshot of all this fooling around with language is that we will use the word God with the caveat that we must at the same time admit that such use means literally that God is a thing to be held, owned, and that is not what is intended. We name the unnameable for the convenience of discussion. On the other side of the world this is dealt with somewhat differently when the most wise would simply maintain silence instead of fruitlessly trying to speak the unspeakable. Kierkegaard writes there is that which “should be suffered and matured in silence.” He further, in the same passage, derides the craving for gossip and the lust for preaching. He is warning to be careful the sensuous does not carry over into the life of the person of faith. He writes the religious (and love) experience become ennobling when it teaches one to keep his feeling within oneself. “The religious individual is silent and whoever is silent before God doubtless learns to yield, but also learns that this is blessed.”
We cannot as lowly creatures endure leading constantly the life of the eternal in time. It is advised to deal with this with humility since there is this absolute difference between God and man, which humility frankly admits its human lowliness and frailty. This religious suffering is merely the “dieing away from immediacy.” He admits the profound difficulty with which one enters the strenuous life of inwardness on which religiosity has embarked though it is the “greatest of miraculous actions.” He writes here that “passion is man’s perdition but it is his exaltation as well.”
Allow me to make note of a somewhat more nuanced view of this from Oriental thought. While Brahaman has no qualities, is without attributes, there are those who hold that while this pertains to the true nature it does not hold for “its personality as God.” In that it might be considered that Jesus is a personality of God. We should accept it remains a mystery, however.
On Don Giovanni, Mozart’s opera: Kierkegaard was quite enamored of this opera. The immediate pertains to the sensuous. The sensuous genius confines himself to the immediacy of the sensuous. That’s Don Juanism, which one lives in the immediate in order to sustain a sense of the infinite thereby yielding to the Daemonic. He externalizes his experience by way of exclusion of the eternal, God. For him there is no tomorrow, only his immediate present. It is in this corruption the meaning of his self indulgence emerges as inconsequential. So he is free and the price is he is sociopathic. Ethical considerations are alien to him. He thinks only of himself, is not fit for society. His life is a perpetual beginning. But! Make some good out of this for surely one can live in the present – the immediate – but from an eternal perspective. I think surrender to God will get you there. One can live surrendering to God, the infinite, the eternal and thus yielding to his will deny the over indulgence of the sensuous. So replace the daemonic in nature with an ethically driven faith wherein accountability of the consequences of one’s actions are real.
End note.
Soren Kierkegaard thought of himself as poet and I can think of nothing more poetic that what he wished to be his epitaph. “Died of a longing for eternity.” Its not my intention to gainsay this superb author but I will allow my comment on this sentiment is that whatever is here it is through that that we live our lives. I conceive that whatever it is is eternal and whatever we are as living creatures, we perforce embody that. So longing for the eternal is longing for what we already are and is sort of like searching for God, as Kierkegaard holds, must begin from being “in” God. That’s saying too much for anyone can appreciate the beauty of Kierkegaard’s sentiment. It is poetic and as such, though perhaps taking a bit of literary license with the Real, it adds a perspective of wonder, of humility, indeed, of Love of God. He adds that from said eternal standpoint “…he would have nothing else to do but to [unceasingly] thank God.” He was one, therefore, who had love of the Lord. No one, I think, has ever been more intent on being in that attitude towards God than the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.
* In the Bhagavad Gita Krsna tells Arjuna who asks that “God”, i.e., Krsna show himself in his true form, that in order to so reveal himself Arjuna must be given by Krsna a faculty capable of handling such a manifestation of God else it would destroy Arjuna.