Christian existentialists

"El uso estropea y hasta destruye toda belleza. La función más noble de los objetos es la de ser contemplados."

"All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?"

"Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying."

"We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions — perhaps so that we could believe in them."

"The devil is an angel too."

"There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school."

"Isolation is the worst possible counselor."

"Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself."

"It is sad not to be loved, but it is much sadder not to be able to love."

"These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century."

"Fe que no duda es fe muerta."

"We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best."

"There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker."

"There are at least two things that clearly can be attributed to the Basques: the Society of Jesus and the Republic of Chile."

"The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies—above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother."

"Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death."

"It appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future."

"It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune — that is to say, when they endeavor to persist in their own being — prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put it."

"Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people."

"Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist — for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?"

"If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence."

"There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought."

"If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The cultivation of any branch of science — of chemistry, of physics, of geometry, of philology — may be a work of differentiated specialization, and even so, only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition."

"Little can be hoped for from a ruler... who has not at some time or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny."

"Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly — but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree."

"Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe, like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a hole and enclosing it with steel."

"Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease."

"Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense."

"Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product."

"Yes perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy of proving can be proven, nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge as the Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is another; and... perhaps there is an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life."

"And he arrives at the cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine had already anticipated... "I think therefore I am," can only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of "I am," which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is a knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek to join in wedlock life and reason!"

"The truth is sum, ergo cogito — I am, therefore I think, although not everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without feeling, without that species of materiality which feelings lends to it? Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove [Descartes] have said: "I feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself, is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable?"

"What the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of a thing, the effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being, self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy, although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, do not recognize it?"

"Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the inquiry into the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore," the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself."

"The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it."

"And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law."

"When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depth of my spirit with the blood of divinity."

"It has been said a thousand times and in a thousand books that ancestor-worship is for the most part the source of primitive religions, and it may be strictly said that what most distinguishes man from the other animals is that, in one form or another, he guards his dead and does not give them over to the neglect of teeming mother earth; he is an animal that guards its dead."

"The wretched consciousness shrinks from it own annihilation, and just as an animal spirit newly severed from the womb of the world, finds itself confronted with the world and knows itself distinct from it, so consciousness must needs desire to possess another life than that of the world itself."

"Glorious is the risk! — καλος γαρ ο κινδυνος, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying … Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression on me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die — no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live — this poor "I" that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me."

"I am the center of my universe, the center of the universe, and in my supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!" What is a man profited if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul? (Matt. xvi. 26)."

"Egoism you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," we are told, the presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said "Love thyself." And nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves."

"I am dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle."

"Once the needs of hunger are satisfied — and they are soon satisfied — the vanity, the necessity — for it is a necessity — arises of imposing ourselves upon and surviving in others. Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity. He boasts even of his weakness and his misfortunes, for want of anything better to boast of, and is like a child who, in order to attract attention, struts about with a bandaged finger."

"The vain man is in like cause with the avaricious — he takes the mean for the end; forgetting the end he pursues the means for its own sake and goes no further. The seeming to be something, conducive to being it, ends by forming our objective. We need that others should believe in our superiority to them in order that we may believe in it ourselves, and upon their belief base our faith in our own persistence, or at least in the persistence of our fame. We are more grateful to him that congratulates us on the skill with which we defend a cause than we are to him who recognizes the truth or goodness of the cause itself. A rabid mania for originality is rife in the modern intellectual world and characterizes all individual effort. We would rather err with genius than hit the mark with the crowd."

"Rousseau has said in his Emile (book iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports it because it is his. ...The essential thing is to think differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists he is a believer." How much substantial truth there is in these gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity."

"For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical. It is from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions — namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism."

"And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can leave ethics on one side. But our religion — although its doctors may protest against this — is fundamentally and for the most part a compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind these words which the Theologica Germanica, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with good, for I am and have no other." And Christ said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and there is no man who perhaps knows what he does."

"But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element predominating."

"The most authentic Catholic ethic, monastic asceticism, is an ethic of eschatology, directed to the salvation of the individual soul rather than to the maintenance of society. And in the cult of virginity may there not perhaps be a certain obscure idea that to perpetuate ourselves in others hinders our own personal perpetuation?"

"The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not."

"The real sin — perhaps it is a sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission — is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal — that is, a heretic — is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason."

"And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible — the Bible, or a society of men — the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offense to the eyes of reason has to be postulated."

"It is the vital asserting itself, and in order to assert itself it creates, with the help of its enemy, the rational, a complete dogmatic structure, and this the Church defends against rationalism, against Protestantism, and against Modernism. The Church defends life. It stood up against Galileo, and it did right; for his discovery, in its inception and until it became assimilated to the general body of human knowledge, tended to shatter the anthropomorphic belief that the universe was created for man. It opposed Darwin, and it did right, for Darwinism tends to shatter our belief that man is an exceptional animal, created expressly to be eternalized. And lastly, Pius IX, the first Pontiff to be proclaimed infallible, declared he was irreconcilable with the so-called modern civilization. And he did right."

"Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason."

"...as the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out, that in France and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget skepticism in those who receive them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter — from seeking to believe with the reason and not with the life."

"The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of a dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational... Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic category."

"In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in me a principle which thinks, wills and feels... Now this implies a begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I think, will and feel. And I — the I that thinks, wills and feels — am immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills and feels."

"To say that everything is idea or that everything is spirit, is the same as saying that everything is matter or that everything is energy, for if everything is idea or spirit, just as my consciousness is, it is not plain why the diamond should not endure for ever, if my consciousness, because it is idea or spirit, endures forever."

"And if the immortality of the soul had been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die, we return to God, or more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were born, and if we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said to be merely atheism disguised; and in my opinion, undisguised."

"Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable. ...The unknowable, if it is something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up."

"From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of life."

"A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is strictly unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind."

"Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them."

"Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined."

"Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than skepticism, in the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the reasoning reason."

"La verdadera ciencia enseña, por encima de todo, a dudar y a ser ignorante. (True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.)"

"Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation."

"To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist."

"To know something is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it, to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself."

"Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophical basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. … the attacks which are directed against religion from a presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks from another but opposing religious point of view."

"To all this, someone is sure to object that life ought to subject itself to reason, to which we will reply that nobody ought to do what he is unable to do, and life cannot subject itself to reason. "Ought, therefore can," some Kantian will retort. To which we shall demur: "Cannot, therefore ought not." And life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding."

"In the most secret chamber of the spirit of him who believes himself convinced that death puts an end to his personal consciousness, his memory, for ever, and all unknown to him perhaps, there lurks a shadow, a vague shadow, a shadow of uncertainty, and while he says within himself, "Well, let us live this life that passes away, for there is no other!" the silence of this secret chamber speaks to him and murmurs, "Who knows!... " These voices are like the humming of a mosquito when the south-west wind roars through the trees in the wood; we cannot distinguish this faint humming, yet nevertheless, merged in the clamor of the storm, it reaches the ear."

"There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness."

"I do not understand these men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason — I wish rather that there should be war between them."

"I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it is all necessary. And I must repeat once again that we have nothing to do with a transcendental police system or with the conversion of God into a great Judge or Policeman — that is to say, we are not concerned with heaven or hell considered as buttresses to shore up our poor earthly mortality, nor are we concerned with anything egoistic or personal. It is not I myself alone, it is the whole human race that is involved, it is the ultimate finality of all our civilization. I am but one, but all men are I's."

"Yes, I know well that others before me have felt what I feel and express; that many others feel it today, although they keep silence about it. ...And I do not keep silence about it because it is for many the thing which must not be spoken, the abomination of abominations — infandum — and I believe that it is necessary now and again to speak the thing which must not be spoken. ...Even if it should lead only to irritating the devotees of progress, those who believe that truth is consolation, it would lead to not a little. To irritating them and making them say: "Poor fellow! if he would only use his intelligence to better purpose!... Someone perhaps will add that I do not know what I say, to which I shall reply that perhaps he may be right — and being right is such a little thing! — but that I feel what I say and I know what I feel and that suffices me. And that it is better to be lacking in reason than to have too much of it."

"For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the justification a posteriori of our conduct, or else they are our way of trying to explain that conduct to ourselves."

"I will not say that the more or less poetical and unphilosophical doctrines that I am about to set forth are those which make me live; but I will venture to say that it is my longing to live and to live for ever that inspires these doctrines within me. And if by means of them I succeed in strengthening and sustaining this same longing in another, perhaps when it is all but dead, then I shall have performed a man's work, and above all, I shall have lived. In a word, be it with reason or without reason or against reason, I am resolved not to die. And if, when at last I die out, I die altogether, then I shall not have died out of myself — that is, I shall not have yielded myself to death, but my human destiny shall have killed me. Unless I come to lose my head, or rather my heart, I will not abdicate from life — life will be wrested from me."

"I have told you that... we know nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save what we pity."

"And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to be all."

"Consciousness (conscientia) is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which a love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God."

"And thus the soul pities God and feels itself pitied by him; loves Him and feels loved by Him, sheltering its misery in the bosom of the eternal and infinite misery, which, in eternalizing itself and infinitizing itself, is the supreme happiness itself."

""The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire to do much and to achieve nothing"… so Herodotus relates that a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet (book ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can embrace everything , or almost everything; with the will nothing, or almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness — no! not if this contemplation implies impotence. And out of this collision between our knowledge and our power pity arises."

"Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply the struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits."

"But the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is insensible to heat."

"In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin, left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation? Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions. This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are."

"Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man. And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature — that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize."

"The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness. For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality presupposing a purpose. And... faith in God is based simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it answer to a purpose. We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the Universe."

"And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that the consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it. Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and have our being."

"...this visionary [ Emanuel Swedenborg in his book Heaven and Hell ] tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in human form, and in the virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one man."

""God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal," wrote Kierkegaard (Afslutende uvidenskabelige Efterskrift); but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "God is great because his thought is action" (Ai giovani d'Italila), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is unthinkable by God. It is not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word — that is to say, with His thought — and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized?"

"Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the voice that assured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is that the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched thereby, that our souls may serve as a nutriment to the Universal soul."

"It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in God, to wish that God may exist, to create God, in a word. To create Him, yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist. For to believe in God is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He first creates us. It is He who is continually creating Himself."

"There is nothing truly real, save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves and desires, save consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it."

"Love is a contradiction if there is no God."

"Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs."

"Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march and it time of war," says Robertson Smith in The Prophets of Israel, "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national organization, centering in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as a host of Jehovah. the very name of Israel is martial, and means 'God (El) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwé Cebāôth — the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in time of peace.""

"Not by way of reason, but only by way of love and suffering, do we come to the living God, the human God. Reason rather separates us from Him. We cannot first know Him in order that afterward we may love Him; we must begin by loving Him, longing for Him, hungering after Him, before knowing Him. The knowledge of God proceeds from the love of God, and this love has little or nothing of the rational in it. For God is indefinable. To seek to define Him is to seek to confine Him within the limits of our mind — that is to say, to kill Him. In so far as we attempt to define Him, there rises up before us — Nothingness."

"Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavor to explain — light, electricity, or universal gravitation — and only so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. In like manner the idea of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as it enables us to explain that which by means of it we endeavor to explain — the essence and existence of the Universe — and only so long as these cannot be explained in any other way. And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the idea of God, the supreme petitio principii, is valueless."

"But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air on the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even if it did not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be directly aware of it, and above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and even though the idea of God does not enable us to explain either the existence or essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And the feeling, mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this — this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance... to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him."

"I must avert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the container or thing which contains, personality the content or thing contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself — which is in a certain way the whole Universe — and that my individuality is my extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite."

"A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows."

"The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which by the gradual elevation of the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification, answers merely to the feeling that God should be a perfect man, that God should include in his nature the feminine element. The progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety, having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, ...has culminated in attributing to her the status of co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead."

"And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity into a Quaternity. If... in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? ...And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification with the Word."

"Not only are we unable to conceive of the full and living God as masculine simply, but we are unable to conceive of Him as individual simply, as the projection of a solitary I, an unsocial I, an I that is in reality an abstract I. My living I is an I that is really a We; my living personal I lives only in other, of other, and by other I's; I am sprung from a multitude of ancestors. I carry them within me in extract, and at the same time I carry within me, potentially, a multitude of descendants, and God, the projection of my I to the infinite — or rather I, the projection of God to the finite — must also be a multitude. Hence, in order to save the personality of God — that is to say, in order to save the living God — faith's need — the need of the feeling and the imagination — of conceiving Him and feeling Him as possessed of a certain internal multiplicity."

"And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And he is in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself creating the longing for Himself."

"And He is the God of the humble, for in the words of the Apostle, God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty (I Cor. i. 27) And God is in each of us in the measure in which one feels Him and loves Him. "If of two men," says Kierkegaard, "one prays to the true God without sincerity of heart, and the other prays to the an idol with all the passion of an infinite yearning, it is the first who really prays to the idol, while the second really prays to God." It would be better to say that the true God is He to whom man truly prays and whom man truly desires. And there may even be a truer revelation in superstition itself than in theology."

"In the vast all of the Universe, must there be this unique anomaly — a consciousness that knows itself, loves itself and feels itself, joined to an organism which can only live within such and such degrees of heat, a merely transitory phenomenon? No, it is not mere curiosity that inspires the wish to know whether or not the stars are inhabited by living organisms, by consciousness akin to our own, and a profound longing enters into that dream that our souls shall pass from star to star through the vast spaces of the heavens, in an infinite series of transmigrations. The feeling of the divine makes us wish and believe that everything is animated, that consciousness, in a greater or less degree, extends through everything. We wish not only to save ourselves, but to save the world from nothingness. And therefore God. Such is his finality as we feel it."

"Is there not therefore rational necessity, but vital anguish that impels us to believe in God. And to believe in God — I must reiterate it yet again — is, before all and above all, to feel a hunger for God, a hunger for divinity, to be sensible to his lack and absence, to wish that God may exist. And it is the wish to save the human finality of the Universe. For one might even come to resign oneself to being absorbed by God, if it be that our consciousness is based upon Consciousness, if consciousness is the end of the Universe."

"To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if he existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness."

"To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be."

"The intellectual world is divided into two classes — dilettantes, on the one hand, and pedants, on the other."

"In the root of the word "faith" itself... there is implicit the idea of confidence, of surrender to the will of another, to a person. Confidence is placed only in persons. We trust in Providence, which we perceive as something personal and conscious, not in Fate, which is something impersonal. And thus it is in the person who tells us the truth, in the person that gives us hope, that we believe, not directly or immediately in truth itself or in hope itself."

"Perhaps there is nobody who would sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their religious faith. Indeed, it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a theoretical truth, the process in which the will merely sets in motion our faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will — it is a movement of the soul towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards something that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that makes us live."

"Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent upon reason, has its well spring and source of power elsewhere, in something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of reason lead to nothing but affliction of the spirit. ...And in truth we wish to live."

"Nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away, for in some way or another everything is perpetuated; and everything, after passing through time, returns to eternity."

"Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him: You have to breathe me in order to live!"

"We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire consciousness of itself, to be itself — for to be oneself is to know oneself — to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at the same time that it remains a prisoner of it."

"Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God — these are never satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and all other consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself; it seeks to be God. And matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing, its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and matter answers: I wish not to be!"

"The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavor to to liberate God from brute matter, to endeavor to give consciousness to everything, to spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious, that the Word may become life."

"Religion is better described than defined and better felt than described. But if there is any one definition that latterly has obtained acceptance, it is that of Schleiermacher, to the effect that religion consists in the simple feeling of a relationship of dependence upon something above us and a desire to establish relations with this mysterious power."

"When at the beginning of the so-called modern age, at the Renaissance, the pagan sense of religion came to life again, it took the concrete form in the knightly ideal with its codes of conduct of love and honor. But it was a paganism Christianized, baptized. "Woman — la donna — was the divinity enshrined within those savage breasts. Whosoever will investigate the memorials of primitive times will find this ideal of woman in its full force and purity; the Universe is woman."

"Jesus said that God was not the God of the dead, but of the living. And the other life is not, in fact, thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and transitory life."

"What objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For him who places himself outside of himself, none; but for him who lives and suffers and desires within himself — for him it is a question of life or death."

"Seek, therefore, thyself! But in finding oneself, does not one find one's own nothingness? ...Carlyle answers (Past and Present, book iii, chap. xi.). "The latest Gospel in the world is, Know thy work and do it. Know thyself: long enough has that poor self of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to know it, I believe! Think it thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like Hercules. That will be thine better plan." …and what is my work? — without thinking about myself, is to love God. ...And on the other hand, in loving God in myself, am I not loving myself more than God, am I not loving myself in God?"

"What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills without its tedium, and without death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam... And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of the eternal recurrence which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?"

"May we not imagine that possibly this earthly life of ours is to the other life what sleeping is to waking? May not all our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what? And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one day will awaken? Will He remember His dream?"

"But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual leveling-down — or, we might say, its death — appears to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature? — for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at the expense of the other?"

"May not the absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would die if it were realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope? And there is no place for hope once possession has been realized, for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others, but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth, whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?"

""God is just and punishes us; that is all we need to know; as far as we are concerned the rest is merely curiosity." Such was the conclusion of Lamennais (Essai, etc., partie, chap. vii.), an opinion shared by many others. Calvin also held the same view. But is there anyone content with this? Pure curiosity! — to call this load that well nigh crushes our heart pure curiosity!"

"May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to eternalize himself because he was evil? May we say that it is not believing in the other life which causes a man to be good, but rather that being good causes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil? These states belong to the sphere of ethics, not of religion; or rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and the being good [forgivable] though doing evil, to religion?"

"Shall we not perhaps be told, on the other hand, that if the sinner suffers an eternal punishment, it is because he does not cease to sin? — for the damned sin without ceasing. This however is no solution to the problem, which derives all its absurdity from the fact that punishment has been conceived as vindictiveness or vengeance, not as correction, and has been conceived after the fashion of barbarous peoples. And in the same way hell has been conceived as a sort of police institution, necessary in order to put fear into the world. And the worst of it is that it no longer intimidates, and therefore will have to be shut up."

"And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit of the tragedy, the very heart of it — the sacrifice of our own individual consciousness upon the alter of the perfected Human Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness. But is there really a tragedy? ...if we could succeed in understanding and feeling that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in surrendering ourselves to Him? Would the stream that flows into the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitterness of the salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its source? would it wish to return to the cloud which drew it life from the sea? is it not joy to feel itself absorbed?"

"And the soul, my soul at least, longs for something else, not absorption, not quietude, not peace, not appeasement, it longs ever to approach and never to arrive, it longs for the never-ending longing, for an eternal hope which is eternally renewed but never wholly fulfilled. And together with all this, it longs for an eternal lack of something and an eternal suffering. A suffering, a pain, thanks to which it grows without ceasing in consciousness and longing. Do not write upon the gate of heaven that sentence which Dante placed over the threshold of hell, Lasciate ogni speranza! [Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate: All hope abandon, ye who enter in] Do not destroy time!"

"Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope. Give us leave to live! The eternity that is like an eternal present, without memory and without hope, is death. Thus do ideas exist in the God-Idea, but not thus do men live in the living God, in the God-Man."

"An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal ascent. If there is an end to all suffering, however pure and spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end to all desire, what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him? And if there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall they not fall asleep?"

"Not without reason did he who had the right to do so speak of the foolishness of the cross. Foolishness, without a doubt, foolishness. And the American humorist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was not altogether wide of the mark in making one of the characters in his ingenious conversations say that he thought better of those who were confined in a lunatic asylum on account of religious mania than of those who, while professing the same religious principles, kept their wits and appeared to enjoy life very well outside the asylums. But those who are at large, are they not really, thanks to God, mad too? Are there not mild madnesses, which not only permit us to mix with our neighbors without danger to society, but which rather enable us to do so, for by means of them we are able to attribute a meaning and finality to life and society?"

"We must needs believe in the other life, in the eternal life beyond the grave. ...And we must needs believe in that other life, perhaps, in order that we may deserve it, in order that we may obtain it, for it may be that he neither deserves it nor will obtain it who does not passionately desire it above reason and, if need be, against reason."

"And above all, we must feel and act as if an endless continuation of our earthly life awaited us after death; and if it be that nothingness is the fate that awaits us we must not, in the words of Obermann, so act that it shall be a just fate."

"Warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we are dying of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost."

"The very same reason which one man may regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded by another man as a motive for shooting himself."

"Uncertainty, doubt, perpetual wrestling with the mystery of our final destiny, mental despair, and the lack of any solid and stable foundation, may be the basis of an ethic."

"He who bases or thinks he bases his conduct — his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action — upon a dogma or a principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honor of the human race."

"My conduct must be the best proof, the moral proof, of my supreme desire; and if I do not end by convincing myself, within the bounds of the ultimate and irremediable uncertainty of the truth of what I hope for, it is because my conduct is not sufficiently pure. Virtue, therefore, is not based upon dogma, but dogma upon virtue, and it is not faith that creates martyrs but martyrs who create faith. There is no security or repose — so far as security and repose are obtainable in this life, so essentially insecure and unreposeful — save in conduct that is passionately good."

"Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do His will — the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself" (John vii. 17); and there is a well known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the proof by keeping its precepts and commandments (Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, book viii., 43)."

"And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act so that in your own judgment and in the judgment of others you may merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die tomorrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to discover the finality that belongs to it — if indeed it has any finality — and to discover it by acting."

"More than a century ago, in 1804, in Letter XC of that series that constitutes the immense monody of his Obermann, Sénancour wrote the words which I have put at the head of this chapter — and of all the spiritual descendants of the patriarchal Rousseau, Sénancour was the most profound and intense; of all the men of heart and feeling that France has produced, not excluding Pascal, he was the most tragic. "Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if it is nothingness that awaits us, do not let us so act that it shall be a just fate." Change this sentence from it negative to the positive form — "And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate" — and you get the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist."

"Passion is like suffering, and like suffering it creates its object. It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something combustible to find the fire."

"Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be pedantry of logic, or of esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy."

"Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints."

"The philosophical thought of Kant, the supreme flower of the Germanic people, has its roots in the religious feeling of Luther, and it is not possible for Kantism, especially the practical part of it, to take root and bring forth flower and fruit in peoples who have not undergone the experience of the Reformation and who perhaps were incapable of experiencing it. Kantism is Protestant, and we Spaniards are fundamentally Catholic. And if Krause struck some roots here — more numerous and more permanent than is commonly supposed — it is because Krause has roots in pietism, and pietism, as Ritschl has demonstrated in his Geschichte des Pietismus, has specifically Catholic roots and may be described as the irruption, or rather the persistence of Catholic mysticism in the heart of Protestant rationalism. And this explains why not a few Catholic thinkers in Spain became followers of Krause."

"Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians."

"Over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, "How dieth the wise man? — as the fool" (ii 16)"

"The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to accept it and accept it as it is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the "trap." But it has been said by Calderón that "to seek to persuade a man that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not console him for them, but it is another misfortune in addition." And furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de Estella said (Vanidad del Mundo, cap. xxi.)"

"The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule."

"I have spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese, Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890, he wrote as follows: "An English statesman of the last century, who was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy for those who think. Very well then, if we are destined to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who feel, we would rather prefer this terrible, but noble destiny to that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that thinks and calculates, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and comically." …we twin-brothers of the Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry of feeling, but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible idea — namely that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically who put faith above reason."

"For the mockers are those who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery."

"Windelband, the historian of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (Was ist Philosophie? in the first volume of his Präludien) tells us that "the history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains an independent existence as a desire for knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval scholasticism upon which it endeavored to establish religious beliefs. But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this conflict?"

"The philosophy of the soul of my people appears to me as an expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of conflict between what the world is as scientific reason shows it to be and what we wish that it might be, as our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be found the explanation of what is usually said about us — namely, that we are fundamentally irreducible to Kultur — or in other words, that we refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to morality or ethics."

""And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so! ...I know very well it is madness to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills; but I know too that anyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better."

"The march, as ever, is toward the future, and he who marches is getting there, even though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the better way!..."

"I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution — learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was the offering of the Middle Ages."

"But the truth is that my work — I was going to say my mission — is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire."

"Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho at his side, inward and heroic too — and tell me if you find anything comic in the tragedy."

"And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all the theories and all the philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books; we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any Critique of Pure Reason."

"But Don Quixote was converted. Yes — and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us with his spirit — this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die."

"And the conversion of the other Don Quixote — he who was converted only to die — was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, and not his death or his conversion that immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for this crime of having been born. Felix culpa! And neither was his madness cured, but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence."

"This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness."

"And the other Don Quixote remained here among us, fighting with desperation. And does he not fight out of despair? ...But "despair is the master of possibilities," as we learn from Salazar y Torres (Elegir al enemigo, Act I.), and it is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. Spero quia absurdum [I hope because it is absurd], it ought to have been said, rather than credo [Credo quia absurdam — I believe because it is absurd]."

"The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane. Mundane — yes, a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi) — either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed are they who are easily befooled!"

"Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. "Then let him not make the demand," it will be said, "let him resign himself, let him accept life and truth as they are." But he does not accept them as they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows!... And he wishes, unhappy man, to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he sinks into despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke — that intellectual Don Quixote who escaped from the cloister — and became an awakener of sleeping souls (dormitantium animorum excubitor), as the ex-Dominican said of himself — he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane (insano) not because they do not know, but because they over-know (soprasanno).""

"But our Don Quixote, the inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title of king for the inscription written over the cross."

"I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still playing, in some interval between acts, we shall meet again. And we shall recognize one another. And forgive me if I have troubled you more than was needful and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took up my pen proposing to distract you from your distractions. And may God deny you peace, but give you glory!"

"And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity."

"I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to.""

"Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky."

"One of those leaders of what they call the social revolution has said that religion is the opiate of the people. Opium...opium...opium, yes. Let us give them opium so that they can sleep and dream."

"Your own philosophy condemns you and supports us."

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

"But the sense of humour remains healthy only when it deals with immediate issues and faces the obvious and surface irrationalities. It must move toward faith or sink into despair when the ultimate issues are raised. That is why there is laughter in the vestibule of the temple, the echo of laughter in the temple itself, but only faith and prayer, and no laughter, in the holy of holies."

"The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men."

"This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor."

"The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control. Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the good of the whole, it must be destroyed by coercive methods and these will always run the peril of introducing new forms of injustice in place of those abolished."

"Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own."

"Reason tends to check selfish impulses and to grant the satisfaction of legitimate impulses in others."

"The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends."

"While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves."

"Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life. Reason may extend and stabilise, but it does not create, the capacity to affirm other life than his own."

"The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power."

"The individual or the group which organizes any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself."

"The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks."

"The hope that the internal enemies will all be destroyed and that the new society will create only men who will be in perfect accord with the collective will of society, and will not seek personal advantage in the social process, is romantic in its interpretation of the possibilities of human nature and in its mystical glorification of the anticipated automatic mutuality in the communist society. ...In all these prophecies pure sentimentality obscures the fact that there can never be a perfect mutuality of interest between individuals who perform different functions in society... Man will always be imaginative enough to enlarge his needs beyond minimum requirements and selfish enough to feel the pressure of his needs more than the needs of others. Every society will have to maintain methods of arbitrating conflicting needs to the end of history; and in that process those who are shrewder will gain some advantage over the simple, even if they should lack special instruments of power."

"Human beings are endowed by nature with both selfish and unselfish impulses."

"The extension of human sympathies [toward ever-larger communities] has... resulted in the creation of larger units of conflict without abolishing conflict. So civilization has become a device for delegating the vices of individuals to larger and larger communities."

"All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion."

"The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience. They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit. The fact that the hypocrisy of man's group behavior... expresses itself not only in terms of self-justification but in terms of moral justification of human behavior in general, symbolizes one of the tragedies of the human spirit: its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command."

"The naïve faith of the proletarian is the faith of the man of action. Rationality belongs to the cool observers. There is of course an element of illusion in the faith of the proletarian, as there is in all faith. But it is a necessary illusion, without which some truth is obscured. The inertia of society is so stubborn that no one will move against it, if he cannot believe that it can be more easily overcome than is actually the case."

"A Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning. (Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman")"

"In the simple and decadent individualism of the Oxford group movement there is no understanding of the fact that the man of power is always to a certain degree an anti-Christ. "All power," said Lord Acton with cynical realism, "corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely." If the man of power were to take a message of absolute honesty and absolute love seriously he would lose his power, or would divest himself of it. This is not to imply that the world can get along without power and that it is not preferable that men of conscience should wield it rather than scoundrels. But if men of power had not only conscience but also something of the gospel's insight into the intricacies of social sin in the world, they would know that they could never extricate themselves completely from the sinfulness of power, even while they were wielding it ostensibly for the common good. (Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman")"

"The Oxford group movement, imagining itself the mediator of Christ's salvation in a catastrophic age, is really an additional evidence of the decay in which we stand. Its religion manages to combine bourgeois complacency with Christian contrition in a manner which makes the former dominant. Its morality is a religious expression of a decadent individualism. Far from offering us a way out of our difficulties it adds to the general confusion. This is not the gospel's message of judgement and hope to the world. It is bourgeois optimism, individualism and expressing itself in the guise of religion. No wonder the rather jittery plutocrats of our day open their spacious summer homes to its message! (Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman")"

"An irrevocable defeat of a socio-historical cause which gives meaning to the life of the individual must create a complete sense of meaninglessness unless the individual is sustained by a religion which interprets such defeats from the aspect of the eternal."

"The final sin of man, said Luther truly, is his unwillingness to concede that he is a sinner. The significant contribution of modern culture to this perennial human inclination lies in the number of plausible reasons which it was able to adduce in support of man's good opinion of himself."

"There is no level of moral achievement upon which man can have or actually has an easy conscience."

"Man does not know himself truly except as he knows himself confronted by God. Only in that confrontation does he become aware of his full stature and freedom and of the evil in him."

"Human existence is obviously distinguished from animal life by its qualified participation in creation. Within limits it breaks the forms of nature and creates new configurations of vitality. Its transcendence over natural process offers it the opportunity of interfering with the established forms and unities of vitality as nature knows them."

"The modern man is . . . certain about his essential virtue . . . [and since] he does not see that he has a freedom of spirit which transcends both nature and reason . . . [he] is unable to understand the real pathos of his defiance of nature's and reason's laws. He always imagines himself betrayed into this defiance either by some accidental corruption in his past history or by some sloth of reason. Hence he hopes for redemption, either through a program of social reorganization or by some scheme of education."

"The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries. Historical communities are, in short, more deeply involved in nature and time than the individual."

"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time, Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, Taking, as Jesus did, This sinful world as it is, Not as I would have it, Trusting that You will make all things right, If I surrender to Your will, So that I may be reasonably happy in this life, And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen."

"God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

"Man is the kind of animal who cannot merely live. If he lives at all, he is bound to seek the realization of his true nature; and to his true nature belongs his fulfilment in the lives of others. The will to live is thus transmuted into the will to self-realization; and self-realization involves self-giving in relation to others. When this desire for self-realization is fully explored, it becomes apparent that it is subject to the paradox that the highest form of self-realization is the consequence of self-giving, but that it cannot be the intended consequence without being prematurely limited. Thus the will to live is finally transmuted into its opposite in the sense that only in self-giving can the self be fulfilled, for: “he that findeth his life shall lose it and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Reinhold Niebuhr The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness 1945 p. 20-21"

"The fact that the prevailing mood of modern culture was able to transmute the original pessimism of romanticism into an optimistic creed proves the power of this mood. Only occasionally the original pessimism erupts in full vigor, as in the thought of a Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. The subjugation of romantic pessimism, together with the transmutation of Marxist establishes historical optimism far beyond the confines of modern rationalism. Though there are minor dissonances the whole chorus of modern culture learned to sing the new song of hope in remarkable harmony. The redemption of mankind, by whatever means, was assured for the future. It was, in fact, assured by the future."

"There were experiences in previous centuries which might well have challenged this unqualified optimism. But the expansion of man's power over nature proceeded at such a pace that all doubts were quieted, allowing the nineteenth century to become the “century of hope” and to express the modern mood in its most extravagant terms. History, refusing to move by the calendar, actually permitted the nineteenth century to indulge its illusions into the twentieth. Then came the deluge. Since 1914 one tragic experience has followed another, as if history had been designed to refute the vain delusions of modern man."

"[The value and dignity of the individual] is threatened whenever it is assumed that individual desires, hopes and ideals can be fitted with frictionless harmony into the collective purposes of man. The individual is not discrete. He cannot find his fulfillment outside of the community; but he also cannot find fulfillment completely within society. In so far as he finds fulfillment within society he must abate his individual ambitions. He must 'die to self' if he would truly live. In so far as he finds fulfillment beyond every historical community he lives his life in painful tension with even the best community, sometimes achieving standards of conduct which defy the standards of the community with a resolute "we must obey God rather than man.""

"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about a particular degree of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized."

"Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning."

"Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb."

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

"The separation of church and state is necessary partly because if religion is good then the state shouldn't interfere with the religious vision or with the religious prophet. There must be a realm of truth beyond political competence, that's why there must be a separation of churches, but if religion is bad and a bad religion is one that gives an ultimate sanctity to some particular cause. Then religion mustn't interfere with the state — so one of the basic Democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state. ... A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie."

"Not necessarily every standard that every church tries to enforce upon the society is from the society's standpoint a good standard."

"We don't properly discriminate. We never discriminate properly when we're dealing with another group and one of the big problems about religion is that religious people don't know that they are probably as flagrant in these misjudgments as irreligious people."

"We Protestants ought to humbly confess that the theater and the sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than, on the whole, the Protestant Church in certain type, in certain parts of the nation."

"The people that weren't traditionally religious, conventionally religious, had a religion of their own in my youth. These were liberals who believed in the idea of progress or they were Marxists. Both of these secular religions have broken down. The nuclear age has refuted the idea of progress and Marxism has been refuted by Stalinism. Therefore people have returned to the historic religion. But now when the historic religions give trivial answers to these very tragic questions of our day, when an evangelist says, for instance, we mustn't hope for a summit meeting, we must hope in Christ without spelling out what this could mean in our particular nuclear age. This is the irrelevant answer, when another Evangelist says if America doesn't stop being selfish, it will be doomed. This is also a childish answer because nations are selfish and the question about America isn't whether we will be selfish or unselfish, but will we be sufficiently imaginative to pass the Reciprocal Trade Acts."

"I know that the Communists are atheistic and godless, but I don't think that that's what's primarily the matter with them. What's primarily the matter with them is that they worship a false god. That's much more dangerous than when people don't believe anything; they may be confused, they may not have a sense of the meaning of life, but they're not dangerous. The fanatic is dangerous. The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they're going to do and guarantees them victory; that's why they're fanatic."

"The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment. Nonetheless, the human situation is so, and this is why I think that the Christian faith is right as against simple forms of secularism. That it believes that there is in man a radical freedom, and this freedom is creative but it is also destructive — and there's nothing that prevents this from being both creative and destructive. That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence."

"Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual — this freedom is necessary for the individual."

"Despotism, which we regard with abhorrence, is rather too plausible in decaying feudal, agrarian, pastoral societies. That's why we must expect to have many a defeat before we'll have an ultimate victory in this contest with Communism."

"My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits — the relevant fruits — are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends."

"It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of ."

"One of the fundamental points about religious humility is you say you don't know about the ultimate judgment. It's beyond your judgment. And if you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion."

""Dread or anxiety," he explained, "is the psychological condition which precedes sin, comes as near as possible to it, and is as provocative as possible of dread, but without explaining sin, which breaks forth first in the qualitative leap." Kierkegaard saw this "sickness unto death" as an inherent factor in human existence, and he taught that a "synthesis" was needed, by which he meant a vital relationship of man with God by which man may resolve his inner conflicts and live at peace with himself. Influenced by these thoughts of Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr has developed the thesis that man is a creature of two dimensions: "He stands at the juncture of nature and spirit." As finite, man is a part of nature, subject to its laws and its vicissitudes; but as self-conscious, man transcends himself, being capable of viewing himself as object, and thus is a creature of spirit. As part of nature he is determined; as spirit he is above nature and free. It is natural to man, therefore, to be in tension between the two; that tension is his anxiety, which is not sin but tempts to sin."

"The reverential awe his words evoked reflects, in part, the shallowness and superficiality of the reigning intellectual culture. ... But to explain his status as "official establishment theologian" we must also attend to the lessons drawn from his exhortations. ... The inescapable "taint of sin on all historical achievements," the necessity to make "conscious choices of evil for the sake of good"—these are soothing doctrines for those preparing to "face the responsibilities of power," or in plain English, to set forth on a life of crime, to "play hardball" in their efforts to "maintain this position of disparity" between our overwhelming wealth and the poverty of others, in George Kennan's trenchant phrase as he urged in a secret document of 1948 that we put aside "idealistic slogans" and prepare "to deal in straight power concepts." Herein lies the secret of Niebuhr's enormous influence and success."

"Traditionally, the idea of the frailty of man led to the demand for obedience to ordained authority. But Niebuhr rejected that ancient conservative argument. Ordained authority, he showed, is all the more subject to the temptations of self-interest, self-deception and self-righteousness. Power must be balanced by power. He persuaded me and many of my contemporaries that original sin provides a far stronger foundation for freedom and self-government than illusions about human perfectibility. Niebuhr's analysis was grounded in the Christianity of Augustine and Calvin, but he had, nonetheless, a special affinity with secular circles. His warnings against utopianism, messianism and perfectionism strike a chord today. We are beginning in this distraught decade to remember what we should never have forgotten: We cannot play the role of God to history, and we must strive as best we can to attain decency, clarity and proximate justice in an ambiguous world. Niebuhr the man? He was high-spirited, great-hearted, devoid of pomposity and pretense, endlessly curious about ideas and personalities, vigorous in his enthusiasms and criticisms, filled with practical wisdom and, for all his robust ego, a man of endearing humility."

"At Swanwick when Niebuhr had quit it A young man exclaimed "I have hit it! Since I cannot do right, I must find out tonight The right sin to commit and commit it.""

"Reinhold Niebuhr is a man of God, but a man of the world as well. Dr. Niebuhr would seem to be saying that if a nation would survive and remain free, its citizens must use religion as a source of self-criticism, not as a source of self-righteousness."

"Niebuhr updated what the Lutheran tradition calls the elenctic use of the law: the function of God's law is first to show us that we are sinners. Luther had made this claim about the Ten Commandments and other laws. Niebuhr applied it to the Sermon on the Mount; the function of these teachings of Jesus is to show us that we need forgiveness."

"The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can — if I may put it this way — find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it."

"After a considerable walk through the forest, where I became acquainted with several of the little lakes I am so fond of, I came to Hestehaven and Lake Carl. Here is one of the most beautiful regions I have ever seen. The countryside is somewhat isolated and slopes steeply down to the lake, but with the beech forests growing on either side, it is not barren. A growth of rushes forms the background and the lake itself the foreground; a fairly large part of the lake is clear, but a still larger part is overgrown with the large green leaves of the waterlily, under which the fish seemingly try to hide but now and then peek out and flounder about on the surface in order to bathe in sunshine. The land rises on the opposite side, a great beech forest, and in the morning light the lighted areas make a marvelous contrast to the shadowed areas. The church bells call to prayer, but not in a temple made by human hands. If the birds do not need to be reminded to praise God, then ought men not be moved to prayer outside of the church, in the true house of God, where heaven's arch forms the ceiling of the church, where the roar of the storm and the light breezes take the place of the organ's bass and treble, where the singing of the birds make up the congregational hymns of praise, where echo does not repeat the pastor's voice as in the arch of the stone church, but where everything resolves itself in an endless antiphony — Hillerød, July 25, 1835"

"In order to learn true humility (I use this expression to describe the state of mind under discussion), it is good for a person to withdraw from the turmoil of the world (we see that Christ withdrew when the people wanted to proclaim him king as well as when he had to walk the thorny path), for in life either the depressing or the elevating impression is too dominant for a true balance to come about. Here, of course, individuality is very decisive, for just as almost every philosopher believes he has found the truth, just as almost every poet believes he has reached Mount Parnassus, just so we find on the other hand many who link their lives entirely to another, like a parasite to a plant, live in him, die in him (for example, the Frenchman in relation to Napoleon). But in the heart of nature, where a person, free from life's often nauseating air, breathes more freely, here the soul opens willingly to every noble impression. Here one comes out as nature's master, but he also feels that something higher is manifested in nature, something he must bow down before; he feels a need to surrender to this power that rules it all. (I, of course, would rather not speak of those who see nothing higher in nature than substance — people who really regard heaven as a cheese-dish cover and men as maggots who live inside it.) Here he feels himself great and small at one and the same time, and feels it without going so far as the Fichtean remark (in his Die Bestimmung des Menschen) about a grain of sand constituting the world, a statement not far removed from madness."

"It will be easy for us once we receive the ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many are there who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?"

"It is as useless for a person to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize its existence and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Not until a person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning."

"What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die."

"It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat — as is the case with the better artists. But it does not seem right that they stop with the historical themes already given and, so to speak, think that only these are suitable for poetic treatment, because these particular themes, which intrinsically are no more poetic than others, are now again animated and inspirited by a great poetic nature. In this case the artists advance by marching on the spot. — Why are modern heroes and the like not just as poetic? Is it because there is so much emphasis on clothing the content in order that the formal aspect can be all the more finished?"

"How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate. (Dialectic - Dispute)"

"In vain do individual great men seek to mint new concepts and to set them in circulation — it is pointless. They are used for only a moment, and not by many, either, and they merely contribute to making the confusion even worse, for one idea seems to have become the fixed idea of the age: to get the better of one's superior. If the past may be charged with a certain indolent self-satisfaction in rejoicing over what it had, it would indeed be a shame to make the same charge against the present age (the minuet of the past and the gallop of the present). Under a curious delusion, the one cries out incessantly that he has surpassed the other, just as the Copenhageners, with philosophic visage, go out to Dyrehausen "in order to see and observe," without remembering that they themselves become objects for the others, who have also gone out simply to see and observe. Thus there is the continuous leap-frogging of one over the other — "on the basis of the immanent negativity of the concept", as I heard a Hegelian say recently, when he pressed my hand and made a run preliminary to jumping. — When I see someone energetically walking along the street, I am certain that his joyous shout, "I am coming over," is to me — but unfortunately I did not hear who was called (this actually happened); I will leave a blank for the name, so everyone can fill in an appropriate name."

"I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself."

"One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states). How many people are just adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs? How few are substantives, active verbs, how many are copulas? Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular."

"There is a contrast of primary significance between Augustine and Pelagius. The former crushes everything in order to rebuild it again. The other addresses himself to man as he is. The first system, therefore, in respect to Christianity, falls into three stages: creation – the fall and a consequent condition of death and impotence; a new creation – whereby man is placed in a position where he can choose; and then, if he chooses – Christianity. The other system addresses itself to man as he is (Christianity fits into the world). From this is seen the significance of the theory of inspiration for the first system; from this also is seen the relationship between the synergistic and the semipelagian conflict. It is the same question, only that the syngeristic struggle has its presupposition in the new creation of the Augustinian system."

"There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves."

"God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but He does what is still more wonderful: He makes saints out of sinners."

"Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. ... it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it's good to be here."

"There must have been many who had a relationship to Jesus similar to that of Barabbas (his name was Jesus Barrabas). The Danish "Barrabas" is about the same as "N.N." [Mr. X or John Doe], filius patris, his father's son. — It is too bad, however, that we do not know anything more about Barrabas; it seems to me that in many ways he could have become a counterpart to the Wandering Jew. The rest of his life must have taken a singular turn. God knows whether or not he became a Christian. — It would be a poetic motif to have him, gripped by Christ's divine power, step forward and witness for him."

"If someone were to expound that godliness is to belong to childhood in the temporal sense and thus dwindle and die with the years as childhood does, is to be a happy frame of mind that cannot be preserved but only recollected; if someone were to expound that repentance as a weakness of old age accompanies the decline of one's powers, when the senses are dulled, when sleep no longer strengthens but increases lethargy-this would be ungodliness and foolishness."

"Knowledge can in part be set aside, and one can then go further in order to collect new; the natural scientist can set aside insects and flowers and then go further, but if the existing person sets aside the decision in existence, it is eo ipso lost, and he is changed."

"Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself; do not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way, been prevented from participating actively in it, and that you are superflous in the obtruse eyes of a busy world, above all, do not permit this to deprive you of your idea of yourself, as if your life, if lived in inwardness, did not have just as much meaning and worth as that of any human being in the eyes of all-wise Governance, and considerably more than the busy, busiest haste of busy-ness - busy with wasting life and losing itself."

"Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent — then shall the rest be added unto you."

"I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians. No, my contention has been this: I know what Christianity is, my imperfection as a Christian I myself fully recognize — but I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be, I should think, to every man's interest, whether he be a Christian or not, whether his intention is to accept Christianity or to reject it. But I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one. Indeed, the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, who sets the problem ‘about becoming a Christian’, does exactly the opposite: he denies that he is a Christian and concedes this claim to the others — the remotest possible remove, surely, from condemning others! And I myself have from the first clearly asserted, again and again repeated, that I am ‘without authority’. My tactics were, by God's aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is — even though not one single person should be induced to enter into it, and though I myself might have to give up being a Christian (in which case I should have felt obliged to make open admission of the fact). On the other hand, my tactics were these: instead of giving the impression, in however small a degree, that there are such difficulties about Christianity that an apology for it is needed if men are to be persuaded to enter into it, rather to represent it as a thing so infinitely lofty, as in truth it is, that the apology belongs in another place, is required, that is to say, of us for the fact that we venture to call ourselves Christians, or it transforms itself into a contrite confession that we have God to thank if we merely assume to regard ourselves as a Christian. But neither must this ever be forgotten: Christianity is just as lenient as it is austere, just as lenient, that is to say, infinitely lenient. When the infinite requirement is heard and upheld, heard and upheld in all its infinitude, then grace is offered, or rather grace offers itself, and to it the individual, each for himself, as I also do, can flee for refuge."

"It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite."

"Aristotle's view that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt, is a positive point of departure for philosophy. Indeed, the world will no doubt learn that it does not do to begin with the negative, and the reason for success up to the present is that philosophers have never quite surrendered to the negative and thus have never earnestly done what they have said. They merely flirt with doubt."

"To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him."

"I may live for thirty years, or perhaps forty, or maybe just one day: therefore I have resolved to use this day, or whatever I have to say in these thirty years or whatever I have to say this one day I may have to live — I have resolved to use it in such a way that if not one day in my whole past life has been used well, this one by the help of God will be. JP VIII 1 A 533"

"It seems to be my destiny to discourse on truth, insofar as I discover it, in such a way that all possible authority is simultaneously demolished. Since I am incompetent and extremely undependable in men's eyes, I speak the truth and thereby place them in the contradiction from which they can be extricated only by appropriating the truth themselves. A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel."

"A man who for a long time has gone around hiding a secret becomes mentally deranged. At this point one would imagine that his secret would have to come out, but despite his derangement his soul still sticks to its hideout, and those around him become even more convinced that the false story he told to deceive them is the truth. He is healed of his insanity, knows everything that has gone on, and thereby perceives that nothing has been betrayed. Was this gratifying to him or not; he might wish to have disposed of his secret in his madness; it seems as if there were a fate which forced him to remain in his secret and would not let him go away from it. Or was it for the best, was there a guardian spirit who helped him keep his secret."

"Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away."

"Once in his early youth a man allowed himself to be so far carried away in an overwrought irresponsible state as to visit a prostitute. It is all forgotten. Now he wants to get married. Then anxiety stirs. He is tortured day and night with the thought that he might possibly be a father, that somewhere in the world there could be a created being who owed his life to him. He cannot share his secret with anyone; he does not even have any reliable knowledge of the fact. –For this reason the incident must have involved a prostitute and taken place in the wantonness of youth; had it been a little infatuated or an actual seduction, it would be hard to imagine that he could know nothing about it, but now this this very ignorance is the basis of his agitated torment. On the other hand, precisely because of the rashness of the whole affair, his misgivings do not really start until he actually falls in love."

"What is asked of a man that he may be able to pray for his enemies? To pray for one's enemies is the hardest thing of all. That is why it exasperates us so much in our present day situation."

"I have never worked as hard as now. I go for a brief walk in the morning. Then I come home and sit in my room without interruption until about three o'clock. My eyes can barely see. Then with my walking stick in hand I sneak off to the restaurant, but am so weak that I believe that if somebody were to call out my name, I would keel over and die. Then I go home and begin again. In my indolence during the past months I had pumped up a veritable shower bath, and now I have pulled the string and the ideas are cascading down upon me: healthy, happy, merry, gay, blessed children born with ease and yet all of them with the birthmark of my personality."

"Consciousness presupposes itself, and asking about its origin is an idle and just as sophistical a question as that old one, "What came first, the fruit-tree or the stone? Wasn't there a stone out of which came the first fruit-tree? Wasn't there a fruit-tree from which came the first stone? Journals and Papers, Hannay, 1996 1843 IVA49"

"So it happens at times that a person believes that he has a world-view, but that there is yet one particular phenomenon that is of such a nature that it baffles the understanding, and that he explains differently and attempts to ignore in order not to harbor the thought that this phenomenon might overthrow the whole view, or that his reflection does not possess enough courage and resolution to penetrate the phenomenon with his world-view."

"Even Plato assumes that the genuinely perfect condition of man means no sex distinction (and how strange this is for people like Feuerbach who are so occupied with affirming sex-differentiation, regarding which they would do best to appeal to paganism). He assumes that originally there was only the masculine (and when there is no thought of femininity, sex-distinction is undifferentiated), but through degeneration and corruption the feminine appeared. He assumes that base and cowardly men became women in death, but he still gives them hope of being elevated again to masculinity. He thinks that in the perfect life the masculine, as originally, will be the only sex, that is, that sex-distinction is a matter of indifference. So it is in Plato, and this, the idea of the state notwithstanding, was the culmination of his philosophy. How much more so, then, the Christian view."

"Det er ganske sandt, hvad Philosophien siger, at Livet maa forstaaes baglænds. Men derover glemmer man den anden Sætning, at det maa leves forlænds."

"Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself."

"But this I thought was the meaning of life, that the individual shook off the habit of accepting the favors of difference, should that be tempting, steeled himself against its humiliation, should that weigh down on him, in order to find the universal, what is common to all human beings, to concern oneself only with that. Oh! How beautiful to lose oneself in this way. But then I thought again that in the having of this concern the meaning of life was to be concerned for oneself as if the particular individual were all there was. Oh! How beautiful thus to find oneself in the universal! If the universal is the rule then the individual is the paradigm [corrected from demand]; if the universal is the demand then the universal is the fulfillment; if the universal is everything, if the universal says everything, then the particular individual believes that the everything is said about him-him alone. So if the place and context here did not require signature, none would be needed, for again it is infinitely inconsequential who has said it (as though the favored one said it, the one who was wronged being in no position to say it, since after all they all have it in them to do it)."

"If I were to imagine a girl deeply in love and some man who wanted to use all his reasoning powers and knowledge to ridicule her passion, well, there's surely no question of the enamoured girl having to choose between keeping her wealth and being ridiculed. No, but if some extremely cool and calculating man calmly told the young girl, "I will explain to you what love is," and the girl admitted that everything he told her was quite correct, I wonder if she wouldn't choose his miserable common sense rather than her wealth?"

"Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die."

"What the age needs is not a genius — it has had geniuses enough, but a martyr, who in order to teach men to obey would himself be obedient unto death. What the age needs is awakening. And therefore someday, not only my writings but my whole life, all the intriguing mystery of the machine will be studied and studied. I never forget how God helps me and it is therefore my last wish that everything may be to his honour."

"Father in heaven, when the thought of thee awakens in our soul, let it not waken as an agitated bird which flutters confusedly about, but as a child waking from sleep with a celestial smile."

"It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox."

"But on the other hand, the understanding, reflection, is also a gift of God. What shall one do with it, how dispose of it if one is not to use it? And if one then uses it in fear and trembling not for one's own advantage but to serve the truth, if one uses it that way in fear and trembling and furthermore believing that it still is God who determines the issue in its eternal significance, venturing to trust in him, and with unconditional obedience yielding to what he makes use of it: is this not fear of God and serving God the way a person of reflection can, in the somewhat different way than the spontaneously immediate person, but perhaps more ardently. But if this is the case, does not a maieutic element enter into the relation to other man or to various other men. The maieutic is really only the expression for a superiority between man and man. That is exists cannot be denied-but existence presses far more powerfully upon the superior one precisely because he is a maieutic (because he has the responsibility) than upon the other. As far as I am concerned, there has been no lack of witnesses. All my upbuilding discourses are in fact in the form of direct communication. Consequently there can be a question only about this, something that has occupied me for a long time (already back in earlier journals): should I for one definitely explain myself as author, what I declare myself to be, how I from the beginning understood myself to be a religious author. But now is not the time to do it; I am also somewhat strained at the moment, I need more physical recreation."

"The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins."

"Job endured everything — until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient."

"A line by Thomas à Kempis which perhaps could be used as a motto sometime. He says of Paul: Therefore he turned everything over to God, who knows all, and defended himself solely by means of patience and humility . . . . He did defend himself now and then so that the weak would not be offended by his silence. Book III, chapter 36, para. 2, or in my little edition, p. 131."

"But it never occurred to him to want to be a philosopher, or dedicate himself to Speculation; he was still too fickle for that. True, he was not drawn now to one thing and now to another – thinking was and remained his passion – but he still lacked the self-discipline required for acquiring a deeper coherence. Both the significant and the insignificant attracted him equally as points of departure for his pursuits; the result was not of great consequence – only the movements of thought as such interested him. Sometimes he noticed that he reached one and the same conclusion from quite different starting points, but this did not in any deeper sense engage his attention. His delight was always just to be pressing on; wherever he suspected a labyrinth, he had to find the way. Once he had started, nothing could bring him to a halt. If he found the going difficult and became tired of it before he ought, he would adopt a very simple remedy – he would shut himself up in his room, make everything as festive as possible, and then say loudly and clearly: I will do it. He had learned from his father that one can do what one wills, and his father's life had not discredited this theory. Experiencing this had given Johannes indescribable pride; that there could be something one could not do when one willed it was unbearable to him. But his pride did not in the least indicate weakness of will, for when he had uttered these energetic words he was ready for anything; he then had a still higher goal – to penetrate the intricacies of the problem by force of will. This again was an adventure that inspired him. Indeed his life was in this way always adventurous. He needed no woods and wanderings for his adventures, but only what he possessed – a little room with one window."

"He fixed his definition thus: reflection is the possibility of the relation, consciousness is the relation, the first form of which is contradiction. He soon noted that, as a result, the categories of reflection are always dichotomous. For example ideality and reality, soul and body, to recognize – the true, to will – the good, to love – the beautiful, God and the world, and so on, these are categories of reflection. In reflection, these touch each other in such a way that a relation becomes possible. The categories of consciousness, on the other hand, are trichotomous, as language itself indicates, for when I say I am conscious of this, I mention a trinity. Consciousness is mind and spirit, and the remarkable thing is that when in the world of mind or spirit one is divided, it always becomes three and never two. Consciousness, therefore, presupposes reflection. If this were not true it would be impossible to explain doubt. True, language seems to contest this, since in most languages, as far as he knew, the word ‘doubt’ is etymologically related to the word ‘two’. Yet in his opinion this only indicated the presupposition of doubt, especially because it was clear to him that as soon as I, as spirit, become two, I am eo ipso three. If there were nothing but dichotomies, doubt would not exist, for the possibility of doubt lies precisely in that third which places the two in relation to each other. One cannot therefore say that reflection produces doubt, unless one expressed oneself backwards; one must say that doubt presupposes reflection, though not in a temporal sense. Doubt arises through a relation between two, but for this to take place the two must exist, although doubt, as a higher expression, comes before rather than afterwards.""

"The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity. Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony."

"Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed."

"The Sophist demonstrates that everything is true and nothing is true."

"The world is rejuvenated, but as Heine so wittily remarked, it was rejuvenated by romanticism to such a degree that it became a baby again."

"Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals."

"Irony is a qualification of subjectivity."

"Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency."

"There was a time, and not so long ago, when one could score a success also here with a bit of irony, which compensated for all other deficiencies and helped one get through the world rather respectably, gave one the appearance of being cultured, of having a perspective on life, an understanding of the world, and to the initiated marked one as a member of an extensive intellectual freemasonry. Occasionally we still meet a representative of that vanished age who has preserved that subtle, sententious, equivocally divulging smile, that air of an intellectual courtier with which he has made his fortune in his youth and upon which he had built his whole future in the hope that he had overcome the world. Ah, but it was an illusion! His watchful eye looks in vain for a kindred soul, and if his days of glory were not still a fresh memory for a few, his facial expression would be a riddle to the contemporary age, in which he lives as a stranger and foreigner. Our age demands more; it demands, if not lofty pathos then at least loud pathos, if not speculation then at least conclusions, if not truth then at least persuasion, if not integrity then at least protestations of integrity, if not feeling then at least verbosity of feelings. Therefore it also coins a totally different kind of privileged faces. It will not allow the mouth to be defiantly compressed or the upper lip to quiver mischievously; it demands that the mouth be open, for how, indeed, could one imagine a true and genuine patriot who is not delivering speeches; how could one visualize a profound thinker's dogmatic face without a mouth able to swallow the whole world; how could one picture a virtuoso on the cornucopia of the living world without a gaping mouth? It does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person's having the daft idea of going through life alone-this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community."

"How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech."

"Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men's thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God. Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy. They do their duty, these shopkeeping souls, but they clip the coin a trifle, like the Jews; they think that even if the Lord keeps ever so careful a set of books, they may still cheat Him a little. Out upon them! This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings; they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin."

"Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate."

"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."

"Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it. Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way. Trust a girl, and you will regret it. Do not trust her, and you will also regret it. Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. Whether you trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it. Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. Whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life."

"Married people pledge love for each other throughout eternity. Well, now, that is easy enough but does not mean very much, for if one is finished with time one is probably finished with eternity. If, instead of saying "throughout eternity," the couple would say, "until Easter, until next May Day," then what they say would make some sense, for then they would be saying something and also something they perhaps could carry out."

"You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father."

"If one prefers to have little with blessing, to have truth with concern, to suffer instead of exulting over imagined victories, then one presumably will not be disposed to praise the knowledge, as if what it bestows were at all proportionate to the trouble it causes, although one would not therefore deny that through its pain it educates a person, if he is honest enough to want to be educated rather than to be deceived, out of the multiplicity to seek the one, out of abundance to seek the one thing needful, as this is plainly and simply offered precisely according to the need for it."

"Every human being is tried this way in the active service of expectancy. Now comes the fulfillment and relieves him, but soon he is again placed on reconnaissance for expectancy; then he is again relieved, but as long as there is any future for him, he has not yet finished his service. And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy."

"In the external, patience is some third element that must be added, and, humanly speaking, it would be better if it were not needed; some days it is needed more, some days less, all according to fortune, whose debtor a person becomes, even though he gained ever so little, because only when he wants to gain patience does he become one's debtor."

"Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.""

"If a person is unwilling to make a decisive resolution, if he wants to cheat God of the heart's daring venture in which a person ventures way out and loses sight of all shrewdness and probability, indeed, takes leave of his senses or at least all his worldly mode of thinking, if instead of beginning with one step he almost craftily seeks to find out something, to have the infinite certainty changed into a finite certainty, then this discourse will not be able to benefit him. There is an upside-downness that wants to reap before it sows; there is a cowardliness that wants to have certainty before it begins. There is a hypersensitivity so copious in words that it continually shrinks from acting; but what would it avail a person if, double-minded and fork-tongued he wanted to dupe God, trap him in probability, but refused to understand the improbable, that one must lose everything in order to gain everything, and understand it so honestly that, in the most crucial moment, when his soul is already shuddering at the risk, he does not again leap to his own aid with the explanation that he has not yet fully made a resolution but merely wanted to feel his way. Therefore, all discussion of struggling with God in prayer, of the actual loss (since if pain of annihilation is not actually suffered, then the sufferer is not yet out upon the deep, and his scream is not the scream of danger but in the face of danger) and the figurative victory cannot have the purpose of persuading anyone or of converting the situation into a task for secular appraisal and changing God's gift of grace to the venture into temporal small change for the timorous. It really would not help a person if the speaker, by his oratorical artistry, led him to jump into a half hour's resolution, by the ardor of conviction started a fire in him so that he would blaze in a momentary good intention without being able to sustain a resolution or to nourish an intention as soon as the speaker stopped talking."

"Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale. Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid. Every speculative price-fixer who conscientiously directs attention to the significant march of modern philosophy, every Privatdocent, tutor, and student, every crofter and cottar goes further. Perhaps it would be untimely and ill-timed to ask them where they are going."

"An old proverb fetched from the outward and visible world says: "Only the man that works gets the bread." Strangely enough this proverb does not aptly apply in that world to which it expressly belongs. For the outward world is subjected to the law of imperfection, and again and again the experience is repeated that he too who does not work gets the bread, and that he who sleeps gets it more abundantly than the man who works. In the outward world everything is made payable to the bearer, this world is in bondage to the law of indifference, and to him who has the ring, the spirit of the ring is obedient, whether he be Noureddin or Aladdin, and he who has the world's treasure, has it, however he got it."

"After all, in the poets love has its priests, and sometimes one hears a voice which knows how to defend it; but of faith one hears never a word. Who speaks in honor of this passion? Philosophy goes further. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts its favor, offering to sell her charms to philosophy. it is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel, but to understand Abraham is a trifle. To go beyond Hegel's is a miracle, but to get beyond Abraham is the easiest thing of all."

"If the ethical – that is, social morality – is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories."

"One sticks one's finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?"

"Who is to blame but her and the third factor, from whence no one knows, which moved me with its stimulus and transformed me? After all, what I have done is praised in others.-Or is becoming a poet my compensation? I reject all compensation, I demand my rights-that is, my honor. I did not ask to become one, I will not buy it at this price. – Or if I am guilty, then I certainly should be able to repent of my guilt and make it good again. Tell me how. On top of that, must I perhaps repent that the world plays with me as a child plays with a beetle?-Or is it perhaps best to forget the whole thing? Forget-indeed, I shall have ceased to be if I forget it. Or what kind of life would it be if along with my beloved I have lost honor and pride and lost them in such a way that no one knows how it happened, for which reason I can never retrieve them again? Shall I allow myself to be shoved out in this manner? Why, then, was I shoved in?"

"In the Church which was founded at Corinth, St. Paul had special difficulties of the kind I have mentioned. In that flourishing commercial city, which through its shipping and situation, maintained a vital connexion between East and West, numerous crowds of people flocked together from all quarters, different in speech and in culture. As they mingled with the inhabitants, they produced, by contacts and contrasts, new and ever new differences. Even in the Church this differentiation endeavoured to make itself felt in sects and parties; and a kind of pagan wisdom made a special attempt to force itself forward as a teacher of truth. In his first letter to this church, from which the text I read is taken, St. Paul strongly combats this tendency."

"My hearers, this discourse has not wandered out into the world to look for conflict, it has not tried to get the better of anybody, it has not even tried to uphold anybody, as though there was battle without. It has spoken to you; not by way of explaining anything to you, but trying to speak secretly with you about your relationship to that secret wisdom mentioned in our text. Oh that nothing may upset you in respect to this, “neither life nor death nor things present nor things to come nor any other creature” (Romans 8:38) –not this discourse, which, though it may have profited you nothing, yet has striven for what after all is the first and the last, to help you have what the Scripture calls “faith in yourself before God” (Romans 14:22)."

"The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it."

"And how does the God's existence emerge from the proof? Does it follow straightway, without any breach of continuity? Or have we not here an analogy to the behavior of the little Cartesian dolls? As soon as I let go of the doll it stands on its head. As soon as I let it go – I must therefore let it go. So also with the proof. As long as I keep my hold on the proof, i.e., continue to demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no other reason than that I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there. But this act of letting go is surely also something; it is indeed a contribution of mine. Must not this also be taken into the account, this little moment, brief as it may be – it need not be long, for it is a leap. However brief this moment, if only an instantaneous now, this "now" must be included in the reckoning."

"Now just as the historical gives occasion for the contemporary to become a disciple, but only it must be noted through receiving the condition from the God himself, since otherwise we speak Socratically, so the testimony of contemporaries gives occasion for each successor to become a disciple, but only it must be noted through receiving the condition from the God himself."

"For whoever has what he has from the God himself clearly has it at first hand; and he who does not have it from the God himself is not a disciple. Let us assume that it is otherwise, that the contemporary generation of disciples had received the condition from the God, and that the subsequent generations were to receive it from these contemporaries – what would follow?"

"Posito I assume and when I say posito, I have the right to assume the unlikely; therefore posito, I assume that Mr. A.A., whose promises supposedly have not weakened him, went to work and wrote the system. Posito, I assume, and when I say posito, I have the right to assume what is more unreasonable than the most unreasonable; therefore; posito, I assume that if Mr. A.A. did not write the system, then Mr. B.B. wrote it-then what? Let us linger for a moment on this thought, with which, of course, we have all been familiar for several years: the thought of the prospect for the hope of the system. Therefore, in order to be very brief, posito, I assume that the system appeared here in Copenhagen, then what? Then one would indeed have to read it, unless Mr. C.C. would instantly be kind and philanthropic enough to promise a summary of the system and also position us in the point of view; then we would again be saved by the promise. If this does not happen, then of course one would have to read it. How troublesome, and who would finally benefit from that?"

"Translated by Todd Nichol along with Prefaces 1997"

"In an age as agitated as ours, it no longer suffices just to be advertised in the newspaper. To be advertised in this way is the same thing as being consigned to oblivion. If one is to be noticed, once must as least appear on the first page under a hand that points to and, as it were, announces or advertises the advertisement."

"Therefore create me! You, the most esteemed, cultured public, are in possession of nervus rerum gerendarum [the moving force to accomplish something]. Just a word from you, a promise to purchase what I write, or, if it is possible, so that everything can be in order immediately, a little advance payment – and I am an author; I shall remain one as long as this favor lasts."

"When one merely states that one has many subscribers and keeps on saying it, then one gets many; just as when one sheep goes to water, the next one also goes, and when it is continually said of a large flock of sheep that they go hither and yon to water, then the rest must also go, so people believe that it must be the demand of the times, that for the sake of use and custom – they must also subscribe."

"When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, “Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat,” it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit. When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing-the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise-and this it what usually happens-that which comes later, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it."

"Freedom's possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil. The possibility is to be able. In a logical system, it is convenient to say that possibility passes over into actuality. However, in actuality it is not so convenient, and an intermediate term is required. The intermediate term is anxiety, but it no more explains the qualitative leap than it can justify it ethically. Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself."

"Dogmatics must be designed in this way. Above all, every science must vigorously lay hold of its own beginning and not live in complicated relations with other sciences. If dogmatics begins by wanting to explain sinfulness or by wanting to prove its actuality, no dogmatics will come out of it, but the entire existence of dogmatics will become problematic and vague."

"Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become."

"Man is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. In the former, the two factors are psyche and body, and spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited. The latter synthesis has only two factors, the temporal and the eternal. Where is the third factor? And if there is no third factor, there really is no synthesis, for a synthesis that is a contradiction cannot be completed as a synthesis without a third factor, because the fact that the synthesis is a contradiction asserts that it is not. What, then, is the temporal?"

"Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other. As soon as the actuality of freedom and of spirit is posited, anxiety is canceled. But what then does the nothing of anxiety signify more particularly in paganism. This is fate. Fate is a relation to spirit as external. It is the relation between spirit and something else that is not spirit and to which fate nevertheless stands in a spiritual relation. Fate may also signify exactly the opposite, because it is the unity of necessity and accidental. ... A necessity that is not conscious of itself is eo ipso the accidental in relation to the next moment. Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety."

"The meaning lies in the appropriation. Hence the book’s joyous giving of itself. Here there are no worldly “mine” and “thine” that separate and prohibit appropriating what is the neighbor's. Admiration is in part really envy and thus a misunderstanding; and criticism, for all its justification, is in part really opposition and thus a misunderstanding; and recognition in a mirror is only a fleeting acquaintance and thus a misunderstanding-but to see correctly and not want to forget what the mirror is incapable of effecting, that is the appropriation, and the appropriation is the reader’s even greater, is his triumphant giving of himself."

"Alas, time comes and time goes, it subtracts little by little; then it deprives a person of a good, the loss of which he indeed feels, and his pain is great. Alas, and he does not discover that long ago it has already taken away from him the most important thing of all-the capacity to make a resolution-and it has made him so familiar with this condition that there is no consternation over it, the last thing that could help gain new power for renewed resolution!"

"Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live."

"I was brought up in the Christian religion, and although I can scarcely sanction all the improper attempts to gain the emancipation of woman, all paganlike reminiscences also seem foolish to me. My brief and simple opinion is that woman is certainly as good as man-period. Any more discursive elaboration of the difference between the sexes or deliberation on which sex is superior is an idle intellectual occupation for loafers and bachelors."

"The immediacy of falling in love recognizes but one immediacy that is ebenburtig (of equal standing), and this is a religious immediacy; falling in love is too virginal to recognize any confidant other than God. But the religious is a new immediacy, has reflection in between-otherwise, paganism would actually be religious and Christianity not. That the religious is a new immediacy every person easily understands who is satisfied with following the honest path of ordinary common sense. And although I imagine I have but few readers, I confess nevertheless that I do imagine my readers to be among these, since I am far from wanting to instruct the admired ones, who make systematic discoveries a la Niels Klim, who have left their good skin in order to put on the “real appearance.”"

"Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books."

"A son is a mirror in which the father sees himself reflected, and the father is a mirror in which the son sees himself as he will be in the future."

"To understand oneself in existence is the Christian principle, except that this self has received much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even more difficult to understand together with existing. The believer is a subjective thinker, and the difference, is only between the simple person and the simple wise person. Here again the oneself is not humanity in general, subjectivity in general, and other such things, whereas everything becomes easy inasmuch as the difficulty is removed and the whole matter is shifted over into the shadow play of abstraction."

"Where is the boundary for the single individual in his concrete existence between what is lack of will and what is lack of ability; what is indolence and earthly selfishness and what is the limitation of finitude? For an existing person, when is the period of preparation over, when this question will not arise again in all its initial, troubled severity; when is the time in existence that is indeed a preparation? Let all the dialecticians convene-they will not be able to decide this for a particular individual in concreto."

"Zealousness to learn from life is seldom found, but all the more frequently a desire, inclination, and reciprocal haste to be deceived by life. Undaunted, people do not seem to have a Socratic fear of being deceived, for the voice of God is always a whisper, while the demand of the age is a thousand-tongued rumor, not an all-powerful call that creates great men but a stirring in the offal that creates confused pates, an abracadabra that produces after its kind as is the case with all production. Even less do people seem to have above all a Socratic fear of being deceived by themselves, do not seem to be the least aware that if the self-deceived are the most miserable of all, then among these, again, the most miserable are those who are presumptuously deceived by themselves in contrast to those who are piously deceived."

"Is there anything we cannot contrive to call the demands of the times, and is there anything that does not acquire a certain prestige by being the demand of the times? But for decisive religious categories to become the demand for the times is eo ipso a contradiction. “The times” is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud collective demands en mass for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made."

"A Roman emperor sitting at the table surrounded by his bodyguard is a magnificent sight, but when the reason is fear, the magnificence pales. So also when the individual does not dare stand taciturnly by his word, does not stand freely and confidently on the pedestal of a conscious act, but is surrounded by a host of deliberations before and after that render him incapable of getting his eye on the action."

"Magister Adler was deeply moved by something higher, but now when he wants to express his thoughts in words, wants to communicate, he confuses the subjective with the objective, his altered subjective state with an external event, the dawning of a light upon him with the coming into existence of something new outside him, the falling of the veil from his eyes with his having had a revelation. Subjectively his emotion is carried to the extreme; he wants to select the most powerful expression to describe it and by means of a mental deception grasps the objective qualification: having had a revelation."

"Everyone who knows something about the dangers of reflection and the dangerous walk along the road of reflection also knows that it is dubious when a person, instead of getting out of the tension through resolution and action, becomes productive about his state in tension. Then there is no effort to get out of the state, but reflection fixes the situation for reflection and thereby fixes the man. The more richly thoughts and expressions offer themselves, the more briskly the productivity advances-in the wrong direction-the more dangerous it becomes and the more it hides from the person, concerned that his work, his extremely strenuous work, his very interesting (perhaps also for a third party who has a total view) work, is a work of bogging himself down deeper and deeper. That is, he does not work himself loose but works himself fast and becomes interesting to himself by reflecting on the tension and diverts himself with an utterly piecemeal productivity about detached details, with isolated short articles."

"The believer humanly comprehends how heavy the suffering is, but in faith’s wonder that it is beneficial to him, he devoutly says: It is light. Humanly he says: It is impossible, but he says it again in faith’s wonder that what he humanly cannot understand is beneficial to him. In other words, when sagacity is able to perceive the beneficialness, then faith cannot see God; but when in the dark night of suffering sagacity cannot see a handbreadth ahead of it, then faith can see God, since faith sees best in the dark."

"If it is God who gives the spirit of power and strength, then it is also the same God who gives “the spirt of self-control,” and if ignoble cowardice and fear of people are just as detestable in any age, the excess of eager enthusiasm, “zeal without wisdom,” are no less corrupting and at times are fundamentally just as detestable, just as blasphemous."

"People are scarcely aware that it is a slavery they are creating; they forget this in their zeal to make people free by overthrowing dominions. They are scarcely aware that it is slavery; how could it be possible to be a slave in relation to equals?"

"The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man's age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man."

"You have surely noticed among schoolboys, that the one that is regarded by all as the boldest is the one who has no fear of his father, who dares to say to the others, "Do you think I am afraid of him?" On the other hand, if they sense that one of their number is actually and literally afraid of his father, they will readily ridicule him a little. Alas, in men's fear-ridden rushing together into a crowd (for why indeed does a man rush into a crowd except because he is afraid!) there, too, it is a mark of boldness not to be afraid, not even of God. And if someone notes that there is an individual outside the crowd who is really and truly afraid – not of the crowd, but of God, he is sure to be the target of some ridicule. The ridicule is usually glossed over somewhat and it is said: a man should love God.Yes, to be sure, God knows that man's highest consolation is that God is love and that man is permitted to love Him. But let us not become too forward, and foolishly, yes, blasphemously, dismiss the tradition of our fathers, established by God Himself: that really and truly a man should fear God. This fear is known to the man who is himself conscious of being an individual, and thereby is conscious of his eternal responsibility before God."

"For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one's eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary."

"How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you."

"If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. ... We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. ... Which deception is more dangerous?"

"Spontaneous love can reach the point of despair, shows that it is in despair, that even when it is happy it loves with the power of despair."

"Forgetting when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creating, since to create is to bring forth from nothing and to forget is to take back into nothing. What is hidden from my eyes, that I have never seen; but what is hidden behind my back, that I have seen. The one who loves forgives in this way; he forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course, cannot see what is lying behind his back."

"If you listen carefully, in what most definitely must be called Gospel you yourself will hear also rigorousness. For example, what Jesus says to the centurion from Capernaum, “If we will apply these words to ourselves, we are obliged to say, “Be it done for you as you believe; if you have faith unto salvation, then you will be saved.” (Matthew 8:13) How lenient, how merciful! But is it also certain, then, that I have faith-I surely cannot summarily transfer to myself the fact that the centurion believed, as if I had faith because the centurion had it. Let us suppose that someone asked Christianity, “Is it also certain, then, that I have faith?” Christianity would answer, “Be it done for you as you believe.”"

"No politics has been able, no politics is able, no worldliness has been able, no worldliness has been able to think through or to actualize to the ultimate consequences this idea: human-equality, human likeness [Menneske-Lighed]. To achieve perfect equality in the medium of world-likeness [Verds-Lighed], that is, in the medium that by nature is dissimilarity, and to achieve it in a world-like [verds-ligt], that is, differentiating way, is eternally, impossible, as one can see by the categories. If perfect equality, likeness, should be achieved, then worldliness would have to be completely eradicated, and when perfect equality, likeness, is achieved worldliness ceases to be. But is it not, then, like an obsession, that worldliness has gotten the idea of wanting to force perfect equality, likeness, and to force it in a worldly way – in worldliness, world-likeness! Ultimately only the essentially religious can with the help of eternity effect human equality [Menneske-Lighed], the godly, the essential, the not-worldly, the true, the only true possible human equality; and this is also why – be it said to tis glorification – the essentially religious is the true humanity [Menneskelighed]."

"It was a purely Christian satisfaction to me that if ordinarily there was no one else there was one who in action tried a little to do the doctrine about loving the neighbor – alas, one who precisely by his act also received a frightful into what an illusion Christendom is and indeed, particularly later, also into how the common people let themselves be seduced by wretched journalists, whose striving and fighting for equality can only lead, if it leads to anything, since it is in the service of the lie, to making the elite, in self-defense, proud of their aloofness from the common man, and the common man brazen in his rudeness."

"I have needed God every day to defend myself against the abundance of thoughts."

"I have never definitely broken with Christianity nor renounced it. To attack it has never been my thought. No, from the time when there could be any question of the employment of my powers, I was firmly determined to employ them all to defend Christianity, or in any case to present it in its true form."

"Sin is man's destruction. Only the rust of sin can consume the soul-or eternally destroy it. For here indeed is the remarkable thing from which already that simple wise man of olden time derived a proof of the immortality of the soul, that the sickness of the soul (sin) is not like bodily sickness which kills the body. Sin is not a passage-way which a man has to pass through once, for from it one shall flee; sin is not (like suffering) the instant, but an eternal fall from the eternal, hence it is not ‘once’, and it cannot possibly be that its ‘once’ is no time. No, just as between the rich man in hell and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom there was a yawning gulf fixed, so is there also a yawning distinction between suffering and sin. Let us not confuse it, lest talk about suffering might become less frank-hearted, because it had also sin in mind, and this less frank-hearted talk might be boldly impudent inasmuch as it is talking this way about sin. This precisely is the Christian position, that there is this infinite distinction between evil and evil, as they are confusedly named; this precisely is the Christian characteristic, to talk of temporal sufferings ever more and more frank-heartedly, more triumphantly, more joyfully, because Christianity regarded, sin, and sin only, is destructive."

"Every earthly or worldly good is in itself selfish, begrudging; its possession is begrudging or is envy and in one way or another must make others poorer – what I have someone else cannot have; the more I have, the less someone else must have. The unrighteous mammon (with this term we perhaps may indeed designate every earthly good, also worldly honor, power, etc.) is in itself unjust and makes for injustice (quite apart here from the question of acquiring it or possessing it in an unlawful manner) and in itself cannot be acquired or possessed equally. If one person is to have much of it, there must be someone else who necessarily gets only a little, and what the one has the other cannot possibly have. Furthermore, all the time and energy, all the mental solicitude and concern that is applied to acquiring or possessing earthly good is selfish, begrudging, or the person who is occupied in this way is selfish, at every such moment has no thought for others; at every such moment he is selfishly working for himself or selfishly for a few others, but not equally for himself and for everyone else. Even if a person is willing to share his earthly goods, at every moment in which he is occupied with acquiring them or is engrossed in possessing them, he is selfish, just as that is which he possesses or acquires."

"A man who but rarely, and then only cursorily, concerns himself with his relationship to God, hardly thinks or dreams that he has so closely to do with God, or that God is so close to him, that there exists a reciprocal relationship between him and God, the stronger a man is, the weaker God is, the weaker a man is, the stronger God is in him. Every one who assumes that a God exists naturally thinks of Him as the strongest, as He eternally is, being the Almighty who creates out of nothing, and for whom all the creation is as nothing; but such a man hardly thinks of the possibility of a reciprocal relationship. And yet for God, the infinitely strongest, there is an obstacle; He has posited it Himself, yea, He has lovingly, with incomprehensible love posited it Himself; for He posited it and posits it every time a man comes into existence, when He in His love makes to be something directly in apposition to Himself. Oh, marvelous omnipotence of love! A man cannot bear that his ‘creations’ should be directly in apposition to Himself, and so he speaks of them in a tone of disparagement as his ‘creations’. But God who creates out of nothing, who almightily takes from nothing and says, ‘Be’, lovingly adjoins, ‘Be something even in apposition to me.’ Marvellous love, even His omnipotence is under the sway of love!"

"God's greatness lies in forgiving, in showing mercy, and in this greatness He is greater than the heart which condemns itself. Behold, this is that greatness of God which we have to speak of especially within the sanctuary; for here we know God differently, more closely – from the other side, if one may say so – that out there, where doubtless He is revealed, is to be known in His works, whereas here He is to be known as He has revealed Himself, as He would be known by Christians. The tokens of God's greatness can be known in nature everyone can behold with wonder, or rather there is no special token, for the works themselves are the tokens; thus every one can see the rainbow and must wonder when he sees it. But the token of God's greatness in showing mercy exists only for faith; this token is in fact the Sacrament. God's greatness in nature is manifest, but God's greatness in showing mercy is a secret which has to be believed."

"This little book (which in view of the circumstances under which it is issued reminds me of my first and more especially of the first to my first, the Preface to the Two Edifying Discourses of 1843, which came out immediately after Either/Or) will, as I hope, recall this to ‘that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader’: ‘it desires to remain in retirement, as it was in concealment it had its origin – a little flower in the cover of a great forest.’ Preface. P. 313"

"now, in the solemn silence before God with the lilies and the birds, where accordingly there is nobody at all present, where accordingly there is no other intercourse for thee but with God-there indeed the rule holds good: either hold to Him/or despise Him. There is no excuse, for no one else is present, in any case no one is present in such a wise that thou canst hold to him without despising God; for precisely there in the silence it is clear how close God is to thee. P. 334"

"Be attentive therefore, according to the instruction of the Gospel, to learn obedience from the lily and the bird. Be not affrighted, do no despair, when thou comparest thy life with these teachers. There is nothing to despair about, for indeed thou shalt learn from them; and the Gospel first comforts thee by telling thee that God is the God of patience, and then it adds: 'Thou shalt learn from the lilies and the birds, learn to be absolutely obedient like the lilies and the birds, learn not to serve two masters; for no man can serve two masters, he must either ... or. P. 343"

"a. Does a Human Being Have the Right to Let Himself Be Put to Death for the Truth? by H.H."

"These two essays probably will essentially be able to interest only theologians. (Preface)"

"He lived year after year. He attended only to himself and to God and this picture-but he did not understand himself."

"He was extremely important to his contemporaries, who wanted nothing more than to see in him the Expected One; they wanted almost to press it upon him and and to force him into the role - but that he then refuses to be that!"

"My doubt goes like this: How could the Loving One have the heart to let human beings become so guilty that they got his murder on their consciences?"

"I can understand myself in believing, although in addition I can in a relative misunderstanding comprehend the human aspect of this life: but comprehend faith or comprehend Christ, I cannot."

"b. The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle. by H.H."

"What, exactly, have the errors of exegesis and philosophy done in order to confuse Christianity, and how have they confused Christianity? Quite briefly and categorically, they have simply forced back the sphere of paradox-religion into the sphere of aesthetics, and in consequence have succeeded in brings Christian terminology to such a pass that terms which, so long as they remain within their sphere, are qualitative categories, can be put to almost any use as clever expressions."

"A genius and an Apostle are qualitatively different, they are definitions which each belong in their own spheres: the sphere of immanence, and the sphere of transcendence."

"If God stops a man on the road, and calls him with a revelation and sends him armed with divine authority among men, they say to him; from whom dost thou come? He answers: from God. But now God cannot help his messenger physically like a king, who gives him soldiers or policemen, or his ring or his signature, which is known to all; in short, God cannot help men by providing them with physical certainty that an Apostle is an Apostle-which would, moreover, be nonsense. Even miracles, if the Apostle has that gift, give no physical certainty; for the miracle is the object of faith."

"Between God and man there is and remains an eternal, essential, qualitative difference. The paradoxical relationship (which, quite rightly, cannot be thought, but only believed) appears when God appoints a particular man to divine authority, in relation, be it carefully noted, to that which has entrusted to him."

"Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ's word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains."

"If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work as art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him."

"Someone in despair despairs over something. So, for a moment, it seems, but only for a moment. That same instant the true despair shows itself, or despair in its true guise. In despairing over something he was really despairing over himself, and he wants now to be rid of himself."

"This fact, that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue, has been overlooked. The latter is partly a pagan view, which is content with a merely human standard, and which for that very reason does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith."

"Out of love, God becomes man. He says: Here you see what it is to be a human being; but he adds: Take care, for I am also God — blessed is he who takes no offense at me."

"The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc., is sure to be noticed."

"I see again what I thought I saw the first time, when I sent forth the little book that was compared to and in fact could best be compared to “a humble little flower under the cover of the great forest”"

"You complain that no one can put himself in your place. I can imagine that it may never have occurred to you, preoccupied day and night with that thought, that you should comfort others: and he, the Comforter, he is the only one of whom it truly holds that no one could put himself in his place-how true if he had complained in that way! He, the Comforter, in whose place no one could put himself, he can put himself completely in your place and in every sufferer's place. .... There is still one who is able to put himself completely in your place, the Lord Jesus Christ, who ”because he has suffered and himself been tempted is able to help those who are tempted” (Hebrews 2:18)."

"Let us then in the brief prescribed moments simply consider the tax collector. Throughout all the ages he has been presented as the prototype of an honest and God-fearing churchgoer. Yet is seems to me that he is even more closely related to going to Communion, he who said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Is it not as if he were now going to Communion, he of whom it is said, “He went home to his house justified” – is it not as if he now went home from Communion!"

"Self-accusation is the possibility of justification. The tax collector accused himself. There was no one else who accused him. It was not civic justice that seized him by the chest and said, “You are a criminal”: it was not the people whom he perhaps cheated who beat him on the breast and said, “You are a cheater” – but he beat his own breast and said, "God be merciful to me, a sinner. He accused himself, that he was a sinner before God."

"Confession should be only in secret before God, who knows everything anyway, and thus it could remain hidden in one's innermost being. But at a dinner – and a woman! A dinner-it is not some hidden, remote place, nor is the lighting dim, nor is the mood like that among graves, nor are the listeners silent or invisibly present."

"She has forgotten speech and language and the restlessness of thoughts, has forgotten what is even greater restlessness, this self, has forgotten herself-she, the lost woman, who is now lost in her Savior, who, lost in him, rests at his feet-like a picture. He speaks about her; he says: Her many sins are forgiven her, because she loved much. Although she is present, it is almost as if she were absent; it is almost as if he changed her into a picture, a parable."

"The truth is always in the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because as a rule the minority is made up of those who actually have an opinion, while the strength of the majority is illusory, formed of that crowd which has no opinion — and which therefore the next moment (when it becomes clear that the minority is the stronger) adopts the latter's opinion, which now is in the majority, i.e. becomes rubbish by having the whole retinue and numerousness on its side, while the truth is again in a new minority."

"The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you."

"A white spot is on the horizon. There it is. A terrible storm is brewing. But no one sees the white spot or has any inkling of what it might mean. But no (this would not be the most terrible situation either), no, there is one person who sees it and knows what it means-but he is a passenger. He has no authority on the ship, can take no action. ... The fact that in Christendom there is visible on the horizon a white speck which means that a storm is threatening-this I knew; but, alas, I was an am only a passenger."

"Editor’s Preface In this book, originating in the year 1848, the requirement for being a Christian is forced up by the pseudonymous author to the supreme ideality. Yet the requirement should indeed be stated, presented, and heard. From the Christian point of view, there ought to be no scaling down of the requirement, nor suppression of it-instead of a personal admission and confession. The requirement should be heard-and I understand what is said as spoken to me alone—so that I might learn not only to resort to grace but to resort to it in relation to the use of grace. S.K."

"Accept the invitation so that the inviter may save you from what is so hard and dangerous to be saved from, so that, saved, you may be with him who is the Savior of all, of innocence also. For even if it were possible that utterly pure innocence was to be found somewhere, why should it not also need a Savior who could keep it safe from evil! –The invitation stands at the crossroad, there where the way of sin turns more deeply into sin. Come here, all you who are lost and gone astray, whatever your error and sin, be it to human eyes more excusable and yet perhaps more terrible, or be it to human eyes more terrible and yet perhaps more excusable, be it disclosed here on earth or be it hidden and yet known in heaven-and even if you found forgiveness on earth but no peace within, or found no forgiveness because you did not seek it, or because you sought it in vain: oh, turn around and come here, here is rest! The invitation stands at the crossroad, there where the way of sin turns off for the last time and disappears from view in-perdition. Oh, turn around, turn around, come here; do not shrink from the difficulty of retreat, no matter how hard it is; do not be afraid of the laborious pace of conversion, however toilsomely it leads to salvation, whereas sin leads onward with winged speed, with mounting haste-or leads downward so easily, so indescribably easily, indeed, as easily as when the horse, completely relieved of pulling, cannot, not even with all its strength, stop the wagon, which runs it into the abyss. Do not despair over every relapse, which the God of patience has the patience to forgive and under which a sinner certainly should have the patience to humble himself. No, fear nothing and do not despair; he who says “Come here” is with you on the way; from him there is help and forgiveness on the way of conversion that leads to him, and with him is rest."

"When God chooses to let himself be born in lowliness, when he who holds all possibilities in his hand takes upon himself the form of a lowly servant, when he goes about defenseless and lets people do with him what they will, he surely must know well enough what he is doing and why he wills it; but for all that it is he who has people in his power and not they who have power over him-so history ought not play Mr. Malapert by this wanting to make manifest who he was."

"In all the flat, lethargic, dull moments, when the sensate dominates a person, to him Christianity is a madness because it is incommensurate with any finite wherefore. But then what good is it? Answer: Be quiet, it is the absolute. And that is how it must be presented, consequently as, that is, it must appear as madness to the sensate person. And therefore it is true, so true, and also in another sense so true when the sensible person in the situation of contemporaneity (see II A) censoriously says of Christ, “He is literally nothing”-quite so, for he is the absolute. Christianity is an absolute. Christianity came into the world as the absolute, not, humanly speaking, for comfort; on the contrary, it continually speaks about how the Christian must suffer or about how a person in order to become and remain a Christian must endure sufferings that he consequently can avoid simply by refraining from becoming a Christian."

"When in sickness I go to a physician, he may find it necessary to prescribe a very painful treatment-there is no self-contradiction in my submitting to it. No, but if on the other hand I suddenly find myself in trouble, an object of persecution, because, because I have gone to that physician: well, then then there is a self-contradiction. The physician has perhaps announced that he can help me with regard to the illness from which I suffer, and perhaps he can really do that-but there is an "aber" [but] that I had not thought of at all. The fact that I get involved with this physician, attach myself to him-that is what makes me an object of persecution; here is the possibility of offense. So also with Christianity. Now the issue is: will you be offended or will you believe. If you will believe, then you push through the possibility of offense and accept Christianity on any terms. So it goes; then forget the understanding; then you say: Whether it is a help or a torment, I want only one thing, I want to belong to Christ, I want to be a Christian."

"Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn—and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself. There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness—all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us. But you, who are truth, only you, our Savior and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to yourself, which you have promised to do—that you will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so that you, according to your Word, can draw us to yourself—from on high, but through lowliness and abasement."

"In hidden inwardness all are Christians; who would dare deny this? Anyone who would take it upon himself to deny it surely runs the risk of wanting to play the knower of hearts. So no one can deny it. That everyone is Christian in hidden inwardness is in this way a secretiveness that is almost locked up, so to speak, behind a jammed lock: it is impossible to find out whether all these thousands upon thousands actually are Christians, for they all are that, so it is said, in hidden inwardness. And not only for the Church but for everybody it holds true that one does not pass judgment on hidden and secret things, because one is unable to judge. Should it not, however, be possible to break this secretiveness and have a little disclosure without becoming guilty of being a knower of hearts? Yes, indeed! How so? In this way, that someone quite simply on his own responsibility takes it upon himself to confess Christ in the midst of Christendom. He does not judge a single person, far from it, but many will disclose themselves by the way they judge him. He does not claim to be a better Christian than others, no, far from it; on the contrary, to the others he makes the admission that they undoubtedly are better Christians than he, they who keep it hidden out of religious fear of winning honor and esteem, whereas he, poor simpleton that he is, on his own behalf is so afraid that it might prove to be shadowboxing with such an extreme Christianity, and therefore he holds to the old Christianity of confessing Christ. Therefore he does not inform against any of the others, that they are not Christians; far from it, he informs only against himself, that he is such a poor simpleton. Nevertheless the thoughts of many hearts would be disclosed by how they judge this poor simpleton, this imperfect Christian."

"The Woman Who Was a Sinner Luke 7:37ff"

"Source: Without Authority by Soren Kierkegaard, Hong 1997 P. 145ff"

"That a woman is presented as a teacher, as a prototype of piety, cannot amaze anyone who knows that piety or godliness is fundamentally womanliness. ... from a woman you learn concern for the one thing needful, from Mary, sister of Lazarus, who sat silent at Christ's feet with her heart's choice: the one thing needful. P. 149"

"Happy is the one in whom there is true sorrow over his sin, so that the extreme unimportance to him of everything else is only the negative expression of the confirmation that one thing is unconditionally important to him, so that the unconditional unimportance to him of everything else is a deadly sickness that still is very far from being a sickness unto death but is precisely unto life, because the life is in this, that one thing is unconditionally important to him: to find forgiveness. ” P. 152"

"The next thing you can learn from the woman who was a sinner, something she herself understood, is that with regard to finding forgiveness she is able to do nothing at all. P. 155"

"To the contemporary, Christ can only say: I will offer myself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world and for yours also. Is this easier to believe now than when he has done it, has offered himself? Or is the comfort greater because of his saying that he will do it than it is because of his having done it? There is no greater love than this, that someone lays down his life for another, but when is it easier to believe, and when is the comfort greater: when the loving one says he will do it – or when he has done it? P. 159"

"To one unnamed, whose name will one day be named, is dedicated, with this little work, the entire authorship, as it was from the beginning. (Dedication) P. 163"

"An authorship that began with Either/Or and advanced step by step seeks here its decisive place of rest, at the foot of the altar, where the author, personally most aware of his own imperfections and guilt, certainly does not call himself a truth-witness but only a singular kind of poet and thinker who, without authority, has had nothing new to bring but “has wanted once again to read through, if possible in a more inward way, the original text handed down from the fathers” Preface P. 165"

"What if the equality between us human being, in which we completely resemble one another, were that none of us really thinks about his being loved? Preface P. 166"

"There is no one at the Communion table who retains against you even the least of your sins, no one, unless you yourself do it. So cast them away from yourself, and the recollection of them, lest in it your retain them; and cast the recollection of your having cast your sins away, lest in it you retain them. P. 170"

"It is love that leniently and mercifully says: I forgive you everything-if you are forgiven only little, then it is because you love only little. Justice severely sets the boundary and says: No further! This is the limit. For you there is no forgiveness, and there is nothing more to be said. P. 172"

"I do not know, my listener, what your crime, your guilt, your sins are, but surely we are all more or less of the guilt of loving only little. Take comfort, then, in these words just as I take comfort in them. P. 173-174"

"Christ speaks of two debtors, one of whom owed much and the other little, and who both found forgiveness. He asks: Which of these two ought to love more? The answer: The one who has forgiven much. When you love much, you are forgiven much-and when you are forgiven much, you love much. See here the blessed recurrence of salvation in love! P. 176"

"Lord Jesus Christ, the birds had nests, the foxes had dens, and you had no place where you could lay your head. You were homeless in the world-yet you yourself were a hiding place, the only place where the sinner could flee. And so even this very day you are a hiding place. When the sinner flees to you, hides himself with you, is hidden in you, he is eternally kept safe, since love hides a multitude of sins. P. 182"

"A person can perhaps succeed in hiding his sins from the world, he can perhaps be foolishly happy that he succeeds, or yet, a little more honest, admit that it is a deplorable weakness and cowardliness that he does not have the courage to become open-but a person cannot hide his sins from himself. P. 182"

"It is true that in the confessional it is the pastor who preaches; but the true preacher is still the secret-sharer in your inner being. The pastor can preach only in vague generalities; the preacher in your inner being is just the opposite; he speaks simply and solely about you, to you, and within you. P. 183"

"My dear reader, read aloud, if possible! If you do so, allow me to thank you for it: if you not only do it yourself, if you also influence others to do it, allow me to thank each one of them, and you again and again! (Preface)"

"The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so – this is the view of Christianity – then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures."

"I assume that Luther has risen from the grave. For several years now he has been living among us but incognito; he has been observing the lives we lead, has been scrutinizing everyone in this regard and me also. I assume that he speaks to me one day and says, “Are you a believer? Do you have faith?” Anyone who knows me as an author will see that I would perhaps be the one who might come off best of all in such and examination, for I have continually said, “I do not have faith” – I have expressed, as does a bird's alarmed flight before a storm, that there is mischief brewing here, “I do not have faith.” So I should say to Luther, “No, dear Luther, I have at least shown the respect of saying: I do not have faith.” However, I shall not press this, but, just as others call themselves Christians and believers, I, too, shall say, “I am a believer,” for otherwise what I wish to be cleared up will not be cleared up."

"I have worked for this restlessness oriented toward inward deepening. But “without authority.” Instead of conceitedly making myself out to be a witness for the truth and causing others rashly to want to be the same, I am an unauthorized poet who influences by means of the ideas."

"Imagine a lover who has received a letter from his beloved – I assume that God's Word is just as precious to you as this letter is to the lover. I assume that you read and think you ought to read God's Word in the same way the lover reads this letter."

"When you are reading God's Word, it is not the obscure passages that bind you but what you understand, and with that you comply at once. If you understood only one single passage in all of Holy Scripture, well, then you must do that first of all, but you do not first have to sit down and ponder the obscure passages."

"When you read God's Word, in everything you read, continually to say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking - this is earnestness, precisely this is earnestness. Not a single one of those to whom the cause of Christianity in the higher sense has been entrusted forgot to urge this again and again as most crucial, as unconditionally the condition if you are to come to see yourself in the mirror."

"Imagine a person who has been and is addicted to a passion. There comes a moment (as it does to everyone, perhaps many times – alas, perhaps many times in vain!), a moment he seems to be brought to a halt: a good resolution is awakening. Imagine that one morning he said to himself (let us suppose him to be a gambler), “I solemnly vow that I will nevermore have anything to do with gambling, never – tonight will be the last time” – ah, my friend, he s lost! I would rather bet on the opposite, however strange that may seem. If there was a gambler who said to himself, “Well, now, you may gamble every blessed day all the rest of your life – but tonight you are going to leave it alone,” and he did – ah, my friend, he is saved for sure! The first gambler's resolution is a trick by the craving, and the second gambler's is to fool the craving."

"His life from the very beginning is a story of temptation; it is not only one particular period in his life, the forty days, that is the story of temptation – no his whole life is a story of temptation (just as it is also of suffering). Every moment of his life he is tempted – that is, he has this possibility in his power, to take his calling, his task, in vain."

"Then he rises from the table and goes out into the Garden of Gethsemane; there he sinks down – oh, that it had happened already! He sinks down, doomed (dodsens) – indeed, was he really any more a dying man (Doende) on the cross than in Gethsemane! If the suffering on the cross was a death agony – ah, this agony in prayer was also a mortal combat; nor was it bloodless, for his sweat fell like drops of blood to the earth."

"That which distinguishes the Christian narrow way from the common human narrow way is the voluntary. Christ was not someone who coveted earthly things but had to be satisfied with poverty – no, he chose poverty."

"As soon as the discourse is about a holy spirit, about believing in the holy spirit, how many do you think believe in that? Or when the discourse is about an evil spirit that should be renounced: how many do you think believe in such a thing? How can this be? Is it perhaps because the subject becomes too earnest when it is the holy spirit? For I can talk about, believe in, the spirit of the age, the spirit of the world, and the like and do not thereby need to think of anything specific. It is a kind of spirit, but I am not absolutely bound by what I say. And not being bound by what one says is highly prized."

"The life-giving Spirit is the very one who slays you; the first thing the life-giving Spirit says is that you must enter into death, that you must die to – it is this way in order that you many not take Christianity in vain. A life-giving Spirit – that is the invitation; who would not willingly take hold of it! But die first – that is the halt!"

"Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 76-77"

"The Spirit brings faith, the faith."

"The world and Christianity have completely opposite conceptions. The world says of the apostles, of the Apostle Peter as their spokesman, "He is drunk,"-and the Apostle Peter admonishes, "Become sober." Consequently the secular mentality considers Christianity to be drunkenness, and Christianity considers the secular mentality to be drunkenness. "Do become reasonable, come to your senses, try to become sober"-thus does the secular mentality taunt the Christian. And the Christian says to the secular mentality, "Do become reasonable, come to your senses, become sober." The difference between secularity and Christianity is not that one has one view and the other another-no, the difference is always that they have the very opposite views, that what one calls good the other calls evil, what the one calls love the other calls selfishness, what the one calls piety the other calls impiety, What the one calls being drunk the other calls being sober. it is precisely the drunken man, the apostle, who finds it necessary to bring home to the sober (I assume) world the admonition: "Become sober!" This very admonition may, as intended, most severely wound the callous secular mentality, which as a rule cannot be wounded very easily or disconcerted."

"From the Christian point of view it stands firm that the truly Christian venturing requires probability. p. 101"

"To become sober is: to come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinitely, unconditionally engaged. P. 104"

"If self-knowledge does not lead to knowing oneself before God - well, then there is something to what purely human self-observation says, namely, this self-knowledge leads to a certain emptiness that produces dizziness. Only by being before God can one totally come to oneself in the transparency of soberness. p. 106"

"This is approximately the way Christendom relates to the essentially Christian, the unconditioned. After seventeen, eighteen detours and running all around someone finally has his finite existence assured, and then we receive a sermon about Seek first the kingdom of God. Is this sobriety or is this intoxication? p. 112"

"This is the truth of the matter. In every human being there is a capacity, the capacity for knowledge. And every person - the most knowing and the most limited - is in his knowledge far beyond what he is in his life or what his life expresses. Yet this misrelation is of little concern to us. On the contrary, we set a high price on knowledge, and everyone strives for this knowledge more and more. "But," says the sensible person, "one must be careful about the direction one's knowing takes. If my knowing turns inward, against me, if I do not take care to prevent this, then knowing is the most intoxicating thing there is, the way to become completely intoxicated, since there then occurs an intoxicating confusion between the knowledge and the knower, so that the knower himself will resemble, will be, that which is known. If your knowing takes such a turn and you yield to it, it will soon end with your tumbling like a drunk man into actuality, plunging yourself recklessly into drunken action without giving the understanding and sagacity the time to take into proper consideration what is prudent, what is advantageous, what will pay. This is why we, the sober ones, warn you, not against knowing or against expanding your knowledge, but against letting your knowledge take an inward direction, for then it is intoxicating." This is thieves' jargon. It says that it is one's knowledge that, by taking the inward direction in this way, intoxicates, rather than that in precisely this way it makes manifest that one is intoxicated, intoxicated in one's attachment to this earthly life, the temporal, the secular, and the selfish. And this is what one fears, fears that one's knowing, turned inward, toward oneself, will expose the intoxication there, will expose that one prefers to remain in this state, will wrench one out of this state and as a result of such a step will make it impossible for one to slip back into that adored state, into intoxication. p. 118"

"When Christianity came into the world the task was simply to proclaim Christianity. The same is the case wherever Christianity is introduced into a country the religion of which is not Christianity."

"Is not “Christendom” the most colossal attempt at serving God, not by following Christ, as He required, and suffering for the doctrine, but instead of that, by “building the sepulchers of the prophets and garnishing the tombs of the righteous.”"

"It is of this sort of divine service I used the expression that, in comparison with the Christianity of the New Testament, it is playing Christianity. The expression is essentially true and characterizes the thing perfectly. For what does it mean to play, when one reflects how the word must be understood in this connection? It means to imitate, to counterfeit, a danger when there is no danger, and to do it in such a way that the more art is applied to it, the more delusive the pretense is that the danger is present."

"And thus Christianity is played in “Christendom.” Artists in dramatic costumes make their appearance in artistic buildings—there really is no danger at all, anything but that: the teacher is a royal functionary, steadily promoted, making a career—and how he dramatically plays Christianity, in short, he plays comedy. He lectures about renunciation, but he himself is being steadily promoted; he teaches all that about despising worldly titles and rank, but he himself is making a career."

"Christ calls it (O give heed!), He calls it “hypocrisy.” And not only that, but He says (now shudder!), He says that this guilt of hypocrisy is as great, precisely as great a crime as that of killing the prophets. ... This then is the judgment, Christ's judgment upon "Christendom." Shudder; for if you do not, you are implicated in it."

"In the New Testament sense, to be a Christian is, in an upward sense, as different from being a man as, in a downward sense, to be a man is different from being a beast. A Christian in the sense of the New Testament, although he stands suffering in the midst of life's reality, has yet become completely a stranger to this life; in the words of the Scripture and also of the Collects (which still are read-O bloody satire!-by the sort of priests we now have, and in the ears of the sort of Christians that now live) he is a stranger and a pilgrim-just think, for example of the late Bishop Mynster intoning, “We are strangers and pilgrims in this world”! A Christian in the New Testament sense is literally a stranger and a pilgrim, he feels himself a stranger, and everyone involuntarily feels that this man is a stranger to him."

"I will not by suppression, or by performing tricks, try to produce the impression that the ordinary Christianity in the land and the Christianity of the New Testament are alike."

"If you label me, you negate me."

"Leap of faith."

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."

""[of Kierkegaard's behavior towards his ex-fiance Regine] There isn't the slightest reason to condemn him, but every call to attempt to understand him". "[Kierkegaard is] the mystery, the great mystery"."

"A master and way out of the league that the rest of us play in."

"Hegel was the great system-maker. What others viewed as his grand achievement Kierkegaard viewed as his unforgivable crime, the attempt to rationally systematize the whole of existence. The whole of existence cannot be systematized, Kierkegaard insisted, because existence is not yet whole; it is incomplete and in a state of constant development. Hegel attempted to introduce mobility into logic, which, said Kierkegaard, is itself an error in logic. The greatest of Hegel's errors, however, was his claim that he had established the objective theory of knowledge. Kierkegaard countered with the argument that subjectivity is truth. As he put it, “The objective uncertainty maintained in the most passionate spirit of dedication is truth, the highest truth for one existing.” ... Kierkegaard, it remains to be said, is not a systematic theologian. We know what he thought of systems and system makers, of which Hegel was the prime example. There is hardly a page in his writings that does not prompt from the systematically minded reader a protest against disconnections and apparent contradictions. Like Flannery O'Connor, he shouted to the hard of hearing and drew startling pictures for the almost blind."

"According to Kierkegaard: Since existence “means the making of moral choices, it is perpetual “either-or” and a life of action. One who merely contemplates a truth is apt to become a “traitor like Judas.” An uncommitted person is not person at all. The ideal of suspended judgment is a high road to moral suicide. Man must act for by his choices he makes himself. In its emphasis upon commitment "Existentialism” comes the nearest to new Testament Christianity. Existence, according to Kierkegaard is a state of anxious suspense and only the paradoxical “leap into faith” will give man certitude in God. The opposite of sin is not virtue but faith. Man's existence, declared Kierkegaard, “is an experience or process of sustained becoming or developing by moral striving and tension. He can never, therefore, be a Christian but only attempt to become one.” Kierkegaard's slant on man is sometimes aesthetic, at times ethical, but in its final form it is theological, concerned with the problem of being a Christian. As a theologian, he has had a singular influence on Karl Barth, Reinhold Neibuhr, Paul Tillich, Emil Brunner, and other leading Protestant theologians of our times."

"As a thorough Christian — or, as he would have put it, infinitely interested in becoming one — Søren Kierkegaard addressed himself neither to Jews nor to Judaism. But they have overheard him. In part because they could not help it... Jews are well advised to be on the alert for what they can learn not only about him but about themselves also."

"Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint."

"Probably the strongest influence on Buber's concept of realization, however, was the existentialist philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. In Kierkegaard's earlier works are found the germ of some of Buber's most important early and later ideas: the direct relation between the individual and God in which the individual addresses God as 'Thou,' the insecure and exposed state of every individual as an individual, the concept of the 'knight of faith' who cannot take shelter in the universal but must constantly risk all in the concrete uniqueness of each new situation, the necessity of becoming a true person before going out to relation, and the importance of realizing one's belief in one's life. These similarities plus Buber's own treatment of Kierkegaard in his mature works make it clear that Kierkegaard is one of the most important single influences on Buber's thought."

"For all its critical analysis philosophy has not yet managed to root out its psychopaths. What do we have psychiatric diagnosis for? That grizzler Kierkegaard also belongs in this galere."

"Hegel's philosophic optimism maintained that the difficulties of Christianity had been completely "reconciled" or "mediated" in the supposedly higher synthesis of philosophy, by which process religion had been reduced to terms which might be grasped by the intellect. Kierkegaard, fully voicing the claim both of the intellect and of religion, erects the barrier of the paradox, impassable except by the act of faith. As will be seen, this is Tertullian's Credo quia absurdum."

"History has a way of reducing individuals to flat, two-dimensional portraits. it is the enemy of subjectivity, which is why Stephen Dedalus called it "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it. I have elsewhere called such men "Outsiders" because they attempt to stand outside history. which defines humanity on terms of limitation, not of possibility."

"There would be no existence if it were reduced to pure existence. My existence is related to that of others. One of the reasons for the emphasis Kierkegaard placed on anxiety and sin and Sartre (in his novel) on nausea is probably that they separated the individual too much (at least at times) from other individuals. It is true that Kierkegaard does not deny the Other, indeed conceives the communion between minds, and above all conceives a spiritual love and a spiritual Church. Nevertheless existence is very often restricted for him to the relation with God. According to him, I am only when I am in the presence of God. In fact, each of these two antithetical positions, that of Kierkegaard and that of Hegel, has its danger. In the too great intensity of the one and in the too great richness of the other there are nearly equal dangers. It is true, as Hegel says, that we are what we know and think and feel, that we are linked with our culture, with history, and finally with the world, that the romantic idea according to which there are in us beautiful unexpressed feelings leads to a kind of effective laziness and a selfish interiority."

"I know of no other great writer in the whole nineteenth century, perhaps even in the whole of world literature, to whom I respond with less happiness and with a more profound sense that I am on trial and found wanting, unless it were Søren Kierkegaard."

""The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed!" This is the voice of our conscience, telling us of the righteousness of God. And since conscience is the perfect interpreter of life, what it tells us is no question, no riddle, no problem, but a fact — the deepest, innermost, surest fact of life: God is righteous. Our only question is what attitude toward the fact we ought to take. We shall hardly approach the fact with our critical reason. The reason sees the small and the larger but not the large. It sees the preliminary, but not the final, the derived but not the original, the complex but not the simple. It sees what is human but not what is divine. We shall hardly be taught this fact by men."

"For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart."

"What expressions we used – in part taken over and in part newly invented! — above all, the famous 'wholly other' breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above,’ the not less famous 'infinite qualitative distinction' between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet."

"Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible."

"Faith is never identical with "piety" even if it were the purest and finest."

"Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace."

"Faith in God's revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo."

"Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God."

"Joy is the simplest form of gratitude."

"The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself."

"Jesus is the movement for social justice, and the movement for social justice is Jesus in the present."

"And now to my socialist friends who are here present: I have said that Jesus wanted what you want, that he wanted to help those who are least, that he wanted to establish the kingdom of God upon this earth, that he wanted to abolish self-seeking property, that he wanted to make persons into comrades. Your concerns are in line with the concerns of Jesus. Real socialism is real Christianity in our time."

"Even a child can see that an industrial enterprise would have neither net profits nor profits in general without the participation of the worker. Why does he receive only a wage from the entrepreneur instead of a share in the profits? There is no other reason other than the fact that the means of production are the private property of the entrepreneur. ... This inequality and dependence is precisely the injustice that we don't want."

"In conclusion, a word about your tired expression that there is a difference between theory and praxis. ... Thereby you want to say that praxis should be as unencumbered as possible by theory. Coming from you, this wish is quite intelligible. What you mean by praxis is private profit; what I mean by theory is justice."

"The Gospel is not a religious message to inform mankind of their divinity or to tell them how they may become divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from men."

"The known plane is God's creation, fallen out of its union with Him, and therefore the world of the flesh needing redemption, the world of men, and of time, and of things — our world. This known plane is intersected by another plane that is unknown — the world of the Father, of the Primal Creation, and of the final Redemption. The relation between us and God, between this world and His world presses for recognition, but the line of intersection is not self-evident."

"The name Jesus defines an historical occurence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world . . . as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that other world. The Resurrection from the dead is, however, the transformation: the establishing or declaration of that point from above, and the corresponding discerning of it below."

"The Resurrection is the revelation: the disclosing of Jesus as the Christ, the appearing of God, and the apprehending of God in Jesus. The Resurrection is the emergence of the necessity of giving glory to God: the reckoning with what is unknown and unobservable in Jesus, the recognition of Him as Paradox, Victor and Primal History. In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it. And, precisely because it does not touch it, it touches it as its frontier — as the new world."

"The power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men. It must not be confounded with any high, exalted, force, known or knowable."

"We know that God is He whom we do not know, and that our ignorance is precisely the problem and the source of our knowledge. The Epistle to the Romans is a revelation of the unknown God; God chooses to come to man, not man to God. Even after the revelation man cannot know God, for he is ever the unknown God. In manifesting himself to man he is farther away than before."

"The revelation in Jesus, just because it is the revelation of the righteousness of God is at the same time the strongest conceivable veiling and unknowableness of God. In Jesus, God really becomes a mystery, makes himself known as the unknown, speaks as the eternally Silent One."

"Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone. Piety is the possibility of the removal of the last traces of a firm foundation upon which we can erect a system of thought."

"God, the pure limit and pure beginning of all that we are, have, and do, standing over in infinite qualitative difference to man and all that is human, nowhere and never identical with that which we call God, experience, surmise, and pray to as God, the unconditioned Halt as opposed to all human rest, the Yes in our No and the No in our Yes, the first and last and as such unknown, but nowhere and never a magnitude amongst others in the medium known to us, God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer . . . that is the living God."

"It is evident that the relation to God with which the Bible is concerned does not have its source in the purple depths of the subconscious, and cannot be identical with what the deep-sea psychical research of our day describes in the narrower or broader sense as libido fulfilment."

"The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise."

"There is no way from us to God — not even via negativa not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way — even of this way — would not be God."

"Our Yes towards life from the very beginning carries within it the Divine No which breaks forth from the antithesis and points away from what now was the thesis to the original and final synthesis. The No is not the last and highest truth, but the call from home which comes in answer to our asking for God in the world."

"God is personal, but personal in an incomprehensible way, in so far as the conception of his personality surpasses all our views of personality."

"While it is beyond our comprehension that eternity should meet us in time, yet it is true because in Jesus Christ eternity has become time."

"Eternity is here (in the stable at Bethlehem and on the cross of Calvary) in time."

"He is the One who stands above us and also above our highest and deepest feelings, strivings, intuitions, above the products, even the most sublime, of the human spirit. God in the highest means first of all … He who is in no way established in us, in no way corresponds to a human disposition and possibility, but who is in every sense established simply in Himself and is real in that way; and who is manifest and made manifest to us men, not because of our seeking and finding, feeling and thinking, but again and again, only through Himself. It is this God in the highest who has turned as such to man, given Himself to man, made Himself knowable to him … God in the highest, in the sense of the Christian Confession, means He who from on high has condescended to us, has come to us, has become ours."

"When attempts were later made to speak systematically about God and to describe His nature, men became more talkative. They spoke of God's aseity , His being grounded in Himself; they spoke of God's infinity in space and time, and therefore of God's eternity. And men spoke on the other hand of God's holiness and righteousness, mercifulness and patience. We must be clear that whatever we say of God in such human concepts can never be more than an indication of Him; no such concept can really conceive the nature of God. God is inconceivable."

"Frederick the Great (1712-1786) once asked his personal physician, Dr. Zimmermann, "Can you name me a single proof of the existence of God?" Zimmermann replied, "Your Majesty, the Jews!" By that he meant that if one wanted to ask for a proof of God, for something visible and tangible, that no one could contest, which is unfolded before the eyes of all men, then we should have to turn to the Jews. Quite simply, there they are to the present day. Hundreds of little nations in the Near East... have dissolved and disappeared in the huge sea of nations; [only] this one tiny nation has maintained itself.... If the question of a proof of God is raised, one need merely point to this simple historical fact. For in the person of the Jew there stands before our eyes the witness of God's covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and in that way with us all. Even one who does not understand Holy Scripture can see this reminder."

"Scientific dogmatics must devote itself to the criticism and correction of Church proclamation and not just to a repetitive exposition of it."

"We begin by stating that religion is unbelief. It is a concern, indeed, we must say that it is the one great concern, of godless man..."

"There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost a canonical status in Protestant theology. But now, we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical."

"Where dogmatics exists at all, it exists only with the will to be a Church dogmatics, a dogmatics of the ecumenical Church."

"At bottom, knowledge of God in faith is always this indirect knowledge of God, knowledge of God in His works, and in these particular works in the determining and using of certain creaturely realities to bear witness to the divine objectivity. What distinguishes faith from unbelief, erroneous faith and superstition is that it is content with this indirect knowledge of God."

"Knowledge of God is obedience to God. Observe that we do not say that knowledge of God may also be obedience, or that of necessity it has obedience attached to it, or that it is followed by obedience. No; knowledge of God as knowledge of faith is in itself and of essential necessity obedience. It is an act of human decision corresponding to the act of divine decision; corresponding to the act of the divine being as the living Lord; corresponding to the act of grace in which faith is grounded and continually grounded again in God. In this act God posits Himself as our object and ourselves as those who know Him. But the fact that He does so means that our knowing God can consist only in our following this act, in ourselves becoming a correspondence of this act, in ourselves and our whole existence and therefore our considering and conceiving becoming the human act corresponding to the divine act. This is obedience, the obedience of faith."

"The revelation of God, in which man's fulfilment of the true knowledge of God takes place, is the disposition of God in which He acts towards us as the same triune God that He is in Himself, and in such a way that, although we are men and not God, we receive a share in the truth of His knowledge of Himself. Certainly it is the share which He thinks proper and which is therefore suitable for us. But in this share we have the reality of the true knowledge of Himself."

"He unveils Himself as the One He is by veiling Himself in a form which He Himself is not. He uses this form distinct from Himself, He uses its work and sign, in order to be objective in, with and under this form, and therefore to give Himself to us to be known. Revelation means the giving of signs. We can say quite simply that revelation means sacrament, i.e., the self-witness of God, the representation of His truth, and therefore of the truth in which He knows Himself, in the form of creaturely objectivity and therefore in a form which is adapted to our creaturely knowledge."

"Whatever we may think of its character as reality or illusion, this sphere arises and exists in the fact that man depends on himself over against God. But this means that in actual fact God becomes unknowable to him and he makes himself equal to God. For the man who refuses his grace God becomes the substance of the highest that he himself can see, choose, create and be. It is of this that he gives an account in natural theology He must do it, because this is the self-exposition and self-justification of the being of man in this sphere."

"God Himself is the nearest to hand, as the absolutely simple must be, and at the same time the most distant, as the absolutely simple must also be. God Himself is the irresolvable and at the same time that which fills and embraces everything else. God Himself in His being for Himself is the one being which stands in need of nothing else and at the same time the one being by which every thing else came into being and exists. God Himself is the beginning in which everything begins, with which we must and can always begin with confidence and without need of excuse. And at the same time He is the end in which everything legitimately and necessarily ends, with which we must end with confidence and without need of excuse. God Himself is simple, so simple that in all His glory He can be near to the simplest perception and also laugh at the most profound or acute thinking so simple that He reduces everyone to silence, and then allows and requires everyone boldly to make Him the object of their thought and speech. He is so simple that to think and speak correctly of Him and to live correctly before Him does not in fact require any special human complexities or for that matter any special human simplicities, so that occasionally and according to our need He may permit and require both human complexity and human simplicity, and occasionally they may both be forbidden us..."

"We are now assuming that we have here the centre and goal of all God's works, and therefore the hidden beginning of them all. We are also assuming that the prominent place occupied by this divine work has something corresponding to it in the essence of God, that the Son forms the centre of the Trinity, and that the essence of the divine being has, so to speak, its locus … in His work, in the name and person of Jesus Christ."

"Man can certainly keep on lying (and he does so); but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel (he does so); but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God. He can certainly flee from God (he does so) ; but he cannot escape Him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God (he does and is so) ; but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in His hate. He can certainly give himself to isolation (he does so — he thinks, wills and behaves godlessly, and is godless) ; but even in his isolation he must demonstrate that which he wishes to controvert — the impossibility of playing the "individual" over against God. He may let go of God, but God does not let go of him."

"The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel because of all words that can be said or heard it is the best: that God elects man; that God is for man too the One who loves in freedom. It is grounded in the knowledge of Jesus Christ because He is both the electing God and elected man in One. It is part of the doctrine of God because originally God's election of man is a predestination not merely of man but of Himself. Its function is to bear basic testimony to eternal, free and unchanging grace as the beginning of all the ways and works of God."

"The saving of anyone is something which is not in the power of man, but only of God. No one can be saved — in virtue of what he can do. Everyone can be saved — in virtue of what God can do. The divine claim takes the form that it puts both the obedient and the disobedient together and compels them to realise this, to recognise their common status in face of the commanding God."

"Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine."

"He exists, not only inconceivably as God, but also conceivably as a man ; not only above the world, but also in the world, and of the world ; not only in a heavenly and invisible, but in an earthly and visible form. He becomes and is, He exists—we cannot avoid this statement ; to do so would be the worst kind of Docetism—with objective actuality. Does this mean, then, that He exists as one thing amongst others, and that as such He can be perceived and may be known like other things ? Well, we cannot deny that He is a thing like this, and can be perceived and knovra as such, if He was and is a man in the world, with an earthly and visible form. But, of course, a man is not merely a thing or object. As a man among men he is a human Thou, and as such distinct from all mere things."

"The Holy Spirit is the coming of the man Jesus, who is the Son of God, to other men who are not this but with whom He still associates* And the witness of the Holy Spirit is the disclosure to these men, and therefore their discovery, of the fact that because they are associated with Him they can be called what they are certainly not called of themselves, and be what they can certainly never become or be of themselves children of God, children of light who in the midst of death are freed from the fear of death because as sinners they are freed from the curse of sin, and as such messengers to all those who, because they do not see the light, are still in darkness, but are not to remain in this darkness."

"Since Jesus Christ is a servant, looking to Him cannot mean looking away from the world, from men, from life, or, as is often said, from oneself. It cannot mean looking away into some distance or height. To look to Him is to see Him at the very centre, to see Him and the history which, accomplished in Him, heals everything and all things, as the mystery, reality, origin and goal of the whole world, all men, all life. To look to Him is to cleave to Him as the One who bears away the sin of the world. It is to be bound and liberated, claimed, consoled, cheered and ruled by Him."

"Nothing is more characteristic of the Hegelian system of knowledge than the fact that upon its highest pinnacle, where it becomes knowledge of knowledge, i.e. knowledge knowing of itself, it is impossible for it to have any other content but simply the history of philosophy, the account of its continuing self-exposition, in which all individual developments, coming full circle, can only be stages along the road to the absolute philosophy reached in Hegel himself. But that which knowledge is explicitly upon this topmost pinnacle as the history of philosophy, the philosophy completed in Hegel, it is implicitly all along the line: the knowledge of history and the history of knowledge, the history of truth, the history of God, as Hegel was able to say: the philosophy of History. History here has entered so thoroughly into reason, philosophy has so basically become the philosophy of history, that reason, the object of philosophy itself, has become history utterly and completely, that reason cannot understand itself other than a sits own history, and that, from the opposite point of view, it is in a position to recognize itself at once in all history in some stage of its life-process, and also in its entirety, so far as the study permits us to divine the whole. It is a matter of the production of self-movement of the thought-content in the consciousness of the thinking subject. It is not a matter of reproduction! The Hegelian way of looking is the looking of a spectator only in so far as it is in fact in principle and exclusively theory, thinking consciousness. Granting this premise, and setting aside Kierkegaard’s objection that with it the spectator might by chance have forgotten himself, that is the practical reality of his existence, then for Hegel it is also in order (only too much in order!) that the human subject, whilst looking in this manner, stands by no means apart as if it were not concerned. It is in this looking that the something seen is produced. And the thing seen actually has its reality in the fact that it is produced as the thing seen in the looking of the human subject. Man cannot participate more energetically (within the frame-work of theoretical possibility), he cannot be more forcefully transferred from the floor of the theatre on to the stage than in his theory."

"The goal of human life is not death but resurrection."

"The enterprise of Adolf Hitler, with all its clatter and fireworks, and all its cunning and dynamic energy, is the enterprise of an evil spirit, which is apparently allowed its freedom for a time in order to test our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ."

"I had to show that the Bible dealt with an encounter between God and Man. I thought only of the apartness of God. What I had to learn after that was the togetherness of Man and God — a union of two totally different kinds of beings."

"I do not preach universal salvation, what I say is that I cannot exclude the possibility that God would save all men at the Judgment."

"When the angels praise God in Heaven I am sure they play Bach. However, en famille they play Mozart, and then God the Lord is especially delighted to listen to them."

"When I come before these men I do not have to explain that we are all sinners. They have committed every sin there is. All I have to tell them is that I, too, am a sinner."

"Man as man can never know God: His wishing, seeking, and striving are all in vain."

"The center is not something which is under our control, but something that controls us."

"Barth's dedication to the sole authority and power of the Word of God was illustrated for us … while we were in Basel. Barth was engaged in a dispute over the stained glass windows in the Basel Münster. The windows had been removed during World War II for fear they would be destroyed by bombs, and Barth was resisting the attempt to restore them to the church. His contention was that the church did not need portrayals of the gospel story given by stained glass windows. The gospel came to the church only through the Word proclaimed. … the incident was typical of Barth's sole dedication to the Word."

"At the center of the discussion of the nature of practical theology is the issue of the relation of theory to praxis. If theory precedes and determines practice, then practice tends to be concerned primarily with methods, techniques and strategies for ministry, lacking theological substance. If practice takes priority over theory, ministry tends to be based on pragmatic results rather than prophetic revelation … Barth, from the beginning, resisted all attempts to portray theory and praxis in opposition to one another. In his early Church Dogmatics he described any distinction between “theoretical” and “practical” as a “primal lie, which has to be resisted in principal”. The understanding of Christ as the light of life can be understood only as a “theory which has its origin and goal in praxis”."

"A Christ-intoxicated man. … What emerges from Barth's theology is a breathtaking, daring vision of a universe in which tragedy, demonic evil and chaos have been met and defeated in the figure of Jesus Christ."

"It is because Barth turns his glance wholly away from the state of faith and directs it to the content of faith that he writes well."

"One of the cardinal points of Barth's doctrine of God is that He is the transcendent God. On every hand Barth is out to set God immensely above the dieties of the world, and the substitutes for God which modern philosophy and scientific research into Nature's forces have put into "modern" man's mind. … Barth makes it explicit from the beginning that God is the unknowable and indescribable God. The hidden God remains hidden. Even when we say we know him our knowledge is of an incomprehensible Reality. … Barth's contention is summed up in the dictum: Finitum non Capax infiniti, the finite has no capacity for the Infinite. … On every hand Barth speaks of time and eternity as two distinct realms, an unbridged chasm between God and man, and the unknown God."

"Most of my criticisms stem from the fact that I have been greatly influenced by liberal theology, maintaining a healthy respect for reason and a strong belief in the immanence as well as the transcendence of God. … Not that God is not transcendent. The liberal so believes, but he also contends that God is also immanent, expressing his creative genius throughout the universe which he is ever creating and always sustaining as well as through the essentail goodness of th world and human life. It is not that God is above us to which the liberal objects, but he does demur when he is asked to affirm that God is with us only in a tiny segment of "experience."… The liberal also finds God in the beauty of the world, in the unpremeditated goodness of men, and in the moral order of reality. … It must also be noted at this point that Barth speaks of the generally accepted metaphysical and ethical attributes of God, sovereignity, majesty, holiness, ect., with a degree of certainty. It was once said of Herbert Spencer that he knew a great deal about the "Unknowable" so of Barth, one wonders how he came to know so much of the "Unknown God." … In spite of our somewhat severe criticisms of Barth, however, we do not in the least want to minimize the importance of his message. His cry does call attention to the desperateness of the human situation. He does insist that religion begins with God and that man cannot have faith apart from him. He does proclaim that apart from God our human efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest night. He does suggest that man is not sufficient unto himself for life, but is dependent upon the proclamatiom of God's living Word, through which by means of Bible, preacher, and revealed Word, God himself comes to the consciences of men. Much of this is good, and may it not be that it will serve as a necessary corrective for a liberalism that at times becomes all too shallow?"

"1919...Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres."

"Barth has been variously damned as a heretic, a narrow-minded Biblicist, and an atheist in disguise — and praised as the most creative Protestant theologian since John Calvin. President James McCord of Princeton Theological says that "he bestrides the theological world like a colossus." Harvard's German-born Paul Tillich, the contemporary religious thinker whose stature most nearly rivals Barth's, has often disagreed with Barth — : "shouting at each other over a glass of wine" — but calls him, "the most monumental appearance in our period." Roman Catholic theologians, notably in Europe, have praised his thinking in terms they usually reserve for St. Thomas Aquinas. Once, upon hearing that Pius XII had paid tribute to his work, Barth smiled and said, "This proves the infallibility of the Pope." More seriously, he insists that the best critical work on his works — over 500 titles so far — has been done by such Catholic Modernists as French Jesuit Henri Bouillard and Father Hans Urs von Balthasar of Basel. By contrast, Reinhold Niebuhr regards Barth as a "man of infinite imagination and irresponsibility" writing "irrelevant theology to America. I don't read Barth any more," he says. And Dr. Cornelius Van Til of Westminster Theological Seminary speaks for a host of U.S. fundamentalists in charging that "Barthianism is even more hostile to the theology of Luther and Calvin than Romanism."

"His treatment of Christian dogma has soared across denominational boundaries, affecting the thought of Baptists, Lutherans and Episcopalians as well as his own Reformed Church. Preachers read him, and his thought probably affects a good share of the sermons spoken in U.S. churches any given Sunday, but laymen hardly know his name. … In a way, this lack of a following is a tribute to the originality and individuality of Barth's accomplishments. His kind of God-thinking has been commonly called "neo-orthodoxy" and "theology of crisis" — labels that Barth rejects, since they scarcely define it at all."

"Barth accepts and welcomes scholarly criticism of the Bible, even when it shows the Scriptures to be full of errors and inconsistencies. He does not consider the Bible infallible, and he deplores orthodox Protestants who make it into "a paper Pope." Nevertheless, the Bible testifies to God's Word, which is revealed to man through human speech. The words that the Biblical writers use may not always be the appropriate ones, but they must be accepted as words elected by God."

"Anxiety is an even better teacher than reality, for one can temporarily evade reality by avoiding the distasteful situation; but anxiety is a source of education always present because one carries it within."

"We are more apt to feel depressed by the perpetually smiling individual than the one who is honestly sad. If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself."

"Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society — Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line."

"One does not become fully human painlessly."

"True religion, namely a fundamental affirmation of the meaning of life, is something without which no human being can be healthy in personality. . . . What happens to mental health when this meaning which religion gives is absent? In other words, what is the effect of atheism on personality? . . . I have been startled by the fact that practically every genuine atheist with whom I have dealt has exhibited unmistakable neurotic tendencies."

"Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity."

"It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness."

"The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities."

"The upshot is that the values and goals which provided a unifying center for previous centuries in the modern period no longer are cogent. We have not yet found the new center which will enable us to choose our goals constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of not knowing which way to move. Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a "slave-morality." Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being "de-humanized," and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identify as persons."

"Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves."

"Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world."

"Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity, who is able to affirm his being, if need be, against all other beings and the whole inorganic world."

"Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves."

"Man is the "ethical animal" — ethical in potentiality even if, unfortunately, not in actuality. His capacity for ethical judgment — like freedom, reason and the other unique characteristics of the human being — is based upon his consciousness of himself."

"In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not."

"It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle. Strange as it sounds, steady, patient growth in freedom is probably the most difficult task of all, requiring the greatest courage. Thus if the term "hero" is used in this discussion at all, it must refer not to the special acts of outstanding persons, but to the heroic element potentially in every man."

"Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own."

"We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one's total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One's religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for."

"In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on his own at an earlier age and for a longer period."

"Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration."

"The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience."

"Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears."

"The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the "when" of the future or the "then" of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound."

"The practical implicati´on is that one's goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility."

"The crucial question which confronts us in psychology and other aspects of the science of man is precisely this chasm between what is abstractly true and what is existentially real for the given living person."

"There is considerable danger that psychoanalysis, as well as other forms of psychotherapy and adjustment psychology, will become new representations of the fragmentation of man, that they will exemplify the loss of the individual's vitality and significance, rather than the reverse, that the new techniques will assist in standardizing and giving cultural sanction to man's alienation from himself rather than solving it, that they will become expressions of the new mechanization of man, now calculated and controlled with greater psychological precision and on a vaster scale of unconscious and depth dimensions — that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general will become part of the neurosis of our day rather than part of the cure. This would indeed be a supreme irony of history. It is not alarmism nor the showing of unseemly fervor to point out these tendencies, some of which are already upon us. It is simply to look directly at our historical situation and to draw unflinchingly the implications."

"Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level — man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology."

"It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it … Modern Western man thus finds himself in the strange situation, after reducing something to an abstraction, of having then to persuade himself it is real. … the only experience we let ourselves believe in as real, is that which precisely is not."

"I have described the human dilemma as the capacity of man to view himself as object and as subject. My point is that both are necessary — necessary for psychological science, for effective therapy, and for meaningful living. I am also proposing that in the dialectical process between these two poles lies the development, and the deepening and widening, of human consciousness. The error on both sides — for which I have used Skinner and the pre-paradox Rogers as examples — is the assumption that one can avoid the dilemma by taking one of its poles. It is not simply that man must learn to live with the paradox — the human being has always lived in this paradox or dilemma, from the time that he first became aware of the fact that he was the one who would die and coined a word for his own death. Illness, limitations of all sorts, and every aspect of our biological state we have indicated are aspects of the deterministic side of the dilemma — man is like the grass of the field, it withereth. The awareness of this, and the acting on this awareness, is the genius of man the subject. But we must also take the implications of this dilemma into our psychological theory. Between the two horns of this dilemma, man has developed symbols, art, language, and the kind of science which is always expanding in its own presuppositions. The courageous living within this dilemma, I believe, is the source of human creativity."

"Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image."

"When people feel their insignificance as individual persons, they also suffer an undermining of their sense of human responsibility."

"Increasingly in our time — this is an inevitable result of collectivization — it is the organization man who succeeds. And he is characterized by the fact that he has significance only if he gives up his significance."

"Anxiety occurs because of a threat to the values a person identifies with his existence as a self … most anxiety comes from a threat to social, emotional and moral values the person identifies with himself. And here we find that a main source of anxiety, particularly in the younger generation, is that they do not have viable values available in the culture on the basis of which they can relate to their world. The anxiety which is inescapable in an age in which values are so radically in transition is a central cause of apathy … such prolonged anxiety tends to develop into lack of feeling and the experience of depersonalization."

"The overemphasis on the Baconian doctrine of knowledge as power, and the accompanying concern with gaining power over nature as well as over ourselves in the sense of treating ourself as objects to be manipulated rather than human beings whose aim is to expand in meaningful living, have resulted in the invalidation of the self. This tends to shrink the individual's consciousness, to block off his awareness, and thus play into … unconstructive anxiety … I propose that the aim of education is exactly the opposite, namely, the widening and deepening of consciousness. To the extent that education can help the student develop sensitivity, depth of perception, and above all the capacity to perceive significant forms in what he is studying, it will be developing at the same time the student's capacity to deal with anxiety constructively."

"A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat."

"It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love."

"Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide."

"The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized — and it may explode into violence."

"Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for him — a generally painful situation of which he is more or less aware..."

"Both artist and neurotic speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this positively, communicating what he experiences to his fellow men. The neurotic does this negatively."

"Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is."

"When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible."

"In a world where numbers inexorably take over as our means of identification, like flowing lava threatening to suffocate and fosilize all breathing life in its path; in a world where "normality" is defined as keeping your cool; where sex is so available that the only way to preserve any inner center is to have intercourse without committing yourself — in such a schizoid world, which young people experience more directly since they have not had time to build up the defenses which dull the senses of their elders, it is not surprising that will and love have become increasingly problematic and even, as some people believe, impossible of achievement."

"The constructive schizoid person stands against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and does not let himself be emptied by it. He lives and works with the machine without becoming a machine. He finds it necessary to remain detached enough to get meaning from the experience, but in doing so, to protect his own inner life from impoverishment."

"Sex can be defined fairly adequately in physiological terms as consisting of the building up of bodily tensions and their release. Eros, in contrast, is the experiencing of the personal intentions and meaning of the act. Whereas sex is a rhythm of stimulus and response, eros is a state of being. The pleasure of sex is described by Freud and others as the reduction of tension; in eros, on the contrary, we wish not to be released from the excitement but rather to hang on to it, to bask in it, and even to increase it. The end toward which sex points is gratification and relaxation, whereas eros is a desiring, longing, a forever reaching out, seeking to expand."

"When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, "You are looking at somebody now." … this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not."

"To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before."

"When we "fall" in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes around us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world. Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects … Love is the answer, we sing. … our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic — albeit desperate — conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros."

"The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both."

"The daimonic is is obviously not an an entity but refers to a fundamental, archetypal function of human experience — an existential reality in modern man, and, as far as we know, in all men. The daimonic is the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself. The daimonic becomes evil when it usurps the total self without regard to the integration of that self, or to the unique forms and desires of others and their need for integration. It then appears in excessive aggression, hostility, cruelty — the things about ourselves which horrify us most, and which we repress whenever we can or, more likely, project on others. But these are the reverse side of the same assertion which empowers our creativity. All life is a flux between these two aspects of the daimonic. We can repress the daimonic, but we cannot avoid the toll of apathy and the tendency toward later explosion which such repression brings in its wake."

"The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it man's 'recall to himself' as Heidegger and later Fromm have argued, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such."

"We must rediscover the daimonic in a new form which will be adequate to our own predicament and fructifying for our own day. And this will not be a rediscovery alone but a recreation of the reality of the daimonic. The daimonic needs to be directed and channeled. Here is where human consciousness becomes so important. We initially experience the daimonic as a blind push. It is impersonal in the sense that it makes us nature's tool. … consciousness can integrate the daimonic, make it personal."

"Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane."

"While the daimonic cannot be said to be evil in itself, it confronts us with the troublesome dilemma of whether it is to be used with awareness, a sense of responsibility and the significance of life, or blindly and rashly."

"Violence is the daimonic gone awry. It is "demon possession" in its starkest form. Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form."

"My fellow liberals and I in America, and in Europe to a lesser extent, believed so strongly in peace and world brotherhood in those days that we could not even see Hitler or the destructively daimonic reality he represented. Human beings just couldn't be that cruel in the our civilized twentieth century — the accounts in the papers must be wrong. Our error was that we let our convictions limit our perceptions. We had no place for the daimonic; we believed that the world must somehow fit our convictions, and the whole daimonic dimension was ruled out of our perception. Not to recognize the daimonic itself turns out to be daimonic, it makes us accomplices on the side of the destructive possession. The denial of the daimonic is, in effect, a self-castration in love and a self-nullification in will. And the denial leads to the perverted forms of aggression we have seen in our day in which the repressed comes back to haunt us."

"[T]he daimonic power does not merely take the individual over as its victim, but works through him psychologically, it clouds his judgment, makes it harder for him to see reality, but still leaves him with the responsibility for the act. This is the age old dilemma of my own personal responsibility even though I am ruled by fate. It is the ultimate statement that truth and reality are psychologized only to a limited extent. Aeschylus is not impersonal but transpersonal, a believer in fate and moral responsibility at the same time."

"[D]epression… can be usefully seen, from one point of view, as the inability to see or construct a future."

"Stoicism, in our day, is not strength to overcome wishes, but to hide them.…Tendencies have become endemic in our culture for our denial of wishes to be rationalized and accepted with the belief that this denial of the wish will result in its being fulfilled."

"Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness."

"Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about."

"The experience of tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union."

"Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the forms ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it."

"Physical courage in whatever scene … seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel he is fighting for others as well as himself."

"However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings."

"I must make the important distinction between the rebel and the revolutionary. One is in ineradicable opposition to the other. The revolutionary seeks an external political change, "the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another." The origin of the term is the word revolve, literally meaning a turnover, as the revolution of a wheel. When the conditions under a given government are insufferable some groups may seek to break down that government in the conviction that any new form cannot but be better. Many revolutions, however, simply substitute one kind of government for another, the second no better than the first — which leaves the individual citizen, who has had to endure the inevitable anarchy between the two, worse off than before. Revolution may do more harm than good. The rebel, on the other hand, is "one who opposes authority or restraint: one who breaks with established custom or tradition." … He seeks above all an internal change, a change in the attitudes, emotions, and outlook of the people to whom he is devoted. He often seems to be temperamentally unable to accept success and the ease it brings; he kicks against the pricks, and when one frontier is conquered, he soon becomes ill-at-ease and pushes on to the new frontier. He is drawn to the unquiet minds and spirits, for he shares their everlasting inability to accept stultifying control. He may, as Socrates did, refer to himself as the gadfly for the state — the one who keeps the state from settling down into a complacency, which is the first step toward decadance. No matter how much the rebel gives the appearance of being egocentric or of being on an "ego trip," this is a delusion; inwardly the authentic rebel is anything but brash."

"True to the meaning of the rebel as one who renounces authority, he seeks primarily not the substitution of one political system for another. He may favor such a political change, but it is not his chief goal. He rebels for the sake of a vision of life and society which he is convinced is critically important for himself and his fellows. … the rebel fights not only for the relief of his fellow men but also for his personal integrity. For him these are but two sides of the same coin."

"The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel."

"Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to man, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his liver during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day."

"There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no.""

"Note the startling regularity through history with which society martyrs the rebel in one generation and worships him in the next. Socrates, Jesus, William Blake, Buddha, Krishna — the list is as endless as it is rich."

"Art is a substitute for violence. The same impulses that drive persons to violence — the hunger for meaning, the need for ecstasy, the impulse to risk all — drive the artist to create. He is by nature our archrebel. … the essence of the rebellion is in the new way of seeing nature and life."

"The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all his adversaries is the last thing on earth he wishes: their extermination would deprive him and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies — being human — also have and could share with him. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with our enemies, we are the poorer."

"The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form."

"Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt — these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. … My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another."

"Communication leads to community — that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking. Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood."

"If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also, you will have betrayed your community in failing to make your contribution."

"Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism."

"It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one's own sensitivity with the suffering of one's fellow human beings."

"The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage."

"Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built."

"The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt."

"Those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists — the dramatists, the musicians, the painters, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images — poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations."

"Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age old capacity to be insurgent. They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds."

"Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be. We can then say, with Joyce, Welcome, O life! We go for the millionth time to forge in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of the race."

"The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves."

"Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint — they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas."

"Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged."

"World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. The pole of world is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing — specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world."

"In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. For the consciousness which obtains in creativity is not the superficial level of objectified intellectualization, but is an encounter with the world on a level that undercuts the subject-object split. "Creativity" to rephrase our definition, “is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.”"

"A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision."

"Dogmatists of all kinds — scientific, economic, moral, as well as political — are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control."

"The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet's struggle brings forth an answer — meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision."

"Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey's studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter."

"Symbol and myth do bring into awareness infantile, archaic dreads and similar primitive psychic content. This is their regressive aspect. But they also bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely subjective but has a second pole which is outside ourselves. This is the progressive side of symbol and myth. This aspect points ahead. It is integrative. It is a progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and our own existence, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur so well states. It is a road to universals beyond discrete personal experience."

"Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the "divine madness" to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean."

"The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously. As Kierkegaard well said, the self is only that which it is in the process of becoming. Despite the obvious determinism in human life — especially in the physical aspect of ones self in such simple things as color of eyes, height relative length of life, and so on — there is also, clearly, this element of self-directing, self-forming. Thinking and self-creating are inseparable. When we become aware of all the fantasies in which we see ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, this becomes obvious."

"Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight."

"The value of dreams, like … divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to "live" themselves into the message."

"Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem."

"When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings. You reject certain ways of saying it; you select others, always trying to form the poem again. In your forming, you arrive at new and more profound meanings than you had even dreamed of. Form is not a mere lopping off of meaning that you don't have room to put into your poem; it is an aid to finding new meaning, a stimulus to condensing your meaning, to simplifying and purifying it, and to discovering on a more universal dimension the essence you wish to express."

"Imagination is the outreaching of mind … the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images and every sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to "dream dreams and see visions...""

"You can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world that makes some sense to you."

"The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. To fill the gaps is essential if the scene is to have meaning. That we may do this in misleading ways — at times in neurotic or paranoid ways — does not gainsay the central point. Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance."

"This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is. Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding — can participate in the constituting of reality — only as they are creative. Creativity is thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-world relationship."

"Certainly the neurotic, anxious child is compulsively concerned with security, for example; and certainly the neurotic adult, and we who study him, read our later formulations back in the unsuspecting mind of the child. But is not the normal child just as truly interested in moving out into the world, exploring, following his curiosity and sense of adventure- going out “to learn to shiver and to shake,: as the nursery rhyme puts it? And if you block these needs of the child, you get a traumatic reaction from him just as you do when you take away his security. I, for one, believe we vastly overemphasize the human being’s concern with security and survival satisfaction because they so neatly fit our cause-and-effect way of thinking. I believe Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were more accurate when they described man as the organism makes certain values — prestige, power, tenderness — more important than pleasure and even more important than survival itself. My thesis here is that we can understand repression, for example, only on the deeper level of meaning of the human being’s potentialities. In this respect, “being” is to be defined as the individual’s “pattern of potentialities.” … in my work in psychotherapy there appears more and more evidence that anxiety in our day arises not so much out of fear of lack of libidinal satisfactions or security, but rather out of the patient’s fear of his own powers, and the conflicts that arise from that fear. This may be the particular “neurotic personality of our time” – the neurotic pattern of contemporary “outer directed” organizational man."

"The existential way of understanding human beings has some illustrious progenitors in Western history, such as Socrates in his dialogues, Augustine in his depth-psychological analyses of the self, Pascal in his struggle to find a place for the “heart’s reasons which the reason knows not of.” But it arose specifically just over a hundred years ago in Kierkegaard’s violent protest against the reigning rationalism of his day Hegel’s “totalitarianism of reason,” to use Maritain’s phrase. Kierkegaard proclaimed that Hegel’s identification of abstract truth with reality was an illusion and amounted to trickery. “Truth exists,” wrote Kierkegaard, “only as the individual himself produces it in action.”"

"Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and those who followed them accurately foresaw this growing split between truth and reality in Western culture, and they endeavored to call Western man back from the delusion that reality can be comprehended in an abstracted, detached way. But though they protested vehemently against arid intellectualism, they were by no means simple activists. Nor were they antirational. Anti-intellectualism and other movements in our day which make thinking subordinate to acting must not at all be confused with existentialism. Either alternative-making man subject or object-results in loosing the living, existing person."

"When one read’s Kierkegaard’s profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche’s amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis."

"In the winter of 1841 Schelling gave his famous series of lectures at the University of Berlin before a distinguished audience including Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Engels, Bakunin. Schelling set out to overthrow Hegel, whose vast rationalist system including the identification of abstract truth with reality and the bringing of all history into an “absolute whole,” held immense and dominant popularity in the Europe of the middle of the nineteenth century. – 1844 Kierkegaard published Philosophical Fragments, and two years later he wrote the declaration of independence for existentialism, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Also in 1844 there appeared the second edition of Schopenhauer’s The world as will and idea, .. central emphasis “will” along with “idea” -- two related works by Marx 1844-45 – “attacked abstract truth’ as “ideology” “using Hegel as his whipping boy” “men and groups bring truth into being” “money economy turns people into things”"

"In the following decades “Kierkegaard remained completely unknown, Schelling’s work was contemptuously buried, and Marx and Feuerbach were interpreted as dogmatic materialists. Then a new impetus came in the 1880’s with the work of Dilthey, and particularly with Freidrich Nietzsche, the “philosophy of life” movement, and the work of Berson. The third phase came after the shock of WWI – “Kierkegaard and the early Marxists were rediscovered and the serious challenges to the spiritual and psychological basis of Western society given by Nietzsche could no longer be covered over by Victorian self-satisfied placidity. The specific form of the third phase owes much to the phenomenology of Edmond Husserl, which gave to Heidegger, Jaspers, and the others the tool they needed to undercut the subject object cleavage which had been such a stumbling block to science as well as philosophy."

"Freud describes the neurotic personality of the late nineteenth century as one suffering from fragmentation – that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego, together with the various neurotic symptoms which result from this fragmentation. “Kierkegaard-who wrote the only known book before Freud specifically devoted to the problem of anxiety-analyzes not only anxiety but particularly the depression and despair which result from the individual’s self-estrangement, an estrangement he proceeds to clarify in its different forms and degrees of severity. Nietzsche proclaims ten years before Freud’s first book that the disease of contemporary man is that “his soul had gone stale” he is – he describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Freud did not know Kierkegaard’s work, but he regarded Nietzsche as one of the authentically great men of all time.”"

"Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement — or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “Follow not me, but you!”"

"The central psychological endeavor of Kierkegaard may be summed up under the heading of the question he pursued relentlessly: How can one become an individual? The individual was being swallowed up on the rational side by Hegel's vast logical "absolute Whole," on the economic side by the increasing objectification of the person, and on the moral and spiritual side by the soft and vapid religion of his day. Europe was ill, and was to become more so, not because knowledge or techniques were lacking but because of the want of passion, commitment. ""Away from Speculation, away from the System," he called, and "back to reality!" p. 69"

"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it."

"Faith lived in the incognito is one which is located outside the criticism coming from society, from politics, from history, for the very reason that it has itself the vocation to be a source of criticism. It is faith (lived in the incognito) which triggers the issues for the others, which causes everything seemingly established to be placed in doubt, which drives a wedge into the world of false assurances."

"I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history."

"This is why there is such an incredible stress on information in our schools. The important thing is to prepare young people to enter the world of information, able to handle computers, but knowing only the reasoning, the language, the combinations, and the connections between computers. This movement is invading the whole intellectual domain and also that of conscience. … What is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant."

"There are different forms of anarchy and different currents in it. I must, first say very simply what anarchy I have in view. By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence. Hence I cannot accept either nihilists or anar­chists who choose violence as a means of action."

"Anarchism can teach Christian thinkers to see the realities of our societies from a different standpoint than the dominant one of the state. What seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the nation-state is the norm. … Whether the state be Marxist or capitalist, it makes no difference. The dominant ideology is that of sovereignty."

"If people lose their motive for living, two things can happen. It only seldom happens that they can accept that fact. In that case, they develop suicidal tendencies. Either they try to find refuge in diversion. We’ve already discussed this. Or they become depressed and begin swallowing medicines. So if people become aware of their situation they react to it in ways of what usually happens in Western society: they become depressed and discouraged. So they just don’t think about their situation and simply carry on. They drive faster and faster. Never mind where, as long as it’s fast."

"I can very well say without hesitation that all those who have political power, even if they use it well have acquired it by demonic mediation and even if they are not conscious of it, they are worshippers of diabolos."

"There remains the problem of Goebbels' reputation. He wore the title of Big Liar (bestowed by Anglo-Saxon propaganda) and yet he never stopped battling for propaganda to be as accurate as possible. He preferred being cynical and brutal to being caught in a lie. He used to say: "Everybody must know what the situation is." He was always the first to announce disastrous events or difficult situations, without hiding anything. The result was a general belief between 1939 and 1942 that German communiqués not only were more concise, clearer and less cluttered, but were more truthful than Allied communiqués (American and neutral opinion) — and, furthermore, that the Germans published all the news two or three days before the Allies. All this is so true that pinning the title of Big Liar on Goebbels must be considered quite a propaganda success."

"The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide. We must not accept this suicide, and we must so act that it cannot take place."

"In point of fact there are a certain number of values and of forces which are of decisive importance in our world civilization: the primacy of production, the continual growth of the power of the State and the formation of the National State, the autonomous development of technics, etc. These, among others — far more than the ownership of the means of production or any totalitarian doctrine — are the constitutive elements of the modern world. So long as these elements continue to be taken for granted, the world is standing still."

"People think that they have no right to judge a fact — all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact."

"The first builder of a city was Cain."

"Cain is completely dissatisfied with the security granted to him by God, and so he searches out his own security. ... He will satisfy his desire for eternity by producing children, and he will satisfy his desire for security by creating a place belonging to him, a city."

"Cain has built a city. For God's Eden he substitutes his own, for the goal given to his life by God, he substitutes a goal chosen by himself."

"The Scriptures ... tell us what man wanted to do when he created the city, what he was hoping to conquer, what he thought to establish. And this narrative of the origin of the city is essential, for we see there in its purest state, and expressed simply, the feelings of the builders. Such feelings are no longer evident in our modern day when the prodigious complexity of the world hides the simple plans of the never-changing human heart."

""Righteous Abel," says Matthew [23:34-45]. What luck! So there is a righteous race! No such thing: Abel dies leaving no children, a fact full of meaning. He is unable to transmit his righteousness."

"Cain is not the city and Abel is not the country; but the relationship between them also illuminates ... the relationship between the city and the country. ... The city was, from the day of its creation, incapable, because of the motives behind its construction, of any other destiny than that of killing the country, where God put man to enable him to live his life as best he could."

"The city is not just a collection of ramparts with houses, but also a spiritual power. ... It is capable of directing and changing a man's spiritual life. It brings its power to bear in him and changes his life."

"Man's power is first of all the result of hardening his heart against God: man affirms that he is strong, conquers the world, and builds cities."

"Urban civilization is warring civilization."

"The social group which the city represents is so strong that it draws men into sin which is hardly personal to them, but from which they cannot dissociate themselves even if they so desire. Individual virtues are engulfed by the sin of the city."

"Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity."

"Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends."

"Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine."

"A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality. Here, then, is one of the elements of weakness of this point of view. It does not perceive technique's rigorous autonomy with respect to morals; it does not see that the infusion of some more or less vague sentiment of human welfare cannot alter it. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. This attitude supposes further that technique evolves with some end in view, and that this end is human good. Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed."

"It is not true that the perfection of police power is the result of the state’s Machiavellianism or of some transitory influence. The whole structure of society of society implies it, of necessity. The more we mobilize the forces of nature, the more must we mobilize men and the more do we require order."

"No technique is possible when men are free. … Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being. … The individual must be fashioned by techniques … in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization."

"True technique will know how to maintain the illusion of liberty, choice, and individuality; but these will have been carefully calculated so that they will be integrated into the mathematical reality merely as appearances!"

"Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it."

"But if technique demands the participation of everybody, this means that the individual is reduced to a few essential functions which make him a mass man. He remains 'free', but he can no longer escape being a part of the mass. Technical expansion requires the widest possible domain. In the near future not even the whole earth may be sufficient."

"...there is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state."

"Technique shapes an aristocratic society, which in turn implies aristocratic government. Democracy in such a society can only be a mere appearance. Even now, we see in propaganda the premises of such a state of affairs. When it comes to state propaganda, there is no longer any question of democracy."

"Sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire’s efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today."

"The individual, by means of the discipline imposed on him by sport, not only plays and finds relaxation from the various compulsions to which he is subjected, but without knowing it trains himself for new compulsions. … Training in sports makes of the individual an efficient piece of apparatus which is henceforth unacquainted with anything but the harsh joys of exploiting his body and winning."

"Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives—in short, all the technical laws and customs—which he encounters in office or factory."

"The individual who is the servant of technique must be completely unconscious of himself."

"People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation). But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps ninety percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe — or disbelieve — in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda."

"Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude."

"Again I want to emphasize that the study of propaganda must be conducted within the context of a technological society. Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world."

"In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint of the organization will no longer be felt by him; the truth is, it will no longer be a constraint, and the police will have nothing to do. The civic and technological good will and the enthusiasm for the right social myths — both created by propaganda — will finally have solved the problem of man."

"First of all, modern propaganda is based on scientific analyses of psychology and sociology. Step by step, the propagandist builds his techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning — and as much on social psychology as on depth psychology. He shapes his procedures on the basis of our knowledge of groups and their laws of formation and dissolution, of mass influences, and of environmental limitations. Without the scientific research of modern psychology and sociology there would be no propaganda, or rather we still would be in the primitive stages of propaganda that existed in the time of Pericles or Augustus."

"The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass. It is at this point that propaganda can be most effective."

"Propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means at his disposal — the press, radio, TV, movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. Modern propaganda must utilize all of these media. There is no propaganda as long as one makes use, in sporadic fashion and at random, of a newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, organizes a few meetings and lectures, writes a few slogans on walls: that is not propaganda."

"The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action."

"Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve."

"Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality."

"...because of the myth of progress, it is much easier to sell a man an electric razor than a straight-edged one."

"Having analyzed these traits, we can now advance a definition of propaganda — not an exhaustive definition, unique and exclusive of all others, but at least a partial one: Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization."

"It is because we know that we are going forward to life and resurrection that we must purify ourselves in order that we may be presented holy and faultless. This purification, of course, is not just ritual or moral. It is purification from the stains of the world. It will manifest itself in our freedom with regard to the things of the world. This is why hope and freedom are so often related in the texts. The hope which binds us to the risen Christ by a full and actual bond is precisely that which allows us to reject the validity of the secular powers."

"There is no concrete possibility at all of disengagement from social, political, and economic determinations. The only freedom man has is to recognize these and to recognize that he is determined by them. The first act of freedom is a recognition of necessity, not theoretically, but with a personal reference, and an attempt to put this recognition to work by trying to assess necessity, to discover its meaning and significance. To face up to the necessity that is seen at work in oneself, to perceive that I myself obey necessity, and to consider the implications of this—this act of recognition is an act of freedom."

"Jesus Christ has not come to establish social justice any more than he has come to establish the power of the state or the reign of money or art. Jesus Christ has come to save men, and all that matters is that men may come to know him. We are adept at finding reasons—good theological, political, or practical reasons, for camouflaging this. But the real reason is that we let ourselves be impressed and dominated by the forces of the world, by the press, by public opinion, by the political game, by appeals to justice, liberty, peace, the poverty of the third world, and the Christian civilization of the west, all of which play on our inclinations and weaknesses. Modern protestants are in the main prepared to be all things to all men, like St. Paul, but unfortunately this is not in order that they may save some but in order that they may be like all men."

"Man himself is exalted, and paradoxical though it may seem to be, this means the crushing of man. Man's enslavement is the reverse side of the glory, value, and importance that are ascribed to him. The more a society magnifies human greatness, the more one will see men alienated, enslaved, imprisoned, and tortured, in it. Humanism prepares the ground for the anti-human. We do not say that this is an intellectual paradox. All one need do is read history. Men have never been so oppressed as in societies which set man at the pinnacle of values and exalt his greatness or make him the measure of all things. For in such societies freedom is detached from its purpose, which is, we affirm, the glory of God."

"Every modern state is totalitarian. It recognizes no limit either factual or legal. This is why I maintain that no state in the modern world is legitimate. No present-day authority can claim to be instructed by God, for all authority is set in the framework of a totalitarian state. This is why I decide for anarchy."

"No society can last in conditions of anarchy. This is self-evident and I am in full agreement. But my aim is not the establishment of an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. Here I differ from anarchists. I do not believe that it is possible to destroy the modern state. It is pure imagination to think that some day this power will be overthrown. From a pragmatic standpoint there is no chance of success. Furthermore, I do not believe that anarchist doctrine is the solution to the problem of organization in society and government. I do not think that if anarchism were to succeed we should have a better or more livable society. Hence I am not fighting for the triumph of this doctrine. On the other hand, it seems to me that an anarchist attitude is the only one that is sufficiently radical in the face of a general statist system."

"The system absorbs those who think they can utilize it. Nor can there be any question of finding a modus vivendi or achieving attenuations. It has been demonstrated how the liberal state becomes an authoritarian state. The course is set and no accommodation will be either lasting or sufficient. In face of this absolute power, only an absolutely negative position is viable. What we have in mind is the attitude that conscientous objectors take on a specific point, and not without good reason. In the present set-up the anarchist attitude of a total refusal of validity or legitimacy to any authority of any kind seems to me to be the only valid and viable one. The point is not to enforce a particular view of society but to establish a counterbalance, a protest, a sign of cleavage. In face of an absolute power only a total confrontation has any meaning."

"When we speak of dialogue with the sovereign, it seems to me that this can be definitely initiated only on the basis of the greatest possible intransigence, for power today is completely alien to any real discussion. It is true that discussion is allowed within the system. But the quarrels between right and left seem to me completely futile, for in every possible way they simply lead to an enhancement of the power of the state. Democracy is a mere trap with the party system as it is and a bureaucracy that cannot be altered. Discussion may go on about taxes and the improvement of social services. But power is totally deaf to the individual, indifferent to the interests of freedom, and ignorant of the true concerns of the nation. Only a radical opposition, i.e., an attack on the root of the situation, can engage it in authentic dialogue."

"This is where each individual must decide for himself. The essential thing is the decision to challenge the modern state, which without this small group of protesters will be checked by neither brake, value, nor reason."

"It seems to me that the free man, i.e., the man freed in Christ, ought to take part in all movements that aim at human freedom. He obviously ought to oppose all dictatorship and oppression and all the fatalities which crush man. The Christian cannot bear it that others should be slaves. His great passion in the world ought to be a passion for the liberation of men."

"We are in the process of seeing the fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe's prophecy in which the painter, impassioned by his mistress-model and also by his art, "did not want to see that the colors he spread on his canvas were taken from the cheeks of the woman seated beside him. And when several weeks had passed, and very little remained to be done, nothing but a stroke on the mouth and a glaze over the eye, the mistress’s spirit still flickered like the flame at the base of a lamp. Then he put on the final touch, put the glaze in place, and for a moment the painter stood in ecstasy before the work he had finished. But a moment later, he was struck with panic, and shouting with a piercing voice: ‘It is truly Life itself,’ he suddenly turned around to look at his mistress. She was dead." Nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images."

"“Everything, right now” is the notion that comes from the presence of images, which in effect get us used to seeing all in a single glance."

"Images produce an intellectual process different from the ancient one or the one developed by classical education. It goes without saying that this process is not completely new; of course, since sight existed, and since people themselves chose their images, they also thought by means of images and entered into this kind of thinking. But this was limited and not frequent, because images were not dominant. The new factor in our day comes from the effect of visual reproduction’s triumph over all else, which involves us in the domination of one form of thought. This supremacy is new, even though we are not dealing with a completely new form of thought."

"The word, although prevalent in our day, has lost its reasoning value, and has value only as an accessory to images. In turn, the word actually evokes images. But it does not evoke the direct images related to my personal experience. Rather, it calls up images from the newspaper or television. The key words in our modern vocabulary, thanks to propaganda and advertising, are words that relate to visual reproduction. They are stripped of all rational content, so they evoke only visions that whisk us away to some enchanted universe. Saying "fascism," "progress," "science," or "justice" does not suggest any idea or produce any reflection. It only causes a fanfare of images to explode within us: a sort of fireworks of visual commonplaces, which link up very precisely with each other. These related images provide me with practical content: a common truth that is especially easy to swallow because the ready-made images that showed it to me had been digested in advance. Make no mistake here: this is how modern people usually think. We are arriving at a purely emotional stage of thinking."

"The emotional quality of what we moderns call our thought produces an extreme violence of conviction combined with extreme incoherence in our arguments. I refer here to ordinary people and not to an intellectual elite. We do not involve ourselves in studying the meaning and consequences of a fact calmly and objectively. The fact asserts itself through its image and associates itself in unchallengeable fashion with other images which, in this mode of thinking, are its true context. Emotions justify as well as provoke or command opinions, which still seem intellectual and reasoned."

"Sight, when used in the context of nature, creates direct communication with reality. It implies that one is involved in this particular reality and quickly leads a person to action. But when the image has become artificial and is purely a means of knowledge, the reaction persists. I feel directly involved in what I see, just as prehistoric people did. And if I am seeing objects or ideas, I am not truly independent; I cannot really take my distance from these objects. From the intellectual point of view, this means I cannot really exercise my critical faculties. The use of images to transmit knowledge leads to the progressive elimination of distance between a person and his knowledge, because of the way we are made to participate when this means is used (this is, of course, in perfect accord with technical civilization, and to be desired by its standards). The critical faculties and autonomy of the thinking person are also eliminated."

"The image that creates this thinking gives rise to a feeling of evidence and a conviction that it is not based on reason. This kind of thinking explains the reaction we so often note among our contemporaries: when someone asks them to give the reason for their opinions, they answer: "It’s evident." This thinking, which creates prejudices and stereotypes, is the domain of the unquestionable. Obviously you cannot dispute with an image, and you cannot challenge the hero of a film. But this extends to the mental images produced by the film: there is no criticism or debate possible, because these involve differing methods of thought. What produces immediate assent cannot bear the discussion process. The conviction acquired in this way can only be attacked on its own ground: by other images."

"Thought based on images can be neither abstract nor critical. … again in this case intellectuals have worked out theories to justify the inevitable. For unconsciously, they could not avoid being subjected to the enormous weight of billions of images (just like other people). Yet consciously, they were well aware that maintaining the demands of critical and independent thought involves a complete break with the rest of humankind. This would make it impossible for them to play their role as genuine intellectuals. They must think like everyone else if they expect to be at all believed by the masses. Thus their conscious and unconscious minds agree in taking them down the path of thought that involves images, evidence, and emotivity."

"A person who thinks by images becomes less and less capable of thinking by reasoning, and vice versa. The intellectual process based on images is contradictory to the intellectual process of reasoning that is related to the word. There are two different ways of dealing with an object. They involve not only different approaches, but even more important, opposing mental attitudes. This is not a matter of complementary processes, such as analysis and synthesis or logic and dialectic. These processes lack any qualitative common denominator."

"We seem to have here a fulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus that a little evil or error will corrupt the whole (like the leaven of the Pharisees). … Christians and the church have wanted an alliance with everything that represents power in the world. In reality this rests on the conviction that thanks to the power of the Holy Spirit the powers of this world have been vanquished and set in service of the gospel, the church, and mission. We must use their forces in the interest of evangelism. … But what happens is the exact opposite. The church and mission are penetrated by the power and completely turned aside from their truth by the corruption of power. When Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this world, he says clearly what he intends to say. He does not validate any worldly kingdom (even if the ruler be a Christian)."

"Evangelical proclamation was essentially subversive. Put in danger by it, the forces of the social body have replied by integrating this power of negation, of challenge, by absorbing it."

"The social body that had been effectively threatened by the diffusion of a faith that bordered on anarchism, on a total lack of interest in worldly matters (administration, commerce, etc.), … reacted in self-defense and absorbed the foreign body, making it serve its own ends."

"Whereas the good news had first been published for its own sake with no concern for success, now ineluctably success brought, as always, a desire for it. … They were not aware of what was happening, namely, that society was inverting Christianity instead of being subverted by it."

"Certainly everywhere in the church there are examples of the rich who give up all things, who become poor for God. They did exist. But in doing this, they either chose the hermit life and withdrew from the life of the church, or they were canonized and held up as miraculous instances of sanctity, that is, they were excluded from the concrete life of the church, set outside the church as “saints” whom, of course, there was no question of ordinary people ever imitating."

"The act of canonization itself demonstrates that these are exceptions not meant for ordinary believers. Ordinary believers should follow a path that conforms to what is natural and normal. Hence theology becomes increasingly a theology of nature and moves further apart from a theology of grace. The hard question put by Jesus: “What more are you doing than others?” is obscured. In accord with society as a whole, theology enters into a search for normality, for obedience to the “laws of nature.”"

"The gospel and the first church were never hostile to women nor treated them as minors. … When Christianity became a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women represent precisely the most innovative elements in Christianity: grace, love, charity, a concern for living creatures, nonviolence, an interest in little things, the hope of new beginnings—the very elements that Christianity was setting aside in favor of glory and success."

"Jesus told his disciples they were a little flock. All his comparisons tend to show that the disciples will necessarily be small in number and weak: the leaven in the dough, the salt in the soup, the sheep among wolves, and many other metaphors. Jesus does not seem to have had a vision of a triumphant and triumphal church encircling the globe. He always depicts for us a secret force that modifies things from within."

"The state, [Kierkegaard] argues, bears a direct relation to numbers. When a state decays, numbers decline and the state disappears. The whole concept is void. The relation of Christianity to numbers is different. A single Christian gives it reality. Christianity bears indeed an inverse relation to numbers. When all become Christians, the concept of Christianity is void. The concept is indeed a polemical one. One can be a Christian only in opposition. When opposition is suppressed, there is no more sense in saying “Christian.” Christendom has astutely abolished Christianity by making us all Christians. … In Christendom there is not the slightest idea of what Christianity is. People cannot see or understand that Christianity has been abolished by its propagation. Again, history probably does not offer any other example of a religion being abolished by reason of its success."

"It was impossible to keep up the great movement of inner and outer freedom initiated by Jesus. The proclamation “You are free through the Holy Spirit,” and Paul’s statement, “Everything is lawful,” were fine for a small, elite group in which everyone knew everyone else. But when it was a matter of thousands of new converts whose depth of faith could not be known, how could they be told that they were completely free to choose their way of life and decide their own conduct? They had to be incorporated and put under the authority of a head of each group, and the more numerous they became, the more sacred and complex this authority had to be. … The glorious freedom that is in Christ could not be tolerated. It was replaced by clear and strict commandments."

"The problem is not merely that of the transformation of Christianity into a state religion but of the diffusion of this faith that has stopped being a faith and has become a collective ideology, a kind of manifestation of thought that collects all the commonplaces, the legends, the miracles, the “prophecies,” the apocalypses, the thaumaturgies, and formulates for the people a facile, moralistic, and constructive set of beliefs."

"Christianity, … welcomed at first among the religions of escape, changes into a religion that gives cohesion to society"

"Very quickly the church found intolerable and inapplicable features in what Jesus Christ demanded and proclaimed. Let us simply take two themes. First, he tells us to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. But how can anyone take this impossibility seriously? … Again, Jesus says, “Go, sell all your goods, give them to the poor, and then come and follow me.” How are we to take this? …"

"Perfect freedom, spiritual as well as political or social, … is accomplished in us by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. … But it is strictly intolerable in the fullness of its implications. It is psychologically unbearable. It carries frightening social risks and is politically insulting to every form of power. It was not possible. On every social level and in every culture, people have found it impossible to take up this freedom and accept its implications. This is the basic impossibility, the unanimous refusal of all people, which has resulted in the rejection of Christian freedom."

"The biblical view is not just apolitical but antipolitical in the sense that it refuses to confer any value on political power, or in the sense that it regards political power as idolatrous."

"In one of the temptations Satan offers to give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, that is, the kingdoms and the related political power. …"

"Jesus find the same mistake in both the Saducees and the Pharisees, both those who collaborate with the Romans and those who oppose them. In the eyes of Jesus they are both wrong. He will not play any part in the political drama."

"The exousia of political power … is a rebel exousia, an angel in revolt against God."

"I believe that the biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power. It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism, to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of "anarchism" (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century)."

"Throughout the Old Testament we see God choosing what is weak and humble to represent him (the stammering Moses, the infant Samuel, Saul from an insignificant family, David confronting Goliath, etc). Paul tells us that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Here, however, we have a striking contradiction. In Constantine God is supposedly choosing an Augustus, a triumphant military leader. This vision and this miracle are totally impossible. But they are not impossible in the context of Christianity that is already off the rails, that thinks of God as the one who directs history and is the motive power in politics."

"After his victory at the Milvian Bridge, faithful to his promise, Constantine favors the church from which he has received support. Catholic Christianity becomes the state religion and an exchange takes place: the church is invested with political power, and it invests the emperor with religious power. We have here the same perversion, for how can Jesus manifest himself in the power of domination and constraint? We have to say here very forcefully that we see here the perversion of revelation by participation in politics, by the seeking of power. The church lets itself be seduced, invaded, dominated by the ease with which it can now spread the gospel by force (another force than that of God) and use its influence to make the state, too, Christian. It is great acquiescence to the temptation Jesus himself resisted, for when Satan offers to give him all the kingdoms of the earth, Jesus refuses, but the church accepts."

"The combination of Christian truth and political power led to the creation of the complex that we know so well. … The emperor endows the church handsomely, helps it in all that it does, aids it in its “mission.” The church supports the emperor’s legitimacy and assures him that he is God’s representative on earth."

"It is frightening to see how easily the church accepts all this. Hardly had it achieved peace before it itself began to persecute. … It commenced the persecution of heretics, and primarily, of course, those who contested the truth and validity of this alliance of empire and church."

"The church … is always at the service of the political power that is either in place or in course of being installed. It goes on to serve the Holy Roman Empire but also the kings of France who split off from it. It will bless all the monarchs who seize power in ways that are tragic, tempestuous, and often bloody and unjust.. It legitimizes everything. This is logical once it associates itself with the existing power."

"Once the church is ready to associate with instituted power it is obliged to associate with all and sundry forms of the state. The scandal is that each time the church seeks to justify both its adaptation and the existing power. It continues to legitimize the state and to be an instrument of its propaganda."

"The church buys the possibility of maintaining itself sat the price of concessions. … In so doing it disavows its martyrs. [Martyrs] want to obey God, not men. But the church trades its support for advantages, honors, titles and money. It comes under the rule of mammon. Finally, it lets itself be bought so as to gain facilities for its celebrations, its evangelism, its good works, its preaching of the good Word. But Satan rejoices at all this, for as this gospel is not based on the cornerstone, on Jesus Christ, but on the power of the world thanks to which it is propagated."

"The church in the spiritual and theological sense always contains a current that is hostile to political power, that is revolutionary and anarchical. But this is not the current that society as a whole, and especially the political authorities, recognize as the church. If these many movements have failed, it is primarily because of their intrinsic nature. Spiritual currents cannot last. When they attach political power, this power attacks them in return and proclaims that the true church is that which is in alliance with it."

"Revelation … unavoidably challenges the institution and established power, no matter what form this may take. But the adulteration by political power has changed all this. Christianity has become a religion of conformity, of integration into the social body. It has come to be regarded as useful for social cohesion (the exact opposite of what it is in its source and truth). Alternatively, it has become a flight from political or concrete reality, a flight into the spiritual world, into the cultivation of the inner life, into mysticism, and hence an evasion of the present world."

"Cosmao’s … thesis is that societies obey two “sociological laws,” … according to which, when left to their own inertia, they “structure inequality” and “fabricate gods that become their masters.” God’s revelation in Jesus Christ expressly contradicts these two laws and should produce equality and destroy false gods. [Cosmao] contends, however, that Christianity has taken on the role of a “civil religion” and has thus become Christendom."

"It would finally be much easier for me to say what I do not believe than what I do believe. This initial statement might be attributed to a negativism with which I am wrongly charged because I have repeatedly said that the first duty of free people is to say no, or because I have often taken up the Hegelian concept of the positive nature of the negative. But it is a mistake to infer pessimism of negativity from this perspective, for no one is at root more optimistic than I am. My ultimate vision is always positive. Hasty reading allows of rash judgments."

"To talk about belief is to inquire at the same time into its validity or truth. It is to enter into a critical study that is not without danger. There is no place for the facile skepticism that says it believes in nothing precisely because it is blind to what it does believe in. We have to be serious because our whole being is at stake here. When I ask what I believe in, I am "searching my conscience," as they used to put it. I am passing judgment on what I believe as this is brought to light. As one advances, a double movement takes place which causes one constantly to come across another belief that is often hidden but which also provides the pause needed to move on to its criticism. "As one advances" — we either have to advance here or be silent. I cannot say easily what I value or think just now, what I regard as true. I have to do something more difficult, which will undoubtedly involve some political evaluations, if I am to try to bring the roots of my beliefs to light."

"I believe that life has meaning. We are not on earth by chance; we do not come from nowhere to go to nowhere. This is a statement; it cannot be proved. Meaning implies both orientation and significance. Not every event or act or word has meaning, but everything is set in that orientation and signification."

"Should anarchists vote? ... For my part, like many anarchists, I think not. To vote is to take part in the organization of the false democracy that has been set up forcefully by the middle class. ... The political game can produce no important changes in our society and we must radically refuse to take part in it."

"We must unmask the ideological falsehoods of the many powers, and especially we must show that the famous theory of the rule of law which lulls the democracies is a lie from beginning to end."

"I believe that the anarchist fight, the struggle for an anarchist society, is essential, but I also think that the realizing of such a society is impossible."

"We can denounce not merely the abuses of power but power itself."

"In his cynical way Napoleon said that the clergy control the people, the bishops the clergy, and he himself the bishops. No one could state more clearly the real situation that the church was an agent of state propaganda."

"It is impossible for the state or society or an institution to be Christian. Since being Christian presupposes an act of faith, it is plainly impossible for an abstraction like the state."

"The Jews ... primarily see in God not the universal Creator but their Liberator."

"Why freedom? If we accept that God is love, and that it is human beings who are to respond to this love, the explanation is simple. Love cannot be forced, ordered, or made obligatory. It is necessarily free. If God liberates, it is because he expects and hopes that we will come to know him and love him."

"All national rulers, no matter what the nation or the political regime, lord it over their subjects. There can be no political power without tyranny."

"Jesus does not advocate revolt or material conflict. ... He reverses the question, and as so often challenges his interlocutors: "But you ... it must not be the same among you." In other words, do not be so concerned about fighting kings. Let them be. Set up a marginal society which will not be interested in such things, in which there will be no power, authority or hierarchy. Do not do things as they are usually done in society, which you cannot change. Create another society on another foundation."

"In a society such as ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be responsible. A simple example: a dam has been built somewhere, and it bursts. Who is responsible for that? Geologists worked out. They examined the terrain. Engineers drew up the construction plans. Workmen constructed it. And the politicians decided that the dam had to be in that spot. Who is responsible? No one. There is never anyone responsible. Anywhere. In the whole of our technological society the work is so fragmented and broken up into small pieces that no one is responsible. But no one is free either. Everyone has his own, specific task. And that's all he has to do. Just consider, for example, that atrocious excuse… It was one of the most horrible things I have ever heard. The director of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was asked at the Nuremburg trials, “But didn’t you find it horrible? All those corpses?” He replied, “What could I do? I couldn’t process all those corpses. The capacity of the ovens was too small. It caused me many problems. I had no time to think about these people. I was too busy with the technical problem of my ovens.” That is the classic example of an irresponsible person. He carries out his technical task and isn’t interested in anything else."

"I know many people who like watching commercials because they're so funny. They provide relaxation and diversion. People come home after a day's work, from which they derive little satisfaction, and feel the need for diversion and amusement. The word diversion itself is already very significant. When Pascal uses the word diversion he means that people who follow the path of God deviate from the path which leads them to God as a result of diversion and amusement. Instead of thinking of God, they amuse themselves. So, instead of thinking about the problems which have been created by technology and our work we want to amuse ourselves."

"Mankind in the technological world is prepared to give up his independence in exchange for all kinds of facilities and in exchange for consumer products and a certain security. In short, in exchange for a package of welfare provisions offered to him by society. As I was thinking about that I couldn't help recalling the story in the Bible about Esau and the lentil broth. Esau, who is hungry, is prepared to give up the blessings and promise of God in exchange for some lentil broth. In the same way, modern people are prepared to give up their independence in exchange for some technological lentils."

"The question now is whether people are prepared or not to realize that they are dominated by technology. And to realize that technology oppresses them, forces them to undertake certain obligations and conditions them. Their freedom begins when they become conscious of these things. For when we become conscious of that which determines our life we attain the highest degree of freedom."

"There is probably no other thinker who has thought as deeply about propaganda in all its dimensions and ramifications as Jacques Ellul. What sets him apart from other analysts is his rare if not unique combination of expertise in history, sociology, law, and political science, along with careful study of biblical and Marxist writings."

"Jacques Ellul is no pedantic theologian discussing ideas like a dilettante whose convictions are never baptized in action. On the contrary, in Ellul one finds that ideas and acts are so integral one to the other that his decisions and actions in actual life are an incarnation of what he thinks and writes. His witness as a Christian has been nurtured in danger and turbulence, not in sanctuary or detachment. He was a militant in the French resistance to the Nazis; he has served in politics as Deputy Mayor of Bordeaux; he is distinguished professionally in the law and in economics; he was among the remnant who were concerned to expose and oppose the atrocities of the French military in the Algerian war; he is esteemed in ecumenical councils as a creative theologian; he is a partisan of renewal and relevance in the Reformed Church of France; he became a Christian in consequence of his immersion in the saga of the Bible while engaged in the strife of the world. In short, he is one who speaks with authority."

"It is, in fact, the essence of technique to compel the qualitative to become quantitative, and in this way to force every stage of human activity and man himself to submit to its mathematical calculations. Ellul gives examples of this at every level. Thus, technique forces all sociological phenomena to submit to the clock, for Ellul the most characteristic of all modern technical instruments. The substitution of the tempus mortuum of the mechanical clock for the biological and psychological time "natural" to man is in itself sufficient to suppress all the traditional rhythms of human life in favor of the mechanical."

"Against Pascal I say: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the philosophers is the same God. He is a person and the negation of himself as a person. Faith comprises both itself and the doubt of itself. The Christ is Jesus and the negation of Jesus."

"It is my conviction that the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, of true and false, of creative and destructive forces—both individual and social. Sometimes I have the feeling that [irony] shows some awareness of the ambiguity of life—as long as it does not degenerate into mere cynicism. The awareness of the ambiguity of one's own highest achievements (as well as one's own deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity."

"Dialectics is the way of seeking for truth by talking with others from different points of view, through "Yes" and "No," until a "Yes" has been reached which is hardened in the fire of many "No's" and which unites the elements of truth promoted in the discussion. It is most unfortunate that in recent years the name "dialectical theology" has been applied to a theology that is strongly opposed to any kind of dialectics and mediation and that constantly repeats the "Yes" to its own and the "No" to any other position. This has made it difficult to use the term "dialectical" to denote theological movements of a really dialectical, that is a mediating, character; and it has resulted in the cheap and clumsy way of dividing all theologians into naturalists and supernaturalists, or into liberals and orthodox. The Protestant Era by Paul Tillich 1948 Introduction"

"As Hegel called the place at the end of philosophy the "place of truth," so Marx thought that the proletariat occupies this favored position, and the psychoanalyst attributes it to the completely analyzed personality, and the philosopher of vitalism to the strongest life, to the process of growth, to an élite or a race. There are, according to these ideas, favored moments and positions in history when truth appears and reason is united with the irrational. There are moments, as I myself have emphasized on different occasions, in which "kairos," the right time, is united with "logos," the "eternal truth," and in which the fate of philosophy is decided for a special period."

"The union of kairos and logos is the philosophical task set for us in philosophy and in all fields that are accessible to the philosophical attitude. The logos is to be taken up into the kairos, universal values into the fullness of time, truth into the fate of existence. The separation of idea and existence has to be brought to an end. It is the very nature of essence to come into existence, to enter into time and fate. This happens to essence not because of something extraneous to it; it is rather the expression of its own intrinsic character, of its freedom. And it is essential to philosophy to stand in existence, to create out of time and fate. It would be wrong if one were to characterize this as a knowledge bound to necessity. Since existence itself stands in fate, it is proper that philosophy should also stand in fate. Existence and knowledge both are subject to fate. The immutable and eternal heaven of truth of which Plato speaks is accessible only to a knowledge that is free from fate—to divine knowledge. The truth that stands in fate is accessible to him who stands within fate, who is himself an element of fate, for thought is a part of existence. And not only is existence fate to thought, but so also is thought fate to existence, just as everything is fate to everything else. Thought is one of the powers of being, it is a power within existence. And it proves its power by being able to spring out of any given existential situation and create something new! It can leap over existence just as existence can leap over it. Because of this characteristic of thought, the view perhaps quite naturally arose that thought may be detached from existence and may therefore liberate man from his hateful bondage to it. But the history of philosophy itself has shown that this opinion is a mistaken one. The leap of thought does not involve a breaking of the ties with existence; even in the act of its greatest freedom, thought remains bound to fate. Thus the history of philosophy shows that all existence stands in fate. Every finite thing possesses a certain power of being of its own and thus possesses a capacity for fate. The greater a finite thing’s autonomous power of being is, the higher is its capacity for fate and the more deeply is the knowledge of it involved in fate. From physics on up to the normative cultural sciences there is a gradation, the logos standing at the one end and the kairos at the other. But there is no point at which either logos or kairos alone is to be found. Hence even our knowledge of the fateful character of philosophy must at the same time stand in logos and in kairos. If it stood only in the kairos, it would be without validity and the assertion would be valid only for the one making it; if it stood only in the logos, it would be without fate and would therefore have no part in existence, for existence is involved in fate."

"As the Greeks devoted themselves to philosophy, obedient to the logos within the limits of the kairos; as the Middle Ages subordinated the logos to the great kairos upon which their culture was built; as modern philosophy through its kairos adapted itself to the logos of a world-dominating science and technique, so our task is to serve the logos out of the depths of our new kairos, a kairos that is now emerging in the crises and catastrophes of our day. Hence, the more deeply we understand fate — our own personal fate and that of our society — the more our intellectual work will have power and truth."

"At the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety."

"One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in “spirit” was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul, in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped."

"What is the end of all the magnificent means provided by the productive activity of American society? Have not the means swallowed the ends, and does not the unrestricted production of means indicate the absence of ends? Even many born Americans are today inclined to answer the last question affirmatively. But there is more involved in the production of means. It is not the tools and gadgets that are the telos, the inner aim of production; it is the production itself. The means are more than means; they are felt as creations, as symbols of the infinite possibilities implied in man’s productivity. Being-itself is essentially productive."

"The anxiety about death is met in two ways. The reality of death is excluded from daily life to the highest possible degree. The dead are not allowed to show that they are dead; they are transformed into a mask of the living. The other and more important way of dealing with death is the belief in a continuation of life after death, called the immortality of the soul. This is not a Christian and hardly a Platonic doctrine. Christianity speaks of resurrection and eternal life, Platonism of a participation of the soul in the transtemporal sphere of essences. But the modern idea of immortality means a continuous participation in the productive process."

"[American] conformism might approximate collectivism, not so much in economic respects, and not too much in political respects, but very much in the pattern of daily life and thought. Whether this will happen or not, and if it does to what degree, is partly dependent on the power of resistance in those who represent the opposite pole of the courage to be, the courage to be as oneself."

"Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self."

"Pietism and methodism reemphasized personal guilt, personal experience, and individual perfection. They were not intended to deviate from ecclesiastical conformity, but unavoidably they did deviate; subjective piety became the bridge of the victorious reappearance of autonomous reason. Pietism was the bridge to Enlightenment. But even Enlightenment did not consider itself individualistic. One believed not in a conformity which is based on biblical revelation but in one which should be based on the power of reason in every individual. The principles of practical and theoretical reason were supposed to be universal among men and able to create, with the help of research and education, a new conformity."

"The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie."

"In a man like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years, became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part."

"The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe."

"Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the universe are in him."

"Enthusiasm for the universe, in knowing as well as in creating, also answers the question of doubt and meaninglessness. Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. And meaninglessness is no threat so long as enthusiasm for the universe and for man as its center is alive."

"The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. “Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence."

"There are realms of reality or — more exactly — of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in terms of quantitative measurement has this character. But it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. But by participating you change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing."

"Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern."

"Plato … teaches the separation of the human soul from its “home” in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas."

"In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject."

"The first element is the experience of the power of being which is present even in the face of the most radical manifestation of non being. If one says that in this experience vitality resists despair, one must add that vitality in man is proportional to intentionality. The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning."

"The second element in absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience on being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible."

"There is a third element in absolute faith, the acceptance of being accepted. Of course, in the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the "power of acceptance". To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be."

"One can become aware of it in the anxiety of fate and death when the traditional symbols, which enable men to stand the vicissitudes of fate and the horror of death have lost their power. When "providence" has become a superstition and "immortality" something imaginary that which once was the power in these symbols can still be present and create the courage to be in spite of the experience of a chaotic world and a finite existence. The Stoic courage returns but not as the faith in universal reason. It returns as the absolute faith which says Yes to being without seeing anything concrete which could conquer the nonbeing in fate and death. And one can become aware of the God above the God of theism in the anxiety of guilt and condemnation when the traditional symbols that enable men to withstand the anxiety of guilt and condemnation have lost their power. When "divine judgment" is interpreted as a psycholog- ical complex and forgiveness as a remnant of the "father-image," what once was the power in those symbols can still be present and create the courage to be in spite of the experience of an infinite gap between what we are and what we ought to be. The Lutheran courage returns but not supported by the faith in a judging and forgiving God. It returns in terms of the absolute faith which says Yes although there is no special power that conquers guilt. The courage to take the anxiety of meaninglessness upon oneself is the boundary line up to which the courage to be can go. Beyond it is mere nonbeing. Within it all forms of courage are re-established in the power of the God above the God of theism. The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."

"A theological system is supposed to satisfy two basic needs: the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the interpretation of this truth for every new generation. Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received. Not many theological systems have been able to balance these two demands perfectly."

"The object of theology is what concerns us ultimately. Only those propositions are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of ultimate concern for us."

"The question now arises: What is the content of our ultimate concern? What does concern us unconditionally? The answer, obviously, cannot be a special object, not even God, for the first criterion of theology must remain formal and general. If more is to be said about the nature of our ultimate concern, it must be derived from an analysis of the concept “ultimate concern.” Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us."

"Man is infinitely concerned about the infinity to which he belongs, from which he is separated, and for which he is longing. Man is totally concerned about the totality which is his true being and which is disrupted in time and space. Man is unconditionally concerned about that which conditions his being beyond all the conditions in him and around him. Man is ultimately concerned about that which determines his ultimate destiny beyond all preliminary necessities and accidents."

"Philosophy asks the question of reality as a whole; it asks the question of the structure of being. And it answers in terms of categories, structural laws, and universal concepts."

"Philosophy and theology ask the question of being. But they ask it from different perspectives. Philosophy deals with the structure of being in itself; theology deals with the meaning of being for us. From this difference convergent and divergent trends emerge in the relation of theology and philosophy."

"Life remains ambiguous as long as there is life. The question implied in the ambiguities of life derives to a new question, namely, that of the direction in which life moves. This is the question of history. Systematically speaking, history, characterized as it as by its direction"

"The Great Commandment demands of everyone the total love of God and the love one's neighbour according to the measure of man's natural self-affirmation. If love is emotion, how can it be demanded? Emotions cannot be demanded. We cannot demand them of ourselves. If we try, something artificial is produced which shows the traits of what had to be suppressed in its production. Repentance, intentionally produced, hides self-complacency in perversion. Love, intentionally produced, shows indifference or hostility in perversion. The means: love as an emotion cannot be commanded. Either love is something other than emotion or the Great Commandment is meaningless."

"There is no truth without the form of truth, namely justice."

"Without the eros toward truth, theology would not exist."

"God's forgiveness is unconditional. There is no condition whatsoever in man which would make him worthy of forgiveness. If forgiveness were conditional, conditioned by man, no one could be accepted and no one could accept himself. We know that this is our situation, but we loathe to face it."

"We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love."

"He who loves God is also able to accept life and to love it. This is not the same as to love God. For many pious people in all generations the love of God is the other side of the hatred for life. And there is much hostility towards life in all of us, even in those who have completely surrendered to life. Our hostility towards life is manifested in cynicism and disgust, in bitterness and continuous accusations against life. We feel rejected by life, not so much because of its objective darkness and threats and horrors, but because of our estrangement from its power and meaning. He who is reunited with God, the creative Ground of life, the power of life in everything that lives, is reunited with life. He feels accepted by it and he can love it. He understands that the greater love is, the greater the estrangement which is conquered by it. In metaphorical language I should like to say to those who feel deeply their hostility towards life: Life accepts you; life loves you as a separated part of itself; life wants to reunite you with itself, even when it seems to destroy you."

"If I were asked to sum up the Christian message for our time in two words, I would say with Paul: It is the message of a "New Creation." We have read something of the New Creation in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Let me repeat one of his sentences in the words of an exact translation: "If anyone is in union with Christ he is a new being; the old state of things has passed away; there is a new state of things." Christianity is the message of the New Creation, the New Being, the New Reality which has appeared with the appearance of Jesus who for this reason, and just for this reason, is called the Christ. For the Christ, the Messiah, the selected and anointed one is He who brings the new state of things."

"No religion as such produces the New Being. Circumcision is a religious rite, observed by the Jews; sacrifices are religious rites, observed by the pagans; baptism is a religious rite, observed by the Christians. All these rites do not matter — only a New Creation. And since these rites stand, in the words of Paul, for the whole religion to which they belong, we can say: No religion matters — only a new state of things. Let us think about this striking assertion of Paul. What it says first is that Christianity is more than a religion; it is the message of a New Creation."

"There are the great religions beside Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and the remnants of classical Judaism; they have their myths and their rites — so to speak their "circumcision" — which gives each of them their distinction. There are the secular movements: Fascism and Communism, Secular Humanism, and Ethical Idealism. They try to avoid myths and rites; they represent, so to speak, uncircumcision. Nevertheless, they also claim ultimate truth and demand complete devotion. How shall Christianity face them? Shall Christianity tell them: Come to us, we are a better religion, our kind of circumcision or uncircumcision is higher than yours? Shall we praise Christianity, our way of life, the religious as well as the secular? Shall we make of the Christian message a success story, and tell them, like advertisers: try it with us, and you will see how important Christianity is for everybody? Some missionaries and some ministers and some Christian laymen use these methods. They show a total misunderstanding of Christianity. The apostle who was a missionary and a minister and a layman all at once says something different. He says: No particular religion matters, neither ours nor yours. But I want to tell you that something has happened that matters, something that judges you and me, your religion and my religion. A New Creation has occurred, a New Being has appeared; and we are all asked to participate in it. And so we should say to the pagans and Jews wherever we meet them: Don’t compare your religion and our religion, your rites and our rites, your prophets and our prophets, your priests and our priests, the pious amongst you, and the pious amongst us. All this is of no avail! And above all don’t think that we want to convert you to English or American Christianity, to the religion of the Western World. We do not want to convert you to us, not even to the best of us. This would be of no avail. We want only to show you something we have seen and to tell you something we have heard: That in the midst of the old creation there is a New Creation, and that this New Creation is manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ."

"The New Being is not something that simply takes the place of the Old Being. But it is a renewal of the Old which has been corrupted, distorted, split and almost destroyed. But not wholly destroyed. Salvation does not destroy creation; but it transforms the Old Creation into a New one. Therefore we can speak of the New in terms of a re-newal: The threefold "re," namely, re-conciliation, re-union, resurrection."

"A new reality has appeared in which you are reconciled. To enter the New Being we do not need to show anything. We must only be open to be grasped by it, although we have nothing to show. Being reconciled — that is the first mark of the New Reality. And being reunited is its second mark. Reconciliation makes reunion possible. The New Creation is the reality in which the separated is reunited. The New Being is manifest in the Christ because in Him the separation never overcame the unity between Him and God, between Him and mankind, between Him and Himself. This gives His picture in the Gospels its overwhelming and inexhaustible power. In Him we look at a human life that maintained the union in spite of everything that drove Him into separation. He represents and mediates the power of the New Being because He represents and mediates the power of an undisrupted union."

"Where the New Reality appears, one feels united with God, the ground and meaning of one’s existence. One has what has been called the love of one’s destiny, and what, today, we might call the courage to take upon ourselves our own anxiety. Then one has the astonishing experience of feeling reunited with one’s self, not in pride and false self-satisfaction, but in a deep self-acceptance. One accepts one’s self as something which is eternally important, eternally loved, eternally accepted. The disgust at one’s self, the hatred of one’s self has disappeared. There is a center, a direction, a meaning for life. All healing — bodily and mental — creates this reunion of one’s self with one’s self. Where there is real healing, there is the New Being, the New Creation. But real healing is not where only a part of body or mind is reunited with the whole, but where the whole itself, our whole being, our whole personality is united with itself. The New Creation is healing creation because it creates reunion with oneself. And it creates reunion with the others. Nothing is more distinctive of the Old Being than the separation of man from man. Nothing is more passionately demanded than social healing, than the New Being within history and human relationships. Religion and Christianity are under strong accusation that they have not brought reunion into human history. Who could deny the truth of this challenge. Nevertheless, mankind still lives; and it could not live any more if the power of separation had not been permanently conquered by the power of reunion, of healing, of the New Creation."

"The word "resurrection" has for many people the connotation of dead bodies leaving their graves or other fanciful images. But resurrection means the victory of the New state of things, the New Being born out of the death of the Old. Resurrection is not an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there is resurrection, namely, the creation into eternity out of every moment of time. The Old Being has the mark of disintegration and death. The New Being puts a new mark over the old one. Out of disintegration and death something is born of eternal significance. That which is immersed in dissolution emerges in a New Creation. Resurrection happens now, or it does not happen at all. It happens in us and around us, in soul and history, in nature and universe. Reconciliation, reunion, resurrection — this is the New Creation, the New Being, the New state of things."

"Where else, besides in scholarly work, should we look for truth? There are many in our period, young and old, primitive and sophisticated, practical and scientific, who accept this answer without hesitation. For them scholarly truth is truth altogether. Poetry may give beauty, but it certainly does not give truth. Ethics may help us to a good life, but it cannot help us to truth. Religion may produce deep emotions, but it should not claim to have truth. Only science gives us truth. It gives us new insights into the way nature works, into the texture of human history, into the hidden things of the human mind. It gives a feeling of joy, inferior to no other joy. He who has experienced this transition from darkness, or dimness, to the sharp light of knowledge will always praise scientific truth and understanding and say with some great medieval theologians, that the principles through which we know our world are the eternal divine light in our souls. And yet, when we ask those who have finished their studies in our colleges and universities whether they have found there a truth which is relevant to their lives they will answer with hesitation. Some will say that they have lost what they had of relevant truth; others will say that they don’t care for such a truth because life goes on from day to day without it. Others will tell you of a person, a book, an event outside their studies which gave them the feeling of a truth that matters. But they all will agree that it is not the scholarly work which can give truth relevant for our life. Where else, then, can we get it? "Nowhere," Pilate answers in his talk with Jesus. "What is truth?" he asks, expressing in these three words his own and his contemporaries’ despair of truth, expressing also the despair of truth in millions of our contemporaries, in schools and studios, in business and professions. In all of us, open or hidden, admitted or repressed, the despair of truth is a permanent threat. We are children of our period as Pilate was. Both are periods of disintegration, of a world-wide loss of values and meanings. Nobody can separate himself completely from this reality, and nobody should even try. Let me do something unusual from a Christian standpoint, namely, to express praise of Pilate—not the unjust judge, but the cynic and sceptic; and of all those amongst us in whom Pilate’s question is alive. For in the depth of every serious doubt and every despair of truth, the passion for truth is still at work. Don’t give in too quickly to those who want to alleviate your anxiety about truth. Don’t be seduced into a truth which is not really your truth, even if the seducer is your church, or your party, or your parental tradition. Go with Pilate, if you cannot go with Jesus; but go in seriousness with him!"

"Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith. And this is the first step we have to make in order to understand the dynamics of faith."

"Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of man's total being. They all are united in the act of faith. But faith is not the sum total of their impacts. It transcends every special impact as well as the totality of them and it has itself a decisive impact on each of them."

"Buber and Tillich each took similar paths toward their common destination of religious socialism. Both had been influenced early in their careers by the 19th century German philosopher Nietzsche's rejection of bourgeois culture in his classic book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and were further influenced by Karl Marx's doctrine of human self-estrangement and objectification in capitalist society while rejecting his anti-religious bias. Moreover, Buber and Tillich, along with all religious socialists, rejected the Marxist “revolutionary dictatorship” of the proletariat. This would represent the extreme of heteronomy for Tillich and the political manifestation of the I-it relationship expressed by Buber that is based on human instrumentalism. … Tillich initially promoted an "idealistic anarchism" in the sense that he envisioned a theonomous culture arising from "communities themselves and their spiritual substance" instead of being promoted by the state. They would eventually part ways to some extent, with Buber continuing to promote a "federalistic communal socialism" yet not rejecting the political component of social life, while Tillich promoted the possibility of a central government that is not absolute in a theonomous society."

"The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority."

"The new religious consciousness rises up against the nihilistic attitude towards the world and mankind. If a religious rebirth be possible, only then on this soil will there be the revealing of the religious meaning of secular culture and earthly liberation, the revealing of the truth about mankind. For the new religious consciousness the declaration of the will of God is together with this a declaration of the rights of man, a revealing of the Divine within mankind. We believe in the objective, the cosmic might of the truth of God, in the possibility according to God to guide the earthly destiny of mankind. This will be the victory of the true theocracy, whether over a false democratism, — the apotheosis of the quantitative collectivity of human wills, or so also over the false theocraticism, — all that apotheosis of the human will within Caesaropapism or Papocaesarism. Christ cannot have human vicarage in the person of the tsar or high-priest. He — is Himself the Tsar and High-Priest, and He will reign in the world. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth, as it is in Heaven.”"

"Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought."

"It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it."

"There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. … The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy."

"The Christian world doesn't know Orthodoxy too well. It only knows the external and for the most part, the negative features of the Orthodox Church and not the inner spiritual treasure. Orthodoxy was locked inside itself, it did not have the spirit of proselytism and did not reveal itself to the world. For the longest time, Orthodoxy did not have such world-wide significance as did Catholicism and Protestantism. It remained apart form passionate religious battles for hundreds of years, for centuries it lived under the protection of large empires (Byzantium and Russia), and preserved its eternal truth from the destructive processes of world history. It is characteristic of Orthodoxy's religious nature that it was not sufficiently actualized nor exposed externally, it was not militant, and precisely because of this the heavenly truth of Christian revelation was not distorted so much. Orthodoxy is that form of Christianity which suffered the least distortion in its substance as a result of human history. The Orthodox Church had its moments of historical sin, for the most part in connection with its external dependence on the State, but the Church's teaching, her inner spiritual path was not subject to distortion. The Orthodox Church is primarily the Church of tradition, in contrast to the Catholic Church, which is the Church of authority, and to the Protestant Churches which are essentially churches of individual faith. The Orthodox Church was never subject to a single externally authoritarian organization and it unshakenly was held together by the strength of internal tradition and not by any external authority. Out of all forms of Christianity it is the Orthodox Church which remained more closely tied to early Christianity."

"The greater part of Eastern teachers of the Church, from Clement of Alexandria to Maximus the Confessor, were supporters of Apokatastasis, of universal salvation and resurrection. And this is characteristic of (contemporary) Russian religious thought. Orthodox thought has never been suppressed by the idea of Divine justice and it never forgot the idea of Divine love. Chiefly — it did not define man from the point of view of Divine justice but from the idea of transfiguration and Deification of man and cosmos."

"It must be recognized that man in his limited and relative earthly life is capable of bringing about the beautiful and the valuable only when he believes in another life, unlimited, absolute, eternal. That is a law of his being. A contact with this mortal life exclusive of any other ends in the wearing-away of effective energy and a self-satisfaction that makes one useless and superficial. Only the spiritual man, striking his roots deep in infinite and eternal life, can be a true creator. But Humanism denied the spiritual man, handed over the eternal to the temporal, and took its stand by the natural man within the limited confines of the earth."

"The whole economic system of Capitalism is an offshoot of a devouring and overwhelming lust, of a kind that can hold sway only in a society that has deliberately renounced the Christian asceticism and turned away from Heaven to give itself over exclusively to earthly gratifications. ... It is the result of a secularization of economic life, and by it the hierarchical subordination of the material to the spiritual is inverted. The autonomy of economics has ended in their dominating the whole life of human societies: the worship of Mammon has become the determining force of the age. And the worst of it is that this undisguised “mammonism” is regarded as a very good thing, an attainment to the knowledge of truth and a release from illusions. Economic materialism formulates this to perfection when it brands the whole spiritual life of man as a deception and a dream."

"In order to be able to go on living it is possible that the bankrupt peoples will have to enter on a new path of self-denial, by curbing their covetousness and putting a check on the indefinite expansion of their wants, and by having smaller families."

"Morally, it is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a hateful and cruel fanaticism. It is as wrong to impute every wickedness to Jews, Freemasons, "intellectuals," as it is to blame all crimes on the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the powers that were. No; the root of evil is in me as well, and I must take my share of the responsibility and the blame. That was true before the revolution and it is true still."

"Nobody is bound to have an optimistic outlook on the future: that is not a precept of the Christian religion. ... It is a matter of immense importance that illusions should be dispelled and man come face to face with positive realities."

"We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? ... Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free."

"It appears that liberty is bound up with imperfection, with a right to imperfection. Socialism leads to the same type of authoritarian state as Theocracy. ... One must choose: either Socialism or liberty of spirit, the liberty of man's conscience. ... Socialism uses a "sacred" authority and establishes a "sacred" society in which there is no place for the "lay," for the free, for choice, for the unrestrained activity of human forces."

"God is denied either because the world is so bad or because the world is so good. Original: Бога отрицают или потому, что мир так плох, или потому, что мир так хорош. [https://www.vehi.net/berdyaev/samopoznanie/002.html ]"

"Spirit is never an object; nor a spiritual reality an objective one. In the so-called objective world there's no such nature, thing, or objective reality as spirit. Hence it is easy to deny the reality of spirit. God is spirit because he is not object, because he is subject."

"Spirit, like flame, like freedom, like creativeness, is opposed to any social stagnation or any lifeless tradition. In terms of Kantian philosophy — terms which I consider erroneous and confusing — spirit appears as a thing in itself and objectification as a phenomenon. Another and truer definition would be, spirit is freedom and objectification is nature (not in the romantic sense). Objectification has two aspects: on the one hand it denotes the fallen, divided and servile world, in which the existential subjects, the personalities, are materialized. On the other it comprehends the agency of the personal subject, of spirit tending to reinforce ties and communications in this fallen world. Hence objectification is related to the problem of culture, and in this consists the whole complexity of the problem. In objectification there are no primal realities, but only symbols. The objective spirit is merely a symbolism of spirit. Spirit is realistic while cultural and social life are symbolical. In the object there is never any reality, but only the symbol of reality. The subject alone always has reality. Therefore in objectification and in its product, the objective spirit, there can be no sacred reality, but only its symbolism. In the objective history of the world nothing transpires but a conventional symbolism; the idea of sacredness is peculiar to the existential world, to existential subjects. The real depths of spirit are apprehensible only existentially in the personal experience of destiny, in its suffering, nostalgia, love, creation, freedom and death."

"I do not think discursively. It is not so much that I arrive at truth as that I take my start from it."

"Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself."

"What one needs to do at every moment of one's life is to put an end to the old world and to begin a new world."

"I see myself immersed in the depths of human existence and standing in the face of the ineffable mystery of the world and of all that is. And in that situation, I am made poignantly and burningly aware that the world cannot be self-sufficient, that there is hidden in some still greater depth a mysterious, transcendent meaning. This meaning is called God. Men have not been able to find a loftier name, although they have abused it to the extent of making it almost unutterable. God can be denied only on the surface; but he cannot be denied where human experience reaches down beneath the surface of flat, vapid, commonplace existence."

"There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object."

"This was once revealed to me in a dream."

"Fate and freedom alike play a part in history; and there are times, as in wars and revolutions, when fate is the stronger of the two. Freedom — the freedom of man and of nations — could never have been the origin of two world wars. These latter were brought about by fate, which exercises its power owing to the weakness and decline of freedom and of the creative spirit of man. Almost all contemporary political ideologies, with their characteristic tendency to state-idolatry, are likewise largely a product of two world wars, begotten as they are of the inexorability's of fate."

"A real reconciliation of East and West is impossible and inconceivable on the basis of a materialistic Communism, or of a materialistic Capitalism, or indeed of a materialistic Socialism. The third way will neither be "anti-Communist" nor "anti-Capitalist". It will recognize the truth in liberal democracy, and it will equally recognize the truth in Communism. A critique of Communism and Marxism does not entail an enmity towards Soviet Russia, just as a critique of liberal democracy is not entail enmity towards the west. … But the final and most important justification of a "third way" is that there must be a place from which we may boldly testify to, and proclaim, truth, love and justice. No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth."

"We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality. If war should come, it will do so on account of our delusions, for which our hag-ridden conscience attempts to find moral excuses. To recover a sense of reality is to recover the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live, and thereby to gain the power of keeping this world from flying asunder."

"Religion for [Berdyaev] is a social phenomenon and is adapted to the needs of the masses; as such, it is embodied in visible institutions and in authoritative formulas. The mystic, on the other hand, is aristocratic in temperament and never quite at home where the masses are catered for. He cannot remain in the world of form and convention and second-hand truths which is all about us and with which official religion has to come to terms; he aspires to a contact with spiritual reality as it is, a return to the ultimate sources of his being."

"Berdyaev attempts to development of Christian symbols that is parallel to Jung's in order to give a place to human freedom and creativity in this sphere of Christian spirituality. Much of the creative self-expression, which ought to have been given a spiritual-religious meaning, had to emigrate out of the domain of ecclesiastic Christianity into the secular sphere, even though it had its origin within it. Both of these elements which Jung and Berdyaev address, that of soul and that of human freedom and creative self-expression, could not be fully accommodated within traditional Christianity and as a consequence found a home in the "pagan" rebellion since the Renaissance and its progressive push towards secularization. The spirituality that had initially been shaped by ecclesiastic Christianity has burst its container and has in turn given shape to the underlying meaning-structures of modern secular society. Jung and Berdyaev share an awareness of these underlying historical dynamics. We have learned and are still learning very bitter lessons about the link between claims of absolute truth and violence. For good reasons contemporary thinkers are more or less unanimous in their suspicion towards all "meta-narratives" which end up justifying the violation of individual freedoms. Any return to a serious consideration of spirituality will have to remain mindful of this persistent danger. Jung's psychology offers an abundant wealth of insights about the need for remaining consistently mindful of the ways in which the shadow operates most forcefully where the light shines most strongly. But a convincing argument could be made for claiming that at present we are paying the price for the repression of religion and spirituality that occurred as a reaction to their destructive sides. In the absence of a spiritual culture the return of repressed spirituality takes destructive forms. Spirituality, by being repressed, does not disappear but mutates into more atavistic forms. This shadow side of spirituality should not make us shy away from it but on the contrary motivate us to find a way to give it a new place in our contemporary culture, a way which does not jettison the liberating games of secular modernity."

"It is difficult to fit the work of Nikolai Berdyaev into any neat category. The label that was used most frequently to characterize him was that of an "existential Christian philosopher" but … his voice is equally relevant to psychology and psychoanalysis and it also constitutes a uniquely original commentary on the very nature of the person in our postmodern world especially in relation to spirituality."

"The life of Berdyaev spans the momentous events of the first half of the twentieth century in Europe. He was no ivory tower philosopher but was intimately affected by these events throughout his life and drew his inspirations from them regarding the nature of the human condition. His writings bear the imprint of the catastrophic situations within which he was destined to live."

"Surprisingly, Berdyaev was able to write, lecture and publish for five years after the October Revolution of 1917. He was once detained and interviewed by the fearsome head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Although he was released, the Bolsheviks gradually realized that Berdyaev was unassimilable to their cause and gave him a choice, along with a group of other intellectuals, of exile or execution. Reluctantly, Berdyaev chose exile to Berlin. He was never again to return to Russia."

"Berdyaev has been categorized as a Christian existentialist and a mystical philosopher. He never avoided the label of "mystic" since he felt it was the mystics of the world who came closest to understanding the role of spirit. Many of the philosophers he quoted were mystics — Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius and especially Jacob Boehme. The influence of Dostoevsky was central to his thought. Nevertheless, Berdyaev is not a naively irrational thinker; he brings an enormous fund of philosophical knowledge combined with the profundity of his own thought to support his view of existence. There are no dogmas in his writings to offend one's intellectual conscience."

"He was arrested twice; he was taken in 1922 for a midnight interrogation with Dzerjinsky; Kamenev was also there. … But Berdyaev did not humiliate himself, he did not beg, he firmly professed the moral and religious principles by virtue of which he did not adhere to the party in power; and not only did they judge that there was no point in putting him on trial, but he was freed. Now there is a man who had a "point of view"!"

"Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation."

"Can the Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of a time now past which was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve, since it is already given with one’s historical situation."

"It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work."

"Myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms—or, better, in existentialist terms."

"The mythology of the New Testament, also, is not to be questioned with respect to the content of its objectifying representations but with respect to the understanding of existence that expresses itself in them."

"Christian life is not realized in developing the personality or in shaping human community and somehow changing the world but in turning away from the world and becoming free of it."

"But what is meant by “flesh” (σάρξ)? It is not what is corporal or sensual but rather the whole sphere of what is visible, available, disposable, and measurable, and as such the sphere of what is transient. This sphere becomes a power over us insofar as we make it the foundation of our lives by living “according to it,” that is, by succumbing to the temptation to live out of what is visible and disposable instead of out of what is invisible and nondisposable—regardless of whether we give ourselves to the alluring possibilities of such a life imprudently and with desire or whether we lead our lives reflectively and with calculation on the basis of our own accomplishments, “the works of the law.” “Flesh” embraces not only material things but also all of our creating and accomplishing insofar as it is concerned with achieving something demonstrable such as fulfilling the demands of the law (Gal. 3:3); to “flesh” belongs every achieved quality and every advantage that we can have within the sphere of what can be seen and disposed of (Phil. 3:4ff.)."

"Freedom from the world is, in principle, not asceticism, but rather a distance from the world for which all participation in things worldly takes place in the attitude of “as if not.” (1 Cor. 7:29-31)"

"I dislike those who present myself as a Protestant philosopher; I am a philosopher and a Protestant."

"If we go back to the intention [Marx, Nietzsche and Freud] had in common, we find in it the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as "false" consciousness."

"The possibility of noncongruence, of discrepancy, in many ways already presupposes that individuals as well as collective entities are related to their own lives and to social reality not only in the mode of participation without distance but precisely in the mode of noncongruence. ... The presupposition here is precisely that of a social imagination, operating in both constructive and destructive ways, as both confirmation and contestation of the present situation."

"People do things, and then they imagine what they are doing in a kind of cloudy realm. Thus we say first there is a social reality in which people fight to earn their living, and so on, and this is real reality, as praxis. This reality is then represented in the heaven of ideas, but it is falsely represented as having a meaning autonomous to this realm, as making sense on the basis of things which can be thought and not done or lived. The claim against ideology therefore comes from a kind of realism of life, a realism of practical life for which praxis is the alternative concept to ideology. Marx's system is materialist precisely in its insistence that the materiality of praxis precedes the ideality of ideas."

"The "hermeneutics of suspicion" is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a "school of suspicion." That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking "the lies and illusions of consciousness;" they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths (Ricoeur 356). Ricoeur’s term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields[.]"

"In 1965, French philosopher Paul Ricœur called Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud the three “maîtres du soupçon,” the “masters of suspicion” that made us regard the conscience as something suspect. Because of these three ideologues, many no longer trust their conscience. They are no longer sure that it is the innate voice of God or human nature. What if the “masters of suspicion” were right, and what we call the voice of conscience is in fact the voice of those who want to deny us the right to revolution, to power, and to pleasure, who have instilled in us their pseudo-values and taught us to call them conscience?"

"Ricoeur distinguishes between two forms of hermeneutics: a hermeneutics of faith which aims to restore meaning to a text and a hermeneutics of suspicion which attempts to decode meanings that are disguised."

"Paul Ricœur speaks of the theologian as a hermeneut, whose task is to interpret the multivalent, rich metaphors arising from the symbolic bases of tradition so that the symbols may 'speak' once again to our existential situation."

"French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), in his book “De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud,” published in 1965, coined the expression “school of suspicion” to describe the collective cultural aim of such famous authors as Karl Marx (1818–1883), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). While proclaiming very different and even opposite philosophies, in Ricœur’s view the ultimate attempt of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche was to teach that reality itself cannot be trusted and fundamentally lies, and that all existing authorities are false. As “masters” (or teachers) “of suspicion,” their credo was not the legitimate critique of existing authorities for their mistakes and misdeeds, but the basic delegitimization of the very concept of authority in itself."

"Life in a world centred on function is liable to dispair because in reality the world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resist this temptation it is only to the extent that there comes into plat from within it and in its favour certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to recognise."

"Being is - or should be - necessary."

"When the pessimist Besme says in La Ville that nothing is, he means precisely this, that there is no experience that withstands the analytical test."

"Is there such a thing as being? What is it? etc. Yet immediately an abyss opens under my feet: I who ask these questions about being, how can I be sure that I exist? Yet surely I, who formulate this problem should be able to remain outside it - before or beyond it? Clearly this is not so. The more I consider it the more I find that this problem tends inevitably to invade the proscenium from which it is excluded in theory: it is only by means of a fiction that Idealism in its traditional form seeks to maintain on the margin of being the consciousness which asserts or denies it."

"I am therefore led to assume or to recognise a form of participation which has the reality of a subject; this participation cannot be, by definition, an object of thought; it cannot serve as a solution - it appears beyond the realm of problems: it is metaproblematical."

"No doubt I shall be told: "In the immense majority of cases this is an illusion." But it is of the essence of hope to exlclude the consideration of cases; moreover, it can be shown that there exists an ascedning dialectic of hope, whereby hope rises to a plane which transcends the level of all possible empirical disproof - the plane of salvation as opposed to that of success in whatever form"

"the world we live in permits - and may even seem to counsel - absolute dispair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope."

"The great pessimists in the history of thought [...] have prepared our minds to understand that despair can be what it was for Nietzsche (though on an infra-ontological level and in a domain fraught with mortal dangers) the springboard to the loftiest affirmation."

"speaking metaphysically, the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves, hope springing from humility and not from pride."

"And yet it is clear that the normal development of a human being implies an increasingly precise and, as it were, automatic division between what concerns him and what does not, between things for which he is responsible and those for which he is not. Each one of us becomes the centre of a sort of mental space arranged in concentric zones of decreasing interest and participat ion. It is as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him; and this sclerosis is bound up with the hardening of the categories in accordance with which we conceive and evaluate the world."

"The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction."

"No two beings, and no two situations, are really commensurable with each other. To become aware of this fact is to undergo a sort of crisis. But it is with this crisis in our moral awareness as a starting-point, that there becomes possible that cry from us towards the creative principle, and that demand by it on us, which each must answer in his own way."

"The past, when it is merely known historically (that is, as a subject for abstract study), somehow piles itself up outside our real lives. ... I think that one of the duties of a philosopher, if he shows himself worthy of his vocation today, is to attack quite directly those dissimulating forces which are all working toward what might be called the neutralization of the past; and whose conjoint effect consists in arousing in contemporary man a feeling of what I should like to call insulation in time."

"No philosopher would be willing to accept the idea of philosophy as a way of escape, but might there not be a question of the philosopher being in duty bound to refuse to accept a world, like our real world here, of disorder and crime where the values of the mind and spirit can no longer find a home?"

"There can be no whole without a thought which grasps it as a whole; and this grasping of what is before the mind as a whole can be effected only by a sort of voluntary halt in a kind of progressive movement of thought."

"We are living in a world which seems to be founded on the refusal to reflect."

"We ought to be able to see more clearly just for what reason the mass-man is so easily turned into a fanatic. What I seem to myself to have grasped is this, that such permeability is due to the fact that man, that the individual, in order to belong to the mass, to be a mass-man, has had, as a preliminary, though without having had the least awareness of it, to divest himself of that substantial reality which was linked to his initial individuality or rather to the fact of his belonging to a small actual group. The incredibly sinister role of the press, the cinema, the radio, has consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas and images with no real roots in the deep being of the subject of this experiment."

"The greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear."

"It would be relevant … to point out the sinister part played by speed, by belief in speed as a value, by, in a word, a kind of impatience that has had a profound effect in changing even the very rhythms of the life of the spirit for the worse."

"There are today an increasing number of people whose awareness is, in the strict sense of the phrase, without a focus; and the techniques which have transformed the framework of daily life for such people at such a prodigious pace – I am thinking particularly of the cinema and the radio – are making a most powerful contribution towards this defocalizing process. … The human creature under normal conditions finds his bearings in relation to other people, and also to physical objects, that are not only close to him in space but also linked to him by a feeling of intimacy. Of this feeling of intimacy, I would say that in itself it tends to create a focus for human awareness. One might go farther and speak of a kind of constellation, at once material and spiritual, which under normal conditions assembles itself around each human being. … This kind of constellation around the individual life is, in a great many countries, in process of dissolution."

"Thales was the father of ancient philosophy. His consternation, and the firm beliefs to which this gave rise, were transmitted to his pupils and to their pupils again. The law of heredity exercises as despotic and unlimited a sway in philosophy as in all other fields of organic existence. Let any one who doubts this cast a glance at any text-book. Since Hegel no one has dared imagine that the philosopher is able to think and inquire “freely”. The philosopher grows out of the past, like a plant out of the earth. Foreword xxxi"

"Spinoza’s formula, “Deus=natura=substantia”, like all conclusions drawn from it in his Ethics and his earlier works, simply means that there is no God. This discovery of Spinoza’s became the starting point for modern philosophical thought. Foreword p. xxxix"

"One of the outstanding examples of the unfree character of modern philosophical thought is perhaps the famous dispute between Hume and Kant. Kant often declared that Hume had awakened him out of “dogmatic slumber.” And in fact, when we read Hume and those passages of Kant in which he appeals to Hume, we might think that this could not be otherwise, and that what Hume saw and what was visible to Kant also, after Hume, must have awakened not only a sleeper, but even a dead man. Foreword p. xlv"

"What can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead? “Justice” should insist that this knowledge or this ignorance should be the prerogative of every human being. p. 3"

"Suppose Euripides is right, and that indeed no one can be sure whether life is not death and death life; can this truth ever become certain? If all men daily repeated Euripides’ words when they got up and when they went to bed, they would remain as strange and as problematic as on the day when the poet first heard them in the depths of his soul. P. 6"

"There are no ideals exalting the soul, but only chains, invisible indeed, but binding man more securely than iron. And no act of heroism, no “good work” can open the doors to man’s “perpetual confinement”. Dostoievsky’s barrack vows of “improvement” now appeared to him as a sacrilege. He experience which he underwent was much the same as Luther’s when he remembered with such unfeigned horror and disgust the vows which he had pronounced on entering the convent. P. 10"

"Plato, too, knew the “underground”, but her called it a “cave” and created his splendid world-famous myth in which men were likened to prisoners in a cave. But he did it in such a way that no one thought of calling Plato’s cave “underground” nor calling Plato himself a sickly, abnormal being, one of those for whom normal men have to invent theories, treatments, etc. p. 13"

"When he was in the settlement Dostoievsky was already especially attracted by these resolute men whom no obstacle could turn from their purpose. He tried by every means in his power to understand their psychology, but he did not succeed. P. 19"

"Directly Kant hears the word “law” pronounced he takes his hat off; he neither wishes nor dares to dispute. He who says “law” says “power”; he who says “power” says “submission” – for man’s supreme virtue is to submit himself. P. 23"

"Dostoievsky was not the first to live though this unimaginably terrible passage from one world to another and to find himself obliged to abandon the stability which “principles’ give. Fifteen hundred years earlier Plotinus, who had also tried to transcend our experience, tells that at the first moment one has an impression that everything is disappearing, and has an overwhelming fear that only pure nothingness is left. P. 28"

"Science is objective, indifferent; it does not consider whether a thing matters or not. It coldly casts its eye over the innocent and the guilty alike, knowing neither pity nor anger. But where there is no pity or indignation, where the innocent and the guilty are alike regarded with indifference, where all “phenomena” are merely classified and not qualified, there can be distinctions between the important and the insignificant. Science pretends to the certainty, the universality, and the necessity of its statements. P. 32"

"What happens to the mind of the underground man has no resemblance at all to thinking, nor even to seeking. He does not think, he excites himself desperately, throws himself about, knocks his head against the wall. He inflames himself the whole time, dashing up to unknown heights of fury, to fling himself into God knows what abysses of despair. He has no control of himself; a force far greater than himself has him completely under its sway. P. 42"

"[Dostoievsky] has taken everything from us; he has left us nothing but “twice two is four”. Will man be able to bear this? Can I bear it myself? Or will my “consciousness”; all human consciousness, be finally crushed under the burden. And then we shall not only feel, but see, if only for a moment, that “here” everything is but beginning, that that what begins here does not finish here, where there is as yet neither beauty, nor ugliness, nor good, nor evil, but only hot and cold, agreeable and disagreeable, where it is not liberty that reigns, but necessity, to which even God Himself is subject, where human will and reason are as unlike the will and reason of the Creator as the dog, the barking animal, is unlike the dog-star. P. 52"

"Is it possible to escape from the curse of knowledge? Can man cease to judge and to condemn? Can he cease to be ashamed of his nakedness, ashamed of himself, or of his surroundings, like Adam and Eve before the serpent led them into temptation. This is the subject of the great discussion, which takes place in the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” (The Brothers Karamazov) between the Cardinal Inquisitor, an old man of ninety in whom all human wisdom is incarnate, and God Himself. The old man has long been silent, ninety years long, but at last he can bear it no longer; he must speak. P. 75"

"Tolstoy pitilessly stips himself before our eyes. There are few writers who show us truths like these. p. 85"

"The Diary of a Madman is in a sense the key to Tolstoy's work. If it had not been written by Tolstoy himself, we should certainly have looked upon it as a calumny, since we are accustomed to look upon great men as the incarnation of all the civil and even the military virtues. p. 87"

"Unvarnished truth, that truth which runs contrary to the vital needs of human nature, is worse than any lie. This is what Tolstoy thought when he wrote War and Peace, when he was still entirely possessed by Aristotle's ideas, when he was afraid of madness and the asylum and hoped that he would never have to live in an individual world of his own. p. 94"

"Reason, which is based upon the world common to us all, which furnishes us with truths like "twice two is four" and "nothing happens without a cause" - this reason not only cannot justify and explain these new terrors and anxieties of Tolstoy's; it condemns them pitilessly as unreasonable, motiveless, arbitrary, and consequently unreal and visionary. p. 101"

"When "the light of truth" appeared to Descartes, he immediately imprisoned his discovery within a logical formula: "Cogito, ergo sum." And the great truth perished, it gave nothing either to Descartes or to any one else. Yet it was he himself who taught: "De omnibus dubitandum." But then he ought first of all to have questioned the legitimacy of the pretensions of syllogistical formulae, which claim to be the only, invariable, expert appraisers of truth and error. Directly Descartes began to make deductions he forgot what he had seen. He forgot the cogito, he forgot the sum, in order to be sure of the ergo which has the power to constrain men's minds. p. 110"

"For this solitary man, "chance", so despised and rejected by science and by "our ego", becomes the principal object of his search. He resolves to perceive, to treasure, and even to express that revelation which hides behind the accidental, which is invisible to a reason busied over earthly affairs and subservient to the exigencies of social existence. Such was Plotinus, the last great philosopher of antiquity. Such also was Tolstoy. p. 116"

"Tolstoy himself would not have been able to recognize by day all that had been revealed to him in the darkness. Did he not declare his antagonism to St. Paul and the doctrine of salvation by faith? We know how angry he was with Nietzsche for his formula "beyond good and evil", which had resuscitated the forgotten teaching of the old apostle. And, indeed, in the "world common to all" men cannot live by faith; in this world works are esteemed, and necessary; in it men are justified, not by faith, but by works. p. 123"

"Where is truth, where is reality? Over there at Grichkino, or here on this plain? Grichkino had ceased to exist for ever; must one then doubt the reality of its existence? And with it the reality of the existence of all the old world? Doubt everything? De omnibus dubitandum? But did great Descartes really doubt everything? No, Hume was right: the man who has once doubted all things will never overcome his doubts, he will leave for ever the world common to us all and take refuge in his own particular world. De omnibus dubitandum is useless; it is worse than storm and snow, worse than the fact that Nikita is freezing and that the bay is shivering in the icy wind. p. 131-132"

"For a sick man we call the doctor, for a dying man the priest. The doctor endeavours to preserve man for mortal existence, the priest gives him the viaticum for eternal life. And as the doctor's business has nothing in common with the priest's, so there is nothing in common between philosophy and science. They do not help one another, they do not complement one another, as is usually assumed - they fight against one another. And the enmity is the more violent because it generally has to be hidden under the mask of love and trust. p. 142"

"To ascribe a purpose, even the most modest, the most unimportant, to Nature, is to equate her activity with that of a human being. At bottom it is indifferent whether one assumes that Nature's aim is to preserve the organism or to create a saintly, virtuous, human being. p. 152"

"Spinoza taught, and his commandments were received as a new revelation. And no one noticed (men prefer not to notice) that Spinoza himself acted, both as man and philosopher, in the diametrically opposite way. He asked no questions which he did not need, and found no answers which did not concern him. p. 159"

"How alarming to men, even today, is Protagoras's doctrine that man is the measure of all things! And what efforts human thought makes to kill Protagoras and his teaching! They have stopped at nothing, not even at direct calumny - even men like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who loved uprightness and honesty with their whole souls and honestly desired only to serve the truth. They were afraid that if they let Protagoras prevail, they would become misologoi, despisers of reason, that they would commit spiritual suicide. They were afraid: that is the point. But there was no reason to be afraid. p. 166"

"It is only the modern, or rather, the most modern philosophy, which found the solution of the question in positivism à la Kant and Comte; to forget plagued and poisoned truth and live for the positive necessities of the next day, year or decade. This terms itself "idealism". It is, of course, also idealism of the purest water which has so possessed the spirit of modern man. The idea is the only god which has not yet been cast down from its pedestal. Scientists worship it no less than philosophers and theologians. p. 172"

"One word more on Hegel. In his "logic" he gives this commandment to the philosopher: Thou shalt free thyself from all that is personal, raise thyself above all that is individual, if thou wouldst be a philosopher. Hegel held himself for a philosopher; does this mean that he obeyed his own commandment; that if, let us say, he had lived in our day, he would "quietly" have accepted all the misfortune which overwhelmed his fatherland? One could take twice and thrice as many striking examples to show how hard - indeed, how impossible - it is to test the sincerity and conscientiousness of the utterance even of philosophers who are justly esteemed as vessels of philosophic thought. p.180"

"Time is infinite, space is infinite, there are innumerable worlds, life's riches and its terrors are inexhaustible, the secrets of the universal structure are incomprehensible - how can an entity hemmed in between so many eternities, infinities, unlimited possibilities, know what it has to do, and how can it choose for itself? Plato, indeed, allowed anamnesis - the recollection of what was in previous lives - but only to a very limited degree. p. 200"

"De omnibus dubitandum, taught Descartes - doubt all things. Easily said - but how to do it? Try, for example to doubt that the laws of nature are always binding: one day a case may occur where nature makes an exception for some stone, and exempts it from the law of gravity. But how to find this stone, if one has the courage to admit such a possibility, even if one knew definitely that such a stone existed? p. 215"

"Plotinus never laughs, he does not even smile. He is solemnity incarnate. His whole task - in this he is continuing and complementing the work of Socrates, "the wisest among men" - consists in detaching man from the outer world. The inner joys, inner contentment, are, he teaches, quite independent of the conditions of our outward existence. The body is a prison wherein the soul resides. The visible world is the wall of this prison. So long as we let our spiritual welfare depend on our jailers, we can never be "happy". p. 242"

"The first commandment of modern philosophy runs: Thou shalt emancipate thyself from all postulates. The postulate has been declared a deadly sin, and he who makes one is the enemy of truth. p. 247"

"We have thus two legends. Man as individual being came into the world in accordance with God's will and with His blessing. Or, individual life appeared in the universe against God's will and is therefore in its essence impious, and death, annihilation, is the just and natural punishment for the sinful self-will. How and by whom shall it be decided where the truth lies? p. 254"

"Everyday experience teaches us that good and ill fortune befall in like measure the godless and the pious, the virtuous and the vicious. This is so, this was so, this will be so. Consequently also, it must be so, for this proceeds from the necessity of the divine nature and there is neither need nor possibility to alter the existing order of things. (Hegel said then: What is real is rational.) Must virtue be rewarded? Virtue is its own reward. p. 268"

"Pascal feared novelty above all things. All the strength of his restless, yet profound and concentrated mind, was applied to resisting the current of history, preventing himself from being carried forward by it. Is it possible, is it reasonable to fight against history? Of what interest to us can a man be, who tries to make time run backwards? p. 274"

"We burn with longing to find some firm stance, some ultimate, unshakable basis, on which we may build the tower that can reach up to infinity. But all our foundations crack and earth opens to the abyss. THEREFORE LET US NOT SEEK CERTAINTY OR SECURITY. p. 284-285"

"It is certain that Pascal never passed a day without suffering, and hardly knew what sleep was (Nietzsche's case was the same); it is also certain that Pascal, instead of feeling the solid earth beneath his feet as other men do, felt himself hanging unsupported over a precipice, and that had he given way to the "natural" law of gravity he would have fallen into a bottomless abyss. All his Pensées tell us this, and nothing but this. p. 291"

"One may say with some certainty that Pascal would have remained the Pascal of the Provinciales had it not been for the abyss. So long as a man feels the solid earth beneath his feet, he will not risk defying reason and morality. Only exceptional conditions of being can free us from the immaterial and eternal truths which rule the world. Only a "madman" declares war on this rule. Remember the "experience" of our contemporary Nietzsche who begged the gods for "madness", since he had to kill the law, or, to use his own words, to announce to Rome and the world that he was "beyond good and evil". p. 305"

"The fundamental condition of the possibility of human knowledge consists in the fact that truth can be perceived by any normal man. Descartes had thus formulated it: God neither can nor wishes to cheat. Pascal, on the other hand, maintains that God both can be and wishes to be a cheat. Sometimes, to certain people, He reveals the truth; but He deliberately blinds the greater number of them in order that they should not perceive the truth. Who is right, Pascal or Descartes? p. 317"

""In so far as the soul is in the body it rests in deep sleep," says Plotinus (III,vi,6). For a century past Plotinus's doctrine has been attracting increasing attention from philosophers. New works on Plotinus are continually appearing, and each fresh examination is another hymn in his praise. p. 327"

"To understand Plotinus's thought we have to study his writings, to read them not once but many times, and to seek precisely for that definition which he tries in all ways to avoid. In other words, to study Plotinus means to kill him, and not to study him means to renounce him. What is to be done? how can we find a way out of this absurd position? p. 335"

"philosophy can never reconcile itself with science. Science aims at self-evident truths and finds in them that "natural necessity" which, after having proclaimed itself for ever eternal, claims to serve as the foundation of all knowledge and strives to rule over all wanton "suddenly". But philosophy has always been, and will always be, a fight with and a conquest of self-evident truths; philosophy is not looking for any "natural necessity", it sees in naturalness and in necessity alike an evil magic, which, if one cannot quite shake it off (for in this no mortal has ever yet succeeded), yet one must at least call by its right name; and even this is an important step! p. 342"

"Plotinus's assertion that the soul, in so far as it is in the body, rests in deep sleep, now acquires a new meaning for us; Plotinus, like his great predecessors Epictetus, Plato, and Socrates, felt that we must awake out of something, overcome some self-evident truths. We must discover the magician who holds the souls of men under his spell. Where is he? How fight against him? p. 349"

"Plotinus and Pascal, each in his day, saw the "supernatural" power and felt it with all their souls. This force was enchanting man by convincing him of the "natural necessity" and the infallibility of reason which offered man eternal and universally valid truths. p. 364"