Page 128 - Eclipse of God

On the Suspension of the Ethical 101

are banished from the absolute into the relative; for that which
is a duty in the sphere of the ethical possesses no absoluteness
as soon as it is confronted with the absolute duty toward God.
“But what is duty?” asks Kierkegaard. “Duty is indeed just the
expression for God’s will!” In other words, God establishes the
order of good and evil, and breaks through it where He wishes.
He does so from person to person, that is, in direct personal
relation with the individual.
On the deadly seriousness of this “from person to person”
Kierkegaard has, it is true, laid the greatest possible stress. He
has declared most clearly that this trial will only be laid upon
one who is worthy of being called God’s chosen one. “But
who,” he asks, “is such a one?” In particular, he assures us time
and again that he himself does not have this courage of faith
which is necessary to plunge confidently, with closed eyes, into
the absurd. It is impossible for him to perform the paradoxical
movement of faith that Abraham performed. One must keep
in mind, however, the fact that Kierkegaard also states that he
has fought to become “the Single One” in the strictest sense
of the term but has not attained it and the fact that he none-
theless once considered having the words “that Single One”
placed upon his grave. There are many indications that when
he described how Abraham gave up his son and nonetheless
believed that he would not lose him (so Kierkegaard under-
stood the event), he had in mind the day, a little more than a
year before, when he himself broke his engagement with his
beloved and yet thought that he would be able to preserve it in
a higher, incomprehensible dimension. In the way of this union
1
(he once explained) “there stood a divine protest” though he
had, to be sure, no lasting confidence in this idea. So little con-
fidence had he, in fact, that in the year of the publication of

1 She also stated once, much later, that he had sacrificed her to God.