BOOKS OF THE DAY
Saint's Progress
tages on Life's Way. By SOren Kierkegaard. Translated by Walter Lowry. (Oxford University Press. 3os.)
ms volume contains an account of three stages by which the egenerate man may come to salvation ' • by " stages " Kierke- aard meant not successive periods, but contemporaneous hases of a single experience. That experience, according to 'erkegaard, is the history of the individual's blind groping ugh the abyss which separates him from God. Even so crude summary immediately suggests several fundamental questions. ow far is Kierkegaard correct in regarding the unbridgeable gap ween man and an unknowable God as the essential fact in
uman existence? Those to whom such a statement must seem,
t best, a wildly improbable hypothesis, must offer some planation of the immense emotional and intellectual force of ese writings. Is the conviction they carry the result of a sus- nsion of disbelief, unwilling rather than willing, which is the t proof of Kierkegaard's genius? To answer yes seems irn- ssible in face of Kierkegaard's elaborate machinery for distin- ishing between what is " poetic," and therefore expressible, and hat is true in a religious sense, and therefore inexpressible. gain, if Kierkegaard's fundamental thesis is rejected, how is one account for a penetrating insight into human behaviour which the direct result of a philosophy which seems at best fantasy d at the worst a wrong-headed paradox? No satisfactory count of Kierkegaard, or, indeed, of any great religious writer, possible until such questions as these have been adequately swered.
The volume consists of three parts. In the first, The Banquet, e arc wholly in the realm of the " poetic "—that is, of reflection hich is immediately suggested by-sensation. A party of young en discuss the subject of love, after a feast which has agreeably toxicated their senses. Sonic celebrate and some condemn love; th praise and blame equally emphasise its ephemeral nature d the absurdity of the importance which is commonly assigned it.
A skilful transition introduces the second part, the Reflections Marriage of a middle-aged, verbose and prosaic judge. Here arriage is praised as superior to love because it involves a eliberate resolution of the will, as opposed to an involuntary traction of sense and sensibility. For Kierkegaard marriage is bhmated by the act of will which is akin to the act which impels an to God. Yet, here again, the praise is only relative and ditional ; and the element of paradox is unmistakable. arriage is praised because it depends on the fulfilment of condi- ens which one need not be cynical to assume never are fulfilled. d therefore, deliberately, Kierkegaard's argument is self- dealing. Deliberately, because otherwise it might seem possible r man to achieve a condition which would contradict Kie:r- egaard's fundamental thesis, the source of his pessimism as of s grotesque humour ; the thesis that " m relation to God we are Ways in the wrong." This belief in an irrational basis of all man activity is, perhaps, the foundation of Kierkegaard's infiu- e during a century that has justified his thesis to the utmost. ers, indeed, have shared his belief; but none, not even Rau- rr, essentially a religious writer without a religion, have more exorably followed out its conclusions.
These two sections are an introduction to the third and longest, idam's Diary, which is the story of Kierkegaard's unhappy e-affair, which obsessed him throughout his life. This love- air, indeed, together with the guilt which he believed he had erited from his father, provide the psychological basis for all thinking. Quidam's Diary tells the story of a young man who ects love and marriage, even though he is genuinely in love and in marriage his greatest happiness and good, because they t felt as a barrier to his religious development. What is inter- mg is that the young man sees himself as an exception, like Ilium in Fear and Trembling; his love for the girl is perfect, regards marriage as the highest good open to man • but a "ble and mysterious injunction has been laid upon him, like curse en a fairy story, or the fate that pursues Kafka's heroes. obedience to this injunction, he must torture, humiliate and Y the girl he loves ; and here the whimsical and almost nal aspect which an unknowable God must present to men is revealed, partaking at once of the cruelty of a Jehovah and the malicious gaiety of a Greek or savage deity. For the young man has nothing to weigh in the balance against his love, the happiness it promises him, and his belief in the sanctity of mar- riage. The only other certainties he possesses are those of his own misery and the misery he must inflict. Further, he has no evidence that he is acting in accordance with God's will ; indeed, it must seem that the action demanded of him must be of the devil rather than of God. The voice he hears is purely subjective ; and if he is wrong in taking it for God's voice, then he is utterly damned. Lastly, obedience to that voice in no way assures him the peace of acquiescence in God's will. He is promised, at the most, not salvation, but only the possibility of salvation, which itself consists, perhaps for all eternity, in the profound melancholy, the " quiet despair," of a religious experience based on the cer- tainty of the unbridgeable gulf between God and himself. This despair is increased by the sense of the. brutality and treachery into which God forces him ; even more, by the " fear and tremb- ling " inspired by a God who can only be sought by such means and whom even such means cannot give the certainty of finding.
Even as a relentless and imaginative examination of a morbid condition, as the analysis of an obsession, this document would inspire the greatest pity and admiration. The real genius of Kier- kegaard is in the sense he inspires that each darkening moment of this young man's experience is a moment in an objective
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