Causalities Of The Abyss—Or--A Revolution Made Legitimate

Jan. '78 Existentialism And Mysticism continued
Kierkegaard's Religious Stage


The third stage—religious stage:

The religious stage of life opened when the individual recognized the
insurmountable nature of the demands of ethical life. Precisely by
going inward, according to Kierkegaard, the individual moved forward
on the road to the absolute, forward en route to the abyss that
enjoined the absolute. Of those who have encountered the abyss, many
have become causalities. They returned to a life of sensuality and
immediacy, but not for enjoyment, for forgetfulness. Marching in
lockstep with their desire to "forget what cannot be forgotten" the
causalities, from that point on, would suffer an endless retreat. For
those who did not find retreat an option, however, there was still
hope. They found it in what Kierkegaard called "religiosity B."

If a relationship with the absolute is to be sustained, an intense
personal relationship (subjectivity is truth) with God becomes
necessary. But, according to Kierkegaard, a person lacks the strength
to sustain a relationship with the absolute, thus another
inexhaustible struggle ensues: the harder one struggles to attain that
relationship, the more distance that opens between God and the
struggling person. It is here that the individual becomes ripe for
Christian conversion because, for Kierkegaard, it is here that God
gets called upon for help.

The finite and the infinite come together in Jesus Christ. The fact
that in Jesus God became man and man became God was and is the
Christian paradox. Only through the affirmation of that paradox does
it become possible to sustain a relationship with the absolute. In the
"leap of faith" the individual is brought into an absolute
relationship with God. With that leap one's whole existence is forever
changed. The religious person shows no outward signs, but inside
passion grows exponentially.

Being a Christian, for Kierkegaard, was not easy. It was sustained by
the "passionate will to believe." And, for Kierkegaard, it was
precisely in doing something before God that one did nothing before
God. "In nothingness before God," Kierkegaard said, "every instant is
a revolution made legitimate." The task of religiosity was to make the
individual become wholly nothing, and exist thus before God. Standing
at the edge of this unbridgeable chasm, with one's spiritual existence
at stake, the religious person, in defiance of all reason, took the
leap— into Christ, and into salvation. Kierkegaard said, "To become is
a movement from the spot, but to become oneself is a movement at the
spot." A leap into the nothingness that binds man to God is also a
leap into that place where the opposites of infinity/finitude,
temporal/eternal, and freedom/necessity dissolve.