“The person who has truly experienced and continues to experience belief
in the forgiveness of his sins has indeed become another person. Everything
is forgotten. And yet his situation is not like that of a child who, after having
been forgiven, once again becomes essentially the same child. No, he has
become an eternity older. For now he has become spirit: the whole of
immediacy and its selfishness, its selfish clinging to the world and to itself,
has been lost. Now he is old, extremely old, humanly speaking, but eternally
speaking he is young.”
It was this rejuvenating eternity that increasingly enveloped Kierkegaard
and that he attempted to describe in one journal entry after another, fully
aware that it could not be described because the experience of God’s love
was completely indescribable. Viewed from without, these journal entries
have the peculiarity of being at the same time both radically private and yet
totally open, but only a cynic would doubt their emotional authenticity:
“It is wonderful how God’s love overwhelms me. Alas, ultimately I know
of no truer prayer than what I pray over and over, that God will at any rate
allow me—that he will not be angry at me—that he will allow me to thank
him continually, thanking him because he has done, and indeed, continues
to do, so indescribably much more for me than I had ever expected. Sur-
rounded with mockery; plagued day in and day out by the pettiness of
people, even of those closest to me, I know of nothing else to do in my
home or in my inmost being, but to give thanks and to thank God, for I
understand that what he has done for me is indescribable....Hepermits
me to weep before him in quiet solitude, to weep away my pain again and
again, blessedly consoled in the knowledge that he is concerned for me—
and at the same time he gives this life of pain a significance that almost
overwhelms me, he grants me success and strength and wisdom in all my
accomplishments....Faith is immediacy after reflection. As a poet and a
thinker I have presented everything in the medium of imagination, while
I myself lived in resignation. Now life is coming closer to me, or I am
coming closer to myself, coming to myself.”
“I Am Regarded as a Kind of Englishman, a Half-Mad Eccentric”
The closer life came to Kierkegaard, the greater became his distance from
another sort of life—social life, other people. The aftershocks ofThe Corsair
were far from over; on the contrary, they seemed to defy the laws of nature,
increasing with the passage of time into a tidal wave that threatened to