Soren Kierkegaard

nation, the youth is drawn... to that image, or the power of his imagina-
tion draws that image to him; he falls in love with that image...;hedoes
not loosen his grip—not even in his sleep—on this image that has made
him sleepless.” And the more this youth looks, the more visible he himself
becomes: “One sees it in his appearance, his eyes see nothing of what lies
closest to him—they seek that image alone; he walks like a man asleep, and
yet he is wide awake, as can be seen from the fire and the flame in his eyes;
he walks like a stranger, and yet he seems to be at home, for through the
power of the imagination he is always at home with this image, which he
wishes to resemble.”
Anti-Climacus does not doubt for a moment that as a result of this, the
youth’s relation to the world is of necessity filled with suffering, and this is
precisely his point: “In a certain sense, the youth has been deceived by the
power of his imagination, but truly, if he himself wills it, it has not deceived
him in a detrimental manner, it has deceived him into the truth—by means
of a deception, it has played him into God’s hands, as it were....Itis
certainly true that he may shudder for a moment in taking stock of the
situation, but let go of that image?—No, that is something he cannot per-
suade himself to do. On the other hand, if he cannot persuade himself to
let go of the image, he cannot escape the suffering, either....Sohedoes
not let go of the image, but he walks intrepidly into the suffering into which
heisled....Hehimself became the image of perfection that he loved, and
truly the power of the imagination did not deceive him any more than did
Governance.”
Eventhough thedeceptionhashere beenembeddedin anartfuldialectic,
Anti-Climacus himself must have sensed how the narrative has suddenly
become disturbingly similar to the story of a seduction, and he therefore
inserts an authoritative comment into his story: “If the power that governs
human life were a seductive power, at that instant it would mockingly say
of this youth, ’Look, now he is trapped.’ ” This does not happen, however,
because “the power that governs human life is love.” This is of course an
edifying thought, but strictly speaking it is nevertheless no guarantee that
the text that makes light of the dangers of seduction does not itself possess
seductive power, perhaps practicing seduction most effectively by denying
that it does so.
It is this pictorial or aesthetic rendering of Christ in particular that en-
courages the young man to follow—to imitate—Christ, demonstrating
quite clearly how the aesthetic is an active principle within the religious.
And it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Kierkegaard has here presented
us with a sort of religious autobiography in a nutshell. In 1849, when he
produced a piece he titled “The Accounting,” which was a condensed ver-