Soren Kierkegaard

ver ymoment I la ye yes on him, I immediatel ythrust him awa yand I m yself
jump back, clasp m yhands together, and sa ysotto voce: ‘Good Lord! Is this
the man, is this reall ythe one, for he looks just like a tax collector.’ It is
indeed he, however. I draw a bit closer to him, watching for the slightest
movement that might reveal a little incongruous bit of telegraph yfrom
infinity, a gaze, an air, a gesture, a sadness, a smile, that would betray the
infinite in its heterogeneit ywith the finite. No! I scrutinize his figure from
head to toe to see if there might not be a crevice through which the infinite
peeped out. No! He is solid through and through.”
Like a shadow that cannot be shaken off, Johannes de silentio pursues his
tax collector up one street and down the next, up one page and down the
next, in order to find the little “crevice,” through which the infinite might
peep, but in vain. Instead he becomes the astonished witness to how the
tax collector goes on walks in the woods and goes to church with equal
ease and naturalness, assuming with no apparent difficult ywhatever role the
situation requires. And toward evening the tax collector gets the idea—as
if in parod yof Abraham’s sacrifice, the ram, which was the miraculous
deliverance in the biblical story—that his “wife will surely have a special
little hot meal for him when he comes home, for example, roast head of
lamb with vegetables.”
Not surprisingl yJohannes de silentio has some difficult yreconciling him-
self to the fact that the tax collector is a knight of faith and not merel ythe
sleek bourgeois his inane behavior seems to indicate, but of course this
ambiguit yis precisel ythe point: The tax collector is proof that there is an
“inwardness that is incommensurable with the outer.” Thus it is not so
muchdespitehis exterior asby virtueof it that the tax collector is a knight of
faith. Johannes de silentio elucidates the dialectic: “He is continuall ymaking
the movement of infinity, but he does so with such accuracy and deftness
that he always expresses finitude, and not for a second does one sense any-
thing else.”
In thefourthversion, however, this was exactl ywhat Isaac did: He sensed
something else—he sensed fear in Abraham’s trembling. Johannes de si-
lentio keeps a watchful eye for similar clues in the figures he experimentally
conjures up in his text. And since he is a persistent fellow who does a
thorough job, he observes them as though the ywere stage actors whose
ever ymovement and gesture indicate degrees on a scale of inwardness he
can read from his seat in a private theater box, where he also observes the
“double movement” of faith, appreciating it as pure, objective inwardness.
For example, he informs us that “the knights of infinite resignation” can be
identified b ytheir step, which is “light and daring.” This is also true to
some extent with respect to the “knights of infinity,” because they have