Soren Kierkegaard

that the tale directs its message: “For the person who has once been exposed
to these images can never be free of them again.”
Freedom from these images—images that perhaps resemble those Johan-
nes de silentio produced in his four versions of Abraham—will never come
to the sleepless man. And this is precisel ythe source of his sleeplessness,
which is wh yJohannes de silentio also concludes b ytaking the sleepless
man’s side in asking the following rhetorical question: “There were count-
less generations that knew ever yword of the Abraham stor yb yheart, but
how man ydid it make sleepless?”
InFear and Trembling, Johannes de silentio does not succeed in elucidating
the relation between inwardness itself and its external symptoms. Nor did
Kierkegaard possess the final answer. While in Berlin, between Ma y10 and
Ma y17, 1843—thus quite close to when he wrote the retracted text about
Regine—he reflected on this problem in the form it would assume if its
main character were no longer a figure from the Old Testament, but the
principal person in the New Testament: “The absolute paradox would be
if the Son of God became man, came to the world, went around in such a
manner that absolutel yno one recognized him; if he became an individual
human being in the strictest sense of the word, a person who had a trade,
got married, et cetera....Inthat case God would not have been God and
Father of mankind, but the greatest ironist....Thedivine paradox is that
he becomes noticed, if in no other fashion, then b ybeing crucified, b y
performing miracles, etc., which means that he is recognizable, after all, by
his divine authority, even if faith is required in order to solve its [divine
authority’s] paradox.”
These lines contain the quintessence of the problem treated inPhilosophi-
cal Fragments, where the question of God’s making himself known, and the
related issue of faith’s knowledge of itself (“the autops yof faith”), will absorb
an enormous amount of the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus’s attention.
Neither this second Johannes nor Johannes de silentio can completel ysub-
due the desire to draw conclusions from the external with respect to the
internal—which could indicate that their author suffered from a predilec-
tion for this sort of thing and that thus, when all was said and done, he
could not bring himself to leave inwardness in its sanctum, undisturbed.
But that is another story. Or, rather, it is the story we are—also—in the
process of following: As time passed, from having been the implacable de-
fender of inwardness, Kierkegaard became its no less implacable prosecutor.
This is wh yhis writings can be read retrospectivel yas an elaborate histor y
of the abolition of inwardness, an abolition that in work after work pushes
its behind-the-scenes manager, the actual author Søren Aabye Kierkegaard,
forward into the front lines, so that b ythe end no one would have an y
doubt about who was doing the talking.