Soren Kierkegaard

nes) does lift the curtain a bit .The rather authoritative description provided
by the unnamed editor makes it clear that Johannes was “altogether too
spiritually defined to be a seducer in the ordinary sense,” which is why the
editor is also unwilling to label him a “criminal.” And the editor goes on
to say that “sometimes, however, he did assume a parastatic body, and then
he was sheer sensuousness.” A parastatic body is a technical term used by
the Gnostics of the early Church with reference to the body of Jesus; it was
only anapparentbody, they maintained, acorpus parastaticum .And this was
also the situation with Johannes: He was a spirit who at times assumed an
apparent sensuousness, but in the deepest sense this was foreign to his es-
sence .His power consisted in the subjugation of that sensuousness .“Rage,
you wild forces,” he declared quite characteristically, “stir, you powers of
passion! Though the crashing of your waves flings its froth at the skies, you
will still not be able to tower above my head.”
The collegial reference to “The Seducer’s Diary” that Kierkegaard later
deleted, right from under Vigilius Haufniensis’s nose, was motivated by an
interest in psychology—“he knows that the woman has anxiety”—but the
reference could also have been motivated by something else .Both, indeed,
are markedlyopticalin their dealings with the world .They arevisualbeings,
and Johannes loses himself so completely in thesightof Cordelia that the
actual Cordelia disappears from his field of vision, which is why she comes
close to being merely a name for theaesthetics of voyeurismthat saturates the
pages of the diary .“She does not see that I am looking at her, she feels it,
feels it throughout her entire body .Her eyes close, and it is night, but
within her it is broad daylight.” This is the rather formidable description of
the activity that Johannes elsewhere calls “a spiritual undressing.”
Thus, too, it is vision that sets the entire plot in motion .When Johannes
takes a stroll out on Langelinie on April 9, he suddenly eyes Cordelia, whose
femininity dazzles him so completely that he is unable to remember how
she looked: “Have I gone blind? Has the inner eye of my soul lost its power?
I have seen her, but so completely has her image now disappeared for me
that it is as though I had seen a heavenly vision .In vain do I summon forth
all the power of my soul to conjure up that image.” He therefore initiates
a thorough search that lasts more than a month, and on May 15 he sees her
again, noting in his diary: “Thank you, dear chance, accept my thanks!
Straight she was and proud; mysterious and rich in thoughts she was, like a
spruce, one shoot, one thought, which from deep within the earth shoots
up toward heaven, unexplained, inexplicable to itself, a whole with no
parts... .She was a mystery that mysteriously possessed its own solution .”
A mere week later he manages to gain access to the house where Cordelia
lives, and on June 2 he ascertains that she possesses “imagination, soul, pas-