Soren Kierkegaard

must continually come closer and closer to the doctrine of the forgiveness
of sins,” he wrote on one of the great many loose scraps of paper dating
from 1848 that deal with this subject, a subject that concerned Kierkegaard
in the most intimate way imaginable. An especially reflexive but also quite
sober-minded monologue found its way onto paper under the heading
“Something about the Forgiveness of Sins”: “The difficulty is, to which
immediacy does the person who believes in it [the forgiveness of sins] re-
vert? Or what is the immediacy that comes as a consequence of this faith,
and how is that immediacy related to what is otherwise called immediacy?
To believe in the forgiveness of sins is a paradox, the absurd, et cetera, et
cetera—I am not speaking of this, but of something else. I assume, then,
that someone has had the enormous courage of faith truly to believe that
God has literally forgotten his sin—a courage that perhaps is not to be found
in ten people in an entire generation—this mad courage: to have acquired
a mature notion of God and after that to believe that God can quite literally
forget. But I assume it. What then? So now everything has been forgotten;
it is as if he were a new person. But are there absolutely no traces left behind?
In other words, is it possible that a person would then be able to live with
the carefree spirit of a youth? Impossible!... How could a person who
believes in the forgiveness of his sins possibly become young enough to fall
in love in the erotic sense?”
These reflections on the relation between the first and the second imme-
diacy led Kierkegaard straight into his existential center: “Here is the diffi-
culty of my own life. I was raised as a Christian by an old man, extremely
strictly. This is why my life is dreadfully confused, and this is why I have
been brought into collisions that no one imagines, much less talks about.
And now for the first time, now in my thirty-fifth year, assisted, perhaps,
by burdensome sufferings, and in bitter repentance, I have learned to die
away from the world sufficiently so that there can properly be a question
of my finding the whole of my life and my salvation by believing in the
forgiveness of sins. But truly, even though I am spiritually as strong as I have
ever been, I am now much too old to fall in love with a woman and that
sort of thing.”
At first blush the reader might be tempted to believe that Kierkegaard
had these reservations about ever again being able to fall in love with a
woman because he was a good psychologist who knew himself and his own
limitations, or that these reservations stemmed from a flaw in his theology
that prevented him from embracing forgiveness totally. The second imme-
diacy, which is at the same time a requirement and a blessing, was for Kier-
kegaardanotherimmediacy, and therefore the person who takes up a posi-
tion within that other immediacy must also have becomeanotherperson: