Soren Kierkegaard

whether, in his love for the human race, Christ could be permitted to sacri-
fice his life, thereby inflicting on the human race the guilt of having put
him to death. The second question is whether, out of love for Christ, a
human being may permit himself to do what Christ permitted himself to
do. The answer to the first question is as simple as it is paradoxical: Christ’s
atoning death was itself an atonement for those who executed him.
The second question is much more difficult to answer, because in the
end it involves taking a position on the question of the extent to which “a
human being, in relation to other human beings, can be assumed to be in
absolute possession of the truth.” In other words, can anyone be said to
have privileged access to the truth? At first blush Kierkegaard was inclined
to answer the question in the negative, and he therefore had the idea of
ending the piece in a rather bluff manner, making use of this “little, humor-
ous concluding flourish”: “And as for the question that causes or has caused
this person so many troubles, my answer is easy: Oh, God no! a person does
not have the right to do this!”
Kierkegaard abandoned this “concluding flourish” for a number of rea-
sons, but then he was left with the main problem: Doesn’t a person incur
more guilt by repressing his knowledge of the unchristian condition of
Christendom than by allowing other people to become guilty of murder?
Kierkegaard has H. H. answer the question in the negative: All people are
sinners, and therefore one individual has no sovereignty over others. This
appears to have decided the matter, but in the same breath H. H. asks:
Where, then, would “awakening” come from, “if a person does not dare
use the only true means of awakening?” Nor is H. H. satisfied with stopping
here: “So—now with respect to the derivative relation to Christ—if one is
a Christian and relates oneself to pagans, isn’t one then in absolute truth in
relation to them? The difference between them is absolute, and being put
to death is precisely the absolute expression of the absolute difference.—To
my way of thinking this cannot be denied.”
With this slightly incoherent argument, H. H. carries out a shift in per-
spective that is obviously attributable to reflections that Kierkegaard does
not display directly to his readers. “Here, just as inFear and Trembling, I can
say that most people do not have the slightest idea what I am talking about,”
he sighed when he was well into the draft of the work. What had been
written was thus of a profoundly personal character and inaccessible to the
general public. The reference toFear and Tremblingis also noteworthy for
other reasons, however. H. H.’s reflections on the theme of sacrifice can in
fact be read as a New Testament variation on the Old Testament sacrifice
theme presented inFear and Trembling. Now, of course, the perspective had