disgusting, and that everyone finds rather repulsive and comical. And if, in
addition to all this, you were a street philosopher, gossiping with everyone,
seemingly good-natured; if you made strange faces, walked crablike, arch-
ing your back on Østergade, it was to no purpose: You merely interrogated
people in order to make fun of them, went there only in order to satisfy
your need for contempt. You dine with the swine, not simply because you
have produced filthy literature, but because—with the mob cheering you
on—you have grasped the desire of the times: to tear down everything
high and holy.”
Patient No. 2067
It was September 25, 1855. Kierkegaard took his pen, dipped it in the ink,
and wrote across the top of the page “This Life’s Destiny, Understood from
a Christian Point of View.” It was to be his last journal entry: “This life’s
destiny is: to be brought to the highest degree of weariness with life. The
person who, brought to this point, is able to maintain (or is helped by God
to be able to maintain) that it is God who, out of love, has brought him to
this point—that person, understood from a Christian point of view, has
passed life’s examination, is ripe for eternity. I came into existence through
a crime. I came into existence against God’s will. The crime—which in a
sense is not my crime, even though it makes me guilty in God’s eyes—is
to give life. The punishment fits the crime: to be deprived of all lust for life,
to be led to the most intense degree of weariness with life....What does
God really want? He wants to have souls that can praise, adore, worship,
and thank him—the business of angels. That is why God is surrounded by
angels. Because the sort of beings of which there are legions in ‘Chris-
tendom,’ the sort who for 10 rixdollars will roar and trumpet to God’s
honor and praise—that sort of being does not please him. No, the angels
please him. And what pleases him even more than the praises of angels is
this: When, during the last lap of this life—when it seems as if God trans-
forms himself into sheer cruelty and with the most cruelly devised cruelty
does everything to deprive a person of all lust for life—when a human being
nonetheless continues to believe that God is love and that it is from love
that God does this—such a human being then becomes an angel. And he
can certainly praise God in heaven, but of course the time of instruction,
schooltime, is always the strictest time. It is as if a person had the idea of
traveling the whole world over to hear a singer with a perfect voice: That
is how God sits in heaven and listens. And every time he hears praise from