Master Kierkegaard: The Complete Journals. Ellen Brown

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Master Kierkegaard: The Complete Journals - Ellen Brown


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evil—their characters do not “develop”—whereas noble yet flawed men such as Faust (worthy subjects of tragedy in Aristotle’s view) go through all sorts of changes, ups and downs, or expansions and contractions, in response to “the yeast of the Pharisees,” that unreliable medium of false growth. Evil = the falsification of what is true and good. Augustine was right. It has no existence by itself—a mere parlor trick.

      I cannot help but think of my master’s financial freedom in this regard. He came “duty-free” into his inheritance. As the youngest, he did not earn it in any sense other than perhaps in terms of the emotional toll his youth took on him. I gather from the little that Mrs. H. has said and the perpetual gloom that hangs over this house that he and his brothers were much shut up in the library or their bedrooms, the father as strict as a drill sergeant and protective as a mother hen, the suffocating combination blanketed over with an additional layer of religious guilt. That the daughters were shut up goes without saying; girls are thought to be suited to imprisonment, better able to adapt to the hothouse atmosphere. And yet, mysteriously, all his sisters are dead. This business of making children feel personally responsible for a sadistic crime committed by imperial overlords against an innocent man nearly two millennia ago makes my blood boil.

      And the mother, a lively spirit in my estimation, yet a former servant, a poor relation, helpless to do anything about it. My dream comes back to me. I had a unique destiny (a pleonasm) that I was being kept from by people who were afraid of what I was or might become. Is this not true of each and every one of us? There is only one miracle necessary to make the whole of creation sacred, and that is life.

      For you have my kidneys in your grasp; you governed me in my mother’s womb.

      I thank you that I am wonderfully made; wonderful are your works, and my soul well knows it.

      My bones were not concealed from you, as I was made in hiding, as I was formed below in the earth.

      Life must be made in hiding, for the world works against it.

      June 27

      June 29

      The cellar cool and damp. Also dark. I work there quickly.

      June 30

      I think my master’s ironical demeanor—a few remarks today about Mrs. H.’s housekeeping regimen seemed to poke fun—is intended to avoid falsehood, but also tends toward falsehood. Everyone plays the straight man to Mephistopheles, Goethe’s master ironist. The witch’s magic spells are no more nonsensical than the theological doctrine of the Trinity, according to Mephisto. And while, of course, Mephisto himself does not actually believe this (the ironist is never persuaded), he sets us to guessing. I would say he makes us think (rather than swallow mystifying contradictions whole), but that is not what he is after. As the witch chants:

      The high power

      Of knowledge,

      Hidden from the whole world!

      And the man who does not think,

      To him it is given:

      He has it effortlessly.

      To the academically trained Faust this is all nonsense, and yet there is sense in it. It goes back to something the Lord says—not entirely clear which person of the Trinity this is supposed to represent, since Jesus was also there from the beginning—in the play’s “Prologue in Heaven”: “A person strays so long as he strives.”

      God and Satan are so often on the same page, so to speak, while noble humanity (Faust) fumbles to find its place. The perspective of the ironist—rising above. The perspective of the contemplative—resting within. Those poor desert mystics, how did they keep from going to the devil?

      Matt


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