Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea
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is to be found with it.
The repetition that renews is a transition from one state
(such as religiousness A) to another (such as religiousness B)
and the states are as different from one another as the creatures
of the ocean are from those of land and air for repetition
takes place not through an immanent continuity with the
former existence which is a contradiction, but through a transcendence.
Any person as a single individual is as unpredictable as the posthorn.
Kierkegaard came to see that clearly as he grieved over Regina’s
grieving at his breaking of the engagement and then discovered
that she was not grieving at all but was about to marry another.
He was totally surprised and the idea crossed his mind that
she must not have cared so much for him if she could so
quickly seemingly forget him and become engaged to another.
This news of her new engagement brought him to identify with
Job at the moment of the Storm when God asked him how
he could question God when God and his creation were so great
and Job did not know all that God was up to with his universe.
However, he came to see that she gave him to himself a second time.
First she inspired him to a full life of witnessing faith
and now she relieved him that he was not hurting her.
That is true repetition for what has been can be again.
However, the second time is like and yet unlike the first.
What has been does not determine what will be and
in his surprise that she went with an other so quickly
he could see how his second experience of erotic inspiration
was different from the first for she loved him and then freed him.
II.3.7 Loving Job as More Important
Satan made a bet with God that if Job should experience
the problem of evil and suffer he would lose his faith in God.
Job lost the prosperity of his flocks and he continued to pray:
“The Lord had given. The Lord has taken. Blessed be the Lord.”
Then Satan upped the ante and God took away Job’s children.
Just as Kierkegaard’s father began to lose his children so Job
lost his and there was the dramatic story of Job’s friends
who claimed that Job must have done evil to be so punished.
That is the Deuteronomic vision that those who are good will be
blessed and those who are evil will be cursed and destroyed.
But that logic did not hold and the unpredictable happened.
At first Job did begin to doubt and despair and to think that
it would have been better if he would had never have been born.
He even thought in the back of his mind that he would like
to take God to a court of law and show God’s injustice.
But then when it looked like Satan was winning the wager
there was the storm and God spoke to Job out of the thunder
and asked him where he was when God created the stars and
the seas and the Leviathan of the deep and Job recognized
his pride and he repented in sack cloth and ashes for doubting.
So with the posthorn we see that doubt about the next note
at first seems to make repetition impossible but then it can
help one to see the non-mechanical true repetition and its doubt.
In Works of Love Kierkegaard explains the role of doubt in the
life of a loving and trusting faith when he writes:
If someone can demonstrate on the basis of the possibility
of deception that one should not believe anything at all,
I can demonstrate that one should believe in everything
on the basis of the possibility of deception. (228)
In his own experience Søren knew that the younger brother, Jesus,
could truly love the elder brother, Job, especially in his ambivalence.
II.3.8 Job’s Faithful Love That Justifies the Exception
At the end of the book in a Concluding Letter by Constantine Constantius
the logic of repetition is explained in terms of a battle between
the universal order and the exception such as Abraham, Job, or Søren
Constantine mentions that the 1, 2, 3 of the ordinary syllogisms
that draw conclusions from the universal and particular do not work
in the case of the individual exception and:
It is asking too much of an ordinary reviewer
to be interested in the dialectical battle in which
the exception arises in the midst of the universal,
the protracted and very complicated procedure
in which the exception battles his way through
and affirms himself as justified,
for the unjustified exception is recognized precisely
by his wanting to bypass the universal. (226)
Job began like Abraham with a vision of land, nation and name
and he was promised he would attain his aesthetic dream if he
would be ethically good and follow the laws of God and he did that
and he did gain prosperity, posterity and rich blessings for all.
Then at step three of the dialectic he was challenged by the universal
and losing prosperity, posterity and blessing he stood face
to face with the problem of evil and wondered how a good God
could be so unjust as to punish him so when he was good.
Then in step four the universal order of God appeared in the great
storm and Job repented in infinite resignation and absolutely
loved the absolute so that he now in step five saw God anew.
In step six according to the epilogue of the miracle he got
his children back a second time and in step seven he was
prosperous once again having recovered the aesthetic.
This battle is the same one that the prodigal must go through
when he wants to win over the elder brother in reconciliation
for the elder brother represents the universal order of the law.
II.3.9 Loving the God-Man as More Important
So Job like Abraham is a type of the God-man who gives up all
for the other in a spirit of praising love that recollects the