Transcendence and Fulfillment. Benjamin W. Farley

Transcendence and Fulfillment - Benjamin W. Farley


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and possibilities raised by any “self’s” relationship with the divine. These problems and possibilities have to do with Kierkegaard’s analysis of the self’s relationship with itself and of that self’s relationship, in turn, to God. In both Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, he restates the problem in numerous ways. Both essays represent the Dane’s reflections on God’s call to Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. It involves a philosophical dalliance, even a teleological suspension of the ethical, between the “universal and the particular, the eternal and the individual,” as well as “the inward and the outward,” to quote his words.15 It addresses the age-old problem of how the individual can appropriate anything of the Eternal while remaining finite and particular. Does not the Eternal negate the concept that the temporal can appropriate anything of the Eternal—at least in the equivocal sense—or that the particular can appropriate the Universal to any meaningful degree? Rejecting Hegel’s theory of the Absolute, which unfolds in history to shape and determine human life, Kierkegaard focused on Abraham’s relationship with God to propose an engaging solution.

      Would Paul have agreed with Kierkegaard that from a “spiritual” viewpoint, Kierkegaard’s position is precisely what he was trying to articulate? That only the extent to which Paul stood in an “absolute” relationship with God, which only God could make possible, could Paul experience his life fulfilled as an “ontological” new creation—as a self in equilibrium with itself? Yet, for Paul, even that was only possible because of the death and resurrection of Christ, who, as the Universal Son of God, took on flesh, thus becoming a particular individual and thereby representing the particular in every human being as well as preparing the self for the status of becoming “higher than the universal.” Through one man, Christ, all humans now enjoy the power and the presence of the Personal Transcendent Universal that cleanses and renews their finite existence.

      For Kierkegaard and Paul, the efficacy of this relationship, or of humankind’s absolute relationship with the Absolute, rests on “faith.” Both Paul and Kierkegaard cite the Patriarch Abraham’s belief in God’s promise as pivotal to their understanding of human wholeness. For Paul, the death of the promised Messiah caught everyone off-guard, becoming something of a “scandal,” while for Kierkegaard, the Abrahamic drama involved an absurdity, a paradox that only “faith” can fathom. Writes Kierkegaard:


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