Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1843

Kierkegaard explores two simple verses from the Old Testament, "Then Job arose, and tore his robe, and shaved his head, and fell upon the ground, and worshiped, saying: Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord took away; blessed be the name of the Lord.",[6] and delivers a message to his "reader" about gratitude.[7]

"pull yourself together, stifle every rebellious thought that would have the audacity to commit high treason against your better nature, disdain all that paltriness that would envy your intellectual gifts and desire them for itself in order to put them to even worse use; disdain the hypocritical virtue that is unwilling to carry the burdens of life and yet wants to be eulogized for carrying it; but do not therefore disdain life, respect every decent effort, every modest activity that humbly conceals itself, and above all have a little more respect for women…. if you cannot control yourself, you will scarcely find anyone else who is able to do it." Either/Or Part II p. 206-207

The Young Man from Repetition found in Job a reason to argue not only with the whole world but also with God, he said, "Job's tormented soul breaks forth in powerful cries. Then I understand; these words I make my own. At the same time, I sense the contradiction and smile at myself as one smiles at a little child who has donned his father's clothes. Indeed, is it not something to smile at if anyone else but Job would say: Alas, if only a man could take God to court as a child of man does his fellow.[8] And yet anxiety comes over me, as if I still did not understand what someday I would come to understand, as if the horror I was reading about was waiting for me, as if by reading about it I brought it upon myself, just as one becomes ill with the sickness one reads about."[9][note 1]

The Young Man had a woman who loved him and was unable to withstand the peer pressure of his age.[10] Job had everything he had taken away from him and the only thing he said was, "The Lord gave", he didn't get angry with God. The Young Man was concerned about the external world but Kierkegaard is interested in the internal world of the spirit where hope endures.[note 2]

In the external world the flesh wants to have what it had before. An individual gets power over others and uses it wisely or continually craves more power. If this repetition is kept up that individual becomes a tyrant. Kierkiegaard says, "What his soul delighted in, it now thirsted for, and ingratitude punished him by picturing it to him as more delightful than it had ever been." If Johannes the Seducer[12] wants to seduce another woman, Kierkegaard says, "What he once had been able to do, he now wanted to be able to do again, and ingratitude punished him with fantasies that had never had any truth. Then he condemned his soul, living, to be starved out in the insatiable craving of the lack (of money, power, adoration, alcohol, drugs, etc..)[13] How can this craving be stopped? Only by choosing the ethical life-view,[14] according to Kierkegaard.[note 3] He says the unhappiest person is the one who has the "content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself" because this becomes a "rigid limitation".[15]

What is the power that binds me? How was the chain made with which the Fenris wolf was bound? It was wrought from the sound of a cat's paws walking over the ground, from women's beards, from the roots of rocks, from the nerves of bears, from the breath of fishes, and the spittle of birds. And thus I, too, am bound in a chain formed of dark imaginings, of unquiet dreams, of restless thoughts, of dread presentiments, of inexplicable anxieties. This chain is "very supple, soft as silk, elastic under the highest tension, and cannot be broken in two.

— Either/Or Vol I p. 33

Kierkegaard presents Job as the prototype that follows one generation after another.[16] He knew the Lord had taken everything away and didn't even go out to attack the Sabaeans who had cut down his herds and their keepers. He traced everything back to God. Kierkegaard asks, "does he alone see God's hand who sees that he gives, or does not one also see God's hand who sees that he takes away?"[17] Job says, "How powerless the assailant's arm, how worthless the schemer's cleverness; how almost pitiable is all human power when it wants to plunge the weak person into despairing submission by wrenching everything from him and in his faith he says: it is not you, you can do nothing, it is the Lord who takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!"[18]

But Job! The moment the Lord took everything away, he did not say, "The Lord took away," but first of all he said "The Lord gave. … Job's soul was not squeezed into silent subjection to the sorrow, but his heart first expanded in thankfulness, the first thing the loss of everything did was to make him thankful to the Lord that he had given him all the blessings that he now took away from him. … His thankfulness no doubt was not the same as in those days that already seemed so far away, when he received every good and every perfect gift from God's hand with thankfulness. But his thankfulness was nevertheless honest, just as honest as the idea of God's goodness that was now so vivid in his soul. Now he recalled everything the Lord had given, some particular thing with perhaps even more thankfulness than when he had received it; it had not become less beautiful because it had been taken away, nor more beautiful, but was just as beautiful as before, beautiful because the Lord had given it, and what might seem more beautiful to him now was not the gift but the Lord's goodness.

— Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 115-116

The moral of the story is directed not to his "reader" but to his "listener".[19]

If you yourself, my listener, were tried as Job was and stood the ordeal as he did, then it would indeed apply precisely to you if what we have said about Job is otherwise correct. If up until now you have never been tried in life, then indeed it applies to you. Are you perhaps thinking that these words are applicable only to the kind of extraordinary situation in which Job was placed? If something similar were to befall you, do you perhaps expect that the terror itself would give you this strength and develop in you this humble courage? Did Job not have a wife-what do we read about her? Perhaps you are thinking that the horror itself cannot acquire the same power over a person as the daily bondage to much lesser hardships. Then watch out that you do not become a slave to some hardship any more than to some person, and above all learn from Job to become honest with yourself so that you do not deceive yourself with imagined power, with which you experience imagined victory in imagined struggle.

— Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 123

This discourse is based on the following 6 verses from the Epistle of James, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of variation. According to his own counsel, he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a first fruit of creation. Therefore, my beloved brethren, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, because a man's anger does not work what is righteous before God. Therefore put away all filthiness and all remnants of wickedness and receive with meekness the word that is implanted in you and that is powerful in making your souls blessed." James 1:17-22[20]

Mikael Pedersen Kierkegaard, Søren's father

He begins with a recounting of the Biblical story of the fall of man. He says, "Only the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was man not allowed to eat-lest the knowledge should enter the world and bring grief along with it: the pain of want and the dubious happiness of possession, the terror of separation and the difficulty of separation, the disquietude of deliberation and the worry of deliberation, the distress of choice and the decision of choice, the judgment of perdition and the anxiety of perdition, the suffering of death and the expectation of death."[21] Man broke the peace by plucking the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and the Garden of Eden was closed. How will the single individual find out where the good is and where the perfect is? Kiekegaard says doubt will explain it to him.[22]

Kierkegaard compares the human love of fathers to God the Father's love.[23][24] Here he speaks of the "terrible upheaval" where God pronounces judgment on the father, possibly Kierkegaard's father, Michael. Kierkegaard reasons this way, ""If God's love does not know how to give good gifts any better than a father's love, then there certainly is small comfort in these words. In this way the words became for him what fatherly love was for him-a beautiful, hallowed, wistful recollection, an uplifting mood that quickened in his soul the conception of the best in the human being but also of the human being's weakness, quickened the soul's most blessed longing but also retracted it again in order to subordinate it to the sadness of concern."[25] Once doubt is planted, Kierkegaard says, "then doubt became stronger. What he himself had discerned, what he himself had experienced, what he with sympathetic concern and to his own grief had become convinced of-that earthly life is vanity, that even people's good gifts are weak-willed and only fill him with disgust[26]-this he now found to be confirmed in Scripture also. Thus it was now plain and clear to him that this is what the words meant, and that far from supporting the most beautiful in life and letting it continue, they on the contrary tacitly condemned it and allowed it to disappear."[27] Was Kierkegaard's father a good and perfect gift or not? Later, in Stages on Life's Way, Kierkegaard explored Solomon's relation to David and asked the same question. Was David a good and perfect gift to Solomon?[28]

The Holy Spirit by Peter Paul Rubens

Kierkegaard says there is a "condition" that makes a gift good and perfect. He explored various conditions necessary for an individual to enjoy life in Either/Or Part II. He says, "Every human being, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and of its purpose." But the condition necessary for the enjoyment of life (health and beauty,[29] power such as Nero had,[30] the esthetic enjoyments of life,[31] "every life-view that has the condition outside itself is despair."[32] Either/Or was an "attempt to actualize an ethical life-view."[33] This "condition" doesn't come from externalities according to Kierkegaard.[34] He says,

What earthly life does not have, what no man has, God alone has, and it is not a perfection on God's part that he alone has it, but a perfection on the part of the good that a human being, insofar as he participates in the good, does so through God. What, then, is the good? It is that which is from above? What is the perfect? It is that which is from above. What is the good? It is God. … God is the only one who gives in such a way that he gives the condition[35] along with the gift, the only one who in giving already has given. God gives both to will and to bring to completion; he begins and completes a good work in a person.

— Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong p. 134

Kierkegaard believed the religious discourse should be used to convince the single individual to not only find the good but also try to become good oneself.

The religious address can deal with everything, but it must continually bring everything into relation to the absolute category of religiousness. It must walk along every path, must know the habitat of every error, where moods have their hiding places, how passions regard themselves in solitude, now where illusions tempt, where the path swings off, in order to bring everything continually into relation with the absolute category of religiousness. … The religious discourse is the path to the good, that is, it copies the path, which is just as long as life; it copies the path that the religious person describes, not in the sense in which the planet describes its course or the mathematician describes a circle. But there is no shortcut to the absolute good, and since it is defined only by the mode of acquisition, the absolute difficulty of this is the only sign that one is relating oneself to the absolute good.

— Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Volume 1 p. 427-428

What is the "one thing needful" that knowledge can't bring? Kierkegaard answers thus:

If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? – because to need the Holy Spirit is a perfection in a human being, and this earthly need is so far from illuminating it by analogy that it darkens it instead. The need itself is a good and perfect gift from God, and the prayer about it is a good and a perfect gift through God, and the communication of it is a good and a perfect gift from above, which comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of variation.

— Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong p. 139

And repeats the same answer in 1846;

If the dialogue Hippias is regarded as an introduction to what the beautiful is, it can serve as a kind of analogy to what the beautiful is, it can serve as a kind of analogy to the sort of introduction of which I am speaking. That is, after several attempts to explain what the beautiful is, all of which are demolished, the dialogue ends with Socrates' saying that he has benefited from the conversation, that he has found out that it is difficult. Whether Socrates is right in such a procedure, since the beautiful is an idea and is not related to existence, I shall not decide. But when in Christendom it seems that so much has been done or attempted to make one forget what Christianity is, then in my opinion it is better to regard an introduction appropriate if instead of resembling the usual introductions-and the hired waiters whom hotels send out to meet the travelers immediately at the customhouse and to recommend their lodging and cuisine-it ends with having made becoming a Christian difficult, although the introduction has also tried to show what Christianity is. The hotel needs the travelers; with regard to Christianity, it would be even more appropriate if people grasped that they need Christianity.

— Concluding Unscientific Postscript Vol. 1 p. 383-384

And again in 1850;

The Invitation: Come Here To Me, All You Who Labor And Are Burdened, And I Will Give You Rest. How amazing, amazing that the one what has help to bring is the one who says: Come here! What love! It is already loving, when one is able to help, to help the one who asks for help, but to offer the help oneself! And to offer it to all! Yes, and to the very ones who are unable to help in return! To offer it, no, to shout it out, as if the helper himself were the one who needed help, as if he who can and wants to help everyone were nevertheless in one respect himself a needy one, that he feels need, and this needs to help, needs those who suffer in order to help them. .... ordinarily it is the case that the person who is able to help must be searched for, and once he is found it may be hard to gain access to him, and when one has gained access one perhaps must still plead with him for a long time, and when one has pleaded with him for a long time, he perhaps at long last lets himself be prevailed upon-that is, he sets a high price on himself. And at times, especially when he refuses payment or magnanimously renounces it, this is simply an expression of the very high price he sets upon himself. But he who sacrificed himself, sacrifices himself here also, he is himself the one who seeks those who have need of help, he is himself the one who goes around and, calling, almost pleading, says: Come here. He, the only one who is able to help and help with the one thing needful, who is able to rescue from the only, in the truest sense, life-threatening illness, he does not wait for anyone to come to him; he comes on his own initiative, uncalled-for he is indeed the one who calls to them; he offers help-and such help! …. But he who calls himself the Savior and knows himself to be that says in concern: Come here. … Oh human self-sacrifice, even when you are most beautiful and noble, when we admire you the most, there is still one more sacrifice-to sacrifice every qualification of one's own self so that in one's willingness to help there is not the slightest partiality. O love-thus to set no stipulation whatever of price upon oneself, completely to forget oneself, so that one is someone who helps, completely blind to who it is that one is helping, seeing with infinite clarity that, whoever that person may be, he is a sufferer-to be unconditionally willing to help in this way, alas, therein different from everyone!

— Practice in Christianity, Hong p. 11-13

This discourse continues using another text from The Epistle of James and he adds a verse from the Book of Jude to explain what he wants to talk about here.

The same apostle from whose epistle the above text is taken warns in the very next passage against the worldly endeavors that sought to penetrate also the congregation in order to establish the difference and distinction in the service of vanity, to emancipate it from the bond of perfection that knits its members together in equality before God, and to make it a slave in subjection to the law that rules the world and has presumably always ruled it: "to flatter people for the sake of advantage" (Jude 16) The idea so frequently stressed in Holy Scripture for the purpose of elevating the lowly and humbling the mighty, the idea that God does not respect the status of persons, this idea the apostle want to bring to life in the single individual for application in his life. If a person always keeps his soul sober and alert in this idea, he will never go astray in his outlook on life and people or "combine respect for status of persons with his faith." "Show no partiality as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ." (James 2.1) Then he will direct his thoughts toward God, and his eye will not make the mistake of looking for differences in the world instead of likeness with God.

— Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong p. 141

And even if he sometimes forgets about equality again and loses himself distracted by life's confusing distinctions, nevertheless his mind, every time he goes to the hallowed place, will be preserved in equality before God during that time and will be educated to preserve increasingly this equality in the clamor of the world and with it to penetrate the confusion. In the world, the differences work frantically to embellish and to embitter life, as beckoning goals, as rewards of victory, as oppressive burdens, as attendants of loss; in the world, external life takes arrogant pride in differences-or cravenly and worriedly sighs under them. But in the hallowed place, the voice of the ruler is heard no more than in the grave; there is no difference between man and woman, no more than in the resurrection; the presumptuous demands of wisdom are not heard there, the pomp and glory of the world are not seen there, for it is seen as something that is not seen. There even the teacher is the servant, and the greatest is the lowliest, and the most powerful person in the world is the one who needs intercessory prayer more than anyone else; there every externality is discarded as imperfection, and equality is true for all, redeeming and equally redeeming.

— Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong p. 141-142

This point of view would break down the barriers between people. But Kierkegaard suggests that this breaking down of the barriers requires battles and victories. He says, "In the hallowed places, in every upbuilding view of life, the thought arises in a person's soul that help him to fight the good fight with flesh and blood, with principalities and powers, and in the fight to free himself for equality before God, whether this battle is more a war of aggression against the differences that want to encumber him with worldly favoritism or a defensive war against the differences that want to make him anxious in worldly perdition.[36] This fight is a fight to unite the "two great classes" who are being obligated "to give or being obliged to receive."[37] Kierkegaard says, "Every human being, whether he gives or receives, essentially has to thank God."[38] These gifts can be a simple word of encouragement, a truth, money etc., but Kierkegaard warns those who "sit and brood like dragons on their earthly treasures, they hoard, like a miser, the good things of the spirit, jealous of them-of what benefit is it to him that the words wanted to teach him to bestow them in the right way?[39]

The person who gives is more insignificant than the gift and the person who receives is more insignificant than the gift, then equality indeed has been effected-that is, equality in insignificance in relation to the gift because the gift is from above and therefore actually belongs to neither or belongs equally to both-that is, it belongs to God.

— Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses p. 157

Kierkegaard's final discourse is about the philosophical questions concerning the soul. He keeps using the Socratic method. This time he asks, "Is it saying too little to say that a person comes naked into the world and possesses nothing in the world if he does not even possess his soul? (…) What is there to live for if a person has to spend his whole life gaining the presupposition that on the deepest level is life's presupposition-yes, what does that mean?[40] He had already asked himself about the soul in Either/Or in this way:

I shall suggest in a few words the danger that faces a person in the moment of despair, the reef on which he can be stranded and utterly shipwrecked. The Bible says: For what would it profit a person if he gained the whole world but damaged his own soul; what would he have in return? Scripture does not state the antithesis to this, but it is implicit in the sentence. The antitheses would read something like this: What damage would there be to a person if he lost the whole world and yet did not damage his soul; what would he need in return? There are expressions that in themselves seem simple and yet fill the soul with a strange anxiety, because they almost become more obscure the more one thinks about them. In the religious sphere, the phrase "sin against the Holy Spirit" is such an expression. I do not know whether theologians are able to give a definite explanation of it, but then I am only a layman. But the phrase "to damage one's soul" is an esthetic expression, and the person who thinks he has an ethical life-view must also think he is able to explain it. We often hear the words used, and yet anyone who wants to understand them must have experienced the deep movements of his soul-indeed, he must have despaired, for it is actually the movements of despair that are described here: one the one side the whole world, on the other side one's own soul. You will readily perceive, if we pursue this expression, that we arrive at the same abstract definition of "soul" at which we arrived earlier in the definition of the word "self" in the psychological consideration of wishing, without, however, wanting to become someone else. In other words, if I can gain the whole world and yet damage my soul, the phrase "the whole world" must include all the finite things that I possess in my immediacy. Then my soul proves to be indifferent to these things. If I can lose the whole world without damaging my soul, the phrase "the whole world" again includes all the finite qualifications that I possess in my immediacy, and yet if my soul is undamaged it is consequently indifferent toward them. I can lose my wealth, my honor in the eyes of others, my intellectual capacity; and yet not damage my soul: I can gain it all and yet be damaged. What, then, is my soul? What is this innermost being of mine that is undismayed by this loss and suffers damage by this gain?

— Either/Or Part II, Hong p. 220-221

Kierkegaard proposes that the world possesses the individual soul, but the world is imperfect. God is perfect. Therefore there is a battle going on and duties to carry out.[41] He describes the battle this way, "In patience, the soul comes to terms with all its possessors, with the life of the world in that it sufferingly gains itself from it, with God in that it sufferingly accepts itself from him, with itself in that it itself retains what it simultaneously gives to both without anyone being able to deprive the soul of it-patience. The soul can obtain nothing through power; it is in the hands of an alien power.[note 4] If the soul were free in some other way, it would not be the self-contradiction in the contradiction between the external and the internal, the temporal and the eternal.(…) This self-contradiction is again expressed in the soul's being stronger than the world through its weakness, in its being weaker than God through its strength, in its inability to gain anything but itself unless it wants to be deceived, and in its being able to gain itself only by losing itself. To know what a human soul is still a long way from beginning to gain one's soul in patience, and it is a knowledge that exhibits its difference from that gaining inasmuch as it does indeed grow in impatience. And even though this knowledge may have its significance, it often deceived a person the very same way the world does, in that he thought that he possessed it, whereas it was his knowledge that possessed him."[42]

The knowledge that is the highest knowledge as far as Kierkegaard is concerned is the knowledge that he had a soul that could relate to God. This was "the one thing needful"[43] He says, "His soul belongs to the world as its illegitimate possession; it belongs to God as his legitimate possession; it belongs to the person himself as his possession, as a possession that is to be gained. Consequently he gains-if he actually does gain-his soul from God, away from the world, through himself."[44] The fight for the soul takes place in the inner being, not in externalities where everything changes from one moment to the next, it is a "work of patience".[45][note 5] Here was Kierkegaard's Either/Or; either the single individual gains his soul from the world and presents it to God at the end of life or he loses his soul to the world and has nothing to present to God at the end of life.[46] Kierkegaard puts it this way in August 1844:

But if he nevertheless is unwilling to be an instrument of war in the service of inexplicable drives, indeed, in the service of the world, because the world itself, the object of his craving, stimulates the drive; if he nevertheless does not want to be like a stringed instrument in the hands of inexplicable moods or, rather, in the hands of the world, because the movement of the soul is in accord with the way the world plucks its strings; if he does not want to be like a mirror in which he intercepts the world or, rather, the world reflects itself; if he does not want this, if he himself, even before the eye aims at something to make a conquest, wants to capture the eye so that it may belong to him and not he to the eye; if he grasps the hand before it grasps for the external, so that it may belong to him and not he to the hand; if he wants this so earnestly that he is not afraid of tearing out the eye, cutting off the hand, shutting the window of the senses if necessary-well, then everything is changed: the power is taken away from him, and the glory. He struggles not with the world but with himself. Observe him now; his powerful figure is held embraced by another figure, and they hold each other so firmly interlocked and are so equally matched in suppleness and strength that the wrestling cannot even begin, because in that moment that other figure would overwhelm him-but that other figure is he himself. Thus he is capable of nothing; even the weakest person who is not tried in this struggle is capable of far more than he.

— Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, To Need God Is A Human Being's Highest Perfection, Hong, p. 308-309

How can a person come to know that a soul resides in them and that another has claim to it? Classical knowledge realized that experience alone doesn't lead one to the truth, but Hegel was interested in making Reason the only path to truth. Kierkegaard disagreed. He said, "A person knows his soul, then, if he truly knows it as something that he may be able t o describe accurately but that is in the possession of another and that he probably desires to possess, but knowledge as such does not help him in this. Even though patience is required for this knowing, as for any other, this nevertheless is not what the words speak about, as is shown in this-that in knowledge patience is not simultaneously the condition and the conditioned. (…) The person who wants to gain his soul in patience knows that his soul does not belong to him, that there is a power from which he must gain it, a power by whom he must gain it, and that he must gain it himself."[47] The soul is in the hands of an alien power, the world, and the single individual must gain the soul from the world in order to present it to God unblemished.[48]

• The Lord Gave and The Lord Hath Taken Away, Blessed Be the Name of the Lord Swenson translation
• Either/Or Volume I Edited by Victor Eremita, February 20, 1843, translated by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson Princeton University Press 1971
• Either/Or. Part II Translated by Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton, 1988, ISBN 978-0-691-02041-9
• Edifying Discourses, by Søren Kierkegaard, Vol. II, Translated from the Danish by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1944
• Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, by Søren Kierkegaard, Princeton University Press. Hong, 1990
• Fear and Trembling; Copyright 1843 Søren Kierkegaard – Kierkegaard's Writings; 6 – copyright 1983 – Howard V. Hong
• Repetition, A Venture in Experimental Psychology, by Constantin Constantius, October 16, 1843, by Søren Kierkegaard, Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 1983, Princeton University Press
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments Volume I, by Johannes Climacus, edited by Søren Kierkegaard, Copyright 1846 – Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1992 Princeton University Press
• The Point of View of My Work as An Author: A Report to History, by Søren Kierkegaard, written in 1848, published in 1859 by his brother Peter Kierkegaard Translated with introduction and notes by Walter Lowrie, 1962 Harper Torchbooks
• Evangelical Christendom: Christian Work and the News of the Churches, Published by J.S. Phillips etc. 1855 p. 127-128

• Eminent authors of the 19th century. Literary portraits, By George Brandes, Published 1886 by T. Y. Crowell & Co. in New York - He has numerous references to Kierkegaard throughout this book
• Friedrich Nietzsche, by George Brandes; translated from the Danish by A.G. Chater, Published 1914 by W. Heinemann in London, This early work of Brandes is also full of references to Kierkegaard
• Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: philosophy, theology, literature, By George Pattison. Psychology Press, 2002
• Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Søren Kierkegaard, by, Robert L. Perkins, Mercer University Press, 2003