Søren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto d**h lyrics

Preface and Introduction Lord! Give us weak eyes for things of no account, and eyes of full clarity in all your truth Preface The form of this 'exposition' may strike many readers as odd: to them it would seem too rigorous to be edifying and too edifying to have the rigour of scholarship. On the latter I have no opinion, but regarding the former I disagree, and were it indeed too rigorous to be edifying, I would consider that a fault. It is one thing, naturally, that not everyone will find it edifying: not everyone is qualified to respond to it in that way, but the fact that the work itself is edifying in character is something else. In a Christian context everything, yes everything, should serve to edify. The kind of scholarship that is not in the last resort edifying is for that very reason un-Christian. An account of anything Christian must be like a physician's lecture beside the sick-bed; even if only those sk**ed in the medical arts should understand it, it should never be forgotten where it is being given. It is just this relationship to life of whatever is Christian (contrasted with a scholarly remoteness), or this, the ethical side of Christianity, that edifies; and an account of this sort, whatever rigour it may possess, is quite different, even in kind, from the 'disinterested' scientific approach whose superior heroism is so far from being heroism in a Christian sense that in a Christian sense it is a form of inhuman curiosity. Christian heroism, and indeed one perhaps sees little enough of that, is to risk unreservedly being oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being alone before God, alone in this enormous exertion and this enormous accountability. But it is not Christian heroism to be taken in by the pure concept of humanity as such, or to have world-history play the admiration game. All Christian knowledge, whatever formal rigour it betrays, should be concerned. But what edifies is just this concern. The concern is the relation to life, to what a person actually is, and thus, in a Christian sense, it is seriousness. In a Christian sense, the superior elevation of disinterested knowing, far from being greater seriousness, is frivolity and pretense. But again, what edifies is seriousness. In one respect then, this little book is the sort a student might have written, but perhaps in another respect not just any professor. But that the treatise is dressed up as it is at least well-advised; yet I would also think psychologically appropriate. There's a more ceremonious style which is too ceremonious to be much to the point and which, to those all too familiar with it, easily becomes meaningless. Just one more comment, doubtless superfluous but I'll risk that: I wish it to be known once and for all that in this entire work, as the title indeed indicates, despair is to be understood as the sickness, not the remedy. Such is the dialectical nature of despair. So too in Christian terminology is d**h the expression for the greatest spiritual misery and yet the cure just to die, to depart from life. 1848 Introduction 'This sickness is not unto d**h' (John 11.4). But still Lazarus died. Upon the disciples misunderstanding him when he later added: 'Our friend Lazarus sleepth, but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep' (11.11), Christ told them bluntly: 'Lazarus is dead' (11.14). So Lazarus is dead, and yet this sickness was not unto d**h; he was dead, and still this sickness is not unto d**h. We know, of course, that Christ was thinking of the miracle which, 'if [they] wouldest believe', was to let contemporaries see 'the glory of God' (11.40), that miracle through which he awoke Lazarus from the dead; so 'this sickness' was not merely 'not unto d**h', but, as Christ had foretold, 'for the glory of God, that the son of God might be glorified thereby' (11.4). Ah!, but even had Christ not awoke Lazarus, is it not still true that this sickness, d**h itself, is not unto d**h? When Christ steps forward to the grave and in a loud voice cries out, 'Lazarus, come forth' (11.43), it is plain enough that this sickness is not unto d**h. Yet, even if Christ had not said that, doesn't simply the fact that He who is 'the resurrection and the life' (11.25) steps forward to the grave mean that this sickness is not unto d**h? That Christ exists – doesn't that mean that this sickness is not unto d**h? And what good would it have done Lazarus to be awoken from the dead if in the end he must die anyway? What good would it have done Lazarus if He did not exist, He who is the resurrection and the life for every person who believes in Him? No, it is not because Lazarus was awoken from the dead; that is not why we can say this sickness is not unto d**h. It is because He exists; that is why this sickness is not unto d**h. For in human terms d**h is the last thing of all, and in human terms hope exists only so long as there is life; but to Christian eyes d**h is by no means the last thing of all, just another minor event in that which is all, an eternal life. And to Christian eyes there is in d**h infinitely more hope than in, simply in human terms, not merely life itself it life at its height of health and vigour. So to Christian eyes not even d**h is the 'sickness unto d**h', so much less so everything that goes under the name of earthly and temporal suffering: want, illness, misery, hardship, adversity, torment, mental agony, sorrow, grief. And even where these are so hard and painful that we humans, or at any rate the sufferer, would say that 'this is worse than d**h', to Christian eyes none of this, which even where it isn't in fact sickness is comparable to it, is the sickness unto d**h. This then, is the measure of the high-mindedness with which Christianity has taught the Christian to think of all that is worldly, d**h included. It's almost as if the Christian were supposed to vaunt this proud elevation above all that humanity normally calls misfortune, over what humanity normally calls the greatest evil. But then Christianity has discovered in its turn a misery which humanity as such does not know exists. This misery is the sickness unto d**h. What the natural man counts terrible, when it is all added up and he can think of no remainder, all this the Christan treats as a joke. Such is the relationship between the natural man and the Christian; it is like that between a child and an adult: what the child shrinks from in horror the adult thinks nothing of. The child doesn't know what is horrifying; the adult knows, and he shrinks from It in horror. The child's imperfection is, first, not to know what is horrifying, and then by the same token to shrink form something else in horror. So too with the natural man. He was no knowledge of what is truly horrifying, yet is not exempted thereby from shrinking in horror. No, he shrinks in horror from what is not horrifying. It is something like the pagan's relationship to God: he doesn't know the true God, but as if that weren't enough he worships an idol as God. Only the Christian knows what is meant by the sickness unto d**h. As a Christian he has acquired a courage unknown to the natural man, a courage he acquired by learning to fear something even more horrifying. That is always how a person acquires courage: when he fears a greater danger he always has the courage to face a lesser. When one fears a danger infinitely, it is as if the others weren't there at all.But the truly horrifying thing which the Christian has learned to know is the 'sickness unto d**h'.