The Meaning of Absence Pt. 1

A brief essay on Kierkegaard
In it's present incarnation, faith is perhaps the easiest thing to reject. The dependence on a suspenstion of disbelief is perhaps more than any reasonable person would like to bear. From the oppisite end it can be considered unreasonable to wholly reject faith based upon popular dogma. The paradox here is whether one must adopt dogma in order to have faith, in which case no pious person can exist outside of religion.

For my part, I reject religion, however this does not translate, to the best of my knowlege, directly into a rejection of faith. True, faith is absurd, but conception of the absurd is something that is uniquly human. In this sense, I must admit to the neccesity of some form of faith. A new definition of of the divine is in order. For my purposes I will define the 'divine' as the continuity of the universe.

One must becarful when crafting definitions for their own particular use, however I do not feel that I have gone to far here.

In my reading of Kierkegaard I developed the following conclusions of his views on faith, particularly, as he put it, 'the Knight of Faith':

1. The knight of faith must first resign himself to the futility of wordliness. In this manner he will exist as a solitary indivuldual, as no man can fully understand him.
2. In this resignation he tosses himself to the mercy of the divine.
3. 'Faith' is a certain trust in the absurd when viewed by those on the outside.
4. A true kinght of faith finds his power in the absurd, thereby applying little meaning to the material world.

If I have adequatly summed up Kierkegaard's notion, then I cannot find a point of dissaggrement here. As he pointed out himself, few men can find the strenght to become true knights of faith. I can however state for certain that important information has been left out. Kierkegaard uses and analogy, a short parable regarding a pauper and a princess. This parable is approprite as long as we can define 'faith' as 'love for the divine'. In using this analogy, Kierkagaard creates a deliema in our realtionship to the divine that he hardly mentions. If the pauper is to represent the aspiring knight of faith, and the princess the divine, we assume that it would be aestetically inapropriate for the princess to love the pauper. Does the divine now also have something to overcome in regard to us?

Certainly this would explain the difficulty of faith. If the divine is the universe, the universe's silence towards us would be a perfect expression of the divine's weakness. What than is the use of a weak divine?

Love as a reflection:
Perhaps it is unfair to charachterize the divine as weak only because of universal silence. It is no however unjustified. In a sense we can define the divine as a supreamly unethical force, if we yeild to Kierkegaard's views. As he expresses, in the situation of the pauper, aestetics demand the paupers silence, so as not to disturb the peace of mind of the princess, and therby confuse the social order. On the other hand, ethics demand discloser. Only in this manner can the pauper avoid making decisions for the other. The divine takes an even more unethical approach to this question when put in the clothing of the Christian God. One who is steeped in dogma may claim that the writen texts are enough affirmation of God's love for humanity. This is a remarkable leap of faith, since on no level can this be proven. Does the lover expect one love letter to be sufficent for many years of love?

This is the fallacy of the Bible. Indeed, is it entirely a love letter? Even the basest reading will expose that God as a lover did not express his love at all when one considers the Old Testement, and in the new did so through a surrogate. In fact one could make the case that the entirety of the Bible would be God's statements to humanity through a surrogate.

Particularly in the Old Testament does God express much disdain for humanity. Far from expressing love, the God of the Old Testament demands it, scarcely offering much in return. God has become in this regard am abusive husband, demading all, while providing only the minimum, eventually to disappear. This is particularly evident in the Christain concept of fearing God.

To fully express this, I provide the following mock conversation with God:

God says, "I am all love. Love me as I love you."
I ask, "What of proof of this? What of Job, and Abraham? They suffered at your hands, at your whim."
God replies, "Yes, but I loved them all the same... Faith must be tested."
"Am I to treat my lover that way? Test their love?" I pause. "Is it appropiate to test your love?"
God thinks for a moment, "Only faith must be tested."
I say, "But you have equated love and faith. Surely you must be willing to express your love for me in more than mere words, just as I must do for you."
God falls silent on this point. He cannot be justified in stating that different rules appy to him, since if you follow Christian logic, the worst of all sins is hypocricy.

In this manner, God looses at his own game. It is apparent that this God may not be what we seek, if we chose to find a more graceful form of the divine.

Having abandoned one dogmatic divine at this point, I will state the nature of my quest: I intend to express what is neccesary from the divine, and subsequently attempt to prove the neccesity of that in the world.