What is the absolute paradox?

Søren Kierkegaard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Søren Kierkegaard answers

The absolute paradox is this: that the eternal has become temporal in a single historical individual, and that this fact — not as a thought-project, not as a speculative possibility, but as actuality — is what understanding cannot accommodate by its own resources.1 Climacus, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, presses the point with precision.

Christianity as a thought-project is not difficult to understand; the difficulty, the paradox, is that it is real.2 What speculation does when it encounters the God-man is shift the scene to the medium of possibility — an eternal divine becoming, a unity of God and man as speculative category — and in that shift the paradox is revoked, not resolved.3

The pagan analogies, the aesthetic-direct criteria of recognition, the idea that what is possible in the fantasy-medium of possibility is also the highest in the medium of reality: all of this is the misunderstanding that confounds Christianity with something the heart of man could have generated from within itself, forgetting the qualitative distinction between what comes from God and what comes from man.4

And here is the consequence for faith. Because the paradox is actuality and not possibility, it can be believed altogether — against the understanding; and if anyone imagines that he understands it, he can be sure that he misunderstands it.5 Faith is not the understanding's conclusion but its limit. What I wrote under the name of Anti-Climacus in Practice in Christianity puts the matter from the other side: the possibility of offence accompanies the God-man every instant, as a man's shadow does not accompany him more inseparably, for the God-man exists only for faith, and the possibility of offence is precisely the repellent force by which faith comes into existence — if one does not choose instead to be offended.6

Johannes de Silentio, in Fear and Trembling, approaches the same structure from the side of Abraham rather than the God-man, but the logic is identical. Only when the single individual has exhausted himself in the infinite — has made the movement of infinite resignation — is the point reached where faith can break forth.7 The paradox of faith is that the single individual is higher than the universal, that he determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.8

This cannot be mediated, for it is due precisely to the fact that the single individual is only the single individual.9 What Climacus adds, and what must not be lost, is the subjective side of the same structure. To believe is specifically different from all other appropriation and inwardness. Faith is the objective uncertainty due to the repulsion of the absurd held fast by the passion of inwardness, intensified to the utmost degree.10

He who from the vantage point of a higher knowledge would know his faith as a factor resolved in a higher idea has eo ipso ceased to believe.11 So the absolute paradox is not irrationality celebrated for its own sake. Reason brings the existing individual to the limit; at the limit, it encounters what it cannot accommodate — the eternal in the temporal, the absolute in the individual, the God-man as actuality rather than possibility. There, what stands before the individual is offense or faith. Both are responses. Neither is the absence of one.

Sources

  1. Christianity as a thought-project is not difficult to understand; the difficulty, the paradox, is that it is real.
    Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 514
  2. Christianity as a thought-project is not difficult to understand; the difficulty, the paradox, is that it is real.
    Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 514
  3. what is possible in the fantasy-medium of possibility (and this it is that underlies all speculative talk about an eternal divine becoming which shifts the scene to the medium of possibility) must in the medium of reality become the absolute paradox.
    Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 514
  4. he will confound Christianity with human nature's own idea and will forget the qualitative distinction which accentuates the absolutely different point of departure: what comes from God, and what comes from man.
    Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 514
  5. It can be believed altogether—against the understanding. If anyone imagines that he understands it, he can be sure that he misunderstands it.
    Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 514
  6. the possibility of offence accompanies the God-Man every instant, a man's shadow does not accompany a man more inseparably than the possibility of offence accompanies the God-Man, for the God-Man is the object of faith... the possibility of offence is just the repellent force by which faith comes into existence—if one does not choose instead to be offended.
    Training in Christianity, pp. 149–150
  7. only when the single individual has exhausted himself in the infinite, only then is the point reached where faith can break forth.
    Fear and Trembling, pp. 100–101
  8. The paradox of faith then is this, that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual... determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.
    Fear and Trembling, pp. 100–101
  9. This cannot be mediated, for it is due precisely to the fact that the single individual is only the single individual.
    Fear and Trembling, pp. 100–101
  10. Faith is the objective uncertainty due to the repulsion of the absurd held fast by the passion of inwardness, which in this instance is intensified to the utmost degree.
    Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 540
  11. He who from the vantage point of a higher knowledge would know his faith as a factor resolved in a higher idea has eo ipso ceased to believe.
    Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 540