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8. Conclusions: The (Im)possible and the (Un)forgivable
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conclusions 181 In this concluding chapter, the ultimate meaning of the infinite qualitative difference as forgiveness is employed as a lens through which to view the relation between our being forgiven by God and the possibility of our forgiving “the other.” In this exploration, the key notion of the “impossible possibility ” of divine forgiveness is read as a model for the “suspension” of offence by which the self remains open to the possibility of forgiving “the unforgivable.” This finally gives rise to the more expansive question of what it might mean for the self to express faith by “forgiving God.” the other before god What has been portrayed in this anatomy of the Kierkegaardian abyss may for some resemble the lonely heroism of the self struggling to know itself before God, in the face of modernity’s disdain for the infinite qualitative difference betweenthehuman and the divine: “Christianheroism—ararity,tobesure—to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific human being, alone before God” (SUD, 5). For many, however, Kierkegaard’s depiction of the self before God irrevocably places the individual upon a precipice , trembling over a holy abyss, necessarily forsaking every creaturely “other” in its anguished struggle to relate to a Wholly Other. “We, ourselves wandering on the narrow ridge, must not shrink from the sight of the jutting rock on which he stands over the abyss; nor may we step on it,” Martin Buber famously warns. “We have much to learn from him, but not the final lesson.”1 This “final lesson” that Buber alludes to is apparently undermined by the conspicuous absence of “the other” in Kierkegaard’s writings. Kierkegaardian inwardness, in this inscription, is consigned to serving as a relic of modern melancholy, the fading silhouette of an overly individualized “self” whose contours, in the vague light of post/modernity, have become increasingly uncertain. eight Conclusions The (Im)possible and the (Un)forgivable 182 kierkegaard and the self before god It is, so Charles Taylor exhorts, by way of the “ethic of authenticity” that humanity responds to the sense of loss which features in our characteristic “malaises of modernity.”2 But in the indeterminate agitation of the postmodern , what becomes of that passionate modern search for “authenticity” which, according to Jacob Golomb, begins with a confession from Kierkegaard and threatens to shipwreck on the shoals of deconstruction?3 Hopefully it has become apparent that the present work sees the common depiction of Kierkegaardian subjectivity as an icon of a definitively modern inwardness as an increasingly dubious fallacy. What is becoming clearer is that Kierkegaard can be read as transcribing the actual iconoclasm of modern selfhood, in order to raise up from its ashes a self becoming itself in the openness of relating to God. To exist before God actually requires “immense passivity, vulnerability and wounded openness” which, as George Pattison rightly observes, “calls for an orientation of the self that is quite alien to the mainstream of Western philosophical thought about the self and is certainly in profound tension with the post-Enlightenment pursuit of autonomy.”4 And neither does this “wounded openness” hermetically seal itself off from the human other— despite the apparent primacy of the self before God. At this point I wish to assert that, while the relation between self and human others has not been the primary focus of the present work, a concern with the “self before God” implies a vision of the human-divine relation that begins with deeming all individuals to be irreducibly equal before God: a valuation which, aspiring to see the human other through the eyes of God, is the starting point for a recognition of the divinely given alterity of every human other. As such, the principal scope of the present work could be aptly summarized by the words of C. Stephen Evans: “God is not the only ‘other’ to which selves can relate and thereby become selves, though God remains the crucial ‘other’ for selfhood in the highest sense.”5 As Kierkegaard describes the human struggle for self-recognition in Works of Love: “The desire is to exist in the eyes of the mighty”—but it is precisely through the eyes of God that one learns that “the relationship between man and man ought and dare never to be one in which the one worships and the other is worshipped” (WL, 128). The notion of the self before God thus calls for all others to be equally valued as inviolably free individuals...