Wanda Warren Berry addresses me with a question:

> 6?	To Ernst Meyer:  could you give me the reference
> for where you say "SK asks us to accept the paradox of
> Christ"?  I need to know where you are reading this in
> order to know what more to say than I did in my post a
> week or two ago.  Then I tried to explain what I think the
> Paradox means in PRACTICE IN CHRISTIANITY.  I think his
> challenge is that one who finds himself shaped by the
> Christian story (as Johannes Climacus does in PHILOSOPHICAL
> FRAGMENTS) look at himself/herself in the mirror of the life
> of Jesus, recognizing his/her own untruth in encountering a
> life which is truth.  Kierkegaard does not ask one to simply
> carry out the sacrifice of intellect involved in believing
> the absurd, that the eternal is in the temporal.  He asks
> that one personally/existentially look at Christ; if one
> is changed in the encounter, Christ becomes the absolute
> for one.  

When I wrote that "Kierkegaard asks us to accept the
paradox of Christ," I had been reading Practice in Christianity.
I make no objection to Wanda Berry's interpretation of this work.
Each one of us confronts paradox according to his or her own
intellectual and emotional experience. We come closest to
understanding when we honor one another in disagreement.
It is when our interpretations appear to coincide, that the
misunderstanding is beyond repair.

At issue is not whether one believes or disbelieves the absurd.
The challenge posed to us by Kierkegaard's writings is to resist
the seduction of the intellect by what purports to be real but is not.
When we become entagled in words, we confuse reality with the
attempted description of it; then what is real becomes obscured 
by the density of our own exhalations.  Once one becomes aware
how little it means to say that a sentence is true, or for that
matter, that a sentence is false, epistemic belief fades both
as a logical and as an emotional issue.

We do not do justice to the paradox by pretending to ourselves
(and to one another) that we can make it disappear.  A paradox
which is subservient to the intellect is not genuine.  A paradox
which the trickery of a parlor magician can make to vanish is
fraudulent.  The paradox which is real will not be dissipated
by logical analysis. To presume to demonstrate it may indeed
be unwise, improper or even indecent. And such a paradox, like
the secret uttered to Hamlet by his father's ghost, will not
be exorcised.  It haunts the souls of those who have seen it. 
At least from an earthly perspective, their lives, like Hamlet's
(and Kierkegaard's), will not have a happy ending.

==============

Kierkegaard's relationship to the university is, I think,
quite analogous to his relationship to the church. It seems
clear that he was strongly attracted to both institutions:
neither could meet his expectations, and he condemned them
both. His rationalization for condemning the church is 
made explicit in Practice in Christianity and in the diatribe
that ensued from it. Kierkegaard's rationale for rejecting
institutionalized learning is implicit in his account of truth
as an inwardness which is incompatible with its profession in
public. We ought not overlook the inconsistencies of Kierkegaard's
conduct. He remained a loyal if unreliable attendant at the
court of Bishop Mynster long after he had recognized the
imcompatibility of his own understanding of Christianity with
the official version. He travelled to Berlin to hear the
lectures of Professor Schelling at the same period in his life
when he was distinguishing his own philosophy from that of
the establishment and railing against "Privat-dozente".

We have, I think, a great deal to learn from Kierkegaard about
both the church and the university and about the problems of the
individual's relationship to them. But it is a mistake to accept
Kierkegaard's criticisms, whether of the church or of the university,
as statements of fact that we are duly bound to endorse.

Ernst Meyer
review@netcom.com