From PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS (1844)

On knowing "the god."

“Any qualification that claims to render the god directly knowable is undoubtedly an approximation milestone, but it registers retrogression rather than progress, movement away from the paradox…. Close attention should be paid to this lest the same thing happen in the spiritual world that happened to the traveler who asked an Englishman if the road led to London and was told: Yes, it does—but he never did arrive in London, because the Englishman failed to tell him that he had to turn around, inasmuch as he was going away from London.”

Published in June 1844, Philosophical Fragments (Philosophiske Smuler) is essentially an extended “thought-project” (Tanke-Projekt), in which Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus seeks to “dance lightly in the service of thought.” Here, in other words, Climacus does not present his philosophy as a systematic solution to society’s great questions nor even as a catalog of his own opinions on various issues. Instead, he is intent on picking up the philosophical “crumbs” (Smuler) that have been swept aside in modernity’s quest for completion. In this passage—and, indeed, throughout the Fragments—Climacus ponders the way in which one comes to know “the god” (Guden). His overarching concern is to remind his readers that, while journalists, pastors, politicians, and philosophers may speak about Guden in certainties and platitudes, these are attempts to subject the divine to human control. The road to the god passes through mystery, even a kind of darkness.