“The religious [is] the sphere of fulfillment, but, please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills an alms box or a sack of gold, for repentance has specifically created a boundless space, and as a consequence the religious contradiction: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful. Just as the ethical sphere is a passageway…just as repentance is its expression, so repentance is the most dialectical. No wonder, then, that one fears it. For if one gives it a finger, it takes the whole hand.”
Stages on Life’s Way (1845) is a curious work, which meanders its way through a host of characters and life-views. Indeed, “meanders” is something of an understatement. “My dear reader,” writes Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Frater Taciturnus towards the end of the book, “but to whom am I speaking? Perhaps no one at all is left.” Nevertheless, Stages on Life’s Way ties together a number of loose threads from previous pseudonymous writings and manages to contribute to Kierkegaard’s authorship writ large. In the passage cited above, the verbose (and thus ironically named) Taciturnus discourses on the problem of repentance. People often identify religiousness with the renewal, or even the rebirth, that stems from a penitent mindset. What few realize, he goes on, is how difficult and murky actual repentance is. As long as one stays within the confines of ethical responsibility, it seems straightforward enough. But when one examines the matter from a religious perspective, it is hard to shake the idea that one simply cannot repent adequately. For the problem is as much ontological as it is ethical: “Just as Jehovah in the Old Testament visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children…so repentance goes backward,” notes Taciturnus. Face to face with this reality, the challenging paradoxicalness of religious life begins to emerge.