“Every human being is only an instrument (Redskab) and does not know when the moment will come when he will be put aside. If he himself does not at time evoke this thought, he is a henchman, an unfaithful servant, who is trying to free himself and to cheat the Lord of the uncertainty in which he comprehends his own nothingness (Intethed).”
“Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?
or thy work, He hath no hands?” So proclaims the prophet Isaiah, who expresses God’s warning that human beings should not confuse themselves with the one who made them (Isa. 45:5-17). Kierkegaard returns to this theme in his 1844 discourse “He Must Increase; I Must Decrease.” Ostensibly about John the Baptist’s self-effacing relationship with Jesus (Jn. 3:22-36), it is ultimately a treatise about what Kierkegaard calls “humble self-denial” (ydmyg Selvfornægtelse). His interest in this topic is as ontological as it is exegetical. As Kierkegaard would later make clear in The Sickness unto Death (1849), the key to an individual’s happiness and flourishing is the correct perception of one’s place in the cosmos. No person, no matter how great or small, is more than an instrument in the hands of the divine. To recognize this fact is to see that one is willed to be here, in this place, now; it is also to see that one is thus willed by a transcendent power.
Indeed, we are not great, but simply vessels. This excerpt is at the end of C.S. Lewis’s “Perelandra,” after the victory won by Ransom, the hero, over the Demonic figure, God being his helper. The Archangel speaks to Ransom, who is overwhelmed by the magnitude of what has been accomplished:
“Be comforted, it is no doing of yours. You are not great…be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad….”