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I. Mother

I.1 With Her Anglican mother

I.1.1 Identification in Mother-Daughter Bonding

Mother was born on September 6, 1917, at that time

of late summer when the sheep are brought down from

Rocky Mountain Highlands to greener lowland pastures

and when ewes are grouped with best bucks for breeding.

Mother was born into the passion of her mother,

Leona Hart-Abbott, and of her father, Levaur Paul Coates.

Gramma Coates had lost her mother when she was but eight

and Grandpa Coates lost his mother when he was only five.

They both grew up in the constant presence of their lost mothers.

When they met and told their stories to each other and ate

a meal together they knew that they were meant for each other.

And it was as if Levaur sensed his lost mother in Leona.

And in Levaur’s lost mother in him, Leona seemed to find her own.

With her many strong Anglican relatives Leona Mae went

through the mourning process in a very successful way.

The beloved presence of her absent mother, Martha Mae, opened her

in sympathy to the sorrows of others and she was robust

and happy and she wanted to bring others into her graced joy.

Already in the womb mother identified with the very feelings,

moods and attitude of her upbeat, strong, pioneering mother.

The very hormones and nervous system of Leona Mae

were identified with by Joneva Mae as the mother’s blood

and lymph system and mucosity became also the daughter’s.

Leona Mae’s preconscious feelings and passions and moods

and her unconscious attitude which evaluated and motivated

all of her conscious thoughts, words and deeds became also

the very fabric of little Joneva Mae and when she was born

and nursed through that first year at her mother’s breast

they bonded in a special dream and vision that would let

little Joneva Mae live out the life that Martha Mae lost.

Martha Mae, Leona Mae and Joneva Mae were one in Mae-love.

I.1.2 In the Attitude of Complacent Agape

Leona and Levaur came together in very positive times.

The First World War was ending and the Roaring Twenties

were already beginning their expansive and manic build up.

The Republican Party made life good for American farmers.

They had claimed their free land and the banking system

helped them get a herd of sheep and a pick-up truck and

all they needed to make the whole wonderful outfit work.

As a young girl between five and eight Gramma went through

very difficult times that would strengthen her throughout life.

In her memoirs Gramma Coates writes: “Father and mother

had misunderstandings so mother took me to Montana with her

where we lived for a year. Later father came out and got me

and I lived with his sister, Ida Blair, near Bellevue.

My mother passed away from a heart attack.” Gramma’s

mother was only seventeen when she married and all

of her trials must have been damaging to her immune system.

For her eight years of grade school Gramma grew up

in Bellevue, right there in the center of Blaine County, Idaho,

in a thriving mining town which was the State’s third largest city.

Already as a child Gramma loved her school and her church.

Two of her relatives from back in Kentucky were Bible scholars.

She loved reading and writing and listening and speaking and

those liberal arts opened her in her dreaming and thinking to

a desire for ever further learning, knowing and understanding.

The Anglican Church was very community minded and

searched out ways to be of service to any who were in need.

She learned the Our Father and it became her favorite prayer.

It helped form her inner-most attitude in a spirit of loving

forgiveness as she prayed each morn and each night: “Forgive

us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Baby Joneva Mae identified with Leona Mae’s forgiving heart.

I.1.3 In the Mood of Concerned Agape

During her first and second year mother had her mother

all to herself but within eighteen months Gramma

was already carrying Aunt Mid and mother was weaned.

Even though as a young mother in her early twenties

Gramma Coates had a fundamental attitude of complacency,

literally, of being pleased with all of existence, she was still

a person of great concern for not only was she anxious

about having lost her mother but she had identified with

her young mother’s anxiety that brought her to run away

with her baby and then saw her baby taken away from her.

After becoming settled in Bellevue her father then up rooted

her again and sent her to relatives in Spokane, Washington,

a city of much greater opportunity for her high school study.

Out of anxious concern her complacency was built up

just as it was out of the World War that the great jubilation

of the Twenties came frolicking forth all happy and free.

Gramma Coates’ mood of complacent concern was

a preference for some values over others in an hierarchy.

She learned of intellectual and spiritual values and in

her mood she felt and preferred them over physical and

vital values which could perish and pass away as did

her physical mother and the physical town of Bellevue

even though spiritually they could be vitally present within.

Just as mother as an infant totally identified with her

mother’s mood so she became a child concerned about

things that might remain and not be taken away.

And complacency and concern balanced each other

in a logic of mixed opposites that did not let

good complacency become bad, satisfied complacency or

let concern become worried and consuming concern.

I.1.4 In the Sense of Proactive Sensitivity

As a young girl Gramma Coates learned to control

her reactions so that she did not at once fall into

negativity out of the force of habit that increases habit.

In Spokane Leona identified with Aunt Sadie who was

only ten years older than herself and the good Episcopalians

taught the young ladies many proverbs to build character

such as: “Count to ten before you get angry.” And Leona

reflected upon and worked upon affirmative proactive responses

instead of negative reactions which could taint everything.

St. Paul clearly saw that the good I intended to do I do not

but the evil that I resolve against, that I often do.

St. Paul was given the grace to be free to serve others

and the Anglicans taught their young to pray for that grace.

And even at the age of four mother began to care for

baby bum lambs who lost their mothers in late winter.

Her love for them taught her patience and peaceful positivity.

She became concerned about their welfare and their lives

and she was glad to feed them with the baby bottle

with all her mother’s and father’s gladness for

those sweet, bleating, darling little orphaned lambs.

And they told her about the Good Shepherd who left

the ninety-nine and went out to find the one lost sheep.

And Leona Mae and Levaur Paul identified with the lost

sheep who had been found and mother identified with them.

Mother felt secure in herself and with others

in the affection which her parents showered upon her.

And when mother was four her new baby brother,

Robert Abbott Coates, was born and mother was already

helping her mother as a “little mother” with a sensitivity

that learned the sweet voice and the gentle touch that could

aid a baby boy as well as bum lambs when they were discontent.

I.1.5 In the Passion of Positive Emotions

Gramma Coates had a real feeling for intellectual values.

Many around her were artists of pleasure who had a feel

for physical values and many were heroic types,

full of vitality, who ventured Westward seeking fortune

much like Abraham who wandered into the unknown.

But Leona identified with Aunt Sadie’s love of books.

She subscribed to Lady’s Home Journal and Parent magazines.

Mother loved hearing Gramma Coates tell and read stories.

By the time she was five she had her own Bible Story Book

and her own Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme Book and she

quickly learned many of the rhymes by heart and she

loved the picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd most of all.

She pondered stories of folly and wisdom, of love and hate,

of joy and sorrow and of fear and courage and she saw

a network of positive emotions and of negative emotions.

And if there was love and joy the network was positive.

And if there was hate and sorrow the network was negative.

She was impressed by heroes, wise men and saints

but most of all she loved the saints because their love

of the holy was a passion for love and joy that let

her also love the truth of the wise, the good of the heroes,

and the beauty of the artists in a network of affirmation.

Of course, as a child she was not aware of all this

but she did identify with it in the value system

of her young and buoyant mother who in great joy

with her young family could love all her sorrow

and even be confident in the face of any threats.

By identifying with her mother’s belief in joy and of

turning sorrow into joy even though it remained sorrow

mother as a child already began practicing the Stoic ethic

that flowed into St. Paul and St. Francis and the Anglicans.

I.1.6 In the Logic of True Thoughts

When she was six mother finally got to go to school

in a little one-room school house on the Fish Creek Flats.

Through the summer high up the Iron Mine Canyon

she was already learning to read in her two books.

The anticipation increased through late August

and they took the sheep down and they moved into

their fall-winter ranch house and mother’s birthday

finally arrived and her father drove her to school.

Already at six mother began practicing the liberal arts

of reading, writing, speaking and listening in orderly silence.

She had to learn to concentrate and not be distracted

as she practiced in her books and notebooks while

the teacher was talking to others in that same little room.

She began to reflect on words as she heard new voices.

She started making the transition into the age of reason.

Toward the end of that school year she began to lose

her baby teeth and to get the teeth one by one that

would lead her along toward the next stage of puberty.

And she was educated into the very first steps of

grammar, rhetoric and logic and the age of reason

into which she took her first steps was the age of logic.

And she began to learn to connect the dots into

an orderly whole as she moved from the immediacy

of emotional identification into reflection on words

and ideas that began to initiate her in self reflection.

And her teacher brought a very new voice into her life

and she would go home and eagerly tell her mother

about her school work and they already began to do

homework together as mother moved from the realm

of preconscious attitude, moods and feelings into

the realm of conscious thoughts, words and deeds.

I.1.7 In the Intonation of Incantational Words

As a little girl mother identified with her mother’s speech

and its clearly articulated, sweet melodious tone.

The muscles and nerves of mother’s lips, tongue and throat

were formed just as were her mother’s as they spoke together

and worked more and more together doing dishes,

cleaning house, cooking and baking, washing and ironing.

Mother wanted to do all with her mother and though mother

had a child’s voice it was moving ever closer to being exactly

like her mother’s with its world making song and magic.

The sing-song reciting of nursery rhymes was almost

a dance that played forth out of joy and back into joy.

Leona’s shamanic spiritual exercises that converted

absence into presence let her become a reader and speaker

of the word that had a cheering and helping power for any

who heard the near incantational rhythms of her voice.

Mother identified with her mother’s power of speech

which could put a halo of magic around each spoken thing.

There would be bacon, eggs and toast with choke-cherry jelly.

They would look so good and smell and taste so good.

But, if Gramma said: “bacon, eggs, toast and jelly”

in her sweet, prolonged, intoned, musical way they

would become unforgettably lovely in your memory forever.

Mother took on her mother’s lovely and playful tones

and her speech had something of a prayer that deified things.

Already in the second grade the discipline of her school work

was taking mother into a logic that was on the alert for

any mistakes or any self-deceit that might hinder truth.

The teacher gave her spelling exercises and checked each letter

and began to develop in mother a careful precision that tried

to get everything on the map of life and in the book of life just right.

And mother’s attitude guided her words in style, form and content.

I.1.8 In the Peace of a Gentle Touch

From her mother and her practice mother learned how

to comfort a lamb, or cat, or dog in distress and to hold

and rock her baby brother in the way of soothing peace.

In her concern for the troubled other she could take

an hysterical animal or a panicking child and quickly

bring him or her into the complacency of a pleasant peace.

The joy of her agapeic attitude and affirmative mood

reached out into the healing caress of her fingers and

with their touch into her words so that she was a peace maker.

Her touch spoke volumes and her thoughts and words touched so

that anyone who came into her presence was touched by an angel.

Gramma Coates had something of a fun play in her voice,

a near devilish twinkling in her dancing brown eyes

and a healing power that could calm the devilish in her touch.

But Gramma Coates as an only child had a sprite’s breeziness

while mother as a first child who learned to mother young

was a more serious and efficient calmer of troubled waters.

The Episcopalian ladies of Spokane became daughters of

the Rebecca Lodge and in their service club they volunteered

like their counterparts in the Masonic Lodge and had good fun

as they built small communities with their work together.

Gramma Coates was an expert of extroversion in her sociality

and conviviality and mother followed her example, but not quite,

for as more introverted and tranquility orientated mother took time

with the laying on of her hands whether she was teaching her

children to comb their hair, tie their ties, or brush their teeth.

Her common sense from childhood on that aimed at excellence

was more hands on and inner-world serious in its care.

In the third grade mother was riding to school on horse back

with her six year old sister, Mildred, holding on behind her.

And mother was a natural teacher and she helped the teacher

teach the first graders their reading, writing and arithmetic.

I.1.9 In the Construction of Upbuilding Deeds

Gramma Coates knew that our deeds as works of love

are all important and she knew how significant her example was

for her children and everyone just as Aunt Sadie’s had been.

Mother believed with her mother in performing good deeds

and she also sensed that good intentions are not enough.

Gramma Coates had allowed grace to heal her heart and she

prayed: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

We do not know what we do for our deeds are motivated by

preconscious forces in the attitudinal moods of our very bodies.

In order to upbuild our loved ones and ourselves we have

to cultivate totally constructive creeds with positive canons

and codes of behavior that are not negative and judgmental.

Because of the complexities of our relationships, as we see

in the case of Gramma Coates and mother, we are very limited

in our knowledge and in the logic of our thoughts, words and deeds

but we trust in goodness despite the evils that threaten us.

We can cultivate becoming the-glass-is-half-full persons

and by putting ourselves in healthy relations stop giving in

to being the-glass-is-half-empty persons or born losers.

As Mother identified with her mother’s agapeic heart

and her truth pursuing mind and her spirit’s quest

for excellence and her body’s habit of constructing

a healthy immune system, Mother was already in the habit

of performing deeds that would cultivate the soil of a good heart

that could bring forth rich fruit from trees in the good earth.

That proverb: “By their fruits you shall know them”

pragmatically guided mother’s mother and thus Mother

who as a nine year old girl was like St. Paul freed

from self-indulgence to perform the works of love

that could serve others in cultivating love, joy, peace,

patience, gentleness and all those fruits of the spirit.

In the mother-daughter bonding mother received a loving faith.

I.2 With Her Mormon Father

I.2.1 In the Logic of the Triad

Levaur Paul Coates was as proud as could be when his little daughter,

Joneva Mae Coates, was born in Hailey, Idaho, on September 6, 1917.

What a relief it was that everything went so well, for as soon as

Leona had her first rhythmic cramps they got in their Ford Pick-Up

and quickly drove the thirty five miles to Hailey, and Dr. Fox

and his nurse at once took care of the anxious, soon to-be mother.

Levaur checked in to a near-by hotel and from there kept watch.

The next morning Leona introduced him to his daughter and she was

well formed and healthy and normal and everything was alright.

And the daughter did identify with the mother in all the deep down

and important ways and was well mothered in her young, joyful

mother’s land of milk and honey and she grew up secure in herself.

Her father was always there too as he worked hard with the sheep

and the whole outfit, as he would say, that kept them all going.

By the time Mother was ten she was secure in herself and

with others for her father was doing well and she was as proud

of him as he was of her and she was well protected from

the mere mother-daughter dyad that would never freely

and fully wean the child and give her security with others.

Without the mother-father-child triad the mother and child

can get locked into a bi-polar relation so that the child

feels like an abject throw-away rather than a strong subject.

If the mother is abandoned or abandons the father then

the child will identify with the mother’s abandonment and

go through life aggressive with mother and sullen with others.

In Levaur’s strong, traditional, Mormon community of Carey that

did not happen and the father would say: “She learns so quickly!”

And the father would love the mother in the daughter and the mother

would love the daughter in the father and all of his, and relationality

was built up and Joneva was relating independently at ten.

The triad by opening beyond the dyad became an open quadrad.

I.2.2 In the Logic of the Quadrad

By the time she was eleven mother and her family had moved

from their summer home up Iron Mine and their winter home

on the Fish Creek Flats into the town of Carey and into

their farm home on the Little Wood River Canal.

Mother’s youngest brother, Elwin, was born when she was ten

and the roles within the family were by then quite clearly worked out.

Mother was her mother’s helper and perfected her art of mothering

as she did much to care for her baby brother and she and he

bonded almost as mother and child as the first and last children.

Mid and Bob helped their father even as ten and twelve year

old children trailing sheep from Carey and Picaboo and the

railroad shipping station built by the Union Pacific for sheep.

So mother bonded in a dyadic relation with her mother

that never became monadic and self-centered because it was

quadratic when the new baby sister came and then the first

brother and six years later the second brother whom she babied.

Mother in the activity of her complex and passionate relations

was never the least bit bored for everyday was filled with

all kinds of tasks and it was difficult to find time for reading.

At the age of eleven the first signs of puberty started to show

and mother was reflecting on the many voices speaking

within her and to her and she was beginning to decide just how

she wanted to be as her exemplars picked her and she them.

The triadic and quadratic relations helped her through weanings.

And mother had identified with her mother’s terrible weaning.

And Johannes de Silentio wrote: “When the child has grown big

and is to be weaned, the mother virginally conceals her breast,

and then the child no longer has a mother. How fortunate

the child who has not lost his mother in some other way.”

And mother was fortunate as her own dear mother had not been.

With affectionate support mother was weaned through puberty.

I.2.3 In the Logic of Quadratic Weaning

Mother identified with the unlimited voices of her mother as

they chorused in her preconscious attitudes, moods, and feelings.

She identified with the unlimited voices of her father as

she knew them in his thoughts, words, and deeds, and as she

saw him in relation to his extended family in all their fun.

Mother was thus a very complicated mix of expanding relations.

She began to reflect on herself and to imitate certain teachers

and not to relate and identify with many around her who were

not in keeping with her taste, but even her taste was expanding.

In March her father brought her a black sheep bum-lamb.

She nursed it with the bottle and cared for it in the spirit of

the Good Shepherd story and picture in her Bible Story Book.

She played with it through the spring and summer and then

one day on about her twelfth birthday she went with her dad

to the barn yard and he took a sheep by the scruff of the neck

and cut its throat and hung it in the barn by its hind feet.

Then he grabbed a black lamb like hers and did the same.

She felt sick and thought that that lamb could have been her own.

Then he asked her to go to her mother and get a platter.

She brought it to him and he put the head of the first sheep

on the chopping block and split it open with the axe and then

he put the brain on the platter and he did the same with the lamb.

He told her that tomorrow they could have scrambled eggs

and brains for breakfast and he said it with obvious delight.

She talked to her mother about her feelings and her mother

told her what a good sheep-man her father was and how

lucky they were to have such a good life during the depression.

At breakfast next morning the twelve year old Joneva could not

identify with the hearty appetite of her parents and siblings.

And she was being weaned again and through her life.

Traumas can either break us or make us stronger teacher-healers.

I.2.4 In the First Deceptive Weaning

Although Grandpa Coates’ family pioneered with the Mormons

they were not practicing Latter Day Saints and as “Jack Mormons”

with a completely secular attitude they loved drinking and good times

and would not enter the church except for the occasional funeral.

The parents agreed that the two girls would be raised Episcopalian

and the boys raised Mormon but mother was the only one with

any religious inclinations and she often went to the Mormon church

and primary school with her school friends and she liked to pray.

She greatly admired the healthy family life of her Mormon friends.

For Christmas Aunt Sadie gave the thirteen-year-old Joneva

a golden necklace chain with a beautiful golden cross and

she loved it so much she could hardly wait to wear it to school.

But one of the Mormon boys whom she admired asked her

“What kind of charm is that?” And she felt embarrassed.

And though the cross of the Good Shepherd was dear to her she

wore it to school no more and though she loved and admired

her Mormon friends she would not let them know that she

wore it at home and she prayed for them when she took it off.

And she began to hide many of her thoughts and to reflect on deceit.

Her mother got along well with the Mormons and they

admired her for she had winning and weaning ways

as she taught mother to be open to all and offensive to none.

And de Silentio wrote: “When the child is to be weaned, the

mother blackens her breast. It would be hard to have the breast

look inviting when the child must not have it. So the child

believes that the breast has changed, but the mother—she is still

the same, her gaze is tender and loving as ever. How fortunate

the one who did not need more terrible means to wean the child.”

Her father thought it was only a black sheep and she should not fret.

The boy thought it was some evil, magical charm and she

became weaned by loving them with acting beyond deceit.

I.2.5 In the Third Weaning of Mutual Mourning

Mother loved her four years at Carey High School from the time

she was fourteen until eighteen and the Mormon atmosphere

suited her well as it fostered a sense of vocation-mission-destiny.

Some of her friends were already talking about going to college and

going on a mission to teach others that our Heavenly Father loves us.

Mother was especially impressed with the good Mormons in that

they did not drink or smoke or swear and in fact they did not

even drink coffee or tea and she could easily appreciate that.

When she visited her cousins Nelson, Burl and Frieda over

at her Uncle Chuck’s and Aunt Omas’ she loved them dearly.

Uncle Chuck was very funny, loveable and always joking

but sometimes he did drink a bottle of beer and go across the street

to the pool hall where some of his friends were just a bit rowdy.

Her father would also drink with his friends and even though

he was a very hard working and productive man mother asked

her mother about such activity and they both saw dark horizons.

They went into the Great Depression that swept the country and

even though farmers were fairly self-sufficient and they now

had their farm the banking system was failing and the sheep business

shut down and mother and her mother felt that an idle mind

is the devil’s workshop and alcoholism began to make them anxious.

And de Silentio wrote: “When the child is weaned the mother, too,

is not without sorrow because she and the child are more and more

to be separated, because the child who first lay under her heart

and later rested upon her breast will never again be so close.

So they grieve together the brief sorrow. How fortunate the one

who kept the child so close and did not need to grieve anymore.”

The weaning process is a kind of mourning process and the loss

of his mother when he was only five left Levaur Coates

with a lack of inner security that needed the boost

of alcohol and the warm camaraderie that it deceitfully fostered.

I.2.6 In the Fourth Weaning of Providing Sustenance

In the last of the four scenarios Johannes de Silentio wrote:

When the child is to be weaned the mother has stronger

sustenance at hand so that the child does not perish.

How fortunate the one who has this stronger sustenance at hand.

This fourth weaning story helps us to understand the failures

of the other three for in none of them was better food provided.

Mother, like Abraham, grew in her faith by its often being tested.

How else could she have come to a loving, forgiving heart toward

her father when he was callous with black sheep bum-lambs like hers?

How else could she forgive the boy who ridiculed her cross?

How could she grow in love toward drinking, rowdy relatives?

Her mother helped her to understand and discover the better food

of loving forgiveness and thus mother was not enclosed in

the failed mourning process of merely aesthetically blackening

the breast or ethically of hiding the breast or in the resignation

of a mutual mourning since better sustenance was provided.

But the four Isaac-Abraham binding stories that parallel

the four weaning stories show us the inadequacies of even

the fourth weaning story for Abraham is not graceful in

his infinite resignation which indicates that he lacks faith

and that he will still retain Isaac and thus Isaac loses faith.

Gramma Coates as an only child must have been well weaned

by her mother and when her great test of being abandoned came

she must have been graced through her father and Aunt Sadie

so that like Abraham she could be graceful in her resignation.

Even though Gramma Coates provided mother with understanding

there was much more than only that food for conscious thought.

Gramma Coates’ attitude, mood and feeling had a buoyant faith.

After all she had been through and successfully mourned

she could be an exemplar for mother so that when her father

or friends or relatives looked offensive she did not take offence.

I.2.7 Pauline Universalism—Johannine Exclusivism

What mother experienced even though it was not articulated was

the difference between her mother’s Episcopalian universalism and

her father’s and the Mormon’s Beloved Community’s exclusivism.

When the boy showed no tolerance for the cross she experienced

a thought, word and deed that was deeply rooted in an attitude

that was very surprising to her because it was not her mother’s

universalistic attitude with which she had come to identify.

Her father, even though he was not a practicing Mormon, had

an attitude that may have been influenced by the English class system.

Later he would wonder why one of his children would marry a Basque,

another an Italian, another a Mexican and the other a poor girl.

Why didn’t they just marry some nice white Anglo-Saxon types?

In John’s Gospel the Word became flesh for the salvation of all

but the world of darkness that did not receive him remains

unsaved just as did Judas and the Jews upon whom John is hard.

Paul and John give different accounts of the Kingdom and the Cross.

Paul has his atonement view of the Cross that Christ died

in order to redeem all the fallen children of Adam and thus

the Kingdom was to come for all humans for there are

no longer Jews or Gentiles, Greeks or Barbarians but

with Christ’s death and resurrection we are all members of

his body and can be members of the family of God and man.

John has a prophetic view of the cross that because Christ

was a prophet he made enemies of the authorities as did

so many of the prophets and thus they put him to death.

John and his people think that the second coming has

already happened at the resurrection and that Christ is

here now judging us and all those who fully believe

and keep his commandments are in his community or

his Kingdom now and mother could see these two views

in her mother’s universalism and in the Mormon’s exclusivism.

I.2.8 Dyadic Johannine Glory

Mother greatly loved her father and knew that he greatly loved her.

He seemed harsh and callous at times but she knew him better.

Gramma and Aunt Mid were helping mother get ready for her

junior prom and they came downstairs and Grandpa was reading

his paper and Gramma asked him: “Well Levaur, how does she look?”

And Grandpa stood up and came over to her and looking

at her from head to foot he said: “Sissy, you are so beautiful.”

And he was so proud of his daughter and a lump welled up

in his throat and he nearly started to cry and mother had seen

him that way before and she began to wonder why he would cry.

Slowly over the years it began to dawn on her that he had the gift

of tears and that it was not sorrow or pain that would make him cry.

It had to do with the pride and glory of a beautiful love relation.

Just as Paul was touched by glory of the angelic face of Stephen

and just as the Roman Soldier said: “Truly this man is the son of God.”

so Grandpa was touched by a moment of glory that made him tremble

and perhaps all his feeling for his lost mother was in his sobbing.

And in John’s Gospel the Son glorifies and thus reveals the Father.

And the Father’s love helps to glorify the Beloved Son’s wonder.

And in John there are several dyadic one-on-one loving moments

such as when Magdalene did not recognize him after the Resurrection.

But in the way he said her name “Mary” as no one else could

ever say it she recognized her Lord and Master in a glory moment.

Did the beloved Mormon community somehow foster that kind of

sentiment that could feel the holy aura around a love of noble beauty?

Did it even go back into the Franciscan roots of English poetry and

had it to do with that shamanic presence that could heal and vitalize?

Mother thoroughly loved her father and even though he would become

a black-sheep bum-lamb wandering about as an alcoholic who

spent his last days at Pocatello in the Insane Asylum she knew

that in spite of it all our Heavenly Father loved him as did she.

I.2.9 Pauline Triadic Glory

In 1936, when mother was eighteen, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

was elected president of the United States and at once big things

began to happen even in the little town of Carey where the Mormons

were totally Republican and cared for as land owners by bankers.

Mrs. York, a Democrat, took over as head of the Carey Post Office

because jobs like that go to people of the party that makes it in.

They continued working on the big dams up Fish Creek and up

Little Wood River and Aunt Omas’ boarding house was filled

with migrant workers and many town’s people got new jobs.

Louie Arrian, a Basque, owned and ran the Carey pool hall and

he hired a young Basque poker player, Joe Goicoechea, to run

his games at the tables and Joe had been in jail for delivering

whiskey during the prohibition and in jail he learned card playing.

And Gramma Coates knew he was back in town for she had

known him as a youth up at the head of Fish Creek where

he often stayed with his uncle Pete Cennarrusa and Joe’s

father had died when he was only five and he and Leona talked

together in the shamanic presence and she liked him very much.

And she told mother what a nice, intelligent young man he was.

And then one day Joe and Joneva met and started talking together.

And she told her father she was talking with him and her father

couldn’t believe that his lovely young daughter would waste

her time on a vagrant, drinking, poker playing man with no

property or good job and he had to be fairly quiet because he saw

that Leona was their cupid and thus he could not speak his mind.

And when Joneva spoke with Joseph she sensed in him a

reverence she had never known before and it was as if he reverenced

her with the reverence his mother had when she said her rosary.

And in the triadic relation between Joseph, Leona and Joneva

there was a kind of triadic glory that gave glory to God in all things.

With coffee and cigarettes each morning he devoutly said his prayers.

I.3 With Her Catholic husband

I.3.1 The Holy Ideal and the Justice of Peace

In her last year of high school mother read Just David,

a novel by Eleanor Porter that revealed to her her destiny

so concretely that it inspired her with the directing dream

of a vision so vivid she felt it would guide her through life.

It was about a boy named David who was raised high

up in the mountains by his father alone in their little

mountain home with their books and violins and mother nature.

Daily David’s father taught him in the pleasure of a shared joy

reading, writing, arithmetic, Latin, French and jujitsu.

Their home reminded her of her home high up Iron Mine.

And it connected in association with Joseph Manuel Goicoechea.

As a youth he spent his summers up Fish Creek with Pete,

the husband of his sister, Claudia, who was like a father to him.

Often by the sheep corrals where the Iron Mine Stream flowed

into Fish Creek mother’s mother, Leona, and Joe’s sister, Claudia,

would meet in friendly, laughing conversation and one day

young Joe with his dancing brown eyes gave Leona some trout.

As he cleaned them for her there in the clear, icy stream

he told her how he liked school and especially sports.

He ran in the hills each day to get in good shape for Fall.

Claudia named her first daughter after Leona because

she liked her so much and because she liked the name.

Now with her mother’s blessing Joe and Joneva were ready

to be married, but mother knew that her father would not

like to give her away to this man of whom he disapproved.

So without any wedding dress or any wedding party

they eloped to Nevada to meet one of Joe’s sisters and

there they were married, but only by a justice of the peace.

With the holiest of ideals she somehow felt in a deep down

and unspoken way that she married in a less than holy way.

They did plan to marry soon in the church to make it right.

I.3.2 Holy Child

On May 18,1938, at 1:30 a.m. in the same Hailey Hospital where

she had been born mother was delivered of her first child.

He was named David Levaur Goicoechea and his last name was

her husband’s last name, and his middle name was her father’s

name and David was the name she associated with the holy.

She now had nursing at her breast her own beautiful, healthy

well formed baby and she gave him the name for which she

wanted a son for she named him after Just David and now

she could teach him the holy arts as David’s father taught him.

Her baby’s name was also associated for her with David,

the shepherd boy who took care of lambs the way she did,

who was the conqueror of Goliath and the friend of Jonathan.

And she was so happy in the joy of her husband who was

the only one left with the name Goicoechea from his family.

For his father died when little Joe was five and his mother

raised him and his five sisters and now he was so proud

of this new Goicoechea that he had to quickly get out

the good news to all of her family and to his that mother

and baby were doing ever so excellently well and he brought

his wife and baby congratulations from those whom he called.

And also the baby’s name was David Levaur and her own

dear father now had a little grandson named after him

and she knew that with him there would be those tears of glory.

She and her husband and her father loved her new little baby

with such great affection that it went beyond all contention

and in her baby all were united in the harmony of reconciliation.

Her mother and her sister and her brothers and all her friends

and relations were so happy and this was an image for her

of what the holy must be like and it was not so much

a mysterium tremendum of some mystery that makes you

tremble in fear, but it had the peace and joy of Baby Jesus.

I.3.3 Sacred Priest—Sacred Baptism—Sacred Matrimony

Baby David was born on May 18, and baptized on June 30.

Even though mother was not catholic she was eager to have

her child baptized and did not want the least procrastination.

She and Joe had been married in a private mass by Father

Dougherty once they got back from their Nevada elopement.

Mother was completely taken by the priest and right away

there was a master-disciple relation and she even asked him

what was so different about a Catholic priest that she had

never sensed in a Mormon priest or an Episcopalian Bishop.

He told her that the Latin word of priest is sacerdos and

that the priest in his celibacy lives apart from the profane

so that through the sacraments he can help people be holy.

He said that the fanum is the temple so that everything profane

is outside the temple or even against the temple and that the

temple is the place of the sacred sacrament of the real presence

of the Body and the Blood of Jesus in the sacred Host and that

that is why the red light burns in the Church and everyone genuflects.

She sensed the sacred in the celibate sacerdos and wondered

and pondered for years what he told her about the difference

between the holy and the sacred and yet their significant relation.

Joe’s sister Claudia and her husband Pete were witnesses to

the marriage and the Godparents for their nephew, David.

There was nothing mother wanted more than the love that brings

the reconciliation of joy and peace and she knew

that with her baby and the priest and his sacraments there

were intimations of a new hope that fit her Just David dream.

And Mrs. Billingsley, one of her high school teachers, gave

her a little pink baby book and mother wrote down

the gifts and from whom they came and each of the gifts

was a sign of love’s power to turn any problem into

a gift and they became memories of everyone’s love.

I.3.4 The Holy, the Sacred, and the Profane

Father made his living by running poker games at the pool hall.

Deep down he was pleased that mother did not approve for he

loved her most of all because she was a holy woman like his

mother and he knew that she would be a very ideal wife and mother.

Even though he was involved in the most profane life

with his smoking, drinking and gambling she knew from

the way he loved her that he had a great reverence for the Holy.

She lived playfully with him in his play and he loved to

play with their little baby and with her in her playful delight.

In the baby book she wrote: “David looked like his daddy at birth.”

Under Recognition of Mother she wrote: “He recognized his mother

before he was three months old.” Under Recognition of Father she

wrote: “David thinks his dad is a play-fellow.”

David identified with the moods and feelings of their play and it

was written: “When he was 11 weeks old we took him to Gooding

to the Rodeo. He behaved perfectly and slept in the dresser drawer.”

Even that makeshift crib had something of their play about it.

And you can bet that many of dad’s high school football,

basketball, boxing, and track and field friends would have

been there in his home town to meet his wife and baby boy

and to welcome them into the friendship of their play together.

To end the depression President Roosevelt initiated work programs

and mother was ever so happy that her husband Joe was hired

to work on building a road up Warm Springs near Ketchum.

But then with winter approaching they moved down to Ketchum

and dad got a job dealing poker at the Alpine Club for Lew Hill.

And so a pattern began for mother as she tried to influence

her husband away from gambling and toward wholesome work.

He was a strong hard worker who loved exercise and good health

but as an excellent poker player he could make much more by

dealing at casinos and he could get jobs there very easily.

I.3.5 Holy War—Holy Pregnancy—Holy Daughter

By 1942, the Second World War was already beginning to rage

in both the European and Asian theatres and uncle Bob would

soon be drafted into the navy and there was mounting anxiety.

There are so many kinds of war: within a person, between

the sexes, within different groups, between political parties.

The opposition of differences is an obvious fact and is

the source of the problem of evil which is the challenge for

all peace makers and those inclined to ways of reconciliation.

In many ways the war of the sexes is the paradigm case for

it is the source of bellicose and rebellious trouble makers and

if solutions could be found for it solutions could be found for all.

The first classical model for building up reconciliation has

always and paradoxically been the moral equivalent to war.

During a war the people on one side ban together strongly and

work with much more zeal than usual to survive and prevail.

The apocalyptic religious view sees the conquering of evil

as the way toward reconciliation and the attainment of peace.

“Peace without justice” or “Peace at any price” are criticized.

A second model is the moral equivalent to pregnancy and

while mother constantly saw various kinds of war around her

she had to keep herself in just the right attitude and to

perform all the right exercises for the sake of a healthy baby.

And she was highly motivated by the thought that whatever she

preferred, desired, thought, said or did was done to her baby.

And her new baby girl, Bette Jo, was born and again

the child was loved by all so that all loved each other.

And the quadratic logic of the little family had new blessings.

David was so happy with his new little sister and mother

loved the new happiness of father for his new daughter.

And each was as happy as a child and the way to reconciliation

also was seen as the moral equivalent to the joyful child.

I.3.6 The Holy and the Sacred

Daddy quickly made the money dealing cards at the saloon

so that their new house could be built down under the hill.

Then before they knew it daddy was called to do war duty

in a ship plant at Bremerton near Seattle, Washington.

They sold their home to Whitey Hirshman, a gambler friend

of daddy’s and he drove their car to Port Orchard, a little town

on the Puget Sound where he found a house that they could rent.

Mother with myself and Bette Jo who was of course, only a baby

took the train day and night and day to Seattle where

daddy met us and he took us to our new home in a strange place.

Daddy left early each morning to take the Ferry to the Port to work.

Meanwhile Uncle Tony, Aunt Mid’s husband, and Uncle Bob

were drafted into the army and navy respectively and Gramma

and Grandpa Coates went to Portland, Oregon, for defense work.

Gramma was constantly worrying about her son and son-in-law

and all the other young men whom she knew and was

hearing about on the radio week by week and some were killed.

Very difficult times were going on all around mother and her

little family, but in most ways with her work, prayers

and spiritual reading she still lived in the enchanted world

that she had read about in Just David and that Father Dougherty

helped her think about with his distinction between holy and sacred.

When he baptized Bette Jo he referred to her as Elizabeth Josephine

and daddy said to mother: “Now see what you have done!”

But to mother it was only funny and with her two children

she was learning to be child-like and she read those words:

“Unless you are like little children you cannot enter the Kingdom.”

And she had named Bette Jo after a youth named Joe in

Just David and his sister Bette for they were friends of David.

Her children’s very names reminded her of the realm of the Holy

and she kept pondering the sacred priest and his sacred sacraments.

I.3.7 Paul and John Becoming Mark

Mother and all around her were going through much upheaval

by living through the war years and those trials were bringing

her to a new religious outlook and fundamental attitude as

she began to raise her family with her husband and in his world.

His mother and five sisters and especially Father Dougherty

all helped her to understand him as a new profile of Jesus.

She had learned the missionary way of St. Paul from her mother

and of a universal love for the goodness of all who are redeemed

by Christ who suffered and died to pay the penalty for sin.

She had learned the way of John’s beloved community from

the Mormon community of Carey in which she grew up.

The cross of suffering which builds up the Beloved Kingdom

here on earth as in Carey had to do with prophetic suffering

which would come to those who live contrary to the world.

But as mother and everyone coped with the anxieties and

inconveniences of war and as she lived in a child-like

attitude for, with and from her children the speech that Peter

gave at Pentecost and that became the skeleton of Mark’s

Gospel and of the Synoptic Tradition began to form her heart.

Jesus (1) whom the prophets foretold (2) went about doing good

(3) but he was made to suffer and put to death. (4) However, he

arose from the dead and ascended into heaven. (5) Now his

Holy Spirit has descended upon us to protect us and guide us.

Mother began to imitate Jesus in caring for others as did

the Good Samaritan and in offering up her own and all

suffering with the Suffering Servant who bore the Cross to teach

us all how to suffer and she saw that reacting negatively

creates more poison within us than do bad eating habits.

She welcomed her husband, children and neighbors with joy and

she prayed especially for any who annoyed or persecuted her.

She pondered how the sacred sacraments might cultivate the Holy.

I.3.8 Communicating in Sacred Silence

Those years of ‘45, ‘46 and ‘47 were a turmoil of activity and

yet for mother, Bette Jo, and myself they were a time of harmony.

Mother loved a life centered on home and family and of good, clean

productive farm work that made each person happy, healthy, and holy.

Daddy was driving a milk truck for the dairy and mother was

pleased with his honest work for she always felt that gambling

was a wrongful taking of someone else’s money and not honest.

We all lived at Gramma and Grandpa’s farmhouse and everything

seemed to go along in an exciting and smooth way without friction.

Mother would wash the dishes and I got to help Aunt Mid dry them.

And I marveled at how much silverware she could hold in

her left hand and I would try to imitate her as we laughed together.

Uncle El taught me how to play monopoly and told me stories

at night before we went to sleep in our bedroom upstairs.

Gramma listened often to the radio and talked a lot about

the war but still had lots of fun in the extended family.

Mother had many voices within her and she lived partly

in her mother’s world, partly in her father’s world, partly

in her husband’s world, and, of course, always in her own world.

And she knew that the writing was on the wall and that her

husband would never be content being a farmer in Carey

even though that idea seemed so ideal for her and the children.

And she was an acting person who made constant

decisions that built up the loving attitude within herself

and within others and she performed good actions knowing

that they contributed to good habits of heart, mind and soul.

But, she was also an acting person in another sense of the word

for from her mother who was quite dramatic she had a sense

of the drama of life and she had to get each voice just right.

She had to keep still voices that would lead to strife and friction

and to strengthen the sweet tone of her voice of reconciliation.

I.3.9 Third Holy Child and Sacred Community

And big changes took place a mile a minute as we moved

to a farm we rented and my dad milked eighteen Holsteins

and grew hay and hunted and fished and visited Ketchum.

Uncle El lived with us and we took the school bus together

as I was in the first grade and he was a sophomore in high school.

And our new little baby brother, Bobby Brian, was born

and named after uncle Bob and my dad’s friend Brian

who was a gambler up in Ketchum and found us a house

right across the street from his. And the war ended and

I washed baby diapers in the irrigation ditch with mother

just as she had with her mother up Iron Mine. And we

did move to Ketchum and Whitey Hirshman and my dad

bought a little nightclub together called The Rumba Club

and their gambling was very successful and we paid $3,500

for our little old house and I started second grade in Ketchum.

We had Catechism school once a week and mother and I learned

the answers together as we had the book propped up on

the window-sill over the kitchen sink as we did dishes together.

She had watched as my dad taught me the Angel of God and

Hail Mary in Carey and now she learned them too and she

decided to become a Catholic when I received first communion.

What William James said about getting down on your knees

and praying if you want to receive faith describes good acting.

We can cultivate the whole network of right attitude, right

mood, right sensing, right feeling, right thoughts, words

and deeds if we are good actors and keep acting out the way

we want to be in sacred reflection that cultivates holy living.

Mother was strongly motivated to live the most excellent way

she could imagine because her children would follow that way too.

Father Dougherty in the reflective standing back of his sacred

celibacy inspired her to focus on sacred communion and love.

II. Søren Kierkegaard

II.1 Reconciling the God-Man and Socrates

II.1.1 The Paradoxical Logic of Erotic Inspiration

On May 19, 1838, at 10:30 a.m., the Existential Movement

was born when Kierkegaard wrote in his journal:

There is such a thing as an indescribable joy

which grows through us as unaccountably

as the Apostles’ outburst is unexpected:

“Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice!:

Not a joy over this or that, but full jubilation,

“with hearts, and souls, and voices.”

I rejoice over my joy,

of, in, by, at, on, through, with my joy,

a heavenly refrain, which cuts short,

as it were, our ordinary song;

a joy which cools and refreshes like a breeze,

a gust of the trade wind which blows from

the Grove of mamre to the eternal mansions.1

Kierkegaard as a young student in his mid-twenties

suffered from a sort of genetic depression.

He moved out of his beloved father’s home

and became estranged from the melancholic old man.

He thought of himself as no longer religious.

He experimented with alcohol and prostitution.

He could not write his Master’s thesis.

He found that he had a secret thorn in the flesh.

But then he fell in love with Regina Olsen,

a beautiful young girl of fourteen.

With the above outburst of existential joy he

realized what had happened as he became reconciled

with his father, with his God and with himself.

His erotic love made of him a celibate religious genius

and his celibacy increased the passion of his eros.

Kierkegaard discovered the paradox of Socratic reconciliation.

II.1.2 The Logic of Socratic Irony

Kierkegaard’s father was a lonely, wretched shepherd boy

on Denmark’s Jutland heath where one day he cursed God.

Then as a teenage orphan he went to Copenhagen to live with

his uncle who employed him in his fine clothing store.

His father married, but his wife died and soon thereafter

his first child was born of the servant girl whom he married.

After a few years his father inherited the store and became wealthy.

Several other children were born and then came Søren who,

as a hunch-back cripple, became his father’s favorite.

The father and the little boy were always together and

Søren sat in on his father’s theology discussion group.

Then the father’s children began to die one after the other

and the father began to think he was cursed by God because

he had cursed God and committed adultery and he was

consumed in a guilt complex with which Søren identified.

At university Kierkegaard was caught up in boredom

and felt he was an ugly little critter who was unlovable.

But then when Regina really loved him he was astounded.

All of a sudden he realized that the reconciliation process

that Socrates describes in the Phaedrus was happening to him.

Socrates said that our body is like a chariot that is

pulled by a vulgar black horse and a noble white horse

and driven by the charioteer of our rational intellect.

When the black horse beholds a beautiful boy he wants sex.

He is so strong that the white horse and the charioteer are dragged

along into sexual activity and since exercise builds strength

the addiction increases and vulgar lust is all powerful.

But it can happen that the soul can fall in love with

the right beloved soul and then the white horse and

the charioteer will sublimate the energy of the black horse

in a reconciling, life changing enthusiasm of Divine Madness.

II.1.3 The Logic of Skeptical Irony

When Kierkegaard and Regina fell in love the indescribable joy

of his erotic inspiration took him totally beyond boredom

and awakened the genius of his creative illness with the energy

of that ancient Platonic love of the Symposium and the Phaedrus.

Kierkegaard now knew Socrates from within and with the energy

of the black horse he could now write his brilliant Master’s Thesis

on The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates.

Socrates was the master of irony because he became the wisest

man in Athens by knowing that he could know nothing.

He clearly saw that the Pre-Socratic philosophical physicists

only had theories when they claimed that all things came from

the one, or the two, or the few, or the many or the infinite.

He knew that they could never know the truth about the becoming

of all things and that allowed him to ironically move from

their proud, pretending, pompously ponderous prejudice

to a new humble, honest, hilariously humorous health.

Kierkegaard saw how true philosophical irony is more than

a literary trope which says one thing and means its opposite.

When the skeptic moves from knowing nothing to being wise

he is working with the logic of mixed opposites that became

for Kierkegaard the very logic of Christian agapeic reconciliation.

Søren saw that the aesthete’s inclusive opposites reconcile

in a common poverty that is always bored but never boring.

The ethical exclusivistic opposites do not reconcile in

a common mediocrity that is never bored but always boring.

Socrates went beyond either inclusive or exclusive opposites

to parallel opposites of the neither/nor of infinite resignation.

In his skeptical irony he was resigned to never knowing

but his wisdom was open to his Daimon for direction.

Socrates had discovered the religion of the second immediacy

but Søren saw that it was not the God man’s reconciliation.

II.1.4 The Logic of Agapeic Reconciliation

The Socratic reconciliation with which Søren was so gifted

when he fell in love with his beautiful and adorable Regina

did harmonize him in three dimensions of his personhood.

But it did not reconcile him to marrying with her.

He was reconciled within himself, with the world and with God.

But after his engagement with Regina he called it off

because he saw that if he married her he would lose

his erotic inspiration and all its religious creative energy.

His thorn in the flesh which troubled him even more than

being a hunchbacked, little cripple probably had to do

with homosexual inclinations and so he felt so

unbelievably blessed to be able to really love his Regina.

Socrates, like so many Greeks, saw Platonic love as

the homosexual love of a man for a beautiful youth.

When Socrates and Plato discovered Platonic love in which

erotic passion made possible celibacy and celibacy’s greater passion

they were astounded at the reconciliation of the black and

white horse with its love of wisdom and even of holiness.

Søren saw at once the difference between Platonic erotic love

and agapeic erotic love and he knew his was not agapeic.

He thought that if he had Christian faith he would be able

to marry her and still have his erotic inspiration.

Agapeic reconciliation in its logic moves from either the aesthetic

or the ethical to neither the aesthetic nor the ethical to the both-and.

Søren beheld Socrates, the Shaman, discover presence in absence.

Socratic wisdom had to do with the three great secret things.

As the sexiest man in Athens Socrates refrained from sex.

As about to die he thought he might live on forever.

As an atheist his familiar Divine Sign protected him.

But Søren’s good Lutheran Christ as incarnate God-man

should be able both to sublimate black horse energy and marry.

II.1.5 The Logic of Personal Growth

As Søren pondered the differences between Socrates and Jesus

he saw that they were not irreconcilable and he defined

the four loves and the stages of personal growth precisely.

For Socrates there was the first immediacy of black horse eros.

Then, there was the noetic reflective realm of friendship.

Finally, there was the second immediacy of Platonic eros.

For Søren there is either the first immediacy of the aesthetic erotic

or the ethical reflection of decisive married affection or

the infinite resignation of the neither/nor that opens religiousness A.

Thus Søren in Sickness unto Death defines the person

“as a relation (aesthetic) that relates to itself (the ethical)

and relating to itself relates to the others (as the absolute and

then as the relative).” So it is our personal task to grow

through the stages on life’s way not only with the great

burst of growth that the Platonic lover experiences with Socrates

but also in such a way that what Socrates leaves behind

with the celibate love of his enthusiasm and Divine Madness

Søren as a good Lutheran thinks he can recover in marriage.

Søren was hoping that even after he broke the engagement

his faith would blossom and he could happily marry Regina.

He did not want to be a burden to her with his melancholy

which he thought might return if he lived in marriage.

He was afraid he would hurt her by breaking the engagement.

But to his surprise she quickly married another and while

she was happily married he kept on loving his inspiration.

In 1848, at Easter time, he did think he could have faith

and become a Lutheran pastor; but even that failed him and

he lived on as a philosophical genius of erotic inspiration.

II.1.6 The Logic of the Both-And

Søren’s logic of the both-and seeks to reconcile opposites

and in this case the opposites are Socrates and Jesus.

He had identified with his father’s quest to be religiously ethical.

But, his father deeply felt his failure and so did Søren

As a university student he tried to escape his father’s ideals,

and in following the black horse of wine, women and song,

even though he was brilliant, he could not follow the white horse

and write his Master’s Thesis in a satisfactory manner.

Then through Regina he found the way of Socrates and with

all the energy of the black and white horses he wrote his thesis.

The gift of Socratic, erotic inspiration had truly saved him

and he knew it could forever if he but loved his muse.

His thorn in the flesh could have been masturbation as well

as homosexuality and he was miraculously delivered from both.

If he was sexually tempted he need but focus on her who

was always powerfully present in his soul’s adoration and

his temptation would flee away and he could continue

to ponder his new philosophy of love and his writing project.

The Socratic way in its paradoxical irony let him follow Jesus.

But what about Regina and the ethical way of Christian marriage?

With Socrates he had been gifted with the reconciliation

of me, myself andI. for the black horse me-id and the

white horse myself-super-ego were harmonized with the charioteer ego.

Socrates reconciled him with Jesus, but would Jesus let him

be reconciled with Socrates and homosexual celibacy

and no real concern with Regina’s quest for marriage?

He began to see that to be an integrated person he had

to move from aesthetic happiness, to ethical health,

to the religious holy and then to have the wisdom that

after leaving the aesthetic and ethical he could so transform

the holy that he could return and renew the aesthetic and ethical.

II.1.7 Loving Socrates as More Important

Can Socrates and Jesus be fully reconciled in Søren’s thinking

if Jesus is like the prodigal son and Socrates like the elder brother?

While Socrates lived and died as a philosopher Jesus lived

and died as a God and such a claim could offend Socrates.

Jesus could look like a prodigal with his claim to be the one

and only Son of the one and only Creator, Father God.

According to Søren if Jesus is to win over the elder brother

he would begin by loving Socrates as more important and

then Socrates might begin to love him as more important.

Søren believed that Jesus did love Socrates more than himself.

In his incarnation Jesus stepped down in self-emptying.

His life was one of self denial for all his brothers and sisters.

He offered his passion and death for the redemption of all.

Jesus loves everyone as more important than himself.

With his love of Jesus Søren really loved Socrates too.

Søren had tried his best to live with purity of heart.

He had tried to will one thing in knowing, loving and serving God.

He had tried to be the best student and philosopher possible.

He had tried to follow his vocation and make it his profession.

But all his effort failed and he felt he was going mad.

Then he fell in love with Regina and Socrates became

his teacher and his guide and helped him understand himself.

His love for Regina let him understand Socrates

and Socrates let him understand his love for Regina.

His writing began going better than he could ever imagine

as he began writing about his beloved Socrates

and that sexual love that ironically took him beyond sex.

In Søren the love of Jesus loved the love of Socrates even

more than himself for the love of Socrates let him

attain the purity of heart that Jesus demanded of him.

Socrates’ praise of love taught Søren how to praise love.

II.1.8 The Noble Socratic Return

Søren greatly admired Socrates and thought that if he had

known of Jesus he would have believed in him and loved him.

That is so because of Socrates’ conversion which revealed how

he would follow his conscience with humility and honesty.

At the heart of Søren’s philosophy of love is the “like for like.”

Before Jesus revealed his agape the “like for like” was that

of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” and that

“like for like” wanted justice without a primacy of forgiveness.

But the “like for like” of the judging Christ is mercifully just.

Whatever goes out from my heart will return with exactly

its same quantity and quality in upbuilding my heart’s habit.

As Søren saw more clearly and loved more dearly each day

as he prayed for his lovely Regina, the queen of his heart,

and as he daily wrote about Socrates, the teacher of his soul,

he knew that the Christ in his heart loved Socrates as more

important so that Socrates could love Jesus as more important.

That is the way the “like for like” always has to work.

It is the law of agapeic love that accomplishes reconciliation.

Christ in justice can truly love Socrates as more important

for Socrates’ love makes up for what is lacking in Christ’s love.

That is so because the heart cannot say to the head: “I have

no need of you.” For in the Mystical Body of Christ

each member is lacking what only the other members can do.

Socrates was not afraid of dying and ironically he comforted

those who were trying to comfort him by telling them that

perhaps after he drank the hemlock he would be with Homer.

And Jesus after he was put to death descended to the dead

and there he no doubt gathered up Socrates and all the others

and let them arise from the dead with him and let them ascend

with him into the realm of God who is universal love.

How could the noble Socrates not love Jesus as more important?

II.1.9 Loving the God-Man as More Important

Søren knew in his mind and his heart that the prodigal Jesus

could win over the elder brother, Socrates, and reconcile with him.

Søren had tried to be reconciled within himself and with others

and with God, but he only sank deeper and deeper into despair.

Then one day he met Regina and she inspired him into integrity

and the reconciliation of Platonic love as his crippled chariot

began to fly with the black and white horse teaming and the charioteer

driving them with poetic, philosophic and holy religious harmony.

Socrates and his wondrous Platonic love reconciled Søren with Jesus.

His aesthetic me, his ethical myself, and his religious I could

harmonize in the happy, healthy, holy wisdom that could

yield great grades, a terrific job and a great life as he became

a relation that relates to itself and in relating to itself relates to God.

The elder brother, Socrates, had a love that won Søren over to Jesus.

But how about the Thou and the you? Could the prophetic Jesus

be reconciled with the mystic Socrates so that Søren could

love Regina for herself and let his muse become his wife?

How could the prodigal Jesus win over the elder brother, Socrates?

Søren’s strategy for winning over the grudging elder brother

has the three parts of: (1) loving him as more important so that

with the like for like he will love the prodigal as more important,

(2) praising love so that he too will come to praise love, and

(3) recollecting the dead so that he will do likewise.

Praising the God who is Love praises all love that truly loves

and praises all of Love’s lovely beings so that the elder brother

knows that he is always being loved and praised by the prodigal.

If they both pray for the dead and trust the dead to pray for them

then in the community of Saints which is Jesus’ Mystical Body

no matter what happens they can trust in eventual reconciliation.

In his heart and authorship Søren understood Socrates by

reconciling him with Jesus and Christ with Socrates.

II.2 Reconciling the God-Man and Abraham

II.2.1 The Absurd Contingency of the Single Individual

S.K. writes his pseudonymical literature as indirect communication

to let himself and his reader be deceived out of self-deceit into truth.

Thus, Johannes de Silentio or John of Silence, is writing about many

secret affairs with this story about Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.

It is a story about Kierkegaard and his estranged father and it is

a story about Søren sacrificing Regina with the broken engagement.

It is a story about Abraham, the father of faith, who believed in

God’s promise of land, nation and name which could be fulfilled

through Isaac, but, if Isaac is to be sacrificed then God and

his promise are absurd for the promise depends totally on Isaac.

So the story is about how faith reconciles Abraham and God.

All the stories in the Abraham cycle are about threats to

either land, or nation or name, but Abraham endures and

the threats and challenges become opportunities that show that

Abraham is truly called by God to be the father of his people.

But this threat is the worst of all because it is not a threat

from other people against the promise, but from God himself.

If God is making the promise and then breaking it he is absurd.

But, by virtue of the absurd Abraham believes and gets Isaac back.

However, Kierkegaard does not get Regina back even though he

thinks that he might be given faith that will let him marry.

This lets Kierkegaard see that for Jesus things are much worse than

for Abraham, for in this case the Father does sacrifice his Son.

What kind of reconciliation can there be when child sacrifice

which ended for the Jews with Abraham is reinitiated with Jesus?

What counted for Abraham was his family and the promise.

But now Søren begins to see that love is a matter for each single

individual’s conscience and things are much more absurd.

He is absurdly called to be a sacrifice as a witness for his generation.

He is not even a part of the whole so that his witnessing can

be logically understood by his generation for he is an exception.

II.2.2 The Absurd Contingency of Postmodern Doubting

Johannes de Silentio’s Fear and Trembling builds up through

eight parts beginning with a Preface about modern doubting.

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, begins by doubting

and in his very doubting gets his Archimedean point which is

certainty that ends the doubting and lets him get his system.

St. Augustine actually began this modern move when he

hit upon the notion: “Si fallor, sum.” “If I fail, I am.”

Descartes who copies St. Augustine at several key points

argued that the “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am”

is logically sound and that to contradict it is self-contradictory.

Kierkegaard began as a good modernist with Augustine and Luther.

When he fell in love with Regina he was certain that he should marry.

But in being called to break the engagement he discovered Socrates

and his ongoing skepticism and he was in doubt and his

life and writing became a constant experimenting in doubt.

After writing his thesis about the irony of Socratic doubting

he then wrote Either/Or which is about either various forms

of aesthetic non-married immediacy or ethical reflective

married commitment and as a good Lutheran he felt he should marry.

But, just as he began to write Fear and Trembling he learned that

Regina was engaged to another and that shook him with doubt.

For Abraham and Luther there was no doubt about the universal

value of marriage for Luther had tried an Augustinian monastery

and he found that celibacy was not for him and he married.

Good Lutherans are certain that if they want direction

in their marriage and family life they should go to a pastor

who knows about marital problems from his own real experience.

How could an old celibate be a good pastor for the married?

And Kierkegaard saw that he was an individual exception

to the general rule and so were Jesus, Paul, and Augustine

and he doubted that they would be foolish about married life.

II.2.3 The Absurd Contingency of Unlimited Voices

Søren was a troubled young man with many relation problems.

He fell in love with Regina, the love of his life, and they got engaged

and that was a serious promise for him, but he broke the engagement.

Søren was in fear and trembling about breaking his commitment.

How much would it hurt her? What consequences would it have for him?

Fear and anxiety are two distinct passions for fear is a being

threatened by something definite such as a bear growling at me

as we come face to face unexpectedly out in the woods unarmed.

Anxiety is being threatened by the indefinite or something that

may or may not be which is the meaning of contingency.

Formal logicians work with abstract ideas such as “the necessary,”

“the possible” and “impossible;” but once you think about

the actual with all its concrete possibilities you are outside of

the realm of formal logic and fear becomes anxiety as the definite

becomes indefinite in the blurring boundaries of relating contingency.

As Søren thought about making his promise then breaking it he

saw many actual possibilities or contingencies for himself and Regina.

In The Exordium, or the out of order, of Fear and Trembling he

experimented with some of the real concrete existential contingencies.

Johannes de Silentio saw that Isaac could be devastated as he

saw that he was to be the sacrificial victim and he could have

taken offence at God, so to prevent that, Abraham could tell

him that it was not God’s command but his own demonic will.

That way Isaac could have kept faith in the God of Abraham.

In contingency two Abraham could have become dejected

and abject by wondering how God could be so monstrous to do this.

In contingency three Abraham could have concluded that even

to believe in God’s command was the sin of child murder.

In contingency four Isaac could have lost his faith.

Søren had these and many more unlimited voices speaking

within himself and such complexity made logic absurd.

II.2.4 The Absurd Contingency of Abraham’s Faith in the Promise

In part three of Fear and Trembling, Eulogy on Abraham, Silentio

laments that life’s unlimited absurd contingencies could bring

us poor humans to the defiant defeat of doubt, dread and despair.

Søren was so tempted when he felt called upon to break his promise

as was Abraham when God seemed to be breaking His promise.

But the challenges of complexities’ contingencies can become

opportunities for heroes, poets and orators to become great.

“One became great by expecting the possible, another by

expecting the eternal; but he who experienced the impossible became

the greatest of all” and, of course, that is exactly what Abraham did.

God looked like an impossible contradiction of opposites as

Abraham went forth in faith to do His will because Isaac

was the means by which God could keep His promise and by

demanding Isaac as a sacrificial victim God would be taking

away the means by which the promise could be kept with honor.

The promise was for this finite, temporal life in that it

had to do with a very large family and a very prosperous land

and somehow becoming a blessing for all of humankind.

So Abraham believed that God was only tempting him and

that if he went forth in good faith to do God’s will in sacrificing

Isaac God would somehow give him back Isaac a second time.

In his faith Abraham so believed and trusted in God that

he reconciled the absurd opposites of God: God who

promises good and wonderful things with God, the monster,

who demands the sacrifice of Isaac and thus the end of the promise.

But Kierkegaard had just as much to reconcile for he did

identify with his father’s melancholia and he did feel like

a hunched back, little creep whom all of a sudden Regina redeemed.

But he felt called to leave her and never get her back in

this life a second time, but that had to do with the new

complexity of Christian faith in the sacrifice of God’s Son.

II.2.5 The Absurd Contingency of Double Movement Leaping

In his Eulogy Silentio writes that Abraham was the greatest of all

“great by that power whose strength is powerlessness,

great by that wisdom whose secret is foolishness

great by that hope whose form is madness

great by that love that is hatred to oneself.”

This is the language or the logos of the Cross as Paul sees it.

It is as if Silentio is quoting Paul here and this is the core

of Søren’s philosophy of love and reconciliation which he

now spells out for the first time in this Preliminary Expectoration.

Søren first spits out his philosophy of double movement leaping by

comparing the Knights of Infinite Resignation and of Faith.

With all of his energy and passion Abraham renounced Isaac

and was willing to give him up as a Knight of Infinite Resignation.

But by faith which is God’s gift Abraham gets Isaac a second time.

As Silentio puts it in thinking of Regina:

By my own strength I can give up the princess

and I will not sulk about it

but find joy and peace and rest in my pain

but by my own strength I cannot get her back again

for I use all my strength in resigning.

On the other hand, by faith,

says that marvelous knight,

by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd.

With Infinite Resignation Buddhists renounce all desire and

Platonists renounce the shadows and images of the cave and

Hegelians renounce each thesis with an antithesis. But Søren,

while renouncing the aesthetic basement and the ethical first

floor of his house with the logic of the neither/nor and

relating absolutely to the absolute, then in faith comes back

and is free to live on all floors of his house at once by

relatively loving the basement, first floor and the second floor.

II.2.6 The Absurdity of Ethically Suspending the Teleological

Silentio focuses on three major problems for Father Abraham.

He is called upon to murder, hate and lie in the worst way possible.

But, does not this make his faith absurd and totally unethical?

The ethical is the universal natural law and every individual,

as Hegel argues, should obey that law with a good conscience.

Socrates saw that we should care for our soul with good conscience.

While there is no mention of good conscience in the Hebrew Bible

it runs through Paul’s writings as an element of his Stoic heritage.

Kierkegaard in Works of Love highlights the practice of cultivating

a sensitive conscience as the single individual’s loving guide.

But here in Problemata I Silentio argues that faith is the paradox

that the single individual is higher than the universal and

that to respond to God’s call Abraham should suspend the ethical

for the sake of his absolute duty to the Horror Religiosus.

There is not only a teleological suspension of the ethical here

but also an absurd suspension of the teleological for Abraham

faces the loss of all meaning as God becomes self-contradictory.

In his duty to the Mysterium Tremendum of the Holy, Abraham

is willing to be tried and tested by God believing all the while that

God will suspend his own command or He will no longer be God.

Silentio further eulogizes Abraham by comparing him to Mary.

She needs worldly admiration as little as Abraham needs tears

for she is no heroine and he was no hero,

but both of them became greater than these,

not by being exempted in any way

from the distress and the agony and the paradox,

but became greater by means of these. (65)

When you read Silentio’s treatment of Abraham you see no

difference between Abraham and the God-man and that is why

Kierkegaard does not sign his name to this deceptive writing

which makes no distinction between the elder and younger brother.

II.2.7 Loving Abraham as More Important

In Works of Love after showing how love is a matter of conscience

Kierkegaard writes a chapter on “The Duty to Love the People We See.”

This takes us right to the heart of our duty to so love Love

that in praising Love we will be able to love each and every person.

To cultivate the conscience that sees why I should love every person

is the main point of Problemata II in which Silentio in order

to comprehend Abraham goes to Luke’s hard saying:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate

his father and mother and wife and children

and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life,

he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26; see Problemata II, 72)

Abraham is pictured here as living out this highest command.

Kierkegaard through Silentio seems to love Abraham as even

more important than Jesus because Abraham seems to have been

the first to practice this strange love that hates in order to follow.

So what is this hard saying about hating each person we meet

in order to love them all about in its absurd paradoxical way?

Kierkegaard explains his usage of it in Works of Love by

showing why the Christian is called to love the enemy and to hate

the beloved and by explaining how the first depends on the second.

When I love my child, my friend, my beloved with the emphasis

on the my, I love with a preferential self love that I need to

suspend with infinite resignation if I am truly to love every

other person as they are in themselves and not as I see them.

So this hard saying is part of the cultivation process in which

I can come to love all persons in the very value of their personhood.

In accord with Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic after I stop

loving my beloved absolutely and I come to love Love absolutely

the I can love all persons as persons and then love my

beloved relatively in all of his or her unique differences.

According to Silentio Abraham is already called upon to do this.

II.2.8 The Abrahamic Blessing for All Peoples

Kierkegaard’s understanding of the strategy of the highest love

that is the gift and task to reconcile all peoples should let

the prodigal son, Jesus, go out to the elder brother, Socrates, the Greek,

and Abraham, the Jew, and begin by loving them as more important.

Just as Socrates in Søren ’s mind would nobly come to love Jesus

as more important in return so could Abraham also do that.

Abraham believes that the promise of being a blessing for all peoples

can be fulfilled through Isaac and his offspring and Jesus

could be the key person in that family line for blessing all peoples.

Silentio treats Abraham and Jesus as the same for the reader

could think that Abraham’s double movement leap is the same

as that of the God-man who as eternal came into the finite flesh.

They do both have universalist intentions even though in Jesus’

case the Son is sacrificed for every single individual person,

whereas in Abraham’s Isaac is not sacrificed for all peoples.

In Problemata III it is asked if it was ethically defensible

for Abraham to conceal his understanding from his family.

The main point is that Abraham did not have any certain understanding.

He acted as if he would sacrifice Isaac and believed as if he would not.

Abraham is trapped in a double bind that calls for the double

movement leap of faith and that makes him higher than other

heroes such as Agamemnon, Brutus, and Jephte who

did sacrifice their children for very clear teleological reasons.

They were Knights of Infinite Resignation, not Knights of Faith.

Silentio’s Abraham is already being loved as a blessing for the peoples

by helping us to love the girl and the young swain, Ephigenia in Aulis,

Aristotle’s bride and bridegroom, Axel and Valborg, Queen Elizabeth,

Agnes and Merman, Sara and Tobias, and Gretchen and Faust.

We must love Abraham as more important for he is greater than these.

II.2.9 Loving the God-Man as More Important

This pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, is being used by Kierkegaard

to deceive us out of our self-deceit into the truth and he tells us

in the Epilogue at the end of Fear and Trembling the truth is that

the highest passion in a person is faith and faith is:

an honest earnestness that fearlessly

and incorruptibly points to the tasks

an honest earnestness

that lovingly maintains the tasks

that does not disquiet people into wanting

to attain the highest too hastily

but keep the tasks young’

and beautiful and lovely to look at

inviting to all and yet also difficult

and inspiring to the noble mind. (121)

Our highest passion is faith in the gift and task of reconciliation.

We can spend our life on this or we can become weary of it.

Fear and Trembling is Kierkegaard’s way of fulfilling his task.

He wants to make the task young and beautiful as was Regina.

She awakened him from his unmotivated lethargy and sleep walking.

By showing us Abraham and his task we can come to love Jesus

and the task He has given us of spending our lives for others.

The actual is higher than the possible and the highest of all

is to live out the highest possible actual which is the gift

and the task which Paul and Kierkegaard were given and which

we can all be given if we notice it and become earnest about it.

Fear and Trembling is a motivational book that wants to move

us to do nothing less than the best we can dream of for others.

The promise and the task of faith in that promise so motivated

Abraham that he lived out his belief that by giving up Isaac

he would get him back a billion fold as a blessing for all peoples.

Jesus as the grain of wheat died that all Abraham’s might live.

II.3 Reconciling the God-Man and Job

II.3.1 Repetition’s Reconciliation Is the Only Happy Love

In Repetition, the companion volume to Fear and Trembling, Søren

also discusses his love for Regina and the engagement breaking.

When he fell in love with her he became a poet who was religious

but he believed that if he had faith he would be able to marry her.

But the engagement breaking was complex and he wrote in his journal:

If I had not honored her higher than myself as my future wife,

if I had not been prouder of her honor than my own,

then I would have remained silent and fulfilled her wish and mine—

I would have married her—

there are so many marriages that conceal little stories.

Such as being gay. Perhaps he worried that if he married her

the whole network of his melancholy would return and she

would have to live day in and day out with a depressed husband.

But he believed that if he really had faith he would be able to remain

in the enthusiasm of his Divine Madness and be married at

the same time in the reconciliation of what he calls “repetition.”

When we think of repetition in English we think of a mechanical

repetition in which the same thing happens over and over again in

exactly the same way so that it is boring and completely non-eventful.

The concept of Kierkegaard has to do with experiencing through

life a reconciled mix of the old and the new at the same time.

The young man falls in love poetically and mystically in a

Platonic recollective love that is captivating for the young girl.

She loves being adored by the melancholic poet as his muse.

But this poetic love is an unhappy love for it expects the new and

the interesting and would be bored with the repetition of the same.

If a love relation is only aesthetically interesting it becomes unhappy.

If it is an ethical mechanical repetition of the same it is unhappy.

But “the dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated

has been, otherwise it could not be repeated, but the very fact

that it has been makes the repetition into something new.”2

II.3.2 Beyond Platonic Recollection to a New Future

Kierkegaard argues that “repetition is the interest of metaphysics

and also the interest upon which metaphysics comes to grief.”3

He demonstrates that by contrasting faith’s repetition with

Plato’s metaphysics of recollection and Hegel’s mediation.

Kierkegaard clarifies his concept of repetition with several kinds

of definition, nominal or etymological, essential, causal, and

descriptive and for each of these he uses the method of free

imaginative variation or the experimentation of comparisons.

Kierkegaard is proud that Danish has such a good metaphysical

word as Gjentagelse which contains all the religious, ethical

and faith based metaphysical meanings that he will bring out.

Repetition means to bring out or to fetch for Gjen means “again,”

and tag means “day” and else means “getting” so the word means

re-getting it again in a new way each day so that even the

English word re-petition is suggestive for petition as the first

form of prayer is renewed with repentance, thanksgiving and praise.

Petition means to earnestly ask for something from the other.

Repetition for Kierkegaard is the renewal of Platonic Recollection.

“Recollection” is also etymologically a very rich word for the

root “lect” is connected with legein which means “to gather”

and so to collect is to gather together into a logos or one.

So Plato reconciled the being of Parmenides and the Becoming

of Heraclitus with the concept of recollection which shows

the identity of the logos with the ontos which connect the many.

But repetition is much more humble and other-oriented for

according to its basic attitude it constantly re-petitions

the other because one is aware of one’s lack and the need.

For Plato one recollects by climbing up out of the cave and

recovering the past truth that the soul knew before it fell.

For Kierkegaard repletion is a forward recollection that renews

all things because of the surprises of the unknown future.

II.3.3 Beyond Hegelian Mediation to a New Past

So recollection is a process that collects the many into the past

in order to re-fetch their meaning and significance so that Plato

would see the fallen soul rising through the remembrance of

things past until he collected them in their originating form.

Thus there is no genuine future or freedom in the realm of

Platonic recollection because the moment of truth only recovers

what has been and has been previously lost and lost sight of.

Hegel’s metaphysics of mediation goes in the opposite direction

to a future and a telos or goal or purpose that makes the past

only a quantitative, instrumental, utilitarian step on the way.

Mediation has to do with the medium or middle premise by which

a conclusion comes out of previous premises such that we can say

that if an acorn is properly nourished and cultivated it will become

an oak tree, but this acorn has been duly nourished and

cultivated, therefore, it has reached its goal and is now this oak tree.

Plato explains things by relating them through recollection to their

archeological formal causes and Hegel explains them by relating

them through mediation to their teleological or final cause.

The moment of truth for Hegel is that moment of mediation

when the thesis is negated by the mediating anti-thesis so that

the new synthesis or new whole comes forth into a new future.

Just as Plato does not have a true freedom or a true future because

his recollection reduces things to the past so Hegel does not have

a true and living past because his mediation negates the past

in not keeping the actual acorn as it only becomes the oak.

Plato’s formal recollection and Hegel’s Aristotelian final or

teleological mediation are both mechanical or natural and

quantitative whereas Kierkegaard’s qualitative leap of repetition

provides a metaphysics that preserves the freedom of a new future

and the freedom of a renewing past so that in the present

there is a reconciliation that keeps the past and allows the future.

II.3.4 Repetition as the Ethical Task of Freedom

The book, Repetition, has its small, powerful, metaphysical section

at the beginning and then it is the story of the young man who falls

in love and his mentor, Constantine Constantius, who helps him

to think about his love affair and to explore repetitions’ meanings.

What the young man discovers is that the repetition can reconcile

four different attitudes that make up the four stages on life’s way.

The young man learns that a lover can be a poet, a husband,

a mystic and a person of faith who can repeat all four at once.

Ordinarily and for the most part good husbands love their wives

ethically and with reflective decisions that promote their welfare.

Job was a good ethical man and husband and father and according

to the Deuteronomic morality and religious vision he should have

been blessed, but instead he was cursed for he lost his flocks,

and his land and his children which proved that ethics can fail.

And this often does happen to good people for ethical love need

not be rewarded since the good can suffer more than the wicked.

The relation between the Kierkegaard-Regina story and the Job

and his children story and the Abraham Isaac story is that they

each want to get back again what they have had taken away.

That would be repetition and a happy beginning reconciliation.

If Job lived happily with his family and they were taken away

life would be renewed in repetition if they were united again.

In the epilogue Job does get his children back but that

seems like a fairy tale for no one has experienced such a thing.

However, eternity is the true repetition and when it begins

in faith in the incarnation, the death and the resurrection

the followers of Jesus believe that each individual lives in eternity.

Kierkegaard writes this book under the pseudonym of the Constant

Constant one and by remaining in love’s debt to Regina he

knows that he will always love her come what may and

he believes that in some ways she will always love him too.

II.3.5 Metaphysic’s Interest on Which Metaphysics Founders

Both Plato and Hegel base their ethics on their metaphysics but

Kierkegaard makes clear that neither of them can account for

the genuine new and thus neither can account for freedom and

without the qualitative leap of freedom decisions are impossible.

Metaphysics seeks to account for becoming but if becoming is

a process of necessity which can be logically accounted for

then it lacks the really new and the contingency and possibility

that are the opposite of necessity and which make freedom possible.

The interest of metaphysics is to give a logical account of freedom

but since metaphysics must be truly logical and based on

necessity it falls into self-contradiction in accounting for freedom.

If there is to be a truly free decision then one must make a

qualitative leap into that decision that is not based upon

a merely quantitative build up of necessary antecedents.

If freedom is a lifting up of oneself by one’s boot straps then

the potency for such a leap must be a real potency in oneself

like the potency in the acorn out of which the oak comes forth

but again that potency only works with a quantitative

build up and this model cannot be one of freedom’s qualitative leap.

So what Kierkegaard shows by contrasting repetition’s

qualitative leap of freedom with the quantitative build ups

of Plato and Hegel is that if we really value freedom then

we have to affirm faith in the God-man whose leap from

being God to becoming man alone is a model for freedom.

Kierkegaard is arguing that if we value freedom and all

that it implies in our Western culture then we cannot deny

faith in agape and personhood without which our secular society

has no real metaphysical basis but only hidden assumptions.

Kierkegaard and Job with their faith could have for themselves

the ethical task of always loving their beloved no matter what

and of remaining in debt to those who are present in their absence.

II.3.6 The Single Individual and the Posthorn

Constantius tells the story of a stagecoach driver who arrives

in a town with the mail and blows a posthorn to let the people

know that he and the mail are there and this horn is unpredictable.

It never sounds the same twice and thus symbolizes no repetition.

However, the dialectic of true repetition is to be found with it.

The repetition that renews is a transition from one state

(such as religiousness A) to another (such as religiousness B)

and the states are as different from one another as the creatures

of the ocean are from those of land and air for repetition

takes place not through an immanent continuity with the

former existence which is a contradiction, but through a transcendence.

Any person as a single individual is as unpredictable as the posthorn.

Kierkegaard came to see that clearly as he grieved over Regina’s

grieving at his breaking of the engagement and then discovered

that she was not grieving at all but was about to marry another.

He was totally surprised and the idea crossed his mind that

she must not have cared so much for him if she could so

quickly seemingly forget him and become engaged to another.

This news of her new engagement brought him to identify with

Job at the moment of the Storm when God asked him how

he could question God when God and his creation were so great

and Job did not know all that God was up to with his universe.

However, he came to see that she gave him to himself a second time.

First she inspired him to a full life of witnessing faith

and now she relieved him that he was not hurting her.

That is true repetition for what has been can be again.

However, the second time is like and yet unlike the first.

What has been does not determine what will be and

in his surprise that she went with an other so quickly

he could see how his second experience of erotic inspiration

was different from the first for she loved him and then freed him.

II.3.7 Loving Job as More Important

Satan made a bet with God that if Job should experience

the problem of evil and suffer he would lose his faith in God.

Job lost the prosperity of his flocks and he continued to pray:

“The Lord had given. The Lord has taken. Blessed be the Lord.”

Then Satan upped the ante and God took away Job’s children.

Just as Kierkegaard’s father began to lose his children so Job

lost his and there was the dramatic story of Job’s friends

who claimed that Job must have done evil to be so punished.

That is the Deuteronomic vision that those who are good will be

blessed and those who are evil will be cursed and destroyed.

But that logic did not hold and the unpredictable happened.

At first Job did begin to doubt and despair and to think that

it would have been better if he would had never have been born.

He even thought in the back of his mind that he would like

to take God to a court of law and show God’s injustice.

But then when it looked like Satan was winning the wager

there was the storm and God spoke to Job out of the thunder

and asked him where he was when God created the stars and

the seas and the Leviathan of the deep and Job recognized

his pride and he repented in sack cloth and ashes for doubting.

So with the posthorn we see that doubt about the next note

at first seems to make repetition impossible but then it can

help one to see the non-mechanical true repetition and its doubt.

In Works of Love Kierkegaard explains the role of doubt in the

life of a loving and trusting faith when he writes:

If someone can demonstrate on the basis of the possibility

of deception that one should not believe anything at all,

I can demonstrate that one should believe in everything

on the basis of the possibility of deception. (228)

In his own experience Søren knew that the younger brother, Jesus,

could truly love the elder brother, Job, especially in his ambivalence.

II.3.8 Job’s Faithful Love That Justifies the Exception

At the end of the book in a Concluding Letter by Constantine Constantius

the logic of repetition is explained in terms of a battle between

the universal order and the exception such as Abraham, Job, or Søren

Constantine mentions that the 1, 2, 3 of the ordinary syllogisms

that draw conclusions from the universal and particular do not work

in the case of the individual exception and:

It is asking too much of an ordinary reviewer

to be interested in the dialectical battle in which

the exception arises in the midst of the universal,

the protracted and very complicated procedure

in which the exception battles his way through

and affirms himself as justified,

for the unjustified exception is recognized precisely

by his wanting to bypass the universal. (226)

Job began like Abraham with a vision of land, nation and name

and he was promised he would attain his aesthetic dream if he

would be ethically good and follow the laws of God and he did that

and he did gain prosperity, posterity and rich blessings for all.

Then at step three of the dialectic he was challenged by the universal

and losing prosperity, posterity and blessing he stood face

to face with the problem of evil and wondered how a good God

could be so unjust as to punish him so when he was good.

Then in step four the universal order of God appeared in the great

storm and Job repented in infinite resignation and absolutely

loved the absolute so that he now in step five saw God anew.

In step six according to the epilogue of the miracle he got

his children back a second time and in step seven he was

prosperous once again having recovered the aesthetic.

This battle is the same one that the prodigal must go through

when he wants to win over the elder brother in reconciliation

for the elder brother represents the universal order of the law.

II.3.9 Loving the God-Man as More Important

So Job like Abraham is a type of the God-man who gives up all

for the other in a spirit of praising love that recollects the dead.

When Job first lost everything he still prayed: “The Lord has

given; the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

But, as he was taunted by his friends he began to give in

to temptation and sigh and lament the very day he was born.

Finally he wished he could take God before a court of law.

At first Job saw all the world as a gift from God and then he came

to see it only as the problem of evil that looked worse and worse.

So it was with Kierkegaard. He came to see himself as a problem.

He could no longer stand his depressed father and moved out.

He was a small, hunch-back, gay, little guy who could not

even write his thesis. He not only had problems; he was a problem.

He was a physical, social, sexual, intellectual mess of problems.

But then Regina loved him and he loved her and all his problems

turned into gifts for now he was reconciled with his father.