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Only lower natures forget themselves and become something new. Thus the butterfly has altogether forgotten that it was a caterpillar, perhaps it can so completely forget in turn that it was a butterfly that it can become a fish. Deeper natures never forget themselves and never become something other than they were.
Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith; for only in infinite resignation does my eternal validity become transparent to me, and only then can there be talk of grasping existence on the strength of faith.
But at least I can see this, that the young girl’s conviction is mere frivolity compared with a faith that is unshakeable even when it sees the impossibility.
every moment to see the sword hanging over the loved one’s head and yet find, not repose in the pain of resignation, but joy on the strength of the absurd – that is wonderful. The one who does that, he is great, the only great one, the thought of it stirs my soul, which was never sparing in its admiration of greatness.
Seen as an immediate, no more than sensate and psychic, being, the single individual is the particular that has its telos in the universal, and the individual’s ethical task is always to express himself in this, to abrogate his particularity so as to become the universal.
Abraham is therefore at no instant the tragic hero, but something quite different, either a murderer or a man of faith.
She needs no worldly admiration, as little as Abraham needs our tears, for she was no heroine and he no hero, but both of them became greater than that, not by any means by being relieved of the distress, the agony, and the paradox, but because of these.
When a person sets out on the tragic hero’s admittedly hard path there are many who could lend him advice; but he who walks the narrow path of faith no one can advise, no one understand. Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion,* and faith is a passion.
If, in this connection, I then say that it is my duty to love God, I in fact only utter a tautology, in so far as ‘God’ is understood in an altogether abstract sense as the divine: i.e. the universal, i.e. duty.
– and to contend with the whole world is a comfort, but to contend with oneself dreadful.
