Daniel’s Reviews > The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening > Status Update

The pagan lives in the aesthetic existence but not the ethical-religious existence. They lack spirit. “The ancient Church Fathers said that the virtues of the pagans were glittering vices: the pagan’s innermost self was despair, that the pagan was not conscious of himself before God as spirit.” “The pagans had such an irresponsible view of suicide, indeed, they praised it”

“The person of faith possesses the eternally sure antidote to despair: possibility, because for God everything is possible at every instant.”

“whether it [the self] thus assumes a more active form in which a person plunges into the fantastic or a more passive form in which he is carried away..the self then leads a fantastic existence in abstract infinitization or in abstract isolation…Thus for example in the religious realm: the relation to God is infinitizing but this can so carry a person away in fantasy that it merely becomes a sort of intoxication

“The imagination is the possibility of all reflection, and the intensity of this medium is the possibility of the intensity of the self.”
“… that the increasing degree of knowledge corresponds to the degree of self-knowledge, so that the more the self knows, the more it knows itself.”

“The possibility of this sickness [despair] is the human being’s advantage over the animal; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian’s advantage over the natural human being; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian’s blessedness.”

“For, humanly speaking, death is the last of things, and humanly speaking, there is only hope as long as there is life. But as Christianity views it, death is by no means the last of all things, is indeed only a minor event within that which is all, an eternal life…”

“A person always acquires courage in this way: when one fears a greater danger, a person always has the courage to confront a lesser one…”