Passion for Nothing Quotes

“This is why faith, hope, and love do not name an acquiring of potencies or the supernatural perfection of already given natural endowments. They are not “a direct heightening of the natural life in a person in immediate continuation from and connection with it.” They name instead an emptying of the self, a “dying to,” an “annihilation,” in which the self abides in “the continual understanding that I am able to do nothing at all.” Paradoxically, however, this self-emptying is simultaneously the “ability to do everything,” the ability to undertake every work absolutely freely, without why, outside of oneself, eccentrically, without seeking to translate one’s action into any kind of merit, disposition, or virtue that one would become anxious about protecting or perfecting. The annihilated soul lets go of every work the instant it is performed. It works only to let go, only to empty, only to sink into nothing, into the joy of possibility. Such annihilation does not result in apathy or quietism. It is the condition for an infinite engagement with existence, yet one without teleological ground: “to become nothing before God, and nevertheless infinitely, unconditionally engaged.”
― Peter Kline, Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard's Apophatic Theology

“What the self is most basically, most intimately, what is eternal in the self, is nothing that could serve as the foundation for the cultivation of self-possessed capability or teleological self-development. Kierkegaard, like Eckhart, understands human existence not in terms of the end-goal of self-cultivation but in terms of the imperative call to releasement, the call to abandon oneself as capable in order to “breakthrough” into faith. The “goal” of existence, its “absolute telos,” is the abandonment of every goal, every project of the self. It is in this abandon that the self becomes the nothing, the nothin-ing, that it is. Only then does the self tap into the elemental and abyssal joy of existence, the certainty that it is loved absolutely prior to any accomplishment and therefore free to love and hope, absolutely.”
― Peter Kline, Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard's Apophatic Theology