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
