Overcome or Overcoming
Topic: Life in Particular
I am not sure if this will be significant for anyone else. I have grown increasingly appreciative of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on the human condition. The following is an excerpt from The Concept of Anxiety in which SK addresses sin and the tendency for humanity to stay only one step behind it, leaving sin with the power and initiative. I have added commentary where it may be helpful. SK’s writing can appear awkward but allow the vivid imagery of perpetual sin witnessed among us emerge.

In repentance sin is posited as actuality (that is repentance is what gives full force and reality to what has preceded it; i.e. the sin.) but repentance does not become the individual’s freedom (repentance, of this sort, does not liberate). Repentance is reduced to a possibility in relation to sin (I think he is saying that sin becomes the substance that give repentance its existence. Repentance is dependent on sin having no influence of its own); in other words, repentance cannot cancel sin, it can only sorrow over it. Sin advances in its consequences (one keeps on sinning); repentance follows it step by step, but always a moment too late (it can never overtake sin). It forces itself to look at the dreadful, but like the mad King Lear “O thou ruined masterpiece of nature” it has lost the reins of government, and it has retained only the power to grieve. At this point, anxiety is at its highest (Anxiety is the condition of “possibility”. That is anxiety is an awareness of what might happen, even though this possibility does not actually exist yet; this is literally being anxious over nothing). Repentance has lost its mind, and anxiety is potentiated (given more power) into repentance. The consequence of sin moves on; it drags the individual along like a woman whom the executioner drags by the hair while she screams in despair. Anxiety is ahead (one is already anxious of the sin before the fact); it discovers the consequence before it comes, as one feels in one’s bones that a storm is approaching (as the act of the sin approaches). The consequence comes closer; the individual trembles like a horse that grasps as it comes to a halt at the place where once it had been frightened. Sin conquers. Anxiety throws itself despairingly into the arms of repentance. Repentance ventures all. It conceives of the consequence of sin as suffering the penalty and of perdition as the consequence of sin (to deal with sin is only to suffer the cost). It is lost. . . . repentance has gone crazy.

To move ahead of sin one requires a “leap” this is posited only in faith. I will read on . . .

Did this make sense to anyone else? I think SK realizes the tendency of Christian repentance to be reactive and under the power of the sin that it follows.