16.3.09

LENTEN REFLECTION OF THE DAY: From Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity:

But we shall not spend any more time on this; we prefer to advance another observation: Is truth such that in relation to it one may suppose that a person can appropriate it summarily with the help of another? Summarily, that is, without willing oneself to be developed in like manner, to be tried, to battle, to suffer as did the one who acquired the truth for him? Is it not just as impossible as to sleep or dream oneself into the truth; is it not just as impossible summarily to appropriate it, however wide awake one is? Or is one is wide awake, is it not merely an illusion if one does not understand or refuses to understand that in relation to truth there is no abridgment that leaves out the acquiring of it, and that in relation to acquiring it from generation to generation there is no essential abridgment, so that every generation and everyone in the generation must essentially begin from the beginning?

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