Let the Lion Roar (2014)

to continue and complete the quote I started above:

"served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality. Perpetually polite, so small, so nice, tampering and meddling and tampering some more – the result is that majesty is completely defrauded – of course, only a little bit. And right here is the danger, for the infinite is more disposed to a violent attack than to becoming a little bit degraded – amid smiling, Christian politeness. And yet this politeness is what our Christianity amounts to. But the very essence of Christianity is utterly opposed to this mediocrity, in which it does not so much die as dwindle away. 

Today’s orthodoxy essentially has its abode in the cordial drivel of family life. This is utterly dangerous for Christianity. Christianity does not oppose debauchery and uncontrollable passions and the like as much as it is opposes this flat mediocrity, this nauseating atmosphere, this homey, civil togetherness, where admittedly great crimes, wild excesses, and powerful aberrations cannot easily occur – but where God’s unconditional demand has even greater difficulty in accomplishing what it requires: the majestic obedience of submission. Nothing is further from obeying the either/or than this sweet family drivel. 

Consider what Christ thinks about mediocrity! When the apostle Peter, for instance, with good intentions wanted to keep Christ from being crucified, Christ answered: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an offense to me” (Mk. 8:33). 

In the world of mediocrity in which we live it is assumed that only crackpots, fanatics, and the like should be deplored as offensive, as inspired by Satan, and that the middle way is the right way, the way that alone is exempted from any such charge. What nonsense! Christ is of another mind: mediocrity is the worst offense, the most dangerous kind of demon possession, farthest removed from the possibility of being cured. To “have” religion on the level of mediocrity is the most unqualified form of perdition. 

The advantages and benefits of earthly life are bound up in mediocrity. But genuine religion has an inverse relationship to the finite. Its aim is to raise human beings up so as to transcend what is earthly. It is a matter of either/or. Either prime quality, or no quality at all; either with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength, or not at all. Either all of God and all of you, or nothing at all! 

We clever humans, however, prefer to treat faith as if it were something finite, as if it were something for the betterment and enjoyment of temporal life. It is supposed to bring us meaning and fulfillment, happiness and direction. This kind of religion is nothing but a deception. If you were honest and if you would look at it more closely, you would see that this really is contempt for religion, a dangerous and culpable irreligion. True faith insists on being an either/or. To treat it as if it were like drink and food is fundamentally to scorn it. But this is precisely the way of mediocrity."

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It is worth reading that even if you think intellectuals serve the ruling class. Kierkegaard is nobody's pawn, least of all the 1% (and he will live on long after David Echh!). However, he -- like us on these boards -- is seeking truth in the only way he knows how. Why does this matter to me? Why should it matter to you? Because of what he says about the infinite: if you are in the matrix (he calls this "mediocrity") you will perpetuate the negative (what we might call here "mind control"). As he says,

"...genuine religion has an inverse relationship to the finite. Its aim is to raise human beings up so as to transcend what is earthly."

This I take to be the aim of true spiritual seekers here as elsewhere (and as ever). It is precisely what gggg69 wrote about on another post: if you can get into the thought that there is only one thought running through us, that we are the expression for that thought and *not* the other way around, then you start to come to terms with one unity means -- and by extension, what true disunity means. Odd but fitting that we must look Within to truly find the Without.