<P> If I am anxious about a past misfortune, then this is not because it is in the past but because it may be repeated, i.e., become future . If I am anxious because of a past offense, it is because I have not placed it in an essential relation to myself as past and have in some deceitful way prevented it from being past . If indeed it is actually past, then I cannot be anxious but only repentant . If I do not repent, I have allowed myself to make my relation to the offense dialectical, and by this the offense itself has become a possibility, and not something past . If I am anxious about the punishment, it is only because this has been placed in a dialectical relation to the offense (otherwise I suffer my punishment), and then I am anxious for the possible for the future . Thus we have returned to where we were in Chapter I. Anxiety is the psychological state that precedes sin . It approaches sin as closely as possible, as anxiously as possible, but without explaining sin, which breaks forth only in the qualitative leap . Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, Nichol p. 91 - 92 </P> <P> Jacques Maritain wrote in 1964, "Soren Kierkegaard was a contemporary of Marx . But it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that his name began to become famous and his influence to be felt . Neither a philosopher in the strict sense of the word - although nourished in philosophy - and yet a philosopher in the sense of being a lay thinker; nor a theologian nor a prophet (obsessed by his feeling for the requirements of the Gospel and by his own unworthiness, he hardly dared to profess himself a Christian), and yet a kind of prophet and a knight of faith, and, at the end of his life, "a witness to the truth" in his passionate revolt against the established church, this poet of the religious, as he called himself, is a figure complex and ambiguous enough to occupy generations of interpreters and to justify their disagreements ." He also claimed that Theodor Haecker was a knight of faith . </P> <P> Kierkegaard used his book Fear and Trembling to make the claim that Abraham, Mary and a tax collector were also knights of faith . These were just common people so faith isn't just for the "chosen few", he says, "Moses struck the rock, but he did not have faith....Abraham was God's chosen one, and it was the Lord who imposed the ordeal ." He says "artists go forward by going backward" by writing about Abraham's faith, Job's faith, Paul's faith and even Christ's faith and by creating imaginary constructions about "heroes" of faith they make Christianity difficult for the simple individual who wants to be a Christian . Yet at the same time churches often make Christianity "a matter of course". Faith just grows by itself, it needs no testing by the individual who wants to have faith, it ends up explained by external functions rather than the internal acknowledgement by the single individual who wants to be a Christian . Artistically faith becomes something impossible to reproduce in actual life . Only the person who is existing can reproduce faith, expectancy, patience, love and the resolution to hold fast to the expectation no matter what happens in his or her own life to the best of their ability . A person can become a Knight of Faith by acting without certainty . This is what Abraham did in Fear and Trembling and The Young Man failed to do in Repetition . One says, I'll do it because everything within me says I should and the other says I'll do it if everything outside of me says I should . Kierkegaard described the difference well in Either / Or . </P> <P> If one wishes to strip people of their illusions in order to lead them to something more true, here as always you (the esthete) are "at your service in every way ." On the whole you are tireless in tracking down illusions in order to smash them to pieces . You talk so sensibly, with such experience, that anyone who does not know you better must believe that you are a steady man . But you have by no means arrived at what is true . You stopped with destroying the illusion, and since you did it in every conceivable direction, you actually have worked your way into a new illusion - that one can stop with this . Yes, my friend, you are living in an illusion, and you are achieving nothing . Here I have spoken the word that has always had such a strange effect on you . Achieve - "So who is achieving something? That is precisely one of the most dangerous illusions . I do not busy myself in the world at all; I amuse myself the best I can, and I am particularly amused by those people who believe that they are achieving, and is it not indescribably funny that a person believes that? I refuse to burden my life with such grandiose pretensions ." Søren Kierkegaard, Either / Or Part II, Hong, p. 78 - 79 </P>

What is the difference between the knight of faith and the knight of infinite resignation