Kierkegaard on learning to will the good
Kierkegaard is comparing “fear” with “the Good itself,” insofar as each try to “help us to will the Good in truth.” He believes that the Good itself is the only way for us to learn, because learning from fear would cause “double-mindedness.” The Good “will not tolerate anyone else, any strange helper.”
[A]s the Good is only one thing, so it wishes also to be the only thing that aids a man. The Good suckles and nurses the infant, rears and nourishes the youth, strengthens the adult, supports the aged. The Good teaches the striving one. It helps him. But only in the way that the loving mother teaches a child to walk alone. The mother is far enough away from the child so that she cannot actually support the child, but she holds out her arms. She imitates the child’s movements. If it totters she swiftly bends as if she would seize it – so the child believes that it is not walking alone. The most loving mother can do no more, if it be truly intended that the child shall walk alone. And yet she does more; for her face, her face, yes, it is beckoning like the reward of the Good and like the encouragement of Eternal Blessedness. So the child walks alone, with eyes fixed upon the mother’s face, not on the difficulties of the way; supporting humself by the arms that do not hold on to him, striving after refuge in the mother’s embrace, hardly suspecting that in the same moment he is proving that he can do without her, for now the child is walking alone (Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Harper Torchbook edition 1956, 84-85).
Due to sloth I can’t find the reference, but I know that in a couple of places Dietrich Bonhoeffer would speak of God wanting us to in some way be able to live “without God.” I recall learning that he spoke of this in Letters and Papers from Prison, and if I’m not mistaken, these passages are commonly misconstrued. Hopefully my theologically inclined friends can clarify the references and context, but I suspect one can connect Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on that topic with what Kierkegaard gets at in this passage. At least that’s how I recall understanding Bonhoeffer when I first heard of his controversial statements.
Speaking of mothers’ faces, has anyone else seen Where the Wild Things Are? What a marvelous and beautiful film.