Stages on Life's Way

Without risk there is no faith ... . If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
- Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript- (1846 David F. Swenson, Lillian M. Swenson, and Walter Lowrie, trans., 1941)

What stage of life are you in?

In his book, Stages on Life's Way, Kierkegaard offered a kind of guide to the stages our lives may go through-if we're lucky enough to live so long.
l) The Aesthetic Stage, As children and young people we are concerned with ourselves and our own lives on a surface level. We want sensation and pleasure and we care little for the consequences our actions have for others. Some people never get out of this stage their whole lives long.
2) The Ethical Stage. At some point in life reason leads many of us to realize that if we care nothing for others, they will come to care nothing for us. This realization sometimes hits people late in life, with the force of a revelation, and so they are led to try to treat others with love and respect,
3) The Religious Stage. Some of us finally come to realize that, no matter how good and ethical we try to be, we are lost and alone anyway and ultimately must give up every thing we hold dear. And being really moral we find to be impossible, for we are ~ only human. We can only overcome this hopelessness through a leap of faith, in which we choose to believe in our salvation even though we know it is hopeless. We meet despair and overcome meet it, not by reason or belief, but by faith. Can you describe three people you know who are each in one of these three stages? What about you? What stage are you in?

Bibliography

Kierkegaard, Soren. Either/Or, Doubleday & Company Inc., Garden City, New York, 1959, two volumes.

Bretall, Robert, ed,, A Kierkegaard Anthology, Princeton Princeton University Press, 1946.

Kierkegaard. Soren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, David Swenson, Lillian Swenson, and Walter Lowrie translation, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1941, 1969.