"It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey"
About this Quote
Kierkegaard’s line lands like a quiet accusation: disbelief is rarely an intellectual problem; it’s a behavioral one. The modern reflex is to treat faith as a matter of evidence and argument, as if belief were a thesis you accept after sufficient footnotes. Kierkegaard flips that comfort. If you can’t believe, he suggests, start by asking what belief would demand of you. The resistance isn’t in the mind so much as in the will.
The subtext is distinctly Kierkegaardian: Christianity (and, by extension, any serious ethical commitment) isn’t meant to be admired from a safe distance. It’s meant to be lived, which means risk, sacrifice, and a kind of exposure that rational spectatorship avoids. “Hard to obey” carries the sting of consequences: forgiving when you’d rather retaliate, relinquishing status, giving up the pleasures of cynicism. Disbelief becomes a protective strategy, a way to keep the self sovereign. If you don’t believe, you don’t have to change.
Context matters here. Writing in a 19th-century Denmark where churchgoing could be cultural routine, Kierkegaard distrusted “Christendom” as a social identity that diluted the radical demands of faith. The line is a critique of respectable religion and, just as sharply, of respectable doubt. It punctures the fantasy that we’re neutral, rational consumers of ideas. We pick metaphysics the way we pick lifestyles: according to what we’re willing to obey.
The subtext is distinctly Kierkegaardian: Christianity (and, by extension, any serious ethical commitment) isn’t meant to be admired from a safe distance. It’s meant to be lived, which means risk, sacrifice, and a kind of exposure that rational spectatorship avoids. “Hard to obey” carries the sting of consequences: forgiving when you’d rather retaliate, relinquishing status, giving up the pleasures of cynicism. Disbelief becomes a protective strategy, a way to keep the self sovereign. If you don’t believe, you don’t have to change.
Context matters here. Writing in a 19th-century Denmark where churchgoing could be cultural routine, Kierkegaard distrusted “Christendom” as a social identity that diluted the radical demands of faith. The line is a critique of respectable religion and, just as sharply, of respectable doubt. It punctures the fantasy that we’re neutral, rational consumers of ideas. We pick metaphysics the way we pick lifestyles: according to what we’re willing to obey.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
|---|
More Quotes by Søren
Add to List
