Endnotes to Problemata: Problema III

1. See Problema II, n4.

 2. The category of the interesting was an important concept in German Romantic aesthetics, introduced by Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) in his On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans. Stuart Barnet (Albany: State University of New York, 2001; originally published in 1797). Schlegel originally introduced the concept to capture the difference between classical and modern poetry. In his analysis, classical poetry (and classical art generally) aimed at beauty and therefore at producing a distinctly ordered work of art; modern poetry (and modern art generally) aimed at the interesting and therefore at producing works of art in which beautiful and ugly, and all manner of opposites, were combined side by side in accordance with an artist’s individuality. Silentio’s analysis, however, does not focus on individuality per se but on “the turning point,” the moment when the individual faces a choice whose resolution will effect a significant transformation in the course of their life. 

3. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where Kierkegaard has Johannes Climacus provide his most complete account of different modes of life, the primary modes are three: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Climacus (a humorist) then places irony as the confinium, or boundary, between the aesthetic and the ethical, and humor as the boundary between the ethical and the religious (see Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:501–2). Does this contradict the idea here that the confinium is the interesting instead? One reason to think not is that in Postscript Climacus is describing modes of existence and detailing the different ways that individuals can attempt to orient themselves and conduct a concrete life. Thus the focus is less on irony than on “the ironist” (1:502) both as a mode of existence and as an incognito for the ethical individual. Ethics and aesthetics do not have that meaning here in Problema III; throughout the Problema, Silentio uses these words in their ordinary sense in terms of two sets of categories and principles by which one may evaluate or judge agents, actions, and situations. “The interesting” is a border category in that “turning points” generally involve ethical dilemmas, which have inherent aesthetic interest to an observer.

 4. Aristotle (384–322 BC), Poetics, 12.1452b. 

5. Oedipus in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC).

 6. Iphigenia in Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripedes (c. 480–406 BC). In this play, it turns out that Artemis has whisked away Iphigenia right before she could be sacrificed, replacing her with a hart, and has taken her to Tauris where she now serves as a priestess.

 7. Kierkegaard’s aesthete pseudonym, “A,” author of Either/Or, Part I, provides an extended analysis of modern tragedy in comparison with ancient tragedy in “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama.”

 8. Aristotle, in describing the mating habits of all the animals he had observed—some more carefully than others—says that “Conception of the true egg and conformation of the wind-egg take 02-DSHPC167-Kierkegaard-Body.indd 111 02/21/24 3:46 PM 112 Endnotes to Problemata: Problema III place rapidly with most birds; as for instance with the hen-partridge when in heat. The fact is that, when she stands to windward and within scent of the male, she conceives . . . for the partridge appears to have a very acute sense of smell.” The History of Animals, trans. d’A. W. Thompson, 6:2, 560b, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:882.

 9. See Iphigenia at Aulis in Euripides V, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, trans. Charles R. Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), lines 855–96. 

10. A Latin phrase literally meaning “argument to the person,” i.e., an argument based on a person’s circumstances. 

11. In ancient Greece, an olive branch was a symbol of good will, peace, or supplication.

 12. This tale of Cupid and Psyche is preserved in The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius (c. AD 124–170). See The Golden Ass (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 217. 

13. In a draft, “Movements and Positions” was envisioned as the subtitle for the work as a whole. The pseudonym was then one “Simon Stylita” (his name alluding to a fifth-century desert father, Simeon Stylites, who lived in isolation from the world atop a pillar in the desert, from which he received the name “Stylites” which in Greek means “standing atop a pillar”), who is presented as a “Solo Dancer and Private Individual” (Pap. IV B 78 / JP 5, 5659). Movements and positions are the language of dance, positions being ways of organizing and setting the body to increase its functional powers, so as to make various movements, in the words of Agrippina Vaganova, “easy and convenient” (Agrippina Vaganova, Basic Principles of Classical Ballet, trans. Anatole Chujoy (New York: Dover Publications, 1946), p. 17). Just as he did in the Preliminary Expectoration, Silentio here uses this analogy to describe modes of psychological self-organization that function to make interior movements of spirit possible.

 14. See G. E. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Wendy Arons and Sara Figal, ed. Natalya Baldyga (New York: Routledge, 2019), esp. Essays 1 and 2, 37–42. Silentio refers to it by its German title, Hamburgische Dramaturgie. 

15. Early Protestant theology made a distinction between archetypal and ectypal theology. Archetypal theology is God’s own self-knowledge, whereas ectypal theology is knowledge of God communicated to creatures. Ectypal theology then had two main types: theologia beatorum (the knowledge of God belonging to the blessed who dwell in God’s presence, also called “knowledge of vision”) and theologia viatorum (the knowledge of God belonging to pilgrims, wanderers, or wayfarers). According to this schema, theologia beatorum and viatorum are distinguished by the fact that the blessed have arrived at their end and see God face-to-face, whereas “wayfarers” are still journeying and therefore their knowledge is necessarily both finite and imperfect (see Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1985), 299–304). Silentio means that “Christian drama” might appear in a different light if one took this to involve  focusing upon how individuals must interact with God in time, subject to partial knowledge, the heterogeneity of time and eternity, and the need to engage and persevere in self-formation over time.

 16. Silentio has here either made a mistake or introduced an unpublicized change in the story, as he does in discussing each of the four main poetic variations. Augurs were a feature of the Roman priesthood, not of Greek religion. What Aristotle in fact reports is that the bridegroom interpreted something as a bad omen (Politics 5.4.1303b37–1304a1). This mistake by Silentio could be an accident made by Kierkegaard, but it is suspicious that in the original story, the bridegroom behaved much more as Kierkegaard himself did, i.e., interpreting various features of his life as constituting a “bad omen” and “divine veto” against the marriage—conclusions he came to doubt immediately before writing Fear and Trembling, saying “Had I faith, I would have stayed with Regine” (SKS 18, 177; JJ:115 / KJN 2, 164). Moreover, this changes the entire meaning of the story, which otherwise would not serve Silentio’s purpose; for interpretations of accidents as pointing to a “bad omen” are significantly more private and subjective than are official pronouncements of the augurs. 

17. Johannes de Silentio alternately disclaims being a philosopher (see Foreword) and being a poet (here in this section) even while writing a book that is described as a “dialectical lyric” and taking on the tasks of both. 

18. Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850), Axel og Valborg (1810), in Oehlenschlägers Tragødier, 9 vols. (Copenhagen: 1841–49), 5:4–111. Axel and Valborg were close relatives and therefore were forbidden by the church to marry until they received papal dispensation. Then, however, it was learned that they were baptismal brother and sister (baptized on the same day in the same church), which was an additional hindrance to their marriage (see Oehlenschläger, 9, 49). 

19. This account of Queen Elizabeth’s last days is related in Lessing, Hamburg Dramaturgy, Essay 22, 93–95; Lessing cites David Hume’s History of England, 6 vols. (1759), vol. 4, and quotes extensively from William Robertson, History of Scotland, 2 vols. (1759), 2:284–86. 

20. Allusion to August Bournonville (1805–1879), a former star dancer of the Paris Opera who returned to Copenhagen to lead the Royal Danish Ballet and transform it into one of the premier centers for classical dance, establishing what is now known as “the Bournonville School” and the Danish style of ballet. Bournonville sometimes referred to himself as a “Ballet-Poet.” For example, in commenting on his balletic production of Faust, he remarked, “Despite everything, this ballet has been extraordinarily successful and is still viewed with interest. It made my name as a ballet-poet and gave the Danish Ballet its real substance” (My Theatre Life, trans. Patricia N. McAndrew [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979], 71; for other appearances of the term, see pp. 341 and 405). Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) seems to be the person who originally applied this title to Bournonville, in a letter from 1841 (“Bournonville is indeed matchless! He is a ballet-poet”). Kierkegaard and Bournonville were acquaintances with mixed feelings for each other. Kierkegaard greatly admired Bournonville as a dancer, but not as a poet. Bournonville admired Kierkegaard’s understanding of irony, but later viewed his attack on Bishop Mynster and the Danish church as “vile.” (For Kierkegaard’s attitudes toward Bournonville, see Anne Margrete Fiskvik, “’Let No One Invite Me, for I Do Not Dance’: Kierkegaard’s Attitudes toward Dance,” in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, 153; for Bournonville’s indebtedness to Kierkegaard on the topic of irony, see Knud Arne Jürgensen, The Bournonville Tradition, 2 vols. (London: Dance Books 1997), 1:66–67; for Bournonville’s reaction to Kierkegaard’s attack on Mynster, see Nathaniel Kramer, “August Bournonville: Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith and the ’Noble Art of Terpsichore,’” in Kierkegaard and his Danish Contemporaries (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 74. For Hans Christian Anderson and Bournonville’s letters, see Knud Arne Jürgensen, Whims of the Poet and the Balletmaster: H. C. Andersen’s and August Bournonville’s Correspondence [Digterens & Balletmesterens Luner: H. C. Andersens og August Bournonvilles Brevveksling] [Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005], 126.) 

21. This legend is first known to occur in a folk song, later collected in Christian Molbech in Agnete og Havmanden, in One Hundred Selected Danish Ballads (Et Hundrede udvalgte danske Viser; Copenhagen: 1847), 313–15. Many Danish authors adapted it, such as Jens Baggesen in his poem “Agnete fra Holmegaard” (1808), Adam Oehlenschläger in his Agnete (1812), and Hans Christian Andersen in his Agnete og Havmanden (1834).

 22. This condition of salvation—the merman’s belief that he can be saved if a woman falls in love with him—is not present in the legend. Silentio has again either made a mistake or allowed himself an unpublicized change in the legend, for he has imported the condition that obtains in the fairy tale of “Beauty and the Beast” and placed it in the legend of Agnes and the Merman, two fairy tales that both appear in Molbech’s One Hundred Selected Danish Ballads. This change—like the one above, in changing a “bad omen” to “augurs”—changes the essence of the original source material. It alters what the Merman must do from an internal movement of repentance, via an absolute relation to the absolute, to an external change of circumstances, via a relation to another finite being. The meaning of the new story, then, would be the folly of making one’s salvation dependent upon such an external condition, a moral that Silentio draws out from the legend both in the following footnote and in the main discussion.

 23. Cf. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, trans. Wallace, 42–45: “We all know the theological dogma that man’s nature is evil, tainted with what is called Original Sin. Now while we accept the dogma, we must give up the setting of incident that represents original sin as consequent upon an accidental act of the first man. For the very notion of spirit is enough to show that man is evil by nature, and it is an error to imagine that he could ever be otherwise. To such extent as man is and acts like a creature of nature, his whole behavior is what it ought not to be. For the spirit it is a duty to be free and to realize itself by its own act. Nature is for man only the starting-point which he has to transform” (p. 44). 

24. This remark foreshadows Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety, in which he treats the concept of hereditary sin, the effect of which is to prevent individuals from realizing the ethical under their own power. 

25. One of the intertestamental writings commonly termed “apocrypha,” Jewish writings produced in the four centuries between the book of Malachi (the last book in the Hebrew Bible or Old 02-DSHPC167-Kierkegaard-Body.indd 114 02/21/24 3:46 PM Endnotes to Problemata: Problema III 115 Testament) and New Testament writings concerned with Jesus Christ, the period known as “Second Temple Judaism.” Judaism does not accept these works as canonical. Within Christianity, their status has been debated; the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches view them as canonical or “deutero-canonical” whereas Protestant churches by and large have rejected them as inspired scripture, even if, like Luther, admitting them to be “useful and good to read.” 

26. Allusion to the German poet Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805); see his poem “Resignation” in The Poems of Schiller, trans. Edgar A. Bowring (New York: Hurst, 1851), 77: “Take, then, these Joy-Credentials back from me.”

 27. Editor’s translation. Daphnis and Chloe is a story of idyllic, innocent love. For a complete English translation, see Longus: Daphnis and Chloe. Xenophon of Ephesus: Anthia and Habrocomes, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Henderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 15.

28. See Tobit 8:1–3. The smoke and odor from the heart and liver on the embers of incense drove the demon away.

 29. Tobit 7:20. 

30. According to the fairy tale of Bluebeard, first recorded in Charles Perrault’s (1628–1703) Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals (Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé, 1697) and subject to numerous reinterpretations. Ludwig Tieck, one of the fathers of the German Romantic movement, wrote a popular version of the tale, The Seven Wives of Bluebeard in 1797, which may be in Kierkegaard’s mind as he uses the German spelling of the name (Blaubart) in the text. In the basic version of the tale, Bluebeard is a wealthy nobleman with a hideous blue beard that repels women, who nonetheless has been married six times. When he marries his seventh wife, he has to leave for business and leaves her with the key to all the doors in the chateau, along with the instruction that she can go wherever she likes, but must not open the door in the basement. When, overcome by curiosity, she does open it, she finds the dismembered remains of his previous wives. He returns unexpectedly and, in his wrath, intends to kill her. She begs the chance to pray with her sister Anne. Just in the nick of time, her brothers arrive and kill Bluebeard. It is notable that the example of Bluebeard differs from the implied analogy with Sarah in two important respects. Silentio suppresses these disanalogies in his description, which may represent a third mistake or unauthorized change to his source material. First, the repulsive feature that sets him apart without any fault on his part, his blue beard, is not actually dangerous to anyone; it is no demon that threatens murder to those he loves. Second—and this is the most important point, for it changes the whole essence of the analogy—the wives’ deaths are therefore not related to the beard, but are fundamentally due to his unjustified desire to preserve his secret and their justified desire to peer into the secret. In Either/Or, Part II, Judge Wilhelm argued that marriage precluded secrecy between husband and wife, and particularly condemned husbands who keep secrets from their wives (“frankness, uprightness, openness” are “the life-principle of love, and . . . secretiveness is its death”; “[it] takes courage to appear as one really is” (Either/Or Part II, 104). Kierkegaard himself seemed to believe this and it was a factor in his deliberations about whether or not to marry Regine  (SKS 18, 178–179; JJ:115 / KJN 2, 165). What is presented here is therefore hard to distinguish from the lie that such a “Bluebeard” might tell himself, namely, that his murderous life is not of his own choosing. 

31. King Richard the Third, act 1, sc. 1. Silentio quotes the passage in German: . . . Ich, roh geprägt, und aller Reize baar. Vor leicht sich dreh’nden Nymphen mich zu brüsten; Ich, so verkürzt urn schönes Ebenmass, Geschändet von der tückischen Natur, Entstellt, verwahrlost, vor der Zeit gesandt In diese Welt des Athmens, halb kaum fertig Gemacht, und zwar so lahm und ungeziemend, Dass Hunde bellen, hink’ ich wo vorbei. See Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke, 12 vols., trans. August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck (Berlin: 1839–40), 3:235–36. 

32. The Jew, a play by the English playwright Richard Cumberland (1732–1811), was performed regularly in Copenhagen’s Royal Theater. Its central character, Sheva, is considered by all to be a miser and a usurer; in point of fact, however, he is a benevolent figure who does good deeds for others in secret. He cannot “be translated into the universal” because of the legal and social discrimination that obtained against Jews, so he adopts the social role cast for him by society, but only ironically, allowing him to “do the good” despite the unjust judgment against him. 

33. Jens Baggesen (1764–1826), “The Cemetery in Sobradise” (“Kirkegaarden i Sobradise”), Danske Værker, 12 vols. (Copenhagen: 1827–1832), 1:282. 

34. The saying Nullum unquam exstitit magnum ingenium sine aliqua dementia may ultimately be based on the writings of the Roman philosopher Seneca (4 BC–AD 65), who—commenting on Aristotle’s observation of a link between melancholy temperament and madness in Problems 1.2.860b15–25—wrote nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit, “there has been no great genius without a mixture of madness.” 

35. Aristophanes (445–388 BC), Athenian comic poet. Wrote forty-four comedies, eleven of which survive. Kierkegaard owned the works of Aristophanes in Greek, German, and Danish. 

36. François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), French writer of the Enlightenment. He wrote works in many genres, but the overall spirit of his works is consistently critical, satirical, and mocking.

 37. “Baron Münchausen” is the name both of an actual German baron and a fictional character based upon that individual. Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Baron of Münchausen (1720–1797) became a minor celebrity for the tall tales he told of his supposed exploits as a soldier and adventurer. Some of these tales were collected in his Manual for Merry People (Vademecum für lustige Leute; 1781–1783). Not all of the Baron’s tales were invented; some were apparently plagiarized, as they can be traced to earlier sources. German author Rudolf Erich Raspe (1736–1794) satirized the baron in his Baron Münchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785, published anonymously in England, where the Baron’s one-time friend Raspe had settled). Raspe’s satirized Baron participates in adventures even more absurd than the original tall tales. In one episode he dresses himself as a Catholic priest to infiltrate the French camp, then, under cover of night, he dismounts more than three hundred cannons and throws them three leagues into the sea, which he attests is the second hardest thing he has done. In another, he is enslaved by Turks and becomes something like a “bee-herder,” during which time a fight with a bear that wishes to steal the honey of one of his bees leads to the baron making an accidental visit to the moon. The “truth” of these tales is in a “Letter to the Public” that is undersigned by Gulliver, Sinbad, and Aladdin. 

38. Tamerlane or Timur the Lame (1370–1405), a Mongolian king with a reputation of being a cruel conqueror. 

39. In 356 BC Herostratus burned the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the so-called “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,” so as to acquire enduring fame. In punishment for his act, he was executed and mention of his name was forbidden in order to prevent him from acquiring the fame he sought. In accomplishing the latter the Ephesian authorities evidently failed. 

40. Gregory of Rimini (c. 1300–1358), Augustinian monk who lectured in Paris and Rimini, claimed that unbaptized children go to Hell, while according to the common Catholic view of the time they go to Limbo, where they experience neither torment nor heavenly bliss. For this reason he acquired the title tortor infantium. 

41. This remark betrays a subtle mistake, or a fourth unauthorized change, in the source material. What Silentio says implies that Goethe’s (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832) Faust did see Margaret in the concave mirror, but in fact, what he sees there is some ideal of feminine beauty (Faust, Part 1, lines 2429–47): FAUST What do I see? A form from heaven above Appears to me within this magic mirror Lend me the swiftest of your wings, o love, And lead me near to her, nearer! Alas! but when I fail to keep my distance, And venture closer up. To gaze, I see her image dimmed as through a haze! The loveliest woman in existence! Can earthly beauty so amaze? What lies there in recumbent grace and glistens Must be quintessence of all heaven’s rays! Or could its like on earth be found?  MEPHISTOPHELES You know, a god can’t strain six days, my friend, And vote himself a bravo at the end, Unless the job was pretty sound. This once, keep gazing at your leisure; I may just sniff you out a peach like this, And lucky he whom fates allots the pleasure To lodge her at his hearth in wedded bliss. A bit later, after Faust has drunk the witch’s potion of youth, Mephistopheles says . . . soon you’ll feel with exquisite enjoyment Young Cupid stir and skip about in you. FAUST Just one more glance before into that mirror! That beauty was so fair, so fresh! MEPHISTOPHELES No, no! That paragon of women, sirrah, Shall soon confront you in the flesh. [aside] No fear—with this behind your shirt You’ll soon see Helen of Troy in every skirt! What Faust sees in the mirror is his own erotic ideal of the feminine. Mephistopheles is therefore lying when he says he will find her for him; instead, he is counting on the fact that once his lust is aroused, the sight of any woman will awaken the ideal through laws of association and similarity. Margaret is the next woman he sees, and he immediately seizes upon her as the one he wants. FAUST God, what a lovely child! I swear I’ve never seen the like of her. . . . [MEPHISTOPHELES enters.] FAUST Here, get me that young wench—for certain! MEPHISTOPHELES Which one? FAUST The one that just walked past. Mephistopheles, however, resists Faust, on the grounds that Margaret is an innocent, and “on her I have no hold at all!” The devil is, essentially, getting caught in his own trap. Having awakened Faust’s lust for this ideal, which will be excited by any woman, and then having promised him he will see her, he is now faced by the dilemma of the first woman Faust sees being a woman over whom  he lacks power. Faust forces Mephistopheles to help him by threatening to abandon their pact if he does not comply. This fourth mistake or unpublicized change in the source material once again changes the nature of the relationship at the heart of the drama. More disturbingly, it accepts, or pretends to accept, Mephistopheles’s lie to Faust that the woman in the mirror is a real woman he will meet. 

42. Silentio uses the German wirtschafte, to engage in trade. 

43. In the Danish comedy Erasmus Montanus or Rasmus Berg (1723, performed 1747), by Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), 1.3, the peasants of Berg’s native village are discussing his return home from college. His father complains that he cannot read his son’s letter due to the amount of Latin in it and therefore comes to the Deacon to discuss it. The Deacon says that although he went to school too, he does not know whether current students are really educated, unlike in his time when they had “bone in their skulls and beards on their chins.” He goes on to discuss the advantages of his education, which includes the ability to devise tricks whereby he can obtain extra pay for his job at funerals, through which he has been able to “get more than any of my predecessors did.” These tricks include having them pay more for certain hymns and for fine sand as opposed to garden dirt. The meaning of the analogy, then, is the use of education for the sake of devising means to trivial material ends. 

44. Silentio means Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, where (Matthew 6) he recommends praying and fasting in secret rather than publicizing that one is doing so for the sake of impressing others (and becoming like the hypocrites). 

45. See Hegel’s Aesthetics, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:64–68; Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. E. S. Haldane (New York: Humanities Press, 1955), 1:398–402; and Philosophy of Right, §140, 180–84. With his remark that Hegel did not understand irony, Kierkegaard may also be thinking of H. G. Hotho’s Preliminary Studies for Life and Art (Vorstudien für Leben und Kunst; Stuttgart and Tübingen 1835), in which it is stated of Hegel: “He also enjoyed jokes and merriment, but the deepest reason for humor was partly closed to him, and the newest form of irony was so contrary to his own tendency that he almost lacked the organ to recognize its existence, let alone enjoy it” (p. 394).

 46. Matthew 6:17–18. 

47. For example, Kierkegaard’s contemporary N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), Danish Lutheran minister and author on a variety of theological, philosophical, literary, historical, political and other topics. In his theology, the congregation took the place ordinarily held in Protestant theology by the Bible as the highest source of authority. 

48. Act 2, sc. 1. Silentio again quotes Shakespeare in German: Wer bat für ihn? Wer kniet’ in meinem Grimm Zu Füssen mir und bat mich überlegen? Wer sprach von Bruderpflicht? Wer sprach von Liebe? Shakespeare, King Richard the Third, Shakspeare’s dramatische Werke, Schlegel and Tieck, 3:278. “Hiesz” (called) has been changed to “bat” (asked) in the second line, a change that is closer to the English. 

49. In the early Christian church, the phenomenon of believers suddenly speaking “in tongues” (that is, suddenly speaking in unknown languages) was common, and common enough that Paul felt he must emphasize the fact that such speaking was desirable and good if prompted by the Holy Spirit, but that it was not capable of building up others unless they understood it, so that one should wish for greater spiritual gifts, above all, the gift of love. See 1 Corinthians 12–14. Here Silentio may wish to emphasize Paul’s claim that speaking in tongues “builds oneself up” rather than others, since Abraham’s speaking, here, could not benefit anyone. 

50. Genesis 22:8. 

51. Plato (428?–348? BC), Apology 36a. The best current manuscripts make the number of votes 30, however, rather than 3 (probably out of 501), meaning that the vote was 280 to convict against 221 to acquit. If the lower number were to turn out to be true, then the vote would be 253 against 248. Socrates responds to the announcement—along with the announcement that the prosecution would seek the death penalty—as follows: There are many other reasons for my not being angry with you for convicting me, men of Athens, and what happened was not unexpected. I am much more surprised at the number of votes cast on each side for I did not think the decision would be by so few votes but by a great many. As it is, a switch of only thirty votes would have acquitted me. I think myself that I have been cleared of Meletus’ charges, and not only this, but it is clear to all that, if Anytus and Lycon had not joined him in accusing me, he would have been fined a thousand drachmas for not receiving a fifth of the votes. In Athenian law, juries vote on the sentence as well as the guilt of the defendant. Both prosecution and defense would propose a penalty, and the jury would go on to choose one of them. Socrates proposed that the appropriate “counter-penalty” would be for the city to treat him as an Olympic victor, or at least to fine him an amount so small as not to harm him. In response to this, more members of the jury vote for the death sentence than initially voted to convict him. 

52. See Diogenes Laertius (Greek writer of the third century AD), Lives of the Philosophers, 2 vols., trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 2:354–55.