Endnotes

1. Echo of Homer’s Iliad, 6.145–49. The Trojan Glaucus, son of Hippolochus, and the Greek Diomedes, son of Tydeus, meet on the battlefield between the two great armies and speak with one another before pledging friendship and exchanging their armor with each other. Great son of Tydeus, why ask about my lineage? ‘Τυδεΐδη μεγάθυμε τί ἢ γενεὴν ἐρεείνεις; Human generations are like leaves in their seasons. οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν. The wind blows them to the ground, but the tree φύλλα τὰ μέν τ᾽ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ᾽ ὕλη Sprouts new ones when spring comes again. τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ᾽ ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρη: Even so generations of men come and go. ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ᾽ ἀπολήγει. See Homer, Iliad, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 116; Homeri Opera, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920), 1:124. Glaucus’s dismissal of the importance of memory, and likening of human life to an alternating series of meaningless and repetitive “generations” and “passing-aways,” contrasts with the perspective of the poem, which presupposes the worthiness of recollecting the heroes, their lineages, and their deeds. This contrast between despair over death and memorialization in poetic glory occasionally comes to the fore of the Iliad, as when another hero says that, despite preferring to live “immortal and ageless,” the heroes instead live “either to give glory / to another man or get glory from him,” 12.335, 341–42, 233–34. That is, their doom is that their best hope is the inferior immortality of poetic recollection. 

2. Probably another allusion to Homer’s Iliad, 3.381. The occasion of the Trojan War was Paris’s abusing the sacred trust between guest and host (xenia) by leaving with Menelaus’s wife, Helen, from Sparta while Menelaus’s guest (in some sources, he abducts her; in others, he seduces and then absconds with her). Agamemnon, Menelaus’s brother, then leads the Greeks to war with the Trojans to avenge the injustice. After several years of combat, the armies agree to allow Helen’s fate to be determined by single combat between Paris and Menelaus. Menelaus completely outmatches Paris but is repeatedly prevented from killing him—his spear narrowly misses him, his sword shatters on his helmet, and the helmet strap with which he is choking Paris snaps and breaks. Finally, Aphrodite snatches Paris up, hides him in a cloud, and whisks him away to his own bedchamber. If so, then the significance of this allusion could be that “misunderstanding” functions as Aphrodite did, preventing Paris from receiving the poetic honor of one who died honorably in heroic combat. It is also possible that Silentio means to allude to the scene of Jesus’s transfiguration or of his ascension. In the first case, after seeing Jesus transfigured with light and speaking with Moses and Elijah, a cloud “overshadows” Peter, James, and John; God speaks from the cloud and they lower their eyes, and when they lift their eyes, Moses and Elijah are gone and only Christ remains. A key element of this event is Peter’s confusion; he initially offers to erect three tents for Jesus, Moses, and John, to which God responds, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matthew 17:5). Here, the significance of the allusion might be that the “cloud of misunderstanding” stands for Peter’s confusion about Christ and the requirement that it be dispelled.In Matthew 16:13–20, Peter confesses for the first time that Jesus is the Christ; then in Matthew 16:21–28, Peter rejects Jesus’s statement that he must suffer and die, and Jesus rebukes him strongly. The transfiguration, with its divine voice speaking from the cloud, immediately follows this. If this allusion is meant, then Silentio (and Kierkegaard) thought that the scene in some sense symbolized Peter’s movement from confusion to greater understanding of his hero, Christ, and the necessity of Christ’s mission ending in death. Finally, it is possible that the cloud is meant to refer to the cloud that covers Christ during the ascension. When Christ has completed his earthly mission, having been crucified, having been raised in resurrection, and having restored his disciples, he ascends into Heaven and “a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9). Then the accent falls not on the misunderstanding so much as on the promise that, in the future, lover and hero will be reunited. 

3. This paragraph, setting out a series of metrics to use in measuring greatness, describes Abraham’s faith in terms that frequently echo biblical motifs or ideas. For example, the motif of “striving with God” is based on the patriarch Jacob’s “wrestling with God” in Genesis 32:22–28. This leads God to rename him “Israel,” meaning “he who strives with God.” The entire nation then takes on the name “Israel” and, symbolically, the role of the one who “strives with God.” Silentio then seems to be suggesting that it is faith itself that constitutes “striving” with God and, insofar as Abraham was the father of faith and perfected his faith at Mount Moriah, Abraham was an even greater wrestler than Jacob. The idea that the strength of faith is powerlessness is an idea presented by Paul in 2 Corinthians. After pleading with God in prayer for him to remove “a thorn in the flesh,” Paul reports that God said to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). In 1 Corinthians, while addressing pride and the divisions it creates within the church, Paul says: “Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:18–19). Finally, in the Gospel of John, when Jesus enters Jerusalem the final time before his death, he is approached by some Greeks. He says to his disciples, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:23–25). This culminates in Jesus rededicating himself to following his path to death and the Father’s promise of glorification. Silentio’s meaning seems clearly to be that the Old Testament portrait of Abraham’s faith already has the features extolled in the New Testament: Abraham’s faith accomplishes great things through God’s grace and power, not Abraham’s strength; it is so contrary to worldly wisdom as to seem folly, but actually shows up the folly of pursuing the path laid by worldly wisdom; and it is necessarily linked to a kind of “death of self” and willingness to let one’s hope die only to be brought back to life by God. Finally, while there is no New Testament statement that “the form” of faith has the appearance of madness, this could be said to represent a fair summary of worldly wisdom’s perspective on faith: someone becoming great by means of faith seems, to the contemporary observer, indistinguishable from someone suffering from madness. 

4. Allusion to Hebrews 11:8–19, part of a New Testament “roll-call” of heroes of faith: By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore. These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. By faith Isaac invoked future blessings on Jacob and Esau. By faith Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, bowing in worship over the head of his staff. By faith Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his bones. 

5. Silentio here likens Abraham, the “chosen one,” to Jesus, the ultimate “chosen one” and “beloved Son” in whom the Father was “delighted” or “well-pleased.” See Isaiah 42:1 (“Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one, in whom my soul delights”), which is quoted in Matthew 12:18; there is an echo of this in Matthew 17:5—the transfiguration of Christ—when the Father proclaims “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.”

 6. Readers and commentators sometimes attempt to determine exactly who is intended by these rather general allusions (“There was one in the world who also lived banished from the fatherland,” “There was one in the world who also had an expectation”). If we assume we must assign a specific referent, then perhaps the Roman poet Ovid best fits the description: he was banished from Rome by the emperor Caesar Augustus in AD 8 to a small island, Tomi, in the Black Sea, where he wrote the elegies Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto; many hold that he still believed he could convince the emperor to recall him to Rome and cancel his exile, but this expectation was dashed. Some may settle upon the prophet Jeremiah, author of the biblical book of Lamentations. In this case, perhaps the thought is that Jeremiah had some expectation that the people would heed his warnings and repent, yet of course they did not do so, Jerusalem was sacked, and its people were carried into exile—the occasion for writing Lamentations. Making these words refer to a specific individual, however, seems to undermine their literary function. Such events could occur in any human life and what the passage emphasizes is that lament and sorrow are typical human responses, those things which any of us would likely do under such circumstances. The individuality of the referent, if any, is therefore unimportant. Any alien living in a strange land and any person with disappointed expectations can find him—or herself—in these descriptions. 

7. When God called Abraham to leave his home and go to an unknown land, he promised him “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). 

8. See Numbers 20:11. During the long journey from Egypt back to the Promised Land, the people began to complain about their lack of water, saying (among other things), “Why have you made us come up out of Egypt to this evil place?” God told Moses to tell the rock, “Yield your water!” and then God would miraculously provide water for them (Numbers 20:8). Moses, angry at the complaining people, struck the rock with his staff instead. God still provided water for the people, but Moses was barred from entering the Promised Land for his disobedience. 

9. See Genesis 18:12. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?” Has Silentio forgotten Genesis 17:17? 15And God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” 17Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” This “forgetting” confirms the observation made by another of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, that Silentio makes use of “the foreshortened perspective” so as to depict Abraham “in a state of completeness.” See Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 586. 

10. Jacob loved Joseph more than he loved his other sons because he was the child of his old age. Genesis 35:22–23, 37:3. But Abraham also had Ishmael for a son (through Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian handmaid); this seems to be another example of Silentio’s “forgetting” mentioned in the note above, especially notable because Silentio has mentioned Hagar and Ishmael in the Prelude; see Prelude, note 6. 

11. See Genesis 18:23–33. The Lord warns Abraham that he is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness, and Abraham intervenes on their behalf, appealing to the Lord and bargaining until he is reassured that God will not destroy the cities if he finds even ten righteous persons in it. 

12. See Luke 23:30. Jesus in this passage describes the response people will have when Jerusalem falls (or, in some interpretations, what they will do during the last days). 

13. A free rendition of Genesis 22:3, 9–10: So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young place of which God had told him [Gen. 22:3]. . . . When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood [22:9]. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son [Gen. 22:10]. 

14. See Genesis 8:4, when the ark finally comes to a rest upon land again, upon “the mountains of Ararat.”

 15. In ancient Greece, the term “divine madness” or theia mania (θεῖα μανία) referred to several different phenomena that were seen as involving a simultaneous loss of selfhood and reason, and a corresponding transformation of agency. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates divides “madness” into two kinds, one arising from “human disease,” the other from a “divine release from customary habits.” He then divides divine madness into four kinds: prophetic, ritual, poetic, and erotic (244–245d, 265a–b in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997)). Any form of divine madness, with its loss of self, could be either beneficial or harmful, either enhance agency or reduce and degrade it. The Greeks therefore viewed even divine madness with ambivalence. This ambivalence is given powerful literary expression in Donna Tartt, The Secret History (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1992); Plato’s Phaedrus appears in the novel at p. 38ff. For a recent academic treatment covering the topic widely, see Yulia Ustinova, Divine Mania: Alteration of Consciousness in Ancient Greece (London; New York: Routledge, 2018).