Epilogue

The Epilogue opens with a merchant parable. In Holland, when the price of spice became sluggish, merchants sank cargoes to drive up the price. Is something similar needed in the world of spirit — a pious pretense that we have not reached the highest, in order to have something to fill out the time? Kierkegaard's answer is no. The tasks are genuinely sufficient for a human life. The properly human — passion — is not something one generation can transmit to the next by instruction. Every generation must begin from the beginning.

No one has learned to love from reading about love; no one has learned faith from hearing that faith is easy. Every generation of faith begins at faith's beginning, has the same task every previous generation had, and comes no further — not because the task is small but because it is large enough for an entire life. "The highest passion in a human being is faith, and no generation begins here at any other point than the previous one." The one who comes to faith does not stop at it — he has his life in it — but he does not get further than faith either. "Not to anything else; for when he discovers this, then he has another explanation."

The book closes with a brief joke. Heraclitus said one cannot step into the same river twice. His disciple, wishing to go further, improved this: one cannot step into it even once. Poor Heraclitus, to have such a disciple! The improvement turns a living, paradoxical observation into an Eleatic proposition that denies motion. This is what the age does to faith: takes a living paradox and improves it into a philosophical abstraction that means nothing, in order to be able to say it has gone further. The Epilogue offers no resolution, no synthesis, no comfort. The book ends where it began: with the task, which is sufficient, and the silence of the one who cannot speak.