Synopsis
A Christian-existentialist study of despair as the self's failure to rest in its ground, curable only through faith in God.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Public domainDespair is the sickness of a self that will not be the self it truly is before God, and the cure is to ground oneself transparently in the power that created it.
It locates the deepest human crisis not in circumstance but in the self's relation to itself and to God, making faith the answer to despair.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality.
Reading note
Read it slowly under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus; the dense opening definition of the self rewards patience and rereading.
Best paired with
Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality