page_title: Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1843
section_title: Every Good Gift and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above
hierarchical_section_title: Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1843 / Structure / Every Good Gift and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above
context_page_description: Four Upbuilding Discourses is a book by Søren Kierkegaard.
context_section_description: This discourse is based on the following 6 verses from the Epistle of James, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of variation. According to his own counsel, he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a first fruit of creation. Therefore, my beloved brethren, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, because a man's anger does not work what is righteous before God. Therefore put away all filthiness and all remnants of wickedness and receive with meekness the word that is implanted in you and that is powerful in making your souls blessed." James 1:17-22
   He begins with a recounting of the Biblical story of the fall of man. He says, "Only the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was man not allowed to eat-lest the knowledge should enter the world and bring grief along with it: the pain of want and the dubious happiness of possession, the terror of separation and the difficulty of separation, the disquietude of deliberation and the worry of deliberation, the distress of choice and the decision of choice, the judgment of perdition and the anxiety of perdition, the suffering of death and the expectation of death." Man broke the peace by plucking the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and the Garden of Eden was closed. How will the single individual find out where the good is and where the perfect is? Kiekegaard says doubt will explain it to him.
  Kierkegaard compares the human love of fathers to God the Father's love. Here he speaks of the "terrible upheaval" where God pronounces judgment on the father, possibly Kierkegaard's father, Michael. Kierkegaard reasons this way, ""If God's love does not know how to give good gifts any better than a father's love, then there certainly is small comfort in these words. In this way the words became for him what fatherly love was for him-a beautiful, hallowed, wistful recollection, an uplifting mood that quickened in his soul the conception of the best in the human being but also of the human being's weakness, quickened the soul's most blessed longing but also retracted it again in order to subordinate it to the sadness of concern." Once doubt is planted, Kierkegaard says, "then doubt became stronger. What he himself had discerned, what he himself had experienced, what he with sympathetic concern and to his own grief had become convinced of-that earthly life is vanity, that even people's good gifts are weak-willed and only fill him with disgust-this he now found to be confirmed in Scripture also. Thus it was now plain and clear to him that this is what the words meant, and that far from supporting the most beautiful in life and letting it continue, they on the contrary tacitly condemned it and allowed it to disappear." Was Kierkegaard's father a good and perfect gift or not? Later, in Stages on Life's Way, Kierkegaard explored Solomon's relation to David and asked the same question. Was David a good and perfect gift to Solomon?
  Kierkegaard says there is a "condition" that makes a gift good and perfect. He explored various conditions necessary for an individual to enjoy life in Either/Or Part II. He says, "Every human being, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and of its purpose." But the condition necessary for the enjoyment of life (health and beauty, power such as Nero had, the esthetic enjoyments of life, "every life-view that has the condition outside itself is despair." Either/Or was an "attempt to actualize an ethical life-view." This "condition" doesn't come from externalities according to Kierkegaard. He says,
  What earthly life does not have, what no man has, God alone has, and it is not a perfection on God's part that he alone has it, but a perfection on the part of the good that a human being, insofar as he participates in the good, does so through God. What, then, is the good? It is that which is 
caption: The Holy Spirit by Peter Paul Rubens
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