It is similar to opening the mouth wide in order to talk loudly. Obviously if a person wishes to talk he does not keep his mouth shut, but he may also open it so wide that nothing at all is said and the mouth merely gapes wide open.] The southern nations also speak this way in categories of absoluteness precisely because they lack abstraction; they use superlatives and measure everything by the criterion of the moment, whereby the matchless becomes a meaningless category. To talk in this manner indeed seems livelier, but it is only a rather imperfect representation of what life is. One who knows something of the fuss the Grundtvigians are making of life and all that lives, together with the nuisance they are creating with the expression, will readily perceive that the whole secret is to achieve a southern childishness that, ignorant of abstraction, lacking the concentration to learn from experience, unembarrassed by dialectical continuity, is Quakerishly made ecstatic in the apoplectic absoluteness.*

* And then finally the theory of the Living Word, which is closely connected to the Church theory, since the Church with the Living Word forms the contrast to the dead word of Scripture

Is the theory of the Living Word a discovery in the ethical-psychological domain? Does the word’s liberating power pertain to quiet inwardness, consequently to passion, beyond that to inclosing reserve, and beyond that to the demonic? [VI B 29:109] Who would not gratefully read (for it is only Grundtvig who has an aversion to reading) what a competent observer would write about that. But here again the merit would lie in the development. Nor would an absolute distinction between the written and the spoken word be imaginable, since generally it would be hardly advisable for any thinker to pretend to have thought an absolute distinction between subdivisions under the same basic concept.

* In margin Or is the Living Word perhaps the mother tongue? Does the discovery signify that everyone actually knows only one language and that one never learns any language in the way one learns this, but then also that for the native the originality of the mother tongue is liberating for his whole spiritual development? No one could wish to learn something about this more than I, who too often have experienced the truth that I, at least, could not learn other languages. But here again it is the particulars that will decide whether the discovery is something or it is altogether matchless. Until the particulars are at hand, only so much is certain, that as an author Grundtvig is not exactly enriching the mother tongue but rather is impoverishing it, for he has used many a good expression so extravagantly and affectedly that one becomes disgusted with it and is almost tempted to stop using it. If one wants to call such behavior partiality for the mother tongue, this must be taken in a very particularist and separatist sense. [VI B 29:109] A true son’s endearing partiality for the mother tongue is recognized rather by his rewinning the prodigal sons of the language, by his regenerating the word ruined and rumpled by continual use and misuse and restoring to it the lost originality.

Is it a metaphysical discovery? Does it pertain to the relation between essence and form, that the word is the essential form of the thought, that in this relation there is an absolute commensurability? Is the discovery perhaps a counterpart to the Hegelian theory that the outer is the inner and the inner the outer?21 Alas, how exceedingly meritorious to be able perspicaciously to clear up this part of the boundary disputes between the logical and the ontological. If this is the discovery, then the absolute distinction is again inexplicable, whereas the merit of the discovery would lie simply and solely in the development.

Is it a discovery in dogmatics? When the discourse is about the Living Word, the speaker’s mood increases like this: The Living Word, life and spirit, the mother tongue, the feminine heart, Denmark’s loveliest field and meadow, the word of the Church, Martin Luther, the matchless discovery, the Word that was in the beginning.* [VI B29 110] This last phrase, as all know, is a reference to the first chapter in the Gospel of John. A reference to this is not exactly a matchless discovery reserved for a world-historical genius; unfortunately, neither is a Neoplatonic-gnosticizing mess matchless. Just as there have been times when idolatry was practiced with numbers, just as even now a lottery player concentrates all his conjecturing on the number, so also the Word has been used and is used—the Word that was from the beginning—in order to evoke the effect of profundity merely by saying it in a hollow voice. Wherever the dialectical and genuine thought development are lacking, one takes an easy shortcut to the most preposterous opposite: the profundity of the profound thought is made obvious by wrinkling the brow,** by yodeling with the voice, by pushing up the skin of the forehead, by staring fixedly ahead, by sounding the deep F in the bass scale. The profundity would consist in a more concrete understanding. Modern speculation has also taken up this λóγος [word]. Trendlenburg, splendidly educated by the Greeks, quotes the following passage from a modern philosophical work as an example of a fallacy (Erläuterungen, p. 69): [VI B 29 III] Gott ist das Wort; die Categorie ist ein Wort; altso ist die Categorie Gott [God is the word; the category is a word; consequently the category is God].23 Now, Grundtvig is seldom guilty of a fallacy; he is much too absolute, much too alive to respect the Roman yoke of the syllogism. To repeat, the discovery here would amount to nothing—to discover that “the word” is used in the New Testament with a special significance and ϰατ’ έξοχήν [in an eminent sense] would be a problematical matter in the nineteenth century, that is, after Christianity has lasted eighteen hundred years.

* Note. This rigmarole does not so much provide the train of thought, which I do not make so bold as to provide, but it is to be regarded as a recipe for preparing the mystical discourse.

** Note. With regard to thought, the mimetic has no significance whatsoever. Yet at times such a significance is conferred upon it. I recall a man who presumably had the content of all his thinking packed into one logical sentence, which he propounded as a formula. When I raised a little objection, he repeated the formula. When I again made a little objection, he repeated the formula and now said that I had not understood the sentence, that it essentially depended on the voice in which it was spoken. Thereupon he asked me to listen. He struck a pose and in a disguised voice,* half chanting, began to recite it three times in a row.22 Of course, I then confessed to him that I had now understood it—what one will not do to slip away from a lunatic man

Is it a historical-dogmatic discovery? Is the Living Word the tradition? So much acumen has been applied to this concept that it requires a subtle thinker to make discoveries. Even Magister Lindberg does not seem to have succeeded; from Grundtvig one did not dare to expect it. —Without daring to say with certainty what the Living Word is according to Grundtvig’s matchless discovery (and who would dare to have a definite opinion on that), I venture the following hypothesis, that the riddle-word is a theme for Grundtvig’s fantasizing.

[Deleted: What has been set forth here diverts me in a way from my project. And yet in another way it does belong in order to prepare for the small yield Grundtvig’s matchless Church theory provides for thought.