Igor Tavilla: The Reader, The Lover, The Prophet

The book offers a three-step itinerary into Kierkegaard’s thinking. It opens with an investigation of his biblical background, offering textual evidence that categories, such as ‘repetition’, ‘stages’, ‘life’s way’ and ‘leap’, find their true meaning in a scriptural framework.

Then it focuses on the superhuman revolutionary conception of love discussed in Works of Love (1847), considering the relation to the unchangeable evermoving God as the basic condition for self-upbringing, and becoming neighbour to oneself as the fundamental task in Christian life. Eventually, it outlines Kierkegaard’s attack against both religious conformism and rational mysticism’s claim to overcome Christianity.

It concludes with two addenda respectively devoted to exploring analogies between Kierkegaard’s communicative strategy and the film Ordet (1954) by C. Th. Dreyer, and to considering Kierkegaards’s religiousness in the light of the modern/archaic dichotomy stresses by Mircea Eliade.