A New Creation

“. . . The hardest test is not the martyrdom of the body but the martyrdom of the feelings, the daily grind, the life of faith that is often without the aid of feelings (the saints call them ‘sensible consolations’) and also without seeing with the external eyes or the internal eyes of our merely human reason (the saints call that ‘the dark night of the senses’ and ‘the dark night of the reason’, two parts of ‘the dark night of the soul’).

Thus the saint is what Kierkegaard calls a ‘knight of faith’. He slays not dragons but a more formidable foe: time, ordinariness, and boredom. Kierkegaard writes,

‘People commonly travel around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men—they abandon themselves to the bestial stupor which gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something. This does not interest me. But if I knew where there was such a knight of faith, I would make a pilgrimage to him on foot, for this prodigy interests me absolutely. . . . I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic message from the infinite. . . . I examine his figure from tip to toe . . . (but) he is solid through and through. . . . One can discover nothing of that aloof and superior nature whereby one recognizes the knight of the infinite. . . . And yet the whole earthly form he exhibits is a new creation.’”

~Peter Kreeft