Kierkegaard and the Capax: The Capacity of the Finite for the Infinite in History and the Moment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Broadly speaking, the present study concerns Kierkegaard and the metaphysics of divine transcendence and immanence in the Lutheran tradition. In particular, it examines Kierkegaard’s position regarding the classical Lutheran claim that the finite has the capacity for the infinite (the capax). According to the capax, God does not simply touch creation but is entirely present within it. As conventionally interpreted, Kierkegaard would seem to have little sympathy for such a view. He is, nevertheless, a thinker in the Lutheran tradition, and he says a great deal that seems to echo the capax. The question thus arises as to whether or not his thinking actually coincides with it. To answer this question, this study draws primarily on Luther and the Lutheran scholastic Johann Gerhard in order to define the classical expression of the capax in terms of a series of divine presences. Among others, these include the divine presence in creation as a whole, human spirit, Christ, and the Eucharist. Using this definition, the study then examines the corresponding conceptions of immanence in Kierkegaard, identifying convergence and divergence. Such analysis demonstrates that Kierkegaard’s thinking does coincide with the classical capax: He develops it in terms of his understanding of history. As he sees it, the finite’s capacity for the infinite is essentially time’s capacity for eternity—something that he calls the moment. This conclusion represents a novel perspective on such perennial Kierkegaardian themes as spirit, contemporaneity, and paradox, as well as Kierkegaard’s intellectual inheritance (Romantic, Idealist, and Lutheran), and his character as a systematic thinker.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".