ABSTRACT
Simon D. Podmore's anatomy, with its engrossing lyrical character, has allowed his readers to experience the journey that leads the self to the place of accepting forgiveness. Some of Podmore's most powerful meditations are on the self who—just on the brink of such surrender—turns back in despair to shut itself in with its own sin. When Bruce H. Kirmmse began work on Soren Kierkegaard and the Self before God, Podmore understood Kierkegaard's infamous anthropological descriptor—the "infinite qualitative difference" between humans and God—as sin. The bulk of Podmore's work has to do with setting the stage for this clear antithesis that is the culmination of his argument. There is a richness and diversity that is appropriate to a text attempting to be not only a work of Kierkegaard scholarship, but a constructive treatment of these themes simpliciter. Forgiveness is the ground of the self, and it rewrites the abyssal infinite qualitative difference as blessedness—rather than anxiety, melancholy, or despair.
