ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes Hera’s curse, passages in the writings of S. Kierkegaard in which he interrogates his theological faith, lines from “East Coker” by T. S. Eliot, and her work with one particular patient who taught her about the importance of faith. She argues that hope is hope for something; love too has its objects but faith it, is ontological and thereby of the human condition and not in something. The author draws upon some passages from Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, in which he struggles between his devotion and his philosophical interrogation of faith, and in which he describes faith as “a tremendous paradox”. Kierkegaard’s creative split is the enacting of the silencing of the two different parts at different times. In the Greek tragedy, The Oresteia, this tragic figure, a tortured king, is asked to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia on the altar to appease the goddess Artemis.
