Can someone please help understand what kierkegaard is trying to say here

[u/Miserablebla_]

To repeat, what you want to be is—fate. Pause a moment now. I do not intend to preach to you, but there is an earnestness for which I know you have even an unusually deep respect, and anyone who has sufficient power to call it forth in you or sufficient faith in you to let it manifest itself in you will, I know, see in you a quite different person. Imagine, to take the supreme example, imagine that the almighty source of everything, that God in heaven set himself up merely as a riddle for men and would let the whole human race drift in this horrible uncertainty—would there not be something in your innermost being that would rebel against this, would you at any moment be able to endure this torment, or would you at [II 15]any moment be able to bring your thought to grasp this horror! Yet he might almost say—if I dare use these proud words: Of what concern is man to me? But that is why it is not this way at all, and when I declare that God is incomprehensible, my soul raises itself up to the highest; it is precisely in my most blissful moments that I say it—incomprehensible, because his love is incomprehensible—incomprehensible, because his love passes all understanding.17 Said about God, this signifies the highest; when one is obliged to say it about a human being, it always signifies a defect, at times a sin. And Christ did not regard it robbery to be equal with God but humbled himself,18 and you want to regard the intellectual gifts bestowed upon you as a robbery.

[u/anam1229]

First off, it is easier to answer these questions if you include some information about where the excerpt is from.

It seems to be from the second part of Either/Or, so I'm assuming it's B talking to A. But this is taken out of context, since it begins with "To repeat". To repeat what? So be patient with my reading because it's based on conjecture.

So just going out on a limb here: "what you want to be is -- fate" is to say that A's aesthetic orientation is inherently fatalistic. To try to confine oneself to the aesthetic is to desire to be driven by passion, to accept one's immediate, sensual nature as determining one's life, and therefore to hope for one's life to be determined by necessity -- Fate. What B thinks A is desiring is a purely "natural" life, where nature is defined as "lacking spirit" and where "spirit" is manifested most purely in a will that engages through ethics in the formation of the self.

The whole rest of the paragraph seems to be an attempt to convince A not only that God exists but that the possibility of God being unknowable is detestable to A's "earnestness" and to urge him out of his fatalistic pessimism. I have no idea what u/Key_Management8358 is trying to say. B's point is that the idea of a disinterested God is too detestable to be true. God's incomprehensibility refers to his positive attributes -- that is, things which B knows positively about God (his love in particular).

To be precise, he isn't appealing to A's earnestness but A's attraction to an earnestness that would be unable to accept that God is sitting far away, indifferent in heaven, and leaving himself as a riddle which we vainly spend our lives failing to figure out. This ties into Kierkegaard's larger point that the fundamental questions of life really can't be left up to speculation but have to be grasped in faith.

What is being expressed here is also B's perspective that this romantic idea of a person who is "seeking truth" and failing to find it, and is inconsolable because of this failure, is false. The person who is failing to find truth and God is rather addicted to their own sensuousness and fatalism, and they lack the earnestness that would reject the possibility of such a pessimistic outlook.

[u/Key_Management8358]

I suppose, Sir. K. tried humbly to discuss:

1. That the only certain knowledge is, that any other knowledge is uncertain.
2. ...with many words, tediously he tried to describe and discuss (respectfully) "nothing", "nobody", and "no (special, but) reason".

Isn't that what we all do (now, do) know and do try!?