“Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice … but the voice of eternity within a man it cannot drown. When by the aid of affliction all irrelevant voices are brought to silence, it can be heard, this voice within.” “My life is one great suffering, unknown and incomprehensible to all others.” And it was out of this suffering that Søren Kierkegaard laid siege to the reigning European philosophy and the comfortable Christianity