 But the dialectic of the “first” pseudonymous authorship never quite reaches the highest, paradoxical form of the religious. We stop short at the representation of the religious by a self-confessed humorist (Johannes Climacus) in a medium which, according to Climacus’s own account, necessarily alienates the reader from true (Christian) faith. For faith is a matter of lived experience, of constant striving within an individual’s existence. According to Climacus’s metaphysics, the world is divided dualistically into the actual and the ideal. Language (and all other media of representation) belong to the realm of the ideal. No matter how eloquent or evocative language is it can never be the actual. Therefore, any representation of faith is always suspended in the realm of ideality and can never be actual faith.