For Blake and Kierkegaard the greatest enemy of the romantic ideal of life is spiritual passivity, a state of mental torpor. This state, which Blake calls “jealousy” and Kierkegaard calls “dread,” corresponds to the medieval accidie or spiritual despair considered to be one of the greatest sins against God. For Blake and Kierkegaard, it is the greatest sin against life. “Accident is the omission of act in self & the hindering of act in another,” insists Blake; “This is Vice but all Act [from Individual propensity] is Virtue. To hinder Another is not an act on the contrary it is a restraint on action both in ourselves & in the person hinderd.” The man in this state of passivity or “hindrance” suffers from melancholy, dread, fear of futurity; he lives in a state of indolence and self-imposed repression that hinders all action and traps him within himself, unable to break through to true existence. “Dread … makes the individual impotent, and the first sin always occurs in impotence,” says Kierkegaard, “melancholy is a sin, really it is a sin instar omnium, for not to will deeply and sincerely is sin, and this is the mother of all sins” (Journal III A 233: quoted from CD, xii; E/O, II, 193).