15 The Last Battle

One autumn night in 1853 Kierkegaard opens his journal and writes a heading at the top of the page: ‘New “Fear and Trembling”’.

He imagines Abraham, on the way to Mount Moriah, telling Isaac that God wants him to be the sacrifice; when they reach the mountain Abraham cuts the wood, binds Isaac, lights the fire – and plunges the knife into his son. Jehovah appears, and asks Abraham if he did not hear his command to stop, to kill a ram in Isaac’s place – No, replies Abraham, I did not hear it. Jehovah brings Isaac back to life, but this is not the same Isaac who followed his father trustingly to Moriah: having understood that he was ‘chosen by God as a sacrifice’, the carefree boy has become like an old man. Abraham sorrows over his lost son; Jehovah promises that they will be united in eternity, where all joy will be restored to them. ‘Had you heard my voice, had you held back – then you would have had Isaac for this life,’ explains Abraham’s God, ‘but what concerns eternity would not have been clarified for you. You went too far, you ruined everything – yet I am making it even better than if you had not gone too far: there is an eternity.’ In this retelling of Genesis 22, Abraham does not stop until he has carried out his awful task, going even further than God had intended. All is lost, and relief lies only beyond this world.

Kierkegaard looks up: through his window he sees, in the moonlight, the tower of the Church of Our Lady against the night sky. A year ago, in October 1852, he moved house again, leaving his peaceful villa by the lake for a cheap lodging at the top of a house in the centre of Copenhagen, a few steps from the church and Bishop Mynster’s episcopal residence. These low-ceilinged rooms, usually rented by students, are all he can now afford. His morning walks begin at the cathedral of Danish Christendom – this church in which he has spent countless hours since his youth, sitting with his family beneath the towering apostles, listening to Mynster’s sermons; where he so often stood yards from Regine and felt her gaze upon him; where he three times preached at Friday communion in the hard years following The Corsair ’s attack.

In his cramped rooms on Klædeboderne, he surveys the enemy and prepares for battle. He broods on Mynster – his worldliness, his hypocrisy, his approving remark about Goldschmidt – as he sharpens his polemic against Christendom, and contemplates his own relationship to God. In 1843, when he began Fear and Trembling in Berlin, Kierkegaard admired Abraham as a ‘knight of faith’ who joyfully returns to the world he had left behind, and receives his beloved son a second time after giving him up. He even longed for this remarkable faith of Abraham’s, which would – had it been possible – have allowed him to live out his relationship to God within the world, inconspicuous, to all appearances an ordinary man. In Fear and Trembling he compared Abraham to Mary, Jesus’s mother, as she appears at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel: young, unmarried and suddenly pregnant, summoned by God to bear an illegitimate, holy child. Both Abraham and Mary went willingly to their divine tasks, misunderstood by their families and friends, and faced the loss of their sons.

But now, ten years later, Kierkegaard regards Abraham’s trial as a ‘child’s category’ compared to the suffering required by true Christianity: ‘Abraham draws the knife – then he gets Isaac back again; it wasn’t serious. The most serious thing was the trial, but then it once more became enjoyment of this life.’ It was different in the New Testament, where ‘the sword … actually came to pierce Mary’s heart, to penetrate her heart – but then she got a referral to eternity; Abraham did not get that.’ For Kierkegaard, Christian faith now means ‘quite literally letting go and giving up, losing the earthly, and sheer suffering, and dying away [from the world]’.

His journal entry on Abraham is not a plan for another book – but if he were to write a ‘New “Fear and Trembling”’ in 1853, he would explain that the sword through Mary’s soul, which the prophet Simeon foresees in Jesus’s infancy, is even more than a mother’s pain at seeing her son crucified. It is also her doubt ‘whether it was not all a fantasy, a deception, the whole affair of Gabriel being sent by God to announce to her that she was the chosen one. As Christ cries: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me – so must the Virgin Mary suffer the human analogue of this.’ In 1843 Kierkegaard made his literary persona Johannes de silentio marvel at Abraham’s faith, which did not long for the hereafter but expected joy in this life. Now he believes that ‘Christianity is suffering to the end – it is consciousness of eternity.’ There is no more need for the dialectical leaps of his pseudonyms, for his own existence has composed a simple theological formula: ‘The closer to God, the more suffering.’

For two years he has published nothing, and written little. As a consequence, he notes in his journal, ‘an enormous productivity has, as it were, accumulated in my head and in my thoughts – indeed, I believe that at this moment a rich assortment of professors and poets could be made out of me.’ Since moving back to the city he has lived more spartanly than before, denying himself various material comforts – even, for short periods, renouncing his writing – ‘all in order to see what I can bear’. In this autumn of 1853, however, he reflects that ‘asceticism is sophistry’, for these finite renunciations put him in a calculating frame of mind, weighing every abstinence, as if renunciation were an end in itself. ‘And so I come once again to grace,’ he wrote on another October night. What matters is his stance towards the world; all that should concern him is the question of how far he needs to go to fulfil his divinely appointed task. ‘You went too far, you ruined everything,’ he now imagines God saying to an Abraham who has blood on his hands – are these words intended for himself? He is considering ‘breaking with everything’ in order to proclaim an austere, terrifying Christianity, but ‘one thing’ gives him pause: Regine. ‘She has no inkling of that sort of Christianity. If I seize hold of it, if I follow through, then there is a religious difference between us.’ This autumn Kierkegaard has felt himself coming under greater and greater strain. Writing is making him weary; it seems ‘almost like foolishness’.

He renounces his journal for a month, then opens it again one cold November night to write a couple of pages about Bishop Mynster – and also, of course, about himself. Until 1848, he records, he remained loyal to ‘the established order’. In spite of his ambivalence towards Mynster, he has respected him more than any other churchman, and, until Practice in Christianity, spared him his polemics. The Corsair affair, and then Mynster’s refusal to condemn Goldschmidt, were decisive turning points. As Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Christianity has leaned further towards ideals of sacrifice, suffering and martyrdom, becoming more and more uncompromising in rejecting ‘the world’, he has come to believe that Mynster himself is ‘without character’: not a true religious teacher but merely an orator, a rhetorician – in short, ‘a journalist’. He knows that his ‘defence’ of true Christianity is ‘something like a plague to Bishop M. – for the truth and such matters do not concern him’. No doubt the Bishop is sleeping soundly in his comfortable residence around the corner. Kierkegaard, the vigilant night-watchman, cannot sleep. He closes his journal, and writes nothing more for three months.

‘Now he is dead,’ he began again on 1 March 1854, under the heading ‘Bishop Mynster’. ‘If he could have been moved to end his life by confessing that what he represented was not really Christianity but a lenient version of it, it would have been extremely desirable, for he carried an entire age.’ Kierkegaard believed that ‘deep down’ Mynster had conceded to him ‘with respect to matters of the spirit’, but refused to acknowledge this openly. The preface to Practice in Christianity had called for ‘admission and confession concerning oneself’ – and if Mynster had admitted that even he, the Bishop of Zealand, fell short of the highest Christian ideals, then Kierkegaard’s task as an author would have been fulfilled. But he had waited in vain for this confession. Now, he concluded, ‘everything is changed: now the only thing left is that Mynster preached Christianity firmly into an illusion.’ He condemned the Bishop not for failing to follow the most radical teachings of Jesus and the apostles – for of course he too failed in this – but for passing off the false for the true.

Bishop Mynster had died at the end of January, four weeks before Kierkegaard returned to his journal to write this entry. Mynster gave his last sermon on 26 December 1853; for once, Kierkegaard did not go to hear him preach, and in retrospect he took this as a sign from God: ‘Now it must happen. You must break with your father’s tradition.’ In early February, two days before Mynster’s funeral, Martensen included a eulogy to the late Bishop in his Sunday sermon, exhorting his congregation to ‘imitate his faith’. ‘From the man whose precious memory fills our hearts,’ declared Martensen, ‘our thoughts are led back to the whole succession of truth-witnesses that like a holy chain stretches through the ages from the days of the Apostles to our own day.’ Bishop Mynster was, he continued, a link in this holy chain, an ‘authentic truth-witness’.

Within days Kierkegaard drafted a scathing attack on Martensen’s memorial discourse. ‘Bishop Mynster a truth-witness!’ – when this meant someone who ‘unconditionally suffers for the doctrine’, whose faith leads him ‘into spiritual trials, into anxieties of soul, into torments of spirit’. To prove Martensen’s error in linking Mynster to the apostles, Kierkegaard cited the First Letter to the Corinthians, where Paul was particularly blunt in contrasting worldly power and arrogance with the humiliations of Christian discipleship. ‘You are held in honour, but we in disrepute,’ Paul wrote to the Greeks in Corinth, ‘we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and homeless … We have become like the rubbish of the world.’ Kierkegaard accused Martensen of playing at Christianity ‘entirely in the same sense as the child plays at being a soldier’ – by removing all the dangers.

Through the spring of 1854 he drafted more polemical articles contrasting contemporary Christendom with New Testament teachings, but he did not publish them. He upset his relatives by denouncing Bishop Mynster at the dinner table. Meanwhile, he elaborated his critique of worldliness in his journal, insisting on the most radical demands of original Christianity. This was a religion that asked its adherents to let go of the ‘egotistical trivia’ with which most human beings filled their lives: ‘commerce, marriage, begetting children, amounting to something in the world’ – the cornerstones of the respectable society that now passed itself off as a Christian community. He blamed women for imposing on men ‘all the nonsense of finitude’, and deplored the ‘aggressive egotism’ of the wife and mother who loves herself ‘by loving those who are her own’. Women were naturally inclined to family life, which drew men away from their spiritual concerns – for this reason, Kierkegaard added, nuns deserved to be esteemed above monks, ‘for when she renounces this life, and marriage, the woman gives up much more than does the man’.

He found some support for these views in Schopenhauer’s essays, which articulated an otherworldly (and misogynistic) pessimism in beautifully lucid German prose. He appreciated Schopenhauer’s polemical bent – his critiques of Hegel, of academic philosophy, of Christian theology – as well as his emphasis on asceticism, suffering and compassion, drawn from ancient Indian spirituality as well as from Jesus’s teachings. But he complained that Schopenhauer’s reclusive way of life showed that he had no ethical character:

He leads a withdrawn existence, occasionally emitting a thunderstorm of epithets – which are ignored. No. Approach the matter differently. Go to Berlin. Move the stage for these scoundrels out into the street. Endure being the most notorious person of all, recognized by everyone … This, you see, undermines the vileness of ignoring. That is what I have practised – on a smaller scale, of course – here in Copenhagen: they became fools with their ignoring. And then I have even dared to do one additional thing – precisely because I have been placed under religious command – I have voluntarily dared to expose myself to being caricatured and ridiculed by the whole mob, from the simple people to the aristocrats, all in order to explode the illusions.

More than a decade after Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s own existence was still caught in a dialectic between worldly achievement and ascetic renunciation. He still believed that neither of these alternatives, though both great temptations for him, were the highest way of being human, that neither were true Christianity. In 1843 he had been inspired by Abraham to envisage a return to the world, an embrace of finite life, which was empowered by divine grace; he had compared the old father’s journey up and down Mount Moriah to a balletic leap, animated by an invisible inward movement that sacrificed the world and then received it back again as a gift. Now the same dialectic pushed Kierkegaard into a different way of being in the world: collision with the established order, disdain for political life, conspicuous suffering, a ‘martyrdom of laughter’.

Nevertheless, he held back from publishing his articles attacking Christendom. At first he did so to maintain a lofty distance from the debate about Bishop Mynster’s successor: Martensen was the preferred candidate of the conservatives, led by the prime minister A. S. Ørsted, while H. N. Clausen, who had taught Kierkegaard biblical exegesis at university, was supported by the National Liberal Party and by the King. But even after Martensen was appointed Bishop of Zealand, head of the Danish People’s Church, in April 1854, Kierkegaard still held fire. For there was also Regine. He could sacrifice many things, but his connection with her – their frequent passings, his sense of responsibility and of a deep, unspoken reconciliation between them – was a kind of anchor in the world. His concern for her soul, his reluctance to denounce the religion by which she lived, made him pause before charging into battle.

Through the summer and the autumn of 1854 he waited. Then in December he sent his first article protesting against Martensen’s eulogy on Mynster to his friend Giødvad, editor of The Fatherland, to be published in the newspaper. By then Regine’s husband Johan Frederik Schlegel had been promoted from Head of the Colonial Office to Governor of the West Indian Islands. In 1855 Schlegel would take up this post – and Regine would leave Denmark.

Bishop Mynster had been loved in life, and virtually ‘canonized’ in death, yet Kierkegaard’s article denounced him as a fraud. Mynster’s preaching, he argued, ‘veiled, suppressed, omitted some of what is decisively Christian, what is too inconvenient for us human beings, what would make our lives strenuous, prevent us from enjoying life’, and Mynster’s existence fell even further short of true Christianity – ‘he was not in character, not even in the character of his preaching’. An authentic Christian truth-witness, Kierkegaard insisted, ‘is a person who in poverty witnesses for the truth, is so unappreciated, hated, detested, so mocked, insulted, laughed to scorn’. Martensen’s memorial discourse was, he added, self-serving – ‘a worthy monument to Prof. Martensen himself’, which ‘called to mind Prof. Martensen for the vacant bishopric’. The article concluded that by calling Mynster a truth-witness, Martensen replaced the danger and risk of Christianity ‘with power (to be a danger to others), goods, advantages, abundant enjoyment of even the most select refinements’, and thus ‘played a game’ with holiness and truth: ‘Truly, there is something that is more against Christianity than any heresy, any schism, more against it than all heresies and schisms together, and it is this: to play at Christianity.’

Kierkegaard’s article appeared in The Fatherland a week before Christmas, and eight days before Martensen was consecrated as Bishop in the Church of Our Lady. Before the year was out Bishop Martensen published a lengthy, supercilious response in Berling’s Times, defending Mynster – and himself – and predicting that Kierkegaard would justify his ‘slovenly’ attack by ‘some other, higher morality of genius, perhaps even by some other, higher religious requirement that … gives him a criterion for his conduct far elevated above the ordinary’. Kierkegaard read Martensen’s article, then tore it into little pieces to be swept away by the woman who cleaned his rooms. Two days later he published a second piece in The Fatherland, repeating his objections to the claim that Mynster was a truth-witness, and adding disdainfully that Martensen’s criticism of his conduct ‘makes no impression on me at all’: it was based on a misunderstanding, and in any case ‘Martensen is too subaltern a personality to be able to be impressive.’ He continued his barrage of Fatherland articles against Martensen’s ‘blasphemy’ into the new year, 1855, but at the end of January he ceased fire. His attack provoked much indignation: several pastors stepped forward to defend their new Bishop – who made no further response himself – while Rasmus Nielsen wrote in defence of Kierkegaard in The Fatherland.

One morning in mid-March, Kierkegaard encountered Regine on the street near his home. She walked purposefully towards him and passed him close enough to quietly say, ‘God bless you – may all go well with you.’ At the sound of Regine’s voice, unheard for fourteen years, he stopped, almost took a step backwards, then greeted her before she hurried away. Thus in a moment, a glance of an eye, their long silence was broken. Later that day Regine and her husband set sail, crossing the North Sea to Southampton and then journeying on across the Atlantic Ocean. Kierkegaard would never see her again. He had lost his anchor in the world.

A day or two after Regine’s departure he sent Jens Giødvad another article. Instead of focusing on the idea of a truth-witness, this one declared ‘aloud and publicly’ what Kierkegaard had said privately to Bishop Mynster: that ‘official Christianity is not in any sense the Christianity of the New Testament.’ He had wanted Mynster to confess this disparity between his own teaching and that of Jesus and the apostles, he explained; without this confession, the Church’s proclamation was – perhaps ‘unconsciously or well-intentionedly’ – an illusion. For the rest of March, Kierkegaard ‘kept up a brisk fire against official Christianity’, publishing seven articles in less than a fortnight. This renewed, intensified attack, cut loose from his concern for its effect on Regine’s faith, encompassed the whole of Danish Christendom. He railed against Denmark’s ‘silk-and-velvet pastors, who in steadily increasing numbers were ready for service when it appeared that the profit was on the side of Christianity!’ His tenth article, ‘A Thesis – Just One Single One’, was figuratively nailed to the door of the Church of Our Lady: here Kierkegaard stated that while Luther’s ninety-five theses were ‘terrible’ enough, now ‘the matter is far more terrible – there is only one thesis. The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at all.’

Although Kierkegaard had left Abraham behind in his pursuit of a truly religious life, he remained as close as ever to Socrates, the gadfly of Athens. ‘The whole of my existence is really the most profound irony,’ he wrote in his journal in December 1854, just before he began his attack on official Christianity – and Socrates showed what it means to say that irony is a profound way of life:

In what did Socratic irony consist? In felicitous turns of phrase and the like? No. Such virtuosity in ironic banter and verbal niceties does not constitute a Socrates. No, the whole of his existence was irony. While every womanizer and businessman, etc. of his time – in short, these thousands – were fully assured of their humanity, and were sure that they knew what it is to be a human being, Socrates lagged behind (ironically) and busied himself with the problem of what it is to be a human being … Socrates doubted that a person is human at birth – one does not slip into being human or gain knowledge of what it is to be human so easily.

Kierkegaard owed his first philosophical awakening to this eccentric teacher, who had introduced him to the deepest questions of existence and taught him how to expose the illusions of an entire age. Socrates did not add another voice to the hubbub of teachings in the Athenian marketplace, but moved among these voices in a way that called them all into question. While at university Kierkegaard had learned from Socrates to ask whether wisdom could be found in any lecture theatre, in any philosophical treatise, in any logical argument; now he asked whether Christianity could be found in any church in Europe. His single thesis – that Christianity no longer existed – was as subversive as any Socratic provocation, for it challenged the assumption underlying his whole culture. And, following Socrates, he found a way to pose his questions in the midst of the crowd. Just as Socrates philosophized in the market square – a place that embodied the values of his age – so Kierkegaard launched his attack on nineteenth-century Christendom in a daily newspaper.

In late May 1855 Kierkegaard sent his twenty-first article to The Fatherland, berating Martensen for failing to respond to his critique of official Christianity, despite this being ‘much more earnest’ than the tussle over Bishop Mynster’s reputation at the beginning of the year. And as this final newspaper article appeared Kierkegaard began a fresh assault, publishing the first in a series of polemical pamphlets collectively titled The Moment. Once again he summoned his literary and philosophical forces, beginning the first issue with an elegant preface which, recalling Plato’s remark that the only people fit to govern are those who have no wish to do so, expressed his reluctance to enter into battle – ‘to work in the moment’. He loved writing, he explained, and his ‘polemical nature’ made him inclined to ‘contend with people’, but he had also wished ‘to satisfy the passion that is in my soul, disdain’. Now, though, his urgent task required him to give up the ‘beloved distance’ from which he disdained the world. He must also relinquish the leisure of his earlier authorship, in which there was ‘always plenty of time to wait for hours, days, weeks to find the expression exactly as I wanted it’. That summer, Kierkegaard cast aside his doubts and poured his energies into a literary activity, devoted now to his single thesis, that echoed the intense productions of the 1840s.

Through June, July, August he published nine issues of The Moment, each pamphlet a collection of articles seeking to dispel the ‘enormous illusion’ of contemporary Christianity. ‘All religion in which there is any truth aims at a person’s total transformation,’ he argued, which meant not just inward change but a new relationship to the world, breaking with all attachments to family, possessions, and professional success. The apostle Paul, he pointed out, was not married, had no official position, earned no money from his spiritual labour. Yet instead of teaching this hard, narrow path, the pastors of Christendom offered ‘to glue families together more and more egotistically and to arrange beautiful, glorious family festivities – for example, baptism and confirmation, which compared with, for example, picnics and other family delights, have their own special charm – that they are “also” religious’. And pastors were no more inclined than anyone else to follow the path of renunciation: ‘One cannot live on nothing. One hears this so often, especially from pastors. And the pastors are the very ones who perform this feat: Christianity does not exist at all – and yet they live on it.’ Kierkegaard called on his readers to stop going to church; he no longer went himself, and was often seen in the Athenaeum, a private library, on Sunday mornings.

These explosive pamphlets ‘aroused a great sensation’, provoking outrage, enthusiasm, and plenty of gossip. Many students were inspired by the radical message of The Moment, while the older generation tended to be sceptical and indignant. ‘I am in complete agreement with your judgement of Kierkegaard’s behaviour,’ wrote the eminent poet Carsten Hauch to his friend Bernhard Severin Ingemann, who had complained of ‘the impudence and shamelessness’ of the polemic against the Church. ‘All reverence is to be uprooted from the heart,’ Hauch lamented: ‘if nothing on earth be respected, nothing in heaven need be respected either. How unfortunate is the younger generation, which is educated and grows up under these auspices.’ Professor Sibbern, now approaching his seventies, still saw the good in his former student, but he regretted that Kierkegaard’s ‘one-sidedness’ now dominated his philosophy – and Sibbern regarded ‘the anger he has stirred up against himself as a good testimony to the Danish people’s sense of truth, justice and gratitude [to Bishop Mynster]’.

Others, though – and not just rebellious theology students – were sympathetic to Kierkegaard’s cause and took his provocations seriously. One of his acquaintances, Pastor Birkedal, felt ‘the strong words cast a profound shadow’ over him as he read The Moment: ‘I couldn’t shake off these questions, but had to subject my entire spiritual posture to renewed testing.’ Magdalene Hansen, a follower of Grundtvig and wife of the artist Constantin Hansen, told a friend that ‘it has been a continuing source of sorrow to me to hear people tear S.K. apart and, so to speak, diligently deafen themselves to the truth in his conduct in order to discern his human weakness all the more distinctly – as if the question were, What sort of a person is S.K.? and not, Am I a Christian?’

Those who encountered Kierkegaard on the streets of Copenhagen in the midst of his full-blown attack on Christendom found him ‘quite his usual self in conversation, even though his voice was weaker and his glance sadder’. When Hans Brøchner met him out walking one summer evening, he was surprised by the great ‘clarity and calmness’ with which he discussed The Moment. Although Brøchner knew many people who were ‘in profound sympathy’ with Kierkegaard’s polemic, he saw how thoroughly this ‘ferocious battle’ had disrupted his friend’s life and consumed his energies – and yet Kierkegaard still showed ‘his usual equanimity of mind and cheerfulness’, and also his sparkling sense of humour.

In September 1855 his former friend and old adversary M. A. Goldschmidt assessed the ‘Kierkegaardian dispute’ with his usual perceptiveness in his journal North and South. ‘Until now it has not been clear whether or not K. was a noble character,’ wrote Goldschmidt. ‘He lived in the world without participating in the business of the world. He took no actions, he was free of visible flaws but also of the temptations of the world, because he didn’t concern himself with them, he didn’t struggle. On the contrary, he was viewed as a noble thinker. Yet … it can be said – truly, without any bitterness, perhaps bluntly (but he himself has served as an exemplar of bluntness) – that he is an unhappy thinker. Many of the outbursts issuing from him testify to sufferings that his pride will not confess.’

By then Kierkegaard was writing the tenth issue of The Moment. He was exhausted, and had a painful cough. One evening he collapsed at a gathering at Giødvad’s house; the next day he fell again, and struggled to his feet with ‘a feeling of utter weakness’. He began to feel numbness and piercing pains in his legs. Still he pressed on, preparing the next pamphlet for publication. It included an article titled ‘My Task’. ‘The only analogy I have before me is Socrates,’ Kierkegaard declared here: ‘my task is a Socratic task, to sound out the definition of what it is to be a Christian – I do not call myself a Christian (keeping the ideal free), but I can make it manifest that the others are that even less. You, antiquity’s noble simple soul, you, the only human being I admiringly acknowledge as a thinker – how I long to be able to speak with you for only half an hour, far away from these battalions of thinkers that “Christendom” places in the field under the name of Christian teachers! “Christendom” lies in an abyss of sophistry that is much, much worse than when the Sophists flourished in Greece. Those legions of pastors and Christian assistant professors are all sophists, supporting themselves by making those who understand nothing believe something, and then making this human number the authority for what the truth is, what Christianity is.’

He had completed this issue of The Moment, though not yet sent it to the printer, when on 2 October he collapsed in the street. A carriage took him home, where he managed to take off his hat to his landlady ‘with a charming look’, and then drove on to Frederiks Hospital. He was admitted to a private room with a view of the hospital gardens. He described his condition to a doctor, who diligently took notes: ‘The patient cannot offer any specific reason for his present sickness. However, he does associate it with drinking cold seltzer water last summer, with a dark dwelling, together with the exhausting intellectual work that he believes is too taxing for his frail physique. He considers the sickness fatal. His death is necessary for the cause which he has devoted all his intellectual strength to resolving, for which he has worked alone, and for which alone he believes that he has been intended; hence the penetrating thought in conjunction with so frail a physique. If he goes on living, he must continue his religious battle; but in that case it will peter out, while, on the contrary, by his death it will maintain its strength and, he believes, its victory.’

Kierkegaard’s nephews Michael and Henrik Lund were both physicians at the hospital, and they visited him every day. His niece Henriette Lund also visited, and sensed that ‘a feeling of victory was mixed in with the pain and sadness’, for his face ‘glowed’ and ‘his eyes shone like stars’. His brother Peter Christian came to the hospital, but Kierkegaard refused to see him. He knew, however, that sooner or later Peter Christian would go to his modest lodgings on Klædeboderne and find locked in his desk a sealed document addressed to him and marked ‘To be opened after my death’ – and that Peter Christian would open it, and read:

Dear Brother,

It is of course my will that my former fiancée, Mrs. Regine Schlegel, inherit without condition whatever little I may leave. If she herself will not accept it, she is to be asked if she would be willing to administer it for distribution to the poor.

What I wish to give expression to is that to me an engagement was and is just as binding as a marriage, and that therefore my estate is her due, exactly as if I had been married to her.

Your brother

S. Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard also expected Peter Christian to find in his desk a second sealed document, dated August 1851, containing his literary testament: ‘The unidentified one whose name shall one day be identified – to whom all my activity as an author is dedicated – is my erstwhile fiancée, Mrs. Regine Schlegel.’

When Emil Boesen heard of his friend’s illness, he made the long journey from his Jutland home to Copenhagen. After two weeks in the hospital Kierkegaard’s lower body was paralysed, and he felt that death was near; Emil found him ‘gentle and at peace’. ‘It seemed as though he wanted me to come so that he could say something,’ Emil wrote to his wife Louise back in Jutland. ‘How strange it is now, when he is perhaps going to die, that I, who was his confidant for so many years and was then separated from him, have come here almost to be his father confessor … Much of what he talks about I may not report.’

Kierkegaard spoke to his old friend about his ‘thorn in the flesh’, a secret suffering which prevented him from having ordinary relationships. ‘I therefore concluded that it was my task to be extraordinary, which I sought to carry out as best I could,’ he told Emil. ‘I was a plaything of Governance … And that was also what was wrong with my relationship to Regine. I had thought it could be changed, but it couldn’t, so I dissolved the relationship.’ In recent years he had alluded to this ‘thorn in the flesh’ several times in his journals, but he was determined to hide its nature from posterity.

‘I am financially ruined,’ Kierkegaard went on, ‘and now I have nothing, only enough to pay the expenses of my burial. I began with a little, twenty-some thousand, and I saw that this amount could last for a certain length of time – ten to twenty years. It has now been seventeen years, that was a great thing.’ The doctors did not understand his illness, he said: ‘It is psychical, and now they want to treat it in the usual medical fashion. It’s bad. Pray for me that it will soon be over … What matters is to get as close to God as possible.’

By Emil’s third visit, on 18 October, Kierkegaard was very weak. He slept badly at night and dozed a little in the daytime. His head hung down on his chest and his hands trembled. Emil asked him if there was anything he still wanted to say. ‘No. Yes, greet everyone for me, I have liked them all very much, and tell them that my life is a great suffering, unknown and inexplicable to other people. Everything looked like pride and vanity, but it wasn’t. I am absolutely no better than other people, and I have said so and have never said anything else.’ Could he pray in peace? ‘Yes, I can do that. So I pray first for the forgiveness of sins, that everything might be forgiven; then I pray that I might be free of despair at the time of my death, and I am often struck by the saying that death must be pleasing to God. And then I pray for something I very much want, that is, that I might be aware a bit in advance of when death will come.’

Emil visited him every day for a fortnight. There were always fresh flowers by his bed, brought by Ilia Marie Fibiger, a writer who served as a hospital attendant – ‘At night she is the supervisor of the hospital. In the daytime she supervises me,’ Kierkegaard joked. Emil was troubled by his refusal to take Holy Communion from a pastor – no, not even from his lifelong friend – though he would accept it from a layman. That would be difficult to arrange, Emil said. ‘Then I will die without it.’ A few days later they talked about his attack on the Church, on which they could not agree. Kierkegaard had used his last few hundred rix-dollars to publish The Moment; how strange, remarked Emil kindly, that his resources had just sufficed. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘and I am very happy about it, and very sad, because I cannot share my joy with anyone.’

Soon after this visit the conversation that for four decades had flowed so abundantly from his lips dwindled to a few sentences, a few words, until he was almost incapable of speaking. Emil returned to his wife. Day by day, as the dry leaves fell outside his window, Kierkegaard’s paralysis worsened and his strength declined. He drifted into unconsciousness, and died after sunset on 11 November: the feast of St Martin, and the last day of autumn. After the light left his eyes, the diamond ring Regine had once worn shone on his hand in the moonlight.