Kierkegaard’s Afterlife

Throughout his life Kierkegaard wrestled with the question of existence: how to be a human being in the world? For him, as for most of his contemporaries – and for many of us now – another question of existence hovered behind, above, below this one, inextricably linked to it but also pointing in another direction. What happens to human beings after they die? Is this life a stage on our journey to eternity? Does it bear the traces of countless past lives, and sow seeds for the soul’s next incarnation? Or does life end with death, and nothing more?

Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, which were published posthumously in 1832, prompted a fierce debate about the Christian doctrine of immortality. Ludwig Feuerbach ended his academic career by arguing that people endure after death only as collective historical memories, while Friedrich Richter suggested that our eternal life consists in our descendants and our works. In Denmark this theological controversy was restrained by censorship laws prohibiting, on penalty of exile, any publication denying the immortality of the soul. But in 1837 Kierkegaard’s philosophy teacher Poul Martin Møller published a long essay titled ‘Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Immortality’, where he argued that Hegelian philosophy was too abstract to deal with this question. In 1841 J. L. Heiberg wrote ‘The Soul after Death’, an apocalyptic poem, which Martensen reviewed in The Fatherland.

Kierkegaard followed these debates, of course, but he did not contribute to them until 1844, in The Concept of Anxiety, where he claimed that recent ‘metaphysical and logical efforts’ to prove personal immortality were self-defeating: ‘strangely enough, while this is taking place, certitude declines’. When he analysed Christian faith in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he declared that ‘immortality is the subjective individual’s most passionate interest’, and argued that the power of a person’s faith in his eternal destiny lay in this passion, not in any logical demonstration. When these thoughts were published Kierkegaard was almost thirty-three years old – and, he believed, close to death; for many years he had expected to die before his thirty-fourth birthday.

In 1847, surprised to be still alive, he returned to the question of immortality in one of his Christian Discourses, published in the spring of 1848. His sermon ‘There Will Be the Resurrection of the Dead, of the Righteous – and of the Unrighteous’ was intended, he proclaimed, to ‘violate security’ and to ‘disturb peace of mind’. Every proof of immortality treated the soul’s fate as a universal question, but Kierkegaard argued that this question always concerns a single individual: ‘in my view it pertains to me most of all, just as in your view it pertains to you most of all.’ And no one, he continued, should be so sure of his own salvation that he begins to speculate on another’s eschatological prospects: ‘Save me, O God, from ever being completely sure; keep me unsure to the end so that then, if I receive eternal blessedness, I might be completely sure that I have it by grace!’

In his 1849 Godly Discourses on the lily and the bird he took a more mystical, panentheist direction, suggesting that the Christian doctrine of eternal life means ‘abiding in God’ in this life as well as beyond it. ‘If you abide in God, then whether you live or you die, whether things go well or badly for you while you are alive; whether you die today or only after seventy years; and whether you find your death at the bottom of the sea, at its greatest depth, or you are exploded in the air: you still do not come to be outside of God, you abide – thus you remain present to yourself in God.’

As on so many issues, Kierkegaard rose above the scholarly debate on immortality among his peers and showed why the entire discussion was misguided. Yet his public pronouncements on the afterlife were not merely polemical. His trusted servant, Anders Westergaard, once asked him, as a learned man, to give assurance of the immortality of the soul – this would comfort him a great deal, Anders said. No, replied Kierkegaard: we are all equally ignorant on this question. Each person must choose between the one possibility and the other, and conviction will follow in accordance with his choice.

Kierkegaard chose eternal life, along with the deep anxiety and deep peace this belief brought him. Whatever the fate of his soul, his afterlife in this world has been extraordinary. I write this concluding chapter in April 2017 at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen, which this year moved from the centre of the city to a vast new campus in Amagerbro, south of the medieval ramparts. Parts of the site are still under construction, and on the newly laid lawns you can see joins between the slabs of turf. On the day I arrived at the campus it was difficult to find the right building, and once inside it – one of several cavernous, light-filled blocks of glass and creamy concrete – I couldn’t find the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre. I asked a passing law student: she wasn’t sure, but then she exclaimed ‘Oh – there he is!’ and pointed to the large bust of Kierkegaard outside the entrance to the Centre. She had recognized him as easily as his acquaintances on the streets of nineteenth-century Copenhagen.

Outside the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre

The research centre houses offices for about a dozen Kierkegaard scholars employed by the university, and desks for graduate students. Ettore Rocca, an Italian professor, has kindly let me lodge in his office while he is away: one wall is filled with works on Kierkegaard in several languages, and there are nine shelves of Kierkegaard’s Danish writings. The offices open onto a library stocked with translations of his books: I try to decipher the titles, and find Repetition in Russian, Fear and Trembling in Icelandic, Either/Or in Slovenian, Philosophical Fragments in Portuguese, The Concept of Anxiety in Korean, The Book on Adler in Japanese, The Concept of Irony in Polish, The Sickness unto Death in Lithuanian, ‘Diary of a Seducer’ in Turkish, From the Papers of One Still Living in Hungarian, and Works of Love in Chinese.

Here I can consult entire scholarly volumes about Kierkegaard’s reception in Northern, Western, Southern, Eastern and Central Europe, the Near East, Asia, Australia and the Americas. There must be tens of thousands of monographs, chapters and articles on every conceivable aspect of his work – his philosophy, his theology, his politics; his views on Shakespeare, punctuation, and pietist hymns; his influence on French existentialists, Italian Catholics and Latin American liberation theologians in the twentieth century. There are also books about men like J. P. Mynster, H. L. Martensen, J. L. Heiberg and F. C. Sibbern, once Copenhagen’s most illustrious figures, now remembered chiefly for their relation to the poetic gadfly they tried to keep at arm’s length. I can read an English catalogue of Kierkegaard’s library, consisting of more than two thousand books, which were sold by auction a few months after his death.

Back in the centre of the city, most visitors to the Copenhagen Museum want to see the permanent Søren A. Kierkegaard Collection, which includes his tall writing desk, the key to 2 Nytorv, a lock of his hair, his pipe, his reading glasses, some coffee cups, a silver pen holder, and the engagement ring he gave to Regine and later wore on his own finger. His manuscripts, journals and other literary remains are archived in the Royal Danish Library – although when in 1856 his relatives offered the library four of his books with handwritten annotations, the head librarian refused ‘for fear that too many people would want to have a look at them’.

Kierkegaard’s papers, which filled a desk and two large chests of drawers in his rooms on Klædeboderne, ended up in his brother’s house. In 1859 Peter Christian Kierkegaard, by then Bishop of Aalborg, arranged for The Point of View for My Work as an Author to be published. Peter Christian was not sure what to do with the rest of the papers, and for years they lay piled up in the provincial bishop’s residence. Eventually he appointed a former newspaper editor, H. P. Barfod, to ‘examine and register, etc. Søren’s papers’. Barfod soon came across a journal entry from 1846 about Kierkegaard’s father: ‘The frightful story of the man – who as a little boy watching sheep on the heath of Jutland, in great suffering, in hunger and cold, once stood on a hilltop and cursed God – and the man was unable to forget this when he was 82 years old.’ He showed it to Peter Christian, who wept and said, ‘That is my father’s story, and ours, too.’

The first volume of Søren Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers appeared in 1869, and was met with such strong criticism that Barfod, having spent years inhabiting Kierkegaard’s consciousness, wrote a preface to the second volume defending his efforts to reveal ‘the colossal and clandestine workshop of the soul [of] this thinker, this melancholy hermit, in his daily sufferings’. Despite the controversy that continued to follow Kierkegaard’s writings two decades after his death, the Royal Danish Library agreed to receive his manuscripts and journals in 1875. Since 1918 a statue of Kierkegaard has reclined, in a very Danish manner, on a chair in the library’s garden.

The entrance to the Royal Danish Library is now on Søren Kierkegaard Plads, which leads along Christians Brygge to Børsgade, the wide street where Regine lived as a girl. During my days in the library’s reading room I leafed, heart racing, through boxes of Kierkegaard’s letters to Regine and notebooks containing Repetition, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity, breaking for lunch at the café in the library’s glassy modern extension, named after Kierkegaard’s final polemics: The Moment or, more literally, The Glance of an Eye. I sat by Café Øieblikket’s huge window overlooking the water and watched pedestrians, cyclists and kayakers pass by. Next door to the café is Søren K, a smart minimalist restaurant.

Kierkegaard in the Royal Danish Library’s garden

Yesterday, a Sunday, I walked up through Nørrebro to Assistens Cemetery, where Kierkegaard was buried. His grave is in the oldest part of the cemetery, shared with his parents, his eldest sister Maren, and his brother Søren Michael, who died in childhood, though the family plot is dominated by the tombstone for Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard’s first wife, Kirstine. During the 1840s Kierkegaard wrote instructions for repairs to the burial plot, and for a new stone to include his own name, which now marks his grave. Beneath ‘Søren Aabye’ is engraved, as he requested, a verse from an eighteenth-century hymn by Brorson, whose hymns he sang with his father at the Moravian meeting house:

In yet a little while

I shall have won;

Then the whole fight

Will all at once be done.

Then I may rest

In bowers of roses

And perpetually

And perpetually

Speak with my Jesus.

Kierkegaard also instructed that ‘the whole burial plot be levelled and seeded with a fine species of low grass, but a tiny spot of bare soil should show in the four corners, and in each of these corners should be planted a little bush of Turkish roses, as I believe they are called, some very tiny ones, dark red’. Though peaceful, the grave is not a lonely place: during the hour I was there, about twelve visitors strolled by in the April sun, pausing to read the words Kierkegaard chose to mark his departure from the world. Daffodils bloomed in the little plot, as well as the red flowers in each corner.

At the graveside, April 2017; Kierkegaard’s tombstone is on the left.

Kierkegaard’s funeral in the first week of winter, 1855, was not so tranquil. Ironically, it was his old enemy M. A. Goldschmidt who confirmed in print Kierkegaard’s own hope about the significance of his death: ‘The most dangerous part of his actions against the clergy and the official Church is now only just beginning, because his fate undeniably has something of the martyr about it: the sincerity of his passion helped hasten the course of his illness and bring about his death,’ Goldschmidt wrote in his journal North and South a few days after Kierkegaard died. Meanwhile, Kierkegaard’s most respectable relatives – Peter Christian Kierkegaard, his brother-in-law Johan Christian Lund, and his nephews Carl Ferdinand Lund and Henrik Ferdinand Lund – decided to hold the funeral service in the Church of Our Lady.

‘The crowd in the aisles was large,’ reported Hans Christian Andersen to the ballet dancer August Bournonville; although women unrelated to the deceased were not supposed to attend funerals, ‘ladies in red and blue hats were coming and going’. Bishop Martensen did not attend, but he kept a close eye on the proceedings: ‘Today, after a large service at the Church of Our Lady, Kierkegaard was buried; there was a large cortège of mourners (in grand style, how ironic!),’ he wrote to his friend Pastor Gude on 18 November 1855. ‘We have scarcely seen the equal of the tactlessness shown by the family in having him buried on a Sunday, between two religious services, from the nation’s most important church … The newspapers will soon be running a spate of burial stories. I understand the cortège was composed primarily of young people and a large number of obscure personages. There were no dignitaries, unless one wishes to include R. Nielsen in this category,’ the Bishop sneered.

One of the obscure young people in Vor Frue Kirke that day was Frantz Sodemann, a theology student, who eagerly wrote to his fiancée’s father with news of the ‘scandal’ he had just witnessed:

There was an enormous crowd present. Church was full to bursting; it was all I could do to get a spot upstairs by one of the columns at the back, from which I could see the coffin. Rumour has it that the clergy had refused to speak, some say at the suggestion of Bishop Martensen … No clergy wearing vestments were present other than Archdeacon Tryde and Dr. [Peter Christian] Kierkegaard, who gave the eulogy … First he explained the family relationships, how their father, who had once herded sheep on the moors of Jutland, had loved the children most intensely; that gradually all but the two of them had departed this life … Next he said that this was not the time or the place to discuss Søren’s actions; that we neither dared to nor could accept much of what Søren had said…; that [Søren] himself had not been conscious of how far he had gone; and that he had gone too far … Then the body was carried away.

The author of this letter regretted not following the crowds to the cemetery, where ‘things really came to a head’. After a handful of earth was cast on the small coffin, Kierkegaard’s nephew Henrik Sigvard Lund, who worked at Frederiks Hospital and spent time with his uncle until the very end of his life, stepped forward to protest against the proceedings. Archdeacon Tryde attempted to stop him, for only ordained clergy were allowed to speak at the graveside – but the crowd urged Henrik on with shouts of ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ and the young man continued his speech: ‘He, my deceased friend, stands and falls with his writings. But I have not heard them mentioned in a single word!’

Henrik read aloud from the Book of Revelation and quoted an issue of The Moment. ‘Is what we are all witnessing today – namely, that this poor man, despite all his energetic protests in thought, word and deed, in life and death, is being buried by “the Official Church” as a beloved member – is this in accordance with his words?’ he asked the gathered mourners. Brandishing his Bible and his uncle’s pamphlets, he declared that Kierkegaard had been ‘violated’ by a Church that resembled ‘the great whore of Babylon, with whom all the kings of the earth have fornicated’.

Four days later, Jens Giødvad printed Henrik Lund’s graveside speech in The Fatherland. ‘To me, the entire affair is a distorted picture of Søren K.; I don’t understand it!’ wrote Hans Christian Andersen in another letter. Bishop Martensen made sure Lund was prosecuted, and the young man had to make a public apology and pay a fine of one hundred rix-dollars. Poor Martensen: even now his massive head, cast in bronze and mounted alongside Mynster next to the Church of Our Lady, looks nervous, as though at any moment he expects Kierkegaard to come round the corner, waving his walking-cane.

As if Kierkegaard’s persistent attacks and his troublesome funeral were not punishment enough for Martensen’s sins, on Sunday 5 May 2013 another service was held for Kierkegaard in the Church of Our Lady: the commemoration of his two-hundredth birthday. From the church’s polished pulpit the velvet-clad Bishop of Copenhagen preached to a congregation that included Queen Margrethe II and several cabinet ministers. Scholars of Kierkegaard from all over the world were present – and on them, at least, the irony of the great state occasion was not lost. From the Church of Our Lady the most illustrious dignitaries moved on to the University of Copenhagen’s ceremonial hall, where a new fifty-five-volume critical edition of Kierkegaard’s writings, in preparation for years under the visionary direction of Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, stood complete. Cappelørn, a Lutheran pastor and theologian, founded the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in 1994 and made it his life’s work to allow Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks to be read alongside the published works: he wrote 41,512 of the 72,628 explanatory notes contained in the new edition. After this blue-bound monument of scholarship was formally presented to the university, the birthday festivities continued into the evening with a premiere of Promenade Abyss, a one-act opera with lyrics inspired by The Sickness unto Death.

Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, 2013: texts and commentaries

Kierkegaard’s birthday was commemorated in many other cities around the world; in London, the celebration took place one week early at St Katharine’s, the Danish Lutheran Church next to Regent’s Park. Kierkegaard’s favourite New Testament passage from the Letter of James was one of the texts for the Sunday morning service, and the sermon recalled his life and his works. It was a beautiful service: I loved the simple grace of the bare white church, and was touched by the openness with which the pastor invited everyone to take communion. After a lunch of rye bread, herrings and Danish cheese, there were lectures by three academics: Joakim Garff, Kierkegaard’s biographer from Copenhagen; George Pattison, then a professor at Oxford; and me. I gave a talk about Mary, Jesus’s mother, whose faith and courage Kierkegaard admired throughout his authorship, though I began by remembering Anne Kierkegaard, the middle-aged peasant who gave birth to Denmark’s greatest philosopher.

Joakim Garff, whose rich, sophisticated biography SAK is almost as long as Either/Or, spoke about the peculiar task of writing the life of Kierkegaard. Though writing was a kind of therapy for him, it was also true, said Garff, that ‘Kierkegaard in his journals did not talk only to reveal but also to conceal’, writing and editing his own papers ‘as if future readers stood and looked over his shoulder’, and ‘planning his own posthumous rebirth’. While the journals return again and again to Regine, to Mynster and to ‘Myself’, they skip across an extraordinary range of subjects, from fishwives to the Incarnation, and ‘not even the biographical culmination points are straightforwardly accessible’. For example, Kierkegaard represented Regine only in a fragmentary way during their engagement, and readers ‘must go all the way to the end of August 1849 before he presents posterity with his “Relationship to Her”’ – in an entry that is marked ‘Something Poetic’. Garff described how he tried ‘to coax the narrative elements forth’ from the ‘monstrous material’ while allowing Kierkegaard to remain an ambiguous, open-ended figure.

George Pattison’s lecture explored Kierkegaard’s love of the theatre, and he had written for the occasion a stage adaptation of Repetition, which was performed in the church that evening by a small cast of Oxford students. The play brought Kierkegaard to life in a way I could not have imagined possible. As his alter ego Constantin Constantius paced across the stage, I marvelled at this echo, in a Camden church, of questions pursued two centuries ago by a small, hunched, bright-eyed figure in odd trousers – pursued from Copenhagen to Berlin, and back across the Baltic Sea, through a series of apartments on Nørregade, Nytorv, Rosenborggade, Østerbrogade and Klædeboderne, in his city’s theatres, churches, newspapers, through the pages of countless books, to and fro across the vast stretches of his soul. I found myself in tears.

Without George Pattison I would not have been in the Danish Church that day, nor written a PhD thesis on Kierkegaard – and it would never have occurred to me to write this book. I met George over twenty years ago, when he taught me metaphysics during my first year at university. An Anglican priest as well as a scholar, he was then Dean of Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, and a lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity. He occupied these roles with a combination of lightness and depth, earnestness and irony, which now strikes me as distinctly Kierkegaardian. There is something paradoxical about a Kierkegaard expert holding an official position in the University and the Church: this situation naturally poses a question of existence, and George somehow seemed to find a way to live that question well. When I finished my philosophy degree he agreed to supervise my PhD. Though I was not a very diligent graduate student, George remained generous and patient; he advised me to attend conferences, which I dreaded, and he arranged my Danish lessons, which I neglected. He told me to consider publishing my thesis, but I felt more inclined to burn it – I would invite my friends, and we’d dance round the fire. Staying in Cambridge and doing a PhD was my path of least resistance: it was a way of deferring the question of what to do with my life. I was more interested in travelling and falling in love than in pursuing a career. I had no intention or aspiration to become a Kierkegaard scholar, or a lecturer in philosophy, or any kind of academic.

I became those things anyway, and Kierkegaard remains endlessly interesting to me. This is because he spoke of, and to, a deep need for God within the human heart – a need for love, for wisdom, for peace – and he did so with a rare and passionate urgency. Though he relentlessly pursued ‘the task of becoming a Christian’, he did not see this as a question of religious identity or affiliation. Perhaps he had too much disdain for institutional religion, but by looking elsewhere he appealed to people who, like the woman who wrote timidly to thank him for his sermon in the Citadel Church, felt uninspired by more conventional Christianity. Through his authorship, which lasted barely more than ten years, he communicated infinite things from his own very human heart – in sparkling prose, with exceptional sensitivity and nuance, and with little trace of dogmatism or moralism.

It is difficult to say what caused my tears as I watched Repetition in the Danish Church in 2013, but it had something to do with casting a sideways glance at my life as a whole, and seeing meaning there. Over the years I had often doubted the value of intellectual work, doubted whether the studies of philosophy I had drifted into were what I should be doing, doubted that I had much to offer my students. Sitting in that white church with all the other people who cared enough about Kierkegaard to spend a day celebrating his birthday, I felt a new confidence in whatever it was that brought me there. And in recent weeks, as I have come close to the end of this book, I have been moved in a similar way, though not so much in relation to my own life. Following Kierkegaard through his final months to his last days in Frederiks Hospital, I sensed the mysterious weight of a human life, glimpsed in its entirety. It is elusive and intimate, slight and immense, fragile and astonishing.