7 Aesthetic Education

Another sleepless night on Rosenborggade: now it is July, the summer solstice has passed and the nights are lengthening at last, but still it is not long until dawn. The apartment is still, the servants are sleeping; outside, the streets are silent. Inside, his thoughts are simmering, and he cannot rest. Recently there have been many nights like this one: during the day he keeps busy, out walking with friends or at home working on his book about the imitation of Christ – yet at night, when he has finished writing, his thoughts return to ‘The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress’. He wrote this article months ago – an inconsequential piece, it might seem to a casual reader – but this summer he has spent countless hours fretting about whether to make it the last act of his own literary drama.

Now it is done: today he gave the article to his friend Jens Finsen Giødvad, one of the editors of The Fatherland, Copenhagen’s liberal daily newspaper. It will soon be published (under the pseudonym Inter et Inter, ‘Between and Between’) in four instalments in consecutive issues, starting on 24 July. This piece of journalism will end his authorship, giving the whole literary production a pleasing symmetry. He began in February 1843 by publishing Either/Or, a large ‘aesthetic’ book teeming with reflections on Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama and French farce, which was followed three months later by a slim volume of religious discourses; now in 1848 his oeuvre is concluded with a large religious book, Christian Discourses, followed three months later by a short ‘aesthetic’ piece about an actress. The last five years of writing can now be seen, in retrospect, as a complete work of art – intricate and intense, complex and profound, yet expressing a single truth.

After weeks of anxious deliberation, there is no going back. He hoped the decision to publish ‘The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress’ in The Fatherland would ease his mind, let him sleep. But the question of publication, alive for so long, is still vibrating within him, making him ill – ‘alas, I would rather write a folio than publish a page’. And this question, to publish or not to publish, is inseparable from the question of who he is, which path he must follow through the world: to be or not to be an author?

No doubt he will be suspected as this article’s author – and though its subject is not named either, she is easily recognizable as Johanne Luise Heiberg, Denmark’s most celebrated actress. In reflecting on her career, Kierkegaard’s article reaches back almost two decades, to the very beginning of his own life as a writer – for he was born less than half a year after Luise Heiberg, and her career has strange parallels with his own. In 1829, when she was seventeen, Luise Pätges (not yet Heiberg) starred in Romeo and Juliet at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre – and then last year, 1847, she played Juliet again, aged thirty-four. This symmetry mirrors the beginning and end of his authorship. Ever alive to the significance of repetitions, he has taken Mrs Heiberg’s reprisal of her juvenile role as the occasion to ask how an artist should make the transition from youth to maturity; how to reconcile the frivolous and the profound elements of his work; how to express both the particularity of his experience and the shared truth of human existence – and how to live these questions onstage, beneath the bright lights of publicity.

During the years between her two Juliets, he has observed, this ‘idolized’ actress learned that her fame was ‘empty’ and her glory ‘burdensome’. Now, as she reaches the height of her artistic powers, there is ‘already gossip going around that she is getting older’. The public are fickle: ‘The same fervid insipidity that without ceasing beat the big drum of banality in her praise and celebrated her eloquently on the cymbals, the same insipidity now becomes bored with its idolized artist; it wants to get rid of her, does not want to see her any more – she may thank God if it does not wish to have her exterminated. The same insipidity acquires a new sixteen-year-old idol, and in her honour the former idol has to experience the total disfavour of banality – because the great difficulty bound up with being an idol is that it is almost inconceivable that one can receive honourable discharge from this appointment.’ The ‘banality’ of public taste is particularly ‘cruel’ to women, who are judged by their superficial beauty: ‘When it comes to the feminine, most people’s art criticism has categories and thought-patterns essentially in common with every butcher’s boy, national guardsman and shop assistant, who talk enthusiastically about a damned pretty and devilishly pert wench of eighteen years. On the other hand, at the point where, from the aesthetic point of view, the interest really begins, there where the inner being beautifully and with intense meaning becomes manifest in the metamorphosis – there the crowd falls away.’

Kierkegaard’s article argues that playing Juliet a second time allowed Mrs Heiberg’s true genius to shine: in the middle of her own life, she expressed Juliet’s youthful vivacity in every word and gesture. While his own art is different – and he is certainly no idol – he is also confronting decisive questions about his creative development and his public image. Now, in 1848, he too can look back on himself at seventeen, when he stepped into a new world – and embarked on the path that led him to his life as an author.

When Luise Pätges gave her first performance as Juliet in 1829, her life was undergoing a transformation. She was half-Jewish, the daughter of poor German immigrants, but her success in the theatre opened the doors to high society. In 1831 she married the well-connected writer Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who was twice her age. Not yet twenty, Madame Heiberg found herself surrounded by Copenhagen’s cultural elite. Kierkegaard did not enter this world of aristocrats and artists so easily – indeed, he never made it into Heiberg’s inner circle. Nevertheless, when he became a student at the University of Copenhagen in 1830, new vistas suddenly opened out before him.

He could now spend his days roaming between lecture rooms and the cafés along Strøget, the line of four busy streets running east to west through the centre of the city. Unlike the old-fashioned taverns, these modern cafés had large glass fronts: their patrons were on show to passers-by as well as to one another. Students and professors gathered in smart tea rooms with Italian names, or in Pleisch’s Konditorier, or in Mini’s, the finest coffee house in Copenhagen. They often piled into the university’s Student Association, where they found a little freedom in their tightly censored city for literary readings, philosophical discourses and political debates.

Kierkegaard leapt eagerly and extravagantly into the arms of his newly unveiled city, while his father took care of the bills: he dined out, drank too much coffee, smoked expensive cigars, bought new clothes, and socialized energetically. He became a familiar figure in Reitzel’s bookshop on Købmagergade, frequented by Denmark’s most illustrious writers, and he took his new books, in their plain paper covers, straight to N. C. Møller’s bookbindery – the best in town – to be bound in gold-embossed leather. He was already in the habit of taking long evening walks with Emil Boesen, his childhood friend, whose father was a Councillor of Justice and, like Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a senior figure in the Moravian community. But now he found the streets of Copenhagen full of young men ready to converse with him about whatever they had just heard in their lectures or read in the newspapers. Although he confided his feelings only to Emil – and even then after imposing his own rules of censorship – he was willing to share his opinions with everyone.

The new people and ideas he encountered at the university introduced him to life-views very different from the one he knew at home on Nytorv, where his family’s frugal peasant habits mixed cautiously with the mores of bourgeois respectability. Of course, by then he was already more educated than his father: at the age of eight he had followed his older brothers to the School of Civic Virtue, where he was drilled in Latin and Greek. His head teacher there, Michael Nielsen, was a strict disciplinarian, who found the youngest Kierkegaard ‘extremely childish and wholly devoid of seriousness, with a taste for freedom and independence, which prevented him from entering too deeply into any subject’. But Nielsen was impressed by Søren’s quick, receptive mind, his great aptitude for languages, and his lively personality, ‘still open and unspoiled’ at seventeen. Kierkegaard left the school having read Horace, Virgil and Cicero, Homer, Plato and Herodotus, and Xenophon’s Life of Socrates. He could translate the Book of Genesis from the Hebrew, and the Gospel of John from the Greek.

Those years at the School of Civic Virtue prepared him well for the degree in theology he began in the autumn of 1830. Again he was following his eldest brother Peter, who by that time had graduated in theology from the University of Copenhagen placed first in his class, studied for a year in Berlin, defended his doctoral dissertation at Göttingen – where he earned a reputation as ‘the demon debater from the North’ – and found himself in Paris in the middle of the July Revolution. But unlike his high-flying brother, Kierkegaard was not a very diligent student of theology. Christian doctrine, biblical exegesis and Church history interested him far less than the new kinds of literature he discovered at the university.

At the turn of the nineteenth century the first generation of German Romantics in Jena and Berlin had broken the old rules of art, religion, morality, philosophy and science: in their hands, human creativity became less constrained and more highly prized than ever before. These young writers evoked a shifting, fluid world that offered itself to be transformed, not only by new aesthetic ideals but by new ways of life. Goethe, the undisputed poetic genius of the age, was held up as the highest human exemplar – but every man, the poet Novalis urged in 1798, ‘should become an artist’. Unforeseen questions lay in wait for Kierkegaard as he entered this world: Could he become a poet? What would it feel like to live poetically? How could he make his own life into a work of art?

Ideas flowed quickly from the German cities to Copenhagen, and early in the new century Romanticism inspired a rising generation of Danish intellectuals. In 1802 Henrik Steffens returned to Copenhagen after studying geology in Germany, where he had become a disciple of the brilliant young philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling. Hoping for a professorship in philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Steffens gave a series of public lectures to large audiences of academics, students, and other men of culture. Modern life had become ‘prosaic’ and ‘irreligious’, he told them, and needed to be reanimated by human genius: ‘that in us which is divine; that which is one with everything, our real essence’. Prose should give way to poetry – not merely a matter of versification, but the pursuit of the ‘stamp of the eternal’ within the finite world. ‘I will open up a more significant vision of life and existence than that to which ordinary existence and daily life, confined as they are by finite needs, leads us,’ Steffens promised his listeners, as he set out the controversial pantheist philosophy he had learned in Germany.

In the university town of Jena, Steffens had encountered the circle of young intellectuals gathered around two brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel – and August Wilhelm’s wife Caroline, who inspired in most of these men an erotic passion that fuelled their creativity. This intimate, extraordinarily talented circle included Friedrich von Hardenberg (writing under the pseudonym Novalis), the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Schelling, who later married Caroline after she divorced August Wilhelm. They were closely acquainted with Goethe, Schiller and Fichte. The new dawn following the French Revolution still seemed bright, and the group shared high hopes for spiritual and political liberation.

In 1798 the Schlegels had started a journal, the Athenaeum, in which they and their friends shaped a distinctively Romantic literature, inspired by Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, published in 1795. Here Schiller urged that ‘the development of man’s capacity for feeling is the most urgent need of the age’, and argued that we become ‘fully human beings’ when we contemplate beautiful works of art, which offer an experience of ‘utter repose and extreme restlessness’. The new Romantic literature, Friedrich von Schlegel explained, would draw on the vast resources of the human imagination to produce ‘a feeling that is not sensual, but spiritual. Love is the source and soul of this feeling, and the spirit of love must diffuse through Romantic poetry everywhere, visibly and invisibly.’ Schlegel regarded human creativity as inseparable from nature’s infinitely productive powers: echoing Schelling’s new philosophy of nature – which influenced scientific as well as metaphysical theories of life – he described the ‘unconscious poetry that moves in the plant, that streams forth in light, that laughs out in the child, that shimmers in the bud of youth, that glows in the loving breasts of women’. This poetry was the true word of God, resounding throughout nature.

At that time Friedrich von Schlegel was living with Schleiermacher in Berlin: encouraged by his friend to write, Schleiermacher contributed dozens of fragments to the Athenaeum, and then published On Religion: Talks to the Cultured among its Despisers in 1799. This book’s unconventional defence of Christianity was addressed to those who, like Schiller and Schlegel, worshipped only philosophy and art. Schleiermacher urged these readers to look inwardly into themselves as well as out at the universe, to awaken a ‘feeling for that eternal and holy being which lies far on the other side of the world’. He described feelings of submission and dissolution that arise when nature is grasped intuitively, seen as an infinite but ordered whole: then one could experience ‘the quiet disappearance of one’s whole existence in the immeasurable’. Appealing directly to his Romantic friends, Schleiermacher deemed art ‘holy’, and poets ‘the higher priesthood who transmit the innermost spiritual secrets, and speak from the kingdom of God’. Artists and poets, he wrote, ‘strive to awaken the slumbering kernel of a better humanity, to inflame a love for higher things, to transform a common life into a higher one’.

Schleiermacher had been educated at a Moravian school and seminary; Schelling and the Schlegels were sons of Lutheran pastors; and Hardenberg’s father was a strict Moravian pietist. Disenchanted with the religion of their fathers, these men had thirsted for an alternative spirituality. Yet their philosophical poetry and poetic philosophies were rooted in their shared Christian heritage, while bursting out of its constraints. Like the pietists, they turned away from the rationalizing currents of the eighteenth century, and sought spiritual ‘awakening’ – for themselves personally and also for society – through feeling, within the human heart. And they too returned to the medieval traditions left behind by the Enlightenment: as the pietists had revived pre-Reformation mystical and devotional literature, so these early Romantics looked back to the age of chivalry and magic, re-reading medieval tales of love and adventure. In the fantastic quests described in these courtly romances and folk tales, they found new models for the inward, spiritual journey of self-discovery and self-development that was already a well-travelled pietist path.

But while the pietists sought their true selves only in those emotions and experiences which would draw them closer to perfect holiness, the Romantics explored the whole range of human feeling, unbounded by moralism or religious orthodoxy. They were all reading Spinoza, the seventeenth-century philosopher who insisted in his masterpiece, the Ethics, that everything ‘is in God’. They embraced Spinoza’s pantheist theology, still widely condemned as heretical, and combined this doctrine with more recent ideas about art and creativity. To the Romantics, pantheism meant unprecedented freedom: if nothing is outside God, then nothing is out of bounds. While the pietists tried to cultivate humility and obedience, the Romantics worshipped the expansive power of the human imagination. Their ideal exemplar was not – or at least not only – Jesus Christ, but any artistic genius who channelled the divine power immanent in nature. Pietists held to the orthodox Christian belief that God had created the world; the Romantics believed that great artists could create new worlds, again and again.

When Henrik Steffens returned from his electrifying visit to Jena in 1802 he had his own circle of friends waiting for him in Copenhagen: J. P. Mynster, young pastor and future bishop; Adam Oehlenschläger, the finest poet of his generation; A. S. Ørsted, a jurist and legal scholar who later became Denmark’s prime minister, and his brother H. C. Ørsted, then embarking on his brilliant scientific career. They often gathered at the home of the writer K. L. Rahbek and his wife Kamma, who presided over Copenhagen’s leading literary salon. Like the Jena circle, this group were closely bound by family ties: Mynster’s stepfather was Steffens’s uncle; Oehlenschläger married Kamma Rahbek’s sister; A. S. Ørsted married Oehlenschläger’s sister.

Steffens’s friends imbibed the new Romantic philosophy. In the summer of 1802 Oehlenschläger published a collection of poems nostalgic for ‘the ancient, ancient, bygone days, when Scandinavia gleamed’, blending Norse myths with Christian imagery to evoke a natural world imbued with ‘mystical divinity’. Inspired by Novalis, Oehlenschläger elaborated this pantheistic vision in his 1805 lyric poem ‘The Life of Jesus Christ Repeated in the Annual Cycle of Nature’. Meanwhile, H. C. Ørsted pursued research into ‘the Spirit in Nature’, and he eventually discovered that – as Schelling had predicted, but not proven – electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the same force. This scientific breakthrough brought into clearer view the spiritual unity which, the Romantics believed, lay hidden beneath the diverse phenomena of nature and culture.

Mynster was also influenced by Romanticism, but his religious awakening of 1803 strengthened his Christian orthodoxy. In 1805 Oehlenschläger, Kamma Rahbek and H. C. Ørsted all urged him to defend Oehlenschläger’s Jesus-Nature poem, which had been denounced by Bishop Balle, then the leader of the Danish State Church. Mynster was himself troubled by the poem’s pagan theology, and his cherished conscience was torn. In the end, after months of soul-searching and mounting pressure from his friends, he wrote – in verse – a sympathetic review of Oehlenschläger’s poem. Steffens, meanwhile, was not offered the chair in philosophy he had hoped for, and went back to Germany.

After those early years of Denmark’s cultural ‘Golden Age’, successive waves of Romanticism reached Copenhagen. Oehlenschläger published his second collection of poems in 1805, went on a European tour, and spent several months in Weimar with Goethe, who towered above the Romantic movement as the incarnation of divine genius. By the time Oehlenschläger returned to Denmark in 1810 to take up the chair in aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen, he had mixed with Romantic writers and thinkers in Berlin, Paris, Rome and Switzerland. When Kierkegaard entered the university in 1830, Oehlenschläger was still there, lecturing on Shakespeare and Goethe; he was recognized as the ‘poetic king of Scandinavia’, and in 1831 he became Rector of the university. Kierkegaard bought Oehlenschläger’s books, and found in them the experimental verse, mixtures of genre, and contrasts of mood that had become familiar to readers of Romantic literature.

By the 1830s, however, Johan Ludvig Heiberg was challenging Oehlenschläger’s claim to his literary throne. Heiberg was born into the elite salon that had nurtured Danish Romanticism: his parents, both talented writers, separated after his father was exiled from Denmark for political radicalism, and young Heiberg lived with the Rahbeks while his parents divorced and his mother Thomasine remarried. After he returned from his travels in Germany in 1824, newly converted to Hegelian philosophy, Heiberg wrote a series of plays that were performed at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre to great acclaim. He quickly established himself as Denmark’s leading literary critic: in 1827 he founded a journal, Copenhagen’s Flying Post, where he published his mother’s stories anonymously, promoted his own aesthetic theory, and criticized Oehlenschläger’s poetry. And in 1831 he married the dazzling young actress Luise Pätges.

Under Heiberg’s influence, Kierkegaard’s generation were taught to see Romanticism as a passing phase – even while the air was still thick with Romantic ideas about the power of poetry and philosophy to change the world. In 1833 Heiberg set out his own manifesto, On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age. There he argued that it was Hegel’s philosophy, not Schelling’s, which would cure the spiritual malaise diagnosed by the Romantics, whose relativistic world view had, Heiberg suggested, only hastened the decline. Hegel and Goethe were ‘undoubtedly the two greatest men the modern age has produced … their works contain the entire life of spirit of our age’; together, in their mutually complementary domains of philosophy and art, these two titans of the Zeitgeist would rescue European culture.

Kierkegaard’s aesthetic education was also shaped by his philosophy professors Poul Møller and Frederik Christian Sibbern, both literary writers as well as scholars. Sibbern is interested in modern philosophy: as a young man, he spent two years travelling in Germany, where he met Steffens, Fichte, Schleiermacher and Goethe. When Kierkegaard first encountered him, Sibbern had recently published an epistolary novel, Posthumous Letters of Gabriel, modelled on Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and in his lectures on aesthetics – which Kierkegaard attended in 1833 – he frequently discussed Goethe. Møller, a talented poet, had adopted the Romantics’ aphoristic, fragmentary style. He was a scholar of ancient Greek literature and philosophy, and an ‘unforgettable’ teacher who inspired Kierkegaard’s love for Socrates. While other Danish intellectuals advanced their careers by travelling the familiar academic trade route to the German university towns, Møller had sailed to China and back following a romantic disappointment. He was Kierkegaard’s favourite teacher.

Men like Oehlenschläger and Heiberg, Sibbern and Møller, taught Kierkegaard to speak of the modern age and contrast it with a classical past; to admire Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe; to see works of art as spiritually potent; to appreciate legends, myths and folk tales; to philosophize through literary criticism. They also embodied the existential possibility that he discovered during his first months at university. These men were professional poets and philosophers: they earned their living from their ideas, their imaginations, their skilled use of language; they debated, they wrote, they published; they were read, reviewed and talked about. In their writing they formed their souls, cultivated their natures, perhaps even honed their genius – and displayed these poetic selves to the world.

Gradually these exemplars entered into Kierkegaard’s life; strands of their lives were woven into his own. He became well acquainted with Sibbern: they talked about philosophy while walking around Copenhagen, or sitting by the fire in Sibbern’s parlour. Sibbern got to know his loquacious student well enough to see that he was ‘a very inwardly complicated sort of person’, ‘very polemical’, and ‘nearly always only capable of speaking about the things with which he was engaged in his innermost self’. Yet Sibbern also noticed that ‘he wanted to look after those people whom the public did not value.’ During Kierkegaard’s engagement to Regine, the philosophy professor spent time with the young couple, and then found himself counselling Regine after the break-up. When she confided her ‘deep indignation’ at how Kierkegaard had ‘mistreated her soul’, Sibbern told her that it would be worse if they were married, for ‘his spirit was continually preoccupied with itself.’

Poul Møller became Kierkegaard’s mentor; his interest in Socrates and his own unsystematic, unconventional style had an enduring influence on Kierkegaard’s philosophical development. He died in 1838, in his mid-forties. But without Møller, Kierkegaard would not have written his dissertation on irony, nor aspired to be the Socrates of Christendom. Six years after Møller’s death, Kierkegaard dedicated The Concept of Anxiety to him – ‘the enthusiasm of my youth; the mighty trumpet of my awakening; the desired object of my feelings; the confidant of my beginnings; my lost friend; my sadly missed reader’.

Even Oehlenschläger, a more remote figure, has a role in his Bildungsroman. In letters to Regine during their engagement, he quoted from Oehlenschläger’s fairy-tale drama Aladdin, and when he went to Berlin following the break-up he took this book with him. ‘If you need me and call / I come like lightning,’ he copied into his notebook while he sailed, overwrought, to Germany. He wrote to Regine of the ‘genie of the ring’ within him, linked to her ‘with the longing of my whole soul, for did I not myself bring you the ring I obey?’ As the steamship ploughed further and further away from her, he reflected that ‘both you and I united together are the genie of the ring.’

And of course Heiberg, though he remained aloof, was drawn into a complex relationship with Kierkegaard. It was Heiberg who published Kierkegaard’s very first article in Copenhagen’s Flying Post in 1834; a decade later, after Heiberg reviewed Either/Or, Kierkegaard was spurred to polemics against his former editor and became more determined to go his own way as a writer; he is still expressing contempt for literary ‘coteries’. In 1846 he repeated Heiberg’s effort to set out a philosophical diagnosis of ‘the present age’ – in the form of a review of a novel by Heiberg’s mother, Thomasine Gyllembourg. And now, in 1848, Kierkegaard has decided to end his authorship with an article about Heiberg’s wife.

During those early years of the 1830s, Kierkegaard discovered a new literature, and learned to read and critique it in new ways. He also learned to read and critique himself differently: while his Christian habits of self-examination lingered – he searched his conscience, he went to confession, he pondered his vocation – he took on the poetic ideals of the Romantics and applied them to his life. Perhaps it is not surprising that he has found the energies and excesses of Romanticism magnified within his own soul. At university, his innate tendency to hyper-reflection was nourished by an intellectual culture steeped in three decades of idealist philosophy and literary irony; his experiences and feelings were wrapped in countless folds of reflection, filled with poetic significance, and suffused with existential doubts.

His memories of these student years are also suffused with grief. His two remaining sisters, Nicolene and Petrea, died in 1832 and 1834 respectively; they had married two prosperous brothers, Johan Christian Lund and Henrik Ferdinand Lund, and they each left four children. His closest brother, Niels, died alone in a hotel room in New Jersey in 1833, having sailed across the Atlantic seeking business opportunities; although Niels wanted to follow their brother Peter to university, their father told him to go into trade. And Kierkegaard’s mother Anne died in 1834, leaving little record of her sixty-six years. In the raw weeks of his grief, he visited the mother of Martensen, then his philosophy tutor, who was away travelling in Europe. Mrs Martensen was struck by his profound sorrow. ‘Never in her life,’ she would often tell her son, ‘had she seen a human being so deeply distressed as S. Kierkegaard was by the death of his mother’, and she felt that he must have ‘an unusually profound sensibility’. ‘She was not wrong about this,’ conceded Martensen. ‘No one can deny him that.’

In the autumn of 1834, three months after his mother died, Kierkegaard began to write down his ideas in a journal. Following the Romantic fashion for medieval literature, he often wrote about characters from folk tales and legends, and he was drawn to figures who in some way took a stance against the world, opposing or subverting its conventions, defying its morality. ‘It is remarkable,’ he reflected, ‘that Germany has its Faust, Italy and Spain their Don Juan, the Jews the Wandering Jew, Denmark and north Germany, Eulenspiegel.’ These characters – a sceptical scholar who sells his soul to the devil; a serial seducer dedicated to sensual pleasure; a despairing outcast condemned to wander in exile; a trickster who exposes his victims’ hypocrisy and folly – were anti-heroic exemplars. To a young man schooled in Civic Virtue, brought up on the sermons of Mynster and Reuss, they revealed dangerous and enticing ways of being in the world.

His first literary journal entries were on the ‘master-thief’: subversive characters like Eulenspiegel or Robin Hood, who were principled and good-hearted as well as cunning. By his criminal activity the master-thief consciously opposed the established order or avenged social injustice; armed with his own ethic, he chose to be an outsider. One day Kierkegaard tried out this ‘youthful, romantic enthusiasm for a master-thief’ in conversation with his father, and received a severe reply: ‘There are some crimes that can be fought only with the constant help of God,’ intoned the old man. Kierkegaard’s deep-rooted fear of his own sinfulness surged up, and he ran to his room and looked at himself in the mirror. Above his bright, anxious gaze his hair was swept into a dramatic quiff, nearly six inches high: at twenty-one years old his religious melancholy had taken a visibly Romantic turn. This image of himself staring into his reflection, torn between moral anxiety and rebellion, reminded him of Friedrich von Schlegel’s account of the legend of Merlin the Magician, in which a young girl becomes afraid of her own body after looking in the mirror.

Around this time, in December 1834, his first article was published in Heiberg’s journal Copenhagen’s Flying Post. This was a brittle, sarcastic response to a patronizing article by one of his university friends on the emancipation of women – ‘in fashion magazines, they study the spirit of the age,’ joked Kierkegaard in ‘Another Defence of Woman’s Great Abilities’. His writing gathered momentum in the summer of 1835 when, at his father’s expense, he spent a few weeks travelling around Gilleleje. In his journal he ‘poeticized’ his travels through the countryside of northern Zealand in the Romantic manner: he visited ancient sites of Danish folk tales and legends, and described gloomy forests, tranquil lakes, the surging sea. ‘People still do not grow weary of gadding about busily pointing out the romantic settings,’ he observed.

During an excursion to Lake Esrom on 8 July the sky darkened, and Kierkegaard prepared himself for some sublime weather. ‘I have seen the sea turn blue-grey and become agitated, and I have watched the gusts of wind that announced the approaching storm swirl the grass and sand upward along the coast, but I have never seen a performance in which the whole forest is set in motion by these gusts of wind (these trumpet calls that announce the judgment),’ he wrote. ‘But it turned out to be just rain.’ Later that day, though, he found his storm, and soon he was ‘soaked to the skin amid thunder and lightning and pouring rain in the heart of the Grib forest, and beside me [in the carriage] sat a boy who trembled at the lightning’. They found shelter in a peasant’s house, where Kierkegaard asked for bread for his horse, and gave the peasant’s wife more money than she thought she should accept – ‘for I could spare it, and she needed it’.

Travelling south from Lake Esrom, past Hillerød, Kierkegaard discovered a landscape of mystical beauty: a valley of quiet beech forests and a small lake overgrown with waterlilies, resplendent in the morning light. Seen through eyes trained by pantheist poetry to discern the divine within nature, this was a spiritual place. Why did anyone need organized religion, he mused, when here ‘the church bells call to prayer, but not in a temple made by human hands – and if the birds do not need to be reminded to praise God, then ought men not be moved to prayer outside of the church, in the true house of God, where heaven’s arch forms the ceiling of the church, where the roar of the storm and the light breezes take the place of the organ’s bass and treble, where the singing of the birds makes up the congregational hymns of praise … where everything resolves itself in an endless antiphony –?’

Still in character as a Romantic poet, Kierkegaard took an evening walk on the northernmost cliffs of the Gilleleje coast and looked out to sea. Oceanic feelings should come naturally to a Danish soul; listening to ‘the deep but quietly earnest song of the sea’ and to the ‘evening prayers’ of the birds, he imagined himself ‘empowered to perceive things differently’. He thought of his mother, of his brothers Niels and little Søren Michael, of his sisters Maren, Nicolene and Petrea. These ‘dear departed ones’ rose from the grave before him, and he felt at ease in their midst: ‘I rested in their embrace, and I felt as if transported out of my body and floating about with them in a higher ether.’ This reverie was interrupted by a squawking seagull – so much for avian prayers – and he ‘turned back with a heavy heart to mingle with the world’s crowds’. Yet in such blessed moments, he wrote:

I have often stood there and pondered my past life and the various influences that have been important to me, and the pettiness that so often creates animosity in life vanished before my eyes. When the whole, looked at in perspective this way, displayed only the larger, more vivid outlines, and I did not lose myself in the detail as I often do but saw the whole in its totality, I was empowered to perceive things differently, to understand how often I had made mistakes, and to forgive others. – As I stood there, free from the depression and despondency that would make me see myself as excluded from the men who usually surround me, or free of the pride that would make me the constituting principle of a little circle – as I stood there alone and forsaken and the brute force of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my nothingness, and on the other hand the sure flight of the birds reminded me of Christ’s words: ‘Not a sparrow will fall to the earth without your heavenly Father’s will,’ I felt at one and the same time how great and insignificant I am.

It was a question, he concluded, of learning true humility. Just as Jesus retreated up a mountain when people wanted to proclaim him their king, so ‘it is good for a person to withdraw from the turmoil of the world’, into the heart of nature, where he can ‘surrender’ to a higher power. Kierkegaard resolved to take inward action, even to keep silent for three years. Of course, that was never a serious vow: back in Copenhagen, he resumed his sociable walks and intense coffee-shop conversations, and a few weeks into the autumn term he was addressing the Student Association on the question of free speech.

Who was that man standing ‘alone and forsaken’ on the Gilbjerg cliffs, contemplating his ‘great and insignificant’ life? How many of his thoughts arose from the swirling sea, and how many were borrowed from literary journals, volumes of poetry, or lectures on aesthetics? Which parts of him came from Nytorv, from Stormgade, from the Church of Our Lady? Had he travelled inwards on this journey to Gilleleje – or did he leave the city in order to fashion his soul according to an image he had discovered within its walls? Was he finding himself, or transforming himself, or creating himself ‘out there’, with the lilies and the birds? Where did his journey end and the journal begin?

By then, of course, he had learned that self-knowledge is not simply a matter of glancing in the mirror – for the person looking back at him was never a distinct, unalloyed self. ‘We often deceive ourselves,’ he confessed, ‘by embracing as our own many an idea and observation which either springs forth vividly out of a time when we read it, or lies in the consciousness of the whole age.’ If our inner lives always reflect the world, how can we know ourselves apart from that world? ‘Yes, even now as I write this observation,’ Kierkegaard reflected, ‘– this, too, perhaps, is a fruit of the experience of the age.’ And within every fold of reflection there is a little space for dissemblance and deceit.

His travelogue culminated in a long passage, more like a literary essay than a diary entry, though it was headed ‘Gilleleje, August 1, 1835’. Here he reflected on the scholarly life, and resolved to ‘live a completely human life, and not merely one of knowledge’. This was not just a personal aspiration, but a philosophical manifesto:

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is true for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgements about them; of what use would it be to me to develop a theory of the state, getting details from various sources and combining them into a whole, and constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see; of what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity, to be able to explain many specific points – if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life? I certainly do not deny that I still accept an imperative of knowledge and that through it men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all. This is what my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. This is what I need to live, a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge, so that I could base the development of my thought not on – yes, not on something called objective – something which in any case is not my own, but upon something which is bound up with the deepest roots of my existence, through which I am, so to speak, grafted into the divine, to which I cling fast even though the whole world may collapse. This is what I need, and this is what I strive for. A man must first learn to know himself before knowing anything else. Not until he has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, sinister travelling companion – that irony of life which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge.

By this time Kierkegaard had spent five years at university, and seemed to be nowhere near completing his theology degree: when he doubted the value of theoretical knowledge, he was questioning the meaning of his own existence. Yet while he was living these questions, he was writing about them at a distance – not yet using pseudonyms, but trying out the persona of a poet.

In this journal entry, as in many others written before and after the journey to Gilleleje, Kierkegaard explored themes from the old legend of Faust, the sceptical scholar. In the 1830s everyone was talking about Faust: this medieval tale of a man who rebelled against God had captured the Romantic imagination, and Goethe finally completed the second part of his poetic drama Faust just before he died in 1832. According to the traditional legend Faust’s life ended in damnation, but Goethe gave the story a new ending. His Faust undergoes a last-minute conversion, similar to St Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus: he is suddenly blinded, cast into darkness, and then rescued from the devil by hosts of angels. In this surprising conclusion to his long-awaited Faust, Goethe seemed to send a parting message to the world he was leaving behind. During his lifetime the great poet had seen the German universities grow more and more professionalized, filled with men striving for enlightenment through academic study – but Faust’s sudden blindness suggested that it is through its dark nights that the human soul matures, expands, deepens, and finds God within its depths.

Kierkegaard has a similar view of the spiritual life, and his soul has absorbed many dark, sleepless nights. But in the mid-1830s he disapproved of Goethe’s ending, because he wanted to use the story of Faust to make his own diagnosis of the modern age. He believed that Faust personified doubt, the defining feature of this age, and that in making Faust convert before he died Goethe had betrayed his character’s very essence. He, Kierkegaard, would produce a new interpretation of Faust, which – like the essays of Heiberg and Friedrich von Schlegel – would merge literary criticism, philosophy and poetry in a brilliant analysis of contemporary culture.

In 1836 the poet Nikolaus Lenau published another version of Faust. Lenau had recently returned to Germany, disillusioned, from Pennsylvania, where he had lived for a few months in a radical pietist commune. His Faust was nihilistic, for his own Romantic melancholy was shading into deep pessimism. Lenau’s poem made misery for Kierkegaard too. ‘Oh how unhappy I am! Martensen has published an essay on Lenau’s Faust!’ he wrote in his journal in 1837, after seeing Martensen’s essay – which argued that Faust symbolized the hubristic, irreligious tendencies of modern secular knowledge – in Heiberg’s new journal Perseus. That day, he was definitely writing in his own voice.

To his ageing father’s increasing dismay, he continued to delay sitting his theology exams, and spent most of his time thinking, talking and scribbling about literature and philosophy. He made notes on humour and irony, Christianity and Romanticism, and he was often seen deep in conversation with Poul Møller, who was preoccupied with these topics. In May 1837 he turned twenty-four, and met Regine Olsen for the first time. That summer, he felt oppressed by ‘the unhappy relativity in everything, the endless questions about what I am, about my joys and what other people see in me, and in what I do’. Yet those endless questions were at least better than unthinking contentment: he did not want to be like ‘the petit bourgeois ’, who valued morality above intelligence and had ‘never felt nostalgia for some unknown, remote something, never experienced the profundity of being nothing at all, of strolling out of Nørreport with four shillings in one’s pocket and a slender cane in hand’.

By then, only three Kierkegaards were left in the family home on Nytorv. Søren, his brother Peter Christian – whose first wife had just died of typhoid fever after a few months of marriage – and their elderly father rattled unhappily around the big house. Until 1837 they had attended Friday communion services together twice a year; now his brother and father went separately, and he did not go at all. ‘Søren these days is perhaps more than ever before weighed down by brooding, almost more than his health can stand, but it only makes him unhappy, indecisive, and is close to driving him insane,’ Peter Christian wrote in his diary that August.

Yes, the university years that enticed and prepared him to become an author intensified his reflection, deepened his sadness, and multiplied his anxieties. Those early disappointments still taste bitter now, more than ten years later – for this feeling, too, has been thickened by fresh layers, compacted to form a heavy pain around his heart. In ‘The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress’ he has noted that the fickle cruelty which slackens ‘the crowd’s’ admiration for Johanne Luise Heiberg as she gets older can be inflicted on authors, too – that is to say, authors who do not (like that actress’s husband) flatter the shallow tastes of the public:

If an author who neither has a considerable fund of ideas nor is very industrious were to publish at long intervals an elegant copybook that is especially ornate and is resplendently provided with so many blank pages – the crowd gazes at this elegant phenomenon with amazement and admiration and thinks that if he has been such a long time in writing it and if there is so little on the page then it really must be something extraordinary. If, on the other hand, an idea-rich author who has something else to think about than elegance and making a profit from an illusion, exerting himself with ever greater diligence, finds himself able to work at an unusual speed, the crowd soon becomes accustomed to it and thinks: It must be slovenly stuff. The crowd, of course, cannot judge whether something is well worked out or not; it sticks to – the illusion.

He battles his disappointment daily, and defiance proves again and again to be his best defence: though Christian Discourses has been hardly noticed, ignored by Professor Martensen and Bishop Mynster, he is still sculpting his authorship with exquisite care. If it must end now, then it will end perfectly – exactly as he wishes it. As the grey light slowly seeps into Rosenborggade, he gives up on sleep. It is nearly five in the morning, and another dawn is breaking.