It is 1 September 1848, and Kierkegaard is preaching for a third time at Friday communion in the Church of Our Lady. A small, frail figure standing before Thorvaldsen’s massive statue of Christ, he takes as the subject of his discourse a verse from John’s Gospel, ‘From on high He will draw all up to Himself’, and explains to the small congregation that following Christ will lift them above worldly concerns. ‘If a man’s life is not to be frittered away, being emptily employed with what while it lasts is vanity and when it is past is nothingness, or busily employed with what makes a noise in the moment but has no echo in eternity, then there must be something higher that draws it,’ he tells them in his soft, expressive voice.
Outside the tranquil church, the streets and the newspapers are noisy with electioneering: on 5 October all men, even peasants, will vote for members of the assembly which will draw up Denmark’s new constitution. But Kierkegaard’s sole concern is the spiritual life of ‘the single individual’. He believes this to be ‘diametrically opposite to politics’, since it has nothing to do with ‘earthly reward, power, honour’. The louder the public clamour about these things, the more decisively he sets himself against them: all that matters religiously, he insists, is the ‘inwardness’ of each human being, ‘not seeking to be a power in the external world’.
He grew up with stories of the Moravian missionaries who sailed bravely to Greenland, and now he sees himself as a kind of missionary, following a divine calling. Yet his peculiar mission is not in a distant Danish colony but in a Copenhagen church, where he must introduce Christianity to people who have been Christians their whole lives. ‘A missionary in Christendom will always look different from a missionary in paganism. If he is addressing Christians, what then does it mean to get them to become Christians?’ Through his authorship he has tried, year after year, to address his neighbours as human beings whose relationship to God is a question that remains to be answered, a task to be lived. His extraordinary literary gifts, his philosophical ingenuity, his powerful imagination, were, he believes, given to him by God – not to enable him to become an eminent professor or win the approval of reviewers, but to ‘make manifest the illusion of Christendom and provide a vision of what it is to become a Christian’. All his resources must be summoned daily in the service of this religious calling.
As usual, his anxieties have been resolved by writing. Now that he has ended his authorship, this resolution is trickier than ever; his latest anxiety is about how the authorship will be interpreted, and the only way out of it is to write a book about his authorship. Reitzel, the publisher of his pseudonymous works, has been talking about printing a second edition of Either/Or since 1846, when the first edition of 525 copies sold out, and if the book is reissued he will have to show how its immoralism and aestheticism were always intended to serve a religious purpose. ‘Now I see my way to writing a short and as earnest as possible explanation of my previous authorship’: everything he has published is an ‘indirect communication’ of Christianity, and only now that this authorship is finished can he finally express his religious commitment directly. ‘For this very reason I am now able to illuminate and interpret indirect communication. Earlier I had been continually unclear. One must always be over and beyond what one wants to interpret.’
Whether or not The Point of View for My Work as an Author will be published is another question – attended, of course, with fresh anxieties – but while he is writing he need not worry about that yet. He is sure to die soon; perhaps Rasmus Nielsen will help to secure his literary legacy, but it cannot be left in his hands. His works will be read by generations, and instead of letting people misunderstand his authorship, misunderstand his life, he must make his own ‘report to history’. After years of literary subterfuge, he will explain his strange vocation and his peculiar methods, beginning with Either/Or. One day, even if he does not live to see it, it will become clear that the man who stood quietly preaching in the Church of Our Lady in 1848 did not differ, in his soul, from the man who created the ‘Seducer’s Diary’ in Berlin in 1842 – for these men shared the same mission.
His task as an author has not been to expound a theology, teach a creed, or correct heresies. ‘Christianity is not a doctrine, but an existence communication. (This is the source of all the nuisances of orthodoxy, its quarrels about one thing and another, while existence remains totally unchanged.) Christianity is an existence communication and can only be presented – by existing,’ he wrote in his journal a few weeks ago. Yet he will never claim to set an example for others to follow, for he believes, like the Moravians, that ‘every human being is equally near to God’ – and that Jesus is the only exemplar. ‘Compel a person to an opinion, a conviction, a belief – in all eternity, that I cannot do. But one thing I can do: I can compel him to become aware.’
Either/Or was the first in a series of ‘aesthetic’ works, written for the kind of reader who ‘thinks he is a Christian and yet is living in purely aesthetic categories’. This is the widespread ‘illusion’ of Christendom: in a culture so steeped in Christianity as nineteenth-century Denmark, it is possible to do all the things expected of a Christian and yet never embark on the task of faith that takes a lifetime – perhaps longer than a lifetime – to accomplish.
Before Kierkegaard began his authorship, he had learned from Socrates that ‘there is nothing that requires as gentle a treatment as the removal of an illusion’ – for a direct confrontation only makes people more defensive and resistant, and strengthens their self-deceptions. It is not easy to correct a mistake that concerns a person’s entire existence. As a Socratic missionary, he has tried to teach his readers ‘not to comprehend Christianity, but to comprehend that they cannot comprehend it’. And so he entered into their illusion in order to draw them out of it: ‘One does not begin directly with what one wishes to communicate, but begins by taking the other’s delusion at face value. Thus one does not begin in this way: It is Christianity that I am proclaiming, and you are living in purely aesthetic categories. No, one begins in this way: Let us talk about the aesthetic.’
This was, he now admits, a ‘deception’, for he entered the aesthetic sphere only ‘in order to arrive at the religious’. But this deception was in the service of the highest truth, the truth of Christianity. ‘One can deceive a person out of what is true, and – to recall old Socrates – one can deceive a person into what is true. Yes, only in this way can a deluded person actually be brought into what is true – by deceiving him.’ A missionary in Christendom must move through the world like a secret agent, working ‘under cover’, for if he presents himself as religious ‘the world has a thousand evasions and illusions with which they protect against him and get rid of him.’
When he began Either/Or in Berlin, he was reaching for a form of writing that signals its own limits, points to something that can’t be captured by either philosophy or art. ‘Life isn’t like a romantic novel,’ he wrote in the preface to Either/Or. The book took up the critique of Romanticism that he had set out in his dissertation on irony, but developed it in a new direction: while his dissertation examined the deficiencies of Romantic irony in a theoretical way, Either/Or showed what it would be like to adopt this irony as a life-view. And he now included in this ‘aesthetic’ life-view not just Romanticism, but the more general tendency of human beings to pursue worldly desires – for material comfort, sensual pleasure, or intellectual stimulation – while avoiding the demands of ethical life, and their own need for God.
Kierkegaard was well aware, of course, of his own aesthetic tendencies. Like the little preface to From the Papers of One Still Living, Either/Or staged a debate between two parts of his soul; this time the argument stretched over several hundred pages, and it was not about publishing a book, but about getting married. On one side of this question stood an aesthete, known only as ‘A’, a witty, melancholy intellectual, a literary critic and an experimental poet: he wrote essays, reviews, fragments and aphorisms, and his eclectic papers made up Part I of Either/Or. Among them was the ‘Seducer’s Diary’, written by the calculating but irresistible Johannes – the character who would supposedly convince Regine that she was better off without Kierkegaard.
Like Johannes, the aesthete ‘A’ turned whatever he encountered into a subject for intellectual reflection or a source of poetic inspiration. He floated above everything – even his own existence – in a bubble of possibility; the world was an endless landscape arrayed before him, which he surveyed with fluctuating interest or disinterest, amusement or boredom, pleasure or irritation. He had no anchor in this world: no commitments, no investments, no moral code, no religion to tie him down. His own actions seemed to him weightless; it made no difference whether he did something, or did not do it. Easily bored, he moved from one thing – an idea, a mood, a woman – to the next. Like Friedrich von Schlegel’s novel Lucinde, his writings scorned bourgeois morality in general, and marriage in particular: ‘Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way … Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way … Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way … Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life.’
On the other side of the debate was Judge William, an older and more conscientious man, married with children, a model of civic virtue. He personified the ethical sphere, where a man could carve out his place within the world: build a solid home and a stable self out of meaningful decisions, enduring commitments, faithful relationships. In two letters to ‘A’, each one the size of a short book, he extolled the duties and the joys of married life. Judge William saw great potential in ‘A’, but was disturbed by his life-view: he told him that he loved him as a son, a brother, and a friend; that despite all his ‘bizarre qualities’ he loved his intensity, his passions, his frailties. He loved him, he wrote, ‘with the fear and trembling of a religious person, because I see the aberrations’.
Although these two literary personas both had watery Scandinavian souls, they were very different: ‘for you,’ Judge William wrote to his younger friend, ‘a turbulent sea is the symbol of life; for me it is the quiet, deep water.’ William’s inner being was like Peblinge Lake on a still day, and he saw his marriage as a stream flowing into this lake, gentle and constant yet full of life:
I have often sat beside a little running stream. It is always the same, the same gentle melody, on the bottom the same green vegetation that undulates with the quiet ripples, the same tiny creatures that move down there, a little fish that slips in under the cover of the flowers, spreads its fins against the current, hides under a stone. How uniform, and yet how rich in change! So it is with the domestic life of marriage – quiet, modest, humming. It does not have many changements, and yet it is like that water, running, and yet, like that water, it has melody, dear to the one who knows it, dear to him precisely because he knows it. It is not showy, and yet at times it has a sheen that nevertheless does not interrupt its usual course, just as when the moon shines on that water and displays the instrument on which it plays its melody.
The Judge urged the young aesthete to ‘earnestness of spirit’ – without this, he warned, ‘you will miss out on the highest, on the one thing that truly gives life meaning; you may win the world and lose yourself.’
This protracted dialogue between two life-views was not just an exercise in ironic self-examination, nor was its purpose solely – or even primarily – to heal Regine’s broken heart. Between the lines of this odd compendium of writings was a scathing commentary on an entire age. Martensen and Heiberg had championed Hegel’s philosophy as the solution to the spiritual crisis of their century, which Romanticism had exposed and, they argued, exacerbated. But Either/Or obliquely portrayed Hegelian thought as equally nihilistic, belonging, like Romanticism, to the aesthetic sphere. Of course, many people lived aesthetically – they lacked an ethical or a religious life-view – without knowing anything about Romantic literature or Hegelian philosophy. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard treated these intellectual trends as signs of the times, symptoms of spiritual vacuity.
In its poetry, science and metaphysics, Romanticism had sought a deeper unity underlying the endless diversity of the world, and Hegel’s philosophy gave a logical structure to this pantheistic quest for unity. Human beings usually understand and order their world by recognizing differences between things – day and night, life and death, male and female, masters and slaves, black and white. Underlying such distinctions is an implicit logic of ‘either/or’: it must be either day or night; animals are either male or female; a man is either alive or dead, either a master or a slave. This logical principle had been formalized by Aristotle, providing the bedrock for philosophical reasoning for many centuries. Yet Hegel emphasized that these differences not only separate things, but join them together, for opposites depend on one another. Days are known as days in contrast to night; slaves are slaves only when they have masters, and masters are masters only when they have slaves; men become conscious of their masculinity in relation to women, and women feel feminine in relation to men. The process of living is inseparable from dying. And the differences between any two human beings are also contained inside each of them, shaping their identity from within.
Hegel’s substitution of a dynamic, dialectical logic for the binary logic of common-sense thinking grounded a bold new theory of history. Writing in the wake of the long revolutionary struggle in Haiti, which ended in 1804 with the slaves in that French colony declaring their independence from Napoleon’s regime, Hegel argued that categories such as master and slave, hitherto regarded as a fixed natural order, shifted through time. Oppressive social relationships could evolve into a balanced civil state based on mutual recognition and respect. This was a philosophy of progress: Hegel argued that when we look at reality from a higher, more objective point of view – as when a historian surveys the epochs of the world, or a scientist uncovers the principles of unity within nature – then we understand that day and night, life and death, male and female, masters and slaves, are moments or phases in a continuous process. The goal of this process, Hegel claimed, is spiritual freedom. As they gain ever greater knowledge, human beings would become more and more like God, who knows everything because he is outside space and time, and sees the entire universe and its history in a single glance.
By the time he wrote Either/Or, Kierkegaard regarded the immense ambition of Hegel’s philosophical system as a symptom of the modern hubris that Martensen had discussed in his 1836 essay on Faust. Part I of Either/Or parodied this Promethean ideal – an ideal with which, Kierkegaard knew, his own generation was particularly burdened. In his ‘Seducer’s Diary’ Johannes described himself looking down upon his own existence, surveying his soul as God surveys his creation, or as a Hegelian philosopher surveyed world history:
My mind roars like a turbulent sea in the storms of passion. If someone else could see my soul in this state, it would seem to him that it, like a skiff, plunged prow-first down into the ocean, as if in its dreadful momentum it would have to steer down into the depths of the abyss. He does not see that high on the mast a sailor is on the lookout. Roar away, you wild forces, roar away, you powers of passion; even if your waves hurl foam toward the clouds, you still are not able to pile yourselves up over my head – I am sitting as calmly as the king of the mountain. I am almost unable to find a foothold; like a water bird, I am seeking in vain to alight on the turbulent sea of my mind.
Perhaps Kierkegaard himself had lived like this before his engagement crisis – always outside himself, hovering above his world. And then he was shipwrecked on the warm-blooded, irrefutable existence of a young woman who lived a few streets away, who loved him and expected to marry him, whose eyes gazed directly into his own, whose tears he could reach out and touch. From Regine he learned that no philosophical system, no merely intellectual approach to life, helps a human being to live in the world, to make decisions, to become himself.
Beyond wrestling with his inner turmoil, he wanted to depose Hegelian philosophy – and he particularly wanted to take the wind out of Martensen’s sails. Through the character of the aesthete ‘A’, so richly drawn because he knew his soul from the inside, he showed that the distinctive dialectical logic that shaped Hegel’s thinking, and reproduced itself at every level of his encyclopaedic philosophy, becomes ridiculous when it is adopted as a life-view. The aesthete finds that his choices mean nothing, for in every decision he contemplates, the alternatives lead to the same outcome: ‘Marry or do not marry; you will regret it either way.’ Neither Hegel nor Martensen had intended their philosophical logic to be applied to ethical life like this – but then Kierkegaard’s point was that someone who pursued a philosophy which didn’t help him to live in the world was distracting himself from the most urgent questions of existence.
While Either/Or ’s aesthetic writings parodied Martensen’s Hegelianism as well as the more amorphous poetic ideals of the Romantics, Judge William’s letters expressed the kind of ethical life-view taught by Bishop Mynster. In fact, Judge William’s chastisement of the aesthete echoed Mynster’s criticisms of Martensen’s theology. Just before Kierkegaard wrote Either/Or, Mynster had disputed with Martensen about the merits of Hegelian philosophy: the two theologians exchanged a series of learned articles about the relationship between philosophy and faith. Other scholars lined up on both sides of their debate, and the phrase ‘either/or’ became a slogan for the issue that divided them. Martensen used Hegelian dialectics to show how opposing theological positions could be reconciled or ‘mediated’ from a philosophical perspective. For Mynster, what mattered most was personal religious commitment: he argued that each individual should affirm his faith – either ‘pantheism’ or ‘supernaturalism’, either Judaism or Christianity, either devotion to God or atheism – and then be true to it in his life.
Judge William’s letters showed how the question of marriage made Bishop Mynster’s position crystal clear. A man either marries or does not marry, and if he does marry he cannot have two wives at once. The Judge’s attitude to women was like Mynster’s attitude to Christianity: he had chosen a wife, and he remained faithful to her. In calling his book Either/Or, Kierkegaard signalled that he was stepping into the debate between Martensen and Mynster. Yet as well as contributing to this debate – apparently siding with Mynster – he was satirizing the whole thing; Either/Or was a philosophical comedy, though within the humour there was deep earnestness. By turning a polite scholarly exchange into a clash of life-views, he showed that this academic dispute posed a question of existence that cannot be answered until it is lived.
Although Judge William – like Bishop Mynster – took this existential question seriously, Kierkegaard did not let him have the last word. The Judge’s two long letters to the aesthete were followed by a sermon, describing how a human being understands himself differently when he lives in relation to God. The sermon was accompanied by a note explaining that its author was an old friend of Judge William, now an obscure pastor in a little rural parish in Jutland – ‘A little man with a squarely built figure, merry, light-hearted, and uncommonly jovial. Although in the depths his soul was serious, his outward life seemed gaily inconsequent.’ He had, he told the Judge, found the Jutland heath to be ‘an incomparable study room for a parson’: ‘There I go on Saturdays to prepare my sermon, and everything widens out before me. I forget every actual listener and gain an ideal one, gain complete self-forgetfulness, so that when I mount the pulpit it is as though I were still standing upon the heath where my eye discovers not a single soul, where my voice lifts itself with all its strength to outdo the violence of the storm.’
A sermon by a country parson seems an innocent thing, but in fact its inclusion in Either/Or was a subversive act. By assigning Martensen to the aesthetic sphere and Mynster to the ethical sphere, Kierkegaard posed a daring question: Were either of these high priests of Danish Christendom approaching life religiously? Was there anything truly Christian in their Christianity? And if neither the Professor of Theology nor the Bishop of Zealand had reached the religious sphere of existence, then who in Copenhagen did exemplify and teach a genuinely religious life? At the end of Either/Or Kierkegaard projected the voice of the religious sphere far beyond his city walls – as if no one within those walls knew how to live in relation to God.
Though they loomed especially large for Kierkegaard as inspirations and adversaries, Mynster and Martensen were not the only influential Christian teachers in Copenhagen in the early 1840s. Another powerful figure was Henrik Nicolai Clausen, who had taught theology at the university since 1822: he was a New Testament scholar and a rationalist of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment order. Professor Clausen trained his students – including Kierkegaard, who attended his classes throughout the 1830s – to read the Bible with a rigorous discipline. In 1825 he published Catholicism and Protestantism: Their Church Constitutions, Doctrines and Rites, which made the familiar Lutheran claim that while Catholics recognized the Church as the highest spiritual authority, Protestants grounded their faith upon scripture. More controversially – and certainly a departure from Luther’s own teaching – Clausen argued that the divine Word should not be simply proclaimed from the pulpit: it needed to be interpreted by the light of reason, guided by historical research. This was a task for biblical scholars, like himself, who were experts in Hebrew and Greek, trained in theology and philosophy. While many of his generation were rebelling, one way or another, against rationalism, Clausen remained confident that human reason could free their faith from the superstition and ignorance which, empowered by dogma, had breached the peace of Christendom for too many dark decades. For Clausen, professional theologians were the quiet guardians of Christian truth, the enlighteners of the Lutheran Church.
Opposed to Clausen in almost every respect was N. F. S. Grundtvig, a firebrand priest, poet, hymnist and political agitator who hustled noisily – and effectively – at the margins of the Danish State Church. In his youth, his nationalism had found expression in a Romantic nostalgia for Norse mythology: inspired by Oehlenschläger, Grundtvig wrote poetry that envisioned restored glory for the Scandinavian people, ‘sons of the giant race’. But after a personal spiritual crisis he turned against the pagan, pantheist ideas of the Danish Romantics, attacking both Oehlenschläger and H. C. Ørsted. During the years after Kierkegaard’s birth, when Denmark remained battered and bankrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, Grundtvig’s nationalist fervour blossomed into a campaign of poetry and preaching that sought to reawaken ‘the heroic spirit of Scandinavia unto Christian deeds’. Like a prophet of ancient Israel he lamented his nation’s spiritual corruption: self-interest had become a god, money was the soul of the state, and unbelief posed more of a threat to Denmark than any foreign army.
In the late 1820s Grundtvig turned his polemical spirit against Professor Clausen, whom he attacked so vehemently that he was sued for libel. Keen to wrest spiritual authority from the hands of biblical scholars, Grundtvig trumpeted his own ‘matchless discovery’ that the original source of Christianity was not the scriptures, but an oral tradition – including the Lord’s prayer, words of baptism and the Apostles’ Creed – that came directly from Jesus and was passed down through generations by word of mouth. Christian truth, he argued, was to be found in this ‘living word’ of the congregation, and not in the dead letters of learned scholars.
Grundtvig’s vigorous preaching of his populist, communitarian theology drew many people of a dissenting bent – including Kierkegaard’s brother, Peter Christian – away from Copenhagen’s established pietist congregation. While the Moravian pietists had practised their faith in separate communities, Grundtvig agitated to change the Danish State Church. Having travelled to England in the early 1830s, he argued for a liberal civil state that permitted religious freedom and allowed the orthodox Christian community, the bearers of the ‘living word’, to flourish on their own terms.
Bishop Mynster, whose zeal for moderation usually tempered his disputes – with Clausen and Martensen, among others – could not abide Grundtvig’s intemperate activism. Mynster tried to thwart Grundtvig by banning him from administering the sacraments, and when this did not work – for Grundtvig was a skilled strategist, and his populist message made him powerful – he tried to contain him by appointing him pastor of Vartov, a residence for the sick and elderly. But by the 1840s Grundtvig had made Vartov Church the centre of a movement that harnessed not only the spiritual energies of pietism, but growing currents of social unrest among the peasants. He conducted these forces from the pulpit; his rousing hymns were sung to the glory of the true, living faith of the Danish people. Peter Christian Kierkegaard, by then also a pastor, was one of his closest followers.
Ever since his student days Kierkegaard has disagreed with his brother about Grundtvig: in 1835 he wrote in his journal that ‘Grundtvig looks on the development of Christian understanding not as progress down a difficult road but like a steam engine running on a railway, with steam fired up by the apostles, so that Christian understanding is prepared in closed machines.’ He distrusts the way Grundtvig’s critique of the Christian establishment seems to go hand in hand with his political ambition: now the polemical pastor is harnessing the new democratic spirit of 1848, and standing for election to Denmark’s Constitutional Assembly. And as he accentuates his own religious purpose as an author, Kierkegaard is anxious to distinguish his mission from Grundtvig’s campaigning career: ‘I have continually objected to a certain party of the orthodox here, that they band together in a little circle and strengthen one another in thinking that they are the only Christians.’ These direct polemics might be politically effective, but they cannot succeed in the complex, delicate spiritual ministry that Christians in Christendom require: ‘Every once in a while a religious enthusiast appears. He makes an assault on Christendom; he makes a big noise, denounces nearly all as not being Christians – and accomplishes nothing. He does not take into account that an illusion is not so easy to remove.’
In the years before he wrote Either/Or, Kierkegaard watched Grundtvig’s rise at close quarters, just as he watched Martensen’s rapid ascent to an influential university position. Mynster and Clausen, of course, already stood at the top of their professions. He heard these four men – his father’s confessor, his theology professor, his nearest rival, and his brother’s spiritual mentor – teach different versions of the truth of Christianity, empowered by their worldly positions. Even Mynster, with whom he sympathized personally, was compromised by his role as leader of a Danish Church inseparable from the political establishment. In Either/Or he opposed them all, showing that none of these powerful Christian figures belonged to the religious sphere.
Of course, Kierkegaard did not claim to speak directly from the religious sphere himself. Yet the sermon at the end of Either/Or drew on his own experience of being dragged into the harsh light of the ethical sphere, where he was judged by human eyes and confronted with his own moral failure. Through this anxiety-inducing experience, he suggested, a human being comes to know his need for God.
His sermon began with a prayer, that ‘the restless mind, the fearful heart may find rest’. And then he described the anxieties and doubts that came with the kind of ethical religion preached by Mynster, who exhorts his congregations to do their best, to act as honourably as possible, while acknowledging that human beings ‘are weak and imperfect creatures’. This way of thinking, the sermon suggested, leads an earnest person to interminable calculations about to what extent he is in the right, and to what extent in the wrong. And of course everyone makes these judgements about others at least as readily as they make them of themselves: in the ethical sphere, people measure their deeds against the conduct of their neighbours, compare their relative imperfections, and claim their share of righteousness. Explaining that respite from this endless, anxious judging can be found only in God, before whom everyone has equal certainty of being a sinner in need of forgiveness, the sermon beckoned the readers of Either/Or beyond the ethical sphere.
It ended with a direct appeal to the pastor’s rural parishioners – and an indirect appeal to Kierkegaard’s urban readers:
Perhaps my voice does not possess enough strength and heartiness to penetrate to your inmost thought – O, but ask yourself, ask with the solemn uncertainty with which you would address a man who was able, you knew, by a single word to decide your happiness in life, ask yourself still more seriously, for truly it is a question of salvation. Do not check your soul’s flight, do not grieve the better promptings within you, do not dull your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts, ask yourself, and continue to ask until you find the answer; for one may have known a thing many times and acknowledged it, one may have willed a thing many times and attempted it, and yet it is only by the deep inward movements, only by the indescribable emotions of the heart, that for the first time you are convinced that what you have known belongs to you, that no power can take it from you; for only the truth which edifies is truth for you.
Kierkegaard completed Either/Or in Copenhagen through the spring, summer and autumn of 1842; he asked his friend Jens Finsen Giødvad, who worked at The Fatherland, to help him publish it pseudonymously. Then as now, he trusted Giødvad to keep the secret of his authorship. Proofreading the manuscript was a tremendous task, and he was impatient: each day he brought a new pile of pages to the Fatherland office on Købmagergade. He often spent the whole morning there, along with other friends of Giødvad who treated the office as ‘a kind of club’. This irritated the newspaper’s chief editor, Carl Ploug – and Kierkegaard was especially distracting: ‘One must imagine what it is like to have to have a newspaper ready at a definite time – and in those days it was early in the afternoon, because the police inspector had to look at the issue before it was distributed – and to have an impractical and very self-absorbed man sitting in the office, ceaselessly lecturing and talking without the least awareness of the inconvenience he is causing. However captivating Ploug found him, and however often he might have felt an urge to sit and listen, he nonetheless had to carry out his … daily task, while Giødvad sat reverently listening at the master’s feet.’
Either/Or was finally published in February 1843 bearing the name Victor Eremita, who had supposedly edited the book after finding the loose papers of the aesthete ‘A’, along with Judge William’s letters, in a secret drawer in a second-hand writing desk. Despite Giødvad’s discretion, the identity of the real author quickly became common knowledge. ‘Recently a book was published here, with the title Either/Or!’ wrote Henriette Wulff to her friend Hans Christian Andersen that February. ‘It is supposed to be quite strange, the first part full of Don Juanism, scepticism, etc., and the second part toned down and conciliating, ending with a sermon that is said to be quite excellent. The whole book has attracted much attention. It is actually supposed to be by a Kierkegaard who has adopted a pseudonym: do you know him?’
A few weeks later Andersen was informed by another friend, Signe Læssøe, that she was reading ‘Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard’. She found it ‘demonic’ but compelling. ‘You have no idea what a sensation it has caused,’ she wrote to Andersen:
I think that no book has caused such a stir with the reading public since Rousseau placed his Confessions on the altar. After one has read it one feels disgust for the author, but one profoundly recognizes his intelligence and his talent. We women have to be especially angry with him: like the Mohammedans, he assigns us to the realm of finitude, and he values us only because we give birth to, amuse, and save menfolk. In the first part (this is a work of 864 octavo pages) he is aesthetic, that is, evil. In the second part he is ethical, that is, a little less evil. Everyone praises the second part because it is his alter ego, the better half, which speaks. The second part only makes me angrier with him – it is there that he ties women to finitude. In fact I only understand a fraction of the book; it is altogether too philosophical. For example, he says, ‘There is no bliss except in despair; hurry up and despair, you will find no happiness until you do.’ At another point he says, ‘One’s happiness can consist only in choosing oneself.’ What does that mean?
Poor Andersen, still smarting from The Papers of One Still Living, sensed that his reviewer had become his literary rival. ‘What you have sent me about Kierkegaard’s book does not exactly excite my curiosity,’ he wrote to Signe. ‘It is so easy to seem ingenious when one disregards all considerations and tears to pieces one’s own soul and all holy feelings!’
Kierkegaard, meanwhile, was no less sensitive than Andersen about the opinions of his peers. However often he turned inward, in search of God, away from the world, he could not escape his own anxieties about what other people thought of him. Indeed, the scandal of Either/Or, though published in the name of a hermit, exposed him to unprecedented publicity. The ethical sphere – still ringing with the judgements that had shamed and wounded him after his broken engagement – expanded, became more populous, and its attentions intensified.
Here in the Church of Our Lady this Friday morning, he receives a different kind of attention. Let the crowds outside shout for Grundtvig; here, a few human beings are gathered quietly, preparing to receive communion, and his task is to help draw them inward, away from the world. He does this by offering his own inwardness, turning his soul inside out. If he has anything to offer his neighbours, it comes from his long struggle to tear himself from his worldly cares – his disappointed expectations, shattered hopes, bitter recollections.
‘If from on high Christ is able to draw the Christian to himself,’ he tells the little congregation:
there is much that must be forgotten, much that must be disregarded, much that must be died away from. How can this be done? Oh, if you have ever been concerned, perhaps concerned about your future, your success in life, have truly wished to be able to forget something – a disappointed expectation, a shattered hope, a bitter and embittering recollection; or if, alas, out of concern for the salvation of your soul, you have quite fervently wished to be able to forget something – an anxiety of sin that continually confronted you, a terrifying thought that would not leave you – then you yourself have no doubt experienced how empty is the advice the world gives when it says, ‘try to forget it!’ For when you anxiously ask ‘how shall I go about forgetting?’ and the reply is ‘you must try to forget’, this is only an empty mockery, if it is anything at all. No, if there is something you want to forget, try to find something else to remember, then you will certainly succeed.
They are gathered in the church to remember Christ: to hear again the words Jesus spoke the night before his arrest, and to take bread and wine, as he instructed, ‘in memory of me’.
‘He will draw all to himself; draw them to himself, for he will entice no one to himself.’ Jesus did not entice his followers with easy consolation, or with promises of ‘power and honour and glory’. The truth that Jesus lived ‘was insulted, mocked, and as the scripture says, spat upon’ – yet it is not right to dwell only on these things, either. Christians should love Christ in his weakness and misery and humiliation, and in his glory, ‘for melancholy is no closer to Christianity than frivolity; they are both equally worldliness, equally far away from the truth, equally as much in need of conversion.’ There are, indeed, many ways to go to Christ, yet they all converge at one place – the consciousness of sin – and every human being must pass through this place within his own heart:
My listener, you, to whom my discourse is addressed! Today he is indeed with you as if he were closer to the earth, as if he were, so to speak, touching the earth; he is present at the altar where you seek him; he is present there – but only in order once again from on high to draw you to himself … Oh, and is it not true, just today and just because you feel yourself drawn today, just for that reason you would no doubt be willing today to confess to yourself and to him how much is still left, how far it is from being true that he has entirely drawn you to himself – from on high, away from everything base and worldly that would hold you back. Oh, my listener, it is certainly not me nor any other human being who says or will say or dares say this to you; no, every human being will have enough with saying it to himself – and should have praise for God if he is ever sufficiently moved to say it to himself. My listener, I do not know where you are, how far he has perhaps already drawn you to himself, how far more advanced in being a Christian you may be than I, and so many others, but God grant this day, wherever you are and whoever you are, you who have come here today in order to participate in the sacred meal of the Lord’s Supper, that this day may truly be blessed for you.