Despite the fact that he seldom took written note of it, Kierkegaard was always on the qui vive for what he termed “hints” from God. For instance, at one point late in life, Kierkegaard bumps into the father of his former fiancée, and he puts off publishing a book, as he waits to see if the encounter is a divine message. I wonder how those who are open to the idea of such hints from on high might interpret the fact that the thinker who was consumed with the question of what it means to have faith was named “Kierkegaard”—which translated into English means churchyard.
The intellectual and spiritual comet that was Søren Aabye Kierkegaard began his days on earth on May 5, 1813. Born in Copenhagen, he was the youngest of seven children born to Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and his second wife and former servant, Anne Sørensdatter Lund. Michael Pedersen’s first wife died childless two years after their marriage, and he married his wife’s maid. In something of a public embarrassment, they had their first child five months after their wedding. The ages of Kierkegaard’s parents were almost biblical for the time. His mother was forty-five when Søren was born and his father fifty-six.
A native of Jutland, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756–1838) began life as a poor shepherd boy on the heaths of Jutland. One unholy day he was so distraught about his hardscrabble lot that he cursed God. His lot soon changed. At twelve, an uncle took him in to work in his dry-goods business in Copenhagen. In time, he went out on his own and became a highly successful textile merchant. He also invested in real estate and stocks and was soon so well off that his progeny would never have to fret about making a living.
The Kierkegaard family was among the nouveaux riches of the Danish capitol city. They were also members of a pietistic community with strong ties to the Moravians.
In the many volumes of personal jottings, Kierkegaard does not devote a single word to his mother, and yet his journals reverberate with reflections about his father. Kierkegaard’s stern, melancholic, pious, and indisputably brilliant autodidact of an old man left an unusually deep impress on him. Some would call it a scar.
Before Søren was twenty-one, four of his siblings, a number of in-laws, and his mother had been buried. At one point, Michael Pedersen confided that the endless treks to the cemetery were all part of a divine punishment for his boyhood curse against God. The elder Kierkegaard announced to his remaining sons, Peter and Søren, that he would outlive all his children, that he was damned “to be a cross upon their graves.” Søren believed him.
As for Kierkegaard’s formative years, the immortal genius was a very good but not a stellar student at the Copenhagen School of Civic Virtue. Years after Kierkegaard’s death, Frederik Welding, a fellow classmate, recalled,
He was always number two or three in the various classes in which we were students. He was a skinny boy, always on the run, and he could never keep from giving free rein to his whimsy and from teasing others with nick-names he had heard, with laughter, and with funny faces, even though it often earned him a beating. I do not recall that his language was ever genuinely witty or cutting, but it was annoying and provocative, and he was aware that it had this effect even though he was often the one who paid for it. (Kirmmse, Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 7)
As though a harbinger of things to come, the young Kierkegaard was called gaflen or “the fork” in part for his ability to discern the vulnerabilities of others and his delight in sticking it to them. And of course, he would one day stick his tines into both the bourgeois mentality and Christendom.
Kierkegaard matriculated in theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1830, taking classes in a wide range of subjects including philosophy, mathematics, physics, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, in which he excelled. He took his sweet time at the university and to some extent lived the life of a flaneur, spending hours and much money as he mingled in café society. His father reprimanded him for the enormous bills that he was running up and his wayward lifestyle as well as for the slow pace of his university studies.
The pater familias died in 1838. Kierkegaard was shocked to have outlived his father. Maintaining that he could not argue with a dead man, the prodigal was supercharged with energy and completed his studies in a veritable flash. In July 1840 he passed his exams at the university and in 1841 he publicly defended his magister (doctoral) dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates. Kierkegaard was such a polemical figure that one of the members of his dissertation committee may have feigned illness rather than exchange intellectual jabs and counters with Kierkegaard at his doctoral defense.
But there was another event that marked the man who would leave such a mark on the world of ideas. In 1837, when he was twenty-four and a university student, Kierkegaard became enamored of the fifteen-year-old Regine Olsen. A little over three years later they became engaged. Immediately, Kierkegaard began to have second and third thoughts, and after thirteen months he terminated the engagement. Regine was distraught. Fearful for his daughter’s health and even life, Regine’s father, Councilor Olsen, humbly begged Kierkegaard to reconsider—but Kierkegaard would not relent. In his nachlass, he would sometimes suggest that he broke off their engagement to protect Regine from the profound melancholy that afflicted his family; on other pages, he intimated that he could not dance with the ideas that were burbling behind his eyes and be home for dinner at five.
In a couple years’ time, Regine recovered from the emotional trauma and married Johan Frederik Schlegel, who later became governor of the Danish West Indies. Still, perhaps in a highly poeticized fashion, Regine remained the queen of Kierkegaard’s heart. Though it would be enough to make any therapist wince, Kierkegaard believed that if you truly loved someone, it was for keeps. There was no getting over it and “moving on.” A true lover “keeps this love young, and it grows along with him in years and in beauty” (FT, p. 44). For as the author of Fear and Trembling tells it, “he is too proud to be willing to let the whole substance of his life turn out to have been an affair of the fleeting moment” (FT, p. 44).
In 1841, two weeks after ending his engagement, and in part to help make the break easier for Regine, Kierkegaard departed for Berlin. There he attended the lectures of the renowned German philosopher Friedrich Schelling. It was in the vibrant German city and the crucible of the split with Regine that Kierkegaard came into his Muse. In four months and while attending classes at the University of Berlin, he penned the immense and immortal Either/Or as well as Two Upbuilding Discourses. In March 1841, having had his fill of Schelling, Kierkegaard returned to Copenhagen, where he continued his prodigious literary productivity. Over the next three years, Kierkegaard held the wire of a kind of intellectual stimulation that few people ever feel and fewer still can tolerate for any length of time. During that period, he composed Fear and Trembling, Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, Stages on Life’s Way, and a shelf of “upbuilding discourses.” All the while, he was scribbling like a fiend in his journals.
In 1844, Kierkegaard resolved that after one more book he would lay down his pen and, though almost comic to consider, take a post as a country pastor! His literary finale was to be The Concluding Unscientific Postscript—“concluding” because it was to be his final book, “unscientific” so as to distinguish it from the systematizing work of Hegel, and “postscript” relative to the Philosophical Fragments. But then fate or something higher intervened.
In December 1845, P. L. Møller put out a critical review of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymously published Stages on Life’s Way. Møller often published anonymously in The Corsair, a popular magazine specializing in political satire. For all his gray matter and confidence, Kierkegaard was a highly umbrageous individual. In January of that year, Kierkegaard, writing under the guise of Frater Taciturnus (one of the pseudonymous authors of Stages on Life’s Way), launched an attack on Møller and The Corsair. This was a time of great political turmoil in Denmark as well as the rest of Europe. Indeed, in 1848 Denmark would make the peaceful transition to a constitutional monarchy. By connecting Møller with the widely circulating left-wing periodical, Kierkegaard delivered a crippling and, most believe, low blow to Møller’s academic aspirations.
The Corsair responded to Kierkegaard’s attack with a torrent of articles and brilliant caricatures, always picturing Kierkegaard as vain and narcissistic. In one illustration, our author is artfully depicted riding on Regine’s back with a whip in hand. There is another of him in formal dress and top hat, arms folded and musing as the world appears to revolve around him. Kierkegaard soon became a negative media star—or, as he described it, “a martyr of laughter.” The man who delighted in ambling around the streets of Copenhagen and talking with everyone from fishmongers to government ministers could no longer make his rounds without attracting a crowd. In his turn, Kierkegaard returned fire with his pen. By the end of the following year, Meir Goldschmidt, editor of The Corsair, resigned. Kierkegaard had won the battle but lost the war; his private life was never the same again. No doubt, this bloody episode, which “The Fork” was certainly guilty of escalating, helped form his very low but perhaps percipient views about the press and the steamrolling abstraction he called “The Public.”
After the Corsair affair, Kierkegaard retired any ideas he had of retiring from his scribbling life. In 1849, he published the Christian psychological masterpiece The Sickness Unto Death. I believe this study represents Kierkegaard at the summit of his powers.
In 1851, Kierkegaard began a period that is widely regarded as the black hole in his life. Though he continued keeping his diary, his publications, which up to this point had flowed like a mighty river, now only dribbled. Again, largely on account of the Corsair incident, Kierkegaard could no longer take his “people baths” in the streets. He led an increasingly isolated and lonely existence. In addition, he was running out of his inheritance and was without prospects for a job, so his journal reflections sway back and forth between worrying about his financial situation and being at what he termed “the innermost center of Christianity.” And then the third climactic event in Kierkegaard’s otherwise writerly life occurred.
In 1854, Bishop Jacob Mynster, who had long ministered to Kierkegaard’s family, died. Kierkegaard’s father was devoted to Mynster, and Kierkegaard himself delivered gift copies of his books to Mynster and was always deeply concerned about where he stood with the prelate. But there was also a powerful current of ambivalence.
At Mynster’s funeral, Kierkegaard’s former professor, Hans Martensen, described Mynster as “a witness to the truth,” one “of the whole series of witnesses to the truth which extends through time like a chain, from the days of the Apostles to our own day.” Kierkegaard, who for years had been obliquely arguing that following Christ required the imitation of Christ in suffering and self-denial, was aghast at the idea that a man who enjoyed power, prestige, and luxury should be likened to those who in bearing witness were spat upon, thrashed, and ultimately executed. As early as Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard was writing, “Not only in the business world but also in the world of ideas, our age stages em wirklicher Ausverkauf [a real sale]. Everything can be had at such a bargain price that it becomes a question whether there is finally anyone who will make a bid” (FT, p. 5). On Kierkegaard’s reckoning, the deep discount was on the requirements of faith.
Kierkegaard judged Martensen’s hyperbole to be a logical extension of the cheapening of religion that had long been under way. He pulled the lanyard and in a series of self-published articles blasted away at the Danish state church, demanding that Martensen explain in what sense Mynster had been a witness. To many, this was all very unseemly, for Kierkegaard was in effect critiquing the praise layered upon a revered individual in, of all things, a eulogy. Martensen offered a tepid response and then attempted to stonewall Kierkegaard; he should have known that this strategy would never work with his firebrand of a former student. Kierkegaard pounded away, detailing the ways in which the institution of Christianity was beating a path away from lives of Christian conviction and authenticity. For the first time, he stopped attending services and encouraged others to do the same—explaining that by staying home people would have one less sin to repent for, since they would no longer be participating in a process that “made a fool of God.”
In the fall of 1855, Kierkegaard delivered his last fusillade. A week later, after having spent what little remained of his inheritance, he collapsed on the street. He was taken to Frederik’s Hospital with his lower body in a state of paralysis. In the hospital, he refused to take communion and speak to any members of the clergy, including his brother, Peter. However, the gravely ill man did make an exception for one minister—his dear friend Emil Boesen. To him, Kierkegaard explained, “When hunters go after the wild boar they choose a certain dog and know very well what will happen: the wild boar will be trapped, but the dog who gets him will pay for it. I will gladly die. Then I will be certain that I accomplished the task. Often people would rather hear what a dead person has to say than someone who is alive” (Kirmmse, Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 125).
On November 11, at the age of forty-two, the hound of heaven died from what may have been tuberculosis. In perfect harmony with the rest of his life, there was a public disturbance at the burial service in Assistens Cemetery. As Kierkegaard’s estranged brother/priest, Peter, began his eulogy, Kierkegaard’s nephew, Henrik Lund, stepped forward and protested the fact that his uncle, who had categorically rejected the state church, was now being buried by the church! Many in the very large crowd shouted “bravo” to Lund’s words, even though the young man was told that he was not allowed to speak.
Although she refused the bequest, Kierkegaard directed that Regine Olsen receive what remained of his material possessions. He also chose these words from Hans Adolf Brorson for his headstone:
In yet a little while
I shall have won;
Will all at once be done.
Then I may rest
In bowers of roses
And perpetually
And perpetually