MAY 1836 TO MAY 1838
THIS period, though it covers two years, can be dealt with briefly. In my big book I called it “The Ethical Stage”—dubiously, and only out of respect for S.K.’s categories. But really S.K. never seriously conceived of an ethical stage as possible apart from a religious belief. Even Judge William, who exemplifies the ethical stage in Either/Or, has a vague traditional religion of immanence—and a good deal more of it than most men have. It is evident from the Journal that immediately after his fall S.K. began to think of picking himself up. He made many moral resolutions; but so many would not have been needed if he had not been continually relapsing. There was some progress evident in the long run, but it was discouragingly slow, and perhaps nothing would have come of it if he had not been aroused by a profoundly religious experience.
In The Point of View S.K. himself deals with this period very briefly but in a way which gives us a desolate impression of the futility of these years. “So I fared forth upon life—initiated into all possible enjoyments, yet never really enjoying, but rather (to indulge the one pleasure I had in connection with the pain of melancholy) laboring to produce the impression that I enjoyed. I fared forth into acquaintance with all sorts of men, yet it never occurred to me that I had a confidant in any of them, and it certainly never occurred to any one of them that he was my confidant. That is to say, I was constrained to be and was an observer. By such a life, as an observer and as spirit, I was extraordinarily enriched by experiences, got to see quite close at hand that aggregation of pleasures, passions, dispositions, feelings, etc., acquired practice in seeing a man through and through and also in imitating him. My imagination and my dialectic constantly had material enough to operate with, and time enough, free from all bustle, to be idle. For long periods I was employed with nothing else but the performance of dialectical exercises with an ingredient of imagination, trying out my mind as one tunes an instrument—but I was not really living. I was tossed about in life, tempted by many and the most various things, unfortunately also by errors, and, alas, also by the path of perdition. So I was when I reached my twenty-fifth year—to myself an enigmatically developed and extraordinary possibility, the significance of which and its character I did not understand, in spite of the most eminent reflection which understood, if possible, everything. I understood one thing, that my life would be most properly employed in doing penance; but in the proper sense of the word I had not lived, except in the character of spirit; a man I had never been, and a child or youth even less. Then my father died. The powerful religious impression of my childhood acquired a renewed power over me, now softened by reflection.”
Observe that in the gilt-edged document S.K. provides no new motto for this chapter. In fact the period we are now dealing with is in a sense continuous with the preceding; S.K. is still on the path of perdition—only now he is trying to retrace it. He was keenly aware of his predicament. On June 12, 1836, about a month after his fall he wrote: “Reformation goes slowly. As Franz Baader justly remarked, one must retrace the same path by which one went.” The reformation went so slowly that more than a year later (on October 11, 1837) he repeated the same saying and added a more disconsolate reflection, to the effect that the enchantment wrought by the fairy king can only be broken when one succeeds in playing backwards without a single mistake the same piece of music by which one was enthralled.
The outlook for release was bad—unless help came from outside. Fortunately it came, and in the moment of his greatest need. It came first from Poul Møller, his most admired teacher, whom he hailed as “the mighty trumpet of my awakening.” This phrase is found in the first draft of the dedication of The Concept of Dread, the book in which he analysed his own situation when he was in the path of perdition, and which he dedicated to the man who first lent a hand to help him out of it. But what does this phrase mean? Again the answer is found by an ingenious piece of detective work, which this time we must credit to Professor Brandt. In my bigger book I rehearsed his argument rather fully: here I can only state the result. In the diary of the poet Hertz there is the following entry for June 4, 1836: “In the afternoon at the Heibergs’ and bade them farewell before their departure for Paris. There—S. Kierkegaard and Poul Møller.” Note that only these two are mentioned in such a company of wits as were likely assembled on that occasion—and that S.K. is mentioned first, as though he, a mere student, were the shining light of the party! Brandt associates this with a passage in the comic play which S.K. wrote in 1838 for the Student Association, in which he was disguised under the name of Willibald and Hertz under the name of Echo. There too an afternoon party is implied in which Willibald and Echo had been together; Willibald had departed hastily and on returning to his room was about to shoot himself when Echo came in and stopped him. There is an undated entry in S.K.’s Journal which describes just such an occasion, and no reason can be opposed to Brandt’s assumption that it describes the effect of Heiberg’s farewell party on June 4.
“I have just come from a party of which I was the soul: witticism flowed from my mouth, all laughed and admired me, but I went (here indeed the dashes should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit)________________________________________________________________away and wanted to shoot myself.”
But what prompted S.K. to leave in haste a party in which he was so much admired? And why did he want to shoot himself? Brandt’s answer. is: The mighty trumpet of his awakening. He supposes that it was then, at the moment when S.K. was in his wittiest, wildest and most nihilistic mood, that Poul Møller said to him with serious concern and abhorrence, “You are so polemicalized through and through that it is perfectly terrible.” It is certain that this warning was actually addressed to S.K., for he remembered it to the end of his life, as we learn from an entry of 1854. If these words were remembered so long, they must surely have been uttered in the nick of time, at the moment when such a warning was most needed, and when the effect would be greatest. And the first effect was so devastating because these words were aimed directly at “the demon of wit,” which S.K. himself recognized as the most ostensible expression of his demoniac defiance of God and man. But perhaps by this trumpet call he was not thoroughly awakened at once. We have seen that it was characteristic of S.K. to be affected tardily by new experiences, after a long interval of reflection. I have no doubt that to him the trumpet sounded louder after Poul Møller’s death—just as his father first acquired full authority over him when his voice came from beyond the tomb. Poul Møller died on March 13, 1838, only two months before S.K.’s religious awakening, and to prepare him for that he had heard in the mean time another trumpet call, that of Georg Hamann.
September 10, 1836, was a notable date in S.K.’s life, for it was then he first became acquainted with Georg Hamann, a German writer who died twenty-five years before S.K. was born, but whom he felt to be, as a thinker, his contemporary and his most congenial contemporary. The first entry about him is important chiefly for the passages it refers to but does not quote: “With regard to a Christian’s view of paganism cf. Hamann, 1 D, pp. 406, 418f., especially 419: ‘No, if God Himself would speak to him, He is obliged to dispatch in advance the authoritative word and bring it to pass: Awake, thou that sleepest!’ ”
Hamann quotes from the chapter on miracles from Hume’s Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding: “So then we may conclude that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even to this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is not sufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.”
S.K. was struck by Hamann’s comment: “Hume may have said this with a scornful and critical air, yet all the same, this is orthodoxy and a testimony to the truth from the mouth of an enemy and persecutor—all his doubts are proofs of his proposition.”
I quote almost in full the other passage from Hamann, of which only the last sentence was quoted in the Journal: “A man who lives in God stands, therefore, in the same relation to the ‘natural man’ as a waking man does to one who is snoring in profound slumber—to a dreamer, a sleepwalker.… A dreamer may have images more vivid than a man who is awake, may see more, hear and think more than he, may be conscious of himself, dream with more orderliness than a waking man thinks, may be the creator of new objects, of great events. Everything is true for him, and yet everything is illusion.… The question is whether it might in any way be possible for a waking man to convince a sleeper (so long as he sleeps) of the fact that he is asleep. No—even if God Himself would speak to him, He is obliged to dispatch in advance the authoritative word and bring it to pass: Awake, thou that sleepest!”
These were precisely the words S.K. had most need of hearing at this time. They were seed thoughts, but they sprouted slowly, and not till the end of this period, that is, about eight months later, did they produce their full effect. It is a common mistake, but a very grave misunderstanding, to suppose that S.K. when he talked about the “leap” of faith meant that the will to believe could be operative, or indeed existent, in a divided mind, or in a mind which was clogged with obstacles, whether intellectual or emotional. This certainly was not his own experience; and most of his works, notwithstanding his scornful rejection of “apologetics,” were designed to remove the obstacles to faith, both intellectual and emotional. Beyond that, he affirmed, no man can help another.
In the meantime things went on pretty much as before—that is, pretty badly. We have seen that in July he made a serious resolution about his Journal, but at this time he made no effort to carry it out. Externally his situation was becoming more and more precarious. During the three years covered by this chapter and the last, the breach with his father was not healed; in a way he was living in his father’s house, he certainly had nowhere else to sleep, and presumably he often ate there. Doubtless it was hard on him “to have to approach his father backward with averted face in order not to behold his dishonor,” and it was hard that he had to live with the righteous elder brother; but what an excruciating grief it must have been to the old man to see his son daily and yet feel that they were separated by an impassable wall, and to behold the dishonor of his Benjamin—or was it his Isaac? who was sacrificed indeed, but not to God! Obviously, it would be better for all of them if Søren lived elsewhere. In fact, on July 28, 1837, S.K. left his father’s house. Henceforth he was to have a room in the town and take his meals at a boarding-house. But his father treated him with great generosity. He promised him a yearly allowance of 500 Rigsdaler (equivalent to $1,000), which was about half of a professor’s salary. Moreover, he paid his debts, to the amount of 1,262 Rdl (about $2,500), of which $400 represented debts of honor to fellow students, $560 to a coffee house, large sums to the tailor, etc., about $100 to the tobacconist, but the largest item, $794, was for books and bookbinding. At a later date he wrote a receipt for this amount in his father’s account book, adding the remark: “And thus Father has helped me out of my embarrassment, for which I thank him.” But the breach was not healed.
It is a sign perhaps of greater seriousness of mind, but perhaps also a sign of more lavish expenditure than could be no covered by his allowance, that during the next academic year S.K. taught Latin to one of the upper classes of the school he had attended as a youth.
By connecting S.K. with the poet Hertz and the group of young men who met as a clique in the back parlor of their boardinghouse, Brandt has opened a new vista into his life as a student. Hertz constructed his works of fiction realistically, and in one of them he relied upon the notes he had made of conversations in this clique. Though all the characters are referred to by nicknames it is possible to identify most of them, and several of them figure in S.K.’s works. It appears that the Banquet in the Stages was recruited from their number. S.K. as a member of this group does not make an agreeable impression. He was admired for his wit and his prodigious knowledge, but he was also feared, especially by those who were the butt of his terrible sarcasm. The sentimental Hans Christian Andersen was one of them, and this defenseless giant was S.K.’s favorite target. P. S. Møller (who presumably was “the Seducer”) was the only one who could effectively return the blows of the Interpreter (i.e. S.K.), and P. V. Jacobsen (who was to figure as Judge William) was the only one whom he treated with respect. We get the impression here, as we do also from Judge William’s description of his “young friend” and from S.K.’s account of himself in the Journals of this period, that he was a talented but insolent youth, who used his wit to wound his comrades and to triumph over them, showed no fellow feeling, but stood aloof from life and observed it superciliously. We get here the particular information that he had a harsh, grating voice. From other sources we know that it was not agreeable in public speaking and was liable to crack under strain.
On July 8 and 16 (not long before he left his father’s house) he made two entries in the Journal which were certainly not meant to enlighten the reader: “O God, but how easily one forgets such a resolution! I have for some time been turned back again to the world, deposed from ruling in my inmost seat. Ah! but what doth it profit a man if he were to gain the whole world and lose his own soul! Today also (May 8) I have tried to will to forget myself, yet not with noisy bustle—that surrogate is of no avail—but by going out to the Rørdams’ and talking with Bolette, and compelling (if possible) the demon of wit to remain at home, the angel with the flaming sword who, as I have well deserved, stations himself between me and every innocent maiden’s heart—then Thou didst overtake me. O God, I thank Thee that Thou didst not let me become at once insane—I have never been so much in dread of it. I thank Thee that once more Thou didst incline Thine ear to me.
“Today again the same scene—I reached the Rørdams’ nevertheless—merciful God, why should that inclination awaken just now—O how I feel that I am alone—a curse upon that haughty satisfaction in standing alone—all will now despise me—O but Thou my God, let not Thy hand fall upon me-let me live and reform.”
About two months later he was again at the Rørdams’, as we learn from a loose leaf, dated with unaccustomed precision: “Sunday, July 9, in Frederiksberg Garden, after a visit on the Rørdams: Like a solitary fir-tree egoistically separate and pointing upward I stand, casting no shadow, and only the wood-dove builds its nest in my branches.”
What can be the meaning of these passionate, despairing, incoherent utterances? Not much light is thrown upon them when we learn that Bolette was the daughter of a deceased clergyman and was engaged to a theological student. S.K. professed that his interest in Bolette was merely “intellectual,” yet in view of her engagement he felt a little bit guilty about this intimacy, and nevertheless, because he found in her companionship a solace which in his great loneliness he craved, he continued to visit her. This evidently does not explain such passionate despair. We get further when we discover that what he unexpectedly encountered at the Rørdams’ was as terrible as an army with banners, nothing less than a pretty girl of fourteen years named Regine Olsen, with whom he fell desperately in love at first sight. The longest of the many accounts in the Journal “about my relation to Her” was written in 1849 and begins by saying: “I saw her first at the Rørdams. There it was really that I saw her during the first period, when I did not visit the family.” And Regina (as she called herself in her old age because S.K. had so called her) remembered long after his death that she had seen S.K. for the first time at the house of the widow Rørdam, where she was invited to a party given for a young girl of her age. S.K. had called unexpectedly, and “the liveliness of his mind made a strong impression. His conversation welled up and was captivating in the highest degree.” She believed that the passages just quoted from the Journal referred to this meeting, and she thought that he was impressed by her, as she was by him. In “The Diary of the Seducer” which concludes the first part of Either/Or there is a lively description of precisely this situation: the young man finds himself unexpectedly in the company of eight pretty girls and captivates them by his conversation. But though S.K. thus succeeded in hiding his emotion, he feared that he was going crazy. He was twenty-four when he fell in love with a child, and this was his first love. It was also to be his last, and in spite of all appearances to the contrary, it was to endure to the end of his earthly life—indeed like Dante he looked forward to a meeting in heaven.
Being apprised of this astonishing fact, and knowing now something of S.K.’s circumstances and disposition, we are able in a measure to piece together the incoherent exclamations which he registered on this occasion, and we find that they reflect the consequences of the Great Earthquake as they are described in the passage quoted at the beginning of the previous chapter. What “resolution” was it he was so prone to forget? Evidently a resolution to seek no intimate contacts in life, least of all with women, since he was doomed to die in a few years and by his father’s secret and his own guilt was debarred from marriage. When this resolve was but for a moment forgotten, God (“the hound of heaven”) overtook him, and overwhelmed him by an unlooked-for experience which brought him to the brink of madness. During this period of frequent drunkenness and constant intellectual inebriation he often felt that he was on the verge of madness, and now more than ever. And yet his terrible loneliness compelled him to go out to Frederiks-berg again and again, when by the sort of espionage in which he was adept he had learned that Regina would be there. But what does he mean when he says, “all men will despise me”? Nothing less than the dread of having to reveal the sordid secret of his fall. Later entries of the Journal make it abundantly evident that, although he discussed the matter pro and con, he felt that marriage demanded absolute candor. What is far less credible, but nonetheless certain, is that he thought it necessary to make an open confession, especially if he were to enter the ministry of the church.
Such was the ominous beginning of a love which was destined to end in tragedy.
It must be said now, retrospectively and with reference to all of the eight years S.K. had already spent in the University, that there was one study which in a measure coordinated all his random interests—that was philosophy. This must be emphasized, and yet it is a matter of course when we remember the description he gives of Johannes Climacus, and when we reflect upon the philosophical profundity of all his works. Philosophy was a study he pursued, not only as a dialectical exercise, but with the passion of personal interest. He studied it, therefore, in the only way that it can be profitably studied, that is, for his own consumption, with a view to discovering a meaning in his life, when meaning had vanished with the rejection of Christianity. We have seen that in the summer of 1835 he assigned to philosophy predominant importance when he declared that Christianity cannot be reconciled with philosophy. He applied himself with the utmost enthusiasm to the study of Hegel, whose philosophy was precisely at that time welcomed in Denmark as the last word of wisdom. Little by little, before the end of the period we are now dealing with, he had become discontented with Hegelianism because it did not furnish him with reality. He quoted with appreciation Lichtenberg: “It is about like reading out of a cookbook to a man who is hungry.” His subsequent works were either expressly or by implication a refutation of this philosophy. Under the influence of Hamann he was gradually led to suspect that religion, and particularly Christianity, was far closer to reality. Nevertheless, he continued to admire Hegel as a thinker. I have quoted in a note to the Postscript (p. 558) the longest expression of appreciation, but in one place he put it all in a single sentence: “If he had written his whole Logic and in the Preface had disclosed the fact that it was merely a thought-experiment (in which, however, at many points he had shirked something), he would have been the greatest thinker that has ever lived. Now he is comic.”
It ought to be remembered that the subject of religion had a prominent place in S.K.’s philosophical inquiry, even though he had abandoned the practice of his religion. It is indeed far too real a factor in human life for any real philosopher to ignore it. It was S.K.’s constant complaint against Hegel that he had ignored not only religion but ethics. The philosopher must explain religion—perhaps by the help of psychologists explain it away. That at least. This direction of S.K.’s philosophical interests is evident in his subsequent works, which contain here and there passages which incidentally reveal the profoundest insight into the origin and nature of religion in general.
Under the influence of Hamann S.K. gradually reversed his judgment about the relative importance of philosophy and Christianity. He still used the same expression as three years earlier, “Christianity and philosophy cannot be united,” but now he means that philosophy must go, or rather, to use the slogan of Johannes Climacus in the Postscript, Away from speculation! away from “the System” and back to reality. This is the point where the modern Existential Philosophy derives from S.K.
We find an approach to his final position in an entry of August 1, 1838, a doggerel rhyme which I render as well as I can. S.K. is called a “poet,” and yet perhaps this is the only verse he ever wrote.
If a body meet a body
Carrying a spade,
And if a body has a rake,
Need either be afraid?
This obviously means that neither Christianity nor philosophy has anything to fear from the other. In spite of the triviality of its expression, this entry had immense significance for S.K. We can measure its importance by the fact that he repeated it (without substantial change) on a loose sheet of paper without date, and that the next sixteen entries are all comments upon it. Another entry is more decisive:
Motto: [in Latin] |
Christianity will have no dealing with the philosophies, even if they are willing to divide with it the spoils; it cannot endure that the King of Sodom should say, I have made Abraham rich. |
But this was written after he had heard the authoritative word, “Awake, thou that sleepest!”
The last words in the Journal which are pertinent to this period were written on the First Sunday after Easter, April 22, 1838, only three weeks before his twenty-fifth birthday and not quite a month before the religious experience described in the next chapter: “In case Christ shall come to dwell in me, it must be as in the Gospel for today in the almanac: ‘Christ enters through closed doors.’