Kierkegaard

by Stephen Backhouse

  Christianity was an impressive figure when it stepped forcefully into the world expressing itself, but from the moment it sought to stake out boundaries through a pope or to hit the people over the head with the Bible or lately the Apostle’s Creed, it resembled an old man who believes that he has lived long enough in the world and wants to wind things up.

  The coteries of Christendom did not seem to be good news for Christianity, or for individual Christians either.

  When I look at a goodly number of particular instances of the Christian life, it seems to me that Christianity, instead of pouring out strength upon them—yes, in fact, in contrast to paganism—such individuals are robbed of their manhood by Christianity and are now like the gelding compared to the stallion.

  Unbeknownst to others, at the same time that Søren was accruing debt, waging snarky student politics, and climbing social ladders, he was also busy working out his relation to Christianity. It was increasingly becoming something that Søren knew he had to make a personal choice about. As a result, Søren became fascinated with the forms of life on offer for people who reject Christianity. His private writing from this time is filled with reflections on three legendary figures. Don Juan, Faust, and Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew represented, for Søren, different modes of life outside of religion. Søren primarily met the figure of Don Juan through repeated attendance of Mozart’s Don Giovani at the Royal Theatre. Don Juan was a serial seducer and hedonist. He lives the immediate life of sensuality. Faust was singleminded and monogamous in his pursuit of knowledge and power. He is a doubter who delves into deep secrets for selfish ends. Ahasuerus is supposed to have mocked Jesus on the way to the cross and as a result was cursed to wander the earth undying until Jesus should return. In Søren’s mind, the three exhibited ascending stages of rejection of Jesus Christ, culminating in Ahasuerus whose rejection was conscious and mocking. He represents the pinnacle of despair because only he recognises how deeply personal the relation to Christianity is.

  Søren clearly intended that his reflections on these three figures would form the basis for his first proper publication, the book that would put him on the map as a serious writer. He had been working over the material for years. Sadly, Søren’s musings would remain largely confined to his private papers. He had been pipped to the post. In 1837, in one of Heiberg’s edited journals there appeared a significant new essay by his despised tutor: “Oh how unhappy I am—Martensen has written an essay on … Faust”!

  Never mind. There would soon be more subjects to occupy the young man’s attention. For, over coffee at a friend’s house one chilly morning in May 1837, Søren Kierkegaard met Regine Olsen.

  CHAPTER 5

  Love Life

  It is 1837. May 8. Mid-morning. Early spring and the chill is still in the air. As he often does, Søren drops by unannounced for a visit to his friend Peter Rørdam. Peter is a family friend and a fellow teacher at the School for Civic Virtue, but in fact it is Peter’s sister Bolette who is the main reason for this visit. At twenty-one years of age and from a comparable family, Bolette seems a natural prospect for the twenty-four-year-old Søren to marry. However, it is not romance that is on his mind this morning. The polemical spirit and witty atmosphere in which Søren operates has been getting to him lately. Søren has been worried that sharp retorts and arguments are becoming a habit. He lives too much in his head and he knows it. Can he even converse normally anymore? Today, Søren is simply looking for real conversations with real people. In Bolette, Søren hopes to find someone to help get “the devil of my wit to stay home.”

  When Søren arrives at the Rørdam house he finds a party of young ladies already there. His plan for simple interaction seems to be fading fast, and in any case it’s too cold to be out walking with Bolette. Søren agrees to join the girls over coffee in the sitting room, and it is here that he meets Regine Olsen. She is fifteen years old, intelligent, composed, strikingly pretty. Søren does not mention her by name in his journal that night, but he does note the occasion and will later describe her effect over him as akin to a magic spell. Søren is smitten. Out of nervousness, a desire to impress, or perhaps simply muscle memory derived from habitual use, he reverts back to his witty ways. His words pour forth unceasingly, he overtakes the conversation and impresses everyone. Regine does not show it at the time, but she will one day describe her young self as extremely captivated.

  Later that night and in the days to follow, Søren reflects on the event. Even though he had originally gone to the Rørdams’ as a way to escape rhetoric, he does not now berate himself for dazzling the party with his words. As with much in life, Søren begins to see that his curse can also be a blessing of sorts. As much as he recognises his predilection for witticism to be troublesome, in this instance it has protected him from something more dangerous. Writing about the day, Søren thanks God for not letting him lose his mind. The devil wit now becomes an “angel with the flaming sword,” and he is thankful that it interposed itself between him “and every innocent girlish heart.” Søren quotes Jesus in Mark 8:36: “For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?” The fact is, before he even met Regine, Søren had begun questioning whether the path marked out for him was one that should—or could—include another. These themes will grow to prominence in Søren’s later writing career, but for now in these journals we see a young man beginning to wonder whether he might be being called to something besides the comfortable married life of the bourgeois citizen. Glittering wit, like the angel’s flaming sword in the Garden of Eden, helps to bar Søren’s heart from going to places where it should not go.

  This might be God’s will, but it is still a lonely life and Søren is ambiguous about his prospects. Like a brick thrown into a pond, Regine has messed up Søren’s sense of himself and his plans, causing waves and ripples he never expected:

  … good God, why should the inclination begin to stir just now—how alone I feel—confound that proud satisfaction in standing alone—everyone will now hold me in contempt—but you, my God, do not let go of me—let me live and reform—

  Søren Kierkegaard. This idealized portrait from around 1840 is by Niels Christian Kierkegaard, one of Søren’s cousins.

  Søren is conflicted. He does not know whether it is better to be a witty loner or an honest lover and is unsure how either fits with the idea to which he wants to devote his life. The journals from this period are confused, repetitive, and self-reflective. They can be annoying in the way that only self-indulgent adolescent diaries the world over can be. But it is good not to judge too hastily. Let the one who has never been young, serious, religious, and in love cast the first stone!

  Regine is lodged in Søren’s heart, but he does not pursue her further.

  The fact is, Søren has a lot of other things going on: spiritually, mentally, and physically. Søren is not well. His back, while not quite hunched, is certainly lopsided, and he suffers from a number of muscular and nervous complaints in connection with what appears to be a twisted spine. His letters and papers contain many references to headaches, insomnia, aversion to bright light, sensitivity to temperature changes, cramps, constipation, and pain. There is some suggestion that he suffered fits and seizures, although Søren’s journals offer scant evidence on this front. In Søren’s lifetime and beyond, a litany of diagnoses have been suggested to account for his condition: compression of the spinal cord; temporal lobe epilepsy; complex partial seizure disorder; Landry-Guillain-Barré’s acute ascending paralysis; acute intermittent porphyria; camphor-induced porphyria; syphilis (contracted); syphilis (inherited); syphilophobia; Potts paraplegia; myelitis. Each item is contested and no one knows for sure. For his part, Søren attributed his fragility to the childhood fall from the tree, but whatever the case, it remains true that he is not what anyone would describe as a strapping young lad.

  The physical frailty had a mental and emotional component. One armchair diagnosis that occurs from time to time is that of depression. It is easy
to look at the steady stream of gloomy writing (in journal and published form) and conclude that Søren was depressed. Søren describes his melancholy as “depression” time and again too. Yet the diagnosis is too pat. For one thing, depression is a debilitating illness. Truly depressed people do not tend to produce reams and reams of material, working and reworking their ideas long into the evening. For another thing, Kierkegaard’s writing is not all miserable. His journals, and later his books, reveal a man fascinated with all the twists and turns the inner life takes. The events of Søren’s life sparked feelings, thoughts, and reactions in him that everyone experiences but most of us allow to dissipate. Søren captured these sensations, turning them around and around, sometimes spinning dross into gold. Sadness, yes, but also joy, humour, worship, and puppy love can be found in the pages.

  Rather than depressed, it would be fairer to say that Søren was mercurial. Not only his writing, but also his actions need to be seen in light of a steady stream of highs and lows keenly felt and never forgotten. “When at times there is such a commotion in my head that the skull seems to have been heaved up, it is as if goblins had hoisted up a mountain a bit and are now having a hilarious ball in there. [In margin: ‘God forbid!’]” This temperament affected all his most important relationships. Søren’s father and brother, his tutors and mentors, his girlfriend, and his God: no one escaped Mercury’s sphere, especially not himself.

  The period between 1837 and 1841 would prove to be highly significant, not only due to the writing Søren undertook during this time, but also because of the things that happened, both to him and within him. From the crucible of these five years emerges Kierkegaard the author, Kierkegaard the plotter, Kierkegaard the wealthy, Kierkegaard the unhealthy, Kierkegaard the independent, Kierkegaard the Christian, Kierkegaard the lover, and Kierkegaard the scoundrel. Almost uniquely for Søren’s idiosyncratically documented life, we can trace the key events of this time, by the month, often by the day, and occasionally by the hour.

  July 1837. Marie, Peter Christian’s sweet, young wife has died. Everyone is melancholic and Søren feels unwell. In an attempt to clear his head, he arranges to go away to the countryside the day of Marie’s funeral. But the trip doesn’t come off and it’s no use. Relations with brother Peter and father Michael are as bad as ever. The debts are piling up. On July 28 things come to a head. In return for his father’s paying off the bills, Søren agrees to leave the family home by the end of the summer.

  September 1, 1837. Søren moves into a set of apartments with enough room for his ever-growing library. Michael Kierkegaard values reading, but this enormous collection is a constant reminder of his son’s unfocused and profligate ways. Surely he won’t be sad to see these books leave his home. Let Søren pay for everything with his own money and see how he likes his library then!

  In the autumn following Marie’s death Peter’s morose religiosity once again rears its head. For his part, Michael can’t help but see her passing as yet another flash of lightning from the divine doom cloud looming over his life. Regarding his own faith, Søren remains a conscious outsider. He continues to work out his attitude to Christianity apart from his brother, his father, and other forms on offer. Living on his own, with no family to answer to and a breach between father and sibling, Søren ceases to attend Holy Communion.

  Also at this time Søren begins to make tentative steps towards a doctoral thesis project. He has not yet started, let alone finished, his undergraduate exams, but already the wheels are spinning. In November he muses, “It would be interesting to follow the development of human nature … by showing what one laughs at on the different age levels.” Søren continues attending lectures on various topics. As an alternative to either rote orthodoxy or vacuous faddish theology, Søren explores philosophy as a way of supplying the idea for which he can live. He attends Martensen’s celebrated lecture series on the history of philosophy but finds Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) a “hackneyed proposition” and Martensen’s own appropriation of Descartes’ maxim “doubt everything” ridiculous. “Philosophy,” writes Søren, “sheds its skin every step it takes, and the more foolish followers creep into it.” Around this time Søren worked out his frustrations with the university scene by sketching out a satirical play called The Battle Between the Old and New Soap Sellers. The play (never finished) likens the intelligentsia and their philosophical schemes to the real-life competition currently being waged between Copenhagen’s soap merchants who were using increasingly complicated advertisements to sell the same basic product. The play is sophomoric and would be largely unremarkable if not for the fact that it reveals how much of Søren’s attitude towards the various philosophic and religious schools of thought had been set, even at this early age.

  1838. Early spring. There is a gap in the journals. In April, Søren breaks his silence, revealing why. “Such a long period has again elapsed in which I have been unable to concentrate on the least little thing—now I must make another attempt. Poul Møller is dead.” Møller was forty-four years old. He was Søren’s teacher and confidante and the model for the way Søren would carry himself as an assessor of the foibles of public life. One day Søren would go on to dedicate a book to Møller, the drafts of the Concept of Anxiety dedication reading: “To the late Professor Poul Martin Møller … the mighty trumpet of my awakening … my lost friend; my sadly missed reader.”

  The dedication lies in the future. At the present moment, matters are made even more galling because Martensen has attracted the patronage of Heiberg. As a result, he is appointed to replace Møller’s position at the university. It is a temporary position but one he will hold for the next two years before being made a full professor. Lest it be forgot, at the same time as Martensen is taking on the mantle of Copenhagen’s golden boy, Søren, only five years younger, has yet to complete his undergraduate degree.

  The events seem to have catalysed the young would-be writer. Later that same April, Søren’s journals go silent again. This time the lack of journal writing is not because of grief but because of a renewed spurt of applied productive energy. Søren is writing in earnest, getting his first proper piece ready for publication. Martensen may have pipped him to the post when it came to Faust, but now Søren has another project in mind that will get him on the literary map. Over the next few months he applies himself to his extended essay and review of Hans Christian Andersen’s new novel Only a Fiddler.

  May 5, 1838. Søren celebrates his birthday. Against the odds, he has survived yet another year. The occasion leads to a renewed spiritual reflection on work, life, family, and God.

  On May 19, precisely timed at 10:30 in the morning, Søren records an experience he has just undergone:

  There is an indescribable joy that glows all through us just as inexplicably as the apostle’s exclamation breaks forth for no apparent reason: “Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice.”—Not a joy over this or that, but the soul’s full outcry “with tongue and mouth and from the bottom of the heart” … a heavenly refrain which, as it were, suddenly interrupts our other singing, a joy which cools and refreshes like a breath of air …

  July 6, 1838, Sunday. The spiritual experience is not repeated, but the effects seem to have taken root. Pastor Kolthoff—one of the few clergymen for whom Søren retained respect—records in his notes that Søren attended confession and Communion at the Church of Our Lady just down the road from the old family home. There is no question of familial pressure, however, for Søren attended alone. Indeed, the summer marks a time of reconciliation between the three Kierkegaard men, which Søren and Peter especially had been working on for some weeks.

  On July 9, Søren rejoices in his journal that his “Father in Heaven” has kept his earthly father alive long enough for Michael to take pride in his reformed child. The son prays that the father will experience “greater joy in being my father the second time than he had the first time.” The reconciliation is evidently bound up with Søren’s renewed confidence in
his faith and his ability to articulate a personally engaging relation to Jesus Christ, for the same entry concludes,

  I am going to work toward a far more inward relation to Christianity, for up until now I have in a way been standing completely outside of it while fighting for its truth; like Simon of Cyrene (Luke 23:26), I have carried Christ’s cross in a purely external way.

  August 8, 1838. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard is proved mistaken in his conviction that he was cursed to outlive all his children, for by 2:00 a.m. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard is dead. He was eighty-two. In a journal entry marked with a cross, Søren writes:

  My father died on Wednesday … I so deeply desired that he might have lived a few years more, and I regard his death as the last sacrifice of his love for me, because in dying he did not depart from me but he died for me, in order that something, if possible, might still come of me.

  The entry concludes, “He was a ‘faithful friend.’ ”

  Michael died reconciled to his son. But he also died without seeing his son marry, finish university, take up a position, or publish anything of significance. To the end of his life he was convinced that Søren had not, and perhaps would not ever, live up to his potential. In later years Peter admitted that Michael was disappointed in Søren for frittering away his talent. Søren too was well aware of the debt he owed to his father that would now never be paid. Many of his most important and spiritually serious books would be dedicated to the memory of the merchant hosier. At the same time, Søren was not blind to the ambiguous nature of the debt. His father loved him and he loved his father, but their life together was still “insane.”