The “reader” is a very important aspect of Kierkegaard’s output, and he had an active participant in mind when constructing his books. All the Discourses bear the inscription: “To the late Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard formerly a clothing merchant here in the city, my father, these discourses are dedicated.” Yet Michael, as a dead man, was not the ideal reader Søren had in mind. It is in the May 16, 1843, Discourses that we first encounter “the single individual.” In an 1849 journal entry Søren admits how at first this phrase was “a little hint to her.” The Discourses are replete with messages and imagery that only Regine would understand. They were intended, first and foremost, for her. In the same journal, Søren records how the scandalous “Seducer’s Diary” in Either/Or was written for Regine’s sake, “in order to clear her out of the relationship.” That piece describes the callous seduction and abandonment of an innocent girl. Regine was supposed to be disgusted at Either/Or and then reassured that the breakup had a spiritual value from reading the Discourses. Only later, as the relationship with Regine receded into the distance, would Kierkegaard’s “single individual” come to take on the wider meaning of any reader who takes on Søren’s challenge for her or himself.
Søren tells us that the pseudonyms and self-named works contained many nods to Regine. But she was capable of making nods of her own.
Søren and Regine often met on the street. They would acknowledge each other with an incline of the head but otherwise they did not speak. On Easter Sunday, 1843, during Mynster’s sermon at the Church of Our Lady, these slight actions took on a significance greater than the sum of their parts. “At vespers on Easter Sunday … she nodded to me. I do not know if it was pleadingly or forgivingly, but in any case very affectionately.” Søren thrashed out the implications of this momentous event in his journals. Her frank actions made Søren suspect that she saw through all he had done. “I had sat down in a place apart, but she discovered it. Would to God she had not done so. Now a year and a half of suffering and all the enormous pains I took are wasted; she does not believe that I was a deceiver, she has faith in me.” Years later Søren would elaborate on the meaning he had ascribed to this, the most indirect of communications. “Her eyes met mine in church. I did not avoid her gaze. She nodded twice. I shook my head, signifying: You must give me up. Then she nodded again, and I nodded as friendly as possible, meaning: I still love you.”
Too many assumptions were riding on too little information. The “conversation” was doomed to fail. The crucial piece missing in this puzzle was something that Regine assumed Søren already knew but of which, in fact, he was completely unaware. For Regine was about to become engaged to her original flame, Fritz Schlegel.
When Søren finally found out the news, he saw the nods in a whole new light. “After her engagement to Schlegel, she met me on the street, greeted me as friendly and charmingly as possible. I did not understand her, for at the time I did not know of her engagement. I looked questioningly at her and shook my head. No doubt she thought that I knew about it and sought my approval.” He had meant the nods in church and the street to mean that he still loved her but must pursue his project, encouraging her to stay the course with bravery and perseverance. Instead, Regine had taken the nods to mean he was giving his blessing and release for her engagement. “No doubt the decisive turn in her life was made under my auspices.” It bears noting that all the “mistaking,” “loving,” “releasing,” “decisive turning,” and the rest are Søren’s interpretations of the nods. Of Regine’s opinion there is no record.
The incident sent Søren packing, yet again, to Berlin for his second trip on May 8, 1843. The writing break would prove short-lived, but it was there he continued Fear and Trembling and altered Repetition. Both books bear the marks of Regine’s decisive alteration to the status quo. It was in Berlin Søren wrote, “If I had had faith, I would have stayed with Regine. Thanks to God, I now see that. I have been on the point of losing my mind these days.” The line illuminates much of the ethos running through Fear and Trembling and its heart-wrenching account of a man who gives up what he loves and yet waits, in faith, for it to be returned to him. Repetition tells the story of a lovelorn Young Man who returns to a foreign city in an effort to recapture his experiences, only to discover that in life true repetition is impossible. The ending to Repetition, especially, reflects a strong editorial hand in the aftermath of Fritz and Regine. A comparison of draft manuscripts and the published version reveals that Søren radically changed the fate of the Young Man. Originally, he commits suicide as a symbol marking the impossibility of ever marrying. In the new version, the Young Man lives on to become a better man, ennobled by the ultimate rejection of his lover.
Like the ending of Repetition, some journal entries from this time contain fantasies of benign revenge against Regine. Søren had often claimed that he wanted Regine to move on with her life, but now that it was actually happening, it stung. Søren was hurt and angered by what he saw was her inconstancy. “But so my girl was—first coy and beside herself with pride and arrogance, then cowardly.” Here was the woman who once wildly pleaded with Søren, now engaged to the sensible Fritz. In his diaries, Søren tries out various scenarios in which he meets Regine on the street and is able to coolly reprimand her for claiming she would die without him and then getting engaged to another within a year. “I have loved her far more than she has loved me,” he tells himself. The entry continues with assurances that his breach with her was a mercy. “I dare congratulate myself for doing what few in my place would do, for if I had not thought so much of her welfare, I could have taken her, since she herself pleaded that I do it … since her father asked me to do it.” The exact reason for his chivalrous action is lost to history—Søren tore this page from his journal. But he saw fit to leave in more assertions that he was “prouder of her honour than of my own” and defends his loving, deceptive break by claiming that marriage to Regine would have been tantamount to drawing her into his “cursed” life. “But if I were to have explained myself, I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my relationship to my father, his depression, the eternal night brooding within me, my going astray, my lusts and debauchery, which, however, in the eyes of God are perhaps not so glaring …” In Søren’s eyes, he may have been guilty of breaking her heart in order to save her, but Regine too was guilty of breaking her promise to love him forever. He took steps to remember her declarations, even if she had supposedly forgotten them. To that end, Søren commissioned to be constructed a tall chest made out of rosewood, in which he kept various tokens of their engagement. “It is my own design, prompted by something my beloved said in her agony. She said that she would thank me her whole life if she might live in a little cupboard and stay with me. Because of that, it is made without shelves.—In it everything is carefully kept, everything reminiscent of her and that will remind her of me. There is also a copy of the pseudonymous works for her. Regularly only two copies of these were on vellum—one for her and one for me.”
Statistically at least, brother Peter was luckier in love than Søren. He had married not once, but twice, having wed Sophie Henriette (or Jette as she was called) in 1841, following the death of his first wife, Marie. Since that time Peter and Jette and their son, Paul, had lived in a country parish where Peter served as a pastor of a village church. As a representative of the established state church, it was one of Peter’s duties to practice compulsory baptisms of the children of Baptist and other dissenting parents. This practice went against Peter’s conscience and his theological association with the Grundtvigian school. Grundtvig was a vocal opponent of the practice, which he saw as religious persecution. Although he too was a senior figure in the official Lutheran church, Grundtvig supported a more laissez faire style of populist “People’s Church” as opposed to the hierarchical “State Church” model. The position put Grundtvig and his disciple, Peter, in direct opposition to the supreme primate, Bishop Mynster. Their stand-off came to a head in 1845, causing a minor
public scandal. Although he was still something of a “Mynster man” out of loyalty to their deceased father, Søren privately agreed with Peter and urged him to stand his ground. The issue was doubly annoying for Søren, because siding with Peter meant tacitly siding with Grundtvig, of whom Søren had almost nothing good to say whatsoever.
Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, a towering figure in Danish politics, church life, poetry, education, and nationalism. “The Grundtvigian nonsense about nationality is also a retrogression to paganism,” Søren complained. “It is unbelievable what foolishness delirious Grundtvigian candidates are able to serve up.”
N. F. S. Grundtvig loomed large on the Danish stage. He was a poet, a politician, and a pastor, and the author of endless volumes of history, theology, and hymnody. One of Grundtvig’s Big Ideas was his so-called “Matchless Discovery.” For Grundtvig the “discovery” was that authentic Christianity does not reside in holy texts written in foreign languages but instead in the public recitation of the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in the native tongue of the people. Another pillar of Grundtvigianism was that different nations in history had been appointed divine tasks. Past ages belonged to the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, and so on. Now was Denmark’s time. In Grundtvig’s voluminous writing, ancient Norse culture is “baptised” and given revelatory status. Søren is scathing about all this. “The Grundtvigian nonsense about nationality is also a retrogression to paganism. It is unbelievable what foolishness delirious Grundtvigian candidates are able to serve up. [ … ] Christianity specifically wanted to do away with paganism’s deification of nationalities!”
Søren had little time for Grundtvig’s bluster and considered his populist rhetoric, which explicitly combined patriotism with Christianity, to be worse than even the intellectualised religion of the cultured elites. His private writing is full of humorous caricatures of Grundtvig and his followers. He was not, however, simply dismissive of Grundtvig on a personal level. The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Søren’s magnum opus, published February 27, 1846, is, in large part, his provision of a rigorous intellectual, philosophical, and theological answer to Grundtvig’s view of Christianity, history, and nation. To be sure, Hegel, Martensen, and others come in for a kicking, but Grundtvig is one of Søren’s major targets in the Postscript.
But, of course, it is not Søren who wrote the book. It is “Johannes Climacus” who arranged for this finale to his Philosophical Fragments to be published. The massive tome, with its comically complicated chapter headings and bewildering arrangement, signals to the discerning reader that part of the book, at least, is a satire on the style favoured by Grundtvig and the Hegelians. Not just the content but the physical dimensions are part of the joke—the “postscript” is four times larger than the book it is supposed to “conclude.” Readers who are not turned off by the jocular style are led into a tour-de-force of intellectual content. The Postscript contains some of the best Kierkegaard (or whoever) has to offer and brings to a conclusion many of the themes in development since Either/Or. To the stages of existence—“aesthetic,” “ethical,” and “religious”—is brought a new form of faithful life. Søren intended this book to be a conclusion, not only to Climacus’s works, but to the authorship as a whole. To this end it contains a lengthy section entitled “A Glance at Contemporary Danish Literature,” which is, in fact, a review and a discussion of all the works since Either/Or up to and including Stages on Life’s Way. The “Glance” is attributed to Climacus, but inserted at the end are a few pages deliberately kept separate from the rest of the text. “The First and Last Explanation” echoes the letter that Søren had published in the Fatherland before launching his authorship with Either/Or years before. In it, he finally acknowledges that he, S. Kierkegaard, is the one responsible for the texts “in a legal and literary sense.” He asks, however, that the pseudonyms be treated as essential parts of the work and not as optional extras. “Therefore, if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine.”
The wish, the prayer, brought to conclusion Søren’s carefully constructed scheme of presenting Christianity to Christendom. The five or so years of ceaseless writing, endless perambulating, lonely living, and prodigious expenditure were brought to an end, and with it Søren intended to renew his long-postponed idea of taking up a quiet pastorate in a country parish. As with every other of Søren’s elaborate schemes, however, this one was not to be.
For one thing, he was a writer, through and through, and the parson’s life was not for him. For another, the great revelation of the genius behind the authorship had actually already been made a month before, in a scurrilous rag of a newspaper. In hindsight “The First and Last Explanation” would come to look less like a triumphant coup-de-grace and more like desperate damage control for a writing career only halfway finished. In 1846, a tabloid campaign against him was brewing, threatening to crack the edifice of the authorship and bring Søren’s world crashing down. And worst of all, he had brought it on himself.
CHAPTER 7
Pirate Life
Catrine Rørdam has a lot to answer for. How much pain, joy, anger, humour, boredom, insight, frustration, spiritual reformation, and existential revolution would have been denied if Catrine Rørdam had cried off her hostess duties? How many sleepless nights and ruined careers, how much spilled ink, and how many trees have given their lives as a result of Catrine Rørdam’s coffee klatches? It is because of her hospitality that Søren was put into the path of the two people with the most impact on his writing career. Søren first met Regine in 1837 at a gathering hosted by the mother of his friend Peter Rørdam. And it was that same year at another of her soirees Søren first made the acquaintance of a young Aron Goldschmidt.
It is not easy being Jewish and Danish in the nineteenth century. True, there is no outright oppression, and Russian or German Jews have it worse, but that does not take away from the steady unease one feels in Danish society. No matter how well you fight in the army, teach in the university, or write in the press—any Jewish person in the public eye is always waiting for the other shoe to drop. In Danish Christendom, Danish Jews are considered slightly off. A “cursed race” in popular lore, like Ahasuerus they are doomed to wander as foreigners even in their home lands. A respectable Jew, going about his daily business, is always ready to hear the taunt “Jerusalem is lost!” or to deal with the insinuation that unlike other “civilised” people, he cares only about making money. And woe betide the Jewish man whose concern actually is about making money.
Meïr Aron Goldschmidt. Amongst his many literary projects, Goldschmidt was the principal author and editor of the satirical Corsair.
Meïr Aron Goldschmidt is an intelligent, artistic, empathic, and funny man. He is politically informed and a committed defender of free speech. Aron is a novelist, essay writer, and a journalist, and is making a name for himself in radical, reform-minded government circles. He is also adept at wringing a profitable livelihood from his writing talents. Unbeknownst to the wider public, Aron is the founder and secret chief editor of the Corsair, a satirical magazine with literary promise and an enormous influence on public opinion. Like many Danish Jews of his generation, however, Aron is constantly on the back foot, unsure about his place in the world and sensitive to receive the good will that his fellow Gentile Danes take for granted. Even his financial success is a source of potential shame, and he aspires to be taken seriously as an artist, author, and thinker.
Aron is particularly susceptible to the opinions and advice of P. L. Møller. Peter Ludvig (no relation to Søren’s old teacher Poul Martin Møller) is an award-winning poet with academic ambitions. He is a friend and early defender of Hans Christian Andersen and a political supporter of Grundtvig’s radical Danish nationalism. He is also a notorious womaniser in a city that likes to be titillated by talk of seduction more than it likes actuall
y doing it. In short, Møller is a bad boy with insider privileges. He represents many of the things that Aron both fears and aspires to. No wonder Aron will later devote the main part of his autobiography to Møller, describing him as “looming up” in Aron’s young life like a sort of “nemesis.”
P. L. Møller first sought out Aron Goldschmidt on the strength of the latter’s involvement with the Corsair. As the editor of the country’s most feared satirical magazine, Aron is a powerful man. He founded the weekly periodical in 1840 as an outlet for radical ideas in opposition to both the conservatism and liberalism of the day. In the first issue, under a pseudonym, Aron wrote that people might object to a newspaper named after a type of pirate ship. Instead, the paper loftily claimed for itself that it was a vessel “manned by courageous young men [who] are determined to fight under their own banner for right, loyalty and honour.” The paper never did quite reach these heady heights, however, and soon gained a reputation for censor-baiting character assassination, gossip mongering, and attacks on the great and the good of Danish society, all the while hiding behind a wall of anonymity and secret identities. There was a serious edge to the paper, which had to constantly dodge official censorship by instituting a rotation of straw-man editors who would take the fall if things got really bad. In one instance in 1842 Aron ran out of fake editors and had to face the law himself. He was sentenced to “six times four days” in jail as a result. The events only served to strengthen Goldschmidt’s resolve, and the Corsair continued its reign of terror unabated. When Møller came on board he joined a small team of writers contributing to a paper read by everyone, high and low, but admitted by none. Hans Christian Andersen noted about the magazine that the elite wouldn’t stoop to buying such a rag, but they would “read to pieces” their servants’ copies.
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