Kierkegaard

by Stephen Backhouse

  Thus a new character, Anti-Climacus, was born with a position and relationship to Søren hitherto unseen in the literature. Although there is a clear connection to Johannes Climacus, Anti does not simply mean “against.” Instead, the anti (as in “anticipate”) connotes something greater or prior. Much as a great house will have an anteroom from which all the other doors and corridors lead, so too Anti-Climacus is invested with thoughts and positions higher and more central than that of the other pseudonyms. Anti-Climacus is not intended to hide Søren’s involvement (he lists his name as the editor) but it does provide the necessary distance Søren felt he needed between the work and himself. If the readers of Christendom felt weighed and found wanting by this ideal Christian, then so too did Søren. “I would place myself higher than Johannes Climacus, lower than Anti-Climacus.”

  Days before Anti-Climacus was due to hit the stage with the publication of Sickness unto Death, Regine’s father, Counsellor Terkild Olsen, passed away. Søren had enjoyed a good rapport with Olsen and the year before had rashly attempted a reunion with him and the family as a first step to seeking an understanding with Regine. Søren had spontaneously taken himself to where he knew the Olsens holidayed. “I was so happy and almost sure of meeting the family there—and that an attempt must be made.” Lo and behold, who should pass by but Counsellor Olsen. “The only one,” Søren wrote, who “I safely dare become reconciled with, for here there is no danger as with the girl.” Søren affected a cheery greeting and offer of friendship, but it was too much for the father, who, with tears in his eyes, said, “I do not wish to speak with you!” and ran away faster than Søren could follow. Søren shouted after him that the responsibility for healing the rift was now on Olsen’s shoulders, but it was to no avail. Søren mused later on the event: “We all weep when the pastor preaches about being reconciled with our enemies. Actually to seek reconciliation is regarded as effrontery. Thus Councillor Olsen … was furiously incensed over it.”

  Now he was dead. Rightly or wrongly, Søren had suspected that Olsen was the main barrier to any future friendship with his daughter. With this obstacle out of the way, Søren wondered whether now would be a good opportunity to test the possibility of rapprochement with Regine. They saw each other often on the streets or in church but had not exchanged a word. After many, many drafts and false starts, Søren eventually found the words for his letter, dated November 19, 1849. The draft read in part:

  … Marry I could not. Even if you were still free, I could not. However, you have loved me, as I have you. I owe you much—and now you are married. All right, I offer you for the second time what I can and dare and ought to offer you: reconciliation. I do this in writing in order not to surprise or overwhelm you. Perhaps my personality did once have too strong an effect; that must not happen again. But for the sake of God in Heaven, please give serious consideration to whether you dare become involved in this, and if so, whether you prefer to speak with me at once or would rather exchange some letters first. If your answer is “No”—would you then please remember for the sake of a better world that I took this step as well.

  In any case, as in the beginning so until now,

  S.K.

  What Regine would have made of this letter, we will never know. She never saw it. Søren, keenly aware that his unusual approach had more than a whiff of the clandestine about it, had enclosed the note in an envelope attached to a cover letter to Fritz Schlegel.

  The enclosed letter is from me (S. Kierkegaard) to—your wife. You yourself must now decide whether or not to give it to her. I cannot, after all, very well defend approaching her … If you disagree, may I ask you to return the letter to me unopened …

  I have the honour to remain, etc.

  S.K.

  This is exactly what Fritz duly did. Søren recorded in his diary, “I then received a moralizing and indignant epistle from the esteemed gentleman and the letter to her unopened.” Elsewhere he commented on the need to avoid even the appearance of impropriety with Regine, and he refused to try to enlist her help in persuading Fritz of the possibility that they might talk again. “Now the matter is finished. One thing is sure—without Schlegel’s consent not one word. And he has declared himself as definitively as possible.”

  The door closed to a real-life friendship, all that remained was for Søren to return to conversing with his imaginary Regine. He continued to allude to her in his books and sent her copies of his Discourses as they were published. Unbeknownst to him, Fritz and Regine were well aware of the full extent of the one-sided literary conversation. They had read Søren’s works out loud to each other during their engagement and continued to purchase his books throughout their married life, following his career with interest.

  Around the same time as receiving Schlegel’s note and the unopened letter, Søren sustained another unpleasant blow from a source equally close to home. A month before, Peter had delivered a talk in which he unfavourably compared Søren to none other than Martensen. To add insult to the injury, the lecture was published in the Danish Church Gazette, a Grundtvigian paper. Søren fired off a letter of protest, complaining of Peter’s misrepresentation of the pseudonyms and pointing out that people will wrongly assume that because he is the older brother, readers will be fooled into thinking Peter has reliable access to Søren’s mind, which he most certainly does not. Søren was annoyed intellectually but also personally hurt. “Dear Peter,” he wrote, “I have now read your article … To be honest, it has affected me painfully in more ways than one.” He begs his brother that if he is to be compared to Martensen, then “it does seem to me that the essential difference ought to have been indicated, namely this, that I have sacrificed to an extraordinary extent and that he has profited to an extraordinary extent.” Finally, “it seems to me that both for your own sake and for mine you should modify your statements about me.” Peter’s comments only just about applied to a handful of pseudonyms, not to Søren, and he again reiterates his wish and prayer. “I myself have asked in print that this distinction be observed. It is important to me, and the last thing I would have wished is that you of all people should in any way have joined in lending credence to a carelessness from which I must suffer often enough as it is.”

  Any comparison with Martensen was always going to rankle, but the timing of this spat was particularly frustrating. Martensen’s star was rising fast. He had been appointed a full professor of theology at the university and had recently published his Christian Dogmatics to international acclaim. Søren had a copy and his marginal notes are, unsurprisingly, disdainful. “All existence is disintegrating,” he scribbles on the book. “While anyone with eyes must see that all this about millions of Christians is a sham… . Martensen sits and organizes a dogmatic system… . Since everything else is as it should be, the most important matter confronting us now is to determine where the angels are to be placed in the system, and things like that.” One observation in particular stands out. “Strangely enough, Mynster is frequently quoted … And at one time it was Mynster whom ‘the system’ was going to overthrow.” This growing rapport between Martensen and Mynster did not bode well. Ostensibly, the two were theological opponents. Mynster was as opposed to Martensen’s Hegelian systematising as was Søren. Yet of late the two churchmen were aligning themselves on the side of exactly the sort of cultured, established, and numerically populous Christendom Søren was warning against. Martensen might be philosophically obtuse, but he was also sophisticated and urbane. In short, he was Bishop Mynster’s kind of man, Hegel or no.

  Søren had been trying and failing to become Mynster’s man for some time. Practice in Christianity was his final application for the post. The bulk of the book was written in 1848, but it was published on September 25, 1850, under the name Anti-Climacus. Practice sold well (better than most of his other books) but was largely ignored by reviewers. As with Works of Love, Søren did not mind, saying of the book, “Without a doubt it is the most perfect and the truest thing I have written.” However, h
e was quick to add, “It must not be interpreted as if I am supposed to be the one who almost censoriously bursts in upon everybody else—no, I must first be disciplined myself by the same thing; there perhaps is no one who is permitted to humble himself as deeply under it as I … for the work is itself a judgment.”

  In retrospect, Søren and others would come to see the book as the beginning of his overt published attack on Christendom. Yet originally Søren had intended Practice in Christianity to be an aid to Mynster and a last-ditch defence for the establishment. The book offers extended reflections on various biblical passages where Jesus bids people directly to follow him without taking offence. The language is mild, exhorting, and Christ-centred. It is not fiery or angry. What it is, however, is a clear presentation of the need for the Single Individual to come out of the crowd and stand before Jesus without recourse to hiding behind the distractions of so-called Christian civilisation, either populist or cultured. The book includes a stirring “Moral,” offering the pastors and leaders of the church to confess their inability to preserve authentic Christianity and to throw themselves upon the grace of God. The primary person who needed to do the admission was the primate of the Danish Church, Bishop Mynster.

  Only if the church confesses its guilt can it continue to be the official representative of Christianity in the land, hence the book is a “defence.” However, Søren was under no illusions that the book could easily be read as an “attack.” Its call to reintroduce Christianity back into Christendom was clearly a bitter pill to swallow for Christendom’s existing army of teachers and preachers. He had private conversations with Mynster about the text and its “Moral.” The bishop was clearly unhappy with the Moral and with Practice’s repeated use of the word “observations,” which was an allusion to his own set of popular devotionals published under that name. However, rather than either admitting the book was correct, or attacking it as blasphemous, Mynster decided to publicly ignore it altogether. The silence was the last straw for Søren who had expected so much and was fast losing all veneration for his father’s pastor. “To me it became clear he was powerless.”

  Regine was never far from Søren’s thoughts even while his complaint with Mynster was ramping up. In May 1851 he had been invited to preach at the Church of Our Lady, where his chosen text was his favourite verse from James 1:17: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” The verse was important to Regine too and featured in the Discourses, which Søren had dedicated to her. Søren confesses in his diary of the day that he had picked the passage with her in mind and had half-hoped she would be in attendance during the sermon. Evidently she was not to be seen that day, but Søren would soon see her very often.

  In April, for financial reasons, he moved to a house outside of the city walls. From there Søren would make the half-hour walk into the city every morning, where he would regularly pass Regine on the street. They never exchanged a word during these moments, but in his journals Søren would recount every look and detail. Eventually, the daily meetings became a source of concern to Søren, for fear of impropriety. Was Regine arranging to run into him on purpose? Later in the year Søren resolved to alter his walk. “So I was obliged to make a change. I also believed that it would be best for her, for this constant dailiness is trying, especially if she is thinking of reconciliation with me, for which I of course would have to ask her husband’s consent.” The change worked for a time, but soon Søren reported seeing her again and was obliged to randomize his route. (The run-ins would more or less continue until Søren moved back into the city in October of 1852, this time in cramped apartments behind the Church of Our Lady.) The fresh memories of Regine are undoubtedly on Søren’s mind when he publishes more Discourses and an explanation of My Work as an Author in August 1851. The final two Discourses were timed to appear at the same time as Søren’s public discussion of the Christian direction of his project. They bore the significant dedication: “To One Unnamed, Whose Name Will One Day Be Named, is dedicated with this little work, the entire authorship as it was from the beginning.”

  In the main Søren’s writing energy was spent on his journals, which by this time were plainly intended for (eventual) publication after his death. An “Open Letter” to one Dr. Rudelbach published in the Fatherland on the last day of the year 1851 represents Søren’s only foray into the public cut-and-thrust during this period. It is a telling indication of Søren’s position at this time. Andreas Gottlob Rudelbach was a renegade reformer who tried to enlist Søren in his schemes to bring about the political separation of church and state. Rudelbach had thought that as a fellow critic of “habitual Christianity,” Søren would be a worthy ally to his cause. In his letter, Søren readily agrees, “I am a hater of ‘habitual Christianity.’ This is true. I hate habitual Christianity in whatever form it appears.” However:

  Habitual Christianity can indeed have many forms … if there were no other choice, if the choice were only between the sort of habitual Christianity which is a secular-minded thoughtlessness that nonchalantly goes on living in the illusion of being Christian, perhaps without ever having any impression of Christianity, and the kind of habitual Christianity which is found in the sects, the enthusiasts, the super-orthodox, the schismatics—if worse comes to worst, I would choose the first. The first kind has still taken Christianity in vain only in a thoughtless and negative way… . The second kind has taken Christianity in vain perhaps out of spiritual pride… . One could almost be tempted to smile at the first kind, because there is hope; the second makes one shudder.

  Søren has harsh words for the obsession with political solutions to spiritual problems that he perceives in Rudelbach and other enthusiasts:

  There is nothing about which I have greater misgivings than all that even slightly tastes of this disastrous confusion of politics and Christianity… . If this faith in the saving power of politically achieved free institutions belongs to true Christianity, then I am no Christian, or even worse, I am a regular child of Satan, because, frankly, I am indeed suspicious of these politically achieved free institutions, especially of their saving, renewing power.

  He ends his letter with a reiteration of his life’s task. “I have worked to make this teaching more and more the truth in ‘the single individual.’ … I have aimed polemically throughout this whole undertaking at ‘the crowd,’ … also at the besetting sin of our time, self-appointed reformation.”

  Any reform Søren wanted was inward, not external. Another short book, For Self Examination drove the point home when it was published on September 10, 1851, under his own name. The so-called “silent years” follow the publication of this book. Over three years in which Søren, astonishingly for him, does not print a thing. Judge for Yourself! was written at this time but not published, as Søren judged for himself that the time was not right to so openly pursue its theme (more stringent than in Practice) of reintroducing Christianity into Christendom. A myriad of journal entries during the silent years reveal that Søren was honing his material. A long entry entitled “About Her” recounts the frequent street meetings (including a smile from Regine on his birthday: “Ah, how much she has come to mean to me!”) and a significant event at a church service where the text was once again James 1:17. Before the preacher began his sermon, Søren (who was sitting behind) records that Regine impulsively turned her head to look at him before sinking down in her seat. Søren saw the sermon and the event as a sort of release for them both.

  Besides repeated returns to Regine, the Single Individual, and “his task,” multiple other entries consider Mynster and Søren’s relationship to him. One long entry from 1852 entitled “The Possible Collision with Mynster” is typical insofar as it sketches ways and means for Søren to take the fight further. “My position is: I represent a more authentic conception of Christianity than does Mynster… . A little admission from his side, and everything will be as advantageous as possible for him.
”

  Christus by Bertel Thorvaldsen. The statue is located at the front of Copenhagen’s Church of Our Lady. It bears the inscription from Matthew 11:28: “Come to Me.” The statue and its invitation are key elements of Søren’s book Practice in Christianity, which was meant as a wake-up call to Mynster and the Danish Church.

  The plans were all for naught, and Søren would never see the bishop converted to his cause. Mynster died on January 30, 1854. His memorial service was not light on pomp and circumstance. Denmark’s finest were out in force, with priests from across the land arriving early in the day to be a part of the proceedings. Martensen, as the royal court chaplain, presided over all. Due to deft manoeuvring on Martensen’s part, the gap between Martensen and Mynster had considerably narrowed over the years. Now it was well known that Martensen, although relatively young, had realistic aspirations to be Mynster’s successor. As such, his memorial sermon was not without some regard to his own position. Whatever he said about Mynster as bishop was also—whisper it—what Martensen envisioned for himself. So it was that in the memorial address Martensen held forth:

  So let us now then imitate his faith … that his memory amongst us in truth must be for upbuilding! Let us admonish ourselves as we say: Imitate the faith of the true witness, the faith of the authentic witness to the truth! … [let his precious memory] guide our thoughts back to the whole line of witnesses to the truth, which is like a holy chain stretching itself through the ages from the day of the Apostles until our own day.

  One can only imagine Søren’s immediate reaction to hearing this speech using his favourite terms like “upbuilding,” “apostle,” “authentic,” and, especially “truth witness.” Of Mynster, of all people, by Martensen, of all people.