Kierkegaard

by Stephen Backhouse

  1859. Denmark. Peter Kierkegaard publishes Søren’s Point of View, the work in which, amongst other things, Søren retroactively spells out the Christian purpose of his career guided by Governance, a “report to history” helped by some creative juggling of the publishing record. Six years pass with nothing more forthcoming.

  Peter Christian Kierkegaard, Søren’s brother and last surviving Kierkegaard. In 1875 he relinquished his position as bishop, citing 1 John 3:15 in his resignation letter. Peter died as a ward of the state in 1888.

  The Kierkegaard family grave in Assistens Cemetery, Copenhagen. Søren is surrounded by family members. His inscription, leaning against the headstone, reads: “In a little while I shall have won, Then the entire battle Will disappear at once. Then I may rest In halls of roses And unceasingly, And unceasingly Speak with my Jesus.”

  1865. Denmark. Peter enlists his secretary, the former journalist H. P. Barfod, to sort out the papers. Barfod discovers lots of juicy titbits, including the story of father Michael’s hilltop cursing of God and evidence that Søren deliberately destroyed pages of his diary he knew would reveal too much of his secret sadness. Barfod is an assiduous editor who thinks of his work on the journals as laying bare the “colossal and clandestine workshop of the soul.” It is also he who had the foresight to collect the valuable memoirs of Søren’s school chums and contemporaries. However, Barfod and his assistant Hermann Gottsched are responsible for a lot of irreparable confusion. Søren’s older, pre-Corsair journals were in various states of disarray and seemed incongruous next to the “NB” volumes. Barfod and Gottsched transcribe and arrange the material according to a scheme of their own devising and then—incredibly—destroy the originals. The first collection of papers and letters are published in 1869. The series will eventually run to eight volumes. The publication of the papers and posthumous material leads to a new wave of interest in Søren Kierkegaard. The books sell well, and Peter as literary executioner donates the money to charity. Peter is dogged by indecision about his priestly vocation, guilt over his actions towards his brother, and envy of Søren’s success. His mental health deteriorates. In 1875 Peter resigns his bishopric and later hands over his royal decorations. In a move that recalls his reason forty years ago for not taking Communion, he quotes 1 John 3:15 in his resignation letter: “Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.” Peter dies as a ward of the state in 1888.

  1866. Norway. Henrik Ibsen publishes Brand, a play about an uncompromising Lutheran pastor with reforming zeal. The next year he brings forth Peer Gynt. Ibsen read Kierkegaard and knew his story but was cagey about attributing influence. Regardless of Ibsen’s protests, the Kierkegaardian connections are widely assumed. Many readers and writers will later claim that the line of Kierkegaard came to them through Ibsen, including the American translator Howard Hong, the Irish novelist James Joyce, and the Spanish philosophical playwright Miguel de Unamuno, who liked to boast that he taught himself Scandinavian languages to read Ibsen, but found Kierkegaard instead.

  1871. Denmark. If one were to ask a nineteenth-century British reader to name a famous Danish philosophical and theological writer, a likely name that would come up might be Hans Lassen Martensen. Bishop Martensen is a (relatively) popular figure abroad. His major works were translated into English in his lifetime, including the Dogmatics that had so infuriated Kierkegaard. Apart from one newspaper rejoinder, during Kierkegaard’s final feud with the Establishment Martensen had kept schtum, much to Søren’s contempt. Now Martensen has broken the silence, devoting twenty or so pages of his recently published Christian Ethics to laying out and then refuting Kierkegaard’s views of sociality and identity. The book is translated into English in 1873 by the Scottish publisher T&T Clark. So it is that Martensen, by answering Søren at last, brings the first extended discussion of Kierkegaard to the English-speaking world. Still, the wave of interest is not sparked. It will take more than this to get the red lines of Kierkegaard arcing over the map of the world.

  Bishop H. L. Martensen’s grave, Assistens Cemetery, Copenhagen

  1877. Denmark. George Brandes is not a supporter of Kierkegaard, but he is the first person in the world to publish a major treatment of Kierkegaard’s life and thought. Brandes’s aim is to separate what he thinks is good about Kierkegaard—namely the attack on Christendom—from what he thinks is bad—namely the Christian purposes for which Kierkegaard made his attack. It is largely through Brandes that word of Kierkegaard reaches Austria and Germany. For many years the most extensive German translations are taken from Kierkegaard’s post-1850 writings, where they are used as fuel for local anticlerical movements.

  1888. Germany. Frederick Nietzsche receives a letter from his friend Brandes, recommending that he take a look at Kierkegaard’s writings. Nietzsche is intrigued and pledges to seek them out. Before he can do so, he suffers the mental breakdown that will lead to his death.

  1896. Denmark. Fritz Schlegel, former governor in the West Indies and lately returned to Copenhagen, dies. His widow, Regine, begins to grant interviews to scholars, biographers, and members of the public hungry for fresh information about Kierkegaard. The conversations all begin with admiration for Fritz, but end with Søren. It is no easy thing being once engaged to Denmark’s greatest polemical poet, and Fritz knew what a singular person he had in Regine. Fritz harboured no petty jealousy but instead did all he could to support his wife through it all. Regine would often exclaim to interviewers, “Oh, that he could ever forgive me for being such a little scoundrel that I became engaged to the other one.” Of Søren himself, Regine is unfailing in her defence and rebuffs any attempts at vilification. The only thing Regine is insistent on correcting is Søren’s insinuation that she was not religiously serious. Regine dies in 1902, with the full realisation—as Søren had predicted—that she had been taken with him into history.

  1913. Germany. Interest in the antichurch Kierkegaard has led to the back-catalogue. Theodor Haecker publishes his first monograph. Haecker will go on to become the major German translator of Kierkegaard. A convert to Catholicism and a committed opponent of the Nazis, Haecker is keenly aware of the relevance of Kierkegaard’s message for his present age.

  It is largely through Haecker that most German readers and writers meet Kierkegaard.

  1913. Germany. Karl Jaspers is working in a psychiatric hospital. He is growing disillusioned with the barbaric treatments being meted out on the patients—straps and extended plunges in hot water are commonly used to cure illnesses of the brain. It is from encounters with Kierkegaard now and into the 1920s that Jaspers finds ways to express his idea that mental illness is an “event” in someone’s life and part of the development of the existence of that person. Jaspers will become a highly influential philosopher and psychiatrist who will write about Kierkegaard and Kierkegaardian themes for the rest of his career, changing the shape of the establishment’s view of mental illness and health.

  1918. Czechoslovakia. Franz Kafka writes in his diary about his encounters with Kierkegaard. He is particularly captured by Kierkegaard’s treatment of the story of Abraham and wonders at ways of telling this ancient pre-Hebraic story from a modern Jewish perspective. Kierkegaard will remain a major influence for Kafka’s entire writing life.

  1919. Switzerland. A young pastor in a working-class village parish begins writing his commentary on the apostle Paul. The Epistle to the Romans lands like a bombshell on the theological scene, and Karl Barth is appointed to a professorship in Germany as a result. Its emphasis on the radical difference between the revelation of God and the natural endeavours of mankind challenges prevailing theologies of human progress and offers a new way of thinking in light of the devastating Great War. “If I have a system,” he writes in the introduction, “it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between time and eternity.”

  1929. Germany. The graduate student Hannah Aren
dt writes her doctoral thesis on Augustine and neighbourly love. She is supervised by Karl Jaspers. A German Jew forced to flee her native country, Arendt will go on to write insightfully about power, violence, and totalitarianism, coining the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the way heinous crimes can be committed through mass complacency. In a 1964 TV interview conducted by Günther Gaus she recalls eagerly studying politics and philosophy from a young age. “Then I read Kierkegaard and everything fell into place.”

  c. 1930. United Kingdom. While living in Cambridge, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks to a friend, “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.”

  1934. Bornholm. Gregor Malantschuk, a Ukrainian orphan who ended up in Germany following the chaos of the Great War, is forced by the rise of Hitler to migrate yet again, this time fleeing to a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. Here he first hears of Kierkegaard from a farm mechanic repairing a threshing machine. He finds in Kierkegaard’s “single individual” an alternative to the dehumanising ideologies of both communism and fascism. Later, Malantschuk forms a Kierkegaard study circle where he mentors many influential teachers and translators, including Julia Watkin, and Howard and Edna Hong. After his death, Malantschuk’s considerable library seeds the Kierkegaardian centres at McGill University in Canada and at St. Olaf College in the United States.

  1935. United Kingdom. E. L. Allen publishes Kierkegaard: His Life and Thought. It is the first monograph in English, but like Brandes, Allen is no fan. His portrait damns Kierkegaard with faint praise, and he thinks Kierkegaard’s response to Christendom was too pessimistic. The next Dane Allen wrote about reveals where he wants British sympathies to lie. Bishop Grundtvig: A Prophet of the North is a glowing endorsement of Grundtvig’s view of national, Christian life.

  1937. Germany. The dissident theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer publishes Discipleship, his manual for seminary students preparing to become pastors in Nazi-dominated Germany. The book’s striking attempt to articulate how to live as Christians in a Christendom seduced by Hitler is similar in theme and structure to Practice in Christianity, the book that Anti-Climacus wrote to unsettle the Christians in his Christendom. Bonhoeffer was steeped in Kierkegaard’s writings. Major tenets of Bonhoeffer’s thought such as “cheap grace” and “religion-less Christianity” are shaped by his encounters with the Dane, as is Bonhoeffer’s choice to opt for real, concrete life against the seduction of triumphalist idealism. For his part in opposing Hitler, Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945.

  1938. United Kingdom and the United States. The Anglo-American world is presented with Alexander Dru’s The Journals of Kierkegaard 1834–1854 and Walter Lowrie’s monumental biography Kierkegaard. They are not the first Kierkegaardian books published in English, but they are the most widely read. Alexander Dru, friend of Theodor Haecker, wrote to the Oxford University Press in 1935 proposing they publish some translated volumes of the philosopher. Dru, an English Catholic (and brother-in-law to the novelist Evelyn Waugh) also enlisted the help of Walter Lowrie, who was labouring on his own translation project. Lowrie, an American Episcopalian pastor and theologian, had found Kierkegaard via Barth. In 1932 (at the age of 64) he taught himself Danish and began his translation work shortly thereafter. Some scattered material had been translated by Lee M. Hollander ten years previous, but unsold copies of the pamphlet were collecting dust in Hollander’s office. David Swenson (a Swede living in America) had been eking out Kierkegaard translations and essays since 1916 after discovering a Danish-language copy of the Postscript in his local library. Professor Swenson’s translation of Philosophical Fragments came out in 1936 and he was drafted to assist with the OUP project. Although Lowrie was not the first American translator, he proved himself to be an unrivalled powerhouse of public relations and productivity on behalf of the Dane. What his translations lost in elegance or accuracy he gained in vitality and rapid quantity. It is through Lowrie (some of whose translations remain in print today) that most English readers will come to trace their introduction to Kierkegaard. OUP published Lowrie’s editions, starting with Christian Discourses and The Point of View in 1939. Further Discourses, Training in Christianity, Judge for Yourself!, and For Self Examination soon followed. Dru and Lowrie collaborated on The Present Age in 1940. It was not lost on anyone that the book’s theme of the malignant mob was especially relevant in light of the looming World War with regimes particularly adept at manipulating the media and popular sentiment. Kierkegaard’s philosophical and pseudonymous works emerged in 1941: Stages on Life’s Way, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and Sickness unto Death. Concluding Unscientific Postscript also came out in 1941, mostly translated by Swenson but completed by Lowrie after Swenson’s death the year before. Swenson’s Either/Or, Concept of Dread, and collected material from the Fatherland and the Moment, which Lowrie called the Attack upon Christendom, all came out in 1944. Apart from this final material, the order of the production did not correspond in any way to the timing or pseudonymous scheme painstakingly worked out by Søren a century before.

  1939. United Kingdom. The New Statesman publishes T. S. Eliot’s rave review of an idiosyncratic new book by a niche writer normally associated with “spiritual thrillers.” The Descent of the Dove by Charles Williams tells the story of the history of Christianity from the point of view of the movement of Goodness and the Holy Spirit across the earth. The high point of the climactic chapter is devoted to Kierkegaard. “His sayings will be so moderated in our minds,” predicts Williams, “that they will soon become not his sayings but ours.” Other fans of the book include W. H. Auden, who credits Williams for his conversion to Christianity and who embarked on a lifelong appreciation of Kierkegaard as a result. Williams, friend of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and other fellow “Inklings,” is no Kierkegaardian novice—in his day job he is an editor for Oxford University Press. It is Williams who first received Dru’s proposal and who was an early champion of the project. It is he who oversees the translation work and who manages Lowrie’s considerable energy and expectations. It is also Williams we can thank for convincing Lowrie not to lumber his biography with the doggy sounding subtitle, “the Great Dane.” During conditions of wartime austerity, Williams labours long and hard to ensure the Press pays for paper at the same time as keeping the price down for the normal reading public. Much of the printing costs are subsidised by Lowrie himself, and Williams often has to broach the subject of money with the translator. “K. may rebuild civilization, but we shall have to be more economical than ever in building K.” In the end the war and the prospect of working with a publisher and market closer to home convinces Lowrie to take his work to Princeton University Press, leaving Oxford as the European agent rather than main publisher. The relationship between Williams and Lowrie remains cordial, with Williams suggesting that while the Americans may have bought more actual books, at least the support of the prestigious University of Oxford was a “more intangible but no less effective” vehicle for the reception of Kierkegaard into English.

  1940. United States. Recent Roman Catholic convert Thomas Merton notes in his journal: “A week ago today I bought Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling at the Oxford University Press, and have since talked about it so much I feel as if I had been reading Kierkegaard all my life.” Merton will go on to become a monk, spiritual writer, nonviolent civil rights activist, and nuclear nonproliferation peace campaigner with worldwide renown. Kierkegaard will remain a constant presence in Merton’s life as a source of strength, guidance, and challenge until his death in 1968.

  1942. France. The Algerian Albert Camus publishes his novel The Stranger and his philosophical treatise The Myth of Sisyphus. The works are considered forerunners of French Existentialism, although Camus rejects the label. Camus is forthcoming in his admiration for Kierkegaard, unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, whose book Being and Nothingness comes out in 1943. Because of his antipathy to Kierkegaard’s Christianity, Sartre often disavow
s any connection. Rather, his thoughts on the fundamental importance of free will are built on Martin Heidegger’s highly influential Being and Time (1927). As it happens, the German philosopher also went to great lengths to hide his indebtedness to Kierkegaard. Being and Time grudgingly mentions Kierkegaard three times in the notes and yet is replete with Kierkegaardian themes, stripped of their Christian orientation. The association of Kierkegaard with the atheistic existentialisms of Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, and others is a powerful one. It led to an explosion of Kierkegaard’s popularity in the 1950s and ’60s in France and America while at the same time cast a long shadow over his modern reception as a Christian thinker.

  1943. United States. Playwright Henry Miller pens a glowing review of Lowrie’s A Short Life of Kierkegaard in the New Republic. His approach is symptomatic of the era in which it is not academics but literate nonspecialists who tend to take up the Kierkegaardian mantle. A lot of the appeal to writers, poets, public intellectuals, artists, and idiosyncratic historians is Kierkegaard’s approach to cultural movements that were defining the “modern age.” He is heard to be saying something to the dehumanising nature of mass culture in all its forms, whether it be communism, fascism, or jingoistic patriotism. Furthermore, he provides a way to talk about the loss of faith and the finding of faith in the shadow of Christianised systems that were proving untenable. Reviews and essays on Kierkegaard begin to appear in places like The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, and, in England, The Times Literary Supplement. The literary influence is and will be felt in such diverse figures as Flannery O’Connor, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, and David Lodge, to name but a few twentieth-century authors.