by John Updike
A childhood classmate later wrote, “To the rest of us who led a genuinely boyish life S.K. was a stranger and an object of compassion, especially on account of his dress.… This [his costume, which resembled the costume of charity schools] procured him the nickname of Choirboy, which alternated with Søren Sock, in allusion to his father’s previous business as hosier. S.K. was regarded by us all as one whose home was wrapped in a mysterious half-darkness of severity and oddity.” And in his autobiographical The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard wrote, “As a child I was strictly and austerely brought up in Christianity; humanly speaking, crazily brought up. A child crazily travestied as a melancholy old man. Terrible!”
Yet the boy’s relation to his father was also intimate and admiring. One of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, reminisces:
His father was a very severe man, apparently dry and prosaic, but under this rough coat he concealed a glowing imagination which even old age could not quench. When Johannes occasionally asked of him permission to go out, he generally refused to give it, though once in a while he proposed instead that Johannes should take his hand and walk back and forth in the room.… While they went back and forth in the room the father described all that they saw; they greeted passersby, carriages rattled past them and drowned the father’s voice; the cake-woman’s goodies were more enticing than ever. He described so accurately, so vividly, so explicitly even to the least details, everything that was known to Johannes and so fully and perspicuously what was unknown to him, that after half an hour of such a walk with his father he was as much overwhelmed and fatigued as if he had been a whole day out of doors.… To Johannes it seemed as if the world were coming into existence during the conversation, as if the father were our Lord and he were his favorite, who was allowed to interpose his foolish conceits as merrily as he would; for he was never repulsed, the father was never put out, he agreed to everything.
I have abbreviated this often quoted passage and italicized a signal clause. By the same light, Kierkegaard did not expect to live past the age of thirty-three (the age of Christ) and did expect his father, though fifty-seven years older, to outlive him (to be immortal). In fact, his father lived to the patriarchal age of eighty-two and Kierkegaard died when he was only forty-two, so the premonition was in spirit correct. There is no doubt that his father fearfully dominated the household. Incredibly, in all of Kierkegaard’s writings there is not one mention of his mother. And an age that has been able to peruse Kafka’s diaries need not be reminded that, severity aside, the competence, the very wonderfulness of a father can be felt as a crushing tyranny. “It is a fearful thing,” Kierkegaard wrote, “to fall into the hands of the living God.”
To all this add a precocious compassion. In his journals Kierkegaard writes of the perils of religious education:
The most dangerous case is not when the father is a free thinker, and not even when he is a hypocrite. No, the danger is when he is a pious and God-fearing man, when the child is inwardly and deeply convinced of it, and yet in spite of all this observes that a profound unrest is deeply hidden in his soul, so that not even piety and the fear of God can bestow peace. The danger lies just here, that the child in this relationship is almost compelled to draw a conclusion about God, that after all God is not infinite love.
It does not seem to me contradictory to posit a father who appears as both God and a victim of God. Such a paradox, after all, is fundamental to Christian theology, and Kierkegaard’s imagination often returns to the forsaken Christ’s outcry on the Cross. Duplicity was the very engine of Kierkegaard’s thought, a habit he elevated to a metaphysical principle—the principle of “indirect communication,” which he found both in Socrates’ intellectual midwifery and in God’s decision to embody Himself in a scorned and mocked sufferer. In all Kierkegaard’s production, nothing is more powerful, more beautiful and typical, than the sweeping Prelude to Fear and Trembling, wherein the story of Abraham and Isaac is pursued through a sequence of differing versions. All portray, in similar language, Abraham and Isaac rising in the morning, leaving Sarah, and travelling to Mount Moriah, where God has told Abraham he must sacrifice his son. In the first version, Abraham, whose face has shown sorrow and “fatherliness,” turns away a moment,
and when Isaac again saw Abraham’s face it was changed, his glance was wild, his form was horror. He seized Isaac by the throat, threw him to the ground, and said, “Stupid boy, dost thou then suppose that I am thy father? I am an idolater. Dost thou suppose that this is God’s bidding? No, it is my desire.” Then, Isaac trembled and cried out in his terror. “O God in heaven; have compassion upon me. God of Abraham, have compassion upon me. If I have no father upon earth, be Thou my father!” But Abraham in a low voice said to himself, “O Lord in heaven, I thank Thee. After all it is better for him to believe that I am a monster, rather than that he should lose faith in Thee.”
Here, in this shocking twist of a myth, that nerve is bared. Here, in this play of ironies and deceits carried out under the highest pressure of dread, we feel close to Kierkegaard’s mysterious and searing experience of his father.
A specific revelation about his father troubled Kierkegaard’s young manhood and was transmuted, or absorbed, into a gnawing guilt or uneasiness that he refers to in his journals as “the thorn in my flesh,” which in turn seems to be synonymous with his singularity, his fate, as “the individual,” to suffer a martyrdom not incomparable with Christ’s. Some crucial confidence was imparted on his twenty-second birthday: “Then it was that the great earthquake occurred, the frightful upheaval which suddenly forced upon me a new infallible rule for interpreting the phenomena one and all. Then I surmised that my father’s great age was not a divine blessing, but rather a curse.… Guilt must rest upon the whole family, a divine punishment must be impending over it.” The exact nature of the “earthquake” is forever buried in the portentous secrecy Kierkegaard assigned it. Possibly the old man’s confession had to do with sex. On the mere statistical records, Michael Kierkegaard seduced his housekeeper in the year of mourning his first wife, married the woman when she was five months pregnant, and fathered upon her a total of seven children, the last, Søren Aabye, being born when the parents, if not as ancient as Abraham and Sarah, were of an age when, in Lowrie’s delicate phrase, “no such blessing was expected.” Kierkegaard frequently speaks of his own existence as a “mistake,” and in the journals of The Last Years this sense of himself has spread to include all humanity: “This whole human existence, dating from the Fall, and which we men are so puffed up about as a devilish tour de force … is merely the consequence of a false step.” Of a hypothetical son he writes:
Concerning himself he learns that he was conceived in sin, born in transgression—that his existence is therefore a crime, that therefore his father, in giving him life, has done something which is as far as possible from being well-pleasing to God.
His vivid, even sensual awareness of Original Sin, of life itself as a crime, may be traceable to an embarrassment he felt about being himself living proof of an elderly couple’s concupiscence. He ranged from the heights of conceit to abysmal depths of shame; near the end of his life, he suffered a stroke while visiting friends and, falling helpless to the floor, rejected the attempts to lift him up by saying, “Oh, leave it [his body] until the maid clears it away in the morning.” In the last journals, he thanks God “that no living being owes existence to me,” urges celibacy upon all Christians, faces cheerfully the consequence that the race would die out, and asserts that “human egoism is concentrated in the sexual relation, the propagation of the species, the giving of life.”
Or the “earthquake” may have been learning that his father, as an eleven-year-old boy, had cursed God. An entry in the journals of 1846 reads:
How terrible about the man who once as a little boy, while herding the flocks on the heaths of Jutland, suffering greatly, in hunger and in want, stood upon a hill and cursed God—and the man was unable t
o forget it even when he was eighty-two years old.
The first editor of Kierkegaard’s papers, Barfod, showed this passage to Bishop Peter Kierkegaard, the one surviving sibling, who confirmed that this was indeed his father, and that, since shortly thereafter the shepherd boy was adopted by an uncle and set on the road to prosperity, he regarded this prosperity as an inverted curse, as God’s vengeance for, to quote Peter, “the sin against the Holy Ghost which never can be forgiven.” It seems likely that this, and not a sexual confession, is the matter of the “earthquake.” And it seems to me, furthermore, that Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom is a repetition of his father’s curse—an attack, ostensibly directed against the Danish Protestant Church, upon God Himself, on behalf of the father who had suffered, and yet also against this same father, who had made his son suffer and bound him to Christian belief.
In 1849, Kierkegaard wrote in his journals, under the heading Something about myself which must always be remembered: “If, with my imagination, and with my passions, etc., I had been in any ordinary human sense a man, then I should certainly have forgotten Christianity entirely. But I am bound in agonizing misery, like a bird whose wings have been clipped, yet retaining the power of my mind undiminished, and its undoubtedly exceptional powers.” And the pamphlets comprising The Attack have been, in every language except English, the first things by Kierkegaard to be translated, as anti-clerical, anti-Christian literature. The “Christendom” Kierkegaard denounced was popularly taken to be synonymous with Christianity, and perhaps it was. It is hard to account otherwise for the strange qualities of the attack as found in The Instant and in these journals. Are specific abuses, as in Luther’s attack upon the Papal church, named? No: “Luther nailed up niney-five theses on the church door; that was a fight about doctrine. Nowadays one might publish one single thesis in the papers: ‘Christianity does not exist;’ and offer to dispute with all parsons and dons.” This is from a journal of 1851; by 1854, Kierkegaard had developed a piercing critique of Luther, stated wittily as:
Luther suffered extremely from an anxious conscience, he needed treatment. Very well: but is that a reason for completely transforming Christianity into a matter of calming anxious consciences?
Kierkegaard does not want consciences to be calmed, he wants them to be exacerbated by the truth about Christianity. “My task is to put a halt to a lying diffusion of Christianity, and to help it to shake off a mass of nominal Christians.” And what is the truth about Christianity?
The ideal means hatred of man. What man naturally loves is finitude. To face him with the ideal is the most dreadful torture … it kills in him, in the most painful way, everything in which he really finds his life, in the most painful way it shows him his own wretchedness, it keeps him in sleepless unrest, whereas finitude lulls him into enjoyment. That is why Christianity is called, and is, hatred of man.
Now, is such advocacy not a hidden prosecution? It may be argued that harsh words were a needed corrective to an existing complacency and that the New Testament itself is sternly world-denying. But I notice that, just as liberal apologists are troubled to explain away the “hard” sayings of Jesus, Kierkegaard is embarrassed by the Gospels’ softer moments—the genial miracle at the wedding of Cana, the sufferance of little children, the promise to the thief on the cross. Kierkegaard says, “Men live their life in the strength of the assurance that of such as children is the kingdom of God, and in death they look for consolation to the image of the thief. That is the whole of their Christianity, and, characteristically enough, it is a mixture of childishness and crime.” Surely here he is attacking something essential to Biblical teaching—the forgivingness that balances majesty. He seems impatient with divine mercy, much as a true revolutionary despises the philanthropies whereby misery is abated and revolution delayed. The “Christendom” he attacks has strangely little substance, apart from the person of Bishop Mynster, his father’s pastor, who is criticized only for his urbanity and eloquence and his refusal to confess that “what he represented was not really Christianity but a milder form of it.” Indeed, the whole attack is an invitation to the Church to commit suicide: “Yes, truly, suicide, and yet an action well-pleasing to God.” Any specific reform—a revival of monasteries, an abolition of “livings”—he explicitly disavows. The one concrete result he expects from his attack is his own imprisonment and death. Though the Church’s functionaries barely troubled to respond even in writing, he did die. He suffered his fatal stroke while returning from the bank with the last scrap of his fortune. He had nowhere further to go, and his death, whose causes eluded diagnosis, seems willed.
In the hospital, he told his only intimate friend, the pastor Emil Boesen, “The doctors do not understand my illness; it is psychic, and they want to treat it in the ordinary medical way.” His conversations with Boesen, a kind of continuation of the journals (printed as such by Dru), have a relaxed sweetness; his terrible “task” is done, and he is happy that so much in his life has “come out right” and is melancholy that he cannot share his happiness with everyone. He refuses to put flowers sent him into water: “it is the fate of flowers to blossom, smell, and die.” Of The Instant, whose tenth number lay unpublished on his desk, he said, “You must remember that I have seen everything from the inmost center of Christianity, it is all very poor and clumsy.… I only said it to be rid of evil, and so to reach an Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” This “Alleluia,” it may be, could be reached only through a scandal in which, alone like a shepherd boy on the Jutland heath, Kierkegaard execrated God. At any rate, with Kierkegaard, as with Proust, we feel writing as a demon—the one way to set a bent life straight.
Kierkegaard would hardly be pleased to know that more than any other thinker of the 19th century—not excluding Newman and Dostoevsky—he has made Christianity intellectually possible for the 20th. Not that the “millions of men falling away from Christianity” that he foresaw and desired has not occurred. But, by giving metaphysical dignity to “the subjective,” by showing faith to be not an intellectual development but a movement of the will, by holding out for existential duality against the tide of all the monisms, materialist or mystical or political, that would absorb the individual consciousness, Kierkegaard has given Christianity new life, a handhold, the “Archimedean point.” From Jaspers and Barth, Unamuno and Marcel, Heidegger and Sartre, his thought has filtered down through the seminaries to the laity. He has become, as he angrily predicted, the property of those men “more abominable and gruesome than the cannibals,” professors and clergymen, and he is used, in the form of a few phrases or a bolder style, to prop up the feeble, always tottering faith of contemporary “Christians.” He has become an instrument in the conspiracy to “make a fool of God.” Those who read him eat the aesthetic coating and leave the religious pill, and “neo-Orthodox” Protestantism, his direct beneficiary, has accepted the antinomianism and ignored the savage austerity, the scornful authoritarianism. Yet Kierkegaard himself, this two-tined Fork with his trouser legs of unequal length, this man in love with duplicity and irony and all double-edged things, lived luxuriously to the last and is nowhere quite free of sophism and vanity. (His sermons, for example, so symphonic and ardent, somehow belong with the memorable sermons of fiction, like those of Father Mapple in Moby Dick and of Père Paneloux in The Plague.) In the journal of 1849 he reminded himself, “It must never be forgotten that Christ also succored temporal and worldly needs. One can also, untruly, make Christ so spiritual that he becomes sheer cruelty.” If this is what Kierkegaard seemed to do in the end, he also remembered that infinite majesty infinitely relents. Late in The Last Years we find this surprising entry: “For with such clarity as I have, I must say I am not a Christian. For the situation as I see it is that in spite of the abyss of nonsense in which we are caught, we shall all alike be saved.”
* The reviewer, in his versifying youth, once indicted, for a threnody never finished, these lines “On the Death of Dr. Lowrie”:
The Reverend D
octor Walter Lowrie, 91, is dead.
The Times of August 12th contains a picture of his head.
I never knew the man but his translations often read.
I never read his forty books, I never sought him whole;
I had to pass right through him when, returning from a stroll,
I flung myself on Kierkegaard to save my flagging soul.
For Walter Lowrie had no peer at Englishing the Dane:
Of twenty-six translated works, thirteen are his domain,
And in those dreadful castles his kind heart will always reign.
His prefaces relate the tale with modest balladry,
Of how a tiny band—scarce more than Swensen, Dru, and he—
Subdued a hostile continent of dark theology.
He led them; old, a clergyman, he led. Retired, old,
He started; goaded Swensen; wrestled Angst, battled Forehold,
Bestemelse, and Aufgehoben; strove. The presses rolled
At Princeton and at Oxford; the pastor’s blue eyes bled
On the thorns of an ugly language; The Concept of Dread
He wept through in a month’s long sitting; inspirator, he led.
RELIGIOUS NOTES
ON THE BOUNDARY, by Paul Tillich. 104 pp. Scribners, 1966.
THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONS, by Paul Tillich. 94 pp. Harper & Row, 1966.
These two small posthumous volumes cast a sympathetic backward light upon a somewhat puzzling figure. Tillich, though possessed of a personal radiance that penetrated even the speckled fog of a television interview, seemed in his writing pervasively ambiguous and tortuously euphemistic. In On the Boundary, a terse autobiographical sketch, he declares that for all of his long life he considered his proper place to be on both sides of the fence. Theologian and philosopher, conservative and socialist, German and American, he felt himself a mediator in a world of fragmentation, and entertained atheism in the church parlor. It took an exceptional serenity to do this: “The man who stands on many boundaries experiences the unrest, insecurity, and inner limitation of existence in many forms.” His tolerance of uncertainty and of contradiction was perhaps specifically Lutheran, and Tillich may have been the first Lutheran voice in American intellectual history. Lutheranism (existing throughout the United States in geographical enclaves whose atmosphere, oppressive and stagnant and idyllic, can be felt in the novels of Conrad Richter) is itemized by Tillich as “a consciousness of the ‘corruption’ of existence, a repudiation of every kind of social Utopia (including the metaphysics of progressivism), an awareness of the irrational and demonic nature of existence, an appreciation of the mystical element in religion, and a rejection of Puritanical legalism in private and corporal life.” In The Future of Religions, which contains, amid much eulogistic padding, four short addresses, he more specifically relates Utopianism and the concept of progress to the Calvinism that has informed American ideals. On the other hand, Lutheranism, with Greek Orthodoxy, is a church of “withdrawal from history.” One wonders, considering the exhaustion of the frontier, where Puritanism had point, whether the future of Christianity in America does not lie with some such withdrawal. History is proving to elude apotheosis, and Tillich’s remarkable rapport with young students appears prophetic of the mystical, latitudinarian, and rather Asiatic new wave of American religious expression.