The SPCK Introduction to Kierkegaard

Peter Vardy

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281059867
• eBook ISBN: 9780281065707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

This is a book about a remarkable man - yet in an important sense it is not about this man at all.

Soren Kierkegaard died in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the age of forty-two in 1855. His writings had little influence in his lifetime and after his death, even with the translation of some of his works into German, he was barely known. Yet today, he is internationally accepted as one of the world's greatest thinkers and is often considered the father of existentialism.

Here, Peter Vardy makes Kierkegaard's often complex and difficult thinking accessible to a wide audience. He sketches a few of the central themes of Kierkegaard's thought and gives the reader a feeling for the way he approaches problems and some sense of the breadth of his work.

This revised and expanded edition is an ideal introduction to Kierkegaard for both students and the general reader.

1

Kierkegaard’s life

Søren Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was born in a poor village in Jutland where he suffered from cold, hunger and loneliness. One day, at the age of 11, Michael Pedersen was on the wild Jutland heath caring for cattle. He was alone, cold and wet and, because of his sufferings, he stood on a little hill, raised his hands to heaven and cursed God, who was so cruel as to allow him to suffer so much. The memory of this curse was to remain with him for the rest of his life. His uncle rescued him by taking him to Copenhagen to work in his clothing business. He eventually inherited his uncle’s fortune, built up a successful cloth and trading business and became a wealthy man. He married at 38 and retired from business at the age of 40. His wife died two years after the marriage, and before the accepted mourning period was complete, on 26 April 1797, he married again – to Ane Sørendatter Lund, who had been a servant in the house before his wife’s death. The first child was born on 7 September 1797 – four months after the marriage. Søren was the last of seven children from the second marriage.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on 5 May 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark’s small capital city. He died there on 11 November 1855. A brother and sister died before he was nine years old and his two remaining sisters as well as one of his brothers died before he was 21. Kierkegaard’s father had a great influence on him as a child – although there is no reference in Søren’s writings to his mother, who did not appear to be at all important in the family. Kierkegaard’s father was a melancholy man who developed, after his retirement, a passion for philosophy. He would have friends in to dinner and they would discuss philosophy (mainly German) into the night. Kierkegaard used to sit and listen to the conversation and was fascinated by the swings in the argument. It was his father who helped develop Kierkegaard’s imagination, taking him by the hand and walking him up and down inside the house talking to him and conjuring up in his imagination the streets of the great cities of Europe, the father pointing out all the sights, sounds and smells to the young boy.

At school, Kierkegaard was always the odd one out, partly because he was physically weak, and partly due to his dress. His father made him wear shoes rather than boots like the other children, as well as skirts to his coat. He was nicknamed ‘Choirboy’, because his clothes resembled those of children in the charity schools, and also ‘Søren Sock’ because of his father’s previous occupation. He had a devastating wit and used this instead of physical strength to protect himself from the jibes of his fellows. The Dean of Vibourg, who was at school with Kierkegaard, told a story which illustrates his personality:

    Professor Mathiessen, the teacher in German, was an exceedingly weak man who never had any authority over us. Once when the horseplay in class had gone very far – it was quite wild in all his classes – when the pupils had made a complete meal with butter-bread, sandwiches and beer and had toasted one another with formal prosits, Professor Mathiessen was about to go out and report the affair to the Headmaster. The rest of us surrounded Mathiessen with prayers and fair promises, but Søren said only, ‘Please tell the Headmaster that this is always what goes on in your class’ – whereupon Mathiessen sat down and made no report. (Quoted in Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), 50–1)

Kierkegaard’s religious upbringing was rigorous and old-fashioned. As he describes it in Point of View on my Life as an Author:

    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! What wonder then that there were times when Christianity appeared to me the most inhuman cruelty. (Quoted in Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, 39–40)

Kierkegaard entered the Royal Guards for his military service but was discharged after three days as medically unfit. At the age of 17, in 1830, he entered Copenhagen University. He worked hard, particularly in the first year, enjoying the exploration of ideas, and read widely. He seemed happy, thoroughly enjoying university life, loving the theatre and the pleasure of conversation and being at the centre of so many parties: he appeared to be making a determined effort to break loose from his rigorous upbringing. He was popular – although people were nervous of him, as his wit could be cruel. He was one of the intellectual and cultural luminaries of Copenhagen society and was known to everyone. At the age of 20, in 1833, he began his Journals, which represent one of the most extraordinary such undertakings ever published and which give marvellous insights into his thought. His wide-ranging university reading contrasted with the conventional but highly orthodox religiousness of his home. His attention to his studies waned and he ran up considerable bills – which his father had to settle – as he lived the life of a wealthy young ‘man about town’. His apparently carefree life, however, contrasted with feelings of deep depression.

Then, in his twenty-second year, what Kierkegaard referred to as ‘the great earthquake’ occurred. This may refer to one of two things – either to his discovery of his father’s childhood curse or else to his discovery that his father had seduced his mother while she was a servant in his house soon after, or even before, the death of his father’s first wife. Both would have had a considerable effect on Kierkegaard, as he had considered his father to be the model religious man. It was this event that Kierkegaard saw as marking the transition from youth to adulthood and it also put a ‘distance’ between him and his father which was not bridged until shortly before his father’s death on 8 August 1838. Kierkegaard had a profound religious experience some months before his father died. He dated his report of this experience precisely – 19 May 1838, 10.30 a.m.:

    There is such a thing as an indescribable joy which glows through us unaccountably as the Apostle’s outburst is unexpected: ‘Rejoice, and again I say Rejoice!’ – Not a joy over this or that, but full jubilation, ‘with hearts and souls and voices’: ‘I rejoice over my joy, of, in, by, at, on, through, with my joy’ – a heavenly refrain, which cuts short, as it were, our ordinary song; a joy which cools and refreshes like a breeze, a gust of the trade wind which blows through the Grove of Mamre to the eternal mansions. (Quoted in Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, 124)

‘The Grove of Mamre’ is a reference to Genesis 18.1: ‘The Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day.’ Kierkegaard does not, however, dwell on this experience a great deal. It happened and it was part of his journey towards being a Christian but, looking back at the end of his life, he thought that throughout the whole of his life he was being educated into what it was to be a Christian.

Following the death of his father at the age of 81, Kierkegaard became a wealthy man and inherited a substantial house in Copenhagen. He was preparing for his theological examinations and passed these in July 1840. In 1837, before his father’s death, he had met a very young girl, Regina Olsen, and had fallen in love with her, but she was only 14 and too young to be wooed and he had to work at his studies. She was confirmed in 1840 at the age of 16 and this was the recognized stage at which he could approach her. He was deeply in love and possibly also saw that Regina provided the hope of a normal life for him. He proposed to her and was accepted. However, he began to suffer from tremendous melancholy and increasingly felt that he could not go through with the marriage. We cannot know the precise reasons but it was at least partly due to his unhappy childhood, the secrets of his dead father, his own personality and the task in life he felt he had to undertake – he loved her too much to submit her to a marriage which he thought would make her unhappy. Finally, after much agonizing, he sent back the engagement ring with this brief letter:

    In order not to put more often to the test a thing which after all must be done, and which being done will supply the needed strength – let it then be done. Above all, forget him who writes this, forgive a man who, though he may be capable of something, is not capable of making a girl happy.

        To send a silken cord is, in the East, capital punishment for the receiver; to send a ring is here capital punishment for him who sends it. (Quoted in Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, 138–9)

Regina was desolated and begged him to have her back – he could not explain why he would not, because he loved her too much. He believed that only by showing himself to be a scoundrel could she turn away from him and be free to love someone else. Otherwise she would have clung to him and would not have been free to find happiness elsewhere. Kierkegaard was convinced that Regina could not find happiness with him and because his love was so great he could not want anything else. He continued to love her for the rest of his life – so much so that one glance from her sent him to Berlin for five months. She later became engaged to a former teacher and she and Kierkegaard had no real communication thereafter. When Kierkegaard died, he left her everything he had.

Kierkegaard defended his thesis, ‘On the Concept of Irony’, in September 1841. In November, he left for the first of four visits he was to make to Berlin – on this first occasion he attended the lectures of Friedrich Schelling, a German philosopher and friend of Hegel. For the rest of his life Kierkegaard lived alone, with a servant, and had no close friends and dedicated himself to his writing. He loved walking the streets of Copenhagen and talking to people and also much enjoyed the company of his young relatives, to whom he was a figure of some amusement and whose visits were keenly anticipated. He was a well-known figure in the city and in the years from 1841 onwards lived an apparently carefree life, often being seen at the theatre. It was, however, something of a double life. He would sometimes go to the theatre at the interval just to be seen and when the next act started he would slip back to his rooms to continue his writing far into the night.

Between 1842 and 1845 he produced some of his most important pseudonymous works – Either/Or, Repetition and Fear and Trembling (1843), Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety (1844) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Stages on Life’s Way (1845), although at the same time he was also writing some of his greatest Edifying Discourses – sermons designed to be read aloud. In December 1845 he became involved in a public and very bitter dispute with the Corsair – a rather scandalous newspaper that defied the strict censorship of its time and relied heavily on gossip about the wealthier classes – which he decided to attack and which in turn attacked him. The upshot of this was that in early 1846 he was made into a figure of fun in Copenhagen, with the Corsair producing caricatures of him and making fun of his bandy legs so that he could no longer walk the streets without being mocked.

Kierkegaard continued his writing, but with a change in style and approach, and his books became more obviously religious. In 1847 he published Works of Love and Edifying Discourses, in 1848 Christian Discourses and in 1849 The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air and Three Discourses on Communion on Fridays as well as, under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Sickness unto Death – which harks back to issues he had dealt with in earlier works. This was followed, in 1850, by Training in Christianity. In 1849 he also wrote Point of View on my Life as an Author, although this was not published until after his death. This book attempted to explain his authorship and what he was trying to do. Throughout this period he was a regular and committed churchgoer and wrote numerous sermons – he even considered taking a post as a pastor.

From 1849 onwards he became increasingly disillusioned with the established Danish Church, which he considered unfaithful to Christian discipleship. He lived in increasingly difficult financial circumstances, as he had been supporting himself all his life on his father’s money and had earned little from his books. In 1854/5, shortly before his death, he directly attacked the Danish Church and its ministers in a series of bitter articles, including some published in his own broadsheet, the Instant. These articles have been collected together in a book titled Attack upon Christendom. He also ceased going to church and on his deathbed refused to receive communion from a minister who he considered to be a state employee rather than a servant of Christ – he would have liked to have taken communion from a layperson but that was not possible. He died in November 1855, giving thanks to God, looking forward to eternity and completely at peace.

Kierkegaard’s lonely childhood; his melancholy and religious father, who was highly intelligent yet deeply affected by his cursing of God on the Jutland heath; his father’s love for his first wife and his seduction of a housekeeper and his preoccupation with philosophy; Kierkegaard’s active imagination, his unhappy childhood and the way he was made to stand out from his fellows and to hone and develop his wit and irony to protect himself; his dissolute life in Copenhagen once he left home; his rapprochement with his father and his religious experience; his engagement to and love of Regina and the stifling of his love for her; his few friends and his cruel treatment at the hands of the Copenhagen crowd following the Corsair affair; his unusual appearance and his loneliness – all these can be invoked to explain his writings in psychological terms; or they can be seen positively – because freedom from external distractions such as friends, security and family laid him open to discovering what it means to live in a relationship with God.

Kierkegaard himself would have considered the details of his life as irrelevant, and to concentrate on Kierkegaard rather than his message is to miss the point. It is, therefore, with his message and his thought – and not with his motivations or his psychological state – that the remainder of this book is concerned.

2

Faith and reason

Kierkegaard was a Christian theologian and philosopher writing in Denmark, a country where almost everyone was Christian and almost everyone went to church. He wrote, therefore, in a cultural milieu very different from ours. One of his central objectives was to examine the relationship between religious faith (particularly Christian faith) and reason. This was a theme that underpinned much of his writings. One important way in which he tackled this relationship was to look at the nature of Christian claims to truth; he did this from the perspective of a pseudonymous author who adopted the viewpoint of a relatively dispassionate philosopher. He was concerned not so much to determine whether Christianity was true but to unpack the logical consequences which would follow if it was true and thereby clarify the relationship between faith and reason. Initially, he did this in a book called Philosophical Fragments written in 1843, in which he contrasted the figures of Jesus and Socrates.

Many today regard Jesus (like Socrates, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and others) as a good man who showed us how to live a good life. In an increasingly secular world, this is a widely accepted and appealing picture. It recognizes the goodness of Jesus, it recognizes his commitment to love, compassion and forgiveness, but it avoids the rational difficulties which many people feel are caused by claiming that Jesus is God, the second person of the divine Trinity. Putting it philosophically, the issue is whether Jesus is in an ontologically different position from Socrates. Was he a wonderful human being, just like other rare but remarkable human beings, or is there something different in Jesus’ very nature?

Kierkegaard sets out, as a philosopher and theologian, to address this question, which lies at the heart of the claims made by traditional Christianity – but his aim in doing so is to explore the faith–reason debate. This was an important issue in the nineteenth century because of the work of two major philosophers. First, Immanuel Kant had argued that reason must be given pride of place and rationality must underpin the human understanding of morality and also of God. Religion, he claimed, must...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Kierkegaard’s life
• 2. Faith and reason
• 3. The nature of truth
• 4. The aesthetic stage
• 5. The ethical stage
• 6. The religious stage
• 7. Ethics and the relationship to God
• 8. The truth of the God-relationship
• 9. Works of love
• 10. Inter-religious dialogue
• 11. Kierkegaard and the Church
• Further reading
• Search items