Incommensurability
By John Updike
This writing is originally published in The New Yorker [link] March 20, 2005
A new biography of Kierkegaard
Joakim Garff, an associate professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, in a brief preface to his monumental “Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography” (translated from the Danish by Bruce H. Kirmmse; Princeton; $35), states that “the Danish biographies of Kierkegaard that have appeared since Georg Brandes’s critical portrait was published in 1877 can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Johannes Hohlenberg’s biography from 1940 is the most recent original work in the field.” Garff’s compendious yet lively work is undeniably a Danish biography; it assumes on the part of its readers a prior acquaintance with, say, the poetry of Adam Oehlenschläger and the intellectuality of King Christian VIII, a firm sense of what the rix-dollar could buy in the eighteen-forties, and a Copenhagener’s inherent familiarity with the saga of his world-famous, locally notorious fellow-townsman Magister Søren Aabye Kierkegaard.
The Kierkegaardian tempest needed Copenhagen’s teapot. In the years of the great Dane’s short and not entirely unhappy life, from 1813 to 1855, Copenhagen still had its medieval walls and numbered about a hundred and twenty-five thousand residents—one resident for every three of this exhaustive tome’s nearly four hundred thousand words. Kierkegaard was born in the little city and died there, and left Denmark only five times, once, on a day trip, to Sweden, and repeatedly to Berlin, where, after an initial sojourn spent attending lectures, he usually holed up in rented rooms and relentlessly wrote. Though he complained of “the costly amusement . . . of being an author in Denmark,” he left a rapturous page of praise for the Danish language, “a language that understands jest fully as well as earnestness; a mother tongue that captivates its children with a chain that ‘is easy to bear, yes, but hard to break!’ ” What he wrote about, in a dozen hectic years, under his own name and a welter of pseudonyms, was himself, a singular being tricked up in many alter egos and attacked from many angles, not only examined but cross-examined, an intricately guilty defendant on trial. One wonders if Kierkegaard could have found his existence so absorbingly important if he had been born into a larger city, where the edges of his ego might have frayed into the general fabric of indifference. A satirical caricature in the Copenhagen magazine The Corsair, published at the height of his local celebrity, shows him standing at the center of a revolving belt of stars, everyday objects, prominent Copenhagen structures, and the sun itself. The caption reads:
There are moments when one’s ideas become confused and one thinks that Nicolas Copernicus was a fool when he maintained that the earth revolved around the sun. On the contrary, the heavens, the sun, the planets, the earth, Europe, and Copenhagen revolve around Søren Kierkegaard, who stands silently in the center and does not even remove his hat for the honor being shown him.
This was no joke; Kierkegaard’s great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe. He offered himself as a corrective to idealism, from Plato to Hegel:
Now if we assume that abstract thought is the highest manifestation of human activity, it follows that philosophy and the philosophers proudly desert existence, leaving the rest of us to face the worst.
Garff’s “labor of love,” as he calls it, not only describes the claustral, interlaced coziness of Kierkegaard’s milieu but partakes of it. Though assiduous in setting forth, year by year, in many short chapters, the facts, from the philosopher’s Jutland ancestors and the variant spellings of his family name to the forlorn auction inventory of his bachelor estate, Garff has a voice of his own—an “informal style and conversational tone,” to quote his translator. Garff’s informal voice enlists us in the village gossip of Kierkegaard’s time. Of his subject at the age of twenty-two, he tells us, “Everyone could see that Søren Aabye needed a change of atmosphere both mentally and physically. He had to get out of town.” Johanne Luise Pätges, the wife of the influential littérateur and tastemaker Johan Ludvig Heiberg, is cattily described as “a goddess sprung from the proletariat, who at the age of thirteen had become the object of his distinguished erotic lust and who was now indisputably the leading lady of the Danish stage, the dazzling, bespangled muse of the age.” When Kierkegaard, as a young divinity student, is introduced into the Heibergs’ circle, we are assured that “the contrast between the pietistic Moravian moderation and simplicity of his family home and the delicate, crystalline sociability of the Heibergs must have been so glaring that it would have required an unusual effort for him merely to stay on his feet.” Venturing deeper into Kierkegaard’s head, Garff characterizes his older and more conventional brother Peter Christian as “Goody-goody Peter, Pusillanimous Peter, that conscientious and self-sacrificing person, who, however, was fundamentally a complete neurotic and unfit for life.” Energetic metaphors animate disputes and rivalries among the long-dead: “While Møller”—Peder Ludvig Møller, a raffish literary rival—“had wasted his substance on the many bedsheets of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard gathered his own into his trusty silver pen, which released its contents with bold virtuosity onto sheets of paper that will survive even the forgetfulness of history.” Or, in an even more aggressive metaphor, “Kierkegaard’s critique of cultivation . . . has here been transformed into a theological torpedo that was guaranteed to collide with the monuments and shrines of cultural Protestantism.”
Though some of Garff’s metaphors and friendly interjections (“Hallo, Copenhagen!” he exclaims at one point) savor of loose words exchanged around a porcelain stove, his tone helps create a sense of excitement, of caring, of importance, of—locally and cosmically—scandal. The word “scandal” derives from the Greek skándalon, originally having the meaning of “trap” but coming in the New Testament to mean “cause of offense,” and translated in the King James Version as “stumblingblock,” as in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” To Paul’s contemporaries and to Kierkegaard’s, the scandal of Christian dogma (God incarnate crucified and risen from the dead) was something to be got around and built in, a stumbling block converted into the cornerstone of Christianity’s humane, busy church. After Kierkegaard, to thinking Christians the scandal was of the essence—a confrontation, for “crisis theology,” with the drastic otherness and unaccountability of God, on the far side of a leap of faith unaided by reason and propelled by human dread and despair. “Either/Or,” the title of Kierkegaard’s most popular work, posed, in two volumes, the situation: either the aesthetic, hedonistic, amorous life or the ethical, religious life. It was a bourgeois illusion, a blasphemy, to think that they were not incommensurable.
Kierkegaard’s quiet life, occupied primarily in study and writing, was marked by four scandals. The first was not his own, though he made it his own. In February, 1846, he wrote in his journal:
How terrible for the man who once, as a little boy watching sheep on the moors of Jutland, suffering terribly, hungry and weak from the cold, had stood atop a hill and had cursed God—and the man was unable to forget it when he was eighty-two years old.
Hans Peter Barfod, the devoted but somewhat cavalier editor of a multivolume set of selections titled “From Søren Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers,” in 1865 called this striking passage to the attention of Peter Christian Kierkegaard, by then a bishop in the Danish church. Peter exclaimed, “That is my father’s story—and ours, too,” and, according to Barfod, “recounted the details of the matter, which I ought not repeat here.” Barfod never did confide the details to print, and, out of respect for the surviving brother’s feelings, “couldn’t find it in his heart” to include the passage in his edition of Søren Kierkegaard’s papers. These writings, in notebooks and on stray scraps of paper, were often Kierkegaard’s way of jotting down ideas for his unique mixture of philosophy, confession, and fiction; they should not be taken as literal autobiography. Yet it seems to be a fact that he and his father, who for all their differences “had important common ground in a few strange ideas,” had discussed this shepherd boy’s curse and deduced from it a divine curse that condemned the father to outlive all seven of his children. They were all, supposedly, destined to die before their thirty-fourth birthday, so as not to outlive Christ. Five—two brothers, three sisters—did so, but Peter surprised Søren by surviving his thirty-fourth birthday, and then the younger brother surprised himself by following suit, living to the age of forty-two. Peter lived too long; besieged by illness and religious scruples, he eventually resigned his bishopric and gave up his legal majority, assuming the legal status of a child, and died at the age of eighty-two.
Other calculations show that the father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard—who fled the hardships of Jutland at the age of eleven and, apprenticed in Copenhagen in his mother’s brother’s drygoods shop, eventually became one of the city’s wealthier merchants—impregnated his serving maid, Ane Sørensdatter Lund, well within the conventional year of mourning for his first wife, Kirstine, and married Ane less than five months before the birth of their first child, Maren Kirstine. Two more daughters and three sons followed, and finally Søren Aabye in 1813, when his father was fifty-six and his mother forty-five. Søren was thus living proof of an incorrigible concupiscence and, as such, an embarrassment to himself.
An undated and physically separate journal entry speaks of a “great earthquake” that led Søren to believe that his “father’s advanced age was not a divine blessing, but rather a curse”; an early reader of Georg Brandes’s biography asked Peter Christian outright if the father’s revelation was sexual, having to do with “unfaithfulness to a spouse.” The idea was indignantly dismissed; Garff, following up some shadowy hints in Søren’s references to leprosy, suggests that the earthquake had to do with syphilis, a fatal taint passed on to the children. The Danish word for “original sin,” the translator tells us in brackets, is Arvesynden, “inherited sin.” This much seems clear: Michael Pedersen was a lusty youth and man, whereas Søren had a significant aversion to the physical side of sex. It is not clear whether or not he was a virgin. Some commentators have taken a mangled (by Barfod) journal entry, “My God, my God . . . the bestial sniggering,” as evidence of a disastrous experience in a brothel; Garff rather doubts it.
The second scandal in Kierkegaard’s life was his brusquely breaking off, in August of 1841, an eleven-month engagement to the eminently marriageable Regine Olsen. Like Kierkegaard, nine years her senior, she was the last of seven children of excellent family: her father, Terkild Olsen, was Councillor of State and a director in the Finance Ministry. The family was cultured—Regine painted miniatures—and religious, attending, like the Kierkegaards, meetings of the Moravian Congregation of Brethren. She was, by the slender accounts before Kierkegaard made her a figure in world literature, pretty and cheerful; there was nothing wrong with her. Garff says, almost impatiently, “She was just a lovely girl of the upper bourgeoisie who wanted to be happy, like everybody.” In the version of Kierkegaard’s farewell letter to her that has come down to us (in his book “Stages on Life’s Way”), the key sentence reads, “Above all, forget the person who writes this; forgive a person who, whatever he might have been capable of, was incapable of making a girl happy.”
Why was he incapable? For nearly a year he had been going through the motions, dining with her and her parents, arranging meetings and outings, sending letters and gifts. His executors returned her letters, which she burned, but twenty-six of his survive. These letters, according to Garff, show a marked improvement in Kierkegaard’s literary art—too much so. “For by virtue of their indisputably aesthetic qualities, the letters make it clear that their author was to become not a husband but a writer.” At the same time, he was busy in the pastoral seminary, judging the sermons of others, delivering his own, appearing to prepare, as his recently dead father had wished, for a respectable career in the ministry. His father’s death, in 1838, had made him and Peter Christian, the only surviving children, heirs to a large estate, of a hundred and twenty-five thousand rix-dollars. Each received a quarter outright; the rest was placed in stocks and bonds generating income. Whatever his source of value in Regine’s eyes, the jilted nineteen-year-old, in the words of the jilter, “fought like a lioness” to keep him, breaching decorum by invading his rooms upon receipt of his letter and, in his absence, leaving a “note of utter despair” that pleaded with him, for the sake of Jesus and the memory of his father, not to leave her. It was only two months later, in a face-to-face confrontation, that she accepted his defection: in Kierkegaard’s version of the encounter, she removed from her bosom a “little note on which were some words from me” and slowly tore it to pieces, afterward stating quietly, “You have played a terrible game with me.” Garff underlines the symbolism: “This little gesture was a decisive act: Regine freed herself from the writing; she had given up being a Regine of words on paper and had returned to reality.”
Two years later, returned to reality, she became engaged to Johan Frederik Schlegel, her girlhood tutor, whose courtship had been interrupted by Kierkegaard’s intervention in her life. As a lawyer rising in government service, Schlegel was a very suitable husband: “practically the exact opposite of Kierkegaard: stable, harmonious, healthy, un-ironic, and patient.” Kierkegaard continued to live in the world of words, pouring out convoluted, philosophically erudite, stylistically scintillating apologies and homages to Regine, their romance first transfigured in “The Seducer’s Diary” portion of “Either/Or.” The publication, in 1843, of this novelistic bundle of discourses, subtitled “A Fragment of Life” and pseudonymously signed “Victor Eremita,” made a sensation in Copenhagen. An already established literary Dane, Hans Christian Andersen, who was in Paris at the time, was informed in a letter from Signe Læssøe, “A new literary comet . . . has soared in the heavens here. . . . It is so demonic that one reads and reads it. . . . I think that no book has caused such a stir with the reading public since Rousseau placed his ‘Confessions’ on the altar.”
“If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it,” says “Either/Or.” In his “Fear and Trembling,” a passionate retelling of the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, Kierkegaard has Abraham seize Isaac by the throat and say, “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.” To himself he says, “After all it is better for him to believe that I am a monster, rather than that he should lose faith in Thee.” This accords with the view that Kierkegaard came to take of his rejection of Regine—it was for her own good that he act the villain, performing a “blackening of the breast” to wean her from him with her spirit unbroken. As late as the writing of “Repetition,” in 1843, he was toying with the idea of reuniting with her; the announcement of her engagement to Schlegel caused him to revise the text, adding some misogyny. Yet the moment of their parting (“a very young girl, almost a mere child—the lovable tears of her misunderstanding”) haunted his journals, and at his death he left the remnants of his drastically depleted fortune to her. Mrs. Schlegel, whose husband had become the governor of the Danish West Indies, rejected the bequest but, as a widow in Copenhagen as the nineteenth century wound down, she voiced reminiscences that “always began with Schlegel, whose excellent qualities she praised to the skies, but . . . always ended with—Kierkegaard.” Neither she nor all of Kierkegaard’s torrential comments, direct and indirect, upon the matter ever quite explained the breakup, which had outraged her family and titillated local society.
There had been signs during the engagement: he was fitfully neglectful, winning kittenish rebukes. According to Garff, at some point she “had been too erotically straightforward” and was primly reproached by the pious seminarian in a later letter of which a surviving draft reads, “I intend to give you a serious dressing-down because in your passion you once went beyond a certain boundary.” He had confided enough unease to his brother so that Peter Christian noted in his journal that “after a long period of struggle and dejection, Søren broke off his connection with Miss Olsen.” As Søren lay dying in Royal Frederik’s Hospital, he talked to his disciple and confidant Emil Boesen, who faithfully visited and, ten years later, was persuaded to write an account of their conversations. One passage has Kierkegaard saying:
“It’s death. Pray for me that it comes quickly and easily. I am depressed. I have my thorn in the flesh, as did St. Paul, so I was unable to enter into ordinary relationships. I therefore concluded that it was my task to be extraordinary, which I then sought to carry out as best I could. I was a plaything of Governance, which cast me into play, and I was to be used. . . . And that was also what was wrong with my relationship to Regine. I had thought that it could be changed, but it couldn’t, so I dissolved the relationship.”
What was this “thorn in the flesh,” to which Kierkegaard often alludes? The phrase is St. Paul’s, in II Corinthians 12:7: “And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me.” Because his conversion experience on the road to Damascus, according to the description in Acts, threw him to the ground, it has been conjectured that Paul was an epileptic. Garff does some fascinating detective work in investigating the possibility of the “falling sickness” as Kierkegaard’s shameful infirmity and the cause, as with Dostoyevsky, of his fits of exaltation and of his graphomania. A contemporary, Professor Frederik Christian Sibbern, recorded rumors of epilepsy, and in one known instance Kierkegaard abruptly fell down, but the most provocative clue is the hospital notation that the patient used Valeriana officinalis. Kierkegaard’s physician, Oluf Lundt Bang, in his “Handbook for Therapy,” wrote that “marriage must be discouraged” for persons suffering from a host of diseases, including epilepsy, and for that complaint prescribed “large doses of rad. valerianæ,” valerian root. But, in the thorough records that Royal Frederik’s Hospital kept during Kierkegaard’s last forty-one days, no epileptic attack was mentioned. Garff spends less time on the possibility, raised in the far reaches of Kierkegaard studies, “that he might have been equipped with a curved penis, whose vaginal maneuverability would in all probability have been somewhat limited.”
From the third besetting scandal, the assault of ridicule launched by the scurrilous journal The Corsair against not only Kierkegaard’s ideas but his physical person, has descended to posterity the impression that the philosopher was conspicuously deformed. A series of caricatures in The Corsair by Peter Klæstrup show a swaybacked, even hunchbacked, figure with a sharp nose, tall hat, stick cane, and comically thin legs, whose trousers, more comically still, are of unequal length. It was this last oddity that the populace of Copenhagen fastened upon as the subject of gibes and taunts, making Kierkegaard’s cherished daily perambulations in the streets a torment; he spoke of “that slow death, being trampled to death by a flock of geese.” The characterization was witty, but the experience was painful, remembered in his journals long after it had subsided as analogous “to the gladiatorial animal combat of pagan times.” If Christ were to return to the world, he wrote, “he would perhaps not be put to death, but would be ridiculed. This is martyrdom in the age of reason.” Things got so bad that, in 1846, Kierkegaard’s tailor, C. M. Künitzer, claimed that his reputation was enough affected by the fuss that Kierkegaard had better go elsewhere to have his trousers made. Detached observers felt that Kierkegaard—who had dared The Corsair to single him out—overreacted, compulsively talking of little else: a letter to Hans Christian Andersen reported that “the poor victim is not enough of a philosopher to ignore this annoyance, but is preoccupied with it day and night and talks about it with everyone.” He had imagined himself a friend of the people, an aristocratic dandy engaging even the lowliest Copenhagener in conversation during his strolls. Now every schoolboy and ruffian called insults after him. His own nephew, Troels Frederik Lund, spotted his uncle on the street and was about to greet him when, as he remembered it,
…at that moment I heard some passersby say something mocking about him and saw a couple of people on the other side of the street stop, turn around to look at him, and laugh. His one trouser leg really was shorter than the other, and I could now see for myself that he was odd-looking. I instinctively stopped, was embarrassed, and suddenly remembered that I had to go down another street.
It was as if the crowd had sniffed out Kierkegaard’s own poor opinion of his body. By the eighteen-forties, he suffered from hemorrhoids and constipation, insomnia and dizziness, urinary difficulties and abdominal pains, and occasionally spat blood. His journal of 1845 exclaims, “ ‘A new horse!’—oh, would that the victorious health of my spirit might dare to cry out, ‘A new horse, a new body!’ ” In the margin beside this notation he disdainfully clarified: “this sweat-soaked, stifling cloak of mush that is the body and the body’s fatigue.” In 1848, he noted, “In my youth my agony was frightful.” He was given a physician’s discharge from the Royal Life Guards after three days’ service. He would not ride horses, fence, or dance.
Yet two drawings of his head by his distant cousin Niels Christian Kierkegaard when Søren was in his late twenties show a romantically handsome youth. Regine found little fault with him; she recalled, “Yes, he was somewhat high-shouldered and his head tilted forward a bit, probably from all that reading and writing at his desk.” (In curious bitter retrospect, her ex-fiancé confided to his journal, “She did not love my well-formed nose, nor my fine eyes, nor my small feet—nor my clever head—she just loved me, and yet she did not understand me.”) The reminiscences of others mention Kierkegaard’s “high shoulders, the restless, somewhat hopping gait,” whose zigzags made him difficult to walk beside, and claim that his back was “a bit curved.” The hospital examination soon after he was admitted recorded nothing abnormal about his spine. His enemy and admirer Aron Goldschmidt, the editor of The Corsair, left the most sensitive impressions of Kierkegaard’s physical aspect:
The shape of his body was striking, not really ugly, certainly not repulsive, but with something disharmonious, rather slight, and yet also weighty. . . . He went about like a thought that had got distracted at the very moment at which it was formed.
Goldschmidt remembered a friendly conversation, before the Corsair affair, in which Kierkegaard seemed to grow larger as he talked. He reported:
There was a long pause, and he suddenly took a little hop and struck himself on the leg with his thin cane. . . . The movement was peculiar and seemed almost painful. . . . I am sure that there was something painful in it, something of the following sort: It was the fact that this learned, thin man wanted to be a part of the joys of life, but felt himself either unable or not permitted to do so.
No autopsy was performed on Kierkegaard’s body, presumably by his own wish. This disappointed some medical students, who wanted to study his brain. The fact that he died at the age of forty-two would appear to substantiate some “thorn in the flesh,” but Garff rules out tuberculosis and syphilis, two common killers of the era, and other diagnoses cannot be confirmed. “And when you get right down to it, what do the physiologist and the physician really know, then?” Kierkegaard had asked in his journals. The thorn in the flesh, one concludes by default, was a complaint of the spirit.
The humiliating Corsair affair, from this distance a tawdry and typical instance of provincial mentality cutting a local eminence down to size, worked in Kierkegaard like a religious poison. In 1848, he wrote, “Truly, I would never have succeeded in illuminating Christianity in the way that has been granted me, had all this not happened to me.” A little later: “It has permitted me to experience the sort of isolation without which one does not discover Christianity. . . . No, no, one must in fact be acquainted with it from the ground up, one must be educated in the school of abuse.” He spoke of his trials as “Christian experiences.” By the mid-eighteen-fifties, his understanding of Christianity had been so radicalized that he proposed, “Christianity is the invention of Satan, calculated to make human beings unhappy.”
The man once “incapable of making a girl happy” sees human unhappiness as intrinsic to traffic with God:
What is absolutely the decisive factor is that Christianity is a heterogeneity, an incommensurability with the world, that it is irrational with respect to the world and with respect to being a human being in a straightforward sense. From my early years, I have winced at a thorn in the flesh, and to this was also connected a consciousness of guilt and sin. I have felt myself to be heterogeneous. This pain, my heterogeneity, I have understood as my relation to God.
His journals repeatedly cite the early pagan characterization of Christianity as odium generis humani, a hatred of everything human. Early in his development, at the age of twenty-two, he had already noted “the strange, suffocating atmosphere we encounter in Christianity,” and that “in comparison to the pagans [Christians] are like a gelding compared to a stallion.” He wrote that “becoming a Christian is like every radical cure: One puts it off as long as possible.” Now he was ready, but at the price of loudly insisting on incommensurability and denouncing every worldly aspect of the Danish state church—its pomp and its bishops and the comfort it offered the comfortable bourgeoisie. He launched upon the fourth scandal of his life, the so-called attack on Christendom.
The attack was a counterattack, upon the geese. “The simple class of people, the common man [who had] been taught to laugh at me, thereby cutting themselves off from the one person in this country who has loved them most sincerely,” are told in a storm of articles and privately financed pamphlets that they should shun church and the pastors, “these abominable people whose way of making a living is to prevent you from even becoming aware of what true Christianity is.” And what are the rewards of becoming aware? “To become a Christian in the New Testament sense is such a radical transformation that, from a purely human perspective, one would have to say that it is the greatest tragedy for a family if one of its members becomes a Christian.” The enemy of organized Christianity, who as late as 1847 had thought of becoming a country pastor, sought, and found, a kind of martyrdom. Hearing of his hospitalization, one citizen of Copenhagen speculated, “Most likely illness, nervous stress, and a sort of convulsive irritability have played a large role in his bitter and negative activities, during which he displayed to the entire world his face, marked as it was by hatred of humanity.” The prominent church leader Nikolai Grundtvig denounced Kierkegaard as “the Father of Lies . . . who confuses his adherents with the appearance of clarity and with all sorts of brilliant delusions, but nevertheless kills everything human in them, leading them to the outer darkness.”
Kierkegaard’s father had been a follower of Grundtvig. Of the two Lutheran bishops who bore the brunt of Søren’s assault, one, Jakob Peter Mynster, had been the father’s confessor and the other, Hans Lassen Martensen, had been young Søren’s tutor. The attack was a father-son affair, a repetition, in a sense, of the curse by the Jutland shepherd boy. It was a vomiting up of the gloomy religiosity that the father had worked upon the son:
Oh, how frightful it is when I think for even a moment of the dark background of my life, right from the earliest days. The anxiety with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful melancholia, of many things in this connection that I cannot even write down. I acquired such anxiety about Christianity, and yet I felt myself strongly drawn toward it.
This was confided to his journals; in public writings, he instructed Christians, “Take an emetic. Come out of this halfway condition.” A generation before Nietzsche, God was pronounced dead as a practical matter; theism so severely preached was hard to distinguish from atheism. The outer darkness that Grundtvig had evoked stood ready for Kierkegaard. The last entry in his journal reads, in part:
This life’s destiny is: to be brought to the highest degree of weariness with life. . . . I came into existence through a crime. I came into existence against God’s will. The crime—which in a sense is not my crime, even though it makes me guilty in God’s eyes—is to give life. The punishment fits the crime: to be deprived of all lust for life.
Human life itself is a skándalon. There was sophistry in Kierkegaard’s attack, but also the fierce, nay-saying passion of Paul and Augustine. Garff’s concretely local biography, big as it is, does not find space to speak of Kierkegaard in the world at large, after his death: his reputation’s slow creep out of Denmark, by way of Germany; his influence on Kafka and Karl Barth and Unamuno and Sartre; his paternity of existentialism and Protestant neo-orthodoxy; the breath of new life he gave, however little he would have wished it, twentieth-century Christianity. Dying, having excoriated the established church and refused to take Communion from an ordained clergyman, he nevertheless reassured his comforter the pious Emil Boesen, who had asked if he believed in Christ and took refuge in Him, “Yes, of course, what else?” A person was either, by one of his formulations, lost in the “dizziness of abstract infinity” or saved “infinitely in the essentiality of the religious.”
Published in the print edition of the March 28, 2005, issue.
Written by John Updike