12 Life’s Labyrinth

At the end of the year, deep in mid-winter, night falls early in Copenhagen. Along Rosenborggade, lamplight and firelight and candlelight fill the upper windows by four o’clock. Passers-by who brave the cold streets glimpse Christmas trees in glowing rooms, hear snatches of songs and children’s laughter. Kierkegaard’s rooms are quiet, and he is alone. ‘1848 has raised me to another level,’ he writes in his journal: ‘it has shattered me religiously; God has run me ragged.’

All year long he has thought about endings – the end of his authorship, the end of his life – and veered between calm acceptance of death and intense anxiety about his literary legacy. Here on Rosenborggade he has produced ‘some of the best things’ he has ever written: the new manuscripts stored carefully in their tin box are, he feels, the ‘fulfilment’ of his life. And yet:

Conditions are so wretched here in Denmark that if I were now to publish, all at once, everything that God has permitted me to finish, I would be positively laughed out of court and accosted by every bully on the street. Merciful God, was it something wicked I had done, then? That once again, in the year just past, I had been so diligent? That God granted me these abilities? Was that a crime, then? And that I should deny God out of fear of the people in this market town! Show me an author who has suffered on this scale in any other country! If you can show me him, so much the better – then I will have someone with whom I can commiserate.

The Point of View for My Work as an Author is now in the metal box: it is finished – but he does not know whether he should publish it. Perhaps God is urging him to bring his long-concealed inner life out into the open, to drag himself through the deep thicket of thorns surrounding him, and show himself to the world. This disclosure would be excruciating. ‘And yet,’ he reflects:

it is perhaps my duty to God, and the hiddenness of my interior life may be something God has permitted until I’ve grown strong enough to speak about it: My unhappy childhood, my abysmal melancholia, the misery of my personal life before I became an author; all this has contributed to my hidden interiority. Until now God has permitted it, but, in one respect, it has been a form of coddling. God has been so good to me, so loving, that I can truly say that my association with him has been my only trusting relationship; and he, in all my misery, has permitted me to find the strength to endure it all, yes, to find salvation in it.

The moments of ‘salvation’ he has found in these intense, difficult months of 1848 remind him of his first love – a gentle, comforting maternal embrace. Now, in his mid-thirties, he is finding his earliest childhood restored to him: he lives each day ‘in relation to God as a child to a father (mother)’. At times his painful memories are accompanied by a new understanding of the past, and what seemed for so long to be a curse can be accepted as a blessing. His perpetual unrest during the early years on Nytorv gave him a deep longing for peace – and this very longing, he believes, brings human beings closer to God. Despite all his anxiety and ambivalence about Christianity, so deeply entangled with his relationship to his father, he sometimes feels that ‘nearly all my life has been so terribly wasted in order that I might experience it all the more truly a second time, in relation to God.’

Yet the question of Regine remains unresolved. Over these last few months, as he revised the story of his life and his authorship, he has thought often about her, and her ‘situation’. She has just celebrated her first wedding anniversary, for she finally married Johan Frederik Schlegel in November 1847, in Our Saviour’s Church. Kierkegaard was sitting in that church on the Sunday when the marriage banns were read for her; on her wedding day he hired a carriage and drove out of town. ‘The keystone of her marriage is and will continue to be that I am a villain, or at least someone who wanted to be important in the world,’ he recently wrote in his journal. ‘She would be completely unhinged if she found out the truth of the matter.’ He believes that his relationship with Regine will outlive the circumstances that drew them apart: ‘The moment I die (which I have constantly expected will happen soon) she will of course have what is rightfully hers. In that respect everything is ready. Her name will be a part of my work as an author, remembered for as long as I am remembered.’

Whatever the future holds, the past has not yet given way. Each time he recalls the broken engagement, he rediscovers his own sins. ‘What a constant torment it has been to me that she should be humiliated for my sake,’ he wrote in the autumn of 1848, seven years after he had returned her engagement ring, and several months into her marriage to Schlegel. He still feels that she was too proud of her relationship to him, that she should have let him go more easily, but he is also convinced that ‘it remains my guilt nevertheless, for my guilt in relation to her is so great that it swallows up her guilt in relation to me.’ He wronged Regine because he did not understand himself – did not understand that he was ‘already betrothed’ to Christianity, with all the complexity this entails. When he asked her to marry him in 1840, he could not see clearly that his own nature prevented him from being a husband, a father, a bourgeois citizen. And he had not yet grasped who he could be in the world.

This Christmas, as families gathered in their homes, he recalled his engagement and felt his solitude. He complained to his journal that ‘the Christmas festival as it is now celebrated in so-called Christendom is pure paganism, mythology. Its idea or thought is thus as follows: a child is what saves, or to become a father and mother is life for a second time, something that purifies, ennobles. Life’s earnestness truly begins when one leaves a new generation after oneself and only then comes in a deeper sense to live in love for one’s offspring, with responsibility for their upbringing, etc.’ Danish Christmases have become festivals of nostalgia for childhood, ‘which is understood to be dancing around the Christmas tree, wanting to play board games and eat pfeffernusse’. This is not how he sees it: ‘No, the Christ child is related to the spiritual category of becoming a human being, and thus is not related to marriage, father, mother, child, but to every individual human being as spirit.’

And now, in the very last days of 1848, he returns to the thought that if he had married Regine she would have been unhappy – ‘There is an infinite difference between her and myself. She wished to shine in the world – and I with my melancholia, and my melancholy view of suffering, and of having to suffer. For a while she would probably have been pleased with her relationship with me, which perhaps at first would have satisfied her with respect to shining. But then, when it was to become earnest, either by my withdrawal into insignificance or by my navigating out into actual, Christian suffering, where no honour and respect are to be won: then she would quickly have lost her good humour. And I – well, I would never have become myself.’

The engagement remains a fork in the road: he took the path that led away from Regine, and he has not turned back, cannot retrace his steps – and yet the lonely path he has chosen keeps circling back to her. Looking back, the September day in 1840 when he proposed to Regine seems to lead inexorably to the events of 1846, when his relationship to the world shifted once again – and from there to this very moment, at the end of a year of reckoning, on the brink of a new beginning.

* * *

In the summer of 1844, after he published The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments and Prefaces – books which were not directly connected to Regine – his writing returned to the question of marriage that dominated Either/Or and Repetition. He was then drafting two separate books on women, love, engagement, marriage. This was a complex literary project: in the first work, divided into an aesthetic and an ethical part, he assembled characters from his 1843 books; the second work reprised the story of a broken engagement, but used a new pseudonym, Frater Taciturnus, to push it in a more religious direction than in Repetition. In 1845 he would publish the two works as a single volume, Stages on Life’s Way, under an editor-pseudonym called Hilarius Bookbinder. At over five hundred pages this was his longest book since Either/Or.

‘I am constantly re-writing parts of it, but it does not satisfy me,’ he reported in his journal at the end of August 1844. ‘At present the productivity has miscarried and makes me constantly write more than I want to.’ For a long time he had expected to die in 1846, when he reached the age of thirty-three – that was now less than two years away, and he wanted to finish these books and write something ‘more important’. He had no time to waste: ‘I cannot write it here in the city; so I must take a journey,’ he concluded.

That day he drove out to Lyngby, about ten miles north of Copenhagen. He did not leave Denmark until May the following year, but all through the summer and early autumn of 1844 he took frequent carriage rides to the countryside, most often to Nyholte, a couple of miles past Lyngby, and once or twice all the way to Fredensborg on the far side of Lake Esrom.

Summer Day at Geel’s Hill near Holte

Those days in the countryside – driving through open vistas, walking in the peaceful woods – nourished his imagination and made his writing even more lyrical, as if lightened by clear air. Each part of Stages on Life’s Way has a rural setting. The book begins ‘in the solitude of the forest’, where a shadowy pseudonym called William Afham recollects a late-night drinking party, modelled on Plato’s Symposium. At this gathering were Victor Eremita and Johannes the Seducer from Either/Or, Constantin Constantius from Repetition, a fashion designer, and a nameless, inexperienced young man. They took turns to deliver speeches in praise of women, William Afham recalls, as he sits meditating among the trees.

‘By now I have learned not to need nighttime in order to find stillness,’ he explains, ‘for here it is always still, always beautiful, but it seems most beautiful to me now when the autumn sun is having its mid-afternoon repast and the sky becomes a languorous blue, when creation takes a deep breath after the heat, when the cooling starts and the meadow grass shivers voluptuously as the forest waves, when the sun is thinking of sinking into the ocean at eventide, when the earth is getting ready for rest and is thinking of giving thanks, when just before they leave they have an understanding with one another in that tender melting together that darkens the forest and makes the meadow greener.’ In these golden hours, he adds, ‘an overstrained person who has suffered much can seek solace, for there is nothing more gentle and more peaceful and more calming than the waning radiance of the afternoon light.’ This was the refuge from anxiety, from judging eyes, from noisy grubby streets, that Kierkegaard had dreamed of ever since his break with Regine – a place where he could retreat and sorrow over his sins.

The first part of Stages on Life’s Way closes with the symposium of pseudonyms taking a carriage to the countryside at dawn, after staying up all night drinking and discoursing about women. Walking through the fields, they glimpse Judge William conversing affectionately with his wife in the garden of their country house – and while the couple enjoy their morning tea, Victor Eremita sneaks into the Judge’s study and discovers a new essay on marriage on his desk.

This essay compares marriage to the monastic life; it praises the humble beauty of maternal love, the deepening beauty of an ageing woman. Like Nicolas Notabene, Judge William has found a way to be both a husband and a writer. His essay ends when he hears his wife walk quietly by his study in the evening:

Just one minute, my beloved, just one moment – my soul is so rich, I am so eloquent at this moment that I want to write it down on paper, a eulogy on you, my lovely better half, and thus convince the whole world of the validity of marriage. And yet in due time, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in a week, I shall throw you away, you wretched pen – my choice is made, and I follow the beckoning and the invitation. Let a wretched author sit trembling when a thought presents itself in a lucky moment, shivering lest someone disturb him – I am afraid of nothing, but I also know what is better than the most felicitous idea in a man’s mind and better than the most felicitous expression on paper of the most felicitous idea, and what is infinitely more precious than any secret a poor author can have with his pen.

After this touching garden scene and uxorious paean to domesticity comes ‘Guilty?/Not Guilty?’, a series of highly wrought diary entries recounting a broken engagement, followed by a long reflection on religious existence. All this is attributed to a monkish pseudonym called Frater Taciturnus, who explains that during a trip to the northern Gilleleje coast he found a sealed wooden casket sunk in Søborg Lake. Inside the casket was the diary, wrapped in oilcloth, as well as ‘a plain gold ring with an engraved date, a necklace consisting of a diamond cross fastened to a light blue silk ribbon, a page torn from the New Testament, and a withered rose in a little box with silver overlay’. But Frater Taciturnus later admits that he composed the diary himself as an ‘imaginative construction’, a thought experiment.

This ‘Story of Suffering’ was the most autobiographical part of Stages on Life’s Way: here Kierkegaard seemed to dive deep into the lake of his soul in order to recover its secrets. He also reproduced word for word the note he sent to Regine when he returned her engagement ring in 1841: ‘Above all, forget the one who writes this; forgive a man who, even if he was capable of something, was nevertheless incapable of making a girl happy.’ He acknowledged his guilt, yet he sensed the divine direction of ‘Governance’ in the whole affair; his life contains an ‘error’ – perhaps his whole life is an error! – and yet this error nevertheless expresses a truth:

June 18th. Midnight. Am I guilty, then? Yes. How? By my having begun what I could not carry out. How do you understand it now? Now I understand more clearly why it was impossible for me. What then is my guilt? That I did not understand it sooner … What can serve as your excuse? That my total individuality predisposed me to something in which I have been corroborated on all sides, which, if I had sought a confidant, I would find confirmed – namely, that a depressed person should not torment his wife with his sufferings but like a man should enclose them within himself. What is your consolation? That I, in acknowledging this guilt, also sense a Governance in it all … What is your hope? That it can be forgiven, if not here then nevertheless in an eternity.

During another brief, sleepless summer night, this diarist resolves ‘with all my power to remain faithful to my spiritual experience’. It would have been better, he admits, if he ‘could have remained faithful to her; it would have been greater if my spiritual existence had countenanced everyday use in a marriage, and I would have understood life more surely and easily.’ Yet he knows that the past cannot be erased or rewritten. His life is like ‘a book that was printed once and could not be reprinted and in it there was no place to make corrections’. However, a writer can add to his book a list of printing errors, which might even include ‘a reading that was much more expressive than what stood in the same place in the text – then it would have to be satisfied to remain standing among the printing errors but nevertheless with its fullness of meaning’.

Kierkegaard knew that, without Regine, he would not have become himself. But who had he become, apart from lines of ink on a page? This question never seemed to find an answer: even the hundreds of pages in Stages on Life’s Way – several thousand pages, when Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Prefaces, Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety are counted too – did not express everything he was. Perhaps the answer was unending; perhaps he came closest to himself in the deep wordless moments he sometimes fell into amid his strenuous days and restless nights.

In Stages on Life’s Way, as in his productions of February 1843, October 1843 and June 1844, he gathered a little troop of imagined selves and sent them off in different directions through the world. This time there were eight of them: William Afham, Victor Eremita, Johannes the Seducer, Constantin Constantius, a fashion designer, an innocent young man, Judge William and Frater Taciturnus. None of these men are Søren Kierkegaard: they are paths which converge at the question of his own existence.

Is he the source of these paths, or their destination? There is a place in Gribs Forest, off the road to Fredensborg, called the Nook of the Eight Paths. His soul resembles this elusive place: ‘Only the one who seeks worthily finds it, for no map indicates it. Indeed, the name itself seems to contain a contradiction, for how can the meeting of eight paths create a nook, how can the beaten and frequented be reconciled with the out-of-the-way and the hidden? And yet it is so: there actually are eight paths, but nevertheless it is very solitary out there … No one travels this road except the wind, about which it is unknown whence it comes or whither it goes.’ If all those trails, all those pseudonyms, all those books convey a single truth, it is that human beings can discern no clear path through life while they are walking. Inside the forest, a man never sees far ahead. And Stages on Life’s Way itself is not a simple journey like the drive out to Fredensborg, passing through Lyngby, Holte, Hørsholm. The book is labyrinthine, disorientating. Kierkegaard knew it would be difficult to understand.

In October 1844 he moved out of his apartment on Nørregade, back down the road to 2 Nytorv, his family home, where he occupied the first-floor apartment. His servant Anders arranged everything, put his library back in order; ‘He is, in truth, my body,’ Kierkegaard joked to Hans Brøchner. As for the rest of him – soul, spirit, pen – he just carried on writing. The drafts of Stages on Life’s Way became even more voluminous, and dense with alterations. Israel Levin had to spend every day at 2 Nytorv for weeks on end to help prepare the manuscripts for publication.

Stages on Life’s Way came out at the end of April 1845, along with Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions by S. Kierkegaard. On 6 May, the day after his thirty-second birthday, an anonymous review of both books appeared in Berling’s Times – and there, for the first time in print, he was named as the author of his pseudonymous works. The reviewer praised his ‘authentic poetic genius’ and astonishing productivity: ‘One would think that Magister Kierkegaard possessed a kind of magic wand by which he instantaneously conjures up his books, so incredible has his literary activity been in recent years … Each of these works is remarkable for a depth of thought that pursues its object to its most minute thread and unfolds a rare beauty and elegance of language, and particularly a fluency that surpasses that of any contemporary Danish writer.’ If he had any negative criticism of these ‘fine books’, added the unknown reviewer, it was that ‘the author takes almost too much time elaborating his reflections, so that they sometimes become rather prolix’.

Despite this extravagant praise, Kierkegaard was furious that his authorship had been made public. He responded three days later with an article in The Fatherland protesting against the ‘unauthorized’ claim that he had written the pseudonymous works – for only an author himself is entitled to make such a declaration. Furthermore, this reviewer did not have the authority even to commend his work. His frustration that his books received scant attention from more influential readers seeped through his disdain: ‘When it is the legitimate leader in Danish literature, Professor Heiberg, for example, who speaks, when it is that masterful, most reverend writer under the pseudonym Kts’ (this was Bishop Mynster) ‘who speaks – well, then a beckoning has a meaning, then an encouraging word has validity, then a kind literary greeting is a joy.’

Less than a week later he went to Berlin for a few days. He was by then immersed in his new book, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, a sequel to Philosophical Fragments. This was a ground-breaking treatise on ‘the task of becoming a Christian’ by Johannes Climacus, his most dialectical pseudonym. Although not a Christian himself, Climacus brilliantly addressed the philosophical problems arising from Christianity; he debated with Lessing and Jacobi, dealt more blows to Hegel’s system, and proposed a new method of philosophy to tackle ‘the subjective individual’s relationship to Christianity’. Kierkegaard had decided that this ‘Postscript’ would be his last book, so it had to secure his reputation. And, wresting control of his authorship from the Berling’s Times reviewer, he ended it with a ‘First and Last Declaration’ which acknowledged that he was behind all his pseudonyms.

Back in Denmark that summer the storm clouds gathered. His work received more praise in the press – not from Heiberg or Mynster, as he wished, but from the disreputable Corsair, Copenhagen’s bestselling weekly newspaper. In July The Corsair expressed admiration for Hilarius Bookbinder, editor of Stages on Life’s Way, and in November the paper paid tribute to Either/Or by declaring that ‘Victor Eremita will never die!’ These slight remarks pricked Kierkegaard’s sensitivity, and sowed the seeds for his collision with the men behind the newspaper.

The Corsair was edited covertly by a subversive young writer, Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, who founded the paper in 1840 when he was just twenty years old. Inspired by the republican and socialist satirical press in Paris, The Corsair mocked the Danish establishment, criticized the King and spread malicious gossip. Goldschmidt was fascinated by the Greek myth of Nemesis, the goddess who punished hubristic mortals: it was Nemesis who lured Narcissus to the pool where he fell in love with his reflection and died by the water’s edge, unable to tear himself away from his beloved image. The Corsair used a different method of retribution, punishing Copenhagen’s celebrities by laughter, and its cartoonist Peter Klæstrup made decidedly unlovely images of these modern mortals. By 1845 Goldschmidt had been found out, imprisoned, fined and censored by Copenhagen’s government – but The Corsair continued. That year Goldschmidt published his first novel, A Jew, drawing on his experience of Danish anti-Semitism.

Goldschmidt admired Kierkegaard’s writing, and they had been on friendly terms since their student years. But another ambitious writer, Peder Ludvig Møller, helped Goldschmidt to edit The Corsair – and Kierkegaard’s relationship with him was much less cordial. Møller, a minor poet and notorious womanizer, would not have been out of place in Part I of Either/Or: he cultivated a virile Byronic image, rather like Johannes the Seducer. He aspired to succeed Oehlenschläger to the Chair of Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen, and he worked incognito at The Corsair to protect his career prospects.

In December 1845, as Concluding Unscientific Postscript was on its way to the printer, Møller published his literary yearbook Gæa 1846, which included a review of Stages on Life’s Way. Referring to Kierkegaard as ‘the philosopher with the many names’, Møller praised his more aesthetic qualities, acknowledging his ‘remarkable gifts’, philosophical ‘genius’, ‘brilliant wit’, ‘amazing abundance of thought and feeling’, and ‘richness and eloquence of writing one rarely finds equalled’. But Møller was irritated by Kierkegaard’s tendency to ‘expose his whole inner development to the public eye’, which was particularly pronounced in Frater Taciturnus’s conclusion to Stages on Life’s Way: ‘Every time one feels able to surrender to pure literary enjoyment the author gets in the way with his own personal ethical and religious development, which no one is actually asking about.’

The Corsair

Nevertheless, Møller turned out to be interested in these ‘personal’ issues, as his review drifted from literary criticism to psychological appraisal to character assassination. With the swagger of a true corsair, he suggested that Kierkegaard’s productivity was the effect of a sickly nature – unwholesome, unnatural and unmanly. ‘Writing and producing seem to have become a physical need for him, or he uses it as medicine, just as in certain illnesses one uses bloodletting, cupping, steam baths, emetics, and the like. Just as a healthy person rests by sleeping, he seems to rest by letting his pen run; instead of eating and drinking, he satiates himself by writing; instead of reproducing himself with a baby a year like an ordinary human being, he seems to have a fish nature and spawns.’ Møller accused him of mistreating women in his writing and also, he hinted, in his life: ‘the feminine nature placed on the experimental rack turns into dialectic in the book and vanishes, but in actual life she inevitably must go mad or into Peblinge Lake.’

‘If you regard life as a dissecting laboratory and yourself as a cadaver, then go ahead, lacerate yourself as much as you want to,’ Møller continued, sharpening his attack with a direct address. ‘But to spin another creature into your spider web, dissect it alive or torture the soul out of it drop by drop by means of experimentation – that is not allowed, except with insects, and is there not something horrible and revolting to the healthy human mind even in this idea?’ By questioning his moral integrity and his virility, Møller’s claws sank into the deep sensitivities Kierkegaard had made such strenuous and complex efforts to protect ever since breaking with Regine and beginning his authorship.

‘To me,’ Møller opined, this perverse author’s reflections ‘are like daguerreotypes in which not only the most important and characteristic features are depicted, as in regular painting, but everything possible is caught so that the whole thing becomes a tangle and a trackless labyrinth. Despite all his intelligence, reflection for him has become a severe sickness; his religiousness, which renounces the whole world in order to be occupied with itself, appears to me to be a pusillanimity at which our Lord and his angels must laugh … If he had lived under conditions that forced him to concern himself with something other than his own whims, he no doubt would have developed his talents to a higher degree.’

As he read Møller’s review, these excoriating words flew at his soul, inscribed themselves in his memory, moulded his thoughts, pierced his heart. And the sharp grains of truth were like salt in his wounds. He retaliated at once, publishing a long article in The Fatherland signed by Frater Taciturnus, who dismissed Møller imperiously: ‘Such persons are not part of my environment, and no matter how obtrusive and rude they are, it makes no difference; this does not disturb my joy over the little world that constitutes my surroundings.’ He ended with a provocation – half-sarcastic, half-serious – that exposed Møller’s connection to The Corsair: ‘Would that I might only get into The Corsair soon! It is really hard for a poor author to be so singled out in Danish literature that he (assuming that we pseudonyms are one) is the only one who is not abused there.’

Soon afterwards he met Goldschmidt on the street, and they discussed these literary hostilities as though neither of them were personally involved. Goldschmidt remarked that Frater Taciturnus had broken a literary rule of honour in naming Møller in connection with The Corsair; Kierkegaard replied that Frater Taciturnus’s ‘right’ must be seen from ‘a higher point of view’. Goldschmidt disagreed, and then they spoke of other things.

On 2 January 1846 The Corsair responded to Kierkegaard’s battle cry by printing a satirical story about Frater Taciturnus – ‘a great and famous recluse and philosopher, who has another name, under which he strolls the streets every day, but it would be indiscreet to mention it’ – colluding with The Fatherland to disclose the identity of The Corsair’s editor. ‘I am as happy as I would be if Heiberg had got one of my books stuck in his throat,’ exclaims Frater Taciturnus once the deed is done, and proposes to celebrate by doing something for the poor: ‘I shall imagine the thought-experiment that I have given a rix-dollar to a poor woman with five small children. Imagine her joy! Imagine those innocent children seeing a rix-dollar!’ The following week the paper ran a sketch featuring ‘Søren Kierkegaard’, accompanied by a cartoon accentuating his curved spine.

Through January and February The Corsair continued to lampoon him every week, mocking his philosophical pretensions and his thin legs – one a little longer than the other – in their uneven trousers. Klæstrup’s drawings depicted Kierkegaard on horseback, Kierkegaard fighting a duel, Kierkegaard sitting outside the office of The Corsair waiting to be let in. The ‘artificial experiment with a young girl’ from Stages on Life’s Way was likened to horse-training; the illustration accompanying this piece had Kierkegaard riding on a lady’s shoulders, reviving Møller’s accusation that he had exploited Regine in his pursuit of literary fame.

When Concluding Unscientific Postscript came out at the end of February – another huge volume, even thicker than Stages on Life’s Way – The Corsair mocked his arrogance in refusing praise for his books:

It is really strange that a man does not have control of the book he buys and pays for with 3 rix-dollars and 64 shillings. If Magister Kierkegaard has a book printed for private circulation among his friends and gives it away, then he can request first of all: Do you acknowledge this book to be perfect, so pure and sensitive that the mere breath of human judgement defiles it? But when someone has honestly and uprightly paid his 3 rix-dollars and 64 shillings and then is told: Read it as you read the Bible; if you do not understand it, then read it over again; if you do not understand it the second time, you may just as well blow your brains out – then a strange feeling comes over him. There is a moment when his mind is confused and it seems to him that Nicolaus Copernicus was a fool when he insisted that the earth revolves around the sun; on the contrary, the heavens, the sun, the planets, the earth, Europe and Copenhagen itself revolve around Søren Kierkegaard, who stands silent in the middle and does not once take off his hat in recognition of the honour shown to him.

The Corsair

Next time he encountered The Corsair’s editor during his daily walk he did not greet him, but met his eyes with a look that was ‘intense, very bitter’. Goldschmidt suppressed his urge to laugh: ‘In the bitterness of that glance, just as in Kierkegaard’s entire personal appearance and manner, there was something that verged on the comic.’ Yet suddenly amusement gave way to ‘the loftiness, the ideality that were also present in his personality’ – for Goldschmidt saw ‘something in that intense, wild glance that drew the curtain, as it were, away from the higher right that Kierkegaard had asserted earlier and that I had not been able, or rather was unwilling, to understand, though I did suspect it. It accused and depressed me.’ That very day Goldschmidt decided to quit The Corsair. He sold the paper a few months later, then travelled to the Continent for a year; when he came home he founded North and South, a political and literary journal which, Møller jibed, was respectable enough to be quoted by Bishop Mynster. Møller himself left Denmark at the end of 1847, and did not return.

The Corsair

Back in 1843, Kierkegaard had described Copenhagen as ‘my beloved capital city and place of residence’. Despite his adversaries’ retreat from the battlefield, it became a different place for him after The Corsair’s attack, which spread from the pages of the newspaper through the city’s streets. Now when he went on his daily walks he was laughed at by strangers, heckled by children. ‘Every kitchen boy feels justified in almost insulting me in accordance with The Corsair’s orders; young students titter and grin and are happy to see a prominent person trampled on; professors are jealous and secretly sympathize with the attacks, and spread them, too, with the appendage, of course, that it is a shame. The slightest thing I do, if it is merely to pay a visit, is twisted and distorted into lies and told everywhere; if The Corsair finds out it is printed and read by everybody … What pains me most is not the vulgarity of the rabble but the secret participation in it by the better people,’ he wrote in his journal in the spring of 1846. He felt betrayed by friends who reassured him that The Corsair’s campaign was insignificant, a trifle, instead of taking a stand in his defence. And he wished that Bishop Mynster, in particular, would speak up for him – for hadn’t he been attacked for an authorship produced in devotion to Christianity? ‘God in heaven, who could endure this if there were not an interior place in a man where it can all be forgotten in communion with you!’ he wrote, adding that he was grateful that his activity as an author was already finished, that ‘it has been granted me to conclude it myself, to understand myself when it ought to stop, and next to publishing Either/Or I thank God for that.’ He once more resolved to become a pastor in the countryside, and imagined himself doing a little writing in his free time: ‘Out there in quiet activity, I shall breathe easier, however much my present life has gratified me.’

He saw The Corsair’s attack as more than a personal ordeal: beyond his own devastated pride and bitter fury, it had political significance. The press is the mirror of the modern city, the murky pool in which a vain populace stares at its reflection – and The Corsair was, he believed, a symptom of Denmark’s degeneracy. Being at the centre of this arena was humiliating, yet he remained defiant, deeming himself ‘as correctly situated in literature as possible, and also in such a way that to be an author becomes a deed’ – for now he was ‘advancing polemically against the age’.

Having declared an end to his authorship, he decided to allow himself to write book reviews – ‘in this way I can still avoid becoming an author.’ In March 1846, as The Corsair continued to lampoon him, he published ‘a little review’ of Two Ages, the new novel by the anonymous author of A Story of Everyday Life, which he had praised in From the Papers of One Still Living. Both novels bore the name of J. L. Heiberg as editor, and it was not difficult to guess that their author was Thomasine Gyllembourg, Heiberg’s mother. Her new novel was set in contemporary Copenhagen, opening in the summer of 1844, when its hero Charles Lusard returns to the city after thirty years abroad and finds it much changed. Lusard is struck by the bright lights, loud music and great crowds in the newly opened Tivoli Gardens, taking the sight of ‘so many people of different classes who gather there’ as a sign of the great progress made in his century: ‘one cannot but marvel when one thinks of the discoveries in science, the inventions that make life easier and more agreeable. Who in past times dreamed of steamships, of railways, that seem to compensate man for his lack of wings?’ Yet other characters in Two Ages lament ‘the dreadful vanity’ of those who go out in town ‘in order to be seen’, and ‘the craving for entertainment that, like an epidemic, is ever more rife among us, destroying the integrity of the family’.

Kierkegaard used his review of Two Ages to develop his own critique of the present age. He drew on Heiberg’s 1842 essay ‘People and Public’, which warned of ‘the people’s dissolution into a public’, of ‘the public itself being transformed from an organic, representative body to an atomized crowd that represents nothing’. But his own analysis of modern life emphasized the pernicious influence of the press. In the preface to his review – which had expanded to over a hundred pages, and had to be published as a book – he insisted that it was intended ‘not for aesthetic and critical readers of newspapers but for rational creatures’. Envy, he believed, had motivated the attacks on him by Møller and The Corsair, and his review identified envy as the ‘unifying principle’ of his ‘passionless’, ‘indolent’ and ‘reflective’ age; he castigated scurrilous journalism as a ‘nasty dog’ which the public keeps for its amusement. When this dog attacks its ‘superior’ victim, he wrote, ‘the public is unrepentant, for after all it was not the public – in fact, it was the dog; and the public is unrepentant, because after all it was not really slander – it was just a bit of fun.’

Yet if someone should think this tragic, and feel pity for the man who has been attacked, he continued:

I cannot agree with that at all, for the person who desires assistance in reaching what is highest benefits from experiencing such a thing and should rather desire it, even if others may be disturbed on his behalf. No, the terrible thing is something else, the thought of the many human lives that are squandered or may easily be squandered. I will not even mention those who are lost or led astray to their downfall, who play the role of the dog for money, but of the many rootless ones, the superficial ones, the sensuous, those who in snobbish indolence get no deeper impression of life than this foolish grinning, all the second-raters who are led into new temptation because in their limitation they even derive self-importance from having sympathy for the victims of the attack, without grasping that in such a situation the victims are always the strongest, without grasping that here it is dreadfully and yet ironically appropriate to say: Weep not for him, but weep for yourselves.

In early May 1846 he took his customary trip to Berlin: he liked to be away for his birthday. Soon after he returned to Copenhagen he became immersed in the case of Adolph Peter Adler, a pastor who had been dismissed from his office by Bishop Mynster the previous year. Kierkegaard had known Adler for more than two decades: they were classmates at the School of Civic Virtue, and then fellow theology students at the university; Adler became a ‘zealous Hegelian’ during those years, and published his lectures on Hegel’s logic in 1842. Then one night Pastor Adler received a revelation: Jesus appeared to him, dictated a new doctrine of the fall – in which Adam sinned because he lost himself in thought – and then commanded him to burn his works and ‘keep to the Bible’. Week after week he announced this revelation from his pulpit; after he had published these inspired sermons in 1843, he visited Kierkegaard and read one of them aloud, partly in a strange whisper, and suggested that Kierkegaard was like John the Baptist in relation to himself, the living vessel of God’s word.

In June 1846, a few months after his dismissal from the Church, Adler published four books. Kierkegaard bought them all, and through that autumn and winter worked on a lengthy essay which stretched his commitment to write only literary reviews. His Book on Adler was subtitled ‘The Religious Confusion of the Present Age, Illustrated by Magister Adler as a Phenomenon’. Adler’s situation raised questions about who has authority to judge what comes from God, and what is mere delusion, and about how the world – and the Church – should respond to someone who receives a divine revelation.

There were echoes of Abraham in the case of Adler, and Kierkegaard saw strange inverse symmetries between himself and this other controversial, preternaturally prolific Christian author. He always disclaimed authority for his writing, while Adler claimed the highest spiritual authority as a witness to Christ; he was still considering seeking an appointment as a pastor, while Adler had lost his clerical living. He thought Adler was confused, but he felt inclined to support him: ‘We need dynamic personalities, unselfish people who are not immersed and exhausted in endless considerations for job, wife, and children,’ he wrote in his journal last year, in the summer of 1847. He spent much of that year revising his book on Adler, and he has considered publishing it under a variety of possible pseudonyms – but he is afraid the book will harm Adler, and the manuscript remains in a tin box in his study.

Instead he published Works of Love, which looks like previous editions of religious discourses by S. Kierkegaard, though much larger. But like his review of Two Ages, Works of Love bears the scars of the Corsair battle: it is a polemical book that questions whether ‘people really know what love is’, and seeks to ‘turn their convenient ways of thought upside down’. One of the discourses contrasts the worldly understanding of love’s selflessness with true Christian love: ‘The merely human idea of self-denial is this: give up your self-loving desires, cravings, and plans – then you will be esteemed and honoured and loved as righteous and wise. The Christian idea of self-denial is: give up your self-loving desires and cravings, give up your self-seeking plans and purposes so that you truly work unselfishly for the good – and then, for that very reason, put up with being abominated almost as a criminal, insulted and ridiculed.’

* * *

Since the Corsair affair, his ambivalent suspicion of the world has hardened into a wholehearted, militant opposition. As 1848 draws to an end, his neighbours gather round their Christmas trees, eat apple dumplings, and chatter about all the changes this year has brought: a revolution, an election, plans for a Danish constitution, new laws on freedom of speech, debates about dividing Church from State, the abolition of slavery in Danish colonies. For Kierkegaard, these long dark evenings offer plenty of time to recall his ‘persecution by the mob, the people, the public, in short the scum that the daily press is able to dredge up’. He now regards newspapers as ‘a form of evil’, and angrily pronounces The Corsair a symptom of Denmark’s ‘demoralization’, ‘disintegration’, ‘envy, caprice, pettiness’.^, In a different mood, he can insist that ‘I feel no bitterness at all at the thought of all the indignities I have suffered and all the times I have been betrayed; I never think of escaping all of this all at once, so to speak, by death. If there is time and place for jest in eternity, I am sure that the thought of my thin legs and my ridiculed trousers will be a source of salutary amusement to me.’ But in this life his trousers have received too much attention, and his authorship too little. His work has been ignored by those qualified to evaluate it – by Heiberg, Martensen, and Mynster most of all – because ‘they are envious’. His brother Peter is his closest kin, and it is difficult to work up much festive cheer for him; instead, he recalls how Peter responded to him a year or so ago when he joked that ‘I think I will entirely give up being an author and go in for horse-riding or things of that sort’, and Peter ‘replied (in all seriousness), “That would be the best thing.” That is how pointless my endeavours look to him.’

As Professor Sibbern observed during Kierkegaard’s student days, he is polemical by nature, and his extraordinary fluency and wit make him a formidable combatant in the literary field. He is still contemplating retreat; since publishing Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he has not added to the pseudonymous authorship – apart from that Fatherland article about Madame Heiberg which caused him such agonies this summer. Yet the events of 1846 showed him that he himself, in his suffering, can be an indictment of his city, of his age, of the world. ‘They must be permitted to trample me down – but they are caught, and I am the stronger,’ he writes now. ‘In physical terms no individual can triumph over the masses. But if the single individual is the one who is truly justified, he is infinitely the stronger. Ah, with a certainty that nothing, nothing can shake, I sense how I am thus infinitely the stronger; all the mistreatment merely increases my certainty of this.’ Of course, his ordeal is nothing compared to what Jesus suffered; he has not been hung on a cross for all to see, and The Corsair’s teeth drew no real blood. Nevertheless he has been ridiculed and scorned and made a public spectacle – and he has tasted the subversive power of martyrdom.

In spite of everything, he can see the funny side. He has offered to his city an authorship posing the deepest existential questions, probing the furthest reaches of the human heart; he has searched and exposed his own soul, stretched his poetic powers and his philosophical ingenuity, spent his money, exhausted his body in this immense effort to revive Christendom, to bring spirituality to life again – and people are jeering at his spindly legs. He imagines his future readers, ‘who will be able to sit in peace and quiet and enjoy, purely intellectually, the infinitely comic drama that, by existing here, I have had the whole of Copenhagen perform’. Only it has been going on for so long now, every single day, year after year. This would be no fun for the audience, and it is worse for him, cast in the leading role. ‘From the poetic point of view, it must be abridged. And that is how it will be for my reader. On the other hand, the religious begins in and with the daily routine, and that is how I understand my life: for me, this infinitely comic drama is a martyrdom.’ If he did not consider it his duty to remain in Copenhagen, then he would travel to some isolated place, look back at his tiny city in the distance, ‘and laugh and laugh’.

‘Dying is the only thing that can clear the air,’ he declared in his journal earlier this year. His existence is troublesome to everyone; when he dies his profound, funny, intricate, eloquent authorship will float free, no longer tethered to the stumbling block of his personality. ‘At that very instant I will be in my ideality, because the problem is that I am too ideally developed to live in a market town … Every day I live, I simply become more of a burden to the envy of the market town.’ He tells himself he has been ‘truly unselfish, by renouncing all worldly advantages’: marriage to a beautiful woman, fatherhood, a family of his own to spend Christmas with; and a career to rival Heiberg’s, Martensen’s, or even Mynster’s, had he been more willing to submit to public approval. Yet he knows too well the exertions of egotism, and he longs for rest. The gentleness that would release his spirit, calm his body, has never come easily to him – and there is no one else to call him softly from his thoughts, to tell him he has done enough for the day and, like Judge William’s patient wife, beckon him gently into bed. He still strains at the leash of self-assertion: it will not loosen, but twists into self-sacrifice.

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