13 At Odds with the World
13
At Odds with the World
‘The question is: When should all the latest works be published!’ Through the winter and spring of 1849 this question pursued Kierkegaard, pinned him down, and paralysed him. The pile of manuscripts he produced during 1848 lay ready, but he had cornered himself into a dilemma about his future: either continue to be an author, or seek an appointment in the Church. The temptation to withdraw from the world to a quiet rural pastorate was now quickened by fear that otherwise his money would run out. His financial situation was not so pressing, however, that it outweighed existential concerns: ‘Humanly speaking, there is something pleasant about having secure employment, comfort; there is something agreeable about working for a living. – And then there are only two classes of people who come together in the opposite kind of life. Wrecked selves, fallen persons – and those who seriously and truly live for an idea. Ah, and in the eyes of the world, it’s all too easy to confuse the two.’
Kierkegaard was well qualified to be a parish priest, or to teach in the pastoral seminary he had attended in 1840: he was an expert theologian, a gifted preacher, and a sensitive counsellor with ‘a special ability to talk with ordinary people’. But would he be offered a clerical appointment if he asked for one? Would publishing the 1848 works damage his prospects? And how could he continue his subversive authorship – which had been produced undercover, without authority – if he held an official position in the Church?
Regine deepened his dilemma further. Whenever he saw her in church or passed her on the street, her presence flooded his soul; he was intensely aware of her slightest movements, and sometimes he felt her eyes on him. They never spoke or exchanged letters, and in this silence every small gesture became a step in a private, infinitely expressive dance. Through her he had become an author and she was inextricable from his writings, yet the professional life he now envisaged was the one that, back in 1840, went hand in hand with marrying her. Seeking an appointment felt like returning to that abandoned path, and was linked obscurely with his wish for a reconciliation with Regine – for forgiveness, if not friendship, though he imagined a brotherly relationship with her, like the spiritual love between a monk and a nun.
He still felt compelled to write. His sense that divine governance directed his authorship was difficult to distinguish from his need to write to assuage his deep anxiety. And however earnestly he assumed the role of suffering Christian – in relation to Regine, a sinner and penitent; in relation to The Corsair, a martyr who endured persecution to banish the evil forces of the present age – the fact remained that writing gave him great pleasure. ‘It is certainly true that I have been unspeakably unhappy ever since I was a child, but nonetheless I must confess that the avenue of escape God provided for me by permitting me to become an author has been rich, rich in enjoyment. So I have surely been sacrificed, but my work as an author is not a sacrifice – it is indeed what I would absolutely most like to continue doing.’ And of course there was also his pride: ‘It is difficult to decide whether it is more humiliating to straightforwardly declare that I can no longer afford to be an author and then take on the burden of finite matters, or to expose myself to everything that might follow if I publish something.’ He did not want to be extraordinary, notorious, misunderstood, and his authorship seemed to demand this of him. As he wrestled with his dilemma he prayed for guidance, and searched for signs of God’s response. He resolved to go, like Abraham, wherever God commanded him: ‘How many times have I said that a warship doesn’t receive its orders until it’s out on the deep? And therefore it might be entirely in order for me to go further as an author than I had originally intended.’
He inhabited the question of publication like a lonely room, its walls plastered with possibilities. In that room he spent days, weeks, months pacing back and forth, miserably shuffling his manuscripts and tinkering at their margins – deleting a word here, altering a phrase there – and debating with himself in his journal. Could he publish The Point of View for My Work as an Author now, or let it wait until after his death? What should he do with The Book on Adler? For a while he considered publishing The Sickness unto Death and its two-part sequel (Come to Me and Blessed Is He Who Is Not Offended) together with a new essay, Armed Neutrality, in one volume titled Collected Works of Fulfilment. Then he amended this to Collected Works of Consummation – for if these works fulfilled his vocation ‘to introduce Christianity into Christendom’, they had also consumed him. He was exhausted, while his prose danced with the agile, fluent energy of his life-force. He composed for this possible collection a brief preface: ‘Just as a cabinet minister steps down and becomes a private citizen, so I cease to be an author and lay down my pen – I actually have had a portfolio. Just one word more, but no, no more words now, for now I have laid down my pen.’
Yet he found temporary relief from these anxious ruminations by producing something new. He returned to three exquisite sermons on the lily of the field and the bird of the air he had drafted in the early spring of 1848, and reworked them to accompany the second edition of Either/Or, which Reitzel published in May 1849. He saw these ‘Godly Discourses’ as a repetition of his very first ‘Upbuilding Discourses’, which had followed Either/Or in 1843: like those, they bore a preface dated 5 May, his birthday. As well as balancing the ‘Seducer’s Diary’ with spiritual teachings drawn from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, these lyrical meditations on nature’s exemplars of carefree devotion worked through Kierkegaard’s worries for his future.
They opened with a petitionary prayer: ‘Father in heaven! Would that we might learn what it is to be a human being.’ Kierkegaard took Jesus’s instruction to ‘Consider the lily’ as an invitation to consider the human condition in contrast with the rest of nature, which expresses God’s goodness spontaneously, in the present moment, without questions or thoughts for tomorrow. From the lily and the bird, he suggested, a human being can learn silence, obedience and joy. And these qualities need to be learned and practised, because human life always strains in the opposite direction. We are pulled away from silence by the constant chatter around us and by our own incessant thoughts, and we are constitutionally disobedient: even the most earnest religious people are divided between doing God’s will and following their own inclinations. Knowing nothing of this ambivalence, the lily and the bird remain obediently ‘in the place assigned’ to them, Kierkegaard wrote, echoing the words he used in his journal in 1848 when he reflected that being an author in Copenhagen, exposed to the public eye, was ‘the place assigned’ to him. And finally he wrote of joy: other living beings take joy in their nature, while we feel anxious and dissatisfied – and yet we share the same gifts as the lily and the bird, and much more besides. ‘That you came into existence, that you exist, that today you receive the necessities of existence, that you became a human being, that you can see – consider this: that you can see, that you can hear, that you have a sense of smell, that you have a sense of taste, that you can feel; that the sun shines for you, and for your sake, that when it becomes weary, the moon begins to shine and the stars are lit; that it becomes winter, that all of nature disguises itself, pretends to be a stranger – and does so in order to delight you; that spring comes, that birds come in large flocks – and do so in order to bring you joy; that green plants spring forth, that the forest grows into beauty.’
Nevertheless, no one knew better than Kierkegaard that being human is never a simple matter of opening one’s petals or spreading one’s wings. As he explained in The Sickness unto Death, another of his still unpublished manuscripts, all human beings have to become themselves, and can hardly avoid falling into despair. Some despair from too many possibilities, others from too few: when overwhelmed by thoughts of what might have been and what may come, ‘the self runs away from itself’, ‘tires itself out with floundering in the possible’, and is unable to move – yet without possibility ‘a man cannot draw breath.’ Only God is the one ‘for whom all things are possible’, and praying to this God keeps a human soul alive, for ‘to pray is to breathe.’ Determinists and fatalists cannot pray; they are in despair, having lost God along with all their possibilities. The Sickness unto Death also distinguished between a despair of weakness and a despair of defiance: some people cannot face their existential task, succumb to melancholy, do not want to be themselves, while others despair through rebellious self-assertion, refusing to acknowledge their need for God.
Kierkegaard had constructed this taxonomy of spiritual disease within the laboratory of his own soul, and as he agonized over his future he felt himself prone to every kind of despair. For a while the decision not to publish anything more than the second edition of Either/Or and Three Godly Discourses had the upper hand. He prayed for success in securing a position at the pastoral seminary – and for reconciliation with Regine. But on 5 May 1849, his thirty-sixth birthday, he repented the ‘melancholia’ and ‘hypochondriacal evasion’ that caused him to flee from his authorship. His daily devotional reading had drawn him towards a new decision: Luther’s sermons prepared him to stand against the world; Thomas à Kempis counselled that peace came from following God’s will rather than his own; Fénelon warned against doing anything less than God expected of him. ‘I wanted to be so terribly clever – rather than relying on faith and prayer,’ Kierkegaard confessed in his journal:
I wanted to secure a comfortable future … I wanted to play lord, decide for myself … Because of the fear of danger, my hypochondria, and a lack of trust in God, I’ve wanted to regard myself as inferior to the gifts I’ve been given, as if taking ownership of those gifts would defraud the truth, and as if viewing myself as inferior weren’t in fact an act of defrauding God and the truth … Humanly speaking, there’s certainly nothing fun or pleasant about being the extraordinary one in these petty circumstances we have in Denmark; it’s becoming painful. But God has overwhelmed me with kindness, granted me so much more than I expected; and he (both by means of the abundance he has granted me during the past year – and its sufferings) has led me to understand my destiny – true enough, it’s different from what I had originally imagined … I had to get that close to the thought of stopping before I picked up the momentum again.
Despite the inspiration of the lily and the bird, this was only a tentative resolution: spring passed into summer, and Kierkegaard remained unsure about publishing his Collected Works of Consummation. ‘What makes my life so difficult,’ he reflected, ‘is that I’m tuned an octave higher than other people are; where I am, what preoccupies me, is not the particular but a principle or idea. Most people think – at most – about whom they ought to marry. I have to think about marriage itself. And so it goes with everything. That’s fundamentally my situation now. Most people think – at most – about what job they ought to apply for, while my fortune is to be deeply involved in a struggle, the battle of ideas, the question of principle about whether so-called Christian professional offices are appropriate in Christianity.’
Meanwhile, at a lower octave, the foundations of Danish Christendom were being dismantled and rebuilt following the revolution that took place in spring 1848, during Kierkegaard’s final weeks in 2 Nytorv. On 5 June 1849 King Frederik VII signed the Constitution of the Kingdom of Denmark, which granted freedom of religion to all citizens: their civic rights no longer depended on membership of the Lutheran Church. The Danish State Church became the Danish People’s Church. But the Constitutional Assembly had not acceded to Grundtvig’s demands to separate the Church from the State, and the establishment of the Danske Folkekirke was enshrined in civil law.
Later in June, Kierkegaard visited Bishop Mynster at his episcopal residence opposite the Church of Our Lady, and asked about an appointment in the pastoral seminary. Privately he now believed Mynster to be ‘allied with worldliness as much as anyone’, and denounced him in his journal for ‘transforming Christianity into such serene tenderness’. Mynster was in his seventies: ‘He will soon be on his way – to be judged. And what harm he’s done to Christianity by conjuring up a false appearance.’ For years Kierkegaard had charged this man with his own anxieties about his relationship to the Church, his place in the world, the reception of his authorship, his loyalty to his late father; now the Bishop loomed larger than ever in his imagination, vibrating with his own existential angst, and after months of inward turmoil about seeking employment Kierkegaard was agitated when he entered Mynster’s house. The Bishop dealt with him kindly, smoothly, efficiently: ‘Good day, dear friend, dear friend – and then he said he didn’t have time to speak with me … And then he repeated this “Dear friend” six or seven times, slapped my back and patted me – i.e. he’s frightened to speak with me because he’s frightened about getting too involved with me.’ He told Kierkegaard to come ‘another time’ – but it wouldn’t be any time soon, because Mynster was about to leave Copenhagen to visit his other Zealand parishes. Kierkegaard complied with Mynster’s deft evasion, and left the episcopal residence with his questions unanswered – and with his resolve to resume his campaign against Christendom renewed.
Bishop Mynster in his later years
Three days later he wrote to Bianco Luno, the printer, to ask him to print The Sickness unto Death. Luno agreed to receive the manuscript the following day, 29 June. That evening Kierkegaard learned that Regine’s father had died. His resolution once more shattered into possibilities: if he had known about Councillor Olsen’s death sooner, perhaps he would have taken this as a sign that it was time to approach Regine, and held off writing to the printer. He spent a restless night, unable to order his thoughts, trying to grasp and follow the long, tangled threads that connected Regine to his authorship. He lay in the dark for hours, his mind splitting itself in two: he seemed to be in dialogue with another person, but he could not tell which voice belonged to him. ‘Look, now he wills his own destruction … You could certainly wait a week or so … Who does he think he is?’
By sunrise he was worn out and utterly confused. It seemed so foolish to spend months wrestling with the question of publication, finally reach a decision, make an agreement with Luno – and then change his mind the next day. Yet he felt that something was warning him off: was this a divine signal, or merely his own cowardice? Kierkegaard knew there was always terror in sending his books out into the world; now, at the dawn of a new battle, was God urging him to pause, perhaps to retreat, or summoning his courage for the fight? His decisive thought was this: ‘The fact that God frightens a person does not always mean that this is something he should refrain from doing, but that it is the very thing he should do; but he must be terrified in order that he learn to do it in fear and trembling.’ So he sent The Sickness unto Death to the printer, and prayed to God for guidance about how far he should go.
‘I’ve been willing to ask God to free me from this terrifying business, and I’m still willing,’ Kierkegaard wrote in his journal later that summer, when things seemed clearer. ‘Moreover, I’m a human being myself and, humanly speaking, would love to live happily here on earth. But because of the Christian state, Christendom, which is evident throughout Europe, I’ve decided to call attention to the price of becoming a Christian, beginning here in Denmark, in such a way that the whole concept – State Church, official posts, salaries – is blown apart. For a few years now I’ve borne the treachery and ingratitude of a tiny country, the envy of respectable people and the mockery of the mob, in such a way that – for want of someone better – I am perhaps qualified to proclaim Christianity. Let Bishop Mynster keep the velvet coat and the grand cross.’
Perhaps Kierkegaard had a right to proclaim Christianity – but perhaps not. This had become the question of his authorship, inseparable from the question of his own existence. If he was to publish The Sickness unto Death and its sequel, now a single work titled Practice in Christianity, he had to settle it somehow. The answer eventually came in the form of a new pseudonym: Anti-Climacus, ‘a Christian to an extraordinary degree’, in contrast to Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, who philosophized about Christianity while claiming not to be a Christian. Although Kierkegaard placed himself, allegedly a ‘perfectly simple Christian’, in between these two pseudonyms, the relationship was more complicated than that – for his pseudonyms expressed the conflict within his soul. In one draft preface to The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus explained that he and Johannes Climacus were brothers, exactly the same age, with everything in common, and yet utterly different: ‘We are not twins, we are opposites. Between us there is a deep, fundamental relationship, but despite the most desperate efforts on both sides we never get any further, any closer, than a repelling contact. There is a point and a moment at which we touch, but at the same moment we fly from each other at infinite speed. Like two eagles plunging from a mountain top to the same point, or like one eagle plunging down from the top of a cliff and a predatory fish shooting from the ocean’s depth to the surface with the same speed, we two both seek the same point; there is a contact, and at the same moment we rush from each other, each to his extremity.’ This image of a divided self, split between inseparable antagonists, echoed Kierkegaard’s dialogical preface to his very first book, From the Papers of One Still Living.
During the winter and spring of 1849, while Kierkegaard was pacing round his Rosenborggade apartment torn between two possible futures – and two possible selves – Fredrika Bremer was paying visits to Copenhagen’s best-known writers and intellectuals. Bremer, a Swedish author and feminist reformer, was researching a series of articles on ‘Life in Scandinavia’: while in Denmark, she interviewed Bishop Mynster, Grundtvig, Oehlenschläger, Heiberg, Carsten Hauch, Hans Christian Andersen, H. C. Ørsted, F. C. Sibbern and Martensen. Kierkegaard refused to see her, so she asked her other interviewees about him – especially Martensen, who invited her to his home several times. In August 1849 Kierkegaard picked up a newspaper and saw his name next to Martensen’s:
Whereas from his central standpoint the brilliant Martensen sheds light upon the entire sphere of existence and upon all the phenomena of life, Søren Kierkegaard stands on his isolated pillar like a Simon Stylites, his gaze fixed uninterruptedly on a single point. He places his microscope over this point, carefully investigating the tiniest atoms, the most fleeting motions, the innermost alterations. And it is about this that he speaks and writes endless folios. For him, everything is to be found at this point. But this point is – the human heart. And – because he unceasingly has this changeable heart reflect itself in the Eternal and Unchangeable that ‘became flesh and dwelt among us’, because in the course of his exhausting dialectical wanderings he says divine things – he has gained a not inconsiderable audience in happy, pleasant Copenhagen, particularly among ladies. The philosophy of the heart must be important to them.
‘Concerning the philosopher who writes on these matters,’ Bremer’s article continued:
people speak well and ill – and strangely. He who writes for ‘that single individual’ lives alone, inaccessible and, when all is said and done, known by no one. During the daytime one sees him walking in the midst of the crowd, up and down the busiest streets of Copenhagen for hours at a time. At night his lonely dwelling is said to glow with light. The cause of this behaviour seems to be less his wealth and independence than a sickly and irritable nature, which finds occasion to be displeased with the sun itself when its rays shine in a direction other than what he wishes.
Bremer’s remark about his ‘sickly’ nature echoed P. L. Møller’s spiteful review of Stages on Life’s Way, which had triggered the Corsair affair. Kierkegaard had long believed that Martensen, envious of his talent, passively colluded in The Corsair’s attack, and Bremer’s article pushed that thorn a little deeper. Martensen, the Professor of Theology, Court Preacher, Knight of the Dannebrog – that exemplar of Christianity! Kierkegaard could not bear to think of his hypocrisy and self-satisfaction, but he thought about it anyway. Through the summer and autumn of 1849 he wrote long, bitter journal entries on Martensen’s success.
He also spent weeks drafting letters to Regine. He asked for forgiveness, offered explanations, thanked her for her ‘lovable simplicity’ and her ‘passionate despair’, expressed his wish to talk with her now and then, and assured her that ‘neither I nor history will forget you.’ The letter he finally settled on, in November, was brief:
Cruel I was, that is true. Why? Indeed, you do not know that.
Silent I have been, that is certain. Only God knows what I have suffered – may God grant that I do not, even now, speak too soon after all!
Marry I could not. Even if you were still free, I could not.
However, you have loved me, as I have you. I owe you much – and now you are married. All right, I offer you for the second time what I can and dare and ought to offer you: reconciliation.
I do this in writing in order not to surprise or overwhelm you. Perhaps my personality did once have too strong an effect; that must not happen again. But for the sake of God in heaven, please give serious consideration to whether you dare become involved in this, and if so, whether you prefer to speak with me at once or would rather exchange some letters first.
If your answer is ‘No’ – would you then please remember for the sake of a better world that I took this step as well.
In any case, as in the beginning
so until now, sincerely and completely
devotedly, your S. K.
He sealed this letter and enclosed it in another letter, to Regine’s husband Johan Frederik Schlegel, requesting that he decide whether to give it to his wife. It was returned unopened, accompanied by a ‘moralizing and indignant epistle’ from Schlegel. Kierkegaard stubbornly recorded in his journal ‘One last step concerning “Her” – It is my unalterable will that my writings, after my death, be dedicated to her and to my late father. She must belong to history.’
The following month Kierkegaard read another newspaper article comparing him with Martensen. This one was written by his brother: in a speech at the Roskilde Convention, printed in the Danish Church Times, Peter Christian Kierkegaard had remarked that Professor Martensen was ‘sober-minded’ while Søren Kierkegaard was ‘ecstatic’. Although Kierkegaard’s writings addressed ‘the single individual’, his brother’s discourse continued, he was acquiring imitators and adherents: men like Rasmus Nielsen, who expounded his philosophy in academic treatises.
That winter Kierkegaard raged against all these worldly priests of Christendom. He sent his brother – who was elected to the upper house of parliament in the last days of 1849 – a polite but indignant letter, suggesting that if Peter wanted to compare him with Martensen he should indicate the ‘essential difference’ between them: ‘that I have been sacrificed to an extraordinary extent and that [Martensen] has profited to an extraordinary extent’. He celebrated the end of the year with a journal entry headed ‘Protest against Bishop Mynster’: ‘He has cravenly evaded actuality, has arranged a sort of private world consisting of circles of the elite in which – as he himself knows, by the way – Christianity has not exactly been the dominant factor: and that is where he has lived,’ he wrote sourly. Mynster enjoyed ‘a life of glory, honour, esteem, abundance, pleasure, distinction’ – but from a Christian point of view that life was ‘a lie’. Kierkegaard was sick of Copenhagen; it was ‘a little, cooped-up place, the homeland of nonsense, a provincial market town’, and its air was polluted by the daily press, ‘the government’s filth machine’. Should he try harder to turn the other cheek? St Augustine, he noted, pointed out that even Jesus did not always keep that commandment.
He found ammunition in Luther’s sermons, which he continued to read regularly along with various mystical writers – Johann Arndt; the eighteenth-century poet and lay preacher Gerhard Tersteegen; and medieval monks like Hugh and Richard of St Victor, whose texts he discovered in a German anthology of Christian mysticism. As he traced a dialectic between medieval Catholic spirituality and Luther’s turn away from monastic life, he began to discern his own task more clearly: just as Luther had corrected the corruptions and excesses of his sixteenth-century Church, so he must correct the worldliness of nineteenth-century Lutheranism. And Luther had wrestled with the same questions about how to be a Christian in the world. In one of his model sermons for reforming preachers, the former monk argued that ‘it is the great, unreasonable fool who runs out of the world into a desert or a wild forest … No, you must be in whatever station and arrangements you are in – for after all, you must be in one place the entire time you live on the earth – so God has not cast you away from people, but among them … Nor should you shroud yourself in a cowl and creep into a corner or hide yourself in a desert. For in so doing you do not avoid the devil and sin – they will find you as well in the desert in a grey cowl as they would in the marketplace in a red coat.’ Yet Luther also insisted that spiritual fulfilment has nothing to do with worldly success: the Christian must ‘regard this life on earth as a pilgrim regards the land through which he makes his journey and the inn at which he spends the night; for he does not think of remaining here; here he expects to become neither a citizen nor a mayor.’ Luther’s words now consolidated Kierkegaard’s view of his own position in the world.
Spring finally arrived, and each day the sun rose a little higher in the sky. His old friend Emil Boesen, who had recently left Copenhagen to take up a pastorate in Jutland, married Louise Holtermann in the Church of Our Lady. Emil was keen for him to visit Louise, but he was reluctant. One cool, sunny Thursday beneath the blossoming trees on the ramparts, he quarrelled with Rasmus Nielsen during their weekly walk: in 1849 the philosophy professor had published a big book, which Kierkegaard regarded as ‘a slavish imitation’ that ‘plundered’ his writings and conversations, ‘battled mediocrity with borrowed weapons’, and ‘spoiled the whole thing with all that scholarly apparatus’. Having brooded on this for nearly a year, he decided that Thursday to reprove Nielsen for plagiarizing his work and turning it ‘into a doctrine’, which it was never supposed to be. Nielsen was angry, and a few days later sent a letter ‘renouncing’ their walks. Then the second edition of Martensen’s weighty Christian Dogmatics came out, with a new preface casting shade on Kierkegaard: ‘Each of us possesses the faith only to a certain limited degree, and we must certainly guard against making our own individual, perhaps rather one-sided, perhaps even rather sickly life of faith into a rule for all believers.’
In April 1850 Kierkegaard moved to a cheaper apartment on Nørregade. On Rosenborggade he had lived in six rooms – there was also a kitchen, maid’s room and garret – and paid two hundred rix-dollars per half year; in the Nørregade apartment he had five rooms and the rent was one hundred and forty rix-dollars. His new home came with fresh irritations. ‘In the afternoons I suffer so much from reflected sunlight that I feared at first that I might go blind,’ he wrote in his journal a few weeks after moving in. And the tenant upstairs had a dog which was at home all day long: ‘it lies by an open window and takes an interest in everything. If a man walks past and sneezes unusually loudly, the dog barks and can go on barking for a long time. If a coachman drives past and cracks his whip, it barks; if another dog barks, it also barks. Thus there is not the least little incident in the street that I do not receive in a second edition, thanks to this dog.’ At odds with the world – and its dog – Kierkegaard found solace in Seneca’s letters, Pascal’s Pensées, Montaigne’s essays, Rousseau’s Émile.