2 ‘My Regine!’
2
‘My Regine!’
If he sits facing backwards and draws the little curtain from the window, he sees the miles travelled recede, watches his own journey unfold. He cannot see where the train is going: the landscape only comes into view once he has passed through it. He has come to think that life itself is like this. We have some knowledge of the past, but not of the future – and as for the present, it is continually in motion, always eluding our grasp. ‘It is quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward. This principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with temporal life never being able to be properly understood, precisely because I can at no moment find complete rest to adopt the position: backward.’
He is wearing the engagement ring he gave to Regine Olsen in 1840. After she returned it to him he had it refashioned, the diamonds set in a small cross, and now the ring expresses what his words strive and stretch for: the paradox of remaining true to his love. Kierkegaard changed his mind and betrayed his promise, but his love for Regine is preserved within this symbol of an eternal love that encompasses all flawed, finite loves, and promises to make them whole. Forged from a crisis, this ring is a memento of his hopes and his mistakes; it will not let him forget his fiancée’s tears; it embodies his change of heart. Nevertheless it is the emblem of a single heart, which dedicated itself first to one uncertain future, then to another – to a life with Regine, and then to a life without her.
Looking back from this curious position of simultaneous motion and repose, strangely outside time, Kierkegaard’s own past stretches out before him. Like his future, it is always awaiting him. From this distance the whole of his engagement to Regine comes into view: its confused beginning, its uneasy duration, its fraught ending, its humiliating aftermath.
Kierkegaard’s ring
From the start, this relationship was charged with anxieties about his relationship to the world: should he set himself apart from the world like a hermit or a monk, or plunge into it – chase success, wealth, women; lay claim to the solid ground of a profession, a home, a family? Perhaps it is now becoming clearer that working out how to live in the world is the question at the centre of his philosophy and his life. For Kierkegaard, this question is never simply intellectual or pragmatic: it will always be a spiritual task, inseparable from the question of how to live in relation to God. He already had a sense of this when he met Regine for the first time, six years ago, at the home of his friend Peter Rørdam. Peter, a fellow theology student, had three pretty sisters; Kierkegaard particularly liked Bolette, and had visited the family with the thought of seeing her. As his conversation danced and his wit sparkled, he could feel his power to captivate the Rørdam sisters and their young friend Regine Olsen. That very day he thought of Jesus’s warning, in Mark’s Gospel, about what it profits a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul. That night he wrote the verse in his journal. He saw himself ‘returning to the world’ after being ‘dethroned’ in his ‘inner realm’: it felt like some kind of fall, though whether it was a fall from grace or from his own pride was not easy to know. Was holding himself back from the world a temptation to be resisted, or an ideal to strive for? That was May 1837, just after his twenty-fourth birthday. Regine was a young girl, not yet sixteen, not yet confirmed.
Regine Olsen in 1840
Later that year he recorded in his journal that despite his poor health – he suffered from digestive problems and stomach pains, as well as from melancholy and hypochondria – he had ‘managed to get out to R—’. Loneliness, anxiety about what other people thought of him, and frustration with himself spilled onto the page. ‘My God, why should these feelings awaken just now – how alone I feel! oh, curse that arrogant complacency about standing on one’s own – now everyone will despise me – oh, but you, my God, do not let go of me – let me live and improve myself!’ Since then he often felt this tension within himself, this vacillation, in relation to Regine. And still now, six years later, when all has been decided outwardly, his heart is unresolved. He still has these conflicting desires, still the same impossible hope. Still it seems important to be faithful to her.
After that first meeting at Peter Rørdam’s house, three years passed before Kierkegaard asked Regine to marry him. In that time his father died, and he finally completed his theology degree. He was about to begin his Magister’s dissertation, and coming to a clearer sense of a new philosophical project. In recent decades Kant, Schelling and Hegel had pushed rationality to its limits; theoretical thinking seemed able to go no further. Yet these limits interested Kierkegaard. Where did he encounter the limits of understanding within himself – and where could he go from there? He had learned from Plato that human beings seek the truth because they do not yet possess it; but if they lack knowledge, how do they know how to find it?
When Socrates was asked this question – how can we learn anything at all? – he explained that each person has an eternal soul, which knows eternal truths. When a soul enters a body it forgets its knowledge, and needs to be taught to recollect it. Separated from the truth, we should spend our years in the world searching deep within ourselves to rediscover what we have lost. Kierkegaard thought about this idea during the summer of 1840, not long before he proposed to Regine. That July he wrote in his journal that Plato’s doctrine of recollection is ‘as beautiful as it is profound and valid’ – for ‘how sad it would be if human beings could only find peace in what lay outside themselves.’ In fact the cities of Christendom throbbed and bustled with efforts to accumulate knowledge of the world by scientific experiment, historical research and news reporting, but were these cacophonous investigations drowning out quieter, deeper voices calling for self-understanding, for inner peace?
Plato’s vision of souls recalling their lost knowledge led to questions about how this recollection happens: what kind of education brings young people closer to the truth? Although Hegel’s philosophy – all the rage in Denmark as well as in Germany – also aspired to uncover and articulate an already-implicit truth, Kierkegaard found its methods too theoretical, its aims too worldly: the Hegelians aspired to an encyclopaedic knowledge of global history, of natural science, of different human cultures. Plato’s philosophy was ‘more pious’, ‘even a little mystical’, giving rise to ‘a polemic against the world’. It sought to ‘quieten knowledge of the external world in order to bring about the stillness in which these recollections become audible’.
So perhaps truth could be found by withdrawing from the world. Kierkegaard thought about seeking the silence of the monastery; Copenhagen’s Franciscan friary was dissolved by reformers in 1530, but he could at least try to renounce the idle chatter of the university, which seemed to him just another strain of gossip from the marketplace, only more deluded in its lofty aspirations. Were his own philosophical efforts anything more than a display of intellectual accomplishment in pursuit of worldly status and acclaim? Would those gains in the world mean losses in his soul, as the verse from Mark’s Gospel implied?
And academic ambition was just one way of grasping at what the world had to offer. At that time Kierkegaard was obsessed with Mozart’s Don Giovanni: he saw the opera performed at the theatre many times, and Don Juan, the great seducer, captured his imagination. He wrote in his journal that the opera ‘seized hold of me so diabolically that I can never again forget it – it was this play that drove me out of the quiet night of the cloister.’ If he wished to return to silence and solitude after all these seductions – success, music, love – it would be difficult to do so.
But in another journal entry from July 1840 he sketched out a contrary idea, that human beings do not reach their fulfilment by leaving the world behind. What if we find ourselves in relation to God and in relation to the world all at once, in the same movement? Here Kierkegaard tried out the thought that worldly circumstances, which he summed up by the word ‘finitude’, were the fabric of religious life: ‘I become conscious in my eternal validity, my divine necessity, and in my contingent finitude (that I am this particular being, born in this country, at this time, under the many-faceted influence of all these changing surroundings).’ A human being’s ‘true life’, he suggested, is the ‘apotheosis’ of finitude. This fulfilment is a spiritual elevation, but it ‘does not mean stealing out of finitude to become volatilized and evaporated on the way to heaven, but rather that the divine inhabits the finite and finds its way in it’.
This account of spiritual life was one way of interpreting Christian teachings about how human beings can move towards an eternal truth. While Kierkegaard found in Plato’s philosophy a ‘polemic against the world’, the Christian scriptures taught him that divine truth could be embodied within the world, in a human body. According to the New Testament, Jesus was Christ, the Son of God, who revealed the deep, mysterious power of his Father by ‘inhabiting finitude’, living in the world.
Yet Kierkegaard inherited a religious tradition deeply ambivalent towards the world. The goodness of God’s creation is a fundamental tenet of Christian faith: the Book of Genesis describes how God made the world, and saw that it was good; the New Testament proclaims the ‘good news’ that God’s Word became flesh; the Catholic Church instilled a faith in material sacraments – bread and wine, body and blood – as transmitters of divine grace; Luther brought spirituality into ordinary life with his earthy sensualism and his reforms allowing priests to marry. Alongside this positive view of embodied life persisted a more Platonic strand, entrenched in Christian theology by Augustine, who combined it with St Paul’s doctrine of sin to emphasize the world’s fallenness. According to Augustine, human beings are caught in a dark, troubled time between the first glory of creation and the radiant lights of final redemption. We twist in these shadows, inclining towards evil even as we yearn obscurely for the highest good.
This ambivalence is not just theoretical, but existential: it is a matter of how to live, what to do, who to be. Kierkegaard had to grow up within a world – and within a body – shaped and coloured by conflicting interpretations. If the Christian theology of incarnation showed that the spiritual and material aspects of life belong together, how should he put this into practice? How, for example, could he tell the difference between the yearnings of temptation and vocation? Perhaps he would be able to make this judgement in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight – but what should he do when he felt his desires calling him, and had to choose which to follow? After all, although life might be understood backwards, it must be lived forwards.
Through all these reflections pulsed the question, How to be a human being in the world? The personal and philosophical aspects of this question became entwined and entangled. Where did love for another person, encountered in her own finitude, fit into these movements in and out of the world, back and forth between monastic solitude and the chatter of academic debates or literary salons? Does romantic love belong to the soul, or to the world? If a divine truth really inhabits the fluctuating world of human circumstances, then this could be a false dilemma – for perhaps the soul can find true love as well as true knowledge within its finite, embodied existence. Then worldly life need not be unspiritual: perhaps the soul does not lose itself in the world, but finds itself there.
Would marrying Regine be a way for Kierkegaard to realize this religious ideal – to actually live it out? It may have seemed so, late in the summer of 1840, as he ‘drew closer to her’. He had passed his university exams, travelled out to the west coast of Jutland to visit the village where his father grew up, and then returned to Copenhagen in August. A few weeks later he proposed to Regine, torn between fitful passion and self-conscious detachment:
On 8 September I left home with the firm intention of settling the whole thing. We met on the street just outside their house. She said there was no one at home. I was rash enough to take this as the invitation I needed. I went in with her. There we stood, the two of us alone in the living room. She was a little flustered. I asked her to play something for me as she usually did. She does so but I don’t manage to say anything. Then I suddenly grab the score, close it not without a certain vehemence, throw it onto the piano and say: ‘Oh! What do I care for music, it’s you I want, I have wanted you for two years.’ She kept silent. As it happens, I had taken no steps to persuade her, I had even warned her against me, against my melancholy. And when she mentioned a relationship with Schlegel, I said: ‘Let that relationship be a parenthesis for I have first priority.’ She mostly kept silent. Finally I left because I was anxious in case someone should come and see the two of us, with her so flustered. I went straightaway to her father. I was terribly afraid of having come on too strongly, and also that my visit might somehow occasion a misunderstanding, even damage her reputation. Her father said neither yes nor no, but it was easy to see he was well enough disposed. I asked for an appointment and got one for the afternoon of the 10th. Not a single word did I say to persuade her – she said yes.
But Regine’s ‘yes’ did not resolve Kierkegaard’s spiritual uncertainties. In fact, it seemed to exacerbate them. Just a few days later they met by chance on the street, and Regine did not recognize her fiancé at first: he had developed a ‘melancholia’ so intense that his appearance was quite altered. When they spent time together following their engagement he often wept, ‘beside himself with sorrow and self-accusation’. Regine’s father suffered from depression, so Kierkegaard’s condition was familiar to her. She hoped to help him overcome it; she listened as he described his grief over the death of his father ‘whom he had loved so much’, his distress at being an inadequate son.
Yet Kierkegaard’s depression was mixed with – maybe even caused by – worry that the engagement was a mistake. Perhaps he brooded on past sadnesses about his father to divert himself, or Regine, or both of them, from the grief that lay ahead. Soon after he proposed to Regine he started to write his dissertation on Socratic and Romantic irony. His friend Emil Boesen, who had studied theology with him, saw that he was beginning to understand more clearly ‘what he himself wanted to do and what his abilities were’.
Always intensely aware of how others perceived him, Kierkegaard knew that marrying Regine would be more than a commitment to love, honour and protect her. Marriage was a public act that required him to occupy specific social roles – husband, father, head of a family – and to take up a profession. As a theology graduate, Kierkegaard would become a pastor or an academic theologian: a conventional religious teacher, and a paid official of the State Church. His life would be understood – it would be measured and judged – according to a well-established way of being in the world, shaped by a precise configuration of duties, customs, expectations.
Kierkegaard did not disparage these things. On the contrary, he wondered whether he was capable of them, and he feared the intimacy of marriage. And as the months went by he saw another kind of life open out ahead of him: he could become a writer instead of a husband. He could live on his inheritance from his father, give himself over to the philosophical task taking shape within him, let writing fill his existence. He could stand conspicuously on the margins of society, set himself at odds with it, call its assumptions into question, and allow his persistent sense of being an outsider to express itself in the world. He could become the Socrates of Christendom! And he could not subject Regine to the consequences of all this.
They were engaged for just over a year. They saw one another often, and frequently exchanged letters. Kierkegaard would send Regine notes by a messenger, arranging to visit her at home or offering to meet her after her music lesson; he wrote longer letters, poetic and affectionate, always addressed to ‘My Regine!’ and signed ‘Your S.K.’ or ‘Yours eternally, S. K.’ Often these letters accompanied a small gift: a rose, a violet heliotrope, a scarf, a handkerchief. Once he sent her a bottle of lily of the valley cologne – he loved this delicate white lily, the symbol of innocence that ‘conceals itself so prettily within its big leaf’, and the flower of May, the month of his birth. Regine sent Kierkegaard wildflowers, an embroidered lettercase, and a decorated box that, he assured her, ‘is not used for tobacco but rather serves as a sort of temple archive’. On Regine’s nineteenth birthday, in January 1841, he sent her a pair of candlesticks and promised to call on her later that day with another birthday present.
Letter from Kierkegaard to Regine, no date, sent with a scarf
Each week Kierkegaard read aloud to Regine the sermons of Bishop Mynster, Denmark’s most influential preacher and churchman. She tried to cheer him up by playing the piano for him: ‘Although your playing may not be perfect in the artistic sense,’ he wrote to her, ‘in this you will, regardless, succeed. David was able to banish Saul’s black mood, and yet I have never heard that he was a particularly great artist. I imagine it was his young, joyful, fresh spirit that helped so much, and you possess yet something more – a love for which nothing is impossible.’
In one letter Kierkegaard told Regine that her love ‘rescued’ and ‘liberated’ him:
Know that every time you repeat that you love me from the deepest recesses of your soul, it is as though I heard it for the first time, and just as a man who owned the whole world would need a lifetime to survey his splendours, so I also seem to need a lifetime to contemplate all the riches contained in your love. Know that every time you solemnly assure me that you always love me equally well, both when I am happy and when I am sad – most when I am sad – because you know that sorrow is divine nostalgia and that everything good in a man is sorrow’s child – know that then you are rescuing a soul from Purgatory.
Another letter to Regine was inspired by his reading of Plato’s Symposium, which portrayed lovers as continually, restlessly desiring their beloved. Love never says, ‘Now I am safe, now I will settle down,’ wrote Kierkegaard, ‘but runs on forever … And what would even heavenly bliss be without wishing?’ He quoted the Romantic poet Josef von Eichendorff, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the Gospel of Matthew, and ended the letter with an extravagant – yet subjunctive – declaration: ‘If I dared to wish, then I certainly know what I would wish for. And that wish is identical with my deepest convictions: that neither Death, nor Life, nor Principalities, nor Powers, nor the Present, nor that which is to come, nor the Exalted, nor the Profound, nor any other creature may tear me from you, or you from me.’
Yet Kierkegaard was tearing himself away from Regine. By the summer of 1841 he had resolved to break off their engagement; he tried in August, but she begged him to stay with her. He described this time as ‘fearfully painful – having to be so cruel, and loving her as I did’. The romance became a battlefield, the lovers adversaries. As late summer darkened into autumn Kierkegaard changed his tactics, feigning indifference to push Regine to end the engagement, but ‘she fought like a lioness: if I had not believed there was divine opposition to the engagement she would have won.’ Then he told Regine directly that she should break it off, so that he could take on her humiliation; ‘she would have none of it, she answered that if she could bear the rest she could probably bear that too.’
Kierkegaard’s niece Henriette Lund, who was then about twelve years old, visited Regine in that summer of 1841. Henriette felt a ‘sense of foreboding’ when she left the Olsens’ house: ‘Regine was just as loving as always, but it seemed to me that I noticed clouds in the skies that had previously been so bright. When we said goodbye, she followed me through the yard out to the Slotsholm side, where the canal had not yet been filled in at that time, and I remember how surprised I was at coming out of the shade and into the bright bath of light, where the sun played on the water. Here we once again said farewell, and for a long time afterward I could see her at the same spot in the clear sunshine with her hand over her eyes, nodding a last greeting to me – how definitively it was to be “the last” we did not know then, and yet I returned home with a feeling of something sad in the air.’
On 11 October Kierkegaard finally broke off the engagement. Still he had to struggle: Regine’s father asked him to reconsider, for she was ‘in despair, utterly desperate’. He felt moved by the humility with which this proud man, a Councillor of State, pleaded with him for the sake of his daughter, but he refused to change his mind. He visited Regine the following day and tried again to explain himself. She ‘took out a small note on which there was something written by me which she used to carry in her breast; she took it out and quietly tore it into small pieces and said: “So after all, you have played a terrible game with me.”’
A few days later Henriette Lund went with her brothers to visit her uncle Søren, who was staying at the Kierkegaard family home – a grand four-storey townhouse in the centre of Copenhagen, where his brother Peter Christian then lived with his new wife. ‘When we children from Gammeltorv arrived there that evening,’ remembered Henriette:
Uncle Søren immediately arrived to take us in to his apartment. He appeared much moved, and instead of his usual playfulness he kissed my hair so gently that I was quite touched. After a moment he wanted to speak to us, but instead broke into a violent fit of weeping, and without really knowing what there was to cry about – at least this was the case for me – but simply carried along by his suffering, we soon were all sobbing as if burdened with a heavy sorrow. Uncle Søren quickly pulled himself together, however, and he told us that one day soon he would leave for Berlin, perhaps to stay away for quite a while. We therefore had to promise to write to him frequently, because he would be anxious to hear how each of us was doing. With many tears, we promised.
The break-up, like the engagement, soon become a public affair, and for both Kierkegaard and Regine the pain of separation was deepened by wounded pride. Regine had fallen from expectant bride to rejected lover – probably destined to be a spinster, for who would want to marry her now? Kierkegaard appeared to be either a cad who had carelessly led a young woman astray, or a feeble, irresolute fool who, though twenty-eight years old and a Master of Theology, still did not know his own mind. ‘It was an insulting break,’ wrote his nephew Troels Frederik Lund, ‘which not only called forth curiosity and gossip but also absolutely required that every decent person take the side of the injured party … here at home harsh judgements were unanimously voiced against him. Disapproval, anger, and shame were as strong among those closest to him as anywhere.’
On 25 October 1841, two weeks after the engagement ended, Kierkegaard boarded a Prussian mailboat to Kiel and travelled on to Berlin – philosophy’s promised land, the intellectual capital of Christendom. Hegel had held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Berlin through the 1820s, his final decade, and now Hegel’s old rival Schelling was there, lecturing to audiences from all over Europe. On that first visit Kierkegaard stayed in Berlin for nearly five months, continued his philosophical studies, nursed his battered dignity, and wrote several hundred pages of Either/Or.
He returned to Copenhagen in the spring of 1842 and carried on writing. The finished book is a voluminous collection of disparate texts – letters, essays, a sermon, and a lengthy ‘Seducer’s Diary’ – attributed to at least four fictitious authors, converging on the theme of romantic love and marriage. The most scandalous voice is that of the seducer, Johannes, who chronicles in minute detail and elegant prose his pursuit of a young girl, Cordelia – not to be confused with Regine’s sister Cornelia. Johannes’s story begins with obsessive stalking through the streets and lanes of Copenhagen, then develops into an intricate, manipulative courtship, and closes with the ambiguous ending of the affair. ‘In my attack, I am beginning to close in on her gradually, to shift into a more direct attack,’ he records during the early phase of his seduction: ‘If I were to indicate this change on my military map of the family, I would say: I have turned my chair so that I am now turned sideways toward her. I am involved with her more; I address her, elicit her response. Her soul has passion, intensity, and, without being brought to the point of oddity by vain and foolish reflections, she has a need for the unusual. My irony over the foolishness of people, my ridicule of their cowardliness, of their tepid torpidity, captivate her.’ A little later, he reflects that ‘I shall very likely manage things in such a way that it is she herself who breaks the engagement … To poeticize oneself into a girl is an art; to poeticize oneself out of her is a masterstroke … I am intoxicated with the thought that she is in my power. Pure, innocent womanliness, as transparent as the sea, and yet just as deep, with no idea of love! But now she is going to learn what a powerful force love is.’ His diary includes anguished letters from the young girl, written after her heart has been broken:
Never will I call you ‘my Johannes’, for I certainly realize that you have never been that, and I am punished harshly enough for having once been gladdened in my soul by this thought, and yet I do call you ‘mine’: my seducer, my deceiver, my enemy, my murderer, the source of my unhappiness, the tomb of my joy, the abyss of my unhappiness. I call you ‘mine’ and call myself ‘yours’, and as it once flattered your ear, proudly inclined to my adoration, so shall it now sound as a curse upon you, a curse for all eternity … Yours I am, yours, yours, your curse.
Kierkegaard still sees this book as, in part, a continuation of his attempt to feign callous indifference to Regine, to persuade her that she was better off without him. He cannot admit, of course, that its theatrical sequence of masks and subterfuges was assembled from the wreckage of his pride, and that the Seducer’s Byronic bravado, like his bold and ingenious philosophical arguments, did more to protest his own virility than to console Regine.
In February 1843 Either/Or was published by Carl Andreas Reitzel, who sold books by some of Copenhagen’s most notable writers – Hans Christian Andersen, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Frederik Christian Sibbern, and the anonymous author of A Story of Everyday Life. Yet Kierkegaard did not place himself among these eminent authors: Either/Or appeared in Reitzel’s bookshops bearing the name of a fictitious editor, Victor Eremita. The choice of pseudonym – ‘Conquering Hermit’ or ‘Solitary Victor’ – seemed to celebrate a return to the cloister, but Kierkegaard remains ambivalent towards the ‘monastic movement’ of detachment from the world. True faith, he has realized, is not simply devotion to God, but faith in the world as a gift of God. This thought has preoccupied him in Berlin during this short second visit. If he’d had this faith – then he would have married Regine.
During their break-up, she said ‘in her agony’ that she would thank him her whole life if she could stay with him and live in a little cupboard in his house. In memory of those words, he has had a tall cabinet made from rosewood to his own design, with no shelves, like an upright coffin. This cupboard does not, thankfully, contain Regine – but it contains her absence. In it he carefully keeps ‘everything reminiscent of her’, including two copies of Either/Or, specially printed on vellum – ‘one for her, and one for me’.
He is summoned from his recollections as the forests north of Eberswalde give way to open land: from the window of his carriage he suddenly sees, to the east, a crown of thorns rising from a field. It is a large pond encircled by sharp, stunted, leafless trees. He leans forward; it is gone in a moment, then a lake shines in the sunlight. And now the train slows and the modest spires of Angermünde come into view. Kierkegaard must surrender his solitude to the other passengers descending here, and those waiting for them on the platform. Once more he is in the world: he becomes again this slight, lopsided figure, limping a little as he walks, his stature heightened a few inches by the crest of hair swept up above his forehead. To those who look more closely he becomes again this pale intelligent face, above all these remarkable blue eyes, ‘deep and soulful’, shining with ‘a mixture of good nature and malice’., He puts on his hat, takes up his cane, grips his bag, and continues on his journey home.