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SØREN KIERKEGAARD was born in Copenhagen on the 5th of May 1813. Both on his father's and his mother's side he was of Jutlandish descent. His father came from a poor moorland farm in a small village in West Jutland, about 10 miles from Ringkøbing. As a boy he was made to watch the sheep on the heath and suffered cold and hardship. But at the age of 12 years he was sent to Copenhagen to live with a maternal uncle who was a prosperous tradesman. Here he received an education and established himself in his 24th year. He made his way with astonishing rapidity and was able to retire from business at the age of 40 and spend the rest of his life as a wealthy man of leisure. He did not die until he had reached his 82nd year, in 1838. At that time his son Søren was 25 years old.

His mother, too, came from a Jutland moorland region, where her father was a smallholder. She was the senior Kierkegaard's second wife and mother of all his seven children. She first came to the house as a servant girl, but married her husband not much more than a year after the death of his first wife. While Søren Kierkegaard, time and time again, makes mention of his father, who was the overwhelming influence in his life, he speaks of his mother hardly at all. She has been described by other people as a kind, cheerful, motherly woman. It would seem that the lighter side of Søren Kierkegaard's nature was inherited from her. She died in 1934, when Søren was 21.

Søren Kierkegaard was the youngest of the family of seven. When he was born his father was 56 and his mother 45, and he often called himself a child of old age. The patriarchal, self-willed father dominated the home. He was a highly gifted man, self-taught, but well-read, and much occupied with spiritual matters. His religious denomination was the pietistic Herrnhuter 'fraternity'. He had a sombre view of life and brought up his children to a strict form of Christianity, which particularly emphasized the sufferings of Christ. He suffered from periodic attacks of depression, awareness of sin and scrupulosity. He especially doubted the salvation of his soul.

There is no doubt that it was from his father that Søren Kierkegaard inherited the deepest layers of his personality, the periodic depressions that weighed him down, as well as the outstanding powers of thought, both the penetrating dialectic intelligence and the passionate imagination. In 'The Viewpoint of My Authorship' Kierkegaard writes in a purely biographical vein:

"As a child I was strictly and earnestly brought up to Christianity, humanly speaking, insanely brought up: even in my earliest childhood I had been overstrained by impressions which were laid upon me by the melancholy old man who was himself oppressed by them -- a child, insanely travestied as a melancholy old man."

Elsewhere is written: "I owe everything to my father from the very start. When he, melancholy as he was, saw me looking sad, he would say, 'See that you duly love Jesus Christ.'"

It was particularly the suffering Christ that the father presented to the child. His son says that from boyhood upwards he was brought up to the view that the truth must suffer and be derided and scorned. He mentions as well the indignation he had felt from childhood because, long before he had experienced it himself, he had learned that the world was ruled by lies, meanness and injustice. "Even as a small child I was told, as solemnly as possible: that everyone spat at Christ (who, indeed, was the truth), that the multitude (those who passed by) spat at him and said: 'Shame on you.' I have kept this deep in my heart. This thought is my life." So it was. The picture of Christ which his father impressed on the boy's mind remained with him throughout his life as the dominating experience. In several places Kierkegaard wrote that the overwhelming impression of Christ made in his childhood 'humanly speaking' made him intensely miserable. "It was all connected with the relationship with my father, the person I have loved most -- and what does that mean? It means thzt he is just the person who makes one miserable -- but out of love. His fault lay not in lack of love, but in confusing an old man with a child." But 'religiously speaking' in the long run he was grateful to his father."From him I learnt what paternal affection means, and thus I was given the concept of divine paternal love, the only thing in life which is firm and unshakable, the true Archimedean point."

In 1830 at the age of 17, Søren Kierkegaard passed his matriculation examination with flying colours and began at once to read theology. Very little is known about his first years as a. student, but from about 1834 begin the first of his youthful notes that have been preserved. They show that he was reading very widely in the spheres of theology, philosophy and aesthetics. He was particularly interested in German theology, in German idealistic philosophy and romantic aesthetic literature.

Then she said to me: Forgive me for what I have done to you. I answered: It was I, after all, who should ask that. She said: Promise to think of me. I did so. She said: Kiss me. I did -- but without passion. Merciful God!
(Søren Kierkegaard)

In 1840 he became engaged to a eighteen-year-old girl of the Copenhagen upper classes, named Regine Olsen, whom he had known and felt drawn to for a year or more. Scarcely, however, had the engagement taken place when he began to have scruples. To quote the journals: "On the second day (after the engagement) I saw I had been wrong. Penitent that I was -- my vita ante acta, my melancholy -- that was enough!"

Kierkegaard realized, in short, that he could not overcome his melancholy, and he felt unable to confide in the girl what he believed to be its causes. The figure of his father barred the way; and the tragedy of the family curse was a thing that could not be revealed. He was thrown back upon himself and his solitude, and was incapable of "realizing the universal" -- that is to say, incapable of human relationships, of opening his mind to others, or even of taking Church office, as he had often intended but never did.

Two months later he had made up his mind that he would not be justified in attaching this light-hearted girl to himself, and perhaps making her unhappy by his melancholy. Yet a broken engagement was in those days a serious matter, which could reflect unfavourably on the woman in particular. To save Regine, Kierkegaard therefore decided to take all the blame on himself, and in such a way that it would be clear to everyone that it was she who had broken off the engagement, and could hardly do otherwise. So for several months he played the part of an irresponsible philanderer, noisily showing off in public and seeking by every means to turn appearances against himself.

In this he succeeded, except in the eyes of Regine, who saw through him and refused to accept the breach. The affair thus became doubly distressing for both of them. When the break was a fact, Kierkegaard wrote in his journals: "When the bond broke, my feeling was: Either you plunge into wild dissipation, or absolute religiosity -- of a sort different from the parson's melange."

He chose the latter. But at the same time he chose something else: he chose authorship. It was in November 1841 that he broke definitively with Regine. Two weeks later he travelled to Berlin (the only place abroad that he ever saw, and that he visited three times), so as to escape from the scene of these agonizing experiences. And there he began to write. It came over him like a torrent, driving him ceaselessly on during the next ten years -- the most concentrated period of output ever displayed by a Danish author, and surely one of the most compact in world literature.

Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven) and The Repetition (Gentagelsen). Both are in the form, so characteristic of him, which lies mid-way between imaginative literature and philosophy, and in which the ideas he is grappling with are presented in clear essence. The idea he is chiefly concerned with in b The year of his real debut was 1843. Before that he had written only a few occasional pamphlets and his University thesis, On the Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates (Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Sokrates; 1841). Now, in 1843, he published no fewer than six books, of which the first is the longest he ever wrote. It is significantly entitled Either/Or (Enten-Eller); and it leads us straight into the world of Kierkegaard's thought. An "either/or" confronts us with a choice, and it is Kierkegaard's meaning to force the reader into making a decision. He must decide how he wants to live out his life, instead of simply drifting passively down the river of life. So in Either/Or Kierkegaard sets out two ways of life, which he calls the "aesthetic" and the "ethical". To "aesthetic", however, he gives a different meaning from the one that we usually give to it; he means the immediate and sensory that is every man's starting point in life. In the first part of his work he shows us a variety of aesthetic lives and types, from the lowest, which is sensory and nothing but sensory, as exemplified in the figure of Don Juan, to the man who has realized the emptiness of a purely aesthetic life, yet who nevertheless clings desperately to it, well knowing that it can lead only to despair.

But why does a life on the aesthetic plane lead only to despair? Because, in Kierkegaard's opinion, man has within him something else, which will not be satisfied by a sensory life. This something else is the eternal. Man, he believes, is made up of diverse and opposing parts. He is, he says, a synthesis of body and spirit, of temporal and eternal, of finite and infinite, of necessity and freedom. It is characteristic of the aesthetic, however, that it overemphasizes one side of the synthesis: the corporeal, the temporal, the finite, and the necessary. Yet the other side is none the less there; and it continually makes itself felt by an anxiety, "a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy", which alarms and attracts at the same time. The term which best describes this call of the spirit in the sensory world, Kierkegaard finds, is "dread" (angst). Thus dread is an indication that man has the eternal within him. Without the eternal there would be no dread. But the man who has felt the dread within, and who yet obstinately persists in an existence in the sensory sphere will end in despair. On these twin concepts, of dread and despair, Kierkegaard wrote two of his most inspired books: The Concept of Dread (Begrebet Angest; 1844) and The Sickness unto Death (Sygdommen til Døden; 1849). These two books are psychological essays, but in Either/Or the same themes are treated in situations of imaginative literature, from the introductory Diapsalmata (aphorisms), in which the alternating moods of the aesthetic man find expression, through examples taken from literature, such as Don Juan, Antigone, and characters from the plays of Scribe, to invented figures like "the unhappiest" and John the Seducer. Together they form a gallery of characters ranging from the immediately sensory, who in a sense is innocent just because of his immediacy, because, in other words, he does not reflect very much on what he does, to the reflecting seducer, who has thought everything out and really acts in defiance and despair.

But the man who through the call of despair has felt the inadequacy of a life in the aesthetic sphere, and who does not, in defiance and despair, remain in it, is mature enough to choose something else and enter into the ethical sphere. This is indicated by the fact that the eternal has asserted its claims on the man, who not only accepts it but believes in the possibility of realizing the ethical claims in the temporal, in the sensory world. Such a man is the ethicist who writes long letters to a friend who is an aestheticist, in the second part of Either/Or. The ethicist is a fighter and an optimist, who feels that he is fighting for a good cause and has no doubt that he will have the strength to convince his friends and the whole world what is the good. He will not deny life in the aesthetic sphere, but feels sure that it is possible to unite the two points of view in a kind of synthesis. Not without reason, one of the chapters in the second part of Either/Or is confidently headed: "On the balance between the aesthetic and the ethical in the development of personality".

That, no doubt, is what Kierkegaard himself felt at that time. Having been strongly attracted to the aesthetic in its more refined forms, he doubtless still hoped that it would be possible to find some kind of synthesis between the two worlds. It is true that he himself had abdicated, having renounced Regine and thus the possibility of his ever marrying. But he had neither abandoned his connection with the world altogether, nor the hope that all in one way or another would be for the best.

He was unexpectedly confirmed in this hope one Sunday in the spring of 1843, when, leaving Vor Frue Church in Copenhagen, he chanced to meet Regine, who also came out from church. She nodded to him. That was all; but he was intensely moved. So she was not ill disposed to him; and she did not consider him a cheat! All manner of ideas began to revolve in Kierkegaard's brain, suggesting that perhaps they could come together in some form of spiritual marriage, unsullied by the lusts of the flesh.

But at first he avoided any contact and went off again to Berlin in order to work undisturbed. There he wrote two books, Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven) and The Repetition (Gentagelsen). Both are in the form, so characteristic of him, which lies mid-way between imaginative literature and philosophy, and in which the ideas he is grappling with are presented in clear essence. The idea he is chiefly concerned with in both is faith, though in very different ways. In Fear and Trembling he again considers the relationship with Regine: a relationship which obsesses him because of an understandable sense of guilt. The chief protagonist in this short book is Abraham, who was ready to sacrifice his own child at God's command. Kierkegaard's father had sacrificed his child -- or at any rate its happiness -- for God in the same way; and he had been ready to sacrifice Regine for the same reason. In his own case, it had meant that he had sacrificed what was most precious to him in this world; he had renounced.

But Abraham had been restrained at the last moment, and after he had shown absolute obedience to God had been given back his child. And applying this experience to his own personal case, Kierkegaard realized the connection: if Abraham had his son returned to him, while he had to renounce his relations with Regine, it was because Abraham had understood the deepest meaning of absolute obedience to the absolute. That is what we call faith; and in faith lies the conviction that for God all things are possible. It follows that the man who has faith does not need to renounce. The man who renounces proves in doing so that he lacks faith; or, as Kierkegaard says in the entry in the journals dated May 1843, that is to say, at the time he was working on Fear and Trembling: "If I had had faith I should have kept to Regine." And he adds: "Faith, therefore, has hope of this life as well, but only by virtue of the absurd, not because of human reason; otherwise it would be mere worldly wisdom, not faith." In fact, he now sees that at the time when he believed a marriage to be impossible and renounced it he should have had faith, when he would have been filled with the conviction that for God all things are possible, even, against all reason, the ability to make an impossible marriage possible; and in that belief he should have remained true to Regine. This idea he sets down philosophically in what he terms "the double movement of infinity", which consists in first breaking with finiteness but being then enabled, through religion, to recover it. Thus it is possible to make life in this world compatible with life in God after all. Renunciation brings man into a negative relationship with the world, but faith brings him back into a positive relationship with it.

This whole chain of reasoning can be said to have been suggested by the nod which Regine allowed herself when she happened to meet her former fiance one Sunday morning as they were both leaving church. The consequence, as he saw it, was the renewed possibility of achieving a marriage, in one way or another, and in one form or another; a consequence, be it noted, of the absurd, by which he means by virtue of a logic outside the reach of human comprehension and therefore, to human eyes, absurd or paradoxical.

The paradoxical aspect of religion may also entail that religion, in certain situations, can conflict with ethical demands and so appear immoral. God's commandment to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac was requiring him to act like a murderer; and when Kierkegaard was obliged to break with Regine this was contrary to the ordinary view of ethics. These are the problems Kierkegaard discusses in Fear and Trembling, in the chapter which carries the rather involved heading: "Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical; that is to say, are there situations in which a man can be forced to disregard ethical demands for a higher authority?" Kierkegaard answers this question in the affirmative; and it is in just this that the paradoxical character of religion is made plain, since it can lead to demands which, from the point of view of ordinary ethics, are unethical.

We should remember, however, that it is a question of a suspension, not an abolition of the ethical, and suspension is temporary. So he says: "What is suspended is not lost, but is preserved in the higher function that is its telos, its purpose." The ethical thus asserts itself as the basis of human life, lifting it out of the aesthetic sphere and bringing it into harmony with the claims of the universal, which in turn are a reflection of the religious claims.

But then comes the question of why some people are placed in such a situation by God that they have to act in a way which must bring them -- if only temporarily -- into conflict with ethics. And who are they? They are the people who, whether by a judgment of God or by guilt, have got outside the universal, the ethical. That guilt puts a man outside the ethical is selfevident, guilt being by definition a breach with the universal or ethical. The judgment of God is another matter, for it signifies that there are men whom God has chosen for a special mission, and who cannot, therefore, be measured by the same yardstick as others.

The man who puts himself by guilt outside the universal -- as indeed all men do -- can bring himself back within the claims of ethics only by virtue of the absurd; in other words, by the faith that for God all things are possible. But he cannot achieve this without first learning to renounce. For, rightly considered, guilt consists in clinging to this world and setting it above the kingdom of God; that is to say, by committing oneself absolutely to the relative and relatively to the absolute. Hence it is an essential requirement that one should first learn to renounce and be willing to abjure the things of this world; and then, since for God nothing is impossible, it is possible that by virtue of faith in God's omnipotence, which can accomplish what to the human mind is impossible and therefore absurd, one will recover a positive relationship to this world. Faith in the absurd, in other words, is the same as the double movement of infinity.

The Repetition is in every sense an extension of Fear and Trembling. The concept of repetition is, of course, nothing else but the double movement of infinity, by virtue of which one repeats, or recovers, the world, after first making the negative movement of renunciation. Yet the two books are not alike. The Repetition treats faith psychologically. It is, as its sub-title says, "an essay in experimental psychology". As so often in Kierkegaard, we see things through the eyes of an observer, and this observer is a man interested in the problems but not personally involved: a cool, rather ironic, occasionally somewhat cynical philosopher o f life who is uncommitted to religion, let alone Christianity.

Such a man is the pseudonymous character, Constantine Constantius, who tells the story. The young man who experiences a love affair resembles Kierkegaard to a hair. And the love affair resembles, to a hair, the one that he suffered. The book's present form is not, however, the original one, and we do not know for certain how the first version ended. From a few hints in the journals we may conjecture that it ended with the suicide of the young man in love, probably because he felt unable to honour the claims of a relationship initiated by himself. Thus where Kierkegaard broke off and went away, his alter ego committed suicide. These are two different ways of solving the conflict: the conflict which consists in neither person being capable of making the double movement of infinity.

In its present form, however, the book has quite another end- ing, and for a good reason, one which is connected with Kierkegaard's own experience. We must remember that the new phase in his production had been set in motion by the little en- counter outside the church, when Regine had nodded to him, filling his mind with ideas which both alarmed him and made him deepen his concept of faith and visualize it in the double movement of infinity, while maintaining its intangibility in the form of paradox. When can a smile and a nod have had so many consequences?

But returning to Copenhagen from Berlin, with two manuscripts ready for the press, Kierkegaard was staggered to learn that Regine had become engaged. She was engaged to the young man, Fritz Schlegel, who had been paying her his attentions before Kierkegaard had come into her life, and with whom she had become reconciled. To Kierkegaard this meant that all he had envisaged after that fateful nod, all the dreams he had dreamt of some spiritual marriage between them, or at least mutual loyalty, married or unmarried, and the whole system of thought which had crystallized like a pearl in the mussel-shell of the smile had proved vain and futile. His world seemed to crumble and turn to dust at his feet. He would make a laughing-stock of himself if he were now to publish his new book, in which the hero commits suicide from disappointed love -- because his own loved one had become engaged to another, as the ending of The Repetition would of course be maliciously misinterpreted. He promptly tore up the last seven or eight pages of his manuscript (it may even have been set up in type) and at top speed wrote a new conclusion, in which we learn that the girl has married another, and in which the hero, instead of taking his life, triumphantly exclaims:

"I am myself again; here I have the repetition; I understand all, and life seems finer to me now than ever... I am myself again; the machinery has been started up. Cut are the meshes I was ensnared in; broken is the spell that had bewitched me, so that I could not return to myself... It is over; my skiff is afloat. The next minute I shall be back to where my soul hankered, where ideas surge with elemental fury... where a man ventures his life every mo- ment, every moment loses it and regains it. I belong to the idea. When it beckons me, I follow it and when it makes an appointment I wait days and nights; there none calls me to dinner, there none waits with supper. When the idea calls I leave everything; or rather, I have nothing to leave; I betray no-one, I grieve noone by being true; my spirit is not grieved by having to grieve another. When I return home, no-one reads in my look; noone questions my appearance; no-one demands of my manner an explanation, which I cannot even give anyone, of whether I am blissfully happy or deep in misery, whether I have gained life or lost it. The cup of intoxication is handed back to me again. Already I breathe in its fragrance; already I sense its effervescent music. But first a libation for her who saved my soul, which lay in the solitude of despair: praise be to womanly magnanimity! Long live the flight of thought; long live danger in the service of the idea; long live the hardship of combat; long live the jubilation of victory; longe live the dance in the whirl of the infinite; long live the wave that hides me in the abyss; long live the wave that hurls me up above the stars."

This ecstatic outburst which Kierkegaard substitutes for the tragic ending was meant as his reply to criticism. He would be no ludicrous, piti ful fool. On the other hand, the world might gain the impression, if it liked, that Regine's engagement came as a relief to him. The reality, his true reactions to the news, can be gleaned from his journals, where, after first hearing the news, he fumes with rage and scorn for the girl who had once cried "It will be my death," and who yet, two years later, lived happily on, in the arms of another man.

Nevertheless in the young man's ecstatic outburst there is more truth, more of Kierkegaard's own inmost being, than he was aware of when he set down these words. For what the young man says, that he can now feel free of all human interests and can therefore devote himself unreservedly to the idea, i.e., to his philosophical and artistic work: that was precisely the impulse which, deepest down, forced the break with Regine, as he was later to realize. The break and its final consummation in Regine's engagement, shattering every dream of a marriage of the spirit, had floated his skiff; except that it was no skiff, but a mighty liner, which now headed, under full sail, for the ocean of philosophy and literature.

The next few years, indeed, were to witness his most intense period of production and the most brilliant successes of his creative art.

Fear and Trembling and The Repetition appeared together in October 1843. In the same way, in June 1844, with only four days between them, Kierkegaard published the two books Philosophical Scraps; or a Scrap of Philosophy (Filosofiske Smuler eller en Smule Filosofi), "by Johannes Climacus, edited by S. Kierkegaard", and The Concept of Dread, "a simple psychological-demonstrative reflection regarding the dogmatic problem of original sin, by Vigilius Haufniensis".

The many pseudonyms can seem like an affectation but indicate a deliberate strategy, by which Kierkegaard aims to avoid teaching or preaching; nor can the opinions expressed in his books always be definitely ascribed to him. When a work like Philosophical Scraps is described as "edited by S. Kierkegaard", we may be sure that it is to a special degree an expression of his own thoughts; but only in those cases where he is shown, not as editor, but as author of the work in question, can the opinions in it be ascribed to him with certainty. This applies, on the whole, only to the many collections of sermons which he published between the literary and philosophical works.

Philosophical Scraps is an attempt to elucidate Christianity. It is, in other words, a work of dogmatics, though, to be sure, a work of an altogether undogmatic character. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that it is an attempt to present Christianity as it should be if it is to have any meaning. Here Kierkegaard's ideas on the paradox as adumbrated in Fear and Trembling come to full flower, because Christ's incarnation is itself a paradox; partly because it means the appearance of the infinite in time, which no human mind can compass, and partly because God, as guiltless, must be absolutely different from man, whose destiny lies in falsehood, since he lives in sin.

The Concept of Dread is concerned with sexuality, taken as the constituent element in the concept of original sin. This extraordinarily penetrating work, perhaps the first work of depth-psychology in existence, is based on the previously mentioned concept of man as a synthesis of soul and body, temporal and eternal, freedom and necessity; and dread is the feeling which grips and dominates the man whose synthesis is threatened by the fact that one aspect of it -- the body, the temporal and the necessary -- is gaining control. Dread is thus a warning voice, though it can be, as well, a temptation to new sin; for, as Kierkegaard says, in words which anticipate Freud's view in Das Ich und das Es, and in Uber das Schuldgefiihl, "Man is not conscious of guilt because he sins, but sins because he is conscious of guilt."

The man who, through the voice of dread, has realized the inadequacy of the aesthetic, sensory sphere has reached the maturity to choose something else and enter the ethical sphere. This is marked by the assertion of its claims by the eternal. But as was the case in the aesthetic sphere, so in the ethical: we rnust distinguish between different stages. At its lowest stage man still believes that he can, alone, meet the requirements of eternity in the world of time. At its highest stage, the ethical man has discovered how little he can achieve by his own endeavours. The man who has realized this has become mature enough to cross from the ethical to the religious sphere, which is based on this very recognition of the inadequacy of human endeavour.

This idea, which had been implicit in all the previous publications from Either/Or onward, dominates the next major work, Stages on Life's Way (Stadier paa Livets Vej; 1845), a voluminous book that is perhaps Kierkegaard's maturest artistic achievement. In a way it reiterates the idea of Either/Or, just as the title is a variation on that of the debut book; but with the vital difference that in the new work the religious stage, as a logical consequence of the ideas embodied in the former works exposing the impotence of human ethics, is separated into a special stage.

Stages on Life's Way, a work of art, and perhaps the maturist expression of Kierkegaard's ideas, is a major work in Danish literature. Before seeing it through the press, however, he was already at work on yet another great book, this time a work of philosophy, and nothing less than a reckoning with the predominant contemporary school of philosophy, Hegelianism, which he feared and opposed with all his energy, because it represented a backward step towards paganism and saw the whole development of the world as a manifestation of a necessary logical -- or as they said then, dialectical -- process, with Christianity an inferior part. Had Hegel's system been anti-Christian it would not have given such great offence to Kierkegaard; but just because it accepted Christianity and incorporated it in the system it was dangerous, and in the great work with the singular title oncluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Scraps (Afsluttende uvidenskabeligt Efterskrift til de filosofiske Smuler), of 1846, he settles accounts with Hegel's doctrine or system. It is probably the wittiest philosophical work ever written.

In the first place, Kierkegaard attacks Hegel's tendency to systematize the whole of existence, declaring that a system of existence cannot be constructed since existence is incomplete and constantly developing. Likewise, he attacks Hegel's confusion of two things which are entirely unconnected: namely, logic and existence. Hegel had endeavoured to introduce mobility into logic; Kierkegaard demonstrates the mistake of trying to mix the categories into a single hotch-potch. Hegel thought he had created the objective theory of knowledge; Kierkegaard, sharply opposing this, put forward the thesis that subjectivity is truth, or -- to quote his own definition of what is truth -- "the objective uncertainty, maintained possession of the most passionate fervour, is the truth, the highest truth, for one existing". To which he adds: "But the given definition of truth is a paraphrase of faith". Kierkegaard deduces one further consequence of his definition of truth: "When subjectivity, intense fervour (inderlighed), is the truth, then truth objectively fixed is paradox."

The threads are thus brought together in this, the most systematic work of the great system-hater. It is certainly no system; but those who have the jaws to bite on this vast work, and the teeth to crush its tough nuts, will there find Kierkegaard's ideas in their most consistent and coherent form.

To my contemporaries my significance depends on my trousers; it may be that to a later era my significance will also depend a little on my writings.
(Søren Kierkegaard)

The pseudonymous authorship caused a great sensation among the literati of the time in Copenhagen. In literary circles it was well-known who the author was, although Kierkegaard guarded his pseudonymity jealously until 1846. In the autumn of 1845, a few months before the publication of the Unscientific Postscript, the talented critic P. L. Møller wrote a review of the existing pseudonymous works. This gave rise to a quarrel, the so-called 'Corsair dispute', which in many ways left a deep mark on the last ten years of Kierkegaard's short life.

P. L. Møller's review contained much praise and admiration, particularly for Kierkegaard's description of the aesthctic stage. But the reviewer took a sceptical view of Kierkegaard as an ethical and religious personality and allowed himself some remarks of a somewhat impertinent, almost personal nature. P.L. Møller devoted his attentions mainly to Guilty? -- Not Guilty? He undoubtedly knew that this book was a poetical-realistic treatment of the story of Kierkegaard's own engagement. He writes of the chief male character, Quidam, that he has lost all that constitutes personality: sentiment, intelligence, will, decision, action, nervous and muscular strength. Everything has been sacrificed to sterile dialectics. And this Quidam has put the female character to such experimental torture that it is astonishing that she has not gone mad or drowned herself. Thus it says:

"If healthy human reason may be allowed to step in here, it might perhaps say in rude impulsiveness: If you wish to regard life as a dissecting-room and yourself as a corpse, very well, tear yourself apart as much as you like; so long as you do no harm to others the police will not come and disturb your activities. But to weave another person into one's spider's web, dissect her alive, or torture the soul out of her little by little in the name of experiment, that is not yet permissible, except in the case of insects, and is there not horror even in the thought of that, which is repulsive to healthy human nature?"

In fact P. L. Møller takes up a moral stand against Kierkegaard which must have been all the more irritating as P.L. Møller had a bad reputation for being a loose-living "aesthete" just in Kierkegaard's understanding of the word, and as a Don Juan. Kierkegaard immediately wrote a scornful article, full of remarks calculated to arouse suspicion about P. L. Møller, in the distinguished daily paper "The Fatherland". At the end of it he expresses the following de- sire: "If only I might soon appear in "The Corsair"! It is really hard for a poor author to be pointed out as the only figure in Danish literature who has not been abused in it." "The Corsair" was a small, but very widely circulated and disreputable weekly which was wont to satirize, often in a coarse manner, the prominent personalities of the time. It carried on "a regime of terror", as was said at the time, and people feared "to be in the Corsair". The magazine had been started in 1840 by a quite young, promising poet, Meir Goldschmidt, who still edited it. P.L. Møller was an occasional contributor. Young Goldschmidt was full of admiration for Kierkegaard and had on various occasions "immortalized" Victor Eremita in his paper. Kierkegaard must undoubtedly have thought that by his officially expressed wish to be abused in The Corsair he had placed Goldschmidt and P. L. Møller in an insoluble dilemma. What were they to do?

But Goldschmidt complied with the wish. From January 1846 "The Corsair" embarked on a stultification of Kierkegaard as an author and as a private individual. The short articles were often accompanied by malicious caricatures, and the persecution continued for a long period. The effect on Kierkegaard was overwhelming, as can be seen from his numerous statements in the Journals about Goldschmidt and his "vulgarity", which he also called "literary contemptibility". Since he was very young, Kierkegaard has been in the habit of spending much time strolling in the streets, and he was very fond of holding conversations with ordinary folk. He was generous to beggars. Now according to his own statement his relationship with "the man in the street" was altered. He became known about the city as "a half-crazy eccentric". Street boys yelled Either -- Or after him and prostitutes accosted the author of The Diary of a Seducer. It was an easy matter for "The Corsair"'s illustrator to caricature Kierkegaard's outward appearance. He was not only round-shouldered but sway-backed and crook-backed as well. His legs were remarkably thin and his gait strangely irregular. Now it became a torture for him to walk along the street. He gradually began to feel like "a martyr who was being ridiculed to death." No one came to his aid to fight against "The Corsair". "The more distinguished envy" held back.

Kierkegaard began to feel more and more isolated, and during the following years his relationship with Christianity grew more intensified. The severe form of Christianity which he had learnt as a child began to become more and more dominant. He had experienced the evil of the world per- sonally through "The Corsair" 's persecution. He begins to feel more and more of a martyr. His leitmotif becomes to an increasing degree to "understand himself in suffering". The Christian ideal is a dying to the world, to temporality. Even great national events such as the Danish-German war of 1848 -- 50 are indifferent to him. "I know only one danger, that of religiosity." The liberal constitution of 1849 is also indifferent to him. He was distinctively conservative in politics, full of irony towards the democratic principle of coming to the right choice by means of a majority of votes, of the ballot system.

The event which set things in train was the death of Bishop Mynster. Mynster had been Bishop of Sjælland and Primate of the Church of Denmark for twenty years. He had been a great influence on old Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, and part- ly in deference to his father the son had continued to respect the great prelate. Mynster was, first and foremost, a man of wide culture and a man of the world. There is no reason to doubt his personal piety, but it was inseparable from his general culture, which drew its strength as much from the Classics and Goethe as from the Gospels. In Søren Kierkegaard as the years pass we find a growing criticism of the ageing bishop, whose form of Christianity seemed to him an adulteration. "Bishop Mynster's service to Christianity, really, is that by his considerable personality, his culture, his prominent position in fashionable circles, he developed the fashion, or solemn convention, that Christianity was something no person of culture could do without. To an eternal and Christian view, however, this is a rather ambiguous service. For surely Christianity is much too great to be patronized. And in his earnestness there is something of a melange -- so touched, so deeply moved, he is at the thought of its past glories, and yet, when it comes to the point, so sensitive about being ever so slightly belittled himself... And yet I love Bishop Mynster, and it is my one desire to do all that I can to enhance his reputation; for I have admired him, and, as a man, admire him still. And whenever I can do something to his advantage, I think of my father, whom I think it pleases."

That was what Kierkegaard wrote in his journals in 1848. Later the tone grew sharper: "In the splendid Palace Chapel an imposing Court preacher, the chosen of the cultivated public, steps forward before a chosen circle of the fashionable and cultivated public and preaches emotionally on the text of the Apostle: 'God chose the mean and despised' -- and nobody laughs!"

Mynster, for his part, did not care for Kierkegaard and kept him at arm's length, rightly seeing him as a dangerous rebel. But in spite of the latent conflict between the two, Kierkegaard continued to show deep respect for Mynster while the bishop lived. He thought that he owed this to his father's memory.

But in 1854 Mynster died and was succeeded by Martensen, a man of some standing: his Christian Dogmatics enjoyed a European reputation, and he had made studies of Christian mysticism, exemplified especially in Jacob Böhme, who had opened up new vistas. But he, too, was an orthodox Hegelian, having the self-assumed task of confuting the subjectivity of Romantic morals through a "theoretical knowledge of objectivity, of the absolute form of the State and religion, of science and art." Thus his theological writing became markedly speculative in its character, culminating in the dogmatics which systematized the Christian world of ideas down to the order of precedence among the angels.

For this man Kierkegaard could have no sympathy at all; and when, in his memorial sermon on Bishop Mynster, he went so far as to call him "a witness to the truth", thereby promoting the admired and idolized Mynster, in a way, to the ranks of the martyrs, Kierkegaard could contain himself no longer. This struck him as blasphemy, and as a distortion of every Christian value. There had to be a protest now!

It was the starting point of the final phase of his authorship, in which Kierkegaard abandoned his pseudonymity and in a series of pamphlets addressed the general public direct, in order to open its eyes to the falsification of Christianity that was being carried out by the clergy in Christianity's name. The attacks culminated in the publication of the little journal called Øjeblikket (The Instant), which appeared in nine issues. The tenth was ready for publication when he collapsed in the street and had to be taken to hospital, where he died shortly afterwards, shattered by the great internal strain imposed by his recent activities.

The last years of his life thus marked an intense outburst of production, in which his work to some extent acquired a new content, and to a great extent a new form. In his desire to find an audience he abandoned his former exclusive form to become broad, popular, even demagogic, his style coming to resemble the journalism he had despised.

As regards content, the last publications added nothing new, but they were new in that it was Kierkegaard himself who spoke, and not his pseudonyms.

This is bound up with the aim he had set himself. He spoke in his own name, not in order to rebuke the Church and the clergy for not fulfilling the strict demands of Christianity (for he was well aware that neither they nor he could do that), but because, while they failed, they refused to admit that they neither could nor would conform to the demands, preferring to live in domestic comfort and prosperity and worldly culture, while trying to make themselves and the world believe that this was the meaning of Christianity.