Authors: John Updike
T
HE
L
AST
Y
EARS
:
Journals 1853–1855
, by Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. 384 pp. Harper & Row, 1965.
It is not certain that the United States needs still more translations of Kierkegaard. The Kierkegaard bibliography in this country is already amply confusing; led by the dauntless Walter Lowrie,
*
a campaign of
translation coincident with the Second World War endowed the English-speaking world with almost all of the torrential
oeuvre
that the Danish thinker had created a century before. Eight books, including the immense
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
, were published here in 1941 alone. The current index of books in print lists twenty-two Kierkegaard titles, not counting duplications and anthologies. Distributed among a number of commercial, university, and religious presses (notably Harper, Princeton, and Augsburg) and bedevilled by overlappings and omissions (
Stages on Life’s Way
seems to be out of print, whereas some of the
Discourses
crop up repeatedly), the list is nevertheless the fullest outside of Germany and Denmark itself. We lack in English only some topical and humorous trifles and the very voluminous total of the journals and stray papers.
The Last Years: Journals 1853–1855
draws upon the papers from 1853 onward and the journals from their resumption on March 1, 1854, after a four-month gap. This material, which represents Kierkegaard in his most haranguing and repetitious phase, is not unknown to previous translation. The final fifty-five pages of Alexander Dru’s selection derive from the same portion of the journals. Professor Smith, though he compiles three hundred and forty pages, omits half of what Dru includes. Absent in Smith are some of the most pungent entries in Dru:
Oh, Luther, Luther; your responsibility is great indeed, for the closer I look the more clearly do I see that you overthrew the Pope—and set the public on the throne.
Hypocrisy is quite as inseparable from being a man as sliminess is from being a fish.
What could be more ridiculous than to use a jack to pick up a pin—or to make use of the eternal punishment of hell in order to make men into that half-demoralized, half-honest bagatelle which is roughly what it means to be a man.
Professor Smith prefers the extensive to the epigrammatic, and he might claim that his selection emphasizes Kierkegaard’s religious thought—the ideas that were projected outward in his pamphleteering attack upon the established Christianity of Denmark. But the pamphlets (ten in all, called
The Instant
) and the open letters that Kierkegaard issued have been already rendered into English by Lowrie, under the title
Attack Upon
“
Christendom
.” This book relates to
The Last Years
much as the outside of a sock relates to the inside; the pattern is not identical, but the threads are the same. After minimizing the considerable duplication, the editor of
The Last Years
justifies its publication by saying, “The last years of Kierkegaard’s life saw a remarkable concentration of the motifs which controlled his whole authorship. This comes vividly to life in the present selection from the journals and papers of that time, and casts light on all that went before it.” True, if “concentration” is taken to mean a narrowing. The prolix philosophizing of the “aesthetic works” and the fervent exhortation of the “religious works” have been succeeded by a third stage—an apostolic or pathological vehemence.
The Last Years
shows Kierkegaard’s mind narrowed to a very hard point. More precisely, it shows his mind and life, those antagonistic twins, both narrowed to a very hard point, the point of attack, which becomes the point of vanishing.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (the name means “churchyard,” and is pronounced “Kĕrkĕgōr”) was born in Copenhagen in 1813—“the year,” he was to say, “when so many worthless notes were put in circulation.” His father, Michael, was a man of great force and complexity. A shepherd lad from the desolate West Jutland heath, he had become a prosperous cloth merchant and grocer in the city, only to retire at the age of forty, perhaps to devote himself to religious brooding. Within a year of his first wife’s death, Michael married a household servant, Ane Lund, who bore him a child four months after their wedding. This marriage was to produce seven children, of whom Søren Aabye (as distinguished from his older brother, Søren Michael) was the last. His father was fifty-six, his mother forty-five; the advanced age of his parents accounts in part for Kierkegaard’s physical frailty, and his position as the family Benjamin for his pertness and conceit. His nickname within the family was Fork—bestowed when, rebuked for shovelling food greedily at the table, he
announced, “I
am
a fork, and I will stick you.” Descriptions of his childhood abound in his journals:
I was already an old man when I was born.… Delicate, slender, and weak, deprived of almost every condition for holding my own with other boys, or even for passing as a complete human being in comparison with others; melancholy, sick in soul, in many ways profoundly unfortunate, one thing I had: an eminently shrewd wit, given me presumably in order that I might not be defenseless.
But many weak boys with sharp tongues are born into the world, and Kierkegaard’s heightened sense of himself reaches for more:
I am in the deepest sense an unfortunate individual who has from the earliest age been nailed fast to one suffering or another, to the very verge of insanity, which may have its deeper ground in a disproportion between my soul and my body.
And in
The Last Years
, in the last entry, within a few weeks of his death, this sense of initial misfortune attains a frightening pitch:
Through a crime I came into existence, I came into existence against God’s will. The fault, which in one sense is not mine, even if it makes me a criminal in God’s eyes, is to give life. The punishment fits the fault: it is to be deprived of all joy of life, to be brought to the supreme degree of disgust with life.
His adult life consisted of a series of quixotic, or expiatory, gestures. His father wanted him to study for the ministry, so he spent his youth in frivolity, drunkenness, and dandyism. His father died, so he settled down to pass the theological examination. He fell in love with and successfully courted Regine Olsen; then he broke off the engagement and buried himself in a frenetic literary activity dedicated to her. He became, under his own name and under the open secret of his pseudonyms, the most remarkable writer in Denmark, the only author above attack by the scurrilous magazine the
Corsair;
so he incited the
Corsair
, though its editor, Meïr Goldschmidt, revered him, to attack, which it did with such success that Kierkegaard’s personal life was made a torment. Lastly, he who
had long been on the verge of becoming a country parson mounted a savage attack upon organized Christianity, exhorting true Christians to abstain from the sin of church worship. He refused the Eucharist, since it could not be administered by a layman, on his deathbed.
Kierkegaard’s American reputation was long deferred and is still esoteric, but in Denmark he was a celebrity. Indeed, he seems to have been the Benjamin of Copenhagen, the marketplace capital of a small and homogeneous country. His break with Regine was surrounded by so much gossip that it amounted to a public event. His pseudonyms, with their interlocking prefaces and compliments, must have been private jokes to a considerable group. His books, surprisingly, sold well enough to make money. During the
Corsair
persecution, his twisted back and uneven trouser legs were caricatured every week for a year, and the students at the university produced a comedy whose ridiculous hero was called Søren Kirk. Children taunted him on the streets. In his journals, he lamented, “To let oneself be trampled by geese is a slow way of dying,” and complained that “when … I have sought recreation by driving ten or twelve miles, and my body has gradually become somewhat weak … when I alight from the carriage … there is sure to be someone at hand who is jolly enough to call me names.” Astonishingly, the very name Søren, up to then the most common male baptismal name; became a byword for the ridiculous, and Danish parents, according to Lowrie, took to admonishing their children, “Don’t be a Søren.” Though helpless under such assault, Kierkegaard was not without power. A staunch monarchist, he was on conversational terms with King Christian VIII, and Lowrie asserts that in the relationship it was Kierkegaard who “held himself a little aloof.” (In his journals, Kierkegaard dryly noted, “On the whole, Christian VIII has enriched me with many psychological observations. Perhaps psychologists ought to pay particular attention to kings, and especially to absolute monarchs; for the freer a man is, the better he can be known.”) Kierkegaard’s satirical pen was a feared weapon. He undoubtedly ruined the life of a former friend, P. S. Møller, with a personal attack published in the newspaper
Fatherland
. So his assault upon the ecclesiastical establishment was delivered from the strength of notoriety, and, far from being the private fulminations of an obscure aesthete and mystic, was a demagogic assault, a well-publicized uproar reverberating throughout Scandinavia. (
The Instant
was immediately translated into Swedish and, not needing translation in Norway,
aroused the interest of young Ibsen, to become the basis of
Brand
.) Kierkegaard’s expectation of arrest and imprisonment was not fulfilled, but at his funeral a crowd of students gathered to protest the church’s appropriation of the body, and a riot was barely averted. W. H. Auden, in introducing his own Kierkegaard anthology, regards
The Attack Upon
“
Christendom
” as not a book but an act: “What for the author was the most important book of his life is for us, as readers, the least, for to us the important point is not what it contains, but the fact that Kierkegaard wrote it.”
Certainly, the journals of
The Last Years
are difficult to enjoy. How different are, say, the
Last Diaries
of Tolstoy, wherein the old man, honored all over the world, a sacred figure to his countrymen, struggles with the naïveté of a child to become good! Kierkegaard never had Tolstoy’s candid willingness to learn and grow. He was endowed from birth with a somewhat elderly mind. Though he read voraciously and could be gregarious and charming, only five people seem to have really interested him: Jesus, Socrates, Hegel, Regine Olsen, and his father. Though his ability to vary and extend his voice is marvellous, a single field of ideas appears to have been in his possession since the beginning. It remained only for him to explore it and to arrive at the ultimate conclusion. One does not find in
The Last Years
those categories—“the absurd,” “the leap,” “dread”—that modern Existentialism has made fashionable; they were expounded in the earlier “aesthetic works.” What one does find, theologically, is a wholehearted insistence upon the inhumanity of God. Through the bitter clamor of these journals—the outrageous but telling satires on bourgeois Christianity, the complaints about priests and professors and Bishop Mynster, the searching diagnoses of Luther and Schopenhauer, the not always tender deprecations of women, the copious self-dramatization, the tedious extollation of “the individual,” the slashing dismissals of “knavish religiosity,” “scoundrelly posterity,” and the “increasing mass of drivel which is called science”—there sounds a note that attains a crescendo in the last pages: Christianity is torture, and God a torturer:
In Christianity God is spirit—and therefore so immensely severe, from love: for he longs for spirit from man.… God is never so severe with those he loves in the Old Testament as he is with the apostles, for example, whose life was sheer suffering and then a martyr’s death.…
In the Old Testament, when the prophet is in need, God always finds a way out—but as for the apostle … there is no talk of unexpected help which shall bring him his strictest necessities; no, God just leaves him in the lurch, leaves him to die of hunger and thirst—it can be as severe as that.
If I were a pagan and had to speak Greek, I should say that God has arranged everything for his own entertainment; he amuses himself like a man who puts a piece of bacon in a mousetrap and watches all the tricks of the mice to get the bacon out without being gripped—so God amuses himself at the leaps and springs and contortions of these millions of men to get hold of the truth without suffering.
… What torture! If a man is really to be the instrument of God, for the infinite will that God is, then God must first take all his will from him. What a fearful operation! And it is natural that no one knows how to examine so painfully as one who is omniscient and omnipotent. Certainly with other forms of torture there are doctors present to estimate how long the tortured man can hold out without losing his life. Yet mistakes can happen, and the tortured man can die before their eyes. This never happens with one who is omniscient.
To be a Christian is the most terrible of all torments, it is—and it must be—to have one’s hell here on earth.… One shudders to read what an animal must suffer which is used for vivisection; yet this is only a fugitive image of the suffering involved in being a Christian—in being kept alive in the state of death.
The vision is so terrible that Kierkegaard almost relents; “What I write is from a Christian standpoint so true, so true, and from a Christian standpoint this is how I must write. And yet I can say that what I write here tortures me to produce … it is repugnant to me.” Again: “Ah, it is with sorrow that I write this. In melancholy sympathy, though myself unhappy, I loved men and the mass of men. Their bestial conduct toward me compelled me, in order to endure it, to have more and more to do with God.”
And what is the essence of God’s nature, that makes “having to do” with Him so painful? Majesty:
Suffering, that there must be suffering, is connected with the majesty of God. His majesty is so infinite that it can be characterized or expressed only by a paradox; it is the paradox of the majesty which is bound to make the beloved unhappy.… Suffering depends on the fact that God and man are qualitatively different, and that the clash of time and eternity in time is bound to cause suffering.