Melancholy Dane
Søren Kierkegaard was brought up in the midst of a bleak home life. In particular his father Michael was the source of much anguish for young Søren, as in his strict pietism he enforced high demands on his children. The guilt that came from Michael cursing God as a poor shepherd boy followed him to his grave. He “continued to be haunted by the suspicion that a curse lay upon his family,”3 seeing evidence for this curse in the death of his first wife, along with five out of his seven children, all in his lifetime.4 This fear seemed to have been passed onto Søren, who, after an “aesthetic” period in his youth, took up his life with determined vigor in the belief that his life would be short.5 He was determined to find a direction for his life beyond his own worldly success, and realized that the mere acquisition of knowledge was not enough:
. . . the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.6
Such thinking is indicative of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjectivity and his critique of his society’s obsession with objectivity. These are key themes that Kierkegaard adopted throughout his authorial task, and in a sense, they became the very “life-view” for which he was looking. He came to name his calling in life to be one that was evangelistic: to reacquaint his society with the truth of the gospel of Christianity, since he perceived that his entire age had lost the understanding of what it meant to be a Christian.7 Armed with a considerable inheritance from his father, it was to this task that Kierkegaard applied himself unreservedly and without worldly constraint.8
Kierkegaard claimed that to be a Christian, a believer must be a “single individual.” “The single individual” is a key concept in the authorship of Kierkegaard. It was the first step in achieving his task of “reintroducing Christianity to Christendom.”9
The single individual—this category has been used only once, its first time in a decisively dialectical way, by Socrates, in order to disintegrate paganism. In Christendom it will be used a second time in the very opposite way, to make people (the Christians) Christians. It is not the missionary’s category with regard to the pagans to whom he proclaims Christianity, but it is the missionary’s category within Christendom itself in order to introduce Christianity into Christendom. When he, the missionary, comes, he will use this category . . .10
Kierkegaard saw himself as the Socrates of Christendom, the “gnat” of his home town of Copenhagen, Denmark, in the first half of the nineteenth century.11 Influenced by his family’s dual involvement with the mainstream Danish state church alongside the fringe anti-institutional Moravian church, Kierkegaard saw his fellow Danes as being oppressed with the illusion of Christendom.12 He believed that his neighbors thought themselves indeed and unquestionably Christian by default, and so would not see themselves in need of Kierkegaard’s evangelistic “task.” Kierkegaard understood this obstacle and took up the illusion of being an aesthetic writer through employing various pseudonyms in order to gain an audience with his neighbors.13 It was by this deception that he was able to be an effective witness, in an attempt to subvert and circumvent the illusion of a Christian identity in his readers.14 Specifically how he was able to accomplish this is a key part of the concern of this book.
Because Kierkegaard understood Christianity to be primarily an inward relation to God, he saw the kind of automatic nominalism in Danish culture and its institutional church as an evil that must be challenged. Such thinking to Kierkegaard was a powerful obstruction that inoculated his neighbors against the gospel which spoke to the individual15—that is, that each person is at all times “directly before God.”16 Kierkegaard sought to upset and disarm the comfortable presuppositions and clichéd understandings of Christianity possessed by the everyday Dane, in an effort to push them into taking responsibility for their own faith and not rely on outward factors such as the faith or the intellectual systems of others. Kierkegaard labeled the oppressive, one-size-fits-all hegemonic system of Danish Christianity, “Christendom.” He spent the final years of his life in a vehement offensive against this religious empire, publishing a series of tracts which were posthumously compiled as Attack Upon Christendom.17
Kierkegaard’s theology was largely in accord with the orthodoxy of the Western church.18 Its distinctive lay in its emphasis on lived life; hence his work is often regarded as the foundation of existentialism. He did not seek to develop a systematic theology that was abstract, exhaustive, and objectively certain (thereby irrelevant to life), but was instead concerned with the lived life of “the single individual.”19 Thus his articulation of the role of a believer (and his definition of a self) was one of continual evolution—that of striving after Christ, who was seen as both the prototype and savior of the Christian.20 Being a Christian was a becoming which necessitated an ongoing balance between many extremes.21 It is for this reason (among others) that Kierkegaard did not focus on developing theology as a comprehensive system, since what mattered was life. For instance, it was less important for him to explain faith as both a gift and a responsibility than it was for him to communicate how faith was taken up and used in the life of a Christian.22
Much of what Kierkegaard was responding to in Copenhagen was his view of the public being dominated and easily swayed by the intellectual fashions of the day. He frequently labeled the phenomenon of this collective tide as “the crowd” in contradistinction to the individual,23 and this evil was directly opposed to the realization of “the single individual.”24 A key feature of Kierkegaard’s thought was the dimension of choice and responsibility, which “the crowd” removed from the individual.25 Kierkegaard understood that this abdication of responsibility could be either intentional or unintentional, and outlines this via his pseudonym Anti-Climacus in Sickness Unto Death.26
In Kierkegaard’s view, the most notable intellectual influence on the Danish public was the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel’s task was so vast that it included a summary of history up to that point, setting forth his contemporary German culture (including German Christianity) as the apogee of human civilization.27 His analysis of the development of philosophy and schools of thought claimed to incorporate all intellectual and cultural shifts into his great “system,” as Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus has called it.28 Climacus claims that Hegel had arrogantly drawn a line around the world, reducing life to an innumerable
