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KIERKEGAARD and HOW HE CAN CHALLENGE US TODAY March, 30, 2014 Andrés Roberto Albertsen

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KIERKEGAARD and HOW HE CAN CHALLENGE US TODAY March, 30, 2014 Andrés Roberto Albertsen 1 KIERKEGAARD AND HOW HE CAN CHALLENGE US TODAY March, 30, 2014 Andrés Roberto Albertsen 1) Some biographical data Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born May 5, 1813, Copenhagen, Denmark, as the youngest of seven children of the second marriage of his father. He died November 11, 1855, Copenhagen. The story of his life is a drama in four overlapping acts, each with its own distinctive crisis or “collision.” His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a prosperous but retired businessman who devoted the later years of his life to raising his children. He was a man of deep guilt-ridden piety who was tormented by the memory of having once cursed God as a boy and of having begun his family by getting his maid pregnant—and then marrying her— shortly after the death of his first wife. His domineering presence stimulated young Søren’s imaginative and intellectual gifts but, as his son would later bear witness, he made a normal childhood impossible. Kierkegaard enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1830 but did not complete his studies until 1841. He entered university in order to study theology but devoted himself to literature and philosophy instead. His thinking during this period is revealed in an 1835 journal entry (by the way, Kierkegaard was a prolific writer of personal journals and they have all been published), which is often cited as containing the germ and initial form of his later work: “The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.…What is truth but to live for an idea?” The first collision of Kierkegaard’s life occurred during his student days: he became estranged both from his father and from the faith in which he had 2 been brought up, and he moved out of the family home. But by 1838, just before his father’s death in this same year, he was reconciled both to his father and to the Christian faith; the latter became the idea for which he would live and die. Becoming a Christian would be for him the task of a lifetime. After his father’s death, Kierkegaard became serious about finishing his formal education. He took his doctoral exams and wrote his dissertation, On the Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates, completing it in June of 1841 and defending it in September. In between, he broke his engagement with Regine Olsen, thus initiating the second major collision of his life. They had met in 1837, when she was only 15 years old, and had become engaged in 1840. Now, less than one year later, he returned the engagement ring he had gotten from her, saying he “could not make a girl happy.” The reasons for this action are far from clear. What is clear is that this relationship disturbed him for the rest of his life. Saying in his will that he considered engagement as binding as marriage, he left all his possessions to Regine (she did not accept them, however, since she had married another man long before Kierkegaard died). It is also clear that this crisis triggered and gave rise to a period of astonishing literary productivity, during which Kierkegaard published many of the works for which he is best known. Kierkegaard wrote two different kinds of authorship: 1) one pseudonymously, using assumed names of publishers, authors and characters, who all embodied distinctive worldviews, leaving it up to the reader to decide what to make of each one; and 2) the other under his own 3 name, in an effort to set his pseudonymous characters and their principal governing attitudes or views of life apart from his own. Most of his authorship under his own name was sermons, or as Kierkegaard called them, edifying discourses. Kierkegaard’s first period of literary activity, from 1843-46 was strongly affected by his broken engagement with Regine. After this first period, he intended to cease writing and become a country pastor, but it never happened. During 1846 Kierkegaard became involved in a dispute with a Danish literary magazine, The Corsair, which generated the third crisis or collision of his life. The Corsair was a satirical magazine, making Denmark’s intellectual elite seem ridiculous by making jokes about them. Much of the writing for the magazine was anonymous, and this anonymity allowed for abusive and irresponsible attacks. Up to this point the magazine had exempted Kierkegaard from its harsh ridicule and it had even praised some of the pseudonymous works. However, after a nasty review of another of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard responded complaining, ironically, that it was unjust for him to be the only important Danish author who had not been “abused” in The Corsair. The Corsair responded by making Kierkegaard the object of its ridicule in a long-lasting, sustained attack that went beyond the boundary of criticism or even ridicule of Kierkegaard’s ideas, making fun of his physical appearance, the uneven length of his trousers, his supposed arrogance, and many other things, both in texts and in cartoons. The affair fundamentally changed Kierkegaard’s life. He decided that more than ever he had to remain at his post and continue his activity as a writer in Copenhagen. The persecution and resulting isolation he suffered gave him a profound sensitivity to the evils 4 that can stem from an anonymous “public,” incited by the press. He came to believe that true Christianity necessarily was linked to outward suffering, since Christian faith requires a break with the values that established societies always embody. So there is a second period of literary activity from 1847 to 1851, also with pseudonymous and under his own name works, strongly affected by the quarrel with The Corsair. The final collision of Kierkegaard’s life was with the Church of Denmark (Lutheran) and its leaders, the bishops J.P. Mynster and H.L. Martensen. As long as Mynster, the bishop of Zealand and the family pastor from his childhood, was alive, Kierkegaard refrained from personal attacks. But Mynster died January 30, 1854, and when Martensen, who would soon succeed him as the main leader of the Danish church, at the funeral praised Mynster as a “witness to the truth,” linking him to the martyrs of the faith, Kierkegaard could no longer keep silent. He held his tongue and refrained from speaking for a few months in order to not interfere in the appointment and installation of Martensen as Mynster’s successor, but in December 1854 he began to publish a series of newspaper articles and later his own magazine, The Moment, which Kierkegaard began in order to carry on his polemical battle with the established church and to argue again and again that what passed as Christianity in Denmark was false. The Moment is Kierkegaard last period of literary activity. He managed to publish nine issues of The Moment and had the tenth issue ready for publication when he collapsed on the street, and was taken to the hospital with paralysis. He died a few weeks later on November 11, 1855, only 42 years old. Only a few times in his whole life did Kierkegaard preach live. He did it a couple of times at the Friday communion services at the Church of Our 5 Lady, the cathedral of Copenhagen, and Sunday May 18, 1851, he preached at the Citadel Church (Kastellet). He preached on James 1:17-21, a text which already had been the basis for some of his edifying discourses. James was Kierkegaard’s favorite letter, unlike Luther, who considered James as a letter of straw. I will remind you of the first verse of the text Kierkegaard preached about: “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” (Perhaps you remember a harvest hymn with this verse as the refrain). We know from his journal that Kierkegaard had suffered greatly from every sort of strain, as was always the case when he had to use his physical person, and apparently the thought of Regine in the congregation (she didn’t attend) did not make the sermon any easier to write. We also know that the day after delivering this sermon Kierkegaard felt so enfeebled and weak that he promised himself that he would never take the pulpit again. He wrote: “It went reasonably well, but my voice was so weak that people complained about not being able to hear… On Monday I was so faint and weak it was frightful… Then I became really sick.” Peter Zahle, an author and later a pastor, who was in the Citadel Church that Sunday, had not been the least bit dissatisfied with Kierkegaard’s voice. Zahle wrote: “No one who has heard him preach will forget that extremely weak, but wonderfully expressive voice. Never have I heard a voice that was so capable of inflecting even the most delicate nuances of expression.”1 2) A quote from that sermon preached live which contains the core of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the Christian faith: 1 Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography. Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 673-675. 6 Kierkegaard preached about the changelessness of God and started with a prayer addressed to “You Changeless One, whom nothing changes!,” and he made it very clear already in this opening prayer that changelessness didn´t mean impassibility (notion adopted from Greek philosophy), for he said: “You are not like a human being.
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