Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children born to Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a wealthy retired wool merchant, and Ane Sørensdatter Lund, a former servant in the household whom Michael had married after the death of his first wife. Michael carried a private conviction that God had cursed the family — for a childhood act of cursing God as a poor shepherd boy on the Jutland heath, and for having taken Ane before their marriage. Søren later called this disclosure, made to him around 1838, "the great earthquake," and it reshaped how he understood his own melancholy as inheritance rather than accident. He was educated at the School of Civic Virtue in Copenhagen and entered the University of Copenhagen in 1830 to study theology, eventually completing a master's degree in 1841 with a dissertation on Socratic irony. He never sought ordination and never held a pastoral post, living instead off his father's considerable estate, which he spent almost entirely funding his own writing.

In 1840 he became engaged to Regine Olsen, a young woman ten years his junior, and broke the engagement the following year for reasons he never fully explained even to himself in his voluminous journals — a decision that shadowed the rest of his authorship, which he came to regard, in part, as a form of indirect communication addressed to her. In 1846 the satirical paper The Corsair, provoked by Kierkegaard himself, ran a sustained campaign of ridicule against him, and for years afterward he was an object of mockery on the streets of Copenhagen, a humiliation he absorbed into his later reflections on suffering and the crowd. In his final year he published a series of pamphlets called The Moment, attacking the Danish State Church and its late primate Bishop Mynster as a comfortable accommodation that had domesticated the New Testament's demand. He collapsed in the street in October 1855 and died in hospital on November 11, refusing communion from a priest because, he said, pastors were civil servants of the crown rather than witnesses to the truth. He asked that his gravestone bear no eulogy, only the phrase he had made central to his life's work: "that single individual."

His Writing and Its Influence

Kierkegaard began publishing in earnest in 1843, producing Either/Or and Fear and Trembling within months of each other, often under pseudonyms — Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Victor Eremita — personas he used not as concealment but as instruments of what he called indirect communication, forcing readers toward their own decision rather than handing them a conclusion. The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, and the massive Concluding Unscientific Postscript followed through 1846, developing his account of subjectivity, the leap of faith, and the difference between an admirer of Christ and a follower. Works of Love and The Sickness Unto Death, written increasingly under his own name, turned more directly toward despair and the neighbor. Throughout, his target was what he called "Christendom" — a Denmark, and by extension a Europe, in which everyone was reflexively christened, catechized, and buried as a Christian while the actual cost of discipleship had quietly disappeared. He read Hegel closely in order to oppose him, and returned often to Socrates as a model of a life staked on a single question.

His immediate readership in Denmark was small and largely hostile. His long-term influence has been immense and divided: existentialist philosophers from Heidegger to Sartre claimed him as a forerunner while discarding his theology, and twentieth-century theologians including Barth and Bultmann drew on his insistence on the qualitative difference between God and man, the crisis of the moment, and the impossibility of mediating faith through system or institution.

Who should read Kierkegaard: readers who suspect that their Christianity has become an inherited habit rather than a decision, and who are willing to be unsettled rather than organized. He rewards those with patience for indirection and irony, and he will frustrate anyone looking for a straightforward doctrinal statement or a program for ministry. He is not for readers seeking reassurance about the church as an institution — he had none to offer. He is for those willing to ask what it would mean to become, and not merely to be called, a Christian.