Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on 5 May 1813 in Copenhagen, the youngest of the seven children of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756-1838), a retired wealthy wool merchant, and Ane Sørensdatter Lund (1768-1834), a former maidservant of the household who became his second wife^[20]. The marriage itself began in shadow: Michael Pedersen's first wife, Kirstine, died of pneumonia less than two years after their wedding; his remarriage to Ane took place less than a year later, when she was already four months pregnant — a circumstance that Copenhagen polite society did not fail to notice^[21]. Ane in turn died on 31 July 1834, aged 66, probably of typhus^[22].

The 'great earthquake': Michael Pedersen's secret

Around 1838, Søren discovered his father's heaviest secret. As a child, a poor shepherd on the desolate heaths of Jutland, Michael Pedersen had, in a fit of despair and cold, cursed God from the top of a hill for his misery^[23]. Convinced ever since that a curse lay upon all his offspring — that his children would all die before reaching the age of Christ, 33 —, the old merchant lived in a permanent religious terror which he passed on to his youngest son. Kierkegaard called this revelation "the great earthquake, the terrible upheaval, which suddenly forced on me a new and infallible interpretation of all phenomena"^[24]. The theologian Simon Podmore explicitly likened this experience to the Anfechtung (trial, spiritual struggle) which Luther himself described as an inward assault of despair before the wrath of God^[25].

Michael Pedersen died on 9 August 1838, aged 81. Søren, devastated, interpreted this death as a final sacrifice made for him — and at last set about completing his theology degree, after years of dissolute living and neglected studies^[26].

Theological studies and encounter with Hegelian philosophy

Having entered the University of Copenhagen in 1830, Kierkegaard pursued theological studies there which he long put off, preferring philosophy, literature and an expensive social life funded by his paternal inheritance. On 1 August 1835, while staying in Gilleleje on the coast of Sjælland, he set down in his journal a sentence that would remain the key to his entire work:

"The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die." — Søren Kierkegaard, journal, Gilleleje, 1 August 1835^[27]

This demand for an existential truth, appropriated by the person and not merely contemplated by the intellect, already stood opposed to the system Kierkegaard was then discovering in Danish lecture halls: that of Hegel, whose philosophy of absolute Spirit dominated Copenhagen university theology through Professor Hans Lassen Martensen^[28]. Kierkegaard finally completed his cand. theol. on 3 July 1840^[29].

On 8 September 1840, Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine Olsen, then eighteen years old, whom he had been courting since 1837^[30]. Less than a year later, on 11 August 1841, he broke off the engagement by returning the ring with a letter of such rhetorical skill that it would reappear 'word for word' in Stages on Life's Way (1845)^[31]. Kierkegaard would never publicly give the exact reasons for this break, but his journals suggest an insoluble conflict between marriage and what he perceived as an exceptional inner vocation, marked by the melancholy inherited from his father and by the feeling that he could not impose the burden of such an existence on Regine^[32].

'The Seducer's Diary' and literary sublimation

The break became the secret matrix of all the work to come. Either/Or (1843), the first major work published under the editorial pseudonym Victor Eremita, contains 'The Seducer's Diary', the story of a young man who coldly calculates the seduction of a young girl before breaking with her as soon as he has won her^[33]. Each major text of this period — Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Stages on Life's Way — takes as its starting point the sacrifice of 'that single individual' which Kierkegaard accomplished by breaking his engagement to Regine^[34]. Disappointed human love thus became the laboratory of a reflection on sacrifice, the absolute and faith that far transcends biographical anecdote.

On 29 September 1841, Kierkegaard defended his Magister Artium dissertation, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, before a panel chaired by the philosopher Frederik Christian Sibbern^[35]. The work, of about 350 pages in its original Danish edition, contrasts the Aristophanic reading of Socrates — a pure ironist, with no positive doctrine — with the more serious readings of Xenophon and Plato, before comparing Socratic irony with the Romantic theories of irony in Fichte, Schlegel and Hegel^[36].

Schelling's disenchanting lectures

In October 1841, a few weeks after his break with Regine, Kierkegaard left for Berlin to attend the lectures of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, then at the height of his European reputation^[37]. Initial enthusiasm soon turned to disappointment: in a letter to his friend Emil Boesen dated 27 February 1842, Kierkegaard declared himself 'extremely dissatisfied' with Schelling's lectures, whose thought he judged still captive to the Hegelianism it claimed to move beyond^[38]. This double disappointment — with Hegel and then with his most prestigious critic — confirmed Kierkegaard in the conviction that individual existence cannot be enclosed in any speculative system, however refined.

Back in Copenhagen, between 1843 and 1846 Kierkegaard began the great cycle of his pseudonymous work. He did not sign these books with his own name, but lent them to fictitious authors — Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio, Constantin Constantius, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus — whose points of view, sometimes contradictory with one another, compel the reader to take a stand himself rather than passively receive a doctrine^[39]. This is what Kierkegaard calls indirect communication: existential truth, unlike a theorem, cannot be transmitted directly — it must be awakened in the one who receives it.

"Either/Or" (1843) and the three stages of existence

Published in Copenhagen by C. A. Reitzel in February 1843, in two volumes under the fictitious editorship of Victor Eremita, Either/Or introduces the work's first great distinction: that of the aesthetic stage, turned toward immediate pleasure and the flight from boredom, and the ethical stage, that of choice, commitment, and marriage^[40]. Later writings add a third stage, the religious stage, itself divided between a general religiosity (Religiousness A, accessible to natural reason, close to Stoicism) and properly Christian religiosity (Religiousness B), founded on the absolute paradox of the Incarnation — the eternal entered into time^[41].

The transition from one stage to another never takes place through logical deduction: it is a leap (Spring), an existential decision that at no moment is fully justified in the eyes of reason alone^[42].

"Fear and Trembling" (1843): Abraham and the teleological suspension of the ethical

Published on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling meditates on the narrative of the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22)^[43]. For universal ethics, Abraham preparing to kill his son is nothing but a murderer; for Kierkegaard, he is the "knight of faith" precisely because he accepts a teleological suspension of the ethical — a particular divine command which takes precedence, for a time, over the universal moral law, in view of a higher end (telos):

"Now the story of Abraham contains such a teleological suspension of the ethical. [...] He acts by virtue of the absurd, for it is precisely absurd that he as the particular is higher than the universal." — Søren Kierkegaard (Johannes de Silentio), Fear and Trembling, Problema I, 1843^[44]

Abraham's act is not a common transgression: it is the limiting example of an absolute obedience which reason alone can never guarantee nor even fully understand — hence the book's title, borrowed from Philippians 2:12: "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling."

"The Concept of Anxiety" (1844): the dizziness of freedom

Published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis ("the watchman of Copenhagen"), The Concept of Anxiety (1844) analyzes anxiety (Angest) not as a mere fear of a determinate object, but as the dizziness proper to freedom before its own infinite possibilities:

"Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself." — Søren Kierkegaard (Vigilius Haufniensis), The Concept of Anxiety, English trans. Reidar Thomte, Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 61^[45]

The work's exact subtitle — A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation on the Dogmatic Problem of Original Sin — shows that Kierkegaard intends to contribute directly to the theology of sin: anxiety is the psychological condition in which human freedom, still innocent, can choose to sin, without that choice ever being necessary or entirely explicable from the outside^[46].

"Concluding Unscientific Postscript" (1846): truth is subjectivity

Published under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, the Postscript (1846) closes the great pseudonymous cycle with a thesis that has remained famous: "subjectivity is truth," or again "truth is subjectivity"^[47]. This is not a denial of the existence of objective truths, but the assertion that, for the truths that engage one's entire existence — and first and foremost the truth of Christianity — what matters is not only what one knows, but how one relates, in the passion of inwardness, to what one knows^[48]. According to Kierkegaard, the Hegelian system, by claiming to make the Christian faith a necessary and objectively demonstrable moment of the absolute Spirit, transforms it into something other than itself: a doctrine that can be known without ever being personally committed to it^[49]. This same work would, a century later, nourish Kierkegaard's critique of Pascal's wager as cold calculation rather than existential decision — a connection that Catholic apologetics itself acknowledges as partly fruitful^[50].

In 1846, through a minor literary polemic, Kierkegaard provoked the wrath of the satirical journal Corsaren ("The Corsair"), which for months multiplied caricatures mocking his gangly silhouette, his legs of unequal length, and his sartorial eccentricity in the streets of Copenhagen^[51]. The episode, humiliating, reinforced his conviction that "the crowd is untruth" ("Publikum er Usandhed"): the anonymous mass dissolves individual responsibility and allows each person to hide behind common opinion so as to flee the personal decision before God^[52].

"A crowd — in its very concept — is untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his responsibility by reducing it to a fraction." — Søren Kierkegaard, 'The Single Individual': two 'notes' concerning my work as an author, appendix to The Point of View for My Work as an Author, English trans. Walter Lowrie, Harper Torchbooks, 1962^[53]

Against the crowd, Kierkegaard sets "that single individual" (hiin Enkelte) — a category he held to be so central to his entire work that in 1848–1849 he wished it alone to appear on his tombstone, "if it is not understood now, it will be understood one day"^[54]. This wish would not be granted: his grave in Assistens Cemetery ultimately bears his dates and stanzas from a hymn by Hans Adolph Brorson^[55].

Alongside the pseudonyms, Kierkegaard published under his own name a series of edifying discourses and religious treatises, in which he speaks without literary mask.

"Works of Love" (1847): the commandment to love

Works of Love (1847) develops a theology of charity founded on the commandment: "You shall love"^[56]. For Kierkegaard, it is paradoxically only by becoming a duty that love escapes the caprice of feeling and becomes truly free and stable:

"It is only when loving is a duty, only then is love eternally secured against all change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily sheltered from despair." — Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, I, 1847^[57]

The insight coincides, on this precise point, with the classical Catholic teaching according to which supernatural charity, a gift of grace responding to Christ's commandment (Jn 13:34), surpasses and stabilizes purely affective love — even though Kierkegaard draws from it no sacramental theology of habitual grace.

"The Sickness unto Death" (1849): despair as sin

Published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus — a voice Kierkegaard judged higher than his own, embodying a Christian ideal he did not claim to have attained — The Sickness unto Death (1849) defines the self as "a relation that relates itself to itself"^[58]. The true "sickness unto death" is not physical death, but despair, identified with spiritual sin: refusing to be the self that God wills one to be, whether that refusal takes the form of unconsciousness, weakness, or proud defiance^[59]. Kierkegaard distinguishes several increasing degrees of despair: the unconscious despair of those who have never questioned themselves, the despair of weakness that recoils before the demand of existing authentically, and the despair of defiance that proudly refuses to depend on anything higher than oneself^[60]. This analysis coincides, by another path, with the Augustinian teaching on sin as a disorder of the will turned away from its ultimate end.

The last months of Kierkegaard's life were dominated by an unprecedentedly violent offensive against the official Church of Denmark, Lutheran and tied to the State.

Mynster's Death and Martensen's Eulogy

On 30 January 1854, Jakob Peter Mynster, Bishop of Zealand and de facto primate of the Danish Church — a figure Kierkegaard had long respected, despite growing theological disagreements^[61] — died. On 7 February 1854, his expected successor, the Hegelian theologian Hans Lassen Martensen, delivered Mynster's funeral eulogy and called him a "witness to the truth" (sandhedens vidne)^[62]. For Kierkegaard, the phrase was a theological scandal: a true "witness to the truth," in the New Testament sense, is one who suffers martyrdom or at least ridicule for Christ — not a prelate honoured by the State who died covered in honours^[63].

"The Moment": Ten Issues Against the State Church

On 18 December 1854, Kierkegaard opened hostilities with a series of articles in the newspaper Fædrelandet, then published from May to September 1855 the ten issues of his own periodical, Øieblikket ("The Moment"), devoted entirely to this attack^[64]. His central thesis: New Testament Christianity demanded renunciation, poverty, persecution; 19th-century Danish "Christendom," where one is born Christian through automatic baptism and the pastor is a salaried official of the Crown, had inverted the Gospel message into its comfortable opposite^[65]. The stir he caused reached far beyond Denmark: it was discussed in Germany, the United States, and even Bohemia^[66].

"Official Christianity has done away with Christianity without even noticing." — Thesis summary of Søren Kierkegaard, The Moment (Øieblikket), nos. 1–10, May–September 1855^[67]

Death at Frederik's Hospital and Refusal of Pastoral Communion

On 2 October 1855, Kierkegaard collapsed in a Copenhagen street and was taken to Frederik's Hospital^[68]. His childhood friend Emil Boesen, who had become a pastor — in precisely the Church Kierkegaard had just spent months attacking — visited him daily. On 19 October 1855, Boesen asked him whether he wished to receive communion:

"Yes, but from a layman, not a pastor." — Søren Kierkegaard to Emil Boesen, Frederik's Hospital, 19 October 1855^[69]

When Boesen objected on practical grounds to such an arrangement, Kierkegaard replied that he would therefore die without it, explaining that "pastors are officials of the Crown — they have nothing to do with Christianity"^[70]. He nevertheless assured Boesen, to the very end, that he remained a believer in Christ^[71]. He died on 11 November 1855, aged 42; the uncertain diagnosis suggested tuberculosis of the spinal cord^[72].

The Troubled Funeral of 18 November 1855

On 18 November 1855, the Church Kierkegaard had fought nevertheless gave him an official funeral. His nephew Henrik Sigvard Lund, growing increasingly agitated during the ceremony, ended up interrupting the service in protest: he considered it a disgrace that his uncle should be buried by the institution he had "so bitterly denounced," and asserted that Kierkegaard, alive, would never have approved such a ceremony^[73]. The outburst caused a scandal in Copenhagen; at Martensen's own intervention, Lund was brought before the courts for disturbing a funeral ceremony and fined one hundred rixdollars, after admitting that he had not been "entirely in his right mind" at the time^[74]. The irony was complete: the man who had devoted his final months to denouncing the collusion between the Church and the Danish State received, despite himself, a state funeral.

Kierkegaard poses a formidable question to Catholic theology: how to honour what he saw most truly about the gravity of faith, without adopting his deepest error about the relationship of faith to reason and to the visible Church?

What Kierkegaard Got Right: Against Facade Christianity

Kierkegaard was right to denounce, with a vehemence no theologian of his century equalled, the danger of a Christianity reduced to an automatic sociological belonging, without personal conversion or existential consequences. His distinction between faith as knowledge of facts and faith as a lived relationship meets, on this precise point, a constant concern of authentic Catholic spirituality — from St Augustine to St Teresa of Avila — for which faith is never a mere notional assent, but an act of the whole person, intellect and will united, under the motion of grace^[75]. The contemporary American philosopher Matthew Becklo, who himself acknowledges owing his conversion to Catholicism in part to his reading of Kierkegaard, thus sums up what Kierkegaard "got right": "the existential gravity of genuine faith," distinct from the mere abstract acceptance of religious propositions^[76].

What Separates Kierkegaard from the Catholic Faith: Fideism, Subjectivism, Absence of the Church

But the Kierkegaardian remedy for ecclesial lukewarmness becomes itself, on three precise points, an error incompatible with Catholic doctrine.

Kierkegaard radically opposes faith to reason: Christian faith demands, in his view, a "leap" into the "absurd," against the understanding, not a fulfilment of natural reason^[77]. Yet the First Vatican Council solemnly teaches the opposite:

"Holy Church, our mother, holds and teaches that God, the principle and end of all things, can be known with certainty from created things by the natural light of human reason." — First Vatican Council, dogmatic constitution Dei Filius on the Catholic faith, chap. 2, 24 April 1870, in Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, ed. Peter Hünermann, 38th ed.^[78]

For Catholic theology, faith elevates and completes reason; it neither contradicts reason nor humiliates it as "absurd": this is precisely what Matthew Becklo recalls when he observes that "the Catholic view of faith and reason contrasts sharply with Kierkegaard's"^[79].

Second, the formula "truth is subjectivity," while it contains a share of truth about the personal appropriation of truths that engage existence, risks, taken literally, relativizing the very objectivity of revealed dogma and salvation history — a danger the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar identifies precisely when he criticizes an "excessively Kierkegaardian" conception of religious fideism, in which the religious stage is placed so high that it becomes cut off from any objective and communicable form^[80]. Balthasar also devotes, in The Christian and Anxiety (1953), a sustained analysis to the lineage running from Luther to Kierkegaard, then from Heidegger to Sartre, on the theme of existential anxiety — without ever minimizing that anxiety through casual fideism, but resituating it within the theological hope that philosophy alone cannot found^[81].

Finally, and this is the most consequential point: Kierkegaard, as a radical Lutheran, recognizes no visible, hierarchical Church as the normal mediator of grace. His refusal, on his deathbed, to receive communion "from a pastor" — even while remaining attached to Christ — illustrates to the point of absurdity the consequences of an ecclesiology that dissolves the sacramental institution in favour of the solitary face-to-face between the individual and God^[82]. Catholic doctrine, by contrast, holds that Christ willed a visible, structured, apostolic Church, and that the sacraments — not mere psychological aids to faith, but instrumental causes of grace — remain the ordinary channel instituted by Christ himself. Kierkegaard's radical individualism, however profound psychologically, therefore cannot be received as such by a theology that affirms the normal necessity of the Church and the sacraments for salvation.

Catholic Reception: Przywara, Guardini, Balthasar, Fabro

Despite these substantial reservations, 20th-century Catholic thought took Kierkegaard very seriously, rather than ignoring or caricaturing him. The Jesuit Erich Przywara published as early as 1929 Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards ("The Mystery of Kierkegaard"), a reading of his whole oeuvre as incisive as it was provocative, three years ahead of his own metaphysical masterpiece, Analogia Entis (1932)^[83]. This Catholic engagement with Kierkegaard, which asserted itself in the 1920s, attracted some of the finest Catholic minds of the century, including Romano Guardini and Henri de Lubac^[84].

The Stigmatine priest Cornelio Fabro, one of the greatest Thomist metaphysicians of the 20th century, was also one of the few Western readers of Kierkegaard in the original Danish text: he founded the Italian Centre for Kierkegaard Studies in 1987 and published as early as 1952 the essay Tra Kierkegaard e Marx ("Between Kierkegaard and Marx"), in which he contrasts the believing, free subjectivity of the Danish philosopher with Marxist collective materialism^[85]. Fabro saw in Kierkegaard the most powerful antidote to Hegelian idealism: against a system that dissolves the individual into the impersonal movement of Spirit, Kierkegaard recalls that to exist, for a human being, is to stand before God as an irreplaceable individual, called to a choice and a leap of faith^[86].

Kierkegaard and 20th-Century Existentialism: Barth, Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers

Kierkegaard's influence extends far beyond the Catholic circle. The Reformed theologian Karl Barth makes the Kierkegaardian "infinite qualitative distinction" between time and eternity the keystone of his own dialectical theology, from the preface to the second edition of his Epistle to the Romans (1922):

"If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the 'infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity." — Karl Barth, preface to the 2nd edition of The Epistle to the Romans, 1922, English trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns, Oxford University Press, 1933^[87]

Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time (1927), acknowledges his debt to the Kierkegaardian analysis of anxiety while reworking it outside any explicit theological horizon; Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Jaspers in turn drew, each in their own atheist or agnostic way, on the Kierkegaardian vocabulary of choice, anxiety, and authentic existence — giving birth, in the 20th century, to a largely secularized existentialism that retains the form of the Kierkegaardian analysis without keeping its properly Christian content.

Kierkegaard's work, long confined to the Scandinavian and German-speaking world for lack of translations, underwent a spectacular rediscovery in the 20th century, carried by the translation of his writings into German (from the 1900s–1920s onward), then into French and English. He is today recognized, across confessional divides, as one of the major sources of the philosophy of existence, Protestant dialectical theology, and contemporary existential psychology. For Catholic thought, he remains a textbook case: a salutary goad against facade religion, whose fideism and individualism must nevertheless be corrected by the doctrine of the analogy between faith and reason, and by the sacramental ecclesiology that Kierkegaard, to his last breath, refused.

• Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995), Thomist metaphysician and direct translator of Kierkegaard from Danish
• Peter Kreeft, Catholic philosopher who counts Kierkegaard among his masters
• Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), another major figure of the 20th-century Catholic renewal
• Pascal's Wager, where Kierkegaard's critique of cold calculation is discussed directly
• Does Prayer Change God, or Ourselves?, which takes its starting point from a formula attributed to Kierkegaard on prayer
• Answers to Protestantism, to place Kierkegaard in the history of Danish Lutheranism
• Martin Luther (1483-1546), whose Anfechtung sheds light on Kierkegaard's own religious anxiety