Authors: Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard was the seventh child of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and his second wife, Ane Sørensdatter Lund (his first wife having died childless after two years of married life). The family was prosperous; Michael Kierkegaard had been brought to Copenhagen by his uncle and had built a small business into a flourishing concern. When his first wife died, he retired at the age of forty and lived on his securities. He was a strict patriarch, profoundly religious, melancholy, and driven by a compelling sense of anxiety and guilt because as a child, while tending sheep in the cold, he had cursed God for allowing him to suffer. His dominance was a continuous and depressing influence on his children, and it probably played an important part in affecting his son’s attitudes toward Christianity. Early in life Søren Kierkegaard developed the conviction that he was somehow intended to be a sacrifice and that it was his mission in life to rebel against the God who made suffering. Nevertheless, it appears that his childhood was on the whole a happy one, possibly because of the careful attention and good humor of his mother, and as the years passed Kierkegaard’s early belief in the necessity of sacrifice gradually disappeared. However, he was burdened both physically and spiritually by a fall from a tree that led to a series of ailments and, eventually, to his final illness.

Kierkegaard entered the University of Copenhagen in 1830. By 1834, a series of deaths, including that of his mother, had reduced his family to his father, himself, and one brother. In that year or the next, a revelation from his father, never made entirely explicit, so affected Kierkegaard that he referred to it as “the great earthquake.” The knowledge of his father’s guilt aroused a sense of anguish and dread in him, and he became estranged from his father and from God, although he reconciled with his father before the latter’s death in 1838. At that time Kierkegaard also returned to the practice of Christian communion and began to explore the possibility that the subjective is the sign of truth, and that religion is more of a revelation of reality than is philosophy.

In 1840 Kierkegaard received his theology degree from Copenhagen, and in the same year became engaged to Regine Olsen. He eventually broke the engagement because he thought that the necessity of keeping secret his father’s guilt, as well as his relationship to God, made marriage impossible. This decision led to more affliction, for Kierkegaard suffered from seeing Olsen marry another man and raise a family in Copenhagen.

Kierkegaard’s major philosophical works, published under pseudonyms, appeared in the period 1843 to 1846. His opbyggelige taler (“edifying discourses” or “upbuilding discourses”), published at various times, were issued under his own name and were intended to make clear the religious intention of his other works. He was persecuted after an attack on the Corsair, a comic journal, by having his works ridiculed in the paper, and he was often involved in controversy. Shortly before his death he made his criticism of “official Christianity” clear in a series of pamphlets entitled Øieblikket (1855, 1881; The Instant, 1944). His work was a reflection of a progression in action from the aesthetic to the ethical and finally to the religious. He died believing in God but not in communion from the hands of a parson, a “royal functionary.”