Soren Kierkegaard Attacks the Church

Soren Kierkegaard Attacks the Church

Published by Robert Herrmann-Keeling at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 by Robert Herrmann-Keeling

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

Also by this author:

Change Your Limiting Life Patterns

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About This eBook:

Soren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity is Truth combines a life of the founder of modern existentialism with introduction to his philosophy.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Melancholy Dane

Chapter 2: Methodology in his Madness

Chapter 3: Categories of his Works

Chapter 4: Christendom and Christianity

Chapter 5: A Life of Jesus

Chapter 6: The First Generation Church

Chapter 7: Kierkegaard Speaks to Christendom Today

Final Remarks

Bibliography

Introduction

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. One of the great, if odd, geniuses of modern times. He is called the father of modern existentialism.

Before he died at just 43 years of age, he had written 15 volumes of works, 32 volumes of Papers and Journals, and 44 books. His writing style was, even in Danish, unique. On more than one occasion he wrote a single sentence that is, in translation, more than a page in length! Although he gave the impression that he was a recluse, he numbered among his friends some of the most important church leaders of his day, even as he condemned them in his books and articles for making a fool of God. He met regularly for lunch with other Danish writers, including Hans Christian Andersen. He was a personal friend of the King of Denmark, and met with him frequently because the king knew SK (as we refer to him here) was in touch with the people and events of Copenhagen.

His philosophy, ideas, writing style, and odd public life contributed to his being one of the most noticed men, and most read writers, of his time. Indeed, he became so popular that Søren became the most popular name for boy babies throughout Scandinavia for more than a generation.

He was raised by a depressed father with intense religious devotion. SK was himself both a man of genius and of psychological disorders, also highly spiritual yet so critical of the official Danish Lutheran Church that he spent the last years of his life condemning it as making a fool of God. He contrasted Christianity (the spiritual movement of the first-generation followers of Jesus) and Christendom (the organized church). His attack in books and articles set him apart and had the added advantage of creating a new philosophy – existentialism – that has influenced the western world for nearly two centuries.

Regarding references and citations:

There are many editions of SK’s books, and collections of his articles, his 32 volumes of Journals, etc. Sources are listed in the bibliography at the back. I am not citing references or page numbers. Shorter quotes are included within paragraphs in quotation marks, and longer quotations are separated from the main text by italicized paragraphs. [Note] indicates my explaining or expanding something in the text, like a footnote, but immediately following the citation as a separate paragraph.

Throughout, I refer to Søren Kierkegaard as SK rather than by his full name. SK or SAK (which includes his middle initial) are traditional.

Regarding Denmark and Danes:

When Denmark is mentioned, we may think first of the author of children’s stories, Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875). He and SK were contemporaries and friendly rivals who met regularly with other Danish authors for lunch. Google famous Danes and you’ll find a list that includes: author Isak Dinesen (1885-1962); Pianist/comedian Victor Borge (1909-2000); Mount Rushmore creator Gutzon Borglum (1867-1941); creator of Danish Modern furniture, Arne Jacobsen (1902-1971); quantum physics Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr (1885-1965); father of modern astronomy Tycho Brahe (1546-1601); and of course Hamlet, Shakespeare’s fictional Prince of Denmark.

Some years ago I was minister of a church in which a family hosted an exchange student from Denmark. After the service I went to our coffee hour. They were standing in the doorway to introduce him. We shook hands, and I exclaimed, Ah! The land of Søren Kierkegaard! His face lit up as he said, "Oh, thank you! Everyone else says Hans Christian Anderson, and it’s so good to meet someone who knows of our real national hero!"

Please come with me now to explore in these pages the life and influence of Denmark’s real national hero, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard.

Chapter 1: The Melancholy Dane

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen, Denmark, the youngest of seven children of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and Ane Sørensdatter Lund Kierkegaard. He lived in Copenhagen his entire life. He died November 4, 1855, at the Frederick’s Hospital.

These many decades later, it is difficult to think of another individual whose influence has been so important to modern Christian theology and philosophy. Credited with being the father of modern existentialism (as his philosophical hero, Socrates, was of classical existentialism), and with inspiring such theologians as Karl Barth, Rudolph Bultmann, and Paul Tillich, to name just three, SK may also be seen as the reasoning behind the self-evaluation through which the modern Christian establishment has been going for the past one hundred years.

James Collins, in The Mind of Kierkegaard, says that, without some understanding of his life, not much sense can be made of the thoughts which stem so immediately from his personal situation. This is certainly true in relation to Kierkegaard’s writings attacking the Danish state (Lutheran) church, which were published during the last eight months of his life.

This present chapter outlines events that influenced SK’s thoughts concerning the Christian church. Chapters are devoted to his childhood and youth, the university years, his pseudonymous and religious writings, the incident with The Corsair, and, finally, his Attack on Christendom.

Childhood and Youth

Some background of Michael Kierkegaard, SK’s father, is necessary to understand SK himself, for the father’s severe and pietistic religious faith made a deep impression on his youngest son.

Michael Kierkegaard was born to the caretaker of a small country church in Denmark’s Jutland, hence the name that means church yard or church keeper. As a young boy, Michael herded sheep as the only source of income in the barren land. It was at such at time that he shouted his blasphemy of god, an act that became his unforgiveable sin and was recorded years later by SK in a Journal entry for February 7, 1846.

How terrible about the man who once as a little boy, while herding sheep on the heaths of Jutland, suffering greatly, in hunger and want, stood upon a hill and cursed God — and the man was unable to forget it even when he was eighty-two years old.

Shortly after, Michael went to Copenhagen to begin work in his maternal uncle’s woolen-goods company. He eventually became the owner of this lucrative business and was able to retire at forty. That he had been materially blessed seemed to him to be ironic condemnation for his lack of faith on the Jutland heaths.

A second incident important to the father, and therefore to the son, occurred about the time of Michael’s retirement. His first wife had died childless, and he was forced to re-marry before the traditional year of mourning was over, this time to his housekeeper and distant cousin, Ane Sørensdatter Lund. The first child of this marriage was born five months later. His earlier blasphemy as a little boy, combined with this incontinence, impressed on Michael a feeling of foreboding and doom: that he would outlive all his children as further punishment for his sins.

Søren was his father’s favorite, perhaps because he was a frail child, or because he differed from his brothers and sisters in out-outlook and intelligence. This favoritism seems to account for the bitterness which his brother, Peder, felt toward him. Although Peder had become Bishop of Aalborg after a brilliant teaching career in the University, he could never reconcile himself to the fact that the younger Søren had held such a claim on their father’s affection. Lowrie indicates that SK, as the Benjamin of the family [that is, the youngest child], was petted by the older sisters, and the stern father was inclined to be indulgent.

Collins attributes SK’s frail physical condition to his being the child of his parents’ old age and to being born with a hunched back and uneven legs. SK authorities Dru and Lowrie accept SK’s Journal entry describing the condition as the result of a fall from a tree as a child. Whichever is accepted, it is clear that SK felt the disparity between a weak body and a strong mind, and that this feeling contributed to his outlook on life. (In psychological terms, we can think of this as part of SK’s inferiority complex and his intellectual outpouring as compensation – some would say over-compensation – for this disparity.)

Some fictionalized passages in SK’s works and Journals give insights into his childhood. In an 1842 Journal entry, he wrote a story, which was apparently intended for eventual publication. In it, young Johannes Climacus is prevented by the weather from going outdoors to play. As an alternative, the father provides divertissement in the form of a game, which consists of imaginary journeys on the city streets and to other countries. Without so much as leaving the living room where they walked, SK wrote,

They went out of doors to a castle in Spain, or to the seashore, or about the streets, wherever Johannes wished to go. His father was equal to anything. What first was an epic now became a drama; they talked while walking up and down, To Johannes it seems as if the world were coming into existence during the conversation, as if his father were our Lord and he were his favorite, who was allows to interpose his foolish conceits as merrily as he would; for he was never repulsed, his father was never put out, he agreed to everything, and always to Johannes’ satisfaction.

Although a joyful comradeship is described here, the passage goes on to hint at the father’s melancholy which came to affect the son. Johannes is described as listening to his father’s conversation with visitors. The guest’s argument would be laid out in a tight logic and Johannes would listen enraptured as, after a brief silence, the father’s rejoinder follows, and behold! In a trice the tables are turned. But while the father was able to debate successfully with others, Johannes was troubled by a contradiction in his father’s personality. Writing four years after Michael’s death, SK notes that his father was able to silence others but not able to silence the voice of his own conscience.

Johannes, whose whole view of life was hidden as it were in the father found himself involved in a contradiction which baffled his for a long time: the suspicion that the father contradicted himself, if not in other ways, at last by the virtuosity with which he could triumph over an opponent and out him to silence.

Another experience, from SK’s childhood no doubt, indicates the beginnings of the centrality of the crucified Christ in his thinking. The passage describes a child being shown a series of pictures: a brave rider on a snorting stead, a huntsman leaning on his bow, etc.

You show the child pictures; the child is delighted. Then you come to one which intentionally was laid among the rest. It represents a man crucified. The child will not at once, nor easily, understand this picture, and will ask what it means, why he hangs on a tree like that. So you explain to the child that this is a cross, and that to hang on it means to be crucified, and that crucifixion in that land was employed only for the greatest malefactors. What effect will that have upon the child?

In The Point of View of My Work as an Author, SK says, as a child I was sternly and seriously brought up on Christianity. Humanly speaking, it was a crazy upbringing. The effect was that the suffering Christ became central to his thinking and the impetus for his eventual attack on the official, established church. Another example of an important childhood experience is to be found in a Journal entry in 1849. Again the suffering Christ is a dominant theme.

It was related to me when I was only a child, and with great emphasis, that they spat upon Christ, who yet was the truth, that the crowd (they that passed by) spat upon him and said, Hold thy peace. This thought is my life and though I were to forget everything, yet would I not forget that they told this to me when I was a child, and the impression it made upon the child.

Lowrie remarks that the image of the suffering Christ "supplied [SK] with courage and serenity in launching his attack upon the established church, the ideal of imitating Christ in his suffering and humiliation. As we shall see, the categories of the crowd and the individual may be traced to this early childhood experience. We may assume that the entire childhood led SK to adopt a nearly clinical depression.

The University Years

On October 30, 1830, at 17, Søren entered at the University of Copenhagen, gaining honors and high honors on the examinations. Michael Nielson. Rector of the School of Civic Virtue from which SK had graduated wrote a report on the young student, saying, He has a good intelligence, open for everything that promises unusual interest, but for a long time he was childish in a high degree and totally lacking in seriousness.

SK’s brother Peder, ordained in the Lutheran ministry and later to be a bishop, had completed his doctoral work in Germany and returned to teach at the University. After taking the second examinations on April 25 and October 27 of 1831, SK elected to study under the theology faculty, as his father had hoped he would. The passing of this examination freed SK from a fixed course of study so he could pursue his academic career at his own pace. For his tutor in philosophy he chose not Peder, the best tutor at the University, but Professor Hans Martensen, later to be the target of SK’s bitter attack on the Danish church.

Along with greater intellectual challenges, the University years gave SK a freedom that contrasted with the restricted life of the somber Kierkegaard household. He moved from the house of his childhood to private quarters elsewhere in Copenhagen. This may reflect his desire for autonomy apart from