Kierkegaard Read online

  The Church of Our Lady, Copenhagen’s “mother church” and the Kierkegaard family’s place of worship. Martensen lived just across from the front portico and Søren lived about a five-minutes’ walk down the road.

  So it is that when on Friday, November 16, 1855, Denmark’s most venerable newspaper announced: “On the evening of Sunday, the eleventh of this month, after an illness of six weeks, Dr Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was taken from this earthly life, in his forty-third year, by a calm death, which hereby is sorrowfully announced on his own behalf of the rest of the family by his brother / P. Chr. Kierkegaard,” it did so with the full knowledge that enclosed in these simple lines raged a storm that threatened to spill out onto the quiet streets of Copenhagen and beyond. Or so they must have hoped. All these citizens had to get and share their opinions somewhere, after all. It was a good time to be a journalist.

  Old Copenhagen

  If the editors who wrote the bare outlines of the story did hope for someone else to provide the colour commentary, they were not disappointed. Other public figures were not reticent to opine on Søren’s passing. Writing in the periodical North and South, an editor and journalist (and himself not without literary ambitions), Aron Goldschmidt spoke up for many of Kierkegaard’s admirers: “He was without a doubt one of the greatest intellects Denmark has produced, but he died a timely death because his most recent activities had begun to gain him precisely the sort of popularity that he could never have harmonized with his personality. The most dangerous part of his actions against the clergy and the official church is now only just beginning, because his fate undeniably has something of the martyr about it.”

  The Jewish Goldschmidt was writing outside the walls of the established church. Key figures of Danish Christianity were less distraught about Søren’s passing, and more certain about his status as a Christian hero. Namely—he was nothing of the kind. The celebrated Pastor Nicolai Grundtvig, a cultural and ecclesial giant in Danish life then (and now), also spoke for many when he preached a sermon on the day of Kierkegaard’s burial, giving thanks that one of the icicles hanging from the church roof had now melted and fallen off. In a letter to a friend, Grundtvig said of Kierkegaard, “I do not wonder that he was surprised by death, for as long as the day of the Antichrist has not yet come, those who tinker with [the national church] will always come to grief, and quickly, just like false Messiahs.”

  To be labelled a great intellect, martyr, and false messiah all at once was no mean feat, but it was not only the religious and literary establishments that had their points of view. The scientific fraternity also made its voice heard. Kierkegaard was, evidently, a medical marvel according to a group of research students who complained about the decision to bury Søren. He should, they said, have been given an autopsy instead of a traditional burial. A mighty brain like Søren’s deserved to be preserved for science. That the engine which powered such a literary output and such a quirky personality should moulder in the ground like any common man was a travesty to research. They complained to the hospital, but the hospital acquiesced to the wishes of the family. This was much to the relief of one of Søren’s friends who had been present at the petition and who wrote in his memoirs, “I thought it decent of the hospital, but those who were enthusiasts of science did not think that sort of thing should be taken into consideration.” Decency won out, but speculation over the contents of Kierkegaard’s skull remained. “He was said to suffer from a softness of the brain,” wrote one of Søren’s committed enemies. “Was this responsible for his writings, or were the writings responsible for it?”

  Here was the rub. It was Søren’s writings, especially the writings which made up the final stage of his life and career, which lay at the root of all the fuss. This collection of pamphlets and newspaper articles are now known collectively as Kierkegaard’s “attack upon Christendom,” and it was while engaged in this attack that Søren died. It was precisely because of these writings that Søren’s admirers and enemies alike agreed that he absolutely should not be laid to rest in a traditional manner. And it was precisely because of these writings that many of Søren’s family desperately wished that he would.

  Henriette Lund, Søren’s niece, provided many remarkable eyewitness accounts of her famous uncle. In her later life she jealously protected his reputation.

  Søren had said he wanted to upset blind habits and overturn easy assumptions. In this, if nothing else, he had succeeded. His niece, Henriette Lund, was present at the house following her uncle’s death. She paints a picture of a family torn between private grief and public responsibility. No one was thinking clearly about the future but were, she says, “living minute by minute in the present.” As a result, no one made definite arrangements for the funeral, and each was leaving the decisions up to the others. There had to be a funeral. But when and where should it take place? If it took place quietly, then it would look like the family was ashamed of Søren and his life’s work, which was all anyone was talking about at the time anyway. On the other hand, as Søren’s nephew (and younger half-brother to Henriette) Troels Frederik notes in his memoirs, a traditional church funeral would have struck a “strongly discordant” note. Troels summarized the quandary well: “Everyone knew that the deceased had characterized pastors as liars, deceivers, perjurers; quite literally, without exception, not one honest pastor.”

  Søren had publicly stated more than once that the comfortable, civilized world of cultural Danish Christendom had done away with Christianity. He had repeatedly denied he was even a Christian, and upon his deathbed he had sent away his ordained brother, refusing to receive Communion from a clergyman. And now the expectation was that Søren was to be given a full funeral from this self-same established Lutheran Danish Church! The unsavoury rabble who liked Søren’s attack and the sophisticated clergy who bore the brunt of it agreed alike that this would be impossible. Yet Søren was the brother of a pastor, the son of a publicly minded churchman, the friend of bishops. What is more, despite his later offensive statements, anyone even slightly familiar with Søren’s work could see that his was no simplistic attack on all things holy. He never stopped invoking the name of Jesus Christ in all his works. Surely it was still a Christian heart that stopped beating when the caustic public persona died in its hospital bed.

  The way forward was not clear, and the family dithered. According to Henriette, “It was probably in this way that some things were decided by mere chance—for example, the choice of the day of the funeral. This should not have been allowed to fall on a Sunday.” Henriette reports that a number of clergy came to Søren’s brother, her Uncle Peter, to get him to change the date. But Peter, doubtless with one eye on the inevitable newspaper report, thought that a change would look like cowardice. And so the arrangements went ahead as planned. Peter settled the decision to bury on a Sunday in Denmark’s mother church, the Church of Our Lady. And he would deliver the eulogy himself.

  Hans Christian Andersen, poet, author, and dramatist. Søren and Hans Christian moved in similar circles but were never close friends. One of Kierkegaard’s first published pieces was a review of Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler in which he accused the author of lacking an authentic point of view.

  On November 24, 1855, Hans Christian Andersen wrote to a friend about the funeral and its aftermath. His observations help set the stage for the whole scenario as it played itself out.

  Søren Kierkegaard was buried last Sunday [November 18] following a service at the Church of Our Lady. The parties concerned had done very little. The church pews were closed, and the crowd in the aisles was unusually large. Ladies in red and blue hats were coming and going. Item: a dog with a muzzle. At the graveside itself there was a scandal: when the whole ceremony was over out there (that is, when [Dean] Tryde had cast earth upon the casket), a son of a sister of the deceased stepped forward and denounced the fact that he had been buried in this fashion. He declared—this was the point, more or less—that Søren Kierkegaard had resigned from our society
, and therefore we ought not bury him in accordance with our customs! I was not there, but it was said to be unpleasant. The newspapers say a little about it. In Fatherland’s issue of last Thursday this nephew has published his speech along with some concluding remarks. To me, the entire affair is a distorted picture of Søren K.; I don’t understand it!

  Andersen was not alone, either in his confusion or in his opinion that with the crowds, colourful hats, muzzled dogs, and graveside protests the whole affair had been grossly mishandled.

  Every eyewitness to the scene comments on the packed building, with funereal tourists describing the enormous crowd present at the service where “the church was full to bursting.” Many had to be content with their spot of floor space behind a column in the back. Before they were all locked down, Søren’s adolescent nephew Troels did manage to find a seat in the pew row immediately behind the family. “A man who I later heard was Prof. Rasmus Nielsen sat in the pew with me and closed the door [to the box pew] so hard that it locked shut.” Nielsen, who fancied himself Kierkegaard’s disciple and successor, was one of the many people there with mixed motives.

  Troels Frederik Troels-Lund, Søren’s nephew. Troels was one of the last people to see his uncle alive.

  Poor Henriette Lund, there to grieve for her beloved uncle, was overwhelmed by a gang of gawkers who pushed their way into the church. The scene she relates was one of a ceremony on the verge of chaos, much like a restless mob waiting for something, anything, to happen. “The tightly packed mass of people surged like an angry sea,” she wrote, “while a ring of rather unpleasant-looking characters had placed themselves around the small flower-decked coffin.” This group was largely composed of self-declared supporters of Søren, upset that with this funeral the church was attempting to absorb into its own one of its most outspoken opponents. It looked like this group of toughs was going to carry the day when suddenly the church door burst open and a smaller group of “completely different appearance” pushed themselves through the crowd in order to grace “Denmark’s great thinker to his grave” with an honour guard around his coffin. These were students from the university, also supporters of Kierkegaard but with a sense of propriety their comrades lacked. “They conquered the space,” Henriette tells us, “and their ring replaced the other like a solid wall.”

  The gang of ruffians, convinced the brightest and best stars of the Danish Church were going to whitewash Søren’s legacy with an outpouring of self-serving, Christianised verbiage, need not have worried. In the end all clergy refused to speak. A rumour went about that this was at the behest of Bishop Martensen. The mutual animosity between Martensen and Kierkegaard was well-known, however; his decision here, if indeed it was his decision, was not solely due to petty foibles. The church was in a bind. If pastors spoke harshly of Søren it would be taken as speaking badly of the dead. If they praised him it would seem they agreed with his notorious attack or, worse, were angling for money from the family.

  So it was that only two members of the clergy were present in their official vestments. Tryde, the old dean of Our Lady, was there because he had to be. Visibly uncomfortable, Tryde bustled about, pushing his little cap back and forth on his head at a feverish pace, “while his face, usually so benign, wore an expression of profound annoyance.” The other clergyman present in his robes was Peter Kierkegaard. He may have been wearing the vestments of his vocation, but when he took his place at the front of the church, he did so not as a priest but as a brother.

  Nephew Troels noted, perhaps with some surprise considering Peter’s earlier dithering and known antipathy towards Søren, that his uncle’s eulogy was powerfully delivered. Other witnesses to the event agree the elder brother was gentle and calm, without directly alluding to the most recent polemics. The eulogy was not published in full until 1881 (which by then was a reconstruction of Peter’s own memories in any case). In his reconstruction, Peter tells us he expressed regret that he did not convince Søren to take rest from his labours or to collect himself calmly. Peter talked about their father growing up on the moors of Jutland, how he had loved all his seven children intensely, and how he, Peter, was now the only one left. He did not think this was the time or place to discuss Søren’s actions—however, Peter stated plainly that he did not agree with his brother and that Søren did not realize he had gone too far. Finally, Peter said he could not thank the gathered mass on behalf of his brother, pointing out that, after all, Søren had always sought solitude instead of being part of a herd. Showing some of his brother’s propensity for honest confrontation, Peter went one further—he could not thank the crowd on behalf of the Kierkegaard family either because he suspected that the crowd was there for mixed motives and wished only to see a spectacle. Peter ended with a prayer that Søren’s prodigious efforts would not be misunderstood and that what was true in them would have a positive effect on the church.

  Henriette tells us that when her living uncle delivered the eulogy for her dead one, the restless crowd “became still as glass.”

  Old Dean Tryde in his fussy clerical garb proved less able to preserve the peace when the crowd spilled outside and down the road for the graveside burial service. Tryde was swept along with the throng, whose members were once again jostling for a place with a view. Young Troels was also caught up in the crush. “Everywhere teemed with the tightly packed crowd, which surged over the graves and the latticework fences, forward to its common goal.” He arrived, breathless, with the rest of the mob at the gravesite. He saw that the freshly dug earth formed a yellow-grey hill, in striking contrast with the green grass growing under the iron railing surrounding the plot. This fence had been removed to give access to the grave, and the crowd pushed and shoved over the yellowy mud, trampling the grass. Everyone assembled, the dean cleared his throat and began the liturgy of committal.

  “Lovet være Gud og vor Herre Jesus Kristus …” The blessing of “God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” faltered on Tryde’s lips. One person had broken free and was standing in front of the crowd. From his vantage point, Troels saw a tall, pale young man dressed in black. The man, nervous, looked around and shouted for permission to say a word: “In the name of God—one moment, gentlemen, if you will permit me!” What was this? The dean complained that as the man was not ordained, he was not allowed to speak. Tryde thought it was all highly irregular and deeply offensive. He was right, but the crowd had not come all this way to see a quiet funeral for an ordinary man. They shouted Tryde down and clamoured their approval of the interloper. “Let him speak!”

  His name was Henrik Lund. He was unknown to many of the people looking on, but it soon transpired that he was yet another nephew of the dead man, one who also happened to be a doctor at the hospital where Søren had died. “I am bound to him by blood ties,” said Henrik, “and I am tied to him, finally, by agreement with his views and opinions, and this is perhaps the strongest tie.” Henrik drew a breath. “He, my deceased friend, stands and falls with his writings, … but I have not heard them mentioned with a single word; … therefore let us investigate here whether his views are true or not!”

  The crowd stayed silent, expectant. “It would never happen in a Jewish society, and never among the Turks and Mohammedans: that a member of their society, who had left it so decisively, would, after his death and without any prior recantation of his views, nevertheless be viewed as a member of that society.” No! cried Henrik, this crime against honesty is a crime “reserved for ‘official Christianity’ to commit.” Henrik wondered how far the clergy were going to go in their lip service to Kierkegaard—he insinuated that they were only angling for a good fee because they had heard that Søren was rich. If he had been poor, then the clergy would have treated this service differently. All eyes must have turned then to Tryde, unlucky representative of all of Christendom, who stood silently, service book quivering in his hand. “What is this ‘official Christianity’ then?” asked the doctor, answering his own question with a quote from the Book of Revelation. “It
is the great whore, Babylon, with whom all the kings of the earth have fornicated, the wine of whose whoredom has made drunk all the peoples of the earth… . Therefore the deceased was also right when, at the end of his life, he so urgently and incisively said what must be said, namely that everyone, by ceasing to participate in the official worship of God as it currently is will always have one sin fewer—and a great sin!—namely the sin of participating in making a fool of God by calling the Christianity of the New Testament what is not the Christianity of the New Testament.” Henrik concluded with a final flourish: “Therefore, both on his behalf and on my own, I protest viewing our presence here as participation in the worship of God sponsored by ‘official Christianity’; … I have spoken and freed my spirit!”

  Some of the crowd yelled “Bravo!” and here and there voices called out, “Down with the clergy!” but mostly there was only scattered applause. Troels tells us that most of the people “stood in tense, silent expectation of what would happen now.” The young man expected a riot, a great shout, something. But nothing happened. “The speaker was gone. I saw the heavy man from the church pew, Rasmus Nielsen—whom I had again discovered near the grave and who had probably wanted to speak out there—depart with an annoyed expression on his face.”