Kierkegaard (6 page)

Anne Kierkegaard, born Lund
, went home to the Lord July 31, 1834, in the 67th year of her life, loved and missed by her surviving children, relatives and friends, but especially by her old husband, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, who on August 9, 1838 followed her into eternal life in his 82nd year.

Anne Sørensdatter Kierkegaard,
neé
Lund, Søren's mother

We must hope that she was loved and missed. We do not know if this is the case because the most significant thing about her, from the point of view of a biography of Søren Kierkegaard, is that in the thousands of pages of his copious journals, diaries, articles, and books, Søren Kierkegaard does not directly mention her once.

People seeking any morsel of Søren's allusion to his mother must remain satisfied with this thin gruel: in
Sickness Unto Death
, there is passing mention of a “
deeply humbled
” wife of an “earnest and holy man” who despairs of forgiveness. The woman must be Anne because the man is certainly Michael Pedersen.

If Søren was
Fremmed
to his school friends, then the word most used to describe his father was
Tungsind
. Melancholy. Weighed down with a heaviness (
tung
) of spirit (
Sind
). Throughout his writings Søren often reflects on the note of guilt repeatedly struck in the melancholy Kierkegaard home.

It is appalling
to think even for one single moment about the dark background of my life right from its earliest beginning. The anxiety with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful depression, a lot of which I cannot even write down.

That their father's heavy spirit pervaded the family is not in question. Where it came from will always remain a matter of conjecture. What burden did Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard bear? The question is one upon which many people have wondered, not least Søren himself. In a famous diary entry, set apart from the rest of the entries, Søren wrote the following lines:

Then it was that the great earthquake occurred
, the frightful upheaval which suddenly drove me to a new infallible principle for interpreting all the phenomena. Then I surmised that my father's old-age was not a divine blessing, but rather a curse, that our family's
exceptional intellectual capacities were only for mutually harrowing one another; then I felt the stillness of death deepen around me, when I saw in my father an unhappy man who would survive us all, a memorial cross on the grave of all his personal hopes. A guilt must rest upon the entire family, a punishment of God must be upon it: it was supposed to disappear, obliterated by the mighty hand of God, erased like a mistake, and only at times did I find a little relief in the thought that my father had been given the heavy duty of reassuring us all with the consolation of religion, telling us that a better world stands open for us even if we lost this one, even if the punishment the Jews always called down on their enemies should strike us: that remembrance of us would be completely obliterated, that there would be no trace of us.

Søren's “Earthquake” has joined the ranks of the great literary mysteries of the ages. He deliberately suppressed the details, but two stories especially come to the fore.

“
How appalling
for the man who, as a lad watching sheep on the Jutland heath, suffering painfully, hungry and exhausted, once stood on a hill and cursed God—and the man was unable to forget it when he was eighty-two years old.” So wrote Søren in a diary entry in 1846. It has the artistic flourish of one of Søren's many thought experiments. Yet when Barfod found the entry going through Søren's papers, he showed it to brother Peter. Yes, confirmed the last of the Kierkegaards, weeping. That is father's story,
“and ours too.”
There was enough truth in the story at least that out of respect for the family, Barfod suppressed its publication.

The second story was less obscure, and more socially sensitive. Søren was not illegitimate, but his sister almost was. The upstanding citizen Michael Kierkegaard married Anne Lund a year after the death of his first wife. That Anne was a cousin and an illiterate housekeeper would have been enough to raise Copenhagen's collective eyebrow. To make
matters worse, their first child, Maren, was born only five months after the hasty wedding. Michael was aware of the impropriety of the union, formalising his reticence in the marriage contract itself. A strange, idiosyncratic document, the contract needed special dispensation from the royal courts to confirm its legality. It explicitly mentions the possibility that it may be that
“the temperaments cannot be united”
between man and wife. In this case, a specific sum was set apart for Anne to go her separate way, and the contract went out of its way to deny her the rights and status of a normal wife. The agreement spelled out the exact amount she would receive in case of death or divorce but denied her the usual rights of inheritance. A yearly amount of 200 r.d. was apportioned to her—equivalent to the yearly wage of an apprentice craftsman.

Michael would later amend his will to include his wife, and clearly love and affection grew in the marriage. Yet that inauspicious start of his family, coupled with the youthful rebellion of the deeply pious man must have contributed to Michael's melancholy. Far from dissipating the cloud of doom, Michael's financial success and his growing family seems to have had the opposite effect. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For people already predisposed to melancholy, the sense of a looming day of reckoning was not wildly implausible: another note struck repeatedly in the Kierkegaard family was that of accident and death. As a young boy, Søren Aabye
fell from a tree
, landing hard on his back. His family were understandably alarmed and attributed Søren's ensuing health problems to this event. Much worse, on September 14, 1819, the twelve-year-old Søren Michael died of bleeding in the head after a schoolyard accident when he crashed into another boy on the playground. The sudden death traumatised the family. Three years later on March 15, 1822, Maren died as a result of convulsions. She was twenty-four, the eldest child and the offspring of Michael and Anne's ill-judged union. Maren had never been well and her death was not a surprise. Middle sister Nicoline died of a fever on September 10, 1832, a few weeks after giving birth to a stillborn son. It was Michael who arranged
to tell his beloved daughter straight of her fatal condition. The doctor had wanted to soften the blow but the father insisted. “
No, my children have not been brought up like that
.” She left behind her husband, Johan Christian Lund, Henrik (aged seven), Michael (six), Sophie (five), and Carl (two).

Upon breaking with the family, brother Niels Andreas had immigrated to America. Less than a year later, after moving from Boston to Providence, and then to New York, he eventually tried his fortune in Paterson, New Jersey. It was there Niels succumbed to “
galloping consumption
” (tuberculosis) on September 21, 1833. News of his death struck the family hard, the news made even worse by the apparent omission of his father in Niels' deathbed utterances. Michael was convinced that the slight was deliberate and was plunged into inconsolable grief.

In the same year that her mother, Anne, passed away, youngest daughter Petrea gave birth to a boy in December 1834. The boy, Peter Severin, was healthy, but Petrea would not live to see the New Year. She left her husband, Henrik Ferdinand Lund, the single father of a two-week-old infant, as well as Henriette (five), Vilhelm (three), and Peter Christian (one). Like her sister Nicoline, Petrea was thirty-three years old. The age would acquire a totemic significance in the Kierkegaard household. Michael became convinced that he was doomed to see none of his children live past thirty-three, an age heavy with meaning.

Now rattling around in a house with only Michael and Peter for company, Søren too absorbed something of this morbid symbolism.

It is really remarkable
that Christ came to be precisely 33 years old, the number of years which according to general reckoning denotes a generation, so that here too there is something normal, in that whatever goes over this number is accidental.

Søren was well aware of the absurdity of the superstition, but it gripped his imagination nonetheless. On their respective thirty-fourth
birthdays, Søren and Peter would share letters, congratulating each other for proving their father wrong.

Religion constituted the final note that created the tone of Søren's household. “
I acquired an anxiety
about Christianity and yet felt powerfully attracted to it.” As with any deeply embedded and historical expression of Christianity, the Christian culture of Denmark was far from monolithic. All the various permutations of political and theological liberalism, conservatism, renewal movements, missionary zeal, rationalistic analysis, militaristic patriotism, peace movements, apologetics, philosophical challenges, Bible studies, cultural accommodation, personal devotion, doubt, faith, hope, and love that one can witness in the Christian world today were present in Denmark in the nineteenth century. Throughout his life, Søren would have cause to engage with all of these aspects and their figureheads.

For the young Søren, however, two main stars dominated the night sky of his Christian galaxy: the religion preached by Mynster and the faith of the Moravian Brotherhood. As with everything else in the family, Christianity was taken seriously in the Kierkegaard home. The easy-going religiosity of the cultured citizens of Copenhagen was not for Michael! His piety was no mere lip service. Like most good Danes, Michael faithfully had his children baptised and confirmed in the Lutheran State Church.

A year before Søren's birth, a young Lutheran minister named Jakob Peter Mynster had been appointed to the church down the road. The earnest young preacher had set out his stall
against
the intellectualism and Enlightenment rationalism that was fashionable in the universities, and
for
personal devotion and commitment to biblical revelation. He was also a firm defender of the cultural sophistication of the Danish Church and had a lively sense of the gospel as poetry. These qualities proved attractive to Michael, and Mynster became the Kierkegaards' family friend and pastor. He would remain so even when he became prime bishop of the national church years later.

Mynster's brand of Christianity was especially appealing because it seemed to offer Michael the best of both worlds. On the one hand, he could instil in his children a sense of socially acceptable, civic-minded Christianity. On the other hand, he could be sure that Mynster was not going to deny the personal, serious aspect of the faith, which for Michael was the most compelling version of all.

Michael was a lifelong Moravian, or
Hernuter
. An off-shoot from the Lutheran Reformation, the Moravian Brotherhood had a strong hold on the rural and peasant population of Denmark. It was a version of Christianity diametrically opposed to the high-minded philosophic liberalism of large swathes of the established church. The Moravians practiced the priesthood of all believers, sought inner renewal, and fostered emotional responses to gospel texts. It was a Moravian who was preaching when the Anglican priest and soon-to-be Methodist reformer John Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed” in England in 1738, and it was Moravians in Denmark who similarly sought to convert the baptised citizens of Copenhagen. Michael was a patron of the Brotherhood, helping them move to a new, larger meeting house in 1816. The Kierkegaard children would attend Moravian prayer meetings with their father on Sunday evenings, after attending to Mynster's sermons on Sunday mornings.

The Moravian emphasis on the tortured and crucified Christ, rather than the Holy Spirit or the Resurrection, did nothing to assuage Michael's sense of impending doom and unforgivable sin. His Christianity was serious and suffering, not joyful or graceful. Søren's later pseudonyms refer more than once to a young boy being shown a picture book of national and mythic heroes. Here was a general who rescued his people. Here was a brave man, feted by his fellows. And then the boy comes across another picture nestled amongst the heroes, deliberately laid across the pages. Here is a man tortured, with wounds in his hands, and blood streaming down his arms. Who did this? Who would harm such a man? The boy is told that it is he who did this, and that this is
the way of the world
. In
later life Søren would recall how he was brought up to believe with a firm conviction that in this base and corrupt world, everything that was Right and True would be spat upon.

Michael and the Moravians may well have been largely correct in their worldly analysis, but the effect on young Søren was deleterious. The unrelenting gravitas proved too much: