Kierkegaard and Death

Introduction

introduction 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Introduction Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben On Wednesday, July 29, 1835, two days before the first anniversary of his mother’s death, a twenty-two-year-old theology student writes of his experience of standing atop Gilbjerg Hoved, a small cliff just outside the North Zealand coastal town of Gilleleje: This has always been one of my favorite spots. Often, as I stood here on a quiet evening, the sea intoning its song with deep but calm solemnity, my eye catching not a single sail on the vast surface, and only the sea framed the sky and the sky the sea, while on the other hand the busy hum of life grew silent and the birds sang their vespers, then the few dear departed ones rose from the grave before me, or rather, it seemed as though they were not dead. I felt so much at ease in their midst, I rested in their embrace, and I felt as though I were outside my body and floated about with them in a higher ether—until the seagull’s harsh screech reminded me that I stood alone and it all vanished before my eyes, and with a heavy heart I turned back to mingle with the world’s throng—yet without forgetting such blessed moments (KJN 1, 9/SKS 17, 13–14). Three days later, Kierkegaard would write the famous entry so often cited as presaging and framing his entire authorial project: “What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do . . . the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die” (KJN 1, 19/SKS 17, 24). But that stunningly prescient entry tends to overshadow another key strand of Kierkegaard’s authorship that also begins in Gilleleje that week: his remarkable, lifelong preoccupation with death, dying, and the dead. Just as the “few dear departed ones” hover over that young student as he stands alone on a hill, trying to make sense of the 2 patrick stokes and adam buben enormity of loss, so the themes of death and mortality haunt Kierkegaard’s signed and pseudonymous works, a constant presence appearing in a variety of guises and concerns. And just as the very name “Kierkegaard” is homonymous with “graveyard ” in Danish, so it has become virtually synonymous with death. Biographically , the specter of death is a constant presence for Kierkegaard, who endured the deaths of all but one of his immediate family members. Though the details are unclear, the Kierkegaard family seemed to interpret these deaths as some sort of divine retribution, according to which none of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard’s children would live to be thirty-four (Christ supposedly died at age thirty-three).1 Only two children—Søren and Peter—surpassed this age, and Søren expresses surprise, almost disbelief , on reaching his thirty-fourth birthday.2 Yet Kierkegaard was fated to die at the relatively young age of forty-two, of mysterious causes that, once again, he interpreted in terms of a religious destiny.3 The medical examiner who admitted Kierkegaard to Frederik’s Hospital in October 1855, Harald Krabbe, noted that the patient held some definite and unsettling views on his condition: He considers his illness to be fatal. His death is necessary for the cause upon the furtherance of which he has expended all his intellectual energies , for which alone he has labored, and for which alone he believes he has been intended. Hence the strenuous thinking in conjunction with the frail physique. Were he to go on living, he would have to continue his religious battle, but then people would tire of it. Through his death, on the other hand, his struggle will retain its strength, and, as he believes, its victory.4 It seems that Kierkegaard viewed his death as the final act of his “martyrdom ” in the service of “true Christianity,” the culmination of the idea for which he was “to live and die.”5 The trajectory of the short authorial life running between the haunted week of resolution at Gilleleje and the strange ending at Frederik’s Hospital was shaped, defined, and informed by the thought of...