The Literary Kierkegaard

Appendix One: Kierkegaard and Dante

Appendix One  Kierkegaard and Dante Although Hegel pronounced the Commedia “the artist epic proper [das eigentliche Kunstepos] of the Catholic Christian Middle Ages, the greatest poem and the one with the greatest material” (HW 10, pt. 3, pp. 408–9/A 2:1103), and although Dante figured prominently in aesthetic discussions among contemporary Hegelians such as Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Hans Lassen Martensen,1 Kierkegaard alludes to the Commedia only several times in his writings. Each of these allusions is terse and indirect, as their primary referent is the attempted emulation of Dante in Heiberg’s A Soul After Death: An Apocalyptic Comedy (En Sjæl efter Døden: En apocalyptisk Comedie, 1841) (see SV1 5:29/Pref. 25).2 Kierkegaard’s Vigilius Haufniensis implicitly distinguishes this play, as well as Martensen’s review of it,3 from Dante and the Commedia: “Some envision eternity apocalyptically, pretend to be Dante, while Dante, no matter how much he conceded to the view of imagination, did not suspend the effect of ethical judgment” (SV1 4:418/CA 153). Likewise, in an earlier draft, Kierkegaard distinguished Dante’s work from “apocalyptic ” writings in which “judgment ethically conceived is suspended”; all such writings, as opposed to the Commedia, he pronounced “merely a fantasy-view” (Pap. V B 60, p. 137, n.d. 1844/CA, Suppl., 207). As Kierkegaard must have read the comments on Dante in Hegel’s Aesthetics, we can only wonder what he thought of them. At first glance, Hegel’s representation of Dante makes the Italian poet seem practically antithetical to Kierkegaard. Unlike Kierkegaard, observes Hegel, Dante did not portray the actual everyday world (HW 10, pt. 3, p. 346/A 2:1055), and he made himself the hero of his own epic, “interweaving his own feelings and reflections with the objective side of his work” (HW 10, pt. 3, p. 360/A 2:1066). Also, unlike Kierkegaard, artists like Dante and Raphael gave shape only to “what was already present in the creeds and in religious ideas” (HW 10, pt. 2, p. 18/A 1:439). Despite these and other important differences, however, there are some equally 311 significant affinities. If Dante as poet in Hegel’s view claimed the right of the church and made himself mankind’s judge (Weltrichter) in assigning historic, mythic, and literary figures to the three otherworldly realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise (HW 10, pt. 2, pp. 181, 211/A 1:564, 589; see also HW 10, pt. 3, pp. 373, 410/A 2:1076, 1104), Kierkegaard pursues a comparable procedure, assigning his own pseudonyms, and prominent figures from history (Socrates), myth (Abraham and the Wandering Jew), and literature (Faust and Don Juan), to whichever of his three this-worldly existential stages they each fit. According to Thomas Miles, Vigilius Haufniensis’s description of Dante as a poetic thinker who “contemplated the mysteries of eternal life” and yet did not “suspend the effect of ethical judgment” might apply to Kierkegaard himself, especially because Kierkegaard locates “eternal life” within lived experience . In Dante, as in Kierkegaard, we find “a devout but fiercely critical religious thinker and a poet who is both richly imaginative and ethically insightful.”4 Moreover, these two poets have in common that both were inspired by unhappy love, both advanced a reformist critique of society and its religious practices, and both endured a resulting ostracism from society.5 Like Kierkegaard’s relation to Dante, the relation of the entire Kierkegaardian authorship to the Commedia is marked by notable similarities as well as differences. Notwithstanding the retrospective assessment Kierkegaard offers of his authorship “in the totality [totalt]” (SV1 13:529/PV 41), it could never be said that his oeuvre constitutes what Hegel, speaking of the Commedia, describes as a “strictly regulated , even almost systematic, poem” (HW 10, pt. 3, p. 409/A 2:1103) with a “strict organization of the whole” (HW 10, pt. 2, p. 211/A 1:589). In contrast to the Kierkegaardian stages and phases of existence, within and between which innumerable movements, transitions, “leaps,” and other dynamics are possible, the Commedia is set in the “unalterable sphere [unabänderliche Kreis]” or “changeless existent [wechsellose Dasehn]” of the afterlife, where individuals “are presented for ever [sic], solidified into images of bronze” and “in their being and action are frozen and are eternal themselves in the arms of eternal justice” (HW 10, pt. 3, p. 409/A 2:1103–4). What similarities might offset these differences? Just as the Commedia...