My favorite philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, that mid-19th century haunter of Copenhagen, is puzzling and elusive in numerous respects, though one often gets the feeling that he thinks the mystery is pretty funny and somehow underneath it all he's saying plainly what he thinks, albeit with lots of stories and witticisms. You can't tell from book to book whether he's writing fiction or non-fiction, for example, and his epoch-making Either/Or, which arguably established existentialism, is presented as a novel, featuring a sheaf of journal entries and philosophical papers by several fictional authors. His best-known books were published under pseudonyms, attributed to everyone from “Hilarius Bookbinder” to “Johannes Climacus” to “Johannes Anti-Climacus.”
But the greatest of Kierkegaard enigmas is this: the relation of Jesus Christ to his girlfriend Regine Olson, and hence the relation of religious faith to romantic love and erotic desire. Christian religious faith is Kierkegaard's great theme, and his treatment of it is the most profound in the tradition. But his own existential crisis of religious faith appears to have been precipitated by a crisis in his engagement to be married. He's often on about the infinity of the subject of faith, and the infinity its object, and the infinity of its commitment. But his biographers think that the treatment of faith and his pining for the girl are just exactly the same, are parallel, or that one causes the other. Going cosmic for a second, we’re at play here between soul and body, between finitude and infinitude, between salvation by a person and salvation by God. I suppose that is itself a pretty good summary of Christianity. But in this case there's also a lot of kissy kissy.
If people don't know anything else about Kierkegaard's biography, they know that he was engaged to a young woman named Regine Olson and that he broke off the engagement despite the fact, elaborately recorded by both parties, that they loved one another very much and that there was no particular barrier to their marrying. There are many accounts of what happened, making use of Kierkegaard's journals and correspondence and her later accounts. Perhaps he thought he wouldn't make a good family man, which is plausible. My own theory is that wanting her, pining for her and idealizing her put him in a relatively sinless condition of faith and aspiration, which came to be his image of what a human being should be in some way. Cuddling with her at night would have complicated matters, perhaps. Regine outlived him by half a century, and never stopped expressing her own devotion to Søren the man and Kierkegaard the thinker, though she married someone else.
Once you know this story and have the notion that Kierkegaard regarded it as the biggest thing that happened in his life, it's hard not to see it everywhere. In Either/Or, for example, the famous "Diary of a Seducer" appears to be an attempt to paint himself as a terrible manipulative cad who never gave a damn about Regine, but only wanted to see if he could fool her into falling for him. It's exciting, and it seems to want to make the breakup easier for her by portraying himself (in thin fictional disguise). On the other hand, the whole of the second volume of that book is an explanation and praise of marriage that would make you think its author is ready to commit for life. How Regine or Søren thought things might turn out or what message was being expressed to her in Either/Or's 1500 pages: one can hardly tell.
Famously, many of the "pseudonymous" and "aesthetic" works of Kierkegaard are occasioned by the Regine situation. He could, for some time, have decided to marry her after all. Instead, he wrote books that seem biographers to be about deciding definitely not to marry her but then thinking that they would somehow ultimately be married anyway, perhaps by a sort of miracle. In what’s probably his best-known work, Fear and Trembling, he imagines a peasant boy who falls in love with a princess. Slowly he realizes he’ll never talk to her, much less marry her. But he commits himself for life to the idea that he’ll marry her after all. This is what came to be known as the Kierkegaardian "leap of faith."
But Fear and Trembling isn’t primarily about peasants and princesses, Sørens and Regines. It’s about Abraham and Isaac and one of most the excruciating stories in the Hebrew Bible. In Abraham's old age, God has given him a son, and promised that he’ll be the father of a great people. When Isaac reaches maturity, God calls on Abraham to sacrifice him. Abraham is portrayed as willing to do so, and at the last minute God substitutes a ram and spares Isaac. It’s often preached as a quick parable of faith: Abraham so trusted God that he would do... anything, even kill his own son.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes de Silentio shows the situation of Abraham to be absurd and impossible; he screws up the intensity to the maximum degree. Abraham’s willing to commit murder at the behest of a God who prohibits murder. He has plunged into a maelstrom of absurdity, logical and moral. As he climbs Mount Moriah to sacrifice Isaac, he’s living in contradiction. Faith, says Kierkegaard everywhere, is a paradox inside of which the believer is to live: the faith of Abraham that he’ll receive Isaac back, or the faith of the peasant that he will find the princess in eternity.
The Christian version of this Abrahamic paradox is this, as Kierkegaard puts it in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, written soon after Fear and Trembling, "the eternal God has appeared in time and died." That’s not something that is difficult to explain rationally, says "Johannes Climacus." It's an impossibility, a ridiculous contradiction, that Christianity calls on us to accept.
This is an extreme view of faith. Kierkegaard recommends Christianity on the ground that it’s the most absurd religion, the religion that’s hardest to believe, or a religion that it would be rationally impossible to believe. This is an extreme position. Profound and difficult, as well, demanding and engaged in matters of ultimate or infinite concern.
But what led to it all? Kierkegaard's great biographer and translator Walter Lowrie describes the genesis of Kierkegaard's greatest works (Fear and Trembling, Repetition, The Concept of Dread, Stages on Life's Way), like this: they "are to be regarded as a second either/or addressed to Regina, and I believe that what prompted S.K. to repeat the question ["what is the faith of Abraham, or in Christ?"] was the profound disturbance he experienced at seeing Regina twice nod to him in church at evensong on Easter Day (April 16, 1843)." Elaborating slightly: the most profound examinations of religious faith in the Western tradition were caused by two quick glances from a pretty girl. After she nodded, twice, he abandoned Copenhagen for Berlin, took shelter in a little room, and (for God's sake!) wrote Fear and Trembling.
On the personal plane, though, matters are even worse, Søren's relation to Regine isn’t really like Abraham's relation to God or even the peasant's to the princess. It wouldn’t have taken a miracle, merely a friendly nod back, for Kierkegaard to get the girl. It leaves me in puzzlement, but maybe that’s where Søren Kierkegaard was trying to take me all along. Thanks, man?
Fear and Trembling, though it might’ve been set in motion by a nod from Regine Olson, isn’t about Regine Olson. It's about God, and the nature of faith. Whatever may have set him going, he went all the way. It's obvious from everything he wrote after that he was a committed Christian. What Regine has to do with that is complex, but not dispositive. His account of faith doesn’t rest on his romantic relationships, requited or unrequited, consummated or not.
On the other hand, what’s the relation of a finite, very typical, experience of a crush or of erotic love, to spiritual experience or an experience of God? Many people have asked, and have wielded the erotic in the service of the spiritual or vice versa, from the Kama Sutra to Abelard and Heloise or Dante and Beatrice. Sex and spirit, God and gonad, orgasm and religious ecstasy, romantic yearning and aspiration after immortality: how are they related, really?
I'm not sure what to say about that, but think that if we have any way to get to the spiritual, it’ll have to be through the physical; if we’re going to get to heaven, we’re going to have to start here on earth in our own bodies. Perhaps as an embodiment of all that is good and pure and holy and infinite, any given Regine is absurdly inadequate. But it was precisely Søren's immersion in that kind of absurdity that coaxed him toward the infinite after all.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell