Picked-Up Pieces (19 page)
Authors: John Updike
A little later, the formula is given a personal turn:
O infinite majesty, even if you were not love, even if you were cold in your infinite majesty I could not cease to love you, I need something majestic to love.… There was and there is a need of majesty in my soul, of a majesty I can never tire of worshipping.
Yet elsewhere this majesty acquires human attributes, even weaknesses. God knows sorrow. “Alas, the more I think about it the more I come to imagine God as sitting in sorrow, for he most of all knows what sorrow is.” God loves, out of need. “It is God’s passion to love and to be loved, almost—infinite love!—as though he himself were bound in this passion, so that he cannot cease to love, almost as though it were a weakness.…” And: “I know that in love you suffer with me, more than I, infinite Love—even if you cannot change.”
The paragraph preceding this last quotation is revealing:
If my contemporaries could understand how I suffer, how Providence, if I may dare to say so, maltreats me, I am certain that they would be so profoundly moved that in human sympathy they would make an attempt (as sometimes happens with a child which is being maltreated by its parents) to wrest me free from Providence.
The hypothetical cruel parents return in another metaphor:
As the child of a tight-rope walker is from his earliest years made supple in his back and in every muscle so that, after daily practice, he is sheer suppleness and can carry out every movement, absolutely every movement, in the most excruciating positions, yet always easily and smiling: so with prayer to the absolute majesty.
And in a third image, world history is likened to “the uproar and hubbub which children make in their playroom, instead of sitting still and reading their books (as their parents would like).” With these similes, we touch a central nerve of Kierkegaard’s thought—the identification of God with his father, whom he both loved and hated, who treated him cruelly and who loved him.
Much is known of Kierkegaard’s relation with his father, but more is mysterious. Kierkegaard wrote in his journals: “Perhaps I could recount the tragedy of my childhood, the fearful secret explanation of religion, suggesting an apprehensive presentiment which my imagination elaborated, my offence at religion—I could recount it in a novel entitled
The Enigmatical Family
.” And another entry reads:
It is terrible whenever for a single instant I come to think of the dark background of my life, from the very earliest time. The anxious dread with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful melancholy, the many things which I cannot record—I got such a dread of Christianity, and yet I felt myself so strongly drawn to it.
A childhood classmate later wrote, “To the rest of us who led a genuinely boyish life S.K. was a stranger and an object of compassion, especially on account of his dress.… This [his costume, which resembled the costume of charity schools] procured him the nickname of Choirboy, which alternated with Søren Sock, in allusion to his father’s previous business as hosier. S.K. was regarded by us all as one whose home was wrapped in a mysterious half-darkness of severity and oddity.” And in his autobiographical
The Point of View for My Work as an Author
, Kierkegaard wrote, “As a child I was strictly and austerely brought up in Christianity; humanly speaking, crazily brought up. A child crazily travestied as a melancholy old man. Terrible!”
Yet the boy’s relation to his father was also intimate and admiring. One of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, reminisces:
His father was a very severe man, apparently dry and prosaic, but under this rough coat he concealed a glowing imagination which even old age could not quench. When Johannes occasionally asked of him
permission to go out, he generally refused to give it, though once in a while he proposed instead that Johannes should take his hand and walk back and forth in the room.… While they went back and forth in the room the father described all that they saw; they greeted passersby, carriages rattled past them and drowned the father’s voice; the cake-woman’s goodies were more enticing than ever. He described so accurately, so vividly, so explicitly even to the least details, everything that was known to Johannes and so fully and perspicuously what was unknown to him, that after half an hour of such a walk with his father he was as much overwhelmed and fatigued as if he had been a whole day out of doors.… To Johannes it seemed as if the world were coming into existence during the conversation,
as if the father were our Lord and he were his favorite
, who was allowed to interpose his foolish conceits as merrily as he would; for he was never repulsed, the father was never put out, he agreed to everything.
I have abbreviated this often quoted passage and italicized a signal clause. By the same light, Kierkegaard did not expect to live past the age of thirty-three (the age of Christ) and
did
expect his father, though fifty-seven years older, to outlive him (to be immortal). In fact, his father lived to the patriarchal age of eighty-two and Kierkegaard died when he was only forty-two, so the premonition was in spirit correct. There is no doubt that his father fearfully dominated the household. Incredibly, in all of Kierkegaard’s writings there is not one mention of his mother. And an age that has been able to peruse Kafka’s diaries need not be reminded that, severity aside, the
competence
, the very wonderfulness of a father can be felt as a crushing tyranny. “It is a fearful thing,” Kierkegaard wrote, “to fall into the hands of the living God.”
To all this add a precocious compassion. In his journals Kierkegaard writes of the perils of religious education:
The most dangerous case is not when the father is a free thinker, and not even when he is a hypocrite. No, the danger is when he is a pious and God-fearing man, when the child is inwardly and deeply convinced of it, and yet in spite of all this observes that a profound unrest is deeply hidden in his soul, so that not even piety and the fear of God can bestow peace. The danger lies just here, that the child in this relationship
is almost compelled to draw a conclusion about God, that after all God is not infinite love.
It does not seem to me contradictory to posit a father who appears as both God and a victim of God. Such a paradox, after all, is fundamental to Christian theology, and Kierkegaard’s imagination often returns to the forsaken Christ’s outcry on the Cross. Duplicity was the very engine of Kierkegaard’s thought, a habit he elevated to a metaphysical principle—the principle of “indirect communication,” which he found both in Socrates’ intellectual midwifery and in God’s decision to embody Himself in a scorned and mocked sufferer. In all Kierkegaard’s production, nothing is more powerful, more beautiful and typical, than the sweeping Prelude to
Fear and Trembling
, wherein the story of Abraham and Isaac is pursued through a sequence of differing versions. All portray, in similar language, Abraham and Isaac rising in the morning, leaving Sarah, and travelling to Mount Moriah, where God has told Abraham he must sacrifice his son. In the first version, Abraham, whose face has shown sorrow and “fatherliness,” turns away a moment,
and when Isaac again saw Abraham’s face it was changed, his glance was wild, his form was horror. He seized Isaac by the throat, threw him to the ground, and said, “Stupid boy, dost thou then suppose that I am thy father? I am an idolater. Dost thou suppose that this is God’s bidding? No, it is my desire.” Then, Isaac trembled and cried out in his terror. “O God in heaven; have compassion upon me. God of Abraham, have compassion upon me. If I have no father upon earth, be Thou my father!” But Abraham in a low voice said to himself, “O Lord in heaven, I thank Thee. After all it is better for him to believe that I am a monster, rather than that he should lose faith in Thee.”
Here, in this shocking twist of a myth, that nerve is bared. Here, in this play of ironies and deceits carried out under the highest pressure of dread, we feel close to Kierkegaard’s mysterious and searing experience of his father.
A specific revelation about his father troubled Kierkegaard’s young manhood and was transmuted, or absorbed, into a gnawing guilt or uneasiness that he refers to in his journals as “the thorn in my flesh,” which in turn seems to be synonymous with his singularity, his fate, as “the
individual,” to suffer a martyrdom not incomparable with Christ’s. Some crucial confidence was imparted on his twenty-second birthday: “Then it was that the great earthquake occurred, the frightful upheaval which suddenly forced upon me a new infallible rule for interpreting the phenomena one and all. Then I surmised that my father’s great age was not a divine blessing, but rather a curse.… Guilt must rest upon the whole family, a divine punishment must be impending over it.” The exact nature of the “earthquake” is forever buried in the portentous secrecy Kierkegaard assigned it. Possibly the old man’s confession had to do with sex. On the mere statistical records, Michael Kierkegaard seduced his housekeeper in the year of mourning his first wife, married the woman when she was five months pregnant, and fathered upon her a total of seven children, the last, Søren Aabye, being born when the parents, if not as ancient as Abraham and Sarah, were of an age when, in Lowrie’s delicate phrase, “no such blessing was expected.” Kierkegaard frequently speaks of his own existence as a “mistake,” and in the journals of
The Last Years
this sense of himself has spread to include all humanity: “This whole human existence, dating from the Fall, and which we men are so puffed up about as a devilish
tour de force
… is merely the consequence of a false step.” Of a hypothetical son he writes:
Concerning himself he learns that he was conceived in sin, born in transgression—that his existence is therefore a crime, that therefore his father, in giving him life, has done something which is as far as possible from being well-pleasing to God.
His vivid, even sensual awareness of Original Sin, of life itself as a crime, may be traceable to an embarrassment he felt about being himself living proof of an elderly couple’s concupiscence. He ranged from the heights of conceit to abysmal depths of shame; near the end of his life, he suffered a stroke while visiting friends and, falling helpless to the floor, rejected the attempts to lift him up by saying, “Oh, leave it [his body] until the maid clears it away in the morning.” In the last journals, he thanks God “that no living being owes existence to me,” urges celibacy upon all Christians, faces cheerfully the consequence that the race would die out, and asserts that “human egoism is concentrated in the sexual relation, the propagation of the species, the giving of life.”
Or the “earthquake” may have been learning that his father, as an
eleven-year-old boy, had cursed God. An entry in the journals of 1846 reads:
How terrible about the man who once as a little boy, while herding the flocks on the heaths of Jutland, suffering greatly, in hunger and in want, stood upon a hill and cursed God—and the man was unable to forget it even when he was eighty-two years old.
The first editor of Kierkegaard’s papers, Barfod, showed this passage to Bishop Peter Kierkegaard, the one surviving sibling, who confirmed that this was indeed his father, and that, since shortly thereafter the shepherd boy was adopted by an uncle and set on the road to prosperity, he regarded this prosperity as an inverted curse, as God’s vengeance for, to quote Peter, “the sin against the Holy Ghost which never can be forgiven.” It seems likely that this, and not a sexual confession, is the matter of the “earthquake.” And it seems to me, furthermore, that Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom is a repetition of his father’s curse—an attack, ostensibly directed against the Danish Protestant Church, upon God Himself, on behalf of the father who had suffered, and yet also against this same father, who had made his son suffer and bound him to Christian belief.
In 1849, Kierkegaard wrote in his journals, under the heading
Something about myself which must always be remembered:
“If, with my imagination, and with my passions, etc., I had been in any ordinary human sense a man, then I should certainly have forgotten Christianity entirely. But I am bound in agonizing misery, like a bird whose wings have been clipped, yet retaining the power of my mind undiminished, and its undoubtedly exceptional powers.” And the pamphlets comprising
The Attack
have been, in every language except English, the first things by Kierkegaard to be translated, as anti-clerical, anti-Christian literature. The “Christendom” Kierkegaard denounced was popularly taken to be synonymous with Christianity, and perhaps it was. It is hard to account otherwise for the strange qualities of the attack as found in
The Instant
and in these journals. Are specific abuses, as in Luther’s attack upon the Papal church, named? No: “Luther nailed up niney-five theses on the church door; that was a fight about doctrine. Nowadays one might publish one single thesis in the papers: ‘Christianity does not exist;’ and offer to dispute
with all parsons and dons.” This is from a journal of 1851; by 1854, Kierkegaard had developed a piercing critique of Luther, stated wittily as:
Luther suffered extremely from an anxious conscience, he needed treatment. Very well: but is that a reason for completely transforming Christianity into a matter of calming anxious consciences?
Kierkegaard does not want consciences to be calmed, he wants them to be exacerbated by the truth about Christianity. “My task is to put a halt to a lying diffusion of Christianity, and to help it to shake off a mass of nominal Christians.” And what is the truth about Christianity?
The ideal means hatred of man. What man naturally loves is finitude. To face him with the ideal is the most dreadful torture … it kills in him, in the most painful way, everything in which he really finds his life, in the most painful way it shows him his own wretchedness, it keeps him in sleepless unrest, whereas finitude lulls him into enjoyment. That is why Christianity is called, and is, hatred of man.
