Kierkegaard Betrothed by Joakim Garff

Kierkegaard’s journey to Kierkegaard is to be followed first and foremost in the wealth of journals in which he sketches and describes the different stages on his life’s way. The accounts are to be found in entries like “About Myself,” or are undertaken in more graphic form, as in the entry from 1837 where Kierkegaard compares himself sadly to the Roman god Janus, who with his two faces could  look both backwards and forward in time:” I am a Janus bifrons: with one face I laugh, with the other I weep.” That the comparison was well chosen was confirmed as the production that was his life took shape and made clear that the categorical either/or for which Kierkegaard became world famous should have been both/and, because that came much closer to his own dialectical nature. Thus he became both melancholy’s theologian and irony’s Magister, both edifying author and merciless prophet, both rhetorical artist and critic of the aesthetic, both paradoxical thinker and the teller of simple tales, both Copenhagen’s dandy millionaire and modernity’s martyr, both the epitome of anxiety and the fearless polemicist, both a self-effacing penitent and monumentally self-aware, both the refined aristocrat and the open-handed street preacher, both a classical master-thinker and a teasing deconstructionist, both the pious monk and the devil-may-care enjoyer of life, both absolutely unmarried and yet betrothed for all eternity to the love of his youth.

This, then, was the man Regine loved, naturally not because of his nose, eyes, feet, or mind, and scarcely either because he was this incomprehensibly rich example of humankind, but far more miraculously because he was in her eyes “that particular individual” whom she so dearly loved that she was ready to take up lodging in a modest cabinet in his elegant apartment, just to be in his vicinity. And then, for heaven’s sake, he sat there and lamented that she didn’t understand him! Understood who, one might ask, understood which Kierkegaard? Was this not an outrageously unreasonable demand from a man who throughout his life had struggled to understand himself!

IN the happily breathless entry about Regine as his “sovereign mistress,” Kierkegaard asked himself whether Regine might form the conclusion of his “life’s eccentric premises.” From a narrow historical point of view, there can be no doubt of the answer, but in a wider and more meaningful perspective the answer becomes far less unequivocal. Regine became the conclusion of Kierkegaard’s eccentric premises in a sense that, through her, he learned that the understanding of the other means less than the love for the other. It came slowly perhaps, but this recognition did come to Kierkegaard, as he let it be known once in 1853, when he had once again installed himself in a cabin, this time of a more metaphorical quality, but again with Regine in mind:


I live now in melancholy’s separate cabin – but I can take pleasure in seeing the pleasure of others . . . To be loved by a woman, to live in a happy marriage, pleased with life – that is now denied me; but when I go out of my separate cabin, I can take pleasure in seeing the happiness of others, can strengthen them in it being well pleasing to God to be happy in life and to enjoy it. To be healthy and strong, a complete person, for whom there is hope for a long life ahead – this, now, is never to be granted me. But when, then, on coming out of my lonely pain among the happy, I believed I could have the sorrowful pleasure of strengthening them in being thus happy with life.

Pleasure over the pleasure of others becomes just as enigmatic as the love out of which this pleasure springs. Correspondingly enigmatic is that love that has its origin in God, who has lodged it in out hearts, for what does that really say? No one knows, no one understands it, but perhaps one receives a hint of it when, somewhere in Works of Love, Kierkegaard writes so grandly:


As the calm lake stems from the deep springs that no eye saw, so too a person’s love has still deeper ground, in God’s love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then neither would there be the little lake nor either a person’s love. As the calm lake stems darkly from the deep spring, so does a person’s love originate mysteriously in God’s. As the calm lake indeed invites you to contemplate it, yet as with the darkness of the reflection prevents you from seeing through it, so does love’s mysterious origin in God’s love prevent you from seeing its ground. When you think you see it, it is a reflection that deceives you, as if what only hides the deeper ground were itself the ground.