Contemporary Authors

• Kierkegaard's Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen - 2017 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
• Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography - 2007 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

• Amazon -

  Joakim Garff is the author of the acclaimed Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton), which has been translated into many languages. He is associate professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen and coeditor of a project to publish definitive new Danish-language editions of all of Kierkegaard's writings. He lives in Copenhagen.

• Wikipedia -

  Joakim Garff (born 25 February 1960, London) is a Danish theologian and Søren Kierkegaard scholar at Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen. He has written several books on Kierkegaard including Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography.

• Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret Website - https://web.archive.org/web/20070209004035/http://www.sk.ku.dk/medpers.asp?id=29

  Joakim Garff

  forskningslektor, lic.theol.

  Phone: +45 33766923
  Email: jg@sk.ku.dk

  Office location:
  1.sal nr. 248

  CV
  born 1960 (Denmark), cand.theol., University of Copenhagen, 1986. Pastoral Seminary, 1987. Fellowship in ethics and philosophy of religion, 1987; Ph.D. Fellowship, University of Copenhagen, 1988. Assistant Lecturer, University of Copenhagen, 1990. External Fellowship, 1991. Ph.D. [lic.theol.], 1991. Assistant Professor, Institute of Systematic Theology, University of Copenhagen, 1991. Employed at the Centre as Associate Research Professor.

  Current work
  Currently working on a project on Kierkegaard and Bildung.

  Memberships etc.
  Editorial Board, Kierkegaardiana, 1989-99. Chairman, Søren Kierkegaard Society, 1992-1999. Editorial Board, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter; Editorial Board, electronic edition of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS-E).

  Selected publications
  “Den Søvnløse.” Kierkegaard læst æstetisk / biografisk (1995); Kierkegaards æstetik (with Jørgen Dehs and Poul Erik Tøjner, 1995); Skriftbilleder. Søren Kierkegaards journaler, notesbøger, hæfter, ark, lapper og strimler (with N. J. Cappelørn and J. Kondrup, 1996; English translation: Written Images. Søren Kierekgaard’s Journals, Notebooks, Booklets, Sheets, Scraps, and Slips of Paper, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, 2003); SAK. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. En Biografi (2000; Swedish translation, 2002; Norwegian translation, 2002; Hungarian translation 2003; German translation 2004; English 2005). Numerous articles and reviews. Authored explanatory notes to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. K4 and K19.

• Soren Kierkegaard Research Center (with a better translation) - http://teol.ku.dk/skc/english/staff/?pure=en/persons/139647

  English > Staff

  Joakim Garff
  Joakim Garff
  Associate Professor, Head of Center

  The Søren Kierkegaard Research Center
  Farvergade 27 D, Building: Lok. 6B-1-14

  1463 Copenhagen K

  jg@sk.ku.dk
  http://www.skc.ku.dk/
  Phone: +45 35 33 01 46
  Presentation
  CV
  Research outputs
  Joakim Garff is Associate Professor and Writer at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen and has been a co-editor of Søren Kierkegaard's Writings in 55 vols. Garff is the author of SAK, an award winning biography of Kierkegaard, which has been translated into a number of languages; into English as Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2005). From 1992 to 1999 Garff was Chair of the Danish Kierkegaard Society. Most recent book is Regine's mystery. The story of Kierkegaard's fiancé and Schlegel's wife (2013) [The Riddle of Regine: The Story about Kierkegaard's Fiancée and Schlegel's Wife]. Currently Garff is working on the research project Nisus formativus, concerning Kierkegaard's concept of self-identity and his critical approach to culture.

  Primary fields of research
  • Kierkegaard Studies
  • Danish Golden Age
  • Aesthetics
  • Biography
  • Hermeneutics

  Current research
  Nisus Formativus. Formation, identity formation and formation criticism

  Selected publications

  Regine's mystery: the story of Kierkegaard's fiancé and Schlegel's wife
  Garff, J. 2013 Gad . 478 p.
  All time Kierkegaard: 200 years with a global dane
  Garff, J. 2013 Christian Newspaper Publishers . 266 p.
  '' Perfection ': Signal of an ambiguous term'
  Garff, J. 2010 To be present: Festivals for Niels Jørgen Cappelørn. Garff, J., Rocca, E. & Søltoft, P. (eds.). Former Daily Newspaper , p. 30-50 20 p.
  Formation, identity formation and formation criticism
  Garff, J. 2008 To get to himself. 15 portraits of Danish education thinkers. Gad , p. 106-138 32 p.
  Lo buffo dello spirito Ab posse esse. Kierkegaard: Teatro, formazione e deconstruzione
  Garff, J. 2008 In: Note Bene, quaderni di studi kierkegaardiani. 6 , p. 107-129
  "What did I find? Not my I": On Kierkegaard's Journals and the Pseudonymous Autobiography
  Garff, J. 2003 In: Kierkegaard Studies. p. 110-124
  SAK: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. A biography
  Garff, J. 2000 Gad . 740 p.
  "To produce was my life": Problems and Perspectives in the Kierkegaardian Biography
  Garff, J. 1997 In: Kierkegaard Studies. Monography series. 1 , pp. 75-93
  Scripts: Søren Kierkegaard's journals, notebooks, booklets, sheets, patches and strips
  Cappelørn, NJ , Garff, J. & Kondrup, J. 1996 Copenhagen: Gad . 179 p.
  The author of the authors
  Garff, J. 1995 Kierkegaard Aesthetics. Garff, J., Tøjner, PE & Dehs, J. (eds.). pp. 69-125
  "The Sleepless": Kierkegaard read aesthetically / biographically
  Garff, J. 1995 Copenhagen: CA Reitzel . 440 p.
  The aesthetic of Kierkegaard: its ambiguity and its role in his theological thinking
  Garff, J. 1992 In: Danish Theological Journal. 1 , pp. 36-55
  "My dear reader!": Kierkegaard read with Restrained Affection
  Garff, J. 1991 In: Studia Theologica. 45 , pp. 127-147
  The eyes of Argus: The Point of View and Points of View with Respect to Kierkegaard's 'Activity as an Author'
  Garff, J. 1998 Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader. Blackwell Publishing Ltd , pp. 75-102

  CV
  Page 1
  Short presentation Joakim Garff is Associate Professor and Writer at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen and has been a co-editor of Søren Kierkegaard's Writings in 55 vols. Garff is The author of SAK, a award winning biography of Kierkegaard, which has been translated into a number of languages; into English as Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2005). From 1992 to 1999 Garff was Chair of the Danish Kierkegaard Society. Most recent book is Regine's mystery. The story of Kierkegaard's fiancées and Schlegels wife (2013) [The Riddle of Regine: The Story about Kierkegaard's Fiancée and Schlegel's Wife]. Currently Garff is working on the research project Nisus formativus, concerning Kierkegaard's concept of self-identity and his critical approach to culture. Employment Education 1994: Associate Professor for Research, Søren Kierkegaard Research Center 1991: Lic.theol., Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen 1987: Pastoral Seminary 1986: Master of Theology (cand.theol.), University of Copenhagen Other academic activities 1992-1999: Chair of the Søren Kierkegaard Society 1991-92: Vice Chair of the Søren Kierkegaard Society 1987-99: Member of the board of the Søren Kierkegaard Society 1985-1995: Lectures at the Royal School of Library and Information Science 1985-1992: Lecturer at the People's University of Copenhagen 1980-1986: Member of the board for the Students' Union 2012 - Head of Studies at the People's University of Copenhagen 1988 - Theological reviewer at Weekendavisen Member, Editorial Boards 1994-2016: Co-editor of Søren Kierkegaard's Writings 1989-1999: Co-editor of Kierkegaardiana 1987-1995: Co-editor of Fønix 1982-1988: Co-editor of Circles Joakim Garff Associate Professor, Head of Center The Søren Kierkegaard Research Center Postal address: Farvergade 27 D Lok. 6B-1-14 1463 Copenhagen K Email: jg@sk.ku.dk Phone: +45 35 33 01 46 Web address: http://www.skc.ku.dk/ Web: http://www.skc.ku.dk/ Associate Professor, Head of Center The Søren Kierkegaard Research Center Copenhagen K, Denmark 1 Jan 2010 → now !! Gæstelærer Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics Copenhagen S, Denmark 1 Nov 1998 → 30 Nov 2013
  Page 2
  Awards 2001: The Georg Brandes Prize 2001: The Weekendavisen Literature Prize

Quoted in Sidelights: "avoids mythologizing the muse, portraying Regine as a sensitive woman in whom deep passions ran unexpressed beneath a calm propriety."
Kierkegaard's Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p82+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Kierliegaard's Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen

Joakim Garff, trans, from the Danish by Alastair Hannay. Princeton Univ., $32.95

(350p) ISBN 978-0-691-17176-0

Garff (Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography) sketches a measured, perceptive portrait of Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard's jilted fiancee, reanimating her not as the philosopher's immortalized muse but as a living, breathing person. Garff's unique access to Regine's letters to her sister Cornelia from 1855 to 1860, while her husband, Fritz Schlegel, was governor of the Danish West Indies, provide rich insight into colonial life but little in terms of Regine's thoughts about her youthful, thwarted love. Garff thus returns to Kierkegaard's own words to examine at length how he rejected the actual Regine so that he might make her his poetic inspiration and authorial dedicatee. As Kierkegaard died in 1855, Garff can only speculate that he still exerted an influence on Regine up until her own death in 1904. Garff's reverence for the "master-thinker theologian" doesn't blind him to Kierkegaard's evident failures where Regine was concerned, and he also avoids mythologizing the muse, portraying Regine as a sensitive woman in whom deep passions ran unexpressed beneath a calm propriety. Readers not well versed in Kierkegaard's biography may find some of the connections between the dead man's writing and Regine's life tenuous, but this is nonetheless a laudable addition to the biographical trend of bringing to prominence the women in the lives of much-admired men. (June)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kierkegaard's Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 82+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250866/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=284a4b30. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250866

Great Dane
Luther Blissett
186.2495 (Apr. 16, 2005): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 New Scientist Ltd.. For more science news and comments, see http://www.newscientist.com.
http://www.newscientist.com/
Soren Kierkegaard: A biography by Joakim Garff, Princeton, 22.95 [pounds sterling], ISBN 069109165X

THIS reviewer has read every page of every book, honest. Until now, presented with an 892-page biography of the 19th-century great Dane, author and self-described genius Soren Kierkegaard.

Named for the proximity of his grandfather's farm to the churchyard, born as the surprise late-life son of a self-made merchant and his erstwhile serving maid, brought up shuttling between the state church and the theologically radical Moravian Brethren, Kierkegaard became the scourge of "official" Christianity and bane of bishops. His writings, including his 1841 master of theology thesis The Concept of Irony, then Either/Or and Repetition in 1843, prefigured much European philosophy. His cousin Henrik Lund scandalously protested at his graveside in 1855 that the church was recuperating him--a media event that Kierkegaard could almost have engineered to further his disestablishmentarianism.

I shall, eventually, read the parts in between, I promise. And on the basis of my sampling of Bruce Kirmmse's engaging translation, I recommend you do so too.

Luther Blissett is a science writer

Blissett, Luther

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Blissett, Luther. "Great Dane." New Scientist, 16 Apr. 2005, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A131902352/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6b46f3f8. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A131902352
Quoted in Sidelights: “consistently interprets Kierkegaard in a suspicious manner, putting a negative spin on most of the crucial episodes.”
Kierkegaard among the biographers
C. Stephen Evans
13.4 (July-August 2007): p12+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Christianity Today, Inc.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Kierkegaard has not been well served by his English-language biographers. Walter Lowrie wrote two early biographies, one immense and full of long quotations from Kierkegaard's as yet untranslated works, and later the much-read and much-loved A Short Life of Kierkegaard. Though not completely uncritical (as a cleric Lowrie could hardly fully endorse Kierkegaard's later attack on the church), Lowrie's works are today often dismissed, too hastily in my view, as hagiography, since he certainly loved Kierkegaard and generally puts the best face possible on the famous episodes in Kierkegaard's life. Josiah Thompson swung to the other extreme in his biography The Lonely Labyrinth, debunking many of Lowrie's views and generally viewing with suspicion almost every claim Kierkegaard made about himself and his own work. (Thompson's suspicious nature ran deep; after writing his work on Kierkegaard he left academe and became a private investigator, author of Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye, and a prominent controversialist about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It is therefore noteworthy that two new biographies have appeared in the last several years: Alastair Hannay's Kierkegaard: A Biography, and Joakim Garff's much-praised Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography, translated from the Danish. Both books are the result of many years of work on Kierkegaard, and both have much to offer the reader. Neither, however, will supplant Walter Lowrie as my first recommendation for someone interested in Kierkegaard's life. Kierkegaard is still waiting for his ideal biographer.

Hannay, a British philosopher born to Scottish parents, spent most of his career teaching in Norway. He was a pioneer in studying Kierkegaard using the tools of analytical philosophy, author or editor of several important works, and has done a series of readable translations of Kierkegaard for Penguin Books. The current book aspires to be, in Hannay's own words, an "intellectual biography," one that looks to the life to help us understand the works and to the works for help in understanding the life. The twin focus gives Hannay's work a lot of its strength; each work of Kierkegaard that is discussed appears in the context of Kierkegaard's own personal struggles, and Kierkegaard's life does offer new angles for understanding those works. Hannay is generally careful to avoid the fallacy of assuming that the biographical context of a work exhausts its meaning, and he is certainly knowledgeable about both the works and the life.

Nevertheless, I found Hannay's book unsatisfying, for two odd reasons. The first stems from one of Hannay's virtues as a philosopher: his ability to see complexity and nuance. This philosophical strength, however, leads to a weakness in the book: Hannay poses multiple possibilities for understanding the episodes of Kierkegaard's life but often finds himself paralyzed when he considers them. Too often the reader is left guessing where Hannay stands himself. One might think that this is a virtue, since Hannay is granting the reader the freedom to make his or her own decisions about the subject, but given that the reader is unlikely to know as much as Hannay himself, the indecisiveness of the author tends to be conveyed to the reader. Frequently the reader discovers that "it is possible that Kierkegaard thought such and such" or that "Kierkegaard might have been motivated by this or that" or simply that "in the end it is unclear" what Kierkegaard was up to. Perhaps Hannay here simply reflects the undecidability that inheres in actual human beings, but it leads to frustration for the reader who longs to know Kierkegaard better, or who at least longs for a vigorous portrait from Hannay with which to interact.

The second problem is that, despite Hannay's philosophical gifts, and the inordinate amount of space given (in a biography) to the interpretation of Kierkegaard's works, I found Hannay not always reliable in his judgments about those works. The unreliability sometimes shows itself in simple factual mistakes, such as his claim (p. 174) that Kierkegaard "never once owned up publicly or even privately" to have written the pseudonymous Either/Or. (I find it unfathomable how a writer as knowledgeable as Hannay could ignore the "First and Last Declaration" that Kierkegaard appended to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which he takes legal and literary responsibility for all his pseudonymous works, even while asking his reader to recognize the distinction between the views of the pseudonymous "character authors" he has created and his own personal views.) At times Hannay gives what I would call serious misreadings of Kierkegaard's texts, and here, in contrast to the restraint he often shows as historian, he tends to make over-confident judgments about matters that are at best controversial.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I made a long list of such instances, but here I can only cite a couple of examples. On p. 387, Hannay considers Kierkegaard's own claim that his writings served the purposes of "Governance" or divine providence, and asks whether it might be true that Kierkegaard was serving God's purposes: "Surely not. The very idea of God transcends purpose, and thus prudence and imprudence too." This mysterious theological edict is offered without justification or explanation, even though if taken seriously it makes the idea of divine providence impossible. A second example can be found on p. 361, where Hannay discusses Kierkegaard's penetrating discussion of love in Works of Love, and, much to my astonishment, judges that Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche, places little value on pity and compassion: "in the struggle out of which Kierkegaard's individual emerges there is, as we saw, a hardening against the pity one is disposed to feel for human suffering...." From my perspective, this is the exact opposite of the truth.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

My own hunch is that many of Hannay's misjudgments arise from a fundamental lack of sympathy for Kierkegaard's Christian faith. Hannay himself was a signatory to the 1980 "A Secular Humanist Declaration," and though, unlike some commentators, he is aware of Kierkegaard's Christian faith and its importance, I find he often views issues connected to that faith through the wrong end of the telescope.

Joakim Garff's Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography is an altogether different kind of book. While even longer than Hannay's work, Garff's biography sparkles from a literary perspective. (This may be partly to the credit of Bruce Kirmmse's excellent translation.) Though Garff spends almost as much time discussing Kierkegaard's works as Hannay does, Garff never loses sight of the story. He knows how to tell a tale, and while certainly long, the book is always a good read. Indeed, much of Garff's biography reads like a novel.

According to Danish historian Peter Tudvad, Garff's work is too much like a novel; that is, it plays fast and loose with the facts. Although Garff's work has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Brandes Award in Denmark, and though the English language version has been extravagantly reviewed by such notables as John Updike, Tudvad, author of Kierkegaard's Kobenhavn (Kierkegaard's Copenhagen) and an expert on the period, has shown that Garff's book is riddled with mistakes. Many of Tudvad's findings have been communicated to English-speaking readers by philosopher M. G. Piety. (1) (Everything I say about this below has been derived from Piety's articles, though I first heard about the controversy when a Danish friend sent me a newspaper article from Copenhagen. Moreover, I am referring to the first English edition of Garff's book, published in 2005; a revised paperback edition, not yet available at the time of this writing, is promised.)

Many of the mistakes are unimportant, but overall the errors show a clear bias: Garff consistently interprets Kierkegaard in a suspicious manner, putting a negative spin on most of the crucial episodes. Here is one example: Garff wants to interpret Kierkegaard as a self-indulgent man who lived luxuriously. So, for example, in a section called "A Dandy on a Pilgrimage," Garff claims that during Kierkegaard's trip to the ancestral family home in Jutland he was accompanied by "his servant, Anders Westergaard" (p. 154). The problem is that Westergaard, who later was employed by Kierkegaard, was actually a soldier during this period and could not have accompanied Kierkegaard on the journey.

A similar mistake occurs later in the book when Garff transforms one Frederik Christian Strube into another one of Kierkegaard's "servants." The problem, according to Tudvad, is that Strube was actually a journeyman carpenter, and would have been required by law to work at his job 12 hours a day for six days a week, leaving little time for domestic service. Kierkegaard allowed Strube, who was mentally disturbed, along with his family, to live with him for three and a half years, professing concern for Strube's mental health, a concern which Garff ridicules. In the same vein Garff, relying on a previous author who painted Kierkegaard as a man who lived extravagantly while giving little to charity, describes Kierkegaard as having little concem for the poor. In reality there are no reliable records to tell us what Kierkegaard gave to charity. (Tudvad reveals that a figure often cited as the total amount Kierkegaard gave to charity in a particular year is in reality the amount given by Kierkegaard's servant.)

Tudvad argues that the mistakes point to a more fundamental problem: Although Garff clearly knows Kierkegaard's writings and the secondary literature about Kierkegaard extremely well, he relies on that secondary literature in a quite uncritical way, thus perpetuating many of the myths that have developed around Kierkegaard over the years. Even worse, according to Tudvad, Garff's reliance on secondary sources sometimes descends to the level of plagiarism, quoting from other authors virtually verbatim without attribution and borrowing original theories and ideas (such as Carl Saggau's theory that Kierkegaard's father believed himself to be afflicted with syphilis), again without citing his sources.

An amusing example occurs when Garff, copying without attribution from Jorgen Bukdahl, claims that there were rumors that a Danish religious figure, J. C. Lindberg, "was to be incarcerated and executed (Danish henrettes) on Christianso, a notorious prison island" (p. 33). What Bukdahl actually wrote was that Lindberg was to be incarcerated and "exiled" (Danish hensaettes). Evidently, Garff miscopied or misread his own notes. Sadly, for reasons I will speculate about later, Tudvad's exposing of Garff's errors has created more difficulties for Tudvad than for Garff, leading eventually to his resignation from his position at the Kierkegaard Research Centre. (Still, the promise of a revised edition with substantial corrections suggests that Tudvad's work has not been in vain.)

As serious as these problems that Tudvad has raised are, they by no means exhaust the flaws in Garff's work. As a general rule, Kierkegaard commentators can be divided into those who regard Kierkegaard's own The Point of View for My Work as an Author as reliable testimony and those who, like Garff, regard The Point of View as self-serving fiction (p. 562). In The Point of View Kierkegaard claims that his central purpose has been to "reintroduce Christianity into Christendom" and that he was "from first to last a religious author." It is true, and Kierkegaard himself affirms this clearly, that he did not have a clear plan for his whole "authorship" when he began writing, but as he wrote, he himself was "educated" by "divine governance." This admission by Kierkegaard, however, by no means implies that his account is untrue; every author realizes that one's intentions in a writing project change as the project itself is implemented, and it is thus quite conceivable that Kierkegaard's account is true.

Garff pours sophisticated scorn on Kierkegaard's account, offering in its place a psychologized version: here Kierkegaard is seen as crippled by an abusive father, incapable of normal relations with women, and hungry for literary fame. Garff offers us a Kierkegaard whose writings served as a kind of therapy, or perhaps psychological defense, against his pathological guilt and depression.

There is truth in all of these charges. Kierkegaard, like his father and like all the rest of us, was a flawed human being. (Though not nearly so flawed as Garff makes him out to be.) The question is whether this all-too-human story is the whole story, or even the most important part of the story.

Throughout my career I have written about Kierkegaard as a prophetic figure who had something important to say both to the secular world and to the Church. To the secular, intellectual world Kierkegaard presents a powerful case that the decline of faith among European intellectuals is not rooted in intellectual problems or the growth of scientific knowledge but in diminished imaginative power and the loss of an emotional grasp of what it means to exist as a human being. To the Church, Kierkegaard presents a powerful protest against "Christendom," the domestication of Christian faith by the equation of faith with human culture. The power of these two messages is evidenced by the continued fascination with Kierkegaard's writings among Christians and non-Christians alike.

However, the power is also evidenced by the lengths to which both of Kierkegaard's polemical targets sometimes go to obscure or eviscerate his message. Sadly, Hannay and Garff, though both have spent much of their lives studying and writing about Kierkegaard, may be examples. As a secular philosopher, Hannay really does not take Kierkegaard's Christian challenge seriously. Perhaps this is what one should expect, given Kierkegaard's own claim that people who are not themselves gripped by the passion of faith will find Christianity offensive.

Garff, on the other hand, could be seen as a representative of the Danish establishment, ensconced in the Christendom Kierkegaard attacked so vigorously. Although his writings about Kierkegaard might suggest that Garff is a professor of literary criticism, he is in fact a trained theologian, having graduated from the pastoral seminary in Denmark; he is also a product of a distinguished Danish family. It is not surprising, then, that Garff finds ways of making Kierkegaard's protest against the Danish establishment the expression of a sick mind and sickly personality. I do not claim this actually explains Garff's motivations; I of course cannot really know what his motives are. But it is a possibility that will at least occur to anyone who knows the history of Kierkegaard's reception in his native Denmark. Nor, sadly, is it surprising that Peter Tudvad, in daring to challenge Garff, has suffered for the same kinds of reasons that Kierkegaard himself suffered, both during his lifetime and posthumously.

If someone takes Kierkegaard's testimony in The Point of View as credible, is not that person in danger of being duped, if Kierkegaard is, as Garff claims, fictionalizing his life and works? Is it not safer to take the critical, suspicious road that Garff himself travels? Kierkegaard himself addresses this question in Works of Love in some reflections on the Pauline claim in 1 Corinthians 13 that "love believes all things." In this section of the book, he argues that a loving person and a mistrustful person may have the same knowledge about a given individual, but they draw different conclusions from what they know, the loving person always choosing to interpret the individual in the best possible light. The mistrustful person regards this as gullible foolishness, an invitation to be deceived. Yet there are many ways of being deceived. To allow one's suspicion and mistrust to cheat one out of love is to be deceived in the most terrible way about the most important thing in life. The lover who believes in another may be deceived about some finite, temporal event, but has a sure grasp on the most fundamental truth.

Those who are unashamed to be described as lovers of Kierkegaard may take some comfort from these thoughts. Of course they forfeit the status of being shrewd, superior beings, who have seen through Kierkegaard's web of deception. But perhaps they partly escape the fate of those people that Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, calls "associate professors," whose "task in life is to judge the great men." The lives of these judges display a "curious mixture of arrogance and wretchedness--arrogance because they feel called upon to pass judgment, wretchedness because they do not feel their lives are even remotely related to those of the great." (2)

I confess that--as a professor--I feel the sting in those Kierkegaardian words. I have my disagreements with Kierkegaard, and there are episodes in his life--particularly the broken engagement to Regine--that I find distressing. I realize that Kierkegaard's motives were doubtless mixed. Still I believe that Kierkegaard struggled hard to be honest with himself, with God, and with his readers. His claims in The Point of View that his authorship centers around his vocation as a Christian seem right to me, not just because he makes them, but because they make sense of the writings in a way that no other view does. And this leads me to humbly confess my love and appreciation for a man whose greatness will withstand the work of biographers and commentators alike.

C. Stephen Evans is University Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Baylor University. Among his recent publications are Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford Univ. Press), Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Baylor Univ. Press), and an edition of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, coedited with Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge Univ. Press).

1. A summary of some of Tudvad's findings can be found in the Danish publication Faklen http://www.faklen.dk/artikler/tudvad04-01.php. An English summary/translation by M. G. Piety is available at www.faklen.dk/english/eng-tudvad07-01.php. Piety has written several articles recounting and defending Tudvad. The examples I provide are taken from "Some Reflections on Academic Ethics," ASK, The Journal of the College of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University, September 2005, and "Who's Soren Now?" in The Philosophers' Magazine, Vol. 31, 2005. (The latter is available online but only by subscription.)

2. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. by C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), p. 55.

Kierkegaard

A Biography

ALASTAIR HANNAY * CAMBRIDGE UNIV. PRESS, REV. ED., 2003

512 PP. $29.99, PAPER

Soren Kierkegaard

A Biography

JOAKIM GARFF * TRANS. BY BRUCE H. KIRMMSE

PRINCETON UNIV. PRESS, 2005 * REV. ED., 2007 * 896 PP. * $24.95, PAPER

Evans, C. Stephen

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Evans, C. Stephen. "Kierkegaard among the biographers." Books & Culture, July-Aug. 2007, p. 12+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A166565867/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2b578304. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A166565867
Quoted in SidelightsL “monumental and magisterial biography,”
Soren Kierkegaard: a Biography
251.51 (Dec. 20, 2004): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
SOREN KIERKEGAARD: A Biography JOAKIM GARFF. Princeton Univ., $35 (872p) ISBN 0-691-09165-X

This is the second major work on Kierkegaard to appear in recent years; Alastair Hannay's intellectual portrait Kierkegaard: A Biography approaches the religious philosopher's life and work in a thematic fashion, discerning behind the veils of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings his anxieties and hopes, failures and successes. Garff, associate professor at the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, proceeds very differently in this biography, portraying a philosopher whose daily life formed the crucible in which his landmark works were written. Drawing not simply on Kierkegaard's most famous writings, Garff also examines in microscopic fashion the minute details of the Dane's life year-by-year from his birth to his death. Garff uses journals, letters, gossip and family conversations to present the portrait of an intense young man whose study of the philosophy and literature of his day turned him into both a romantic and an anti-romantic, a Christian and a rebel against Christendom. For example, Garff points out that Goethe's Faust heavily influenced the young Kierkegaard, as did his participation in a circle of friends who discussed romantic literature. Although some will accuse Garff of revealing salacious details of the philosopher's life--as in the chapters on Kierkegaard's relationship with his fiancee Regine Olsen--this monumental and magisterial biography offers fresh glimpses into the sometimes-tortured life and work of this true philosophical genius. (Feb.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Soren Kierkegaard: a Biography." Publishers Weekly, 20 Dec. 2004, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A126585125/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=27734852. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A126585125
Quoted in Sidelights: “liberates Kierkegaard” from the caricatures of him as “a hunchbacked and melancholy hypochondriac,”
Garff, Joakim. Soren Kierkegaard
Bryce Christensen
101.5 (Nov. 1, 2004): p447.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* Garff, Joakim. Soren Kierkegaard. Tr. by Bruce H. Kirmmse. Feb. 2005. 872p. illus. index. Princeton, $35 (0-691-09165-X). 198.

Much has changed since a prominent nineteenth-century cleric dismissed the writings of Soren Kierkegaard as "blasphemous toying with what is holy." But while generations of serious readers have learned to treasure the Danish thinker's profound meditations on the modern meaning of Christian faith, many have remained captive to the earliest caricatures of Kierkegaard as a hunchbacked and melancholy hypochondriac. Thanks to a gifted translator, English-speaking readers at last can share an acclaimed Danish biography that liberates Kierkegaard from those caricatures, even as it establishes the vital links between his tempestuous personal life and his epoch-making works. Garff allows readers to see, for instance, how Kierkegaard deliberately primed himself for his literary-religious mission by severing--at the cost of intense self-laceration--the only romantic tie of his life. In a similar manner, Garff connects the tensions in Kierkegaard's relations with his own father to the theological drama of Fear and Trembling. An acute critic, Garff discerns Kierkegaard's deeply private and psychological motives for pressing toward martyrdom in his implacable warfare against Christendom's complacent ecclesiastical hierarchy. But he also keeps in view the larger historical context, one in which Karl Marx was asking his own revolutionary questions about the role of religion within a rapidly industrializing world of commodity capitalism. A biography that illuminates an often-misunderstood mind.--Bryce Christensen

Christensen, Bryce

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Christensen, Bryce. "Garff, Joakim. Soren Kierkegaard." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2004, p. 447. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A125066491/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e94215be. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A125066491
Quoted in Sidelights: “In the end, Garff paints a riveting picture of someone with an extremely complex set of feelings and expectations, so problematically undetached from personal engagements, that the reader palpably senses the urge to draw from them a timeless, narrative significance,”
Wisdom in Love, Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity
Kevin Hoffman
55.4 (Summer 2006): p602+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.sagepub.com
Wisdom in Love, Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity. By Rick Anthony Furtak. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. ISBN 0-268-02874-5. Pp. xii +236.

Soren Kierkegaard, A Biography. By Joakim Garff. Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-691-09165-X. Pp. xxv + 867.

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard is frequently thought a prolific, unmarried writer bent on riddling his audience with a strenuous and frightening view of human existence. From those with a passing familiarity, you might hear: Isn't he the one who cut himself off, from his father, his fiance, the Danish church, and finally his entire readership, only to die prematurely, melancholy and aloof? Indeed, his standards for spiritual health appear so high and paradoxical, one wonders whether the final heavenly banquet will have any guests at all, or if any, whether they will have lost their appetite along the way. It might come as a bit of a surprise, then, to pick up Rick Anthony Furtak's Wisdom in Love, Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity and find that the Dane's authorship actually advocates vulnerably engaged emotional attachments over against Stoic other-worldly flights.

Furtak locates his analysis within the contemporary return to ancient Greek ways of addressing the role of emotions in the moral life. For some time philosophers have been increasingly sloughing off the modern burden of pitting reason against the passions, a tradition in which the emotions are either involuntary, hydraulic facts about us (Descartes), essentially reliable but inscrutable sentiments against which reason is impotent (Hume), or corrupt principles it is our transcendental duty to overcome (Kant). What these sickly, internally divided caricatures suggest is that our passions are dark and stubborn, unlikely to play a positive role in shaping and directing the moral personality in an authentic, integrated way. In contrast, the common ancient assumption is that emotions are themselves intelligent; they arise from and are a response to what we perceive as valuable and salient beyond ourselves in the environed world. Without them we simply wouldn't care about anything, including care morally.

To say emotions are intelligent, however, is not to claim that we do not often care about the wrong things, or care too little, or too much, about the right things. But it does imply our desires can be examined, developed, educated, and integrated in more or less salutary ways. In Furtak's words, the "cardinal virtue" of this "renovated ethics would be nothing less than the readiness to be always affected in the right ways, based upon a care for the right things" with the goal of having "earned the right to trust oneself in becoming passionate"(36). The crucial point against the Stoics is that we do properly cherish and depend on external goods beyond our control and ought to remain open to favored experiences in which fate might intervene. In this, Furtak appeals warmly to the work of Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum, among others, and marshals evidence that Kierkegaard prefigures this return to ancient philosophy as a resource with which to set himself up against both the romantic and rationalist trends of his day.

The case Furtak makes is not one of simply tracing an intellectual debt. The longest sections of his argument are indirect and interpretive. In part, this is due to the nature of Kierkegaard's own texts, themselves indirect, and certainly ones that require interpretation. What is therefore distinctive about Wisdom in Love is the lens through which Furtak brings into focus Kierkegaard's hallmark esthetic, ethical, and religious points of view around the passionate pursuit of meaningful experiences that are subject to the vicissitudes of time and fortune. The pathos of the esthete, for instance, "either distances itself from existence or else is present in it through an illusion" and therefore suffers from an "abstract sentimentality" (54, 58). In contrast, the distinctively ethical individual knows that the rather sad and elusive nature of purely esthetic experience can be rendered intelligent by committing to some concrete project. "We can tell a whim from a significant inspiration only if an understanding gained over time is activated in the momentary response," such that one is no longer "stranded in an empty present tense" (71-72).

One of the most laudable features of this analysis is how Furtak allows the esthete to respond in kind before moving on to the religious point of view. Taken at their best, romantics perceive that ethical individuals, by emotionally settling in and down, can close themselves off, and in a distinctive way suffer from a failure of imagination. Moral resolutions can themselves distance one from existence, from new and uncharacteristic loves that a life would be less meaningful without. It's not just that sober married individuals may be esthetically unexciting but that it might take a truly sensitive esthete to point out how morally boring they can be as well. Sentimental romanticism and bourgeois rationalism are thus the neither/nor contained within Either/Or.

Furtak's approach to the religious point of view is not only the most controversial aspect of Wisdom in Love but also of Kierkegaard's writing all told. The debate is over how detached and unemotional religious individuals are portrayed, how engaged by particular worldly aspirations they are supposed to be. Drawing from both pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous works, Furtak makes the case that a person of emotional integrity knows that "[i]nsofar as a person loves, he or she is at the mercy of a world in which value may dawn unexpectedly and what is valued may be taken away" and that this will take faith, "a matter of accepting one's place in the whole unknown process." Along the way, one will have to have developed a tragic-comic "sense of humor which does not ironically hold back from the world but is reconciled to it in all of its mixed detail" (109, 110, 114, 139). Any interpretive conclusion must be selective, and Furtak's is no exception. But what is particularly useful about this one is that it provides a general framework on the basis of which one could sort through and evaluate any given Kierkegaardian sketch of the religious point of view, whether in Fear and Trembling, Stages on Life's Way, the Postscript, Works of Love, or Practice in Christianity, each quite different, and none of which receive lengthy, specific treatment in Furtak's overview.

Stepping back, one might wonder how Kierkegaard himself fared in light of the ideal Furtak culls forth from his writings. Not that we could judge the ideal based on it; one simply might be curious. If we turn to the longest, most detailed, and most recent biography by Joakim Garff, the answer is surely as complex as the authorship itself. A natural place to begin is with Kierkegaard's stormy engagement to Regina Olsen and subsequent break a year later. Unsurprisingly, it's the break that typically gets all the press. But the lead-up and long aftermath contain all the agony and ecstasy of giving oneself over to a singular particular attachment. Garff's account begins, revealingly, with a secondhand report of how Regina, after the death of her subsequent husband, Fritz Schlegel, and forty-five years after Kierkegaard's death, eventually stopped speaking "of Schlegel, and spoke only of Kierkegaard" (175). Soren's own version begins with them in her parlor:

She was a bit uneasy. I asked her to play a little for me on the
piano, as she usually did. She did so, but it didn't help me. Then
I suddenly took the music book, closed it, not without a certain
vehemence, tossed it off the piano and said, "Oh, what do I care
about music? It's you I'm looking for, you I've been seeking for
two years." (175)
He did not have to wait long for Regina to reciprocate this impetuous overture. Thereupon ensued a written correspondence of which only Kierkegaard's side survives, and whose sheer aesthetic qualities "make it clear that their author was to become not a husband but a writer" (179). But why exactly did Kierkegaard break the engagement, the separation against which she "fought like a lioness"? The only detailed explanation we have is a poetic rendition in the form of an anonymous diary found by a pseudonym locked in a box at the bottom of a pond with the key inside, cryptically titled "Guilty/Not Guilty, A Story of Suffering," and included in the larger work Stages On Life's Way. Evidently, any answer will be interpretive.

Surprisingly, Garff himself locates the interpretive key not in the diary entries themselves, which recount Kierkegaard's side of the troubled courtship, but in the six interspersed pericopes, each of which tell "a tale about a person who had once abandoned himself to his sensual desires and who is now marked by the consequences of his fall, morally as well as physically" (342). It turns out these are highly encrypted references to a psychological earthquake Kierkegaard's father caused in his son by way of a confession. As background we must know that by twenty-two young Soren Aabye had experienced the death of his mother and five of his six siblings, beginning with the brother closest to him in age and name, Soren Michael, and ending with his favorite older sister, the "fiery strawberry blonde" Petrea Severine. Also relevant is that his father's first wife died within two years of their marriage, and the lineage in which Soren was the last began ignobly after five months of marriage to Ane, then a servant girl. What dad confessed, in an ambiguously pious, blasphemous rage, was that all this death was a prolonged, providential curse for his potentially syphilitic lechery, a guilt and punishment his children could count on inheriting. Out of genuine love and considerable anxiety, the son does seem to have been caught and bound with a vicarious sense of shame. The concern for his betrothed, presumably, would be over infecting her, if not physically, then no doubt morally.

But Garff also provides evidence that Kierkegaard never finally adopted his father's horrific view of providence, which drives us back to the story of unhappy love contained in the diary itself. There we read a tale about two developmental temperaments with emotional outlooks simply too different to share the kind of common understanding required of authentic intimacy and trust. The tragedy is that each seems to realize this in their own way, but again, in too different a way. The predominant view is that, the poetic writings aside, Kierkegaard's personal life was a series of increasingly detached sublimations of perfectly normal desires. But if Garff is right to suggest that the diarist's story "just might be Kierkegaard's own" it does not match the standard line. Cupid struck, he fell, she flushed, he broke, she pleaded, they both wept, and neither forgot. On no reading could one say he was anything but emotionally engaged. And continued to be, since the account in Stages does not include her getting married to someone else, as Regina did. Apparently he refused to close the matter, if only in his own imaginatively faithful heart. Outside of his imagination, we also learn from Garff that eight years after the engagement Soren and Regina continued to see each other in the street, at times frequently. Signals must have passed between them, since he problematically attempted to reopen correspondence, through Schlegel, which the latter understandably foreclosed.

That Kierkegaard was no free-falling stoic Garff dramatically portrays in the row over the low-brow satirical weekly The Corsair, which began with a literarily envious ad hominem review of "Guilty/Not Guilty?" Kierkegaard responded in the more reputable Fatherland by similarly attacking the pseudonymous reviewer's own literary venture and then exposing him as the real author of the censorious publication. One thingled to another. Kierkegaard was treated with a corresponding breach of pseudonymous etiquette, and the whole affair ended with a series of ironic visual caricatures lampooning his physical appearance and place within the Danish world of letters. One image went so far as to picture him with a need to be carried on the shoulders of a woman twice his stature. Thereupon The Corsair ended its circulation in a scandalous flurry, all of which came to actual jeering on the street. Garff suggests much of this was well deserved, but Kierkegaard clearly took it personally, and again later, as a widow, Regina still felt offense at his becoming a laughingstock.

This encounter with the popular press permanently colored Kierkegaard's social bond with his readership, and most certainly informs the final act of his career in which he publicly assaulted the bourgeois faith of the reigning clergy. The content of this rhetorically ecstatic campaign was that official Christianity was Christian only in name and that the socially and economically comfortable leaders were guilty of a loathsome deception. At first, all he wanted was an admission. But when he was dismissed by the bishop as theologically tone-deaf, lacking chivalry, and furthermore as thin-haired, hunch-backed, and having one trouser leg shorter than the other, Kierkegaard lost it. "O, Luther" he wrote, "you had ninety-five theses. How frightful! And yet in a more profound sense, the more theses, the less frightful. This matter is far more frightful: There is only one thesis. The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at all. There is nothing here to reform" (747). After which he then compared the pastor to a sophisticated cannibal who speaks eloquently about the suffering of Christ, and who, for this service, deserves "a silver centerpiece for his table, a cross of knighthood, and a complete set of embroidered armchairs" (760). No one knew what to do. And it didn't help that Kierkegaard's own practical advice was to begin by taking away clerical pensions so that true piety might once again emerge in history.

Trouser length aside, one might wonder whether Kierkegaard, in casting himself as a latter-day Socrates with a death-wish, did not finally betray a real contempt for, in Furtak's words, "the world ... in all of its mixed detail" (139). Garff does not come down on this question either way. But he does tell us that during these events in the final year of Soren's life, on the day Regina was set to leave with her husband for the East Indies, she sought him out and

before long, caught sight of the well-known figure in the
broad-brimmed hat. As she passed by, she said with a voice so
soft, it could just barely be heard, "God bless you--may all
go well with you!" Kierkegaard was quite stunned, but then
managed to tip his hat and greet his old love--for the
last time ever. (746)
In combination with this, Garff offers evidence that Kierkegaard was aware his attack on the clergy was also a self-critique, a confessional judgment on his own largely poetic existence, on his own failure to act.

In the end, Garff paints a riveting picture of someone with an extremely complex set of feelings and expectations, so problematically undetached from personal engagements, that the reader palpably senses the urge to draw from them a timeless, narrative significance. Behind the authorship we find a single great refusal--equal and opposite to that of the nihilist--to relinquish meaning in life when experience so often and painfully belies it. On the surface, this passion can appear ridiculously overblown, which is why the details are so important. For example, at the time when Kierkegaard first met Regina, and made a deep impression on her despite being already, at fifteen, under the gaze and tutelage of her eventual spouse, he was then pursuing a twenty-one-year-old Bolette, a fact that he unsuccessfully tried to scratch out of his journals for the sake of posterity. And later, there was evidently something between him and Regina's older sister Cornelia, who may well have been the model for Cordelia in "The Seducer's Diary" Perhaps he did have reason to fear a lecherous tendency. In any event, there was a lot to make sense of, so many feelings to christen. We become convinced, though tempted otherwise, that what Kierkegaard needed was not therapy, but a story. What he no doubt did inherit from his father was a need to endow his personal suffering with cosmic importance. And so he wrote. Not as a flight from the world, but with a tangled commitment to a human page he refused to break in order to establish within his readers an inner communion that would render them far less ethically shallow. In so doing, he did not manage the throws of personal investment very well.

But to the degree that one sticks to certain ideals, and fully acknowledges rival goods and competing values, right in the thick of things, without recourse to sagacious compromises with fate, which of us would do any better? Perhaps that is the lasting message of both his life and work. Or if we do manage to handle it better, to give Garff the last word, that would be because in reality "he was like everybody else--merely multiplied tenfold" (439).

Kevin Hoffman

Valparaiso University

Hoffman, Kevin

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hoffman, Kevin. "Wisdom in Love, Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity." Christianity and Literature, vol. 55, no. 4, 2006, p. 602+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A152195995/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6395e14e. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A152195995
Quoted in Sidelights: "This is a book worthy of its subject--artful, comprehensive, paradoxical, informative. Joakim Garff may know Kierkegaard's books and papers better than Kierkegaard himself did. No student of Kierkegaard, no matter how long he has been at it, can fail to learn from this book"
"magnificent"
Kierkegaard: A Biography
Ralph McInerny
67.2 (June 2006): p452+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.ts.mu.edu/
KIERKEGAARD: A BIOGRAPHY. By Joakim Garff. Translated from the Danish by Bruce H. Kirmmse. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2005. Pp. xxv + 867. $35.

This is a book worthy of its subject--artful, comprehensive, paradoxical, informative. Joakim Garff may know Kierkegaard's books and papers better than Kierkegaard himself did. No student of Kierkegaard, no matter how long he has been at it, can fail to learn from this book. I myself have been reading and lecturing on him all my life, but G.'s biography often made me wonder if I had ever before really gotten the hang of the Dane. G. is fortunate to have as his translator Bruce Kirmmse to whom we are indebted for Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (1990) and Encounters with Kierkegaard (1996).

The book is divided into parts and the parts into years, but the operative atoms of the book are the titled sections making up the parts, each a well-wrought essay. Life and literature are intertwined here, as they were for Kierkegaard. G.'s claims that the books and mounds of papirer were a sustained effort on Kierkegaard's part to shape his own life for posterity. On this assumption, G. moves carefully through passages that seem factual and objective, but he is on the alert for what we are not given. Kierkegaard has found in G. the man who may be his definitive biographer; we are given the subject, warts and all.

G. opens and closes with Regine Olsen, but Kierkegaard's broken engagement with her is only one of the major elements in his life on which new light is shed. Another is Kierkegaard's relationship to his father--and to a lesser degree to his brother Peter--where G. seeks clues for the mystery of the broken engagement. The final attack on the established church is handled well, and G. avoids the trap of assuming that Kierkegaard's enemies were as bad as he depicts them (for example, Martensen and Andersen).

We get a sense of Copenhagen in the early 19th century--its economy, its pastimes, its social hierarchy, its journalistic duels, its salons, its sewage system. But it is Kierkegaard's friends and enemies--the setting for the short and troubled life (1813-1855)--that continues to fascinate. Thanks to G., a new generation of readers will be drawn to Kierkegaard. G. discusses but leaves tantalizingly unresolved whether Kierkegaard was epileptic, though the malady could have been at the source of his obsessive writing. I think G. is right not to decide; we just do not know enough. He is good on Kierkegaard's personal finances, giving reason to doubt the received opinion that he went broke publishing himself.

Kierkegaard was not a saint, certainly not an ascetic. He lived well, inherited money, diverted himself with travel, ate, drank, and smoked, had a valet and other servants, yet was throughout, as he claimed, a religious writer on foundational questions: What does it mean to be a Christian? What is faith? Kierkegaard mounted devastating analyses of reductionistic philosophers who would cut Christianity to the procrustean bed of reason alone. Perhaps it would be too much to claim that he was at his best as a critic, in the polemical mode. There is, after all, The Works of Love. We must seek Kierkegaard's affirmative views in polemics, particularly in the attacks published as The Moment that led to his collapse. At the end, he refused the consolations of the Danish Lutheran Church and died a Christian freelance. Yet he may correctly be regarded as the quintessential Protestant, the apotheosis of private interpretation.

How does one adjudicate disputes over what is or what is not Christianity? As Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard kicked from under faith the props of history, church, and biblical scholarship. From the realization that to be a Christian each must take up the task for himself, Kierkegaard moved to the view that each must decide what it is he is becoming. It is the subjective side, not any objective complement, that matters. The atomization of Christianity logically follows: there is no community, there is no church, there is only the isolated individual, and nothing can support the decision that he makes. Faith is against reason; reason has nothing to do with faith.

As a rhetorical ploy, in pseudonymous works, this radical subjectivism can seem merely instrumental. Becoming a Christian amounts to appropriating something, but Kierkegaard is no help in learning what that something is. Perhaps everyone is supposed already to know. He does say in the papers that his literature, being aimed at nominal Christians, would not work for someone who quite literally did not know what was being talked about. This suggests that there must be a prior direct communication, but did he mean it?

These and a host of other questions will be discussed with renewed enthusiasm as a result of this magnificent biography.

RALPH MCINERNY

University of Notre Dame

McInerny, Ralph

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
McInerny, Ralph. "Kierkegaard: A Biography." Theological Studies, vol. 67, no. 2, 2006, p. 452+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A146958174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=96404411. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A146958174
Quoted in Sidelights: “calls us to ponder Kierkegaard in the context of his ambitious, anxiety-ridden life and through the eyes of his contemporaries. … Though Garff demands much of his readers, his lively, conversational prose draws us into Kierkegaard’s mind and cultural setting.” Garff,
“a remarkable Christian who suffered intensely in his inwardness”
“dazzling brilliance as a writer burdened both his own existence and that of his contemporaries.”
Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography
Richard Crouter
122.18 (Sept. 6, 2005): p37+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography.

By Joakim Garff. Princeton University Press, 872 pp., $35.00.

JOAKIM GARFF'S justly acclaimed biography of Kierkegaard, published in English in the year marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen, invites us into the literary world of Denmark's golden age. It also calls us to ponder Kierkegaard in the context of his ambitious, anxiety-ridden life and through the eyes of his contemporaries.

The text is masterfully translated by Connecticut College historian Bruce H. Kirmmse, whose collection of eyewitness recollections of Kierkegaard, Encounters with Kierkegaard, appeared in 1996. Though Garff demands much of his readers, his lively, conversational prose draws us into Kierkegaard's mind and cultural setting.

This is the story of a remarkable Christian who suffered intensely in his inwardness. Like Socrates, Kierkegaard was determined to render our life choices, including those about religious faith, more difficult. Garff's interrogation of this unusual life reminds us not just of Kierkegaard's mental anguish, but also that his dazzling brilliance as a writer burdened both his own existence and that of his contemporaries.

Garff has long pored over Kierkegaard's journals and notebooks, as well as his published works, and he has concluded that the pseudonymity Kierkegaard held to in his main works allowed him to be more frank and direct about his beliefs, while the private journals and papers written under his own name are more guarded. Garff thereby sets aside what scholars call the problem of pseudonymity: "which of the masks really speaks for Kierkegaard?" Garff's solution seems plausible.

Garff has also creatively resolved the problem of putting Kierkegaard's material in order. Outwardly the book develops chronologically. It is divided into five sections that cover the periods of Kierkegaard's youth and education, the main writings of the 1840s, his literary row with the Corsair, Kierkegaard's increased disillusionment, and finally his attack on the church, his sense of martyrdom and his death. Within that frame, the philosopher's career unfolds.

But the presentation isn't entirely chronological. Because Garff begins the book with an account of the death scene, readers know of the befuddlement that surrounds Kierkegaard's end and must then wonder how it came to be. Flashbacks and anticipations in the form of vignettes and brief descriptions of specific episodes fill the story with suspense.

The biography brings early-19th-century Copenhagen alive street by street, depicting clothing styles, sanitation problems, disease and harlotry alongside the city's high literary and philosophical culture.

Familiar figures are presented, along with fresh insight into how they figured into the writer's pursuits: Kierkegaard's jilted fiancee, with whom he retains a kind of relationship; his obsessively religious, adulterous father, who haunts him at every point; his estranged older brother, who suffers from dementia; the much admired Poul Martin Moller, whose early death robs Kierkegaard of a literary ally; a local literary giant who fails to recognize Kierkegaard's genius; his nemesis in the Corsair affair, who moves to Paris to get away; his former teacher H. L. Martensen, who is skeptical of Kierkegaard's character and becomes the bishop of Seeland; and, finally, the bishop and churchman J. P. Mynster, who epitomizes for Kierkegaard the reasons why the Christianity of the New Testament no longer exists. In Garff's deft hands we see these characters' complexity. We also see that the polemical treatment Kierkegaard gave them was often undeserved, or only partly deserved.

From beginning to end Garff writes with immense feeling for the internal conflicts and ambitions that inform Kierkegaard's authorship. Though he tried, Kierkegaard could never walk away from his troubles. His sociability and daily perambulations among the Copenhagen characters he loved served him well, at least until his ruin at the hands of the Corsair. Apart from trips to the countryside and four journeys to Berlin, Kierkegaard's travels were internal; they took place inside his own mind and were duly recorded in journals, notebooks and papers. Garff confirms both that Kierkegaard was a writer of uncommon sensitivities and that he was often a difficult person; indeed, his temperament may have played a role when his gifts went unrecognized by the only literary circle that appears to have mattered to him.

Garff does not explore head-on Kierkegaard's arguments about existence, God and moral obligation, which are of interest to philosophers, theologians and ethicists. Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Works of Love and Sickness unto Death receive sporadic and limited notice compared to works that disclose Kierkegaard's inner life, his character and his aims as a writer. This approach perfectly fits Garff's aims, challenging those concerned with Kierkegaard's theological and philosophical views to think about the life that produced the teachings.

But the theological Kierkegaard studied in divinity school is only apparently absent from these pages. Though it is unstated, a theological lesson pulses through the book: Kierkegaard's tormented Christian soul was living out the very pride, ambition, anxiety, sin and hope for redemption that his works so stunningly illuminate. An Augustinian or Niebuhrian reader might well finish the book with a sigh and say, "Well, yes, I guess I will take my treasures in earthen vessels, especially if they are crafted in golden-age Denmark."

Those who find so large a book daunting may wish to sneak up on Garff's Kierkegaard by first taking some soundings on their own. This could include dipping into Kierkegaard's journals, marvelously displayed in Alastair Hannay's one-volume Papers and Journals: A Selection (1996); rethinking what can be theologically appropriated from Kierkegaard with the help of David J. Gouwens's Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (1996); or experiencing a personal encounter with Kierkegaard's ethics by picking up Gordon Marino's Kierkegaard in the Present Age (2001). Hannay's Kierkegaard: A Biography (2001) also enriches the world of Kierkegaardiana.

Reviewed by Richard Crouter, professor emeritus at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Crouter, Richard

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Crouter, Richard. "Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography." The Christian Century, vol. 122, no. 18, 2005, p. 37+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A135968103/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=32603e56. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A135968103
Quoted in Sidelights: “vivid description of life in the Copenhagen of the 1830s, including “a particularly splendid account of the city’s literary elite,”
“provocative.”
Kierkegaard's voices
Gregory R. Beabout
.154 (June-July 2005): p47+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Institute on Religion and Public Life
http://www.firstthings.com/
SOREN KIERKEGAARD: A BIOGRAPHY BY JOAKIM GARFF Translated by BRUCE H. KIRMMSE Princeton University Press 872 pp. $35.

WHEN SOREN KIERKEGAARD lay dying in Copenhagen 150 years ago, it would have been hard to predict the influence his work would later have. European Christendom already appeared to be in terminal decay, and Kierkegaard's main purpose as a writer was to awaken his readers and to convince them of the necessity, and difficulty, of radical Christian discipleship. At his death he had good reasons to doubt whether his work would have much effect on future readers.

To begin with, he had written entirely in Danish--very much a minor language. His fate, he feared, was to be a forgotten writer from a provincial market town: "I write books which presumably will not be read." Even in Denmark, none of his dozens of volumes sold more than a thousand copies during his life. His genius wasn't altogether overlooked by his contemporaries; Danish newspapers eulogized him, predicting he would "assume a prominent place in Danish history." But he felt himself condemned to be, at most, a big fish in a very small pond.

The larger problem with Kierkegaard's work was its severity: he offered a stern rebuke and an even sterner challenge to an entire religious establishment. In Denmark, baptism in the state church had become a matter-of-course rite of citizenship. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, "Christendom" had become a mistaken baptizing of nearly everything: Where real Christianity called for a transformation of one's whole life, Christendom simply "christened" everything--giving it a new name and leaving it otherwise unchanged. "What Christianity wanted was chastity--to do away with the whorehouse. The change is this, that the whorehouse remains exactly what it was in paganism, lewdness in the same proportion, but it has become a 'Christian' whorehouse."

Kierkegaard was only half right to despair of his legacy. The language was a barrier: For almost fifty years after his death, he remained unknown outside Denmark. But once his work began to be translated, his influence spread rapidly, until he is now widely regarded as one of the great philosophical minds of the nineteenth century.

But his efforts to bring Christianity to European Christendom have been largely ineffective, especially in his homeland. Today, almost all Danes are baptized, but less than five percent of them regularly attend church--one of the lowest percentages in Europe. And polls suggest that the country is no more Christian in belief than in practice: half of all Danes say God doesn't matter in their life at all.

From this modern, post-Christian Denmark now comes Joakim Garff's massive and provocative new biography, in an elegant and brisk translation by Bruce H. Kirmmse. When Garff's work first appeared in Danish five years ago, it received much praise for its passionate and novelistic presentation of Kierkegaard's life and times. In retelling the story of Kierkegaard's short career, Garff set himself two goals: "to reinstall Kierkegaard in his own time," and to separate the facts about the man from the myths created by his several self-depictions.

The biography is quite successful at achieving its first goal. Garff gives a vivid description of life in the Copenhagen of the 1830s. He provides a particularly splendid account of the city's literary elite, who frequently wrote their most lively commentaries under pseudonyms. J.L. Heiberg, for instance, used the underscore symbol "_" to sign his articles while he was the editor of a leading journal. "The merriment took on such proportions that writers who wished to remain incognito eventually used up all the uppercase and lowercase letters in both the Latin and Greek alphabets, and people finally had to resort to using numbers."

When Kierkegaard was twenty-two years old, he made his first foray into this literary hothouse. Writing as "B" in Heiberg's journal, Kierkegaard composed a stunning jeu d'esprit. His article was such a hit that some thought Heiberg himself must have written it. Suddenly, Kierkegaard found himself on the inside of a group of Hegelian romantic dandies. He was leading the kind of life he would later criticize as a form of empty despair.

The characters and culture of Denmark are not the only things that seem animated in Garff's writing. The city of Copenhagen itself comes alive. We feel as though we are following the author as he walks through the city's streets, smelling the odors of the marketplace, and catching sight of Kierkegaard as he strolls through the town's crowds to take his daily "people bath."

Garff's second goal in his biography is less creditable. He tells us that he wanted to find the "cracks in the granite of genius, the madness just below the surface, the intensity, the economic and psychological costs of the frenzies of writing, as well as the profound and mercurial mysteriousness of a figure with whom one is never really finished"--in short, to unearth the "Kierkegaard complex."

The "Kierkegaard complex," it turns out, is not so different from the Oedipus complex. The author suggests that Kierkegaard's overbearing father made it impossible for him to enter into normal human relationships, especially with women. Pent-up libidinal desires resulting from an overactive super-ego inevitably led to revolt and misery, which was soothed but never healed by the therapeutic sublimation of artistic production.

Though Freud is hardly mentioned in the biography, it's his intellectual framework that provides the outlines of the story--explaining Kierkegaard's scruples, his broken engagement with Regine Olsen, and his constant literary output. Garff seems to assume that the message of Kierkegaard's father (to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself) is irrational and impossibly demanding. The effort to obey this teaching, involving as it does the repression of the libido, must result in self-torment and ultimately illness.

At certain points, this way of understanding Kierkegaard's life seems useful. His father was indeed overbearing, and certainly Garff's account of Kierkegaard's attack on Christendom in the final years of his life makes Kierkegaard seem both unhappy and profoundly frustrated.

But as an overall interpretation of Kierkegaard's life, Garff's Freudian diagnosis is finally unconvincing. It requires the biographer, for instance, to take too many liberties in reconstructing the relation between father and son. Michael Kierkegaard may have been brooding and domineering, but that doesn't--or doesn't have to--explain why he taught his children to practice the virtues of temperance and chastity. Garff seems unable to imagine how any healthy person could consider these things forms of excellence. And so we are told that the father "put a fateful mark upon the son's desire, reversing what is natural and unnatural, and to this extent had sexually molested his child."

Here Garff is following Freud, of course, whereas Kierkegaard and his father belonged to the classic Christian tradition of moral reflection. Kierkegaard thought that our desires, emotions, thoughts, and relations could be educated. Following Augustine, he tried to show that a person whose desires are educated comes to see that an infinite desire for the finite is a recipe for despair: our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

Garff operates always with suspicion, never quite trusting Kierkegaard's account of things--either in his published work or in the many volumes of journals he left for posterity. This distrust motivates Garff to search for other sources; he is interested in everything any of his contemporaries ever wrote about Kierkegaard. He searches out report cards, bank records, diaries, and letters. He has done his homework, and his massive research provides us with a picture of Kierkegaard that is multi-textured. But it also distracts Garff from what is most important, and he loses sight of Kierkegaard's own self-understanding.

We learn a great deal about the mentors against whom Kierkegaard rebelled--particularly Heiberg, the Hegelian litterateur, and Mynster, the Danish bishop--but, strangely, we learn almost nothing about the only mentor to whom Kierkegaard dedicated a book: his philosophy professor Poul Martin Moller. And despite extensive treatment of the political changes of 1848, there is little discussion of the impact of democratization on the Danish Church. Garff does not always do enough to help the reader judge how many of Kierkegaard's complaints about the local Church were warranted.

In truth, the Kierkegaard we meet reading Garff is not as richly complicated as the Kierkegaard we meet reading Kierkegaard himself. Like any brilliant stylist, Kierkegaard was aware that his first audience was always a fiction: part of his job as a writer was to imagine his reader. He expected that his reader would in turn have enough imagination to conjure up a sense of an implied author, and he did everything he could to help him do so. In this sense, Kierkegaard is like Plato, who almost never puts himself in his own writing, except once to tell us of his presence (at Socrates' trial) and once to tell us of his absence (at Socrates' death). Plato is implied throughout his dialogues, yet the flesh-and-blood Plato is always in the background, behind the text.

Were a reader of Plato's dialogues to become overly concerned with Plato the man--worrying about the details of his financial situation or hypothesizing about possible sexual lapses--it would become impossible to engage the dialogues in a serious way. This is not to say that we must accept Plato's purposes every step of the way. And we might be legitimately curious about the real man behind the texts. But we can't do justice to Plato the philosopher if we are constantly sidetracked by speculations about whether Plato the man really lived up to his own teachings. By focusing solely on the historical Plato, we'll miss other important questions: Where is Plato being ironic? What virtues does Plato want me, as his reader, to develop? Are there good reasons why I should reject his arguments or distrust the story he is telling?

Kierkegaard liked to play with the boundaries that separated him from the authors and narrators of his books. Part of the joy of reading him is the encounter with these various voices. After one has sorted out the pseudonyms, there is still the challenge of discovering how, for Kierkegaard, a difference of voice implies a difference of character--how vice and virtue are embodied in a style. By registering these differences, Kierkegaard becomes, by way of indirection, a moral teacher. By charting the rhetorical strategies of his implied authors and narrators, he awakens us to our own self-deceptions and urges us toward a supernatural integrity--a fight relation with God, others, and ourselves. And he hopes to do the same for himself.

Garff's approach tramples over this complexity. With his boundless interest in the flesh-and-blood Kierkegaard, the biographer seems deaf to the delicate counterpoint between implied author and implied reader. That counterpoint is not a mere fiction; it is a central part of Kierkegaard's project that here gets lost in the rush of detail. In its historical scope and in the richness of its descriptions, Garff's Soren Kierkegaard sets a new standard for Kierkegaard scholarship. It has done more to help us understand Kierkegaard's social milieu than any other biography. But it does not always succeed in helping us to understand Kierkegaard's work in its own terms. While searching for "cracks in the granite," Garff too often neglects the real seam of Kierkegaard's moral and literary genius.

GREGORY R. BEABOUT is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University and an adjunct scholar with the Acton Institute's Center for Academic Research.

Beabout, Gregory R.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Beabout, Gregory R. "Kierkegaard's voices." First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, no. 154, 2005, p. 47+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A132841263/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=04d1a87f. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A132841263

"Kierkegaard's Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 82+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250866/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=284a4b30. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017. Blissett, Luther. "Great Dane." New Scientist, 16 Apr. 2005, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A131902352/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6b46f3f8. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017. Evans, C. Stephen. "Kierkegaard among the biographers." Books & Culture, July-Aug. 2007, p. 12+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A166565867/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2b578304. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017. "Soren Kierkegaard: a Biography." Publishers Weekly, 20 Dec. 2004, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A126585125/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=27734852. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017. Christensen, Bryce. "Garff, Joakim. Soren Kierkegaard." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2004, p. 447. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A125066491/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e94215be. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017. Hoffman, Kevin. "Wisdom in Love, Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity." Christianity and Literature, vol. 55, no. 4, 2006, p. 602+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A152195995/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6395e14e. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017. McInerny, Ralph. "Kierkegaard: A Biography." Theological Studies, vol. 67, no. 2, 2006, p. 452+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A146958174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=96404411. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017. Crouter, Richard. "Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography." The Christian Century, vol. 122, no. 18, 2005, p. 37+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A135968103/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=32603e56. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017. Beabout, Gregory R. "Kierkegaard's voices." First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, no. 154, 2005, p. 47+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A132841263/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=04d1a87f. Accessed 9 Dec. 2017.

• Metapsychology
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  Word count: 919

  Quoted in Sidelights: "Joakim Garff's wonderful book is ... the first full account of who Regine Olsen was; her intelligence, bravery, passion and her steadfastness,"
  This is a unique and beautiful love story, very well-told ..., Alastair Hannay. I very highly recommend it.

  Review - Kierkegaard's Muse
  The Mystery of Regine Olsen
  by Joakim Garff
  Princeton University Press, 2017
  Review by John Mullen, Ph.D.
  Aug 8th 2017 (Volume 21, Issue 32)
  Søren Kierkegaard (1813 -- 1855) was one of the greatest thinkers, writers and philosophers of the nineteenth century. I consider him thus for his intensity, imagination, psychological insight, thoroughness of analysis, his uncompromising rejection of intellectual pretense and his determination to speak to essential features of human living. His two huge authorship collections; one pseudonymous, including Either/Or (1843), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1856) and others, and one signed, including Works of Love (1847) and For Self-Examination (1851) and others, are exceedingly complex in their relationships to each other and to his overall project as a writer. Perhaps as complex and intense was his character; passionate, ironic, incredibly self-reflective, sensitive and uncompromising.
  In September of 1840, in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard, then twenty-seven, proposed marriage to Regine Olsen, who was nineteen. Eleven months later he broke off the engagement, leaving Regine distraught and her family angry and embarrassed. But this was not the end to their intimate connection, indeed it was its truest beginning, preceding Regine's marriage Frederic Schlegel in 1847 and lasting until Kierkegaard's death in 1855, perhaps until Regine's death.
  Joakim Garff's wonderful book is the story of that relationship, and is the first full account of who Regine Olsen was; her intelligence, bravery, passion and her steadfastness. Why did Kierkegaard fail to follow through with the engagement? In his Journals, he is pretty clear about it. Garff describes Kierkegaard as a "writing machine" and indeed he was. In just the years around which the engagement took place he finished his four-hundred-page dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates, and quickly wrote the eight-hundred and fifty page, two volume masterpiece, Either/Or, one of the great books of the century. Kierkegaard saw his future as a writer not just as a passion, but as a sacred vocation. He could not stop and had no right to do so. His mind was overflowing with ideas, he had a project for his writing. In these circumstances, he saw such a marriage as impossible, as necessarily failing in the face of this. And too, there were his melancholy and his fluctuating moods. He wrote, "Ah! I paid dearly for once misunderstanding my life …" And, of course, Regine did as well.
  The marriage did not happen, Regine married another, but the couple - Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen -- continued, or perhaps began. They saw each other with a contrived regularity. In this context, the use of that word "saw" is unique in its literality. That is all they did. They did not touch, laugh, smile or speak to each other. They knew each other's habits and would pass each other along the street, in the park, in the vestibule of church. They would reveal themselves only with their presence. Each was a person of great probity. In several journal entries Kierkegaard refers to seeing Regine Olsen "every other day" or "almost every day". And Regine Olsen appears everywhere, in many obvious disguises, in Kierkegaard's writing. He dedicates, On My Activity as a Writer (1851) to: "A Contemporary. Whose name must still be suppressed, but whom history will name … as long as it mentions mine." Elsewhere he calls her his "… heart's Sovereign Mistress," and "that One Individual" to whom all is work is dedicated.
  In March of 1855, Regine was to leave Copenhagen for St. Croix in the West Indies where Fritz would serve as governor. On the departure date Regine search wildly for Søren and, finding him, she spoke aloud after fourteen years of silence, in what would be their last glimpses of the other, "God bless you—may all go well with you." Her voyage was 4000 miles and Kierkegaard would die back in Copenhagen, at age forty-two, soon after it ended.
  Joakim Garff tells the story of Regine's five years of harsh life in St. Croix through her letters to her sister, Cornelia, letter he was given in 1996 by Cornelia's grandchild. She withstood malaria, boils, incessantly boring social occasions and the oppressive heat. He letters are beautifully written, formal, and mention Kierkegaard in only the most oblique fashion.
  Upon the return to Copenhagen of Regine and Fritz, there was one final confrontation with the now-deceased Kierkegaard, one final blow to husband Fritz, who was always second in Regine's heart. Kierkegaard's journals were gradually published, opening to all in Copenhagen Kierkegaard's most intimate views of Regine and their engagement. The Journals' contents became the "talk of the town". In the last years of her life Regine invited writers to her home to provide her side of the great love story. But none of it could match the masterful account in Kierkegaard's Journals. Regine Olsen died at age 82 in 1904.
  This is a unique and beautiful love story, very well-told by the Joakim Garff and artfully translated by the Kierkegaard scholar, Alastair Hannay. I very highly recommend it.

  © 2017 John Mullen

  John Mullen is a writer living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He has written the widely-read, Kierkegaard's Philosophy: Self-Deception and Cowardice in The Present Age (1995), and the recent novel, The Woman Who Hated Philosophers (2017).

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