“Christianity recommended celibacy.” This seems deliberate—or is it
merely a coincidence that a reflection on the renunciation of sex is the first
thing that comes up after the death of the father?
Before we can get our bearings, questions begin to fly at us from every
quarter, drawing into their wake one of the most disputed of all Kierke-
gaard’s journal entries, the entry about “the great earthquake,” a powerful
piece of writing:
Then it was that the great earthquake took place, the frightful upheaval
that suddenly forced upon me a new, infallible law of interpretation
for all phenomena. Then I sensed that my father’s advanced age was
not a divine blessing, but rather a curse; that our family’s remarkable
intellectual abilities merely enabled us to tear one another to pieces.
Then I saw in my father an unhappy man who would outlive us all, a
memorial cross on the grave of all his own hopes, and I felt the stillness
of death increase around me. The entire family must bear the burden
of a guilt, it must be the subject of God’s punishment: It was to disap-
pear, wiped out by the mighty hand of God, expunged like an un-
successful experiment. Only once in a while was I able to take solace
in the thought that my father had had the burdensome responsibility
of comforting us all with the consolation of religion, of giving us all
the final sacrament, so that a better world would await us, even if we
lost everything in this world, even if we were to be overtaken by the
punishment that the Jews always called down upon their enemies:
that our memory would be entirely blotted out, that no trace of us
would remain.This journal entry is part of a small group of entries that have a clearly
autobiographical character. It is preceded by two quite brief quotations with
which Kierkegaard wanted to sum up the principal themes of his childhood
and youth. In the first quotation, under the heading “Childhood,” he cites
Goethe: “Halb Kinderspiele, / Halb Gott im Herzen” [German: “Half chil-
dren’s games, half God at heart”]. In the second quotation, under the head-
ing “Youth,” he cites the Danish poet Christian Winther: “Beg?—we will
not! / Youth on the road of life / Forcefully seizes the treasure.” These
quotations are succeeded by a passage with the heading “25 Years Old,”
consisting of twelve lines from act 3, scene 5 of Shakespeare’sKing Lear.
Immediately thereafter comes the entry about the great earthquake.
H. P. Barfod was so captivated by these journal entries that he broke
entirely with the principle of chronological continuity and placed them
at the very beginning of the multivolume selection he titledFrom Søren
Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers. In doing this, of course, Barfod also assigned