Soren Kierkegaard

overshadowed everything in the family’s more or less mythic self-under-
standing—his father’s cursing of God—of which Peter Christian had pat-
ently been aware for more than a generation. Indeed, about a decade earlier
he had had his memory of this incident painfully refreshed. One morning
in February 1865, when he was at the bishop’s residence working on Søren
Kierkegaard’s journals, Barfod read journal JJ from February 1846 and came
upon an entry that was of such a personal character that he thought it proper
to submit it to the bishop. The entry read: “How terrible for the man who
once, as a little boy watching sheep on the moors of Jutland, suffering terri-
bly, hungry and weak from the cold, had stood atop a hill and had cursed
God—and the man was unable to forget it when he was eighty-two years
old.” When Peter Christian finished reading the entry through he burst into
tears. “That is my father’s story—andours, too,” he said to Barfod, where-
upon (still according to Barfod) he “recounted the details of the matter,
which I ought not repeat here.”
Later generations of researchers would have been spared countless head-
aches if Barfod had gone just a little bit out of his way to repeat “the details
of the matter”—and a great deal of irritation would have been avoided if
he had at least refrained from mentioning his sin of omission. It makes
matters no better that Barfod confessed that out of concern for the aged
bishop he “couldn’t find it in his heart” to publish “his brother’s painful
outburst”—that is, Søren Aabye’s journal entry about cursing God that has
just been cited—and he therefore left it out of his edition ofFrom Søren
Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers. Barfod’ssuppressionof such a decisively sig-
nificant journal entry is psychologically understandable, but in principle it
was just as unwarranted as Peter Christian’s subsequentdenialof its exis-
tence. He might have had many reasons for this denial, but his reaction to
the journal entry at the time of its discovery testifies in itself to the great
importance he attributed to his father’s cursing of God, which apparently
was the great earthquake in Peter Christian’s life. He assumed that this had
also been the case in Søren Aabye’s life, but in this respect he was probably
wrong, inasmuch as merely by mentioning the incident in his journal, the
younger brother had given it a sort of public character. On the other hand,
there is hardly any reason to doubt that the father’s cursing of God did play
an enormous role in Søren Aabye’s understanding of himself and that it
functioned as a sort of all-purpose explanation of the untimely death of the
children. None of them were to live beyond age thirty-three—no longer,
that is, than Jesus—an age limit that was surely rooted in the family’s partial-
ity for numerological mysticism. Thus Søren Aabye, who had been initiated
into the unfathomable logic of coincidences, wrote in his journal on January
22, 1837: “It is quite remarkable that Christ lived to be exactly thirty-three