Soren Kierkegaard

dren’s faces to see if he could recognize his own features in theirs and ascer-
tain whether he was the father, Michael Kierkegaard studied the faces of his
own children to see whether they were marked for death as he was. In short,
he was looking not for signs of resemblance but for signs of sickness.
The origin of this fear is revealed in the second piece, “A Leper’s Self-
Observation,” which also has the “gaze” built into its title. The piece is
about Simon the leper, a figure from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus
is a guest in his home in Bethany and a woman anoints Jesus with the most
precious of oils [Matthew 26:6]. In a manner typical of Kierkegaard’s use
of scriptural passages, however, he lifts Simon the leper out of his original
context and places him among the graves out in the wilderness, where we
encounter him sleeping on a stone, far from humanity. Then he awakens,
gets to his feet, and cries into the empty wilderness: “Simon!—Yes!—
Simon!—Yes, who is calling?—Where are you, Simon?—Here.—With
whom are you speaking?—With myself.—Is it with yourself? How dis-
gusting you are, with your skin eruptions, a plague on everything alive!
Keep away from me, you abomination! Flee out among the graves!” After
a long, excruciating monologue, which almost seems to congeal into a sup-
purating verbal sore, stinking of self-contempt, Simon the leper sits down
again and asks for Manasseh: Manasseh! Manasseh! But Manasseh is gone.
Manasseh was actually an Old Testament figure, an idolater king of Judah
depicted in 2 Kings 21:1–18, but as with Simon the leper Kierkegaard tears
Manesseh out of his biblical context. “So, he has gone off to the city, then.
Yes, I know it. I have concocted a salve that causes all skin eruptions to
turn inward, so that no one can see them, and the priest will have to pro-
nounce us healthy. I taught him how to use it, and I told him that the
sickness does not end because of this, that it turns it inward, and that a
person’s breath can infect another person and cause him to become visibly
leprous. Then he shouted with joy. He hates life; he execrates human be-
ings; he wants to avenge himself; he hurries off to the city; he breathes
poison on all of them. Manasseh, Manasseh, why did you make room for
the Devil in your soul? Was it not enough that your body was leprous?”
A demonic and alarming allegory takes form deep within this dark tale,
a reconstruction of a crippling relationship to one’s father: The initial letters
of Simon and Manasseh correspond to the initial letters of Søren and Mi-
chael, but they have been reversed so that Manasseh is Søren and Simon is
Michael. The father is a leper, and leprosy is a metaphor for syphilis. And
the salve he uses to combat the infection is not a poetic invention but existed
in the real world as a mercury salve, known as “the gray ointment,” which
physicians believed to be effective in treating syphilis. The curative effects
of the mercury salve treatment were only visible after fifteen or twenty