Soren Kierkegaard

Christianity consists of one gigantic illusion, a world-historical misunder-
standing. To the horror of his aged parents, when he returned home to the
episcopal residence he was “full of bitterness, sarcasm, abusive language, and
witticisms,” as his ill mother put it in a letter to Peter Christian. Things
came to a head during the summer of 1872. Peter Christian had to make
the journey to Copenhagen, and together with the philosopher Harald
Høffding, he accompanied his son to the insane asylum in Oringe, where
Professor Jensen made the diagnosis of dementia præcox,or schizophrenia.
The following year his medical journal reported the following: “For a time
he is more deeply depressed, anxious, whimpering, dares not eat, is com-
pletely confused, asks about ‘the Tribunal,’ to which he wants to make a
confession, talks about being buried alive.” After one of his depressing visits
to the asylum, Peter Christian wrote in his diary, “the results seem dismal
to me.”
Shortly after Poul’s admission to the asylum, Peter Christian received a
letter from Henrik Lund, who told him that he had “placed himself under
the care of Prof. Jensen,” at the very same insane asylum in Oringe. So, for
a period of time, Peter Christian could make one trip and call upon two
sick members of the unfortunate remnants of the Kierkegaard family. It is
easy to understand the reasons for the complaints Peter Christian noted in
his diary concerning lack of appetite and serious insomnia. For quite some
time, his dreams had also been rather horrid, and a couple of days before
what would have been Søren Aabye’s fifty-eighth birthday, he noted: “The
ship on the ways, its crew taken, the robbers use thirst in an attempt to
force me to promise to remain silent.” Two days later we read: “The dream
about a group of people intoxicated with opium.”
During the winter of 1874, Poul was placed with some relatives on the
estate of Annissegaard, but when he heard voices inside the walls, he re-
turned to the episcopal residence, where he allowed himself to be cared for
like a little child. In December 1876, one of Poul’s friends from earlier days
wrote the following to Jens Peter Jacobsen: “I have received two more
letters from [Poul] Kierkegaard, one of them twelve pages long. The second
letter, four pages long, is absolute proof that he is raving mad. Every religion
and philosophical system dances the most desperate cancan in his unfortu-
nate brain.” But a couple of years later his condition had improved suffi-
ciently for him to be able to accept sheltered employment at the diocesan
library in the loft of the Cathedral School. The final thirty-five years of his
life were spent in Aalborg, behind the closed shutters of number 4 Grønne-
gade, where he wrote five diminutive collections of verse with titles like
“Merlin, or the Son of the Devil,” “Family Studies,” and “The Sin against
the Holy Spirit, or The Accursed House.” The mere titles of these satanic