Soren Kierkegaard

years, however. If the treatment was ended too early, the contagious mate-
rial circulated within the organism and could pass through the cerebral
membrane, causing cerebral paralysis, the most striking symptom of which
was so-called megalomania. If the infection went into the spinal marrow,
on the other hand, it led to the shaking palsy. Both leprosy and syphilis,
which are characterized by the sores and nodules that accompany them as
well as by varying degrees of bone loss, typically of the nasal bone, end in
death, but as a rule decades pass before this takes place.
Michael Kierkegaard had none of these symptoms, but he may have
feared he was living with a syphilitic infection in his body. Might this ex-
plain why he waited so long to marry? Did he want to be certain that he
was healthy? When Kirstine, his first and most beloved wife, died, he mar-
ried Ane, who became the mother of his seven children, five of whom died
before they reached the age of thirty-four. For a man with an “all-powerful,
but melancholic imagination,” these deaths must inevitably have seemed
the punishment he deserved—and he deserved it because he had once as-
cended a little hill out on the heaths of Jutland and cursed God. The doctors
were wrong, he was not healthy but had infected both his wife and his
children. God had not forgotten his blasphemy; He had merely taken His
sweet time, His infinitely sweet time.
It is a repellent thought, a crazy fantasy, but as the inserted tale has it: “It
would not have done any good if anyone had wanted to help him.” We
may assume that young Søren Aabye knew aspects of his father’s past and
that he had heard about his cursing the Lord out on the heath. In that case
he would surely have done what he could to reassure the old man that the
deaths in the family were attributable to natural causes: that Søren Michael
had died of a brain hemorrhage, Maren Kirstine of convulsions, Nicoline
Christine and Petrea Severine of complications from childbirth, Niels An-
dreas of tuberculosis; that his first wife had died of pneumonia, his second
of typhus. The theological student would have been able to cite all this as
evidence for why the deaths were not the work of a vengeful God who
demanded repayment for a childhood transgression of so long, long ago.
Superstition, phantasms, melancholy self-torture! But it did no good, and
at one point in January 1836 the journal reports: “Truly, it is often sad and
depressing when one wants to accomplish something in this life by means
of words, and yet in the end sees that one has accomplished nothing and
that the person concerned stubbornly sticks to his views.” The son had
apparently made another attempt at well-intentioned demythologization:
He had explained, comforted, reassured, made light of the whole business.
But then one day the father, his pride irritated at all this youthful naı ̈vete ́,
told his son that he only knew half the truth: The curse was connected to