Soren Kierkegaard

(Romina) #1

a sin of quite a different order, that in his youth he had been like a wild
animal and had contracted an infectious disease, a syphilitic punishment.
The Lord understood how to avenge Himself so diabolically that He let the
sinnerhimselfbe the cause of the disappearance of his family, whereupon
he, now a broken old man, a grand figure dressed in purple, was to remain
behind as a “memorial cross on the grave of all his own hopes.”
This new causal explanation made the youngest son shiver. Not only did
he see himself theologically disarmed at one blow, he was also drawn into
the still unconcluded story of a sickness whose inevitability was demon-
strated most convincingly by the deaths of his five siblings. Perhaps the
sickness had entered his own bloodstream, so that he, too, was ill and had
possibly infected others, something his father could have prevented if he
had not remained silent about what he knew, if he had revealed the truth
about the terrible disease in a timely fashion.
In the parable of Simon the leper and Manasseh are we confronted with
the origin of the great earthquake? Was Maria’s death doubly unbearable
because it convinced the three Kierkegaard men that the disease retained
its strength undiminished? Was Peter’s peculiar conduct with regard to her
illness owing to a profound fear of having infected his wife with the family’s
fatal seed? Was this perhaps the reason that, in accordance with a sort of
crazy logic, he did not dare to kiss her? Or did he really know nothing?
Was he simply ensconced in his belief in the sentimental tale about his father
having cursed God out there on the little hill in Jutland? Or is the parable
of Simon the leper and Manasseh just a skillfully poetized obsession, merely
neurotic art with no basis in reality?
This latter can hardly be the case. Because the following lines, taken
from a journal entry of mid-May 1843, make it virtually certain that the
piece is closely connected to Kierkegaard’s own person: “Whatever dark
thoughts and black passions still reside within me I will try to get rid of in
a written piece that will be entitled ‘A Leper’s Self-Observation.’ ” Writing
is where Kierkegaard reworked or simply “got rid of” traumatic experi-
ences. This is the most explicit expression of the fact that Kierkegaard—as
well as others—employed writing for therapeutic purposes. Mereconjecture
about the scourge of an invisible sickness must have summoned forth a
permanent state of anxiety, and the detailed analysis of original sin [Danish:
Arvesynd, “inherited sin”] inThe Concept of Anxietywas thus more than just
an academic exercise. “What the Scriptures teach,” we read in that work,
“that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and
fourth generation is proclaimed loudly enough by life. It is of no use to
want to talk oneself out of this horror by explaining that this assertion was
a Jewish doctrine.”

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