to reinterpret his physical weakness and discern a theological point. In 1847,
he sighed that “viewed in animal categories, as a plow horse or as beef for
butchering, I am quite inferior....Ihaveneither muscles nor strong legs
nor fat flesh. No wonder, then, that I am looked down upon by other
people.” But in 1854 he would write: “A frail, thin, sickly, pitiable man,
so small-boned, almost like a child, a form such as every animal-man almost
finds laughable to view as a human being—he is employed for strenuous
tasks under which giants would collapse: You scoundrels, do you not see
that I, too, am present, I, the Almighty? Do you not see the absurd?” The
abnormally powerful spirit could now be pitted in earnest against the frail
and imperfect flesh: “Slight, thin, and weak, denied in almost every respect
the physical basis for being reckoned as a whole person, comparable with
others; melancholic, sick at heart, in many ways profoundly and internally
devastated, I was granted one thing: brilliant intelligence, presumably so
that I would not be completely defenseless.”
The misrelation between spirit and body not only made a theological
point, it was also a prerequisite for artistic productivity. So it is scarcely
too much to say that by a strange paradoxical logic, it was Kierkegaard’s
psychosomatic conflict that made him a great success in world literature.
This very success, however, was itself a great theological problem. And
it led to new suffering.
The Bull of Phalaris
When the tyrant Phalaris, who ruled over Agrigentum in Sicily, wanted to
put his enemies to death, he had them roasted in a gigantic copper bull
whose nostrils were outfitted with flutes fashioned such that the screams of
his enemies were transformed into the most delightful sounds. This per-
versely refined instrument of torture was what Kierkegaard had in mind
when he wrote the first of the “Diapsalmata” that constitute the opening
section ofEither/Or: “What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals
profound torment in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when sighs
and cries pass over them, they sound like beautiful music. His lot is like that
of the unfortunates who were put in Phalaris’s bull and gradually tortured
over a slow fire: Their screams could not reach the tyrant’s ears to terrify
him; to him they sounded like sweet music. And people crowd around the
poet and say to him, ‘Sing again soon,’ which means ‘May new sufferings
torment your soul, and may your lips remain formed as they have been—
because the screams would only upset us, but the music is delightful.’ And
the reviewers show up and say: ‘That’s right. That is how things must be