Soren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard’s writings, but Anti-Climacus then adds considerable dramatic
depth to his diagnosis: “The poet existence we are concerned with here
differs from despair in that it has a conception of God....Such a poet may
have a very profound religious need, and the conception of God is included
as part of his despair. He loves God above all things. God is for him his only
comfort in his secret torment, and yet he loves the torment, he will not let
go of it. He would like so very much to be himself before God, though not
with respect to the fixed point at which the self suffers—there, in despair,
he does not want to be himself. He hopes that eternity will remove it.”
In his book about Hans Christian Andersen, Kierkegaard wrote that “the
author paints himself into the picture, just as landscape painters occasionally
enjoy doing, ”and here we are confronted with this very sort of self-portrai-
ture. Even though this was certainly not the first time that Kierkegaard had
permitted himself such a daring self-portrait in a pseudonymous work—
something he had been able to permit himselfbecausethe work was pseud-
onymous, thusat first glancedirecting the reader’s gaze away from its actual
author—in this case he was nonetheless unusually indiscreet. Kierkegaard
more than implied that his concept of Godmightbe a sort of defense mecha-
nism that he used to preserve his melancholia and to protect the self-enclo-
sure he loved and did not want to abandon—because if he abandoned it,
he would also have to abandon his writing, his art. Anti-Climacus’s confes-
sion on behalf of Kierkegaard continues: “And yet he continues to relate
himself to God, and this is his only salvation; it would be for him the greatest
of horrors to have to be without God—‘it would be enough to despair
over.’ And yet he actually does permit himself—though perhaps uncon-
sciously—to poetize God into something a bit different than what God is,
a bit more like a fond father who is all too willing to give in to the child’s
‘only’ wish. Like a person, unlucky in love, who became a poet and bliss-
fully praised the joys of love, he became the poet of the religious.”
It was clearly notwhatKierkegaard wrote, but rather thefactthat he
wrote, that induced him to use the term “poet ”with reference to himself.
The God whom this poet “perhaps unconsciously ”poetized for himself was
thus a God who gave him permission to cling to the pain—specifically to
the pain that has always been the unfathomable wellspring of art. But this
poetizing cannot have been entirely unconscious, because the artist is in fact
in the act of seeing through his own ploy: “He understands obscurely that
what is required is that he let go of this torment, ”that he must “humble
himself under it in faith and take it upon himself as a part of the self.”This
is the humiliating acceptance of the suffering as a part of himself that the
poet cannot carry out, and he cannot because he does notwantto: “But to