Soren Kierkegaard

trayed as possessing characteristics typical of social classes far beneath Kier-
kegaard’s own, as, for example, when he described himself as a spy and
then went on to associate that role with the notions of guilt and punishment
that appeared almost compulsively whenever he wrote about himself:
“What I have said to myself and about myself is true: I am like a spy in
service of what is highest. The police also employ spies. And for that pur-
pose they do not always use those people who have exactly led the best
and most upright of lives. On the contrary, the police exploit the cunning
of wily and cunning criminals, compelling them to cooperate because the
police know all about theirvita ante acta. Ah, God, too, uses sinners in this
way. The police, however, do not think about reforming their spies. God
does. When, in his mercy, he uses such a person, he also brings that person
up and reforms him.”
Kierkegaard’svita ante acta, his earlier life, his life to date, is a perennial
part of his self-presentation and the phrase ostensibly refers—not without a
slight prurience—to sinful scenes to which the reader is never granted ac-
cess. “With him everything was inner emotions. His talk of a prodigal
youth, of the sins of youth, et cetera, can only refer to ‘sins in thought,’ ”
Israel Levin insisted, supporting his assertion by pointing out that one
merely had to look at Kierkegaard’s “entire background to annihilate any
thought of debauchery in him. ”Levin was far from being a witness to the
truth, but he correctly noted the tendency of Kierkegaard, as he got older,
to portray his past in a theatrical light as one of uninhibited sensuality—as
if he had been a dandified voluptuary who had frequently gone berserk in
the brothels of Copenhagen. The portrait is without historical foundation,
but it was an important part of Kierkegaard’s attempt to create the dialectical
twilight in which he wished posterity to view him. He himself explained
these complications in the following complicated fashion: “I admit that I
began my work as an author from a position of advantage: I was viewed as
something close to a scoundrel, but as an enormously brilliant intellect, that
is, a social lion, one of the truly spoilt children of the age....Butthis was
where the spy lurked, and no one had been on the lookout for him. For a
person to begin as a debauched voluptuary, a social lion, and then, many
years later, become what people call a saint: That doesn’t catch people’s
attention. But for a penitent, a sort of a preacher of repentance, to take the
precaution of beginning in the costume of a social lion: People are not
exactly used to that.”
We must grant Kierkegaard that “preachers of repentance ”very rarely
disguise themselves as “social lions, ”but we must also point out that it is
not utterly irrelevant to mentionOn the Concept of Irony, where Kierkegaard
had emphasized a similar sort of oscillation between monastic isolation and