Soren Kierkegaard

Jesus Christ.’ ” This is not a very pleasant entry, and what makes it especially
sinister is the unreserved approval with which the son quotes the father’s
words—and this approval was more the rule than the exception. A couple
of journal entries later, Kierkegaard repeats the remark, by now almost a
decade old, that his father had let fall when the altogether-too-worldly
Søren Aabye had made his dangerous comment about the possibility that a
“master thief” could turn his life around and mend his ways: “Everything
my father told me was true, ‘There are sins from which a person can be
saved only by extraordinary divine help.’ And humanly speaking, I owe
everything to my father. In every way he has made me as unhappy as possi-
ble, so that my youth was incomparable torment. Because of him, in my
inmost thoughts, I came close to being offended by Christianity. Or indeed,
I was offended by it, even if I decided out of respect for it never to say a
word about this to anyone, and out of love for my father to present Chris-
tianity as truthfully as possible—in contrast to the nonsense that is called
Christianity in Christendom. And yet my father was the most loving of
fathers, and I yearned and continue to yearn profoundly for him, and I have
never failed to remember him morning and evening, every day.”
It was a father’s son who wrote these lines, a son who had been wronged,
but who himself had also done wrong. And naturally, the question that
modern psychology in particular finds it difficult not to ask is whether the
adult son could have avoided transferring the characteristics of the earthly
father to the heavenly father—could he have avoided projecting? This can
never be answered unequivocally, but surprisingly enough Kierkegaard ap-
pears at a number of places to destroy every suspicion of such projection.
“I have quite literally lived with God as one lives with a father,” he wrote
in a journal entry in which projection is unmistakable. But then a few pages
later in the same journal comes this radical twist to the story: “My father
died—then I got another father in his place: God in heaven—and then I
discovered that my first father had really been my stepfather and only in an
unreal sense my first father.”
We ought to pay particular attention to the concluding clause. For it is
here that Kierkegaard settled accounts with his father: Michael Pedersen
Kierkegaard had shown himself to have been a “stepfather” and he therefore
had to yield his position to the true father, the heavenly father, God. And
this insight was precisely what finally made it possible for the son to do to
the hosier something that had previously presented insurmountable diffi-
culties—to forgive him.
Kierkegaard formulated the idea of the substitute, the vicar, at about the
same time that his work onThe Sickness unto Deathcaused him to occupy
himself once again with the question of the forgiveness of sins. “I really