Soren Kierkegaard

very thing that had to be done: “He must be terrified in order that he learn
to do it in fear and trembling.”
During this unrest it became clear to him that ifThe Sickness unto Death
was to be published at all, it would have to be published pseudonymously.
And there the matter rested. Work began at the printer’s on June 28. In the
midst of the process there was some “nonsense with Reitzel” that made
Kierkegaard “extremely impatient,” so that he almost took back the manu-
script and put it aside to be published later with the other manuscripts and
in his own name. It was not too late to do it: The title page had not yet
been set, nor had there been a final decision about the author’s name. But
when Kierkegaard went to Luno he learned that the book was mostly fin-
ished, with Anti-Climacus on the title page as author and Kierkegaard as
the editor. “This is how one must be helped and how one must help oneself
when it is so difficult to act,” Kierkegaard later explained to himself in his
journal, where we are also informed that in the manuscript he had deleted
the “passages that referred to me and to facts concerning my work as an
author, which of course a poetic figure (a pseudonym) could not say; and
only a few touches remained, which were of the sort appropriate to a poetic
personality.” So Kierkegaard could once again breathe easily, think clearly,
and look back: “I must apologize and blame myself because much of what
has previously been noted in this journal is an attempt to exalt myself, for
which God will forgive me. Until now I have been a poet, absolutely noth-
ing more than that, and wanting to go beyond my limit has been a desperate
battle....Therefore:The Sickness unto Deathwill now appear, but pseudony-
mously, and with myself as the editor. It is labeled ‘for edification,’ which
is more than my category, the poet category of ‘the edifying.’... The
pseudonym is named Johannes Anticlimacus, as opposed to Climacus, who
said he was not a Christian; Anticlimacus is the opposite extreme: to be a
Christian to an extraordinary degree. If only I myself manage to become
even a quite simple Christian.”
On July 30, 1849,Adresseavisenno. 176 contained an advertisement for
The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and
Awakening. The book was 136 pages long, with seven additional pages for
the table of contents and introduction. Itwas written by Anti-Climacus, but
edited by a man who concealed himself behind the name S. Kierkegaard, or
was it the reverse? In any event, the mysterious dream reveals how close
Kierkegaard and the pseudonyms had come to one another, but it can also
be seen as an ironic footnote to the often wildly abstract theories advanced
in later times purporting to explain the reasons Kierkegaard might have had
for publishing his works pseudonymously. In this case it was due to a ran-