Kierkegaard by Stephen Backhouse

life’s ups and downs with him. But in order to find that idea—or, to put it more correctly—to find myself, it does no good to plunge still farther into the world. That was just what I did before. . . . I have vainly sought an anchor in the boundless sea of pleasure as well as in the depths of knowledge. I have felt the almost irresistible power with which one pleasure reaches a hand to the next; I have felt the counterfeit enthusiasm it is capable of producing. I have also felt the boredom, the shattering, which follows on its heels. I have tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge and time and again have delighted in their savouriness. . . . Thus I am again standing at the point where I must begin again in another way. I shall now calmly attempt to look at myself and begin to initiate inner action; for only thus will I be able, like a child calling itself “I” in its first consciously undertaken act, be able to call myself “I” in a profounder sense. But that takes stamina, and it is not possible to harvest immediately what one has sown. . . . I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot’s wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill.
    Søren’s quest for truth that was personally engaging—for which he could “live and die”—led to an early rejection of much of the Christianity he had so far encountered. In an 1835 letter to his brother-in-law, Søren admits, “ I grew up in orthodoxy , so to speak,” however, “as soon as I began to think for myself the enormous colossus gradually began to totter.” This was, undoubtedly, an awkward position to be in for someone training to be a minister in the established state church. Søren’s prevarication did not spring from hostility to Christianity as much as aversion to the way Christianity took the form of coteries in Christendom. Brother Peter seemed to be able to align his religious seriousness with a willingness to associate with specific factions in church politics. For some years Peter had been a supporter of N. S. F. Grundtvig, a Danish nationalist, poet, populist politician, and church reformer whose group set Creedal Christianity against the liberal Christianity of Mynster and Bible-minded enthusiasts like the Moravians, who in turn were set against the cultured elitism represented by Martensen and Heiberg. The endless, noisy tribalism of Christendom was wearing on Søren. He did not mean to find his life’s purpose by joining a group . Søren often writes of the enthusiasm to band together and defend a certain expression of Christianity as a type of betrayal of the original ideal.
Christianity was an impressive figure when it stepped forcefully into the world expressing itself, but from the moment it sought to stake out boundaries through a pope or to hit the people over the head with the Bible or lately the Apostle’s Creed, it resembled an old man who believes that he has lived long enough in the world and wants to wind things up.
    The coteries of Christendom did not seem to be good news for Christianity, or for individual Christians either.
When I look at a goodly number of particular instances of the Christian life, it seems to me that Christianity, instead of pouring out strength upon them—yes, in fact, in contrast to paganism—such individuals are robbed of their manhood by Christianity and are now like the gelding compared to the stallion.
    Unbeknownst to others, at the same time that Søren was accruing debt, waging snarky student politics, and climbing social ladders, he was also busy working out his relation to Christianity. It was increasingly becoming something that Søren knew he had to make a personal choice about. As a result, Søren became fascinated with the forms of life on offer for people who reject Christianity. His private writing from this time is filled with reflections on three legendary figures. Don Juan, Faust, and Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew represented,