'His books were read but ridiculed'

 I watched another episode of The Sea of Faith last night – number four (not yet on the BBC iPlayer but available, with blurry visuals, on YouTube). This one focused on two very different thinkers – Marx and Kierkegaard: 'compare and contrast' indeed. As with Freud, I wondered if Marx would be quite so prominent if the series were made today: back in 1984 I guess it was still possible to think that societies built on Marxist foundations might thrive – no longer, obviously. The half of the programme devoted to Kierkegaard was very much more rewarding, and Cupitt expounded the great Dane's ideas on Christianity quite lucidly, helped by an actor (Colin Jeavons) doing a good job of impersonating Kierkegaard. 
  Cupitt, I noticed, chose to pronounce 'Kierkegaard' with a silent 'd'. This triggered memories of Malcolm Muggeridge (last glimpsed here suggesting an 'orgy' to Kingsley Amis) screwing up his features hideously as he wrestled with the name, finally bringing out, in a long agonised drawl, something like 'Kierke-yaaaaaaaawd'. Whatever the challenges posed by his name, Kierkegaard was something of a hero to the late period, spiritual Muggeridge, who wrote this about him:  
'Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, he pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise.'
  For a useful summing-up, elegantly expressed, we could turn to the American poet Dana Gioia. Here is his 'Homage to Soren Kierkegaard '–

Work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling.
                            —St Paul

I was already an old man when I was born.

Small with a curved back, he dragged his leg when walking

the streets of Copenhagen. 'Little Kierkegaard,'

they called him. Some meant it kindly. The more one suffers

the more one acquires a sense of the comic.

His hair rose in waves six inches above his head.

Save me, O God, from ever becoming sure.

What good is faith if it is not irrational?

 

Christianity requires a conviction of sin.

As a boy tending sheep on the frozen heath,

his starving father cursed God for his cruelty.

His fortunes changed. He grew rich and married well.

His father knew these blessings were God's punishment.

All would be stripped away. His beautiful wife died,

then five of his children. Crippled Soren survived.

The self-consuming sickness unto death is despair.

 

What the age needs is not a genius but a martyr.

Soren fell in love, proposed, then broke the engagement.

No one, he thought, could bear his presence daily.

My sorrow is my castle. His books were read

but ridiculed. Cartoons mocked his deformities,

His private journals fill seven thousand pages.

You could read them all, he claimed, and still not know him.

He who explains this riddle explains my life.

 

When everyone is Christian, Christianity

does not exist. The crowd is untruth. Remember

we stand alone before God in fear and trembling.

At forty-two he collapsed on his daily walk.

Dying he seemed radiant. His skin had become

almost transparent. He refused communion

from the established church. His grave has no headstone.

Now with God's help I shall at last become myself.