Sárospataki Füzetek 15. (2011)
2011 / 4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Kónya Péter: Szlovák reformátusok a 17-18. században
Sawyer, Frank Kierkegaard - a flag in the WINDS OF CHANGE 1. Person Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) lived his relatively short life in Copenhagen where he lived off his inheritance and wrote incessandy. He also liked to frequent the theatre and walk the streets observing people. He became well known in the small capital city town (about 200.000) and he was mocked by cartoons in the press. He in turn wrote sarcastically about important people and about the church. He was not known internationally during his own life time, but soon became increasingly relevant as a ‘father of existentialism’. His life was typified by anxiety, about which he endlessly psychologised and philosophised. He claimed: “Our whole earthly existence is a sort of indisposition....”1 He also said: “My grief is my castle, which like an eagle’s nest ... nothing can conquer.”* 2 Indeed, S. Kierkegaard had a frail body, a melancholy spirit, but (as he says himself) a witty mind. A typical Kierkegaardian remark goes like this: one of S. Kierkegaard’s teachers who always let things get out of control became exasperated one day when the boys started eating food and turned the class room into a picnic area. The teacher said he was going to report this to the headmaster. Thereupon the boys began to beg the teacher to forgive them one more time. But the youthful S. Kierkegaard said (something like): ‘Sir, when you get to the headmaster’s office, please tell him that your class always is like this.’3 The typical Kierkegaardian irony here is that the challenges the teacher to face the unpleasant truth and say so to others. Kierkegaard’s anxiety and melancholy came straight from his father and the family. S. Kierkegaard was the last of seven children. Over the years the first five died and their father saw this as a punishment by God and also assumed that he would outlive the last two. Soren expected the same. Soren’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard grew up very poor in the barren region of Jutland (Northwest Denmark). The family name: churchyard, i.e., graveyard came from where the grandfather lived in the poor parsonage in Jutland. Soren’s father tended sheep as a boy and suffered hunger and cold for which he cursed God. But he was taken to Copenhagen as a young man and set up in business by an uncle and he eventually became wealthy and entertained prominent citizens. When his wife died he drop'Peter Rohde, ed., The Diary of Seren Kierkegaard (New York: Carol Publishing, 1993), 22. 2 Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, in Robert Bretall, ed., A Kierkegaard Anthology (New York: Modem Library, 1946), 35. 3 Incident told in Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970), 39-40. 2011/4 Sárospataki füzetek 53
