Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard was the youngest son of a rich Copenhagen wool merchant, a devout and melancholy Lutheran who as a boy had cursed God on the Jutland heath and believed himself cursed in return; five of his seven children died young. The melancholy passed to the son. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, took ten years to graduate, lived dissolutely for a time, and settled down only after his father's death in 1838.

In 1840 he became engaged to the seventeen-year-old Regine Olsen and broke the engagement the next year without explanation; he never married, and she remained the hidden reader of all he wrote. In 1841 he took his master's degree with On the Concept of Irony and went to Berlin to hear Schelling. Over the next four years he published Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Stages on Life's Way and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, all under pseudonyms, each representing a view of life, with the author standing behind them passing no verdict.

His question was: in a country where everyone calls himself a Christian, how does one become a Christian? Hegel's system had turned Christianity into a comprehensible philosophy; he wanted to restore its offence. The Incarnation is absurd; faith is not understanding but passion, holding fast to something with infinite passion in objective uncertainty. Truth is subjectivity: what matters is not what you believe but how. Abraham raising the knife over Isaac is the 'teleological suspension of the ethical'; the knight of faith stands alone before God outside all universal norms.

In 1846 he fell out with the satirical paper The Corsair and was mocked all over Copenhagen, which ended his thoughts of a country parsonage. In his last years he launched a furious attack on the Danish state church, calling official Christianity a betrayal of the New Testament; in 1855 he collapsed in the street and died six weeks later at forty-two, his inheritance nearly spent. Almost unknown outside Denmark, his books were translated into German in the early twentieth century and shook Heidegger, Jaspers, Barth and Sartre, and existentialism took its name from him.