Books: Great Dane

STAGES ON LIFE’S WAY — Søren Kierkegaard—Princeton ($6).

Søren Kierkegaard, who died in 1855, is slowly being excavated from the Danish. Had this philosopher and mystic not written in a minor language, his fame would have resounded with that of Carlyle, Nietzsche, Dostoevski. It was upon Kierkegaard’s assertion of romantic individualism that Scandinavian literature in the last century rose to world-famed greatness and influence. He was the prototype of Ibsen’s gloomy cleric, Brand. Profound also was his influence on Spain’s late, great Catholic scholar, Miguel de Unamuno. Yet only in the last five years has more than an inkling of Kierkegaard been Englished. His most active American disciple, Walter Lowrie, waded into the Danish language solely to rescue Kierkegaard for a larger audience. This week he offers one of the best and biggest of some 30 volumes.

“I sit alone like a Greenlander in my kayak, solitary upon the great sea of life,” explained Kierkegaard. He cultivated a melancholy “inwardness,” saw Christianity everywhere as passionless, sterile, soft. He discerned three stages of experience: 1) esthetic, 2) ethical, 3) religious. Progress through them comes only with inward struggle, firm decision. Essence of Christian religiousness, to him, is suffering. So real Christians are few.

Kierkegaard’s literary method was to invent characters, let them work out their ways of life, publish their “diaries” and “memoirs.” Stages on Life’s Way gleams brilliantly as character after character cuts a new facet on that indestructible gem, love between man & woman. Part I is a memoir of a wine-sodden banquet where a gay seducer, a fashion stylist, a cynic, etc. discourse on follies of woman and love. Theirs is life’s esthetic stage. The ethical is explored in Part II by a happily married essayist. “Yes, it is true, no poet will ever be able to say [of the married man] as the poets say of the crafty Ulysses that he saw many cities of men . . . but the question is whether he would not have learned just as many things and just as pleasant if he had stayed at home with Penelope.”

Part III affects to be a manuscript found in a lake. Actually it is a diary of Kierkegaard’s own unhappy love affair. Said he, “I am experiencing more poetry than there is in all romances put together.” His problem: “Dare a soldier on the frontier (spiritually understood) take a wife, a soldier on duty at the extremest outpost, who is fighting day and night . . . against the robber bands of an innate melancholy. . . ?” In his soul-searching the diarist approaches the last stage in life’s way, the religious.

Stages on Life’s Way is not only one of Kierkegaard’s best books* but luckily his most interesting to ordinary, unmystical readers. And because his musings on the erotic are so lucid, irreligious mankind will respect this essentially religious thinker. Judges Translator Lowrie, “The Stages is clearly a work of genius.”

*Of Kierkegaard’s works, the Rev. Walter Lowrie has translated better than a dozen. Next to appear will be Concluding Postscript, which he calls “the keystone of S. K.’s whole authorship.” Held up in England by war is Either /Or, K’s first, easiest work.