ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREAT BOOKS

The Journals of SOren Kierkegaard. A selection edited and translated by Alexander Dru. (Oxford University Press. 25s.)

THE absence of an English version of Kierkegaard's works has been for many years a hindfance to the development of philosophical thought in this country, as well as a disgrace in

our publishers ; but if the great Danish writer has had to wait Iong for justice to be done to his genius, he has finally fallen into the best possible hands. With this volume the Oxford Press has launched a definitive translation of his works nncfPr the general care of Mr. Alexander Dru, a careful and exact scholar who has not only learned Danish for this special purpose, but who is evidently prepared to devote years of toil to this arduous and uneconomic task. He has begun

in the best possible way—with a comprehensive selection from the Journals which, in the definitive Danish edition, occupy the best part of ten volumes. A selection—it amounts to six hundred pages—was inevitable ; the original Journals contain, not only a quantity of unessential matter, but many repetitions. As selected by Mr. Dru, they now form a closely connected and continuously interesting record of the course of Kierkegaard's life and the development of his ideas. The actual translation, which presents many difficulties, is done with

great care and sensibility.

The Journals begin in 1834, when Kierkegaard was twenty- one. Though nothing is -truer than Kierkegaard's statement that " everyone is essentially what they are to be when they are ten years old," it is nevertheless surprising to find with

what sureness he has already discovered himself, decided on the nature of his personality and the course of his destiny.

What is truth, he asks, but to live for an idea ? In order to lead a complete human life, " and not merely one of the understanding," he sees the necessity of basing the development of his thought upon " something which grows together with the deepest roots of my life, through which I am, so to speak, grafted upon the divine."

" It is with joy, and inwardly strengthened, that I contemplate those great men who have thus found the precious stone, for the sake of which they sell all, even their lives, whether I see them intervene forcefully in life, and without faltering go forward on the path marked out for them, or discover them remote from the highway, absorbed in themselves and in working for their noble aim. And I look with reverence even upon the errors which lie so near by. It is this divine side of man, his inward action which means everything, not a mass of information • for that will certainly follow and then all that knowledge will not be a chance assemblage, or a succession of details, without system and without a focussing point. I too have certainly looked for such a centre."

It is only by realising that Kierkegaard had set out with this

determination to find a centre, to know himself before anything else, and thus to see his way through life, that we can understand the two decisive moments in his career—his refusal of marriage

and his break with the official Church. He fell in love with a young girl,, Regine Olsen, and she returned his love with a

simple, naive passion. They became engaged, but the next day Kierkegaard realised that he had made a mistake. He thought of many ways out of his predicament, even suicide, but finally decided on self-abasement. He behaved as if he were " subtle, false and treacherous," with the object of killing her love for him. His action caused anger, resentment, bewilderment, and was never properly understood until

the publication of these Journals ; but even with the help of his confession, it needs a certain effort of sympathy and perhaps a spiritual affinity to appreciate his motives. " It was a time

of terrible suffering : to have to be so cruel and at the same time to love as I did. She fought like a tigress. If I had not believed that God had lodged a veto she would have been victorious." God had lodged a veto—such love of God as Kierkegaard had conceived could not co-exist with the love of a human being. It compelled him to an asceticism as rigorous as that of the saints ; and indeed, from this moment Kierkegaard's life was in every sense that of a saint. He is perhaps the most real saint of modem times.

This same intensity and integrity of spiritual experience inevitably brought him into conflict with the organised Church, or Christendom. His attack only became open and embittered towards the end of his life, and there is some truth in the suggestion that it had its origins as a psychological release from parental repression—his father was a gloomy fanatic over- whelmed by a sense of guilt. But the criticism of Christianity

runs throughout the Journals, and is not confined to the Church ; we find him, for example, as early as 1835 contrasting the luxuriance of the Christian imagination when it deals with eternal suffering and torment with its poverty when it deals with the happiness of the chosen and the faithful. The Protestant Church of his own country receives the most frequent and the most fatal blows ; but Catholicism is not spared, and -I find it a little hard to understand the enthusiasm which Kierkegaard inspires in many Catholics. Still less can his arguments appeal to the sceptic or agnostic. Kierke- gaard's " true inwardness " is a passion which pierces through all collective forms of religion to " the contemplation of God face to face."

It would be a mistake to give the impression, however, that the Journals are exclusively concerned with the author's religious development. Kierkegaard was essentially a poet —a child of the Romantic Movement—and he analyses every aspect of life with profundity, with irony and often with lyrical feeling. These Journals have been compared with the Confessions of St. Augustine, the Pensees of Pascal and the Apologia of Newman ; they have something of the quality of all these great books, and still something more—something nearer to Nietzsche than to anything. these other names convey, though Pascal is very near. But of the three spheres into which Kierkegaard divided existence—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious—it is only Nietzsche who rivals him in his understanding of the significance of the aesthetic.

HERBERT READ.