This article explores nineteenth-century Danish Lutheran layman Søren Kierkegaard’s option for celibacy, asking why he made this choice, how it affected him, and what we can learn from his story. Thomas G. Casey SJ teaches philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome.

An unexpected example of celibacy

I have learned a lot about celibacy through reflecting upon the life story of a nineteenth-century Lutheran layman. Celibacy was not at the heart of this man’s calling, yet it did have a major impact on his life, bringing him a lot of pain as well as bearing great fruit. I would like to share his story with you. There is always the danger that I will end up exploiting him for my own purposes in the process, manipulating him in order to justify Catholic celibacy. In order to counter this tendency, I will try to be as fair to his story as possible.

This nineteenth-century Lutheran is often hailed as the father of existentialism, although he had no intentions of founding a philosophical movement at all. Yet there is a grain of truth in this phrase, because he became a kind of father through his writings, giving birth to new ways of thinking and living. This man was born in Denmark in 1813. His name was Søren Kierkegaard.

While he was still in his twenties, Kierkegaard freely decided to become celibate. Why did he make this decision? Did it help him to be a more loving person? Can we learn anything from his story for today?

In September 1840, at the age of 27 years, Søren Kierkegaard became engaged to a stunning young woman called Regine Olsen. They were both from wealthy bourgeois families in Copenhagen, and coincidentally both the youngest of seven children. Her beauty seemed the perfect match for his brilliance. But the day after their engagement, Søren became convinced he had made a terrible mistake. For the next year both Søren and Regine suffered as the engagement steadily unravelled. He cultivated an air of indifference and even cruelty in an effort to pretend to Regine that he did not love her, yet all the while he agonized inside. Regine saw through his play-acting, and fought as hard as she could to keep the engagement alive. But by October 1841 it was definitively over. It took Regine a long time to get back to normal afterwards. Although she was a full nine years younger than Kierkegaard, her hair went prematurely grey and her health deteriorated for a time. But six years later she had recovered her spirits sufficiently to marry a man called Frederik Schlegel with whom she was to have a happy marriage. After the engagement ended Kierkegaard left Denmark for several months and studied in Berlin. He returned to Copenhagen in the spring of 1842, and wrote with new passion and energy, as book after book was published.

Kierkegaard never stopped thinking of Regine, and although she was never mentioned in his books, his writings are full of messages secretly directed to her. When he died in 1855 he ordered that his few possessions should be left to his former fiancée.

‘It is naturally my will that my former fiancée, Mrs. Regine Schlegel, should inherit unconditionally what little I leave behind. If she herself refuses to accept it, it is to be offered to her on the condition that she act as a trustee for its distribution to the poor.

What I wish to express is that for me an engagement was and is just as binding as a marriage, and that therefore my estate is to revert to her in exactly the same manner as if I had been married to her.’1

Regine died almost 50 years later in 1904. By then she was a widow. But even in her final years she was fond of repeating something Kierkegaard had said to her decades before: ‘You see, Regine, in eternity there is no marriage; there, both Schlegel and I will happily be together with you.’2

Why Kierkegaard chose celibacy

Although Kierkegaard is regularly, and often unfairly, associated with doom and gloom, he did not choose celibacy in order to lead an austere and frigid life. As a rule he praised marriage, except toward the end of his life when he attacked it vehemently, though this bitter stance seems an aberration. For the most part, he considered marriage to be part of the natural order of things, and in addition to be a way of life blessed by God. In Either-Or II, the character Judge William extols marriage as ‘the most intimate, the most beautiful association that life on this earth provides.’3

There was probably an element of fear in Kierkegaard’s initial decision to become celibate. His did not want to see Regine suffer by becoming privy to his troubled inner life and abiding sense of melancholy. However, his motivation matured over time. As the years progressed, both Kierkegaard and Regine, reflecting independently on his choice, saw that his celibacy nourished the growth of his soul and anchored him in a life bigger than himself. Regine’s compassionate view is all the more impressive given the huge hurt she experienced because of the break-up. Kierkegaard’s bigger life was inseparably connected with his writing, and it is revealing that the vast majority of Kierkegaard’s numerous books were published during a seven-year period following the break-up of his engagement, between the years 1843 and 1850. But his celibacy was also essentially linked to his faith, a faith that was admittedly expressed in a privileged way through his written words.

Kierkegaard left one love in order to respond to the claim that another love – God’s love – made upon him. Unfortunately the way things turned out, Regine was left to pick up the pieces of her broken emotional life, though luckily Schlegel had been waiting in the wings to woo her, which meant she did not become stuck in the role of a jilted woman, which would have been trying in nineteenth-century Denmark. Writing in his journals, Kierkegaard reflected that the ordeal of his broken engagement was the crucible of fire that formed and shaped him and his vocation. It also struck him with the wisdom of hindsight that his struggle with Regine was simultaneously a wrestling with God: ‘in every one of my collisions there is a collision with God or a struggle with God.’

Regine too, despite the pain and emotional hurt she initially suffered, found comfort as the years went by in the realization that God was at the heart of Kierkegaard’s choice of celibacy. In September 1856, the year following Kierkegaard’s death, she wrote a letter to his nephew in which she remarked that Kierkegaard had sacrificed her for the sake of God. She added that this was not on account of any form of ‘self-torture’ on Kierkegaard’s part, even though she acknowledged that Kierkegaard had often feared as much, but instead because of ‘an inner call from God (which I believe has been demonstrated by time and by the results of his actions).’4

How did Kierkegaard live his celibacy?

Kierkegaard was a man of prayer. In fact he made a point of praying for Regine every day. His rich prayer life is hinted at by the many beautiful prayers he composed. Here, for instance, is part of a prayer that is found in the preface at the beginning of his book Works of Love:

How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you! How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you who revealed what love is, you our Saviour and Redeemer, who gave yourself in order to save all. How could one speak properly of love if you were forgotten, you Spirit of love, who take nothing of your own but remind us of that love-sacrifice, remind the believer to love as he is loved and his neighbour as himself!5

Now and then others caught glimpses of Kierkegaard’s deep spiritual life, as for instance his best friend Emil Boesen to whom he addressed the following words as he lay on his death-bed in the autumn of 1855: ‘What matters is to get as close to God as possible.’6

Kierkegaard was convinced that his celibacy would be rewarded, both in the present life, and the life to come. He was of course the author (through the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio) of Fear and Trembling, which describes how Abraham was prepared to sacrifice Isaac in the unshakeable conviction that he would receive his son back in this life (Abraham’s faith was solely in this life since he had no concept of heaven). Kierkegaard also entertained the hope that he would receive Regine back during his lifetime, not as a lover or wife, but in a brother/sister kind of relationship. He saw Regine intermittently while he was walking in Copenhagen or when he went to church on Sundays, although they refrained from speaking to one another.

Kierkegaard could not stop loving Regine, so remaining celibate was not easy. He was partially buoyed by the belief that they would enjoy one another’s company forever in the next life. However, Kierkegaard’s hopes for a Platonic relationship this side of the grave were dashed in March of 1855. It was at this point, seven years after her marriage to Frederik Schlegel, that Regine left for the Danish West Indies with her husband who had been appointed Governor there. This was the last time Kierkegaard set eyes on his beloved, and perhaps the grief of this final parting hastened his death, for he passed away several months later in November of 1855, at the age of 42.

Kierkegaard was a passionate person, and he never retreated into an ivory tower of speculation. He regarded passion as an indispensable feature of faith, and he was appalled by the lack of passion in the society around him, above all the lack of passion for God. ‘Faith’, he remarked in the epilogue to Fear and Trembling, ‘is the highest passion in a person.’7 However, Kierkegaard rejected eros conceived as self-centred, superficial and temporary love, the kind of fleeting desire exemplified in the figure of Don Giovanni, the protagonist in Kierkegaard’s favourite opera by the same name, an opera composed by his favourite musician Mozart.

In daily life, Kierkegaard managed to keep the passion of eros alive along with the selflessness of agape, recognizing in practice, like Pope Benedict XVI, whose favourite composer also happens to be Mozart, that love, despite its ‘different dimensions’, is in fact ‘a single reality’.8 If desire is at the core of eros, then Kierkegaard was a man of great desires: his driving passion was to bring home the urgency and greatness of Christianity to every individual who read his books. He wanted to change the face of the culture around him, and he used all the resources of his immense intelligence and creativity to goad and coax his contemporaries to change their lives. He wanted the people of Denmark to make a paradigm shift, moving from a nominal adherence to Christianity to a real and living faith.

Kierkegaard managed to avoid nestling into the cocooned life of a bachelor. A recent Danish study has uncovered evidence to show that Kierkegaard accommodated a poor family in his apartment for four years, from 1848 to 1852.9 The man of the family, a carpenter called Frederik Strube, had psychiatric problems, and needed to be hospitalized during that period. Most of us would find it a big inconvenience hosting a husband and wife along with their two daughters for even four days!

What lessons can be drawn from Kierkegaard’s celibacy?

When it came to celibacy, Kierkegaard did not look on himself as a role model. He was not consciously trying to model behaviour for other people. And he did not make a public vow of celibacy. Nevertheless, I believe that those of us who are celibate can learn from his example.

9 First of all, we can learn from Kierkegaard the importance of internalizing our celibacy. As time progressed, Kierkegaard steadily clarified the reasons for his celibacy. He appropriated and internalized these reasons. There seem to have been two major reasons. First, celibacy helped give him a special sense of being close to God, and secondly, it enabled him to spread the Gospel through his writings, which was something that dovetailed with his own talents, and helped others too.

9 Another lesson we can learn from Kierkegaard is that our motives develop and deepen over time. The initial reasons that draw people to celibacy can be noble, selfish, or more often a mixture of both. In fact, when we look back years later, we often feel uncomfortable about acknowledging some of the reasons we entered the celibate way of life. (In a similar way, a layperson might be embarrassed to admit why he or she first got married). Although fear had the upper hand at the beginning, Kierkegaard progressively saw his celibacy in a more positive light, realizing it was linked with his deep sense of God and his freedom to reach people through his writing.

9 A third lesson to be drawn from Kierkegaard’s celibacy is that we never quite work celibacy out. Just when we think we have got it together, it has an uncanny knack of catching us unawares and throwing us off balance. Challenges and difficulties are to be expected in the life of celibacy. Although Kierkegaard sacrificed the possibility of a married relationship with Regine, he never got over her, and never stopped loving her. He could not deny his feelings, and so he continued to experience celibacy as a real sacrifice.

9 A final lesson I draw from Kierkegaard’s celibacy is the importance of expressing the fire and passion inside of me through my life and ministry. Kierkegaard was animated by the desire to make a difference to the world, especially through the written word. He found solid satisfaction in this, even though outwardly he had little success. In fact, most of Kierkegaard’s books sold few copies during his lifetime. Yet he believed in their importance and value, and this gave him a deep sense of contributing something great to humanity. He was convinced that posterity would recognize his worth, and he was right: he believed without seeing, and his faith was rewarded after his death.

Søren Kierkegaard died over 150 years ago, yet his example is still relevant. Fundamentally he enjoyed the adventure of life, even a celibate one as it turned out. He accepted the inevitability of pain and anxiety, yet he also trusted that they would not ultimately destabilize him. He was not always sure where celibacy was taking him, yet he was prepared to go along for the ride, knowing as he put it himself, that life is lived forward but only understood backward.

1 Kirmmse, B.H. (ed), Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, translated by B. H. Kirmmse and V. R. Laursen, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp.47-48.

2 Kirmmse, B.H., Encounters with Kierkegaard, p.42.

3 Kierkegaard, S., Either-Or II, H.V. Hong and E. H. Hong (ed and trans), Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987, p.62.

4 Kirmmse, B.H., Encounters with Kierkegaard, p.51.

5 Kierkegaard, S. Works of Love, H.V. Hong and E. H. Hong (ed and trans), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp.3-4.

6 Kirmmse, B.H., Encounters with Kierkegaard, p.123.

7 Kierkegaard, S., Fear and Trembling, H.V. Hong and E. H. Hong (ed and trans), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p.122.

8 Pope Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, number 8.

9 See Tudvad, P. Kierkegaard’s København, Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag, 2004, pp.348-353.