Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard by Clare Carlisle

Abstract

Reviewed by: Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard by Clare Carlisle Ronald F. Marshall Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard. By Clare Carlisle. London: Allen Lane, 2019. xvii + 339 pp. Clare Carlisle, author of Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming (2006) and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: A Reader's Guide (2010), has written [End Page 226] a Kierkegaard biography which does not follow the standard wombto-tomb format. According to the renowned Wittgenstein biographer, Roy Monk, he had to read it twice before he could get it (NewStatesmanAmerica, March 27, 2019). Carlisle takes that risk because she wants to write a Kierkegaardian biography of Kierkegaard (xiii)—following his dictum (Journals, eds. Hongs §1030) that we live life forward but understand it backward (15, 20, 55, 151, 188). To capture this insight she has to jostle her timeline a bit. But that does not diminish the brilliance of her biography—seeing, as she does, that Kierkegaard's books throw "sparks into the dry pews of Christendom" (6). Nor does it keep her from dwelling on the women in Kierkegaard's life—more than other biographers have (putting the lie to Terry Eagleton's charge that Kierkegaard was "deeply misogynistic"—London Review of Books, August 1, 2019). The fact that Kierkegaard never mentions his mother in his writings does not mean, says Carlisle, that "he has forgotten her; it is the silence owed to something sacred, which held him long before he knew how to speak" (65, 72, 103). And on his onetime fiance, Regine Olsen, she calls her his "anchor in the world" (239, xii). Most of all she accentuates the two anonymous women's letters thanking him for his books—in which they found "the source of life which has not failed" them, keeping them from being lonely as long as they were in "the company" of them (228–30). But more than that, her biography is the first Lutheran one of Kierkegaard—arguing, as she does, that his "spiritual legacy is a miniature rendition of three centuries of Reformation history" (76). That builds on Thomas Cahill's claim that Luther, who was often misunderstood in his own time, "might have been better appreciated in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard" (Heretics and Heroes, 2013, 173). Kierkegaard, after all, regarded him as his master (Journals §§2422, 2465). For Carlisle, Kierkegaard is the latterday Danish Luther, but with only one thesis, not ninety-five, namely, that there are no real Christians left because "a person's total transformation" has been excised from Christianity, leaving all putative Christians faithlessly attached to "family, possessions, and professional success" (241, 243). Kierkegaard saw in Luther that the Christian "must regard this life on earth as a pilgrim regards the land through which he makes his journey [End Page 227] [expecting] to become neither a citizen nor a mayor. Luther's words … consolidated Kierkegaard's view of his own position in the world" (216–17; LW 77:196-97, 202). In order to further our transformation into the likeness of Christ (2 Cor. 4:18), Kierkegaard believed he had to struggle mightily to lift up the forgotten or rejected "spiritual struggles of Luther, St. Augustine, [and] of Jesus himself" (14). He thought that their restless struggles needed to become ours (230), making us human in a less familiar way (xvii). In one extended footnote (267–68), Carlisle notes three passages from Luther on the Christian's need of restlessness (LW 25:263, 433, 460). But a short appendix or excursus on this might have served her better: "The Church has been put into the world so that it must constantly run the devil's gauntlet." "We have not yet come where we ought to be, but we are all on the road." "As long as we live here, it is all falling down and getting up again." "There remains in us an everlasting strife and resistance." "The whole of life is the year of probation." "Faith takes no holidays." "Put off and tear away any affection for this life." "A Christian … constantly strives and struggles with all his might." "The life of a saint is more … a...