ABSTRACT
In the vast scholarly literature about Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors, the mysterious Vigilius Haufniensis has been decisively upstaged by the much more celebrated Johannes Climacus. In one of the few books entirely devoted to the topic of sin and anxiety in Kierkegaard’s corpus, Gregory Beabout has lamented that “there has been very little written about Vigilius Haufniensis.”1 Unlike the more prolific Climacus, Haufniensis was the author of only one rather short book, The Concept of Anxiety, which was published in June 1844. That single volume is notoriously difficult to read, and its style is sometimes laboriously academic, so much so that it has been deemed “nearly impenetrable,”2 and excoriated for its “vile, slovenly style” and “clumsy, unnecessary terminology.”3 Partly because it lacks the literary flair typical of the presentation of the “stages of existence,” and partly because it does not neatly fit into the schema of the stages, Vigilius’ volume “often seems to be treated as something apart from the bulk of Kierkegaard’s authorship.”4 This relative neglect is exacerbated by the fact that Haufniensis divulges much less information about himself than Climacus does in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. To further motivate this marginalization of Haufniensis, Kierkegaard’s own commentaries on his authorship say surprisingly little about him. For example, in The Point of View for My Work as an Author Kierkegaard merely includes The Concept of Anxiety in a catalogue of the aesthetic works without bothering to explain the significance of the pseudonymous author.5 Given the fact that Haufniensis seems to be pedantic and
not very self-revelatory, it is understandable that his persona would have received much less attention than most of the other pseudonyms. Nevertheless, grasping Haufniensis’ personal perspective and pathos is essential for understanding the possible meanings of The Concept of Anxiety.
