ABSTRACT
Although the Bible in Kierkegaard’s Denmark was still the reigning religious authority, the principal collection of stories and teachings that framed human life in a broad vision of meaning and purpose, its explanatory sovereignty had been severely compromised. Other sources of insight in the natural and social sciences had already begun to shine their lights on the human creature. The hermeneutic of suspicion that today so permeates the intellectual culture of the West, which regards ancient texts as the quaint literary vestigia of pre-scientific societies, had begun to press its case, and the vivisection of the Jewish and Christian scriptures into so many straining cords was well underway. Hobbes and Spinoza had long since challenged the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and groundbreaking works of biblical criticism were published long before Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Anxiety in 1844.1 Major figures from Hobbes and Hume to Rousseau and Kant had examined human nature in ways not grounded on Genesis. Karl Rosenkranz (1805-79) had generated his Psychologie through conceptual distinctions, not
1 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) published the Wolfenbütteler Fragmente, from Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ (1694-1768) manuscript, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, from 1774 to 1777 in his Zur Geschichte und Literatur. Kierkegaard possessed Lessing’s collected works, see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s sämmtliche Schriften, vols. 1-32, vols. 1-28, Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung 1825-27; vols. 29-32 Berlin and Stettin: Nicolaische Buchhandlung 1828 (ASKB 1747-1762). Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827) had put out his influential Einleitung in das Alte Testament, vols. 1-5, Leipzig: Weidmann & Reich 1780-83, and Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780-1849) wrote many works Kierkegaard possessed, including his Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in die Bibel Alten und Neuen Testamentes, vols. 1-2 (in 1 tome), 4th ed., Berlin: G. Reimer 1833 (ASKB 80) and his Lehrbuch die hebräisch-judischen Archäologie, 3rd ed., Leipzig: Vogel 1842 (ASKB 872). David Friedrich Strauss’ (1808-74) Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, Tübingen: Osiander 1835-36, was much discussed in the years when Kierkegaard was reaching his intellectual maturity; he possessed Strauss’ Fremstilling af den christelige Troeslære i dens historiske Udvikling og i dens Kamp med den moderne Videnskab, vols. 1-2, trans. by Hans Brøchner, Copenhagen: H.C. Klein 1842-43 (ASKB 803-804), and works on Strauss, such as Franz von Baader’s Über das Leben Jesu, Munich: Franz 1836 (ASKB 407), and Julius Schaller’s Der historische Christus und die Philosophie. Kritik der Grundidee des ASKB 759). See also
through reflection on the biblical narrative, and Kierkegaard could have done the same.2 In this environment, under these circumstances, the fact that Kierkegaard should root such fundamental convictions in the soil of Eden, that he should write his most psychological work expositing the temptation and Fall of Adam, surely tells us something about Kierkegaard and what he sought to communicate.
