ABSTRACT
Although Søren Kierkegaard stands among the most creative and idiosyncratic of modern thinkers, he nonetheless occupies a particular location in the intellectual discourse of modernity. Recent decades of Kierkegaard scholarship have returned him to Golden Age Copenhagen by exhibiting the finer grains of the world in which he lived and the richer textures of his literary life and influences in nineteenth-century Denmark. Although Kierkegaard’s works are sui generis, they were not created ex nihilo. If it were ever possible to envision him in a timeless intellectual space, with reference only perhaps to Hegel, this was not because Kierkegaard had few influences, but because he made use of so many that he was fully beholden to none. Indeed the array of influences seems especially broad in Kierkegaard’s case, from literature to philosophy and theology, from the Congregation of Brethren to the University of Copenhagen, from churches to theaters and cafés, from late moderns like Hegel and Schelling to early moderns like Pascal and Descartes, and from medieval mystical theologians and early church fathers to Pietists and Reformers. Kierkegaard cast wide the net of an expansive intellect and drew together and reassembled whatever he found useful.
