ABSTRACT
There are very few thinkers who spend their lifetime in practising what they preach. Job says, ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither; the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’ (Book of Job 1: 20-21). According to Kierkegaard (1944b: 7), ‘Jobs significance does not lie in the fact that he said so, but in the fact that he acted in accordance with it.’ The same can be said about Kierkegaard, who lived as per his teaching and opposed spiritual and moral complacency. Even in his deathbed he refused to receive Eucharist from any pastor, arguing that pastors are civil servants of the crown who have nothing to do with Christianity. He broke his engagement with Regina Olsen, thinking that it would be wrong to allow his ‘melancholy and gloomy spirit to darken her radiant youth and beauty’. His life is the source of many of the preoccupations and repetitions within his ‘oeuvre’. His personal life pervades his work, and his philosophical convictions are infused in his personal life.
