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"...What our age needs is education. And so this is what happened: God chose a man who also needed to be educated, and educated him privatissime, so that he might be able to teach others from his own experience." From Kierkegaard's [personal] Journals.

2013 is the bicentennial of Kierkegaard's birth. He probably would have not wanted you to know that, but he has plenty more things to let you know.

They call him the "Father of Existentialism". You know you're asking for trouble when trying to write about a man who holds that distinction, but I must make an effort, once again, to try in vain to talk about one of my heroes-period. Philosopher, theologian, man in love, man in despair, man in angst, man in thought, man in anxiety, the man who launched the great "Attack on Christendom" in order to save Christianity...I can obviously go on but he is almost beyond description in a way though I have just described him at considerable length.

To get to the book itself, it is a relatively short read in comparison to most of his work and is an implicit response to his earlier masterpiece Concluding Unscientific Postscript to "Philosophical Fragments" written under the pseudonym "Johannes Climacus" while this book is written under the name "Anti-Climacus". I have read excerpts of "Postscripts but not the whole work in its entirety (it is long), but a lot of the main points are brought up and somewhat expounded on from a different angle here.

The title of this book is actually 2/3 of the main topic of the book which is that the sickness unto death is despair; that is THE word of this book and main idea.

In two parts, he is going to talk about the kinds of despair and than what despair actually is. Throughout that time we will get the standard anti-Hegelianism, mixed with the very in-depth psychological, existential (obviously, he even uses the word), and theological insight that has made his work as new today as it was 50, 100, and 164 years ago.

I am constantly amazed at how at his best, he could tell you anything and make it sound ultra-enlightening even if you feel you have heard it before. For such a small book I felt overwhelmed (in a good way) at all the information that I was getting in such little space. The only other book that really did that to me is Notes from Underground, another existential classic.

This book also recalled Fear and Trembling to my mind. But where that book gives the existential definition of faith (the "teleological suspension of the ethical), this book gives the existential definition of sin.

One common complaint about this book is about some of the lag in part one which infuriated me when part two came around and he easily explains all the tortured points he was making in a page and a half. The good news is that he makes up for it big time in part two when he gets into the topic "Despair is Sin", from there he's on a rampage of everything you ever thought about sin and [Christian] faith...

One is amazed at how well executed his criticism of institutional Christianity (which he calls "Christendom") is without seeming in the least apostateical yet he pulls no punches, whether you're pious or a pagan he is going after you and trying his best to make you question what you thought you knew:

"But it has to be said, and as bluntly as possible, that so-called Christendom (in which all, in their millions, are Christians as a matter of course, so that there are as many, yes, just as many Christians as there are people) is not only a miserable edition of Christianity, full of misprints that distort the meaning and of thoughtless omissions and emendations, but an abuse of it in having taken Christianity's name in vain...

Alas! the fate of this word in Christendom is like an epigram on all that is Christian. The misfortune is not that no one speaks up for Christianity (nor, therefore, that there is not enough priests); but they speak up for for it in such a way that the majority of people end up attaching no meaning to it...Thus the highest and holiest leave no impression at all, but sound like something that has now-God knows why-become a matter of form and habits indefensible-they find it requisite to defend Christianity."

Oh and his feelings toward apologetics? "One can see now...how extraordinarily stupid it is to defend Christianity, how little knowledge of humanity it betrays, how it...[makes] Christianity out to be some miserable object that in the end must be rescued by a defence[sic]. It is therefore certain and true that the person who first thought of defending Christianity in Christendom is de facto a Judas No. 2; he too betrays with a kiss, except his treason is that of stupidity. To defend something is always to discredit it. Let a man have a warehouse full of gold, let him be willing to give away a ducat to every one of the poor - but let him also be stupid enough to begin this charitable undertaking of his with a defence in which he offers three good reasons in justification; and it will almost come to the point of people finding it doubtful whether indeed he is doing something good. But now for Christianity. Yes, the person who defends that has never believed in it. If he does believe, then the enthusiasm of faith is not a defence, no, it is the assault and the victory; a believer is a victor."

One has to have read or be familiar with "Concluding Unscientific Postscripts" to understand why he is so against Christian apologetics. In that work he comments on the absurdity of the idea that the eternal should come into time and die while taking on the form as the least and lowest of men. He argues here and there that the idea is from an intellectual bases absurd to all hell and back, thus making it indefensible but at the same time making it the supreme act of love and morality and is, at least for him, the solution to despair-but of course I'm simplifying this so my small mind can understand.

This is just a taste of the ideas going through this book and I would advise you to read it and experience it for yourself.

One more person who deserves some credit in this book is obvious (to those who knows the life of Kierkegaard) was the only love he ever had, his fiancée Regine Olsen. This book, like many of S.K.'s work, is autobiographical to an extent and his relationship to Olsen manages to show-up in quite a bit of his works in one form or another. They were not Dante and Beatrice but she had a devastatingly profound effect on him and she could be called, in a way, the mother of existentialism. This really impresses me and makes me feel that Kierkegaard was probably one of the best psychologist of his own mind outside of Jung.

"Let us speak of this in purely human terms. Oh! how pitiable a person who has never felt the loving urge to sacrifice everything for love, who has therefore been unable to do so!"