Regine Olsen
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Regine Schlegel née Olsen (January 23, 1822 – March 18, 1904) was a Danish woman who was engaged to the philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard from September 1840 to October 1841. Regine's relationship with Kierkegaard exerted a crucial influence over his intellectual development, philosophy, and theology, and the legacy of their engagement figures prominently in his writings.
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Engagement to Kierkegaard
Regine was born on January 23, 1822, in Frederiksberg, a district of Copenhagen, Denmark. She first met Kierkegaard on a spring day in 1837 when she was 14. Regine later recalled that upon this first meeting Kierkegaard had made "a very strong impression". A mutual infatuation developed between the two while Regine was being tutored by Schlegel, her future husband.
Regine had also made a strong impression on Kierkegaard, who began to pursue her over a long period of time, ingratiating himself first as a friend and later attempting to court her. On September 8, 1840 Kierkegaard finally revealed his feelings to Regine when she was playing the piano for him at her family's house. He recounted the events years later in his journal: "'Oh! What do I care for music, it's you I want, I have wanted you for two years.' She kept silent." Kierkegaard proceeded to plead his case to Etatsraad (Councilman) Olsen, Regine's father, immediately. Her father granted Kierkegaard his blessing, and the two became engaged to be married.
Almost immediately, however, Kierkegaard began to have doubts about his ability to be a husband. Throughout the following year, Kierkegaard threw himself into his work. He began his seminarian studies, preached his first sermon, and wrote his dissertation for his magister degree. Regine sensed that Kierkegaard's ostensibly busy schedule was a pretence for avoiding her. They did maintain a voluminous correspondence; for a time he wrote her cryptic letters every Wednesday. Kierkegaard's letters have survived, but, aside from a few lines, Regine's letters seem to have been destroyed. On August 11, 1841, Kierkegaard broke off the engagement, sending Regine a farewell letter along with his engagement ring. Regine, heartbroken, immediately went to Kierkegaard's house; when he wasn't there, she left a note pleading for him not to leave her.
Kierkegaard seems to have genuinely loved Regine but was unable to reconcile the prospect of marriage with his vocation as a writer, his passionate, introspective Christianity and his constant melancholy. Regine was shattered by his rejection of her, and was unwilling to accept Kierkegaard's breaking of their engagement, threatening to kill herself if he did not take her back. Kierkegaard attempted to quell this through actions which made it appear that he did not care for her at all and make it seem that Regine had broken it off. As he later wrote, "there was nothing else for me to do but to venture to the uttermost, to support her, if possible, by means of deception, to do everything to repel her from me in order to rekindle her pride." He wrote her cold, calculated letters in order to make it seem that he didn't love her anymore, but Regine clung to the hope that they would get back together, desperately pleading to him to take her back. On October 11, 1841, Kierkegaard met with her and again broke off the engagement in person. Her father tried to persuade him to reconsider after assessing his Regine's desperate condition, claiming that "It will be the death of her; she is in total despair" Kierkegaard returned the next day and spoke with Regine. To her query as to whether he would ever marry, Kierkegaard icily responded: "Well, yes, in ten years, when I have begun to simmer down and I need a lusty young miss to rejuvenate me." In reality, Kierkegaard had no such plans, and would remain a celibate bachelor for the rest of his life.
Regine was crushed by the whole affair, as was Kierkegaard, who described spending his nights crying in his bed without her. The story of the engagement became a source of gossip in Copenhagen, with Kierkegaard's flippant dismissal and apparently cruel seduction of Regine becoming wildly exaggerated. Regine's family reacted with a mixture of confusion, finding Kierkegaard's actions incomprehensible, to outright hatred for causing Regine such pain. Kierkegaard would later beg for Regine to forgive him for his actions. In a famous letter, he wrote, "Above all, forget the one who writes this; forgive someone who, whatever else, could not make a girl happy."
Marriage to Schlegel
On November 3, 1847, Regine married her old tutor, Frederik Schlegel, in the Church of Our Saviour in Copenhagen. The marriage was happy and stable. Regine and Frederik even read aloud to each other passages from Kierkegaard's writings, which were then getting much attention in Denmark.
On a number of occasions in 1849, Regine and Kierkegaard crossed each other's paths, beginning with dispersing from church after Mass, and later on the routes for afternoon walks both of them took. On November 19, 1849, Frederik Schlegel received a letter from Kierkegaard entreating him to allow him to speak to Regine. Schlegel did not respond to the letter, and denied Kierkegaard further requests to talk with Regine. Soon afterwards, Frederik was appointed governor of the Danish West Indies, and Regine accompanied him there, departing on March 17, 1855.
She was never to see Kierkegaard again. Regine and Frederik returned from the Danish West Indies to Copenhagen in 1860, five years after Kierkegaard's death. The remains of his estate had been bequeathed to his "former fiancé" Regine. Frederick died in 1896. In 1897, Regine moved to Frederiksberg to live with her older brother.
After the death of Schlegel, she accepted requests by biographers, commentators and friends, to discuss her side of the relationship between her and Kierkegaard. The interviewers include Hanne Mourier, Raphael Meyer, Peter Munthe Brun, Robert Neiiendam, Julius Clausen, and Georg Brandes. In 1898 she decided to dictate to, among others, the librarian Raphael Meyer the story of her engagement to Kierkegaard. This account was published after Regine's death in 1904 as Kierkegaardian Papers: The Engagement; Published on Behalf of Mrs. Regine Schlegel, but in general scholars concede that it offers little information that wasn't already known through Kierkegaard and other sources. Regine is buried in Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen, along with both Kierkegaard and Frederik Schlegel. In his commentary about Regine, Robert Neiiendam wrote that "she knew 'that he took her with him into history.' And this thought made up for what she had suffered."
Effect of breakup on Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard never fully recovered from his failed relationship with Regine. For a time in between their break-up and her marriage to Schlegel, they had polite and civil contact during daily walks and in church. These were mostly non-verbal on Kierkegaard's part and caused him great anxiety. It seems that he was attempting to utilize his complicated authorial method of indirect communication in his personal life, and his tormented approach caused him great distress. When he absconded to Berlin in 1842 to study philosophy, he was haunted by a woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Regine. Even while immersing himself in his studies, Regine was always on his mind: "Not even here in Berlin has my, alas, all-too-inventive brain been able to refrain from scheming something or other. She must either love me or hate me, she knows no third possibility. Nor is there anything more harmful to a young girl than half-way situations." It was during this time that Kierkegaard was formulating his own philosophy, as well as his first book, Either/Or.
There has been scholarly contention as to the motives behind Kierkegaard's breaking of his engagement to Regine. It has been suggested that Kierkegaard's reading of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac (told at length in his book Fear and Trembling) influenced his perspective on Regine and marriage: he believed that, if he were to sacrifice the person most dear to him as an act of religious faith, God would return her to him at the last moment. Instead, Kierkegaard was confounded when Regine moved on and married someone else.
Regine in Kierkegaard's writings
Regine Olsen occupies a central role in Kierkegaard's thought and writings, and indeed a unique position in the history of all of Western philosophy. It can be argued that no other single woman has been so instrumental in a major philosopher's development as Regine was to Kierkegaard. In some ways, it is difficult to understand Kierkegaard fully without at least a cursory knowledge of his failed relationship to Regine.
Kierkegaard's failed relationship with Regine influenced his views on marriage, love, commitment, authenticity, and perhaps above all, faith and relationship to God. His mention of Regine in his writings, however, (aside from his personal journals) is always indirect. Either/Or, Kierkegaard's first book, is full of veiled references to his relationship with Regine. Aside from lengthy sections dealing with the matters of erotic seduction and a sermon on the virtues of marriage, it includes The Seducer's Diary, featuring a young man who calculates his seduction of a young girl from afar, and upon winning her affection, breaking off the relationship. The story has strong parallels to Kierkegaard's relationship to Regine, and has often been taken to be a fictionalization of it. It has also been published as its own separate volume. Stages on Life's Way contains an analysis of the three "spheres of existence" — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. As the ethical corresponds to dedicating one's life to another — to marriage — the religious corresponds to dedicating one's self to God. It seems to have been this decision — this "either/or" — which consumed Kierkegaard during the years of his engagement, and he felt that he could not reconcile his marriage with his religious calling. With the exception of a single work dedicated to Poul Martin Møller, Kierkegaard dedicated all of his writings to his father, another formative figure in his life, and to Regine.
In popular culture
- Italian rock band, Port Royal, has a song titled "Regine Olsen."
