(2) “The Sickness unto Death” will be pseudonymous and is to be gone through so that my name and the like are not in it. (3) The three works, “Come Here, All You” “Blessed Is He Who Is Not Offended,” and “From on High He Will Draw All Men to Himself” will be pseudonymous. Either all three in one volume under the common title, “Practice in Christianity, Essays by———,” or each one separately. They are to be checked so that my name and anything about me etc. are excluded, which is the case with number three. (4) Everything under the titles “The Point of View for My Work as an Author,” “A Note,” “Three Notes,” and “Armed Neutrality” cannot conceivably be published.43

Despite a residual ambivalence about publishing and although “there is no hurry about publishing,” Kierkegaard did speak with publisher Carl A. Reitzel, “who said he dared not take on anything new for publication.”44 This was troublesome to Kierkegaard, because he had been pondering too long over many issues. “Earlier, of course, I had had misgivings,” he wrote in a retrospective journal entry, “and they promptly returned: what should I do with all the writing that now lay completed. If I got an appointment first, then it could hardly be published….” Meanwhile, he tried to see the Minister of Church and Education and Bishop Mynster. He missed the former, and the latter had no free time the day that Kierkegaard called on him.

During the same period I had been reading Fénelon and Tersteegen. Both had made a powerful impact on me. A line by Fénelon struck me especially: that it must be dreadful for a man if God had expected something more from him. Misgivings awakened full force as to whether such a change in my personal life could even take place. On the other hand, I was qualified to be an author, and I still had money. It seemed to me that I had allowed myself to panic too soon and to hope for what I desired but perhaps could not attain and thus perhaps would make a complete mess of things.

So I wrote to the printer. I was informed that their services were available and could they receive the manuscript the next day; decisions are seldom made that fast.45

Kierkegaard had already had enough practical problems and issues of principle to preoccupy him almost to the point of immobility apart from writing. Then, the evening before he was to deliver the manuscript, he learned that Régine Olsen’s father had died.

That affected me powerfully. Strangely enough, he had died one or two days before I had heard of it, and I learned of it only after my arrangement with the printer. I said to myself: If you had found out about it before you wrote to the printer, you perhaps would have held back in order to see if this could have some significance, however firmly I was convinced that it was extremely dubious to speak to her precisely because I deceived her by pretending I was a deceiver.46

Sleeping poorly that night, he imagined that someone spoke to him or that he talked to himself in a nocturnal conversation.

I remember the words: See, now he intends his own destruction. But I cannot say for sure whether it was because it was I who wanted to call off sending the manuscript to the printer and make an overture to her, or the reverse, that it was I who stood firm on sending the manuscript to the printer. I can also remember the words: After all, it is no concern of (but I cannot remember exactly whether the word was yours or mine) that Councilor Olsen is dead. I can remember the words but not the particular pronoun: You—or I—could, in fact, wait a week. I can remember the reply: Who does he think he is.47

There was something terrifying about the nocturnal conversation. It seemed that he was being frightened away from something, something from which he himself wanted to be excused. But at the same time he considered “that God’s terrifying a man does not always signify that this is the thing he should refrain from but that it is the very thing he should do, but he has to be shocked in order to learn to do it in fear and trembling.”

So I sent the manuscript to the printer. I prayed God to educate me so that in the tension of actuality I might learn how far I should go. I desperately needed a decision; it had been a frightful strain to have those manuscripts lying there and every single day to think of publishing them, while correcting a word here and there.

Then the book [The Sickness unto Death] was made pseudonymous. That much was dismissed.48

“This was a real education, and it is still by no means finished.”49

Kierkegaard’s self-education in the writing of The Sickness unto Death is reflected in the late changes in the printing manuscript, resulting in the use of Anti-Climacus as the pseudonymous author and the designation of Kierkegaard as the editor.50 Humbled under the ideality of the work, he could not venture to publish it under his own name. “It is poetry—and therefore my life, to my humiliation, must obviously express the opposite, the inferior.”51

It is absolutely right—a pseudonym had to be used.

When the demands of ideality are to be presented at their maximum, then one must take extreme care not to be confused with them himself, as if he himself were the ideal.

Protestations could be used to avoid this. But the only sure way is this redoubling.

The difference from the earlier pseudonyms is simply but essentially this, that I do not retract the whole thing humorously52 but identify myself as one who is striving.53

The use of the pseudonym Anti-Climacus not only epitomizes Kierkegaard’s decisive termination of more than a year of agonizing self-reflection and deliberation about publishing, but it also marks a turn in the entire authorship.