An aversion to sunlight, a sickly childhood and a failed engagement: Kierkegaard knew all about anxiety, writes PETER BOLT.

It is said that the 19th century Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813"1855) was the first philosopher to recognise that many people in our modern age experience feelings of "anxiety' for reasons not easy to comprehend.

In 1844, when he wrote his book The Concept of Anxiety, he could say that philosophers had avoided the topic, but nowadays, it has been placed firmly on the psychological agenda.

This Danish thinker distinguished "anxiety' (or "dread') from the ordinary fear that renders us some protection from harm. Such normal fear is, of course, built into our bodies in the famous fear, flight, and fight reflexes. Low-level anxiety is also part of everyday life, whether about family, friendships or finances; jobs; health, safety and welfare.

But anxiety can become abnormal and disabling. Despite the Federal Government's 1999 announcement that depression was "the Ailment of the 21st Century',  the same 1997 report that fuelled this announcement, Mental Health and Well-Being Profile of Adult Australians, showed that, whereas 5.1 per cent of Australians suffered from depression in the previous 12 months, 9.7 per cent suffered from some kind of anxiety disorder.  Perhaps Kierkegaard's meditations may be of relevance to contemporary Australians.

If Kierkegaard lay upon a contemporary psychiatrist's couch, plenty of potential causes for anxiety would be exposed. He was a frail child and he suffered from curvature of the spine, mysterious fits that left him weak, and an aversion to sunlight.

He did not have a good relationship with his father. Michael Kierkegaard was 56 when Søren was born. He had a rather dark and grim Christianity, and his child-rearing was rather authoritarian. His youngest son grew up admiring his father greatly, but also fearing him.

Søren and his brother Peter were the only two of seven children who survived the ravages of accident, disease and childbirth complications. When Søren was 22, his father revealed a dreadful secret that he had harboured for most of his life. When he was 11 he had cursed God, and now Michael felt he had brought a curse upon the family and God was punishing him by finishing off his children one by one. Peter and Søren became convinced that they too would die young.

Although he began studying to be a Lutheran pastor, Søren withdrew from university and left the family home to live the life of an "aesthete'. Doubting his own Christian faith, he discovered literature, the opera, philosophy, drink and girls, but the futility of such a life soon pressed in upon him, and he sank into despair at his lack of direction and his remoteness from his friends. At 25, his faith was rekindled and he was reconciled with his father, just three months before Michael died.

Peter was eight years older than Søren, healthy and strong in body and intellect. However, the many obvious differences of personality and attitude between Søren and his elder brother contributed to their relationship being characterised by mutual rivalry and filled with conflict. Even when he lay dying, Søren refused to see Peter. Even when delivering the funeral oration, Peter implied Søren was mentally unstable.

Another defining relationship in Kierkegaard's life was his 1840 engagement to the pretty and intelligent 18-yearold Regine Olsen. Overcome by doubts and anxieties, within 12 months he broke the engagement and escaped to Berlin in the midst of gossip and public disgrace. Regine finally married another admirer, but remained confused about what had gone on with Kierkegaard. He never forgot her and returned to this broken engagement with almost monotonous regularity in his writings for the rest of his life, eventually leaving her everything in his will.

But, as interesting as he may be on the couch, as one commentator puts it, "there is still rather more to Kierkegaard than a neurotic bundle of sexual repression, hypochondria, father-fixation and religious mania'. After his break with Regine, he began a period of "furious scribbling', writing 35 books mostly between 1842 and 1850, and filling 22 volumes of his journals " not to mention his letters, newspaper articles, dissertations and a series of diatribes against clerics and magazine editors.

Although criticised by his own contemporaries, Kierkegaard's influence on our contemporaries has been enormous, even if indirect, mediated through existentialist philosophers such as Jaspers, Heidegger, Marcell, Buber and Sartre; psychologists, such as Freud and Fromm; protestant theologians such as Barth and Tillich; and postmodernists and deconstructionists, such as even Derrida himself.

When it comes to the concept of anxiety, Kierkegaard was not so much concerned with anxiety over something, as with anxiety about nothing. That is, there is an anxiety about our very existence that human beings need to come to terms with.

Twentieth-century existentialism drew upon his ideas that humans are anxious when confronted with the possibilities of life. We must choose what to do, and, as we do so, we choose who we become. This freedom of choice arouses anxiety.

But there was more to Kierkegaard than this. His Concept of Anxiety is actually a deliberation on the psychological effects of hereditary sin. The Fall has changed the world to make it an anxious place. How we respond to this kind of existential anxiety is the difference between sin and faith. Anxiety is the middle term between temptation and sin. But this anxiety presents a crisis, and, if properly dealt with, this can be resolved by faith in the incarnate God.

Kierkegaard's deliberations about anxiety were part of a larger life-project to understand the Christian gospel. Against a shallow moralism that misunderstands humanity by never looking below the surface, he understood how profoundly human beings have been marred by the Fall, and that, consolation could only be provided by the God who had become flesh.

The deep anxiety underlying the many anxieties of our fellow Australians comes from the same cause. Our anxious compatriots should be pointed to the same consolation.