As Stages on Life’s Way, Three Discourses... is divided into three sections: confession, marriage, and death – three crucial occasions in the life of each single individual. The three imagined discourses that constitute the present work – What It Means To Seek God, On the Occasion of a Confessional Service; Love Conquers All, On the Occasion of a Wedding; The Decisiveness of Death, At the Side of a Grave – deal with fundamental questions such as guilt, sin, forgiveness, marriage, and death. They all involve the anxiety of making a decision, a theme that is central in Kierkegaard’s philosophical as well as religious thought, placing these imagined discourses centrally in Kierkegaard’s “first” authorship.

Johan Nicolai Madvig (1804-1886) was a classical scholar and politician.

As one of the greatest classical scholars of the nineteenth century, Madvig’s influence on scholarly and cultural life in Denmark can hardly be overestimated.

Madvig served five times as rector of the University of Copenhagen, president of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters as well as the first chairman of the Carlsberg Foundation. Alongside his astonishingly prolific scholarly career, Madvig had a very successful political career, serving as chairman of the Danish Parliament, president of the Privy Council and Minister of Education. As the leading Danish classical scholar of his time, Madvig discussed with Kierkegaard parts the manuscript for On the Concept of Irony before the public defense of the thesis and continued to play an important role in his life.

Only one single presentation-copy of the Three Discourses has been registered and is known to exist (the present).

Himmelstrup 76.

The present copy is no. 29 in Girsel's "Kierkegaard" (The Catalogue) which can be found here.