In Stages on Life’s Way, he continues his work on these stages and moves on to present also the religious stage, which occupies approximately two thirds of the work. The religious stage is that in which man attains a personal relationship with God and that in which man only truly begins to exist, the aesthetic and ethical stages being inadequate. It is in this foundational work, in the religious stage, that Kierkegaard first properly describes what is now known as the “Leap of Faith” (in fact a “leap to faith”), namely the leap that involves willing and belief instead of reason and knowledge, the leap that you take in order to connect to God and which requires that which Kierkegaard calls “the suspension of the ethical”.

Undoubtedly among Kierkegaard’s most brilliant literary achievements, “Stages on Life’s Way” is written in the form of different viewpoints of Kierkegaard’s many pseudonymous characters.

We have both Hilarius Bookbinder, who by chance has come into possession of the documents presented in the work and has prepared them for printing.

We have the famous banquet scene, which mirrors Plato’s Symposium, described by William Afham, and in which the three aesthetics participate: Johannes the Seducer, Victor Eremita, and Constatin Constantius.

We have Judge William’s discourse in praise of marriage, and we have the diary, discovered by Frater Taciturnus, of a young man, who was deeply in love but felt compelled to break off his engagement. This story in form of a diary is the closest one comes to a description of Kierkegaard’s own love story, his relationship to Regine. The diary describes an engagement that has lasted for six months; it alternates between the morning notes that recall the engagement and the midnight notes that put it all in perspective.

The work closes with a letter to the reader from Taciturnus on the three “existence-spheres” represented by the three parts of the book.

“Stages on Life’s Way” is one of Kierkegaard’s most important works. Not only does it sum up and explain some of the most important themes of Kierkegaard’s previous works, utilizing the characters and pseudonymous authors of the earlier works to do so; it goes beyond these foundational themes, introduces the religious stage, and points to the further development of the central themes in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, most of which are only fully developed in “Concluding Unscientific Postscript”.

Written under a pseudonym and without Kierkegaard’s name appearing as publisher or indeed anything else, he was unable to give away presentation-copies of the work. Thus, not a single presentation-copy of the work exists.

Himmelstrup 78.