The Sickness unto Death
book by Søren Kierkegaard
The Sickness unto Death (Danish: Sygdommen til Døden) is a book written by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. A work of Christian existentialism, the book is about Kierkegaard's concept of despair, which he equates with the Christian concept of sin, which he terms "the sin of despair". Walter Lowrie wrote that he saw the themes in The Sickness unto Death as a repetition of those in Kierkegaard’s earlier work, Fear and Trembling, and as being even more closely related to those in The Concept of Anxiety. Kierkegaard used two pseudonyms for opposite purposes: "Johannes Climacus" suggests that he is not a Christian, whereas "Anti-Climacus" suggests he is "an extraordinary Christian".
Summary
Anti-Climacus introduces the book with a reference to a phrase in the Gospel of John, 11:4: "This sickness is not unto death." The phrase occurs in John's gospel of Jesus, in which Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. However, Anti-Climacus raises the question: would not this statement still be true even if Jesus had not raised Lazarus from the dead? While the human conception of death is that it is the end of life, the Christian conception of death is that it is merely a stop along the path of eternal life, and thus nothing to be feared. Rather, it is the inability to die that is to be feared. The real "sickness unto death", according to Anti-Climacus, is not physical death but despair—a kind of spiritual death, which stems from not embracing one's self.
According to Kierkegaard, an individual is "in despair" if he does not align himself with God or with God's plan for the self.
“The Sickness unto Death” enters the record as book by Søren Kierkegaard. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sickness, unto and Death can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1214072. VIAF identifies the subject as 176045671. The Library of Congress control number is no2024042585. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1849.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Sickness unto Death” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.