If the Enlightenment turned to reason to reoccupy the place left vacant by the death of God, the history of the last two centuries has undermined the confidence that reason will bind freedom and keep it responsible. We cannot escape this history, which has issued in a pervasive nihilism and has rendered all appeals to the ethical questionable. Nor could Kierkegaard. The specter of nihilism haunts all of his writings, as it haunts already German romanticism, to which he is so indebted. To exorcize it is his most fundamental concern. And it is the same fundamentally religious concern that...