CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 13
‘The question is: When should all the latest works be published!’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 242.
‘Humanly speaking, there is something pleasant about having secure employment’: ibid, p. 14.
‘a special ability to talk with ordinary people’: see Encounters with Kierkegaard, ed. Bruce Kirmmse, trans. Bruce Kirmmse and Virginia Laursen (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 109 – from H. C. Rosted, Den gamle Postgaard in Hørsholm (O. Cohn and E. Hasfeldt, 1925), p. 27. See also Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 111, where Tycho Spang recalls Kierkegaard’s ‘quite remarkable and unusual talent for talking to people of every age and from every walk of life’.
In relation to The Corsair, a martyr: on Kierkegaard’s martyrdom at the hands of The Corsair, see for example Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 349: NB10, 166 (February to April 1849): ‘I am feeling indescribably weak and it seems to me that it can’t be long until death makes an end of the matter. And truly a dead man is just what Copenhagen and Denmark need if there is to be any end to all this mean, envious, grimacing baseness.’ Kierkegaard considered that he had offered himself as a sacrifice ‘to guarantee that P. L. Møller and Goldschmidt were kept in line’, though he thought it ‘a heavy fate’ that instead of earning wealth and renown for his art, ‘as a result of being born in a demoralized market town’ he was ‘insulted by every street urchin, which envy followed behind and gloried in its victory’.
‘It is certainly true that I have been unspeakably unhappy’: ibid, pp. 259: NB9, 78 (February 1849).
‘It is difficult to decide whether it is more humiliating’: ibid, p. 300: NB10, 60 (February to April 1849).
What should he do with The Book on Adler?: on Kierkegaard’s reworking of The Book on Adler, see ibid, p. 525.
‘to introduce Christianity into Christendom: ibid, p. 242: NB9, 56 (January or February 1849).
‘Just as a cabinet minister steps down’: ibid, p. 237: NB9, 45 (January or February 1849).
a petitionary prayer: see S. Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses, trans. Bruce Kirmmse (Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 5.
‘in the place assigned’: ibid, p. 52.
‘That you came into existence, that you exist’: ibid, pp. 78-9.
‘the self runs away from itself’: S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 35–6.
he repented the ‘melancholia’ and ‘hypochondriacal evasion’: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11–NB14, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 8: NB11, 8; p. 55: NB11, 105 (May to July 1849). On how Kierkegaard’s devotional reading influenced his decision to publish The Sickness unto Death, see Peter Sajda, ‘“The Wise Men Went Another Way”: Kierkegaard’s Dialogue with Fénelon and Tersteegen in the Summer of 1849’, in Kierkegaard and Christianity, ed. Roman Králik, Abrahim H. Khan, Peter Sajda, Jamie Turnbull and Andrew J. Burgess (Acta Kierkegaardiana, vol. 3, 2008), pp. 89–105.
‘I wanted to secure a comfortable future’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11–NB14, pp. 8–14: NB11, 8–20 (May to July 1849).
‘What makes my life so difficult is that I’m tuned an octave higher’: ibid, p. 101: NB11, 174 (May to July 1849).
The Danish State Church became the Danish People’s Church: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 8: Journals NB21–NB25, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, Bruce H. Kirmmse, David D. Possen, Joel D. S. Rasmussen and Vanessa Rumble (Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 679–81.
Privately he now believed Mynster to be: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11–NB14, pp. 17, 35, 42, 45, 47: NB11, 25, 59, 61, 77, 80, 87 (May to July 1849).
He told Kierkegaard to come ‘another time’: see ibid, pp. 113: NB11, 193 (May to July 1849); p. 488.
He spent a restless night: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 8: Journals NB21–NB25, pp. 356–7: NB24, 54 (April to November 1851).
‘I’ve been willing to ask God to free me’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11–NB14, pp. 138–9: NB11, 233 (May to July 1849) – passage abridged.
‘We are not twins, we are opposites’: ibid, p. 124: NB11, 204 (May to July 1849); S. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 282: Pap. X B 48 (1849).
‘Whereas from his central standpoint the brilliant Martensen’: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11–NB14, pp. 550–51. Like Kierkegaard, Fredrika Bremer renounced marriage in the 1830s to become a writer; she was inspired by modern German philosophy and by English utilitarianism. When she left Copenhagen in 1849 Bremer sailed to New York and toured America: she wrote about slavery, prisons, Quakers and Shakers, and the Scandinavian communities of the Midwest. On her way back to Sweden she spent a few weeks in Britain, visiting Liverpool, Manchester and London, and meeting George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell.
Fredrika Bremer’s account of Kierkegaard was echoed by her English contemporary Andrew Hamilton, who travelled to Denmark around 1849 and later published a lengthy, two-volume travelogue. He did not meet Kierkegaard, but often saw him walking the streets, usually deep in conversation: ‘He is a philosophical Christian writer, evermore dwelling, one might almost say harping, on the theme of the human heart. There is no Danish writer more in earnest than he, yet there is no one in whose way stand more things to prevent his becoming popular. He writes at times with an unearthly beauty, but too often with an exaggerated display of logic that disgusts the public … I have received the highest delight from some of his books … Kierkegaard’s habits of life are singular enough to lend a (perhaps false) interest to his proceedings. He goes into no company, and sees nobody in his own house, which answers all the ends of an invisible dwelling; I could never learn that any one had been inside of it. Yet his one great study is human nature; no one knows more people than he. The fact is he walks about town all day, and generally in some person’s company; only in the evenings does he write and read. When walking, he is very communicative, and at the same time manages to draw everything out of his companion that is likely to be profitable to himself.’ Andrew Hamilton, Sixteen Months in the Danish Isles, vol. 2 (Richard Bentley, 1852), p. 269.
Martensen, the Professor of Theology, Court Preacher, Knight of the Dannebrog: Martensen had followed Mynster’s footsteps to become Court Preacher in 1845 and a Knight of the Dannebrog in 1847.
‘Cruel I was, that is true. Why?’: see S. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, ed. and trans. Henrik Rosenmeier (Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 335–6 – letter to Regine Schlegel, 1849. For the series of draft letters to Regine and her husband, see ibid, pp. 322–37.
he was acquiring imitators and adherents: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11–NB14, p. 658. Peter Christian Kierkegaard also cited as one of Kierkegaard’s ‘imitators and adherents’ the pseudonym H. H., under which Kierkegaard published Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays – a drastically abridged version of his unpublished Book on Adler– in May 1849. As with his earlier pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard’s friend Jens Giødvad had taken the manuscript to the printer to protect its author’s identity. Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays offered ‘a point of view’ on Kierkegaard’s authorship by comparing the figures of poetic genius, apostle and martyr, and exploring their different relationships to the truth. It was much less personal than The Point of View for My Work as an Author, revealing only ‘that I am a genius – not an apostle, not a martyr’: see S. Kierkegaard, Without Authority, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 238.
a journal entry headed ‘Protest Against Bishop Mynster’: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11–NB14, p. 385: NB14, 63 (November 1849 to January 1850).
‘a little, cooped-up place, the homeland of nonsense’: Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 7: Journals NB15–NB20, ed. and trans. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, Bruce H. Kirmmse, David D. Possen, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist (Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 120–21: NB16, 38 (February to March 1850).
St Augustine, he noted: see ibid, p. 158: NB16, 92 (February to March 1850). Augustine was commenting on Matthew 5:39.
He found ammunition in Luther’s sermons: on Kierkegaard’s reading of Luther and Tersteegen, see David Yoon-Jung Kim and Joel D. S. Rasmussen, ‘Martin Luther: Reform, Secularization and the Question of His “True Successor”’, and Christopher B. Barnett, ‘Gerhard Tersteegen: Kierkegaard’s Reception of a Man of “Noble Piety and Simple Wisdom”’, both in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart (Ashgate, 2009), pp. 173–217 and 245–58.
‘it is the great, unreasonable fool who runs out of the world’: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 7: Journals NB15–NB20, p. 528; see Martin Luther, En christelig Postille, trans J. Thisted (Wahlske Boghandling, 1828), vol. II, pp. 242; 246.
Emil was keen for him to visit Louise, but he was reluctant: see Letters and Documents, pp. 344–6 – letter from Emil Boesen to S. Kierkegaard, 7 March 1850; and pp. 357–8 – letter from S. Kierkegaard to Emil Boesen, 12 April 1850.
he quarrelled with Rasmus Nielsen: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 7: Journals NB15–NB20, pp. 219–22: NB17, 71 (March to May 1850). Kierkegaard wrote several journal entries on Nielsen’s book, which in his view ‘battled mediocrity – in part with borrowed weapons’ and ‘spoiled the whole thing with all that scholarly apparatus and detail’: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 5: Journals NB6–NB10, p. 271: NB10, 9; p. 283: NB10, 33; Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 6: Journals NB11–NB14, p. 28: NB11, 46.
‘Each of us possesses the faith only to a certain limited degree’: see Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks Volume 7: Journals NB15–NB20, p. 681. Martensen’s book came out in May 1850.
a cheaper apartment on Nørregade: see ibid, p. 695.
‘In the afternoons I suffer so much from reflected sunlight’: ibid, pp. 287, 324: NB18, 48, 92 (May to June 1850).